Lionboy: the Truth Read online

  ‘You stole it too!’ Charlie retorted.

  ‘Enough,’ said Aneba firmly, and, tempted though he was to carry on, Charlie recognized from his father’s tone of voice that trouble was just one more cheeky answer away, so he let it drop. Reluctantly.

  ‘We found the circus boat,’ Aneba continued, ‘and your friends Julius and Pirouette and Madame Barbue, and Mabel.’ He didn’t mention how much she and Magdalen had fought to start with, or how Mabel had been loyal to Maccomo. ‘Mabel worked out that you’d be bringing the Lions here, and we followed. But – where is Maccomo? We expected him to be here too.’

  Charlie hesitated.

  Maccomo was tied up under a tree out in the Argan Forests, where the Lions lived. He was the Lions’ prisoner. Charlie felt in his heart that Maccomo’s fate was fair and not unreasonable, but he wasn’t sure the grown-ups would agree. He’d worked out the fate with the Lions, who were extremely tough and straightforward when it came to things like revenge and punishment. They didn’t have any human delicacy. Perhaps his parents would want to take Maccomo to the police station or something respectable like that. In the old days the police, apparently, were who you relied on to sort out crime problems, and his mother could be very old-fashioned at times … but nowadays everybody powerful had a police force of their own. Security, they called them.

  Also, he wondered how Mabel felt about Maccomo now.

  But he had to tell them.

  ‘He’s with the Lions,’ he said at last. ‘It seemed only fair.’

  Mabel gasped. Charlie knew what she was thinking: how would the Lions, his former prisoners, treat him now that they were in charge, in their own territory?

  He gave her a straight look – as if to say, ‘So? Your tigers, who you love so much – would they harm you, if you lost your power over them? And if they would, what does that tell you?’

  Magdalen and Aneba glanced at each other.

  Then: ‘Good riddance,’ said Aneba. ‘We’ve got better things to worry about.’

  Magdalen didn’t look quite so convinced, but she let it pass. It didn’t matter anyway. Charlie knew that no humans would take the Lions on, unless they were prepared to fight to the death – or unless they had Charlie to negotiate for them.

  Mabel was quiet.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said Magdalen, ‘do we need to worry about Rafi? Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Aneba. ‘A bad arm and a punch in the face aren’t going to get rid of him forever.’

  ‘Well, anyway, we shouldn’t stay here,’ said Magdalen. ‘Rafi knows we’re here. He can tell the Corporacy. He might have told them already. We should go home and report all this and get some government protection and get back to work – there’s still a lot to be done on the asthma cure –’

  ‘Oh,’ said Charlie. He reached into his pocket. ‘Here.’

  The piece of paper he handed his mum was battered and travel-stained. His feeling of pride at giving her back her asthma cure formula was pure and strong and joyful.

  She blinked at it. ‘Bless you,’ she said, and gave him a blinding smile, followed by another blinding, passionate hug. ‘We just need to get back to normal …’ she said, and she drifted into silence.

  Aneba was giving her a long, sad look.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  Charlie understood. ‘He means there isn’t any normal any more,’ he said.

  Magdalen thought about their little house in London, their yard with its honey-scented plants, their neighbours. How safe and long ago it seemed. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘If we go home to London,’ said Aneba gently, ‘the whole thing can just start up again. How could we live and be safe? I really think we should go down to Ghana, and take some time, and from there we can get in touch with people in London and see what’s going on without returning to our usual haunts.’

  For a moment Charlie imagined them all as ghosts, haunting their house and the market and the fountain where the schoolkids played football. He didn’t want to be a ghost. He’d kind of thought it would all be over once he found his parents. They would take charge again, they’d all go home, and everything would – yes, he too had thought everything would go back to normal.

  But now there was no normal. He could see that. There could be no normal until Rafi was definitely stopped and got rid of … But how can you definitely stop and get rid of someone? Kill them? He didn’t want to kill anyone. And, more importantly, there could be no normal until the Corporacy was stopped and … But you can’t get rid of something as big as the Corporacy. The Corporacy had business all over the world, it made and sold medicine all over the world, it had its weird Gated Village Communities all over the place, full of people living Corporacy Lives. People loved the Corporacy – it made the people inside feel safe. It was so big and powerful. Yeah, thought Charlie, it’s so big and powerful, it thinks it can just steal people and make them work for it.

