Easy Tiger.

‘Easy Tiger,’ Archie said, swaying and backing away towards the living room door. He wasn’t sure how a ten-foot long Bengali tiger had squeezed into his living room, its peculiar yellowish orange coat with black brown stripes combining with the orange globe of street lighting piercing the gloom, the glow familiar, reminiscent of St Stephen’s school disco, held in the basement of the church hall, where you could only pick out your dance partner by looking at their white, or since it was a Catholic environment, greenish-white teeth,  especially since that Bengal tiger subspecies was quite rare, and especially since he lived three up in a tenement in Castle Street, which was quite a rough area, with the likes of  pit bulls breeding on the close stairs and acting as unpaid yapping concierges on every landing. He thought he’d have heard something and it wasn’t exactly a Rottweiler rescue advert or zone for endangered species. He considered if Joey the fanny licker, who would nick anything, and get in anywhere but women’s knickers, was taking the piss and getting his own back at him, or if it was some kind of modern Candid Camera and he was being filmed. In his designer Y-fronts, flip-flops scraping the floor, he stuck his pigeon chest out an extra inch. His muscles rippled,  body shaped like a rubber eraser, and his head shaven, the gold bar stuck into an earlobe stuck out like lightning on jug ears.

                The tiger was lying on its side and looked to be sleeping, or resting. His head, the size of his big-screen telly, black dots in yellow marble eyes stared at him and its jaw dropped open and it smiled. It swished its ringed tail back and forth as if deciding what to do with him. It had marked its territory with piss that smelled like buttered popcorn. Archie made a dive for the door before he became a lumpy snack.

                Lane his girlfriend was pushing through into the living room, just as he was coming out. They clashed. Archie taking a step backwards. The tiger has stretched as it stood up. It clasped Archie’s hand delicately in its mouth, the rough sandpaper of its pink tongue adding garnish to the touch of his skin like cucumber in a man’s sandwich.

                Both the tiger and Archie looked at Lane in different ways. There wasn’t much eating in her. She seemed mostly to be made up of hair, peroxide so bright that confused drivers at the bottom of Duntocher Road regularly rear-ended each other believing the lights had changed when she crossed the road. The community council had debated whether to put up signs around the danger area, warning of the Lane hazard, in the same way routinely worked for other itemized road dangers to deer and horse and tractors or even poor little hedgehogs; they went as far as proposing, by a single vote, to commission a prototype sign, with a big red X through a blinking blonde mop, but the results were disappointing, it looked nothing like Lane.

                ‘Are you goin’ to let that thing get away with that Archie?’ said Lane. ‘It’s takin’ the piss and look what it’s done to our good rug.’ She screwed her face up like a screen wipe and added, ‘that was a present from a very good friend of mine, you know’.

                The tiger let go of Archie’s hand and leaped, with a roar that scattered every dog working the streets, its front claws ripping through a see-through nightie, a £299.99 bargain from an Ann Summers’ evening, pinning her to newly sanded floorboards, tearing and disembowelling with a few swipes that at any other time would have been a welcome, but gory addition, to any ultra-blond women’s diet plan, and bit her head off.

                The tiger turned like a rogue comma, its mouth garnished red and yellow orbs of eyes resting on Archie. It spat out a blonde hairball.

                He held his hands up and edged back towards the window. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘I didnae like her whiny voice either. I wiz goin’ off her. And she could go on a bit.’ He bumped against the windowsill, feeling blind for the latch. Three up, he didn’t fancy his chances. The tiger padded towards him.  He did what he had to do, his hand shaped into fists, beating them against his chest as he charged, screaming, ‘me Tarzan, you fuck off!’

                It wasn’t until he was standing outside the front door, laughing like a hyena as he looked at the blood on his hands, wondering where it had come from, that he realized he’d made it, his manhood intact. The guy that lived in the same landing, the door next to his showed a glimmer of light.

                ‘You alright there Archie?’ said a disembodied voice.

                ‘Fine,’ said Archie. ‘Never been better. But you better phone the police. A tiger’s just ate my bird.’

                ‘Fuck off,’ said the disembodied voice. ‘I’m no’ a fuckin’ grass.’ The front door slammed shut, setting all the dogs in the close off like four different fire alarms competing in who could bark the loudest and longest.

                Later, when the police had reason to use several Tasers on him and beat him about the head with truncheons for his own safety, and because he was making whooping Tarzan noises and beating his chest, they took him in.

                Inspector Morley a small finicky man, conducted the interview with a younger tanned colleague, Archie sitting shaking and rattling across the table in front of them. Morley turned the pages of a forensic report he had in front of him, showing the position of Lane’s body, blood arcs and spray, and a possible weapon.

                ‘So,’ said Inspector Morley after the preliminaries, leaning across the desk and talking into the recorder, ‘your alibi is your girlfriend was eaten by an unknown Bengali tiger, which subsequently escaped?’

                ‘Aye,’ said Archie. ‘Seems hard to believe, but at least she died with a clean pair of knickers on. She’d have appreciated that.’

                ‘Easy tiger,’ said the young police officer. ‘From what I seen of the body she was all Brazilian and it was winking up at me.’