“Mr. Handley!”
“No, I don’t want to talk,” muttered Cuthbert. “You canna see I’m bloody busy?”
It was one of the zoo’s Asiatic lions, an old male, Arfur, from whom Cuthbert had been hearing quite regularly that week. Of all the zoo’s denizens, the lions were without question the most articulate and provocative, especially in the last few days. They growled at Cuthbert in tones simultaneously bellicose and hard-done-by, arguing impatiently for justice, and, naturally, for release from their cages.
“You really do need to free us first,” rasped Arfur. “Failing in that would be . . . well, it would be immoral.”
“Rubbish.”
“That old French writer Camus, you know he thought a man without ethics was a wild animal, ‘loosed upon the world’? And if you don’t let us out, you stand convicted of the gravest indifference, old Cuddy.”
“But I’m not indifferent,” he said. “Look at me!”
These lions could cleverly walk a line between sounding confident and subtly mistreated at the same time, thought Cuthbert. Arfur made him think back to long ago, to the pushy assurance of the once-fresh “New Labour” party chap, Tony Blair, but a version of him like the statue he’d seen during his first zoo visit—elderly, wizened, skin burnished like a body from a peat bog.
“Taking Britain forward is really the only choice, and lions simply must lead the way!” Arfur said to Cuthbert, groaning slightly, and goading, goading, goading. Panthera leo had given more to Britons than any other species, Arfur claimed, and “never once” complained or demanded reward.
Cuthbert countered: “Well, what . . . what about, say, England’s field voles? They’re far more common than you, these days. They’re millions and millions of souls. And they’re not mithering at me like dying ducks in a thunderstorm—no, not that lot. The voles ’ave no, like, program as you lot’ve got.”
Arfur retorted: “You make our point, actually, Cuddy. You can’t be tiny and common and very well stay regal, can you? The English aristocracy do things—obstinately. A field vole sounds like something from Siberia.” But to Cuthbert, Arfur seemed less obstinate than pigheaded.
A few nights before, Cuthbert had admitted to the lions that he feared them. The aggrieved tone of their thoughts had unsettled him. Gravel-voiced and glottal, they were among the first creatures (perhaps because Cuthbert feared them most) to send messages to him, no matter where he went in London, no matter the time. They seemed to be able to reach out and finger him.
“You’re really not much of a being, are you?” Arfur once observed. “We could master a whole country of Cuddies.”
Cuthbert didn’t like that. “You canna even master your cage. I’m the free one, aren’t I?”
“Ha!” said Arfur. “Thus speaks the Solunaut. You wait. You haven’t even visited us, have you? Let us out first, Cuthbert.”
“I was preoccupied. There were otters . . . I . . . I needed to see.”
“Nonetheless, we require immediate release, my friend. Otters! Who cares about otters?”
Cuthbert sighed. “I do.”
“But mark my words, we lions are going places—you’ll see.” Arfur added, “I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we”—he cleared his mucky voice—“if we reclaim Alexandria someday.” Arfur coughed, clearing his throat with a rumbling grunt. “Soon. And we’re not really in a cage, are we? Just undo our enclosure. It’s more a kind of moated theater of sorts.”
“It’s still a cage. And you’re in one because you’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Arfur whined. “We’re the last lions in the last zoo on earth.”
As bedraggled and amusingly haughty as Arfur could sound, lions nonetheless, as a group, still terrified Cuthbert. In childhood, he would see David Attenborough on the telly, explaining how lions used group-hunting tactics. He still recalled one program in which a lioness plunged its entire head into the open skull of an elephant. When it pulled out, Cuthbert recalled, it bore the wet-haired, sated look of a swimmer who’d just swum a dozen laps.
“You’re bloody war beasts,” Cuthbert said to Arfur at one point. “You’re walking terror. I think it’s best to let the jackals out first.”
“No . . . first!” Arfur spat. “We’ve kept this island safe. We’re ‘lionhearted,’” he added with a soup?on of mockery. “Don’t blame us for defending national interests.”