the lion's tail

Every Chinese New Year a lion comes down our lane.

It is not a real lion. I know that. It is two people inside a big bright head with a fringe, and a body made of cloth, and a drum walking behind it going BOOM, and it dances house to house and bows at every door. The families give it oranges and a red packet, and it eats the packet right out of the air. I have watched it my whole life. It is the best thing that walks.

And every year the same thing happens. The lion comes. The lion dances. The lion turns the corner. And the lion is gone. Down the lane to the next street, the BOOM getting smaller, and us left standing in the road with the dust still going up.

This year I decided we would keep up.

"We are going to follow the lion all the way," I told the gang. "House to house. To the end. We are going to be the lion's own lion."

I called us the Second Lion. The name lasted about as long as it took me to say it, and the real lion never found out it had a rival, but you have to call a thing something before you can march it down a lane.

To follow a lion you need a lion. So we built one. Pei Pei found a cardboard box for the head and cut eyes in it. Divya drew a face on it that was more cat than lion, but a proud cat, so it counted. We got an old sarong for the body, long enough for two kids under it, one at the front holding the head up high and one at the back, bent over, holding the first one's waist.

I wanted the front. Of course I wanted the front. The front is the bright part. The front is up high. The front is the bit the oranges get thrown at. I put myself at the front before anybody could say anything, because if there is a bright seen part of a thing, I want to be it. That is just true about me and I am not going to pretend it is not.

Nobody wanted the back. The back is bent over the whole time. The back cannot see. The back is just a bottom under a sheet, and nobody throws an orange at a bottom under a sheet.

"I will be the back," said Kavi.

Kavi is in the gang. Kavi only knows loud, and Kavi only knows fast, and you do not usually put Kavi anywhere a thing needs to be quiet, because Kavi has never once been quiet, not even by accident. But Kavi did not want the front. Kavi wanted the back, the bent-over unseen part nobody else would take, and he climbed under the sheet behind me happy as anything, loudly, so that the whole street knew he was the back.

Then Aiman turned up to charge admission to a lion that did not exist yet. He set a rate to walk behind our lion as if it were the real troupe. He took two sen off a small boy before I could stop him.

We set off after the real lion, our cardboard head up, the proper drum going BOOM in front of us, our own drum being Faiz hitting a biscuit tin in time, very correctly, because Faiz does everything correctly and it is unbearable.

We made it eleven steps.

On the twelfth step the lane bends. I leaned left to take the bend. The back of our lion went right. The sheet pulled tight between us. The head jerked one way and the body went the other, and our lion split straight down the middle in the road, the front trying to reach a door on the left, the back marching off toward a longkang on the right, like an argument that had grown legs and could not agree which way it was even angry.

We fell over. A lion does not fall over. Ours did, in a heap, in front of an auntie's house, while the real lion bowed beautifully two doors down and ate a red packet out of the air to a big cheer.

I got us up. I tightened the sheet. I gave new orders. Orders fix things. That is what orders are for.

"When I lean, you lean," I told the back. "I will call it. I say left, you go left. I am the head. I see the way. I steer."

We tried again. I called every step. Left. Now straight. Now I am bowing, bow with me. And every single time the back was half a beat behind, because the words had to get from my mouth, under the head, through the sheet, to a kid who could see nothing but her own feet. A lion that bows half a beat late is a lion that head-butts a door.

We head-butted three doors. One auntie gave us an orange anyway, out of pity, which I took, because you take the orange.

By the fourth house I was hot, and the head was crooked, and the real lion was a whole street ahead, just a BOOM now, leaving us behind the way it leaves everyone.

Then the back of our lion spoke. Quietly, for once. From under the sheet, where she had been bent over all day with her hands on my waist and her eyes on nothing.

"Stop telling me where to go," said Kavi. "I can feel where you go. Your feet. I have got your feet. Just walk. I am right behind you. I have been right behind you the whole time."

So I stopped calling it. I just walked.

I leaned into the next bend and said nothing. Behind me, the back leaned too, half a second before I had even finished leaning, because she had felt it through my waist before I had finished deciding it. I bowed and the body folded down with me, smooth, like one animal. I turned the corner and the whole lion turned the corner, the head and the tail going the same way at the same time for the first time all day.

We did not split again.

We caught the real lion at the very last house, right at the end of the lane, just as it finished. We stood close behind it with our cardboard head up and our tail steering us steady, and when the real lion bowed, we bowed, half a beat together, whole. The drummer with the real drum looked back at the two small idiots in a sarong, and he gave us one extra BOOM, just for us. I have never been given anything better.

Kavi came out from under the sheet, red and grinning and loud again, asking was he good, was he the best back, had I seen. I had not seen. I was the head. The head sees nothing at all. The head is up high in the bright part being looked at, and it is the tail, bent over under the sheet where nobody throws an orange, that feels the whole lion and keeps it walking true. The loudest kid in the gang had been down there the whole time, in the part nobody once looked at, holding the two of us together, and glad to be there.

I told her she was the best back there has ever been.

I am always grabbing the front of everything. The bright part, the seen part, the part the oranges hit. Next year, when the lion comes down our lane, I am going to ask for the tail. I do not think I will be any good at it. You have to feel where the other person is going before they have gone, and trust them while you see nothing, and trusting and seeing nothing are the two things I am worst at in the world.