Mr Tumnus: Good evening, good evening. Excuse me – I don’t want to be inquisitive – but should I be right in thinking that you are Daughters of Eve?
Claire: He looks like the devil! Oh Jesus! He’s the Devil!
Michelle: He’s not the fooking devil Claire!
Claire: He’s got horns!
James: To be fair, he does sort of look like the devil…
Michelle: Shut up James!
Orla: I really like your horns there Mr Devil, can I try them on like?
“Daughters of Eve,” began Aslan
“Excuse me, I’m a Son of Adam!” James interjected
“Daughters of Eve” Aslan continued, ignoring him entirely.
As for Aslan himself, the girls didn’t know what to do or say when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the girls had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him and went all trembly.
“Go on,” hissed Erin.
“No,” whispered James, “you first.”
“You’re English!” whispered Erin back again, “Lions are your… heraldry!”
“Michelle,” whispered Claire, “What about you?”
“Fook off!” whispered Michelle “I’m not walking up to a fecking lion!”
And of course the longer they went on doing this the more awkward they felt. Then without warning Uncle Colm advanced to the Lion and said:
“Very nice to meet you Mr Aslan, now, if I can trouble ya, I was just wanderin’ I was if you’ve ever been to Derry? Because there was a young fella in Lettershandoney, and this must have been, what, twenty years ago now if it’s a day I reckon, there was a young fella there who said that he’d been walkin’ across to Killywool to visit his uncle who was down with a rackin’ case of the flu one February, although it might have been March now I think about it, or possibly it was right at the end of January, but he, this young fella I mean, was walkin’ across to Killywool when he said he came over a lion sittin’ by the side of Tannaherin road. Now, if that wasn’t strange enough, Derry not bein’ known for lions you understand, the fella said that the Lion asked, and that is it spoke out loud, it asked him what time the next bus to Belfast would be comin’ along. And now this fella he was, as I’m sure you can understand, rather taken aback at not just encounterin’ a lion out in the open, so to say, in Derry, but one that was a patron of the bus service, and despite bein’ extremely familiar with the bus service since his car was taken joy ridin’ by some young lads a few months earlier and driven’ into the Foyle just short of Magheramason, which is why he was walkin’ to Killywool in the first place you see, the fella just couldn’t think of a single word to say to the creature. So as you can imagine we had a fair lot of questions for this young fella, you know, lions not generally bein’ encountered waitin’ to catch the bus, even in places where lions are generally known to be around the place, if you take my meanin’. And Iain, that’s Bertha’s brother from Killarney, Iain asked the fella if maybe he’d seen a cat, because there was a woman in Tannaherin who had thon mental illness, I think they call it, where a body can’t help but collect cats like they were spoons, and this woman in Tannaherin must have had at least six cats in and around her house, and so he thought that maybe the young fella had just been surprised by one of this mad woman’s wee cats, and the fella said no, that simply couldn’t be the case, you see, because this lion creature was far too large to be a wee cat. So we asked if maybe it could just have been a particularly overgrown wee cat that he saw, but he straight denied that as well, on account, so he said, that cats, no matter how large they may be, can’t talk. Now, I know what you’re thinkin’ and sure enough we pointed out, and this was me, and Sol, and Bertha’s brother Iain from Killarney who were talkin’, we pointed out that lions are not known for talkin’ any more than cats are, but he, quite astutely if I can say it, he asked if any of us had ever met a lion. And we all had to admit right there that we’d not had the pleasure of meetin’ a lion, although Iain said he’d seen one of thon wee meerkats in Dublin Zoo, although, to be honest, I suspect based on his description of the wee creature, that he’d actually got himself confused while lookin’ at a mongoose…”