He sits cross-legged too near the TV in his jungle pajamas with the ROAR! across the heart, but as it’s not the bedtime routine just yet, I tousle his hair and then play it. He’s a sweet boy, with so much of his mother in him. Side-eyeing him while he’s engrossed in the show, I can see that iron will in miniature, the light in his eyes of pursued desire. But he’s still only young. His ambitions at the moment are with lions. Lately he’s been holding his plushy so tightly, so often, its stuffing has been flattened in his fist. He cuddles it—Mr. Lion, unsurprisingly—and I sit on the sofa behind him. He won’t sit with me, but I can’t leave and do something else as he’ll pause it and ask for me back. I’ll always accede but it’s frustrating. I sigh discreetly, steaming the bones of his spine. He’s a good kid but he’s at that age he wants to repeat things and it’s easier to go along with it than push back or set boundaries that are really more his mother’s to explain as we’d agreed it’s better I’d be a peaceful presence.
She’s right, and she’s always remarking on how well we get along and I know it, and really, I love it, but he’ll grow up to work with computers, I’m certain, and I’d like him to ride his bike a bit more or bulk out some day but we’ve years for that to happen and until then, surely I can tolerate the boredom?
“But there’s more than one way to fight!” blares the narrator, as the screen cuts to two lions whomping with bloodied paws. It’s his favourite part, the fight for the pride. “The winning male gets every breeding female, every infant cub.” He smiles at a close-up of a pair of stained fangs bared, of a golden ragged mane like a crayoned sun. “The loser retreats, to try another day.”
“Rewind” he says, and points to the remote, “I want to watch it again.”
Every day he does this. I eat my annoyance before I speak. “I’ve seen it already,” I tell him, as casually as I can, “so can’t we keep going?” On screen, the camera glides languidly across the usual savanna.
Inevitably, with subtle petulance: “no.”
“Well, I don’t want to,” I say, but in an offhand, playful way, waggling the remote out of reach. It’s a risky strategy.
“Why not?” he asks, and I’m thinking about whether his mother’s heard—did it sound like a rebuke?—and miss my opportunity to lie.
On screen, the victor, bruised in his triumph, claims his prize. “I have my pride,” I say, pointing at the TV and roaring. It’s a stupid pun—I stamp on the truth in it—and though I think he won’t get it, he laughs and tells me I’m silly. He’s a sharp kid.
We watch a bit more until he starts to yawn. I bustle him to his mother; she’ll settle him better in bed. The show’s still playing when I come downstairs, and the narrator’s explaining that when a lion takes over a pride, a biological imperative applies. Steps are taken to ensure his lionesses are receptive. I’ve been obliged to sit through this enough by now, and I know, not that I’ll ever tell his mother, that ensure is just a neutered coerce.
The narrator is inexplicably upbeat. “There’s a way to make a lioness enter oestrus…”
Upstairs, Ethan will be fidgeting under his duvet with a ROAR! across his heart, playing out his dreams of fighting. That’s my guess. In truth, I don’t know him well enough yet.
On screen, that ragged mane enters the frame again. The focus shifts to our champion’s mouth, to his oil-black gums and grungy yellow fangs. It lingers at last on his rugged foot-long tongue, red-pink as sockeye salmon or a newborn. The soundtrack goes quiet. The narrator waits. A sandy looking cub is plucked by the nape of the neck. The lionesses expect it, like a ritual. It’s as delicate a procedure as snipping a flower stalk.
I’ll have to sit through this all again tomorrow. What I don’t tell the boy is how enamoured I’ve grown of watching lions too. Their rival lives are vibrant on the inside of my eyes. I can’t help but imagine their approach to it now, and how after the fighting, there’s only one family.
And sometimes I wonder, although I’ll never tell his mother, if that’s a lot fucking easier for everyone.
