Vati sensed the excitement and came trotting upstairs. He slunk up to Leroy’s lion, and peered at its eyes, and dismissed it as unimportant. We played with the pen tops, filling the silent house with whirrs and clicks and the muffled thud of paws belting up and down the stairs.
The dawn chorus was starting when Leroy decided the lion was finished. He stood back to look at it with a satisfied smile. Leaving the pens scattered on the floor, he went back to bed, and the house fell silent.
I followed Vati downstairs and out through the cat flap into the light of the rising sun. We caught a mouse each and took them back into the house to play with. I ate mine, but Vati chucked his on top of the piano and left it there for Graham. He went straight to sleep in our favourite armchair, while I stayed awake, washing and listening. I was nervous about what Leroy had done. I wanted to warn Angie before Graham woke up. I felt it justified an amplified extended-meow, so I sat outside her bedroom door and did one, a real beauty. Then I stuck my claws out and tapped on the door, politely, like a human.
I heard a groan and a yawn. Graham opened the door.‘What’s up, Timba?’ I looked around at the scattered pens and the lion on the wall and felt it was my fault.
Leroy appeared, and he didn’t look nervous at all. His eyes danced with excitement. ‘You like my lion?’ he said to Graham. ‘It’s a surprise.’
In one of Leroy’s story books was a picture of a very hairy, very angry giant towering over a downtrodden little farmer. Graham looked exactly like that giant as he stood there in his boxers, staring open-mouthed at Leroy’s lion. I saw a red flash burn upwards through his aura until it reached his head and Graham pushed his fingers through his hair and made it wild and scraggy.
The smile was disappearing from Leroy’s face, and the silence hung in the air. I felt it reaching into my memory, and I recalled the time in my early kittenhood when a man had shouted, and instantly extinguished any spiritual light. I didn’t want Graham to shout at Leroy and destroy the bright joy in the boy’s heart.
So I did another amplified extended-meow and gave Graham a stare that he couldn’t ignore. It helped him with the rage he was struggling to control.
‘You angry?’ whispered Leroy.
Graham raised his eyebrows and made his voice quiet. He sat down on the wide window seat.‘Come here, Leroy. I need to explain something to you.’
Leroy shuffled over to him.
‘Look at me, please,’ Graham said, and his own eyes were so full of light that Leroy looked at him attentively, seeming fascinated by this giant of a man who could speak quietly when he was angry. Graham used that same hushed tone to create suspense when he was reading stories to Leroy.
‘This is my house,’ Graham said. ‘And I like it, in fact, I love it. I lived here when I was a little boy, like you. I like it to look clean and bright, and if I want a picture, I put it in a nice frame, with glass over it, like that one there.’ He pointed to a nearby painting of the sea.‘It looks good, doesn’t it?’
Leroy grunted.‘Yeah.’ He fidgeted and I could see he was still expecting Graham to shout at him the way Janine had done.
‘So … I’ll tell you what we are going to do about that lion that’s appeared on the wall … look at me, Leroy,’ Graham continued. ‘I must say … it’s a quality drawing … very good. BUT.’ His voice rose slightly. ‘I don’t want it on our nice clean wall. So, what I’m going to do is take a photo of it with my digital camera, and you can help me make a posh frame for it … then we can hang it on the wall. We can even put it on Facebook.’ Leroy’s smile was reappearing, only to vanish as Graham spoke, low and sinister. ‘However … I am going out after breakfast, until lunchtime, and when I come back I want to see that wall painted a nice apple green like it was before. Otherwise the photo will stay inside my camera. Do you understand, Leroy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘AND … ’ The red flash burnt through Graham’s aura again. ‘Look at me. I want a promise that you’ll never, never, never EVER draw on my wall in my house again.’
‘OK,’ Leroy mumbled.
‘Is that a deal?’
‘Deal.’ Leroy banged his small hand against Graham’s giant one.
‘But … we’ll put my lion on FACEBOOK?’
‘We’ll put the lion on Facebook,’ Graham promised, and Vati came running upstairs with his tail up, and made a fuss of Graham, purring and gazing adoringly at him. Cats like quiet voices too.
Later, Angie covered the floor with a sheet and set Leroy up with a tin of apple green paint and a roller. Painting over his lion made him cry, but he got on with it, and made a mess. His hair and his hands were smeared with paint, and there were drips everywhere.
‘Keep those cats away from the wet paint,’ Angie said. ‘We don’t want two apple green cats!’
Too late. Vati and I had already played around on the slippery sheet. Vati had trodden in one of the drips and left apple green paw marks along the landing and down the stairs. And I had managed to sit in a pool of paint.