Catcall Read Free

leaves so close that the air from their wingtips brushed my ears. There were spider monkeys, leaping from branch to branch and swinging on ropes. There were two Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, fast asleep on a bed of straw, snoring loudly.
    Kim giggled and prodded Dad in the ribs. ‘Now who do they remind me of?’
    ‘Mike snores, too,’ Jamie told Dad. ‘Only not as loud as you.’
    It was so cold that I quite fancied snuggling in the straw with those pigs. My breath clouded in front of my face and I had to keep wiggling my toes inside my boots to keep them warm. But the cold was making the day special. It was that crisp, bright kind of cold–the grass crunched as we walked on it, and the low sun dazzled.
    Best of all were the lions. There was a family of them, out in the sunshine in a grass enclosure. We stood together, Jamie huddled against Dad’s legs, and watched the lions through a big pane of glass that was built into the fence. The lioness lay with her twin cubs on a mound, while the male prowled and prowled, walking in a slack, powerful way, his eyes swivelling. He’d worn a path beside a deep ditch that ran all the way round the enclosure, just inside the fence.
    ‘Patrolling his territory,’ Kim said. ‘Keeping an eye on things.’
    ‘Both eyes,’ said Jamie.
    I realised how close the lion would come as he padded along the ditch below us. Excitement shivered through me. I stood perfectly still, but he didn’t look up. As he passed, I stared down at his rough, shaggy mane, and his tawny fur. What would it be like to push my hands into that thick mane, and feel his hot lion breath? I could smell him, strong and catty. I was close to a real lion,
incredibly
close, near enough to reach down and touch him if the glass pane hadn’t been there. Jamie pressed himself back against Dad’s legs. He must have stopped breathing, because I heard him let out a gust of air as the lion padded on past.
    The female didn’t move from her mound. She was clasping a bloody chunk of bone, big enough to be from a cow or a pig. She held it down with one paw, licking it.
    ‘Did she kill it?’ said Jamie. ‘That bone?’
    Kim huffed a laugh.
    ‘No, J,’ said Dad, tugging at the zip on Jamie’s fleece. ‘The park-keepers gave it to them. They don’t have to kill, not here.’
    The cubs were playing around the lioness, rolling and tumbling and batting, like kittens. When one of them tried to tug at the bone, she gave it a cuff with her big front paw.
    ‘She won’t hurt it, will she?’ said Jamie.
    ‘Oh no,’ Dad told him. ‘She’s just saying,
this is mine–keep off.
She won’t hurt her own cubs.’
    ‘Not like Splodge with that mouse!’ I reminded Jamie. ‘Remember how fierce he was?’
    About two weeks before, Splodge brought a mouse into the front room, where we were all watching TV. Mum let out a shriek and Mike sprang to his feet, but Splodge backed off, with a strange low growl in his throat. I was nearer. I got down on the floor and tried to work out how to save the mouse. If I pulled it away, Splodge would grip tighter with his teeth. Its eyes made me think of apple-pips, and its pink paws were like hands as it dangled from Splodge’s mouth. Splodge’s eyes glared with an angry wildness I’d never seen before–usually, he was a big softie. The mouse made a tiny sound, too tiny even to be a squeak, more like a gasp. Its front paws twitched feebly, and then, all in a second, I saw it die. The light went out of its eyes, and it hung quite still from Splodge’s jaws, a limp, dead thing.
    I saw then how mysterious a life is. How, when it flickers out, nothing can bring it back.
    ‘What, did daft old Splodge-Puss manage to catch a mouse?’ Dad said now. ‘I’m surprised he could be bothered to heave himself off the sofa!’
    ‘He killed it!’ Jamie said proudly.
    At the time, he’d been more excited than upset. I’d only thought how terrified the mouse must have been. And of that tiny, quick,