Dany was rocked backwards and forwards by the swaying movement of the lorry that trundled through the misted night. The straw pricked against his cheek, tiny spikes of it crept up his shirtsleeves and even small microbes of it crept into his nostrils. This bed was most unlike his own at home, with the dormer window peering down on the silent garden, through which every now and then he glimpsed a fox, strolling towards the other gardens of the other bungalows, all alike, in the little cul-de-sac that led to nothing in particular. That bed was always cold, no matter how much warmth his mother implanted in the goodnight kiss; the telegraph wires outside his window would moan softly with an unseen wind, etching a tangled scrawl against the night sky, a message in a dead language he could never decipher. So there was much to be said for his new situation. There was definite life here, in the low throb of the distant engines, in the shifting straws underneath him, in the strange, feline odour that seemed to hang in the air around him. If he ever had a grandmother, he imagined she would smell like that. And while he knew he must have had a grandmother – in fact he had seen pictures of her dim and smiling black-and-white face in the family album – he had never known her, and more to the point, never smelt her.
So he slept, eventually, and happily. And the animal odour that he had noticed seemed to wrap itself around him as he slept, cocooning him in the sweetest of dreams. He dreamt he was walking through a forest with giant slender trunks and a huge panoply of leaves overhead and he was with a grandmother; indeed he was holding her hand and the straw skirt she wore, like those Polynesian islanders, kept rubbing off the back of his hand. Her other hand wrapped around a sleeping cat. She had a kind of necklace of dried flowers and was explaining the varieties of jungle flora to him – and flora meant flowers and plants, he was proud to remember, while fauna meant rocks and shells and other dead things – when they were both rained upon from above. He raised his face to the panoply of leaves above and found it washed in eucalyptus-odoured drops.
And he awoke then to find a lion pissing on him. There was no cause for alarm, the lion being separated from him by rusting iron bars, and Dany, whose eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, noticed for the first time that the trailer was neatly divided in two. He occupied one straw-filled half, while the lion occupied the other and gazed at him with dim, grandmotherly eyes. But it was no grandmother, it was a lion, no doubt about it, one leg lazily raised to direct a stream of urine on to the bed of straw upon which Dany had been sleeping.
‘Come on,’ the boy objected and shifted in the straw, away from one last, contemptuous spurt.
But the lion didn’t reply and the boy was oddly relieved. So many strange things had happened, a lion that replied would have been much too much. So he rolled himself in the bales of unurinated straw and considered himself lucky. And he laid back his head, to wrap himself in one more precious swathe of sleeping.
Meanwhile, and it’s a word one should never use, meanwhile, since there is no meanwhile, there is only time, doing its mysterious thing in its infinitude of ways. But, as Dany was sleeping, the other we call Andy now lay in what used to be his bed. The telegraph wires made soft, rhythmic clicks against each other, moved by the wind outside that created an eerie mechanical hum. He seemed to be waiting for something, rather than sleeping; his eyes blinked occasionally, as if to keep time with the scraping music of those wires outside.