CHAPTER 34
From watching wildlife programmes Lulubelle knew the only safe thing to do in the presence of a lion was to keep still and stay quiet. She found she had no other option anyway, because the shock of finding Savage in the cage took her breath away and froze her bones.
She was sitting cross-legged, her usual position for thinking, with her hands round her ankles. Now she found she was gripping them, and forced herself to stop. The last thing she needed was to get pins and needles in her legs.
If the lioness pounced, she stood no chance. One stride forward and one swipe of that huge armoured paw would be all it would take. But if the lioness, who might have been given some drug for her infected paw, was lethargic or just lost interest in this small distraction, Lulubelle might have a chance - one chance and no more - to move very swiftly and get herself out of the cage the same way she had got in, through the wide bars.
Savage was motionless, standing, looking in Lulubelle's direction. She was alert: Lulubelle could tell that by the smell of her. She had loved lions when she was small. Their pungent smell had never put her off, as it had some of the other fairground and circus children, and she had never found them frightening. Many times, the trainers had warned Lucinda to watch her small daughter more carefully. Once before, she had been found in their compound, snuggled up against a yearling lion cub. Thankfully, the lions had seemed to regard her as another cub and hadn't reacted, and the trainer had rescued her before the cub woke up and stretched out its claws for a rough and tumble with this unexpected new playmate.
But that had been when she was two and a half. Now she was ten, nearly eleven, she knew more about lions than she had then. She knew it was no mere fussing by grown-ups when they insisted that even the most passive and placid beast must be treated with extreme caution. She had seen a keeper mauled.
She tried not to remember it now - the man, experienced with lions, having followed the same careful routine with them that he had for years, staggering and collapsing on the ground outside the cage, blood pouring from his face, and his arm almost hanging off.
Lulubelle forced herself to stop thinking of the possibility. Savage would smell panic on her, just as Lulubelle could smell the animal's warning mechanism. Girl and lioness were both still, apparently passive but totally alert. Neither was fooled by the other's stillness.
Think of something relaxing, Lulubelle told herself. Her mind went to Lucinda, rehearsing now. She liked to watch her, never tired of the hypnotic swinging to and fro of the trapezists, knew to a millisecond when they were ready to throw themselves from the comparative safety of the handbar into mid-air. She imagined the perfect curve of Lucinda's body, every muscle tensed, flying high above the tiers of seats which would later be filled by a rapt and petrified audience, craning their necks to see Lucinda, her hands outstretched, apparently miss making contact with Pedro, hanging by his feet from the other trapeze.
The audience would gasp as she seemed to mistime her arrival and spin out of control into a half-somersault. Only Lulubelle never doubted, never blinked, till she saw Pedro's hands firmly gripped round Lucinda's ankles and Lucinda, upside down, waving and smiling triumphantly.
Savage extended her neck slightly, sniffing Lulubelle's scent. There must be no trace of fear in it. Thinking of Lucinda's act and of her fellow trapezists, both so professional, so experienced, was safe. Lulubelle had never seen either Pedro or Juan miss a catch. She had seen Lucinda, a few times, drop into the safety net, but only from the high wire, never during the trapeze act. Sometimes, when they were rehearsing a new move on the trapezes and she hadn't quite perfected it, Lucinda would mistime a catch and land awkwardly in her catcher's grasp, spraining an ankle or a wrist, but she had never had any serious injury and it was never the fault of Pedro or Juan. They were tense, dour men, homosexual partners who kept themselves to themselves and didn't socialize much with the others. But their intense, introspective characters were part of Lucinda's safety net. They never relaxed their vigilence.
Lucinda herself was reckless, the one who enthusiastically embraced all the new ideas and wanted to emulate every other trapezist's latest feats of skill. No one seeing her launch herself off the high platform, held only by her neck between Juan's feet as he swung out into the air with both muscled hands gripped like steel round the bar of the trapeze, would suspect Lucinda capable of feeling fear.
No one, that is, who hadn't seen her sobbing into her pillow because some ringmaster had reprimanded her for being late or had threatened her with the sack for some affair that had disrupted relationships among her colleagues, or because some man had left her, or hit her, or failed to use contraceptives and the circled date on the calendar had been and gone with no reassuring event. It was men who caused Lucinda to fear, not heights or physical risks or the ever-present possibility of a slip, a clumsy landing, or a rebound over the edge of the safety net.
Lulubelle never worried about Lucinda’s physical safety, or not consciously, though she did have nightmares. And Lucinda had been drinking more recently. Tonight, for example. Lulubelle had been so concerned about her mother being late for rehearsal that she hadn't really stopped to consider whether Lucinda was too drunk to work. And would she remember to tell Mr Mannfield she wouldn't be doing the high wire act tonight? He always accepted that, never pushed her, but would Lucinda, more reckless than ever when drunk, insist on going ahead with it?
There was a sudden shout from the Big Top. Lulubelle, instinctively, moved her head sharply. Had Lucinda had an accident? Savage, about to settle down again in the corner, lifted her head and snarled, moving forward a pace. Lulubelle, turning back quickly, found the lioness's head two metres away from her face and panicked. Forgetting what she'd learned, she let out a scream, jumped to her feet and tried to force herself through the bars.
The manoeuvre, so easy when she was relaxed and believed the cage empty, was not easy now. Twisting her slim frame sideways, she still couldn't make it fit, and her head seemed huge. She had one leg through and one arm; she wriggled and twisted. Screams escaped from her throat, beyond her control. Savage, her jaws open, tensed her huge shoulders and waited, watching her victim squirm and squeal.
There were footsteps outside, people running, looking for the source of the noise. At least they weren't all in the Big Top, responding to the other crisis - but would they find Lulubelle?
The trailer shook slightly as a man ran up the ramp. She was beyond noticing who it was. He was shouting instructions to her. Then there was another man, also shouting, shouting at the lioness, trying to distract her. Another voice was accusing the first of having left the door of the outer cage open. Everyone was talking to her, shouting at her, pulling at her, then trying to push her back into the cage, forcing her to move round towards the locked door.
She was paralysed with fear. She had almost forgotten the lion. It felt as though every fear during the whole of her life gathered force and bore down on her, like a giant snowball gathering weight and speed as it hurtled downhill towards the point of her life where she was now poised, between the freedom beyond the bars and the one swift bite of the lion's jaws.
Screaming uncontrollably, her eyes tightly closed and her hands tightly gripped round the bars, she was impossible to help. Savage was becoming agitated, pacing between the man who was trying to distract her and the more interesting distraction of the young girl screaming. Someone ran to fetch meat, another in search of supplies of a tranquillizer drug.
Suddenly the trailer shook heavily. Savage snarled, and swiped a lethal paw through the bars towards one of the men, who backed hastily against the mesh of the outer cage.
Lulubelle hadn't noticed the trailer shaking. Her first indication of Arto's arrival was a roar that made Savage cower. Then the bar she was clinging to suddenly bent away from her hand; a strong grip gently but irresistibly detached her fingers from the bar and she felt herself pulled through the widened space, to safety.
Still screaming and gasping, she was slung e
ffortlessly over one massive shoulder, the width of a normal athlete's entire shoulder span, and carried from the cage. Crossing the fairground, now coming alive with music and trial runs of the mechanisms driving the different rides, Arto strode towards his own caravan and deposited Lulubelle on to the cushioned lap of Marisa his wife.
Genius Page 34