In Search of the Blue Tiger

by Robert Power

  If animals eat people, do they become like them? If people eat animals, do they become like them? Like Jonah inside the whale. Is he a whale or still a person? Cannibals eat people to get their wisdom. Is that why the tiger eats men?

  ‘Come on then, Oscar. No more time today.’ Mrs April is standing by the door. She has a coat over her arm and a bag in her hand. ‘Time to go home.’

  ‘But the second part of the book,’ I say. ‘I never got to see what was in the second half of the book.’

  ‘There will always be another day, young Oscar,’ she says with a smile. ‘Just be glad of that.’

  The next day I dream a dream.

  I have my scrapbook under my arm. I look at the cover. The figurehead on the Cutty Sark is a Bengal Tiger. The book feels much thicker and heavier than I remember it to be. I am walking in a jungle and come to a clearing. There in front of me on a rough path is a tiger. I sense it is on patrol, marking its territory. I feel no fear as it turns its head towards me. The colour and texture of its fur is like marmalade. Its presence grips me in a spell. I hold up my book and try to speak, but no words come from my mouth. The tiger just looks on, keeping me in its sights.

  When I wake up, the dream wet on my tongue, I get my scrapbook down from the shelf and open to the next blank page. This is what I write.

  I must learn everything about tigers, so that when I become one I will know how to be and what to do and when to do it. I will collect a new tiger fact every day and write it down here. If I don’t understand it exactly, that will be OK as it will make sense when I get older. I have found one book in the school library on tigers. I will search in the cellar for more. My tiger fact collection will be my manual for being a tiger, like the one I got to make a crystal radio (but better, because that didn’t work no matter how hard I tried and anyway the Father threw it in the bin in a mood – the manual, not the radio, that’s still in lots of bits in the box). He always gets angry when he can’t do things. Like when we played cards once and he couldn’t follow the rules, so he kicked the table in the air (clubs and hearts, diamonds and spades flying across the kitchen). We don’t play card games anymore and no one makes anything.

  Tiger Fact

  Even though men have done their best to kill all tigers, there are still more different types alive than there are extinct.

  Scientific names of tiger (Panthera tigris)

  Remaining sub-species:

  Bengal: Panthera tigris tigris

  Siberian: Panthera tigris altaica

  South-Chinese: Panthera tigris amoyenis

  Sumatran: Panthera tigris sumatrae

  Indo-Chinese: Panthera tigris corbetti

  Extinct sub-species:

  Caspian: Panthera tigris virgata

  Javan: Panthera tigris sondaica

  Balinese: Panthera tigris balica

  FIVE

  OSCAR MEETS MRS APRIL IN THE PARK

  ‘The joys of meeting pay the pangs of absence; else who could bear it?’Rowe

  A Thursday in the park, walking my plum-coloured dog. The sun is bright and warm for this time of year. One of those fantastic crisp days lighting up the sky, before winter finally snuffles it out. Somewhere over by the lake I hear music. The sun is low, so I shield my eyes. The light is reflected off the brass instruments of the Salvation Army playing in the bandstand. They are playing a jaunty tune to a group of children. Recognising the melody, I sing along.

  ‘The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah.

  The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah.

  The animals went in two by two, the tiger and the kangaroo …’

  My dog barks in appreciation. Then he barks a different bark, as if something strange has caught his attention. It’s then I spot the Fishcutter Twins on the edge of the crowd by the bandstand. They wear identical navy blue overcoats and bottle-green berets. Although they are a distance away, I sense they are watching me. I want to go towards them. I want to ask them about names and animals and Jehovah. I tug on my dog’s lead to pull him in their direction, but he refuses to move. Then I see another figure walking on the pathway between us. With a gasp, I realise it is her.

  Under her jacket she wears a white blouse with an emerald green lizard across her bosom. I see the lizard; then I look at the ground. She is here. Away from the library. Walking outside in the park. Walking, not sitting or shelving. I am to meet her away from the safety and haven of the library. She holds a cream canvas parasol in a gloved hand. The lace trim of the glove against her wrist.

  She gets closer. I stare at my dog. His tongue hangs from the side of his mouth like a slice of honeyed ham. I feel my face flush and redden.

  ‘Oscar, how nice to see you,’ she says with a smile. ‘And what a lovely little dog.’ She bends to stroke my dog’s head. ‘He is such a wonderful colour. He’s almost mauve.’

  I search for something to say. ‘I’ll come to the library on Tuesday,’ and I lower my head.

  ‘Good,’ she answers, easy as slicing a peach. ‘Well, I’m taking a walk around the lake. Shall we walk together?’

  ‘Er … ummm … that would be nice,’ I say, the way I’ve heard some adults speak. And it would.

  ‘And what is the name of your lovely dog?’

  ‘He’s called Stigir,’ I reply as we walk along the gravel path by the rose bed.

  ‘What an imaginative name. How did you come to choose that?’

  So I tell her how the dog got his name. It happened like this.

  It is a Sunday morning. The wind is up in the garden. Some crisp brown leaves scratch at the kitchen door. The Mother sits at the table, peeling something. The Great Aunt looks out the window, watching another autumn slipping away. There is a silence of sorts and I sense my opportunity.

  ‘Stigir,’ I shout at the dog, who is doing nothing. He pricks up his ears from the corner of the room. ‘Stigir, stop doing that.’

  The dog looks around, trying to make sense of the words. No one else moves. The two women: deep in their own worlds.

  ‘Stigir,’ I say slowly, clearly, ‘stop stigging about.’

  The Mother stops peeling. ‘Stigger?’ she says.

  The Great Aunt turns from the window. She wears a thick black frock with a white ruff. She looks like someone from an old painting. ‘I’ve never heard a dog called Stigger,’ she says with a disdainful look on her face. ‘What sort of a name is that then? Ask him,’ she says, prodding her finger in the direction of Mother.

  ‘I call him Stigir because he’s always stigging about,’ I answer before the Mother gets a chance. I’m prepared for this. To stand my ground. To do battle.

  ‘Stigging?’ says Mother, her voice a bit high-pitched. ‘What’s stigging?’

  ‘Look,’ I say, pointing at my little dog. ‘He’s doing it now.’

  Stigir looks decidedly confused, his head moving up and down and from side to side. Then he nuzzles his nose into the old battered sofa by the door.

  ‘See, he’s stirring and digging. Aren’t you, Stigir? You’re stigging, aren’t you?’

  Mother nearly smiles. The Great Aunt just scowls. But she reckons it sounds more like a dog name than a cat name.

  When I finish telling her the story I look at Mrs April. She is smiling. Only me and Blue Monkey and the Stigir dog know the secret behind the name. But I want to tell someone else. Someone I can trust. Someone who would understand.

  ‘They said I couldn’t call him Tiger,’ I say to Mrs April, the sun jumping off the water of the lake onto her lizard brooch.

  I look over to the bandstand, but the Twins are nowhere in sight. Stigir pricks up his ears, as if something else is nearby.

  ‘Who said you couldn’t call him Tiger?’ she replies.

  We are so close to the edge of the lake. Near to where I once saw a turtle basking in the sun on a piece of wood jutting out of the water. Like the survivor of a shipwreck. Floating on a sliver of splintered plank.

  ‘They. Mother, Great Aunt,’ I say, rememberi
ng the turtle, the way its neck stretched, slower than the unfurling of a leaf.

  ‘So you called him Stigger instead? It’s a nice name,’ she says, turning her face to the sun. Drinking in the warmth, the nourishment. A tendon stands out along her neck. It is strong and sinewy like the metal cables on the canal lock gates.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ I whisper.

  She looks away from the sun towards me. The light catches the pearl necklace she wears. They are like drops of sparkling milk. She smiles, but is serious.

  ‘Yes, I can, if you want me to,’ she says, her voice gentle.

  ‘Well, his name is secret. Stigir. S. T. I. G. I. R.?’

  I look at her to see if she understands. If she has worked it out.

  ‘Oh, Stigir,’ she replies, ‘that’s how you spell it.’

  ‘Well,’ I continue, excited. Stigir is standing a few feet away, sniffing around the base of a holly bush. ‘I wanted him to have a tiger name, after all. And I read this story in one of the library books. All about a princess standing by a river, trying to get across.’

  I gaze to the other side of the lake. She is there, in my mind, the Princess, in a long flowing dress, looking up and down the waterway for a place to cross. An anxious expression is on her face. Something is about to happen and she needs to be on the other side. This side, where me and Mrs April are.

  ‘But she can’t. She can’t get across. The water is too deep and the river too wide. Then, like magic … it is magic … a tiger appears by her side. He tells her to climb onto his back and then he starts swimming across the water. She doesn’t get wet. The tiger swims like a crocodile. When she gets to the other side, she lies down and has a baby. A boy or a girl. I’m not sure. Let’s pretend it was a boy. When she goes back to her palace she calls the river Tigris, after the tiger who helped her cross the water, so she could have her baby where she was meant to.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ exclaims Mrs April, a broad smile on her face. ‘T.I.G.R.I.S. Stigir!’ She claps her hands and laughs out loud.

  I make an adult laugh. Stigir looks up and barks.

  Some animals are more attached to their offspring than others. Not like the turtles hatching on the beach who never know their parents and have to make a run for it to the sea as the birds fly down to eat them. Others do more for their children than the turtles. Like a pelican. If her children are hungry she will tear open her breast and feed them her blood. Which child would you rather be? A turtle on the beach or a pelican being fed by its parent’s blood?

  I just wish mine would stop trying to kill each other.

  Tiger Fact

  Only very rarely are mortal combats between tigers recorded. Once, two cubs were observed walking with their mother along the Lahpur valley, ten miles from Jogi Mahal in Ranthambore. The tigress saw an adult male walking towards them. The cubs hurried away to hide while their mother continued towards the tiger. The tiger and tigress sat down together before moving a short distance to the sandy bank of a nearby stream. The tigress showed affection to the tiger in order to distract him from the cubs. However, the cubs, sad and frightened at being away from their mother, came into the open. The tiger made a sudden dash towards the cubs. The tigress reacted instinctively, attacking the tiger from the rear, gripping his right foreleg and then killing him with a fatal bite to the throat. Later on, the tigress ripped open the rump of the dead tiger and proceeded to eat his left hind leg.

  I hold Blue Monkey tight to my chest. I know how much he hears without speaking, how much he sees without telling. His eyes are sharp and clear and he looks at me like he can see deep inside.

  ‘Blue Monkey,’ I say, as the cries and clatters downstairs move from room to room like a plague, ‘I remember a time in the garden when I was really small. There was a worm and I threw a brick at it. I don’t know if I hit it, but I threw another brick and then another. There was an old outhouse that was demolished, so there were bricks everywhere. I threw so many bricks and I just kept throwing them where I thought the worm was. In the end all the bricks were piled up and I felt really bad that I had squashed the worm.’

  Blue Monkey is still listening, his soft fur gentle on my cheek. So I tell more of the story and what I know of worms and how you can break them in two and then they grow whole again: a red band around their middles shows you someone else has already torn them in half. And I tell him about the time I climbed the big tree in the orchard and went out on a branch and couldn’t get back, though I must have done, because I was on my own.

  We both listen. The commotion downstairs has quietened. We wait a moment or two for more, but no one comes.

  I cuddle Blue Monkey close to me and climb back into bed.

  ‘Thank you, Blue Monkey, for looking after me,’ I whisper. And we both fall fast asleep.

  SIX

  OSCAR HEARS ABOUT THE GREAT AUNT MARGARET’S BABY

  ‘Fire came down from heaven, therefore restlessly works itself through all combustibles till it returns thither again.’ Secker

  I look through the keyhole. It is cold against my eye, even though the fire burns and crackles in the corner of the room. By its light I can see Mother and Great Aunt, sitting close to each other. The record on the gramophone has gone silent.

  ‘All right for you,’ says Great Aunt, her arms flailing around as if she is trying to keep her balance. ‘You have your child. Your golden boy. He’s all right. He’s alive and don’t I know it. The madness bubbling under those curly locks.’

  Mother says nothing. I can see the bun of her hair above the back of the armchair.

  My Great Aunt’s arms keep circling: the conductor to the orchestra of the flames.

  ‘He can run around and play with that dog, free as a bird. But my baby, my darling baby girl. She is gone. She is gone and he is here. Every time I see him … he doesn’t know what he does. So unfair … unfair.’

  Her arms fall to her side. The only sound is the hissing of the fire.

  After a few moments I watch Mother get up from her chair and move towards her Aunt. She is doing something. I sense it is with tenderness. Rearranging Great Aunt’s hair; folding her reading glasses; placing the rosary beads on her lap. Then she sits back in her own chair. I am about to turn away when I hear a gentle sobbing. Rhythmic and heaving. I cannot tell if the crying is from Mother or Great Aunt.

  I knew there was a baby. My Great Aunt often told me the story of the coach-house fire.

  The first time she told me it was like this.

  There is a large blue flower in a vase. The shape of the flower is one I have never seen before. It spirals and twists up against itself as if in pain. At its end it flops back towards the table in tired submission. Its centre is a peppered yellow pod that lets tiny specks of pollen drop onto the shiny varnish of the table. My Great Aunt is pouring tea, so I bend down and lick up the pollen, like beads of sugar. She does not see me, though I notice my steamy tongue-print on the tabletop. As she turns around I rub away the evidence with the cuff of my cardigan.

  ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘It’s time for a true story.’

  She often tells me stories. Here in the coach-house. In the late afternoon. On the cake-stand is a single plate of biscuits. They look like dry cement. My Great Aunt looks serious and foreboding. She gestures for me to sit opposite her. Where she won’t be tempted to touch me.

  ‘Your mother is not the only one in this family to have had a baby,’ she begins.

  For once she is not holding her rosary beads, but her fingers move between each other like spider legs. I listen, like I always listen to these words from the adults. Expecting anything; being surprised at nothing. I reach out and touch one of the stems in the vase. The pollen falls like snow. I press the grains on the tip of my finger. I can count them. Six, seven, eight. All this I do as I listen.

  ‘She was a pumpkin. My dove. My bird. She lit my life with a flame of golden orange.’

  Then there is silence. I look at her. She is staring ahead. She is a mile away, yea
rs away. Then she gently sings. ‘She was as beautiful as a butterfly and as proud as a queen.’

  I lick the pollen. I taste it in my mouth. My Great Aunt is somewhere else and notices nothing, singing softly.

  ‘Although you were near me I never was quite sure, my wee bonnie lass who came down from the sky.’

  As always the fire burns in the huge fireplace. It warms and lightens the room. The flames jump and twist, the logs crackle and clap. I watch as one spark escapes and flies away up the chimneystack. A great shadow is cast against the wall, I sense Great Aunt Margaret is watching too.

  She stares into my face with a wildness of eye.

  ‘The flames took her. My sweetness. The fire wrapped itself around her. And all the screaming and all the tears could not put it out.’

  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.