But when I made a rush job of saying goodbye and leaving then and there, he just looked relieved. And I didn’t see Mark Kelly again till I came back from Tyneside. That was more than a week later. The time-scale we work on, well, it might as well have been a year. By then things had moved on — what do they say? — apace.
Andy dreamed for much of the night about the animals he knew were on Mark’s body. Were there really seahorses and centaurs? Had he seen them? Great, splashy butterflies on his shoulders; cherubs and turtles malformed with age. Was he making it all up and giving Mark’s body more credit than it deserved?
There was no leopard, he was sure about that. He’d have noticed any leopards a mile off. After a while in that dream the creatures in their tattoo colours cleared away and made space for Andy’s favourite.
In a weak spot the leopard will come back and give me that
baleful stare.
Mostly his eyes are green and blue and I’m sure that he’s a he. He has that hungry look men get.
And women don’t get that hungry look? Oh, don’t quote me on this. I’m only talking from my experience.
Green and blue, eyes like clocks. Eyes always at twelve, always at dinnertime. This is the eye of the leopard that comes back to look at me.
I have fallen out of bed because the leopard looks at me. He doesn’t do anything else, he gives me that hungry look and, in a weak spot when I’m not feeling my best, it’s enough to startle me out of bed.
I woke tangled in my sheets. I woke wrestling them, damp, and I thought they were his pelt, glossy and wet, coming flayed and free in my hands.
His mouth hangs open all the time, he’s frozen like that. Not stupidly like a dog’s mouth, panting and sloppy. His mouth is open in a grin that cracks his head wide open and his ears stand on end, his whiskers all a-tremble.
I haven’t described his spots yet. The leopard’s proverbial spots.
Look! that black-lipped, pink-gummed, bloody and ivory grin proclaims. Oh, look at my proverbial spots!
Tonight I veer my eyes away from his marks, as if at a defect. But how can I? His spots are everywhere. A pox on him! His covering is comprehensive, from the ends of his whiskers to the tip of a tail that twitches and coils to punctuate the sentences I invent for him to say. Oh? he purrs. Ah! he murmurs. Oooh...he concedes, jabbing the air with that tail of his, dot dot dot.
Under, between and round the spots his fur is tough and golden. It cascades over muscle. If you opened him up, you’d expect him to be golden through and through. But he’s not, inside he is fibrous red meat, like me and you, my leopard.
Those black spots, now that I can gather myself up to stare uninhibitedly, are the exact size and shape of lip marks, all over him. Someone in black lipstick has taken him and kissed him all over. As if with equal parts passion and possessiveness, they have laid a claim to his pelt and marked it for their own. They have kissed his twinkling golden ears, his fairer, tightly muscled sides and even the soft, dimpled pads of his feet.
Have I mentioned before that I dream of my leopard at times like these? When I feel like this?
It comes from the time I lived in a taxidermist’s. Before I lived in Penny’s house I had rooms above my uncle Ethan’s taxidermist’s shop in Darlington. Downstairs in the gloom, surmounting mildewed pedestals and scratched glass cabi-nets, were stoats and kingfishers, everything you’d expect. The cupboards were full of all his stuffing paraphernalia. There was a back room where he would set to hollowing the poor beasts out and patching them up again.
In the front window, sunning itself in the meagre light, his leopard surveyed the length of North Road with that same baleful stare. He said he never would sell that leopard. It was as broad across the shoulders as I was and from its nostrils to the end of its tail it almost spanned the width of the shop.
I used to do bar work and when I came back late to the empty shop and flat there would be only my leopard to greet me. To say, How was your evening? Why are you so late? Who is this you’ve brought home with you?
Look what the cat’s dragged in! he’d go, and I would laugh.
Uncle Ethan let his taxidermist business go and I had to move out. “It was a liability,” he said, “and believe me,” he added, “a man with a wooden leg knows a liability when he sees one.” All the animals went and I wanted to keep the leopard for my own. Yet at that stage I didn’t even have a home. I could just see myself on the streets with a leopard in tow. Bringing Up Baby. So I just lost sight of him.
Some nights he’s back, looking at me, giving me advice.
Often I tumble out of bed, all sweaty, when I see him in the night.
He jumps up on his hind legs and presses his paws into my shoulders. The retracted nails dig into my skin but never break the surface. All the while I get the feeling my leopard is trying to impress something on me. His advice.
When I dream of him tonight, the night I’ve been round Mark’s, the leopard’s telling me I was right to think I should get out of Aycliffe for a while.
Go north, the leopard is saying, pressing his paws on my shoulders, his mouth gaping wide,