  How were his parents ever going to get away from that?

  It made his head spin.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Magdalen. ‘We’ll go south. How about you, Mabel?’

  ‘I’d really like to be with you all,’ she said, ‘and have a rest, which is what you certainly need. A lovely holiday … but I know that’s not really on. No. I must go back to the Circus. I can’t leave my tigers with Major Tib and Sophie forever.’

  Charlie felt a pang of disappointment – here he’d just acquired this rather mysterious and glamorous aunt, and now she was disappearing again before he could even get to know her. And he wasn’t sure he trusted her, even if his parents did. He felt bad as well about Major Tib, the tall, magnificent Ringmaster with his high boots and velvet tailcoats. He knew Major Tib was furious about the Lions escaping, but he liked him and respected him, and he meant him no harm.

  ‘Tell him …’ he said.

  ‘Tell him what?’ said Mabel in an amused tone.

  ‘Tell him – tell him I was for the Lions, not against him,’ said Charlie. ‘Tell him I’m kind of sorry. And send my love to Julius and Hans and Pirouette and Madame Barbue and Sigi and everybody.’

  Mabel smiled. ‘OK,’ she said. She recognized something in Charlie then. She had known already that he loved the Lions – that was obvious, by what he’d been through with them – but now she knew that he loved the Circus too. He was a good kid. Family. Her smile was a little wobbly.

  Charlie stared at her. She still made him nervous.

  She was glancing across at Magdalen.

  ‘Magdalen,’ she said. Then she took a big breath and sighed. And, abruptly, she said, ‘Oh, snike it, so what – listen, all of you. This is it. What happened. Mag –’ She breathed in a huge breath. ‘Mag, I had a baby.’

  She’d gone white, like an egg. Then she went pink.

  Magdalen stared at her.

  ‘I was pregnant and I took off and Mum didn’t know and I had it adopted.’

  Silence.

  ‘It?’ said Magdalen very quietly.

  ‘Please don’t judge me,’ said Mabel. ‘Him. I had him adopted. It seemed the right thing to do. Then everything was different for me and I couldn’t go home and I never went home and I’m glad to be with you now. Please don’t judge me.’ The words tumbled out, a waterfall of words over sharp, difficult stones. ‘I don’t need to talk about it, or want to, but you need to know. I’m very, very sorry for deserting you.’

  Charlie was confused.

  ‘Surely if you’re having a baby that’s just when you need to stay home?’ he said.

  The women looked at him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mabel. ‘I know that now. It looked different then.’

  ‘Need to think about this,’ said Magdalen. She looked a little ill.

  Not having any brother or sister, Charlie didn’t know much about that kind of family life, but he could easily see that if you had a sister and she’d just disappeared, you’d be a bit upset.

  ‘Nothing to think about,’ said Aneba, sitting up. �
��It was long ago and you’re both here now. Take some time to get used to each other again – Mabel, don’t go yet. You and your sister need to hang out together.’

  The two women were holding hands. Charlie caught Aneba’s eye and Aneba winked at him and stood up, saying, ‘So, Charlie, we’re going to Ghana. See Grandma. Swim at Labadi Beach and Mile Thirteen. Go and watch the Starlets …’ The Starlets were Charlie’s favourite football team, the national juniors, and they’d been doing incredibly well recently, beating all the top junior teams.

  Would Rafi and the Corporacy follow them to Ghana?

  Still, at least Maccomo was dealt with.

  Chapter Two

  Essaouira lies between the thunderous Atlantic, which pounds its dark red ramparts and purple rocks with huge waves, day and night, and a long, low, scraggly forest of argan and thuja trees, which grow out of the sand and smell delicious when you rub their tough spiny leaves. The forests used to cover most of the area, but the thuja wood when polished made pretty boxes and picture frames which smelt as bittersweet as the leaves, so every year there was less and less forest, and more and more pretty souvenirs for visitors. Luckily, a hundred years or so before, some carpenters had noticed that at this rate their grandsons would have no wood to make boxes from, and started replanting the forests. There was enough forest now for some parts of it to be forgotten and wild again, rough and thorny, inhabited only by snakes and lizards and owls and runaway goats – and Wild Lions.

