Father of Lions by Louise Callaghan

Author:Louise Callaghan [Callaghan, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789540789
Publisher: Head of Zeus

29

Abu Laith

THE MAN FROM YEMEN WOULD KILL HIM, MARWAN KNEW, easy as breathing. He had a patchy beard dyed bright yellow with henna, and straggly black hair on his head. His face was very dark, and his body reed-thin, his eyes dull with a dead anger. When he strode into the zoo that day carrying a long black rifle, Marwan had known that there was something wrong with him, and that this wasn’t a normal man. Even the other two Daeshis who had come with him said that he was crazy. They were from Tel Afar, a city 40 miles west of Mosul. Next to their leader, the Yemeni, they had seemed reasonable.

‘Don’t come back tomorrow,’ one of them had said to Marwan as the Yemeni walked around the zoo, shouting at the few families who had already arrived to get out. They had left their picnics behind as they scrambled to leave the zoo. ‘He’ll kill you. He’s so angry.’

They had screeched up in a white Nissan van around lunchtime. There hadn’t been many people in the zoo. The fighting had been growing closer, the explosions louder, for a few days now and the visitors had dwindled to a few local regulars who took their picnics to the park and came to look at the monkeys. There was no queue in front of the ice cream stand and the lights on the merry-go-round had been turned off. Everyone had worried they would be an easy target for coalition aircraft, and there wasn’t in any case enough fuel for the generator.

Marwan had come to the zoo anyway, because he was still getting paid and because he was waiting for Heba. She hadn’t been to the zoo for a few weeks, and he had been worried in a way that he had never been before. He missed her, and was very afraid for her. Fighting had been raging around Gogjali, the suburb of Mosul where she lived, for weeks throughout November 2016. He didn’t know whether her family had stayed at home, or fled further into the city away from the fighting. He didn’t know her address, or her father’s name. He had started to become aware that he didn’t know whether she was dead or alive. But still he stayed, hoping she would come.

He was also worried about the animals. Lula didn’t like loud noises, and the planes were making her panic when they swept through the sky at high speed, making a swooshing, booming sound. She lumbered restlessly around her cage, occasionally pawing at Warda to keep him away from the lions. Marwan had put up chicken wire between the lion and bear cages, but it hadn’t stopped Mother staring at the cub as if he was a steak while he scampered about on his three legs, looking surprisingly cheerful apart from his watery eyes.

But now the men from Tel Afar had come to the zoo with the Yemeni, who strode around radiating malice and brandishing his rifle.

‘Get out,’ the Yemeni had shouted, as the families grabbed their children and ran out of the zoo.

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