LionArt

The exhibition was a huge success and the artist walked softly amongst the crowd, lapping up all the praise. No one had ever seen anything like it and even normally taciturn critics were using words like 'unique' and 'inspiring'. London was electric with the news and people were actually queuing up to see the world's first entirely crocheted landscape. Even more remarkable was that the artist was previously unknown and a young man.

He moved away from the crowd, a solitary figure all in black and watched with a wry smile on his lips. Patrice had been born little Patrick O'Hare, the sixth son and eighth child of a market trader on a council estate that he tried very hard to forget. His father never understood Patrick; he showed no interest in the family business selling fruit and veg and had a distressing tendency to wear lilac shirts and use hair products. When Patrick insisted on studying art in London his father gave him a bag of apples, a one way ticket and sent him on his way.
To while away the long hours when he wasn't studying, Patrick took up crocheting and found he had a natural talent. Soon he had outgrown patterns for bedspreads, ponchos and scarves and began to experiment. First he crocheted some flowers and then a garden to put them in and as the years passed, the landscape grew. He displayed bits of it in the windows of his ground floor flat and word had spread. Suddenly he was discovered and the rest, as the cliche says, was history. Now he was Patrice with a mysterious past and demand for his work was burgeoning beyond his capacity to produce.

"Wonderful, quite wonderful," enthused a critic with a mouthful of free canapes. "What's next? How will you top this?" Patrice pretended to think to think for a moment. "I have a few ideas; just playing around with some new themes," he replied in the estuary English he had worked so hard to cultivate. "The idea I like the most so far..." he dragged out the pause aware that the people nearby had stopped talking to hear him, "...yes; I think I will create a jungle!" There were gasps and comments. "But how will you manage that alone without shutting yourself away in a quiet room for months?" asked the critic. Patrice just smiled secretively and moved on.

Patrice's new studio was an empty warehouse in a run down part of the East End. Up rickety wooden stairs was a storeroom door with a shiny new padlock. Inside was a mountain of coarse brown, green and dun coloured wool; a commode and two elderly sisters whom Patrice had kidnapped from the local Darby and Joan Club. They sat on heaps of wool, crocheting and discussing the strange turn their lives has taken.
"Nell dear," said Ruth, "I really don't want to work with this rough wool." Nell agreed and mourned "With nothing but sticky porridge and apples to eat and you know what apples do to me." Ruth shuddered; she definitely didn't need reminding with the tangibly malodourous commode in the corner. They crocheted on. Ruth finished a long twisting vine and fixed a climbing monkey to it as Nell completed her firsr lion. As Ruth stepped back and stared intently at the vine with one finger to her lips, Nell began plaiting a few dreadlocks into the mane of her lion for multicultural appeal. [She often watched current affairs programmes.] Ruth preferred action movies and replayed some favourite scenes in her head as her hands began to move busily amongst the rasping wool. "There!" Nell eclaimed and stood back to admire her lion. Ruth looked up briefly as she crocheted. "It's a beautiful lion dear, but I can't think why that nasty boy wants a lion in the jungle; surely it should be a tiger?" Nell was stricken. "Oh no! Should I change it? Oh but it looks so good and the dreadlocks took so long....."
"You certainly will not change it. Let him discover his mistake for himself." Ruth stated heatedly. She hadn't forgotten the meanacing crochet hook at her throat as they were taken prisoner and entertained herself with imagining where she would put it when she saw Patrice again until she had calmed down.

Eventually Ruth laid down her hook and gathered up the scratchy mass of crocheted wool. "That doesn't look much like a lion, dear." Nell observed. Ruth used her hook to prise open the little square window. "That's because it isn't a lion," she answered jamming the hook deeply into a screw hole. The mass of wool was attached and then flung over the peeling windowsill. "It's a ladder!" Nell was full of admiration. Ruth went first, her sensible A line skirt flapping in a slight breeze as she scrambled arthritically down into the moonlit alley.

The sisters sat in their cosy flat sharing a box of Dairy Milk. They washed down the sticky fondants with swigs of whiskey from the bottle set companionably on the table between them. By the double looked door stood their father's old elephant gun loaded with apple cores; just in case Patrice knew where they lived!