A second tale co-created by my three-year old, who chooses two words that then get made into a story. It was recently his birthday party, and lions are particularly exciting at the moment, in a love-hate-joy-fear sort of way.
20th September, 2026
Once there was a boy who lived on the twelfth floor of a big building in an enormous city. This boy didn’t need a watch or a clock because anytime he needed to know the time he could just look out his bedroom window at the huge tower block opposite and tell the hour by which lights were on.
Top left hand window, thirteenth floor. That must mean it’s six o’clock in the evening, the time the lady arrives back from work with her rucksack and sleepy eyes. Fifth window from the left, sixth floor. That must mean it’s five in the morning: the time the man in his striped dressing-gown lets his cat out on the balcony.
This boy had a ritual of his own. He would rush back from school at four o’clock, go straight to the kitchen, make himself a cheese sandwich, then go and sit in his room to see how fast he could eat it. He knew that if he finished by the time the little window on the eleventh floor, right in the centre of the building, turned on, then he’d managed to make and eat his sandwich in under fifteen minutes — because the janitor always and without fail went to his store cupboard at that exact time to have his own sandwich, alongside a cup of tea. He was so good at it now that he sometimes finished with time to spare, and saved the last half for later, wrapped in a napkin in his pocket.
Sometimes the boy saluted the janitor with his sandwich. Sometimes, but not always, the janitor saluted back with his.
One night the boy couldn’t sleep, because the next day was his birthday. He’d tried counting everything — sheep, goats, chickens; chickens jumping over sheep and sheep jumping over goats — but nothing was working.
He sat up in bed and looked out his bedroom window. He always kept the curtains open, because that way he could tell what time it was. Only three lights on in the building, and all of them on the very top floor: the twenty-first. That must mean it was very late, because that floor only lit up at night, when a lady would walk around her house looking at all the paintings on the wall, drinking coffee, and splattering her own paint at the big canvases that she rolled out onto the huge floor. She was the only person the boy had ever seen who looked outwards at night like he did. She would stand at her window with her head right back, looking at the night sky for a long time, and then she would go back to her canvas and put the sky onto it.
It was frustrating, the boy thought, that he couldn’t really tell if it was closer to midnight or closer to morning. The painting lady was his only way of telling, because she would go to sleep when the sun came up, but meanwhile he had no way of guessing — as she would paint for hours without ever changing place.
Then the boy had an idea.
If he was able to see more of the city, the buildings all hidden behind the tower, then he could see more lights and know whether people were getting up or going to bed.
The boy went out the back door into the big stairwell. It was cavernous and dark. His voice echoed all the way down and up it. He crept up the first flight of stairs in his slippers, passing the door of the floor above. All was silent behind it. It must be very late, he thought.
He carried on upwards, puffing and huffing on the huge stone steps, until suddenly he reached a door. He stopped to gather his breath, then pushed it, and it clattered open with a big swing.
A gust of wind slapped the boy right in the face, ruffling his hair manically and nearly pushing him backwards. He took a few steps out onto the big, flat surface that was the roof of the building, putting his arms outwards like a low helicopter to keep balance.
Behind him, the door swung shut with a clang that made him jump.
The boy turned and pushed it. It did not move. He pushed it again with his shoulder, and then with both hands, and then he stood very still in the wind and understood that he was on the roof of his building in his pyjamas and his slippers, and that nobody in the world knew he was there.
The city lay below all around him. There weren’t just a few more buildings behind the big tower but tens of thousands, all with little lights on. It looked as if someone had put a torch into an ants’ nest and the light was coming out of all the tiny holes.
Just as his brain was whirring and his red shirt being flapped by the strong winds that hit and pushed him from all sides, he heard a growling sound.
The boy looked around the darkness. “It must be a storm coming,” thought the boy, but then he heard it again, this time louder and with a kind of sigh mixed into it. He looked about and saw, in one corner of the roof, a shadowy dark grey lump.
The lump breathed.
The boy stopped where he was. The lump was longer than his bed. As he watched, one eye opened in it — a great gold eye, low down and close to the ground — and looked at him.
It was a lion. A big golden-haired lion with a dark red mane, lying on his side and looking very sleepy, or perhaps quite unwell.
“Who are you?” asked the lion, in a weak, growly voice.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” said the boy.
“Well I’m not the one who’s just arrived. It’s custom that the person who’s been in the place the longest asks the person who’s been in the place the shortest who they are. And that’s me doing the asking, in that case. And so. Who are you?”
“I live in this building,” explained the boy, “and I came up to see the city and tell the time, and then got stuck up here.”
“Why would you want to tell the time?” the Lion asked. “What use is the time?”
“Oh,” said the boy. “Because each day after school I come home and make myself a sandwich, and I like to time how quickly—”
“A sandwich?” interrupted the lion. “Did you just say a sandwich?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “I was saying that I come home and the first thing I do is make a sandwich and I go and eat it—”
“What do you put into this sandwich?” asked the Lion.
“Um, cheese usually. And tomato. And some lettuce and sometimes some ham.”
“Ham?” said the Lion, his eyes opening a little wider.
“Only sometimes,” said the boy, nervously.
The lion leaned up then on his shoulder and looked properly at the boy. The boy could see that he was very thin: his shoulder blade was poking right out and his ribs moved as he breathed his deep growly breaths.
“Would you do me a favour?” asked the Lion. “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten in four days. And I should very much like one of these sandwiches you make. With ham in it, please. And only very little lettuce, if it must be in there. Plus pickle, if you have it.”
The Lion’s eyes sparkled at the idea of the pickle.
The boy’s hand went, without him telling it to, to the pocket of his pyjamas. There was half a cheese sandwich in there, wrapped in a napkin.
He thought about it. If he gave the lion the sandwich, the lion would still be hungry afterwards. Half a sandwich was nothing to an animal that size. And then there would be nothing left on the roof for a starving lion to eat except a boy.
He thought about it for a good while.
Then he took the napkin out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and put the half sandwich down on the floor, and stepped back.
The lion looked at it. Then he looked at the boy. Then he picked the sandwich up almost delicately and ate it piece by piece, then put his large head back down on his large paws.
“Cheese,” he said. “Thank you. That was the kindest thing anybody has done for me in a very long time.”
“It’s my pleasure” the boy said, breathing a tiny internal sigh of relief. “Why haven’t you eaten in four days?” he asked.
“Because the wretched machine dropped me here four days ago,” the Lion growled, getting some energy now from his anger. He pawed the ground as he spoke. “The cