The Dead Lion

Whether he was South African or English, I don’t know. But he and his family had spent some time there. I knew this because of the photograph of the dead lion on the wall. It was not dead in the photograph. The picture frame enclosed the bars of the cage behind which the lion, lying on one side, appeared to roar towards the camera.

It was not actually roaring, Peter’s mother told me. It had in fact been yawning, and then not long after the yawn Peter’s father had shot it. Peter had told me this in the school playground, his tone forced in its casualness. For a while I was pleased to know this piece of information, because it seemed something nobody else was aware of. However, I soon learned that everybody was aware, but that it held little interest. Not because of the story, which could have been exciting if told well and at the right time, but because it was Peter. I felt cheated by this discovery. It did not seem fair to be the last to know, even if it was a very small village school and I had been late starting because of my illness.

Still, despite Peter’s boastfulness, it seemed to me that to have shot a lion – in the days when such a thing was a source of pride rather than revulsion – was quite an accolade. I wondered what had happened. In my imaginings, I felt sure that the lion must have attacked Peter and his family, and that Peter’s father had bravely responded by standing his ground until the lion was close enough for a single well-aimed shot to send it tumbling down.

Nothing my father had done could compare. ‘He was going to be in the navy,’ I told Peter. ‘But then he broke his leg playing football and it didn’t heal right and so he couldn’t be anymore.’ Even as I said it, I could sense the flimsiness of this statement. To have had a father almost in the navy – when several of the other children at the school had parents who were actually serving – was not something worth mentioning. ‘And my mother once saw the Queen,’ I added, slightly despairingly. Peter did not even acknowledge this second statement.

Still, he can’t have been too put off by my lack of interesting parents, because I often went round to his house after school or at weekends to play and have dinner. This was not, I realise now, something any of the other village children did. It was at one of these visits that I saw the photograph of the lion in the cage. Its mouth was open so wide you could see the pink slab of tongue, looking like something you might see laid on the counter at the village butchers. The photo had been taken at night, with a digital camera, the flash making the lion and the bars of its cage seem almost garish against the darkness surrounding it.

Peter and I were having dinner and his mother was sat at the head of the table watching us eat. Her hands were clasped together and resting on the patterned tablecloth, her back leant primly against the chair. She caught me staring at the photograph on the wall.

‘Peter’s father helped catch that lion,’ she said. ‘It had been killing cattle. So they tracked it down, and somebody shot it with a tranquilliser dart. That’s why in the photo, it’s actually yawning, though it looks like a roar. It had only just woken up.’

I did not know what tranquilliser meant, but it did not feel right to ask. I simply nodded and kept eating my fish fingers, carrots and peas.

‘Peter’s father took that photograph. He’s a very good photographer.’

Peter nodded as though to emphasise the point.

‘And then they drew lots to decide who would shoot it. Peter’s father drew the short straw, so he went and got his gun –’

‘He had a gun?’ I found myself saying before I could stop to think. Nobody in the village had guns, except perhaps some of the farmers.

‘Everybody had guns over there,’ Peter said. ‘It wasn’t like here.’ He spoke with an absolute certainty, although he must have been very young when his family returned to England.

Peter’s mother nodded. ‘So he got his gun,’ she said, ‘and he shot the lion.’

I did not know what to say to this. The true circumstances of the lion shooting seemed far less enthralling than Peter’s simple unadorned claim that his father had shot a lion. Catching it, photographing it, and then shooting it because you had drawn the short straw – this did not match up with the image of the shooting I had carried in my head, where Peter’s father had been protecting his family. That image seemed justified, and brave. The story as told by Peter’s mother seemed neither of those things.

I am not sure what I said in reply, or indeed if I did say anything in reply, because at that point Peter’s father came in and the atmosphere changed. I could sense a stiffening of Peter’s posture, a tighter clasping of his mother’s hands, and so I grew tense too.

Peter’s father had a tanned, lined face. He was balding, with only a monkish band of wispy black hair at the back of his head. His eyebrows, however, were thick and dark. Luscious, even, and joined together in the middle. It seemed as if at all times a dark cloud was hanging above eyes that glittered like those of the gyrfalcon I had once seen at a fair. This effect was heightened by a beaklike nose and a mouth downturned like his brows. I had once seen him in the playground waiting to collect Peter from school and he had scared me then. Now I was in the room with him, he scared me even more.

He spoke first to Peter’s mother, then swivelled round to his son. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce your friend, Peter?’ he snapped. He spoke with an accent I did not recognise. His words seemed overly clipped, and stood in contrast to the burring, elongated vowels with which his family and most of the village’s inhabitants spoke.

Peter murmured an introduction.

