I do not remember a lot of my childhood, there are sections missing, I am sure most people share this mottled view of their past. There are moments which are merely hazy, dog-eared at the edges and lacking in colour or details, and then there are those scenes which simply combusted somewhere along the line. These latter scenes tend to be quite sly in their desertion, they do not reveal themselves to be absent until you hit thirty-something and your eldest asks you where you were when Diana died. However I do recollect the day my mother told me about Lions and Wolves. She wished me to be wary of the world and it’s predatory characters, she counselled me: better to dip a cautious toe into love than diving eagerly in. And I record her story here today in the hope that others shall heed her words more vigilantly than I did.
It could not be said that my mother was a clever woman, she’d be brought up on a diet of bread and coal dust and left school at the age of twelve, just two years before the obligatory leaving age was raised to sixteen in ’73. She was not clever, but she was wise, grafted from the hard-boiled women of WWII, she was a housewife, yes, but one built from granite. She was baptised Katherine Robinson, her family called her Katie, her friends called her Kathy, she met Donald, my father, at the age of seventeen and his ungainly surname ‘Herring’ squatted upon her like a toad, for as long as I can remember he called her ‘old woman’.
It was the morning after my sixteenth birthday, I sat at the kitchen table, pooling milk from my cereal into the spoon and drinking it on its own, so much sweeter. My father came in his customary short-sleeved shirt and slacks, he threw himself on to the chair as Mum wordlessly placed a cup of tea and two buttered slices of toast down in front of him. He tore bites from his toast in the same way he would with a steak, and watched me through a furrowed brow as I played with my breakfast. I was not reprimanded for this sort of thing, as hearsay would have me believe that most children are, he did not see it as his place to bring up a daughter. Not a syllable was ever exchanged over the breakfast routine, I always wondered what intensity and efficiency of discourse they must share in the bedroom to give space for such silence. Father did not linger over this meal, he would gulp down his sugary tea, pull on his coat, kiss my mother with wet lips and be out the door all in one swift movement.
‘Your father used to be a lion, you know.’ Mum said in a blank tone, moving from her spot at the sink to sit beside me, a mug clasped in her slender hands.
‘Mum?’
‘Your father,’ Her eyes met mine and a small, nearly unrecognisable smile appeared on her lips, forming creased dimples on her cheeks, ‘he was a real lion, I was proud to have him, now look at him, that’s a sad sight no denyin’ it.’
I did not say anything more, I don’t think she needed me to. She reached into a pocket a pulled out a cigarette packet, lighting one she held it limply and grasped my wrist with her other, mug-warmed hand.
‘I was so young, and you’re even younger you sweet thing, this place was different in those days, it was brighter, there was more out there for a girl, suppose we’ve gone backwards now haven’t we darlin’? Oh but you wouldn’t…oh never mind that. There’s just, well, you’re a woman now I suppose and I think you deserve to know a little bit about the world, no one ever told me, oh no, no one ever tells the women, might as well be born legs akimbo, scrubbing brush in hand.
‘But your father, he was a good man once, I think you should know that darlin’, every kid should see their father as a king. That’s the thing about lions, they don’t last nearly as long as you’d hope them to, Donald was such a sweet thing, he pulled me by the heart strings and didn’t let go ‘til he every part of me, sorry darlin’ but you must know that’s how it is. I met your father, we were still quite young, he’d got himself a job in a factory, was doing all right, he had a car and a moustache god bless him, thought he was twice the age he was, made him look – well anyway, he was a decent man. He was a lion, so innocent to his own good looks, his own father had died when he was quite young so he had that touch of sensitivity a single-mother can give you know? He didn’t know what to do with a woman, that’s what a lion is y’see, a man grown in the downiest of feathers, in the safest nest, they learn to be sweet, humorous, generous, abstinent. Lions grow thick and strong and beautiful with no knowledge of their own brilliance, oh darlin’ if only you’d see your father in those days, locked away in that bungalow with his mother. But lions are the worst kind, you’ve got to know that sweetheart.’
The pressure on my hand increased, she looked down to her tea and let out a gentle chuckle, a familiar form of self-preservation, meant to prevent tears.
‘All men are wolves my dear, all men, the only difference between them is the time when it shows itself! Lions are just late bloody arrivals. Because eventually they’ll want to leave in search of other packs, of life, of fun, of wisdom, ha! It didn’t take long, I should’ve seen it bubbling up inside him, I’d married a lion darlin’ don’t you be doubting that, he became a wolf. The wolf came from the inside, underneath his smooth skin grew lice-addled fur so thick it strained the flesh to keep it in, the bones burst through his cherub-face, you could see a phantom snout twitching between his eyes. And I saw the blue of those eyes grow sour with yellow. I’m pretty sure if I’d taken off one of those socks I’d darned for him I would’ve seen the middle of his foot elongate, like a hare’s, ready to gallop off to some maiden in red.
‘Wolves aren’t nice darlin’, you’ve got to know that, but it’s inevitable, lurks in all good men I reckon, lurks in all good women too, Vixens are dangerous things, but you needn’t worry yourself about that. Wolves are…devious things, your father stopped saying a thank-you for his toast, then he stopped telling me he loved me, then he sort of stopped anything.’
She had stopped looking at me, mesmerized by her own words, at the time it simply seemed to me like a decorative elaboration of a loveless marriage, but the way she gazed at the front door, as if she’s never been past the perimeter, as if its frame were embroidered with thorns.
‘And now he goes out in the night, he goes out with the face of a lion and the blood of a wolf, he goes out and he leaves me.’
My mother never mentioned it again, and the following day breakfast routine repeated itself smoothly, I watched them they imitate tumbleweed in both motion and connotation for the next three years until I left home. I met a Vixen, fell in love, and we bought a bungalow in Somerset, and this morning she didn’t thank me for her toast.
