In Search of the Blue Tiger (7 page)

My Great Aunt shakes like a huge oak in a gale.

‘There was nothing to do. Nothing to do. My poor baby girl lost in the flames. Crying for a mother. Lost so. Crying for me she was and I was nowhere to be found. Lost amongst the horses crashing around her, watching her burn.'

I look at her and she looks at me. Her hair popping out of its grips, her face bearing down on me. I do not flinch. Nothing in this house makes me flinch.

‘My baby, baby, baby,' she hisses, the spittle bubbling around her tongue and lips.

This was how I found out Great Aunt had been a mother.

Stigir and me love going to the park. So does Mrs April. Once again we meet by chance, down by the old bandstand where the Salvation Army plays tambourines and hymns on Sunday mornings. But today the bandstand is empty and the only sounds are the ghosts of trumpeters.

‘Oscar,' she says, excitedly, ‘how very lovely to see you again. And Stigir.'

Stigir's ears prick up. He knows she's in on the secret of his name.

I have my scrapbook under my arm, so we can have a read when we want to. Mrs April notices it.

‘You are such a special boy,' she says with a smile unusual to me.

It reminds me of the things Great Aunt says, that confuse me so. ‘You're odd,' the Great Aunt says sometimes. ‘Just like him. That so-called father of yours.'

But Mrs April has a different tone about her. A different way of saying the words. I stare at the flaking paint of the bandstand to hide my confusion.

‘Don't look sad, little Oscar,' she says, gently rubbing the back of her hand across my cheek.

Her touch.

‘I'm not. Just my shoelace,' I mumble, blushing, bending down to retie the double-knot.

‘And the other one, the other one needs fixing,' I say, still bent over, the blood and shame rushing to my head like a torrent. I can't look up at her. This woman with kindness in her voice. For if I do, she would know I know so much and trust so little.

I kneel as if waiting to be knighted. The sun beats down on my back, searing through my woollen jumper like a sword.

‘Shall we have some cake?' she says, her voice kinder than an iced-sponge, more soothing than a cream-soda.

I turn my head to look up to her. She is silhouetted against the sun. Although her face is dark I can feel the beauty of her smile.

‘If you want to, you can come to my house. We can have tea and cake. You can tell me more about your research.'

She smiles down at me with a softness that asks nothing, hides nothing.

She has a light in her eyes that is no part of my world of adults. She is offering me cake. Cake and tea. I can taste it in my mouth. This kindness.

I fumble once more with my shoelace. A good tug to impress her that my endeavours are needed. To let her know I am just the sort of boy who would not want to worry an adult by skipping along with a lethal shoelace straddling in tow.

‘No thank you, the cake. No thank you,' I hear myself say.

‘Well, perhaps another time,' she says.

‘Yes … the dog … I must go,' I say hurriedly, lest the blushes return.

‘Come on then, Stigir,' I shout to my dog and leap into the air.

Stigir jumps up from where he lay and we gambol along the path. Of this I am sure. Of this I am safe. I throw him an imaginary ball; he runs an imaginary chase. Over my shoulder I watch Mrs April. She shields her eyes from the sun, plotting our progress. I can tell she is impressed by our playfulness, me and the Stigir dog. She knows nothing of our real world, where wild animals come out at night, where no one tosses an imaginary ball, no one skips in the park on a bright sunny day. I watch her, even though she thinks I am at play. She stands tall and straight. From the lake a swan beats its wings and raises itself from the water, pulling away from the surface, forcing itself skywards, until it is fully in the air, coasting towards a distant destination.

I might get no cake today, but the sun in the park, the swan in the sky, and the librarian lady watching the boy and the dog make me happy.

Later on in bed, some sound of waves in the distance, a cat upsetting a dustbin, a comforting rattle of wind on the windowpane, I think of what the cake might have been. I picture a large round fruitcake, one slice invitingly cut. Some crumbs have fallen onto the plate. A solid silver knife lies on its side, waiting patiently to make its next mark. Most delicious of all, just visible in the heart of the cake, is a bright red cherry. Cherry red. I can taste it in my mouth. Cherry. Cherry cake.

‘Next time,' says my dream, ‘next time she asks, I will.'

‘Of wild creatures, a tyrant; and of tame ones, a flatterer.' Bias

Blue Monkey has come down from the shelf and is sitting with me on the bed as I read aloud. Blue Monkey is very wise, but he never lets on that he knows all this, that he's always known this. For he is kind and shares in my sense of wonder and discovery. And he is patient and shows great interest in all I have written down.

‘I am so excited, Blue Monkey,' I say as I reread the latest entries in my scrapbook. ‘These are real clues.'

Stigir pricks up his ears at the sound of my voice. I hold the book open and wait for Stigir as he sidles up beside us and lays his head on my lap.

Today in the library I read the second part of the book:
Man meets animal in flesh and claw.
It is even more astonishing than the first part.

Part II: Were-animals: when people become animals

People CAN change into animals. You think there are only were-wolves. This is not true, there are many other kinds:

Were-crocodiles (see page 11)

Were-pigs (see page 15)

Were-tigers (see page 25)

Were-crocodiles

Are-crocodiles

Nile-crocodiles

Smile-crocodiles

Lycanthropy is the word for a human being changing into a wolf. There are two types: the first type is when a person goes mad and thinks they are a wolf. This may come with a craving for blood. The second type is when a person becomes a werewolf.

I've heard of were-wolves, in fairy-stories. Like I've heard of vampires, ghosts, and other scary monsters. But I've never heard of were-tigers and other were-animals and never in a true adult book from the reference section of the adult library. Outside my bedroom window I can see the moon. It is not quite full, but full enough. I stroke Stigir on the back of the neck, to feel his closeness, to know he is there. He responds by putting his head on my knee. He gives my leg a lick to show he is on my side, to tell me not to be scared.

‘Stigir, Blue Monkey, there are were-tigers,' I say, reading from my book. ‘People who can change into tigers. And were-pigs and were-crocodiles and were-horses.'

I close the curtains to keep the night out. I sharpen my pencil in readiness. The trimmings fall onto my writing desk, curling and spiraling, uncoiling like a snake. A were-cobra. Things changing from one thing to another. I look around the room. A clock, a wall, the paper of my scrapbook. I feel the paper. It was the bark of a tree, a were-tree. One thing one minute; another the next. Then I understand. It all becomes clear.

The Father, the Mother, the Great Aunt. They are all were-animals.

She can taste the blood. Inside and outside her body. She hears the heavy breathing of his sleep as she turns her head to see his face. The bruises of her cheek and jaw make her wince, but she stays silent. She sees the scratches on his face, feels the skin under her fingernails. His arm is heavy across her back, the weight of it pins her to the bed. This is her man. Whatever they may say. Whatever they may think.

Outside the door she hears her son. He is counting. 13 … 14 … 15 … 16. His dog is there too. The sound of its paws shuffling on the wooden floor. She can do nothing for this boy now. For she is here, in the space of the bedroom, in her world. The one she has created.

… 22 … 23… 24 …25.

She surveys the chaos of the room. Clothes torn and strewn, dressing-table overturned. Hairbrush, make-up, jewellery, scattered to the four corners. By the bedside she spots the upturned bottle, a dreg of whiskey inside. She stretches out and picks it up, straining not to wake him, not to have to fight over the last drop. She gulps it down in one. She drifts off to sleep. The strong arm of her sailor husband across her aching and exhausted body, the sound of numbers in her head, and the faint recollection of a blue shadow passing in the corridor outside the bedroom.

Through the small barred window of the cellar, the low morning sun lightens up the corner where my grandfather's trunks and boxes stand in a pile. I haul one down, throw open the lid and search through it like a smuggler. This trunk is old and battered, with faded P&O liner stickers worn into its leather. Inside are neatly folded dress shirts and old-fashioned breeches with buckles at the hems. The smell is of olden days. With a sense of guilt in disturbing the past, I lift the piles of clothes carefully from their resting place, feeling underneath for hidden treasure. I pull out a worn and tattered folder, loosely tied by a red ribbon. The knot falls away and some photos and papers tumble to the floor.

One of the pictures is of a couple standing in a country lane. The man wears a great-coat and wide-brimmed hat and the woman has on a fur-lined overcoat. She too is wearing a hat, a small rounded one that covers her forehead. It is hard to see her eyes as she is looking down to the man's outstretched hand as he offers her something, some candy maybe, from a paper bag. She reminds me of Mother, but heavier, with rounder cheeks and an easy smile.

I sit on the floor and sift through the papers. One catches my eye. At the head of the paper is a royal crest wrapped around a latin motto that means nothing to me. Also at the head of the paper is an etching of a large building on a hill, set in parkland.

What is written, in sloping, old-fashioned handwriting, is signed with a flourish by Doctor Edmond Fox, Fellow of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists.

The patient, Alicia Hayes, a 57-year-old female, was examined by me today at the request of her family. I found her to be in sound physical health, with no history of long-standing ailments, nor any known allergies. She is taking no prescribed medications. She talks of recurrent bouts of melancholia followed by florid periods of euphoria. Her present state is that of the former, with recent thoughts of self-destruction, which have led to her family seeking my professional help. She reports hearing voices day and night, the most persistent of which exhorts her to hang herself. This has led to her wandering the lanes after dark, with the express purpose, in her own words, of ‘checking branches to ascertain which will hold my weight.' I assess her to be of unsound mind and a moderate to severe risk to herself. I thereby commit her to a two-week stay in Stanhope Ward. She should be confined to bed and, in addition to regulation meals, be fed two quarts of fresh cow's milk at 10am and then again at 6pm.