‘Speak up, boy.’

Peter introduced me again, his voice louder.

His father asked who my parents were, nodded curtly when I told him. ‘Living in the old Patrick place?’ he asked.

I did not know where he meant. ‘The grey house,’ I said, ‘on the main road.’

‘Yes. As I said. The old Patrick place,’ he repeated, his tone brisk. Then he looked away from me as though I had ceased to exist, his gaze moving instead to his wife. ‘Dinner?’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’ She stood up, looked at Peter and me. ‘Put your plates on the side when you’re finished please, boys,’ she told us.

‘Don’t see why they should,’ said Peter’s father. ‘Let them go and play while it’s still light outside.’

‘It’ll only take them a moment,’ Peter’s mother said mildly.

‘I don’t,’ repeated Peter’s father, very slowly, ‘see why they should.’ His eyes were fixed unblinkingly on his wife’s face. She looked away.

I felt that to move, to make a sound, would be to make some kind of mistake. Peter was focused on his plate of food and did not offer any sign of what the best thing to do would be. Wishing I had not eaten my dinner so fast, I looked down at the patterns in the tablecloth. It was decorated with colourful stripes, and to pass the time I imagined I was driving a car in between them, their colour determining the speed with which I travelled. I found that doing this meant that time seemed to speed up and boredom be alleviated. The downside was that it meant my focus had a tendency to slip away from whatever was happening around me. Peter’s mother said my name several times before I noticed that she was doing so.

‘Are you deaf, boy?’ said Peter’s father. ‘She said you can get down.’

Several moments passed before I was able to speak. ‘S-sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘I…’ My voice trailed off as I gestured uselessly at the tablecloth. Peter was looking at me curiously.

‘It’s alright,’ said Peter’s mother. ‘You were away in your thoughts, weren’t you? You boys can go and play now.’

Peter and I slipped down from our chairs and left the room. Our plates stayed on the table, and as we left the kitchen and closed the door behind us, nobody was moving to pick them up.

 

My parents were both teachers, and ambitious ones, which invariably meant that every few years one of them would get a new job and we would move house. The village in which we lived during the years I describe was the first place where my memories seem more distinct and clearly drawn – though I know all too well that memory is a deceptive thing.

I have never been back to the village since we left, five years or so after arriving.  I recall different places within it through the incidents that occurred there, rather than through distinct memories of the places themselves. So I know there was a playpark because I once tripped up and split my chin open on the edge of the metal slide. I picture the old church, its tower weathered and its walls speckled with lichen, because of the procession of primary school harvest festivals and carol services I attended there. And I recall the web of footpaths and grassy lanes that were spun around the village’s boundaries because every Sunday my family would walk along them and often you would see Peter’s father walking there too.

He was the kind of man for whom the village seemed a confine. He would pace its boundaries, glowering beneath his heavy brows, as though the hedgerows and fences were the bars of some great cage that only he could see. You would turn a corner and he would be there, striding towards you. He wore an old Barbour coat that seemed too big for him, the pockets flapping as he walked. Sometimes he would give a curt ‘good morning’ in response to my parents’ greetings, but mostly he just nodded, his pace seeming to increase as he walked away from us.

‘Must be hard for him,’ I remember my mother saying to my father after one such encounter. ‘Being so far from home, knowing you can never go back.’

‘I don’t,’ my father replied, ‘have all that much sympathy. He knew what he was doing. I think he walks so much to soothe his conscience.’ That was all they said on the matter.

But that exchange had been enough to set me wondering about where Peter’s father had come from, why he had been forced to leave. I looked up what conscience meant in the dictionary at school. It made me feel more certain that his leaving and his conscience were both connected to the lion, somehow. Yet it did not seem clear why killing it would mean he had to come to the village, and walk the lanes each weekend.

I suppose I could have asked Peter, but I am not convinced he could have given me a truthful answer. There was also the fact that he and I did not speak as much these days. As the school year went on, I began to settle in amongst my classmates. I made new friends, went to other houses to play with people, joined in with the games that took place in the scrap of woodland adjoining the playground, led by a boy called Nick whose skinniness belied his strength. I scraped my bare knees clambering over the stone wall at the edge of the trees. I enjoyed this clandestine operation so much that even when my friends and I were caught doing so by a teacher and kept in at breaktime for a week, due to having gone out of bounds, I did not much care.

My parents, though, were furious. After I had recovered from my illness their patience with me, and one another, had grown much shorter. ‘Why don’t you play with Peter anymore?’ my father asked me once. ‘He seems like a good boy.’

I said nothing. They would not understand if I told them of how Peter and I had run out of games to play and things to say to one another, of how it simply was not possible to simultaneously be friends with the others and with Peter. How could such things be explained to parents? Besides, there was the issue of Peter’s claim that his father had killed a lion, and the way in which it contrasted with the true nature of the killing, as told by Peter’s mother. In a childlike clarity of perception, where the implication is understood even if the reasons for it are not, I knew that these two accounts did not reflect well on Peter. It was easy enough to distance myself from him, simply through joining in with what all the others were doing.

Occasionally Peter would try to participate in the games we were playing – I think the teachers might have encouraged him to – but he would always suggest changing the storyline of whatever we were doing. Given that the games were often re-enactments of comics read or TV shows seen, this did not go down well. For most, it was a minor irritant that could be brushed off, but for Nick it could not.

The first few times Peter tried to change the story, Nick explained that things were decided. That what occurred was set out before the game began. That if Peter went off and did his own thing, it ruined it for everybody else. If Peter, as the guard of the treasure, stood his ground when attacked and didn’t flee, then how could the jewels and the gold be retrieved? If one of the goodies suddenly turned bad at a crucial moment, then how would it be possible for everybody to escape from danger?

Peter would nod, slowly, in a way that made it seem like he was listening. Clearly, he was not, for the game would start and before too long Peter would change the course of action and the predetermined thrills – the sudden ambush amongst the willows, the boat that would appear in the nick of time to carry everybody from danger – would be spoilt. And with each of these acts Nick’s anger grew.

Things came to a head in the cloakroom after school one day. I was putting my lunchbox and pencil case in my bag. It had a drawstring and toggles, which meant I found it difficult to open and close, and concentrating on this I paid little attention to what was going on until the first blow landed.

I think it was in fact Peter who threw the first punch, or who pushed Nick. I don’t know what had been said, but I watched as Nick pushed back, and then threw two quick punches to Peter’s stomach, sending him to the red tiled floor. There was a decisiveness to these movements, a ruthlessness out of keeping with the playfighting which happened often enough in the woods and playground.

There was a silence. It was not a true silence, in terms of an absence of sound. There was the chatter of an after-school club in the playground coming through the open window, the scraping of a bench as Peter tried to pull himself upright, a gasp and a nervous laugh from somebody behind me. Yet the room still felt silent, because there was a lack of intervention. There were no sounds from anybody moving to stop what was taking place. Nick kicked Peter in the ribs, once, twice and then a third time just as the double doors beside my peg swung open and Peter’s father stepped into the room. It really did go silent then.

Peter’s father moved with the swiftness of a man who may plausibly once have shot a lion. He raced forwards, and in a few short strides was beside the two boys. He grabbed Nick by the collar of his school polo shirt, half-dragged him towards the door. Peter was on his feet at this point, and his father grabbed his hand and moved between the cloakroom benches, taking both boys with him.

I was standing beside the double doors. The glittering eyes fell upon me and if there was any recognition there of the boy who had used to come to his house I did not see it. ‘Open the door,’ Peter’s father barked, and I obeyed out of pure fear. The three of them moved across the lobby area between the cloakroom and the door opposite, which led to the headteacher’s office. The rest of us followed and stood in the lobby. We watched as Peter’s father briefly let go of his son and pushed open the study door.

‘This boy,’ roared Peter’s father, ‘has been beating up my son.’ The wooden door closed and muffled his shouts. A teacher, drawn there by the noise, came along and told us all to go home. When we came back the next day Nick was not in school, nor the two days after that, and when he did return, for some time he and Peter were always placed away from one another and never put in the same group for anything.

 

That was it. Over time, Peter did join in our games. He did not try to change things, but quietly followed whatever pre-determined storyline had been set out. He and Nick would sometimes speak to one another, civilly enough. If you did not know better, the incident might as well have never occurred. After all, it was a small village and though that made it easy for adults to hold grudges it was harder for children to do so, pressed together as we were every day into the two classrooms that made up the school.

The years went on and eventually my mother got a deputy headship and we moved out of the village. As I said, I have not gone back. There has been little reason to. My new home and school were far away and I soon fell out of touch with the friends I’d had. So what became of Nick, and of Peter, what they might be doing now, I have no idea. For a long time I did not think of them. But in these later days of my life, when the past increasingly plays on my mind, Peter and Nick – or rather, the children they were and the child I was – run through my memory with increasing frequency. So in turn does Peter’s father, more so than any of the adults from that time, that place. Whether he is even still alive – he would be very old now – I do not know. In some ways, I like to think he is, that he still stalks the deep lanes between the hedgerows, pushing against the boundaries of the village, hungering for whatever it was he had lost and cannot find.

© Ned Vessey 2025