  It was from here that Charlie’s Lion friends had been kidnapped and was to here that they had returned. (Only Primo, the ancient creature who had been created, not born, stayed behind in Venice, loved and adored by the Venetians.) The Oldest Lion had found that his mother was still alive, the three Lionesses had greeted their sisters, and the Young Lion and Elsina, who had both been born in captivity, shyly began to make friends with the wild cousins that they had never met. At night, they all lay together. Elsina’s eyes were as round as the moon as she lay wakeful under the African night. She had never slept out of doors before leaving the Circus. She had hardly even been out of doors. The adventure – running through Paris with Charlie, hiding on the train roof through the dreadful snowstorm, their time locked up in the courtyard in Venice, the long trip on the solarboat – all that had been exciting and terrifying. But this was something different. This was meant to be home. This was, apparently, where she belonged.

  She gazed up at the moon. The moon gazed down at her. She snuggled closer to her brother. He at least was unchanged.

  The Young Lion snuggled back. He too was having trouble sleeping. Every night he kept one eye and a tiny portion of his mind always turned to the big tree to the east, where the Liontrainer Maccomo, their former master, was tied up. For years Maccomo had kept the Lions prisoner on board the Circe, drugging them with those scented drops he put in their water, forcing them to do tricks in the Ring, keeping them in that cabin … Now it was his turn. He was their prisoner, and they were drugging him.

  The Young Lion had wondered how a bunch of Lions could give drugs to a human, but it wasn’t hard. In the first place, Maccomo had developed a taste for the drops after Charlie had started giving him the medicine to make him dopey, way back on the Circe. So when the Oldest Lion stood in front of Maccomo with the bottle between his feet, and his paw lazily lifted, studying his long, terrible claws, revealing them and then sheathing them, and giving Maccomo a look, it didn’t take long for Maccomo to get the idea. The Lions wanted him to drink the drops. Fair enough. He was so tired and shocked and terrified that he couldn’t even think about what a dreadful situation he was in. Taking drugs to blur his mind seemed to him like a very good idea. Well – to part of him. The part of him that was blurred already …

  ‘Poor, stupid Maccomo,’ said the Oldest Lion, looking at him with contempt.

  ‘Father,’ said the Young Lion. ‘Two things worry me. He might drink it all and kill himself …’

  ‘That worries you?’ said the Oldest Lion. ‘How would that be a problem?’

  Looked at Lionishly, of course, it was not a problem.

  ‘You’ve been too long with Charlie,’ said the Oldest Lion. ‘That’s a human thought, a human fear. Lions don’t care about other things dying.’

  He’s right, thought the Young Lion. I’ll have to think about that.

  ‘Your other point?’ the Oldest Lion was saying.

  ‘What do we do when it runs out? Won’t he become strong again, and try to escape?’

  ‘He will never be healthy, living here, eating the bits of flesh we give him. This life in the Lions’ place will make him weak, just as life in the human place made us weak. We need not fear him.’

  But the Young Lion was not sure. Even tied to a tree, suffering with the heat of the sun in the day and the cold of the forest nights, even weak, and drug-addled, and badly fed, Maccomo was still Maccomo. He was still a clever, calm, mysterious man, a man with a bad, selfish, cunning heart. He was not to be underestimated.

  Far away in Venice, Primo was sad. He felt safe, living with the pale statues and the tall lamps in the great courtyard of the Doge’s Palace – well, what had been the Doge’s Palace but was now, since the Doge’s removal from power, the Palace of the People of Venice. He ate well; he was warm. Venetian cats came each day to talk to him. Venetian humans came too, asking for his blessing on this and that, and he gave it, and that seemed to make them happy. The noble gondoliers tended to his every need: Claudio, of course, and Gabriele, Alessandro and Carlotta.

  But he was sad. He missed the only companions he had ever known, the group of Lions who had taken him in and helped him, with their curious human boy, Charlie. He was old, he knew it, and he was tired. He didn’t really like being looked at. No amount of cushions and admiration could make Venice’s damp rotting islands hot and dry. Lapping waves were not rustling grasses. These humans were not the lizards and goats of … of where?

  Primo was homesick for a home he had never known. He had made his decision to stay in Venice for the best of reasons – if in the height of excitement – but actually, in his ancient heart, he wished he were … where? Well. The only home of the only Lions he had met was Africa. He wished he were in Africa, with them.

  Claudio noticed. He saw that Primo wasn’t really eating properly, that he no longer swayed to his feet when visitors came to see him, that he tired quickly. Claudio did his best by bringing Primo fresh red meat, by letting him sleep, by singing to him and playing the piano – Primo loved music – but it was no good. When Primo, after refusing food for three days, developed a cold and started sneezing, Claudio could avoid the truth no longer. They should have gone with the others.

  One morning, assuming his special Talking-to-Lions position (standing rather formally with his head slightly bent and his hands clasped in front of him) and speaking very clearly, because he still did not quite believe that cats could understand humans, Claudio announced, ‘Today, Signor Primo, beloved of Venice, visitors is coming for you, to give you compliments and so forth.’

  Primo wasn’t that interested in visitors. He gave a heavy, breathy, Lionish sigh, and then he yawned, his immense sabre teeth arching from his mouth as his lower jaw dropped away. Claudio’s eyes widened with admiration.

  ‘Is no ordinary visitors,’ continued Claudio. ‘Is the man you didn’t like because he keep you prisoner but now we know is only because he didn’t understand properly his duties and now he very sorry – is, in fact, Edward, head of security services of King Boris of Bulgaria.’

  Edward, eh? Edward, who had first dressed him up in the fake wings that the Venetians had so adored. Edward, who had kept Charlie and the Lions locked up in King Boris’s palazzo for weeks when King Boris had said they were guests who needed help on their way to Africa … Primo turned his head away with a sniff.

  But the man who approached him next was not Edward. Edward was a tall, fair Englishman with a very suave manner. This was a dark, bustling little man in a waistcoat the colour
and sheen of a particularly glamorous beetle.

  ‘Lead me on, lead me on!’ he was crying as he crossed the courtyard. ‘Where is the darling creature? Has he taken over the old devil’s private apartments? Is he lying in glory on some damask-draped four-poster bed? I do hope so. If I find after all that he’s living on damp straw in a back alley I shall be most disappointed …’

  ‘Indeed, Your Majesty, he is not,’ said the tall, fair Englishman who accompanied him. ‘I am assured he is most carefully attended to, and –’

  ‘I’m joking, Edward,’ said the man. ‘Can’t you tell?’

  ‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ said Edward sheepishly, but at that moment Claudio approached and said, ‘Your Majesty! I didn’t know you was coming to Venice! Welcome, benvenuto, Majesty! Look, here is Primo. Primo, here is His Majesty.’

  And Primo turned his head back.

  Now, Primo and King Boris had never actually met. When Charlie had introduced the King to the Lions on board the Orient Express, Primo had stayed behind. Primo had been too huge, too strange, too sick, too sad to just go about meeting people. But now was different. Primo knew who King Boris was – his saviour, and the saviour of the other Lions and Charlie. And King Boris knew who Primo was – the miraculous creature, created illegally from fossilized DNA, out of time and without family, the friend of the Lions and the Catspeaking boy, and the new mascot of Venice. But seeing him in life – how huge he was, his great teeth resting against his black gums, his massive shoulders and golden flanks – King Boris was swept over by a flood of admiration. What a wonderful animal.

  ‘Salve, Primo,’ said the King. ‘How are you?’

  Of course, King Boris could not speak Cat. But he knew Charlie could, and he was open-minded about these things, and a naturally friendly person.

  Primo slowly blinked his huge eyes. They were milky and old-looking.

  ‘Claudio,’ said King Boris in a serious voice. (He had known Claudio since he was a small boy – indeed Claudio’s dad had been King Boris’s dad’s personal gondolier. Claudio and he used to go scrumping pomegranates and fishing together as lads.) ‘Claudio, he does not look well. Look how sad his eyes are. Look how he lies there, so tired and limp. What is the matter with him?’