Read Online Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks by Alan Coren - Free Book Online Page B

Those were the best ones, in the old days. George would not let her go for them any more. Not after the time she had gone into the bush after the bull that had tossed him. She had dropped it, finally, with one so clean you had to part the forelock to find the hole. When she got back, George had been lying in the sun for three hours.
    â€˜He was a tough one,’ she said.
    â€˜I know’, he said. ‘I have lost a lot of blood.’
    â€˜Where did he get you?’ she said.
    He took his hands away.
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜That is the way it is, sometimes.’ He laughed, briefly.
    â€˜Like Manolete,’ she said.
    â€˜Yes.’ He began to cry. ‘Like Manolete.’
    Things had been different between them after that, and he would not let her hunt the water-buffs any more. He did not like what it did to her, he said. So she sat around the camp, in the brass African heat, raising mongeese and cross-breeding scorpions. Sometimes she would stick pins in little clay models; but even that did not help.
    She saw the first two boys come over the hill with the animal slung on poles between them. George walked alongside, carrying the big Remington by its strap. He waved at her, the way he always did, and she took another finger of scotch, and waved back. She got off the camp-bed and went towards them.
    â€˜It’s a lioness,’ she said, quietly. ‘You son-of-a-bitch.’
    â€˜I didn’t want to do it, but it happened that way. She came out of the bush, and no one had time to ask questions. She was a big one,’ he said, ‘and she was coming fast.’
    She looked at the animal, with its guts torn open and its swollen teats hanging down, heavy with uselessness. She saw the belly full of old fertility, with the fat black flies buzzing around it.
    â€˜Cojones,’ she said.
    â€˜I didn’t want to do it,’ said George again.
    â€˜I hate it when you kill females.’ She looked at the bronze horizon. ‘I hate it when you take it out on them.’
    â€˜Don’t pity me,’ he said, ‘for Christ’s sake.’
    â€˜She just calved. Is that why?’
    â€˜I didn’t know she had cubs, I swear. When she came at us, I thought she was just one of the mean ones.’
    â€˜I hope it was a clean shot.’
    He pumped a used shell out of the Remington.
    â€˜Some things you just don’t lose.’
    â€˜You’re so damned clever,’ she said.
    Two boys came up, grinning, with a basket between them.
    â€˜I brought you a present,’ said George. He flipped open the lid. Inside there were three lion cubs; their eyes were still closed. There was something terrifying about their innocence.
    â€˜You and your goddamned metaphors,’ she said.
    He turned and walked into the tent. He pulled his bed a little further away from hers and sat down. He looked at the typewriter. Someday he would write about it, he thought. You can get rid of it when you write about it. He would write with symbols, so that when he was dead they would know he had been one of the big ones all the time. Turgenev was one of the big ones. And Flaubert. And Jack Dempsey. He was one of the big ones, too. And Ludwig von Beethoven. Turgenev and Flaubert and Dempsey and Beethoven and Peter Abelard and that old man in Key West who caught the biggest goddamned sailfish he’d ever seen in his life with a two-dollar rod. They were the great ones.
    The next day he went up-country on a Government weevil survey. He did not get back for five months, and when he walked out of the bush, waving and calling the way he always did, it took six houseboys to get the lion off him.
    â€˜You didn’t have to do that,’ he said. He lay on his back in the tent, his one good eye bright among the bandages. ‘You didn’t have to alienate her.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ she said. She smiled. She was looking better than she had for a long time. ‘Elsa’s