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from her face in a peach-coloured hairclip, shaped like an oyster. She wears a long chocolate-coloured skirt stretching to her calves. Around her neck she has a ring of beads like tiny apricots. This lady, reaching for a book, her long fingers covered in rings of white gold and caramel glass, looks so beautiful to me at this moment.
    â€˜There you are,’ she says, placing the small volume in front of me. ‘This will give you some more information for your project.’
    I turn it over. It has a title that sets my heart racing:
    Man meets animal in flesh and claw
    The book is in two halves. The first is subtitled:
    Man-Eaters: On Land and Sea.
    Inside are fantastic pictures. One shows a polar bear dragging a man from his tent on the ice. Another has a huge eagle flying high above the mountaintops, a struggling baby tightly gripped in its talons. In another, an alligator seizes the leg of a man in its powerful jaws, blood and flesh dripping through the torn trouser-leg. Sharks and wolves, grizzly bears and lions, pythons and crocodiles. A world of immense danger.
    My heart jumps to discover a whole chapter on tigers.
    Out of the corner of my eye I can see Mrs April looking at me from her desk. She smiles and pulls a face of horror and alarm. I stifle a laugh, reassured. I open my scrapbook at a fresh page. In large block capitals, which later on I will colour in blood red, I write:
MAN-EATING ANIMALS
1. TIGERS
    Man-eating tigers have killed over one million people in Asia during the last 400 years, about 2,500 per year. Here’s a good example: during one year in Riau Province, Sumatra, thirty people were killed by tigers, compared with twenty-five deaths by murder. And tigers aren’t murderers, they are only doing what is natural. Maybe they’re getting their own back for that man who burnt the first tiger at the stake after the tiger trusted him so.
    When I become a tiger, I will be a man-eater. Then I can eat the Father when he’s a man. Or at night, when he’s a wild pig, I can hunt him down and watch the fear grow in his eyes as I trap him in the forest.
    One legend says anyone who identifies the whereabouts of the tiger will be the next victim. The ghost of the last victim of the man-eating tiger rides on its back and chooses the next, pointing out anyone who betrays the tiger’s movements.
    I draw a whole-page picture of a man in a purple cloak on the back of a tiger. The hooded figure points to the lighted room of a house in the village in the near distance. I am so engrossed in my reading and writing I barely hear the bell ring to signal the library is closing.
    Mrs April taps me gently on the shoulder.
    â€˜It is time to go, I am afraid,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep the book to one side, so you can use it any time.’
    I look down at my picture. The man is pointing to someone. Trying to tell the tiger something. The house I have drawn reminds me of my house. There is a lit window. What is going on in there? What are the sounds I am straining to hear?
    If animals eat people, do they become like them? If people eat animals, do they become like them? Like Jonah inside the whale. Is he a whale or still a person? Cannibals eat people to get their wisdom. Is that why the tiger eats men?
    â€˜Come on then, Oscar. No more time today.’ Mrs April is standing by the door. She has a coat over her arm and a bag in her hand. ‘Time to go home.’
    â€˜But the second part of the book,’ I say. ‘I never got to see what was in the second half of the book.’
    â€˜There will always be another day, young Oscar,’ she says with a smile. ‘Just be glad of that.’

    The next day I dream a dream.
    I have my scrapbook under my arm. I look at the cover. The figurehead on the Cutty Sark is a Bengal Tiger. The book feels much thicker and heavier than I remember it to be. I am walking in a jungle and come to a clearing. There in front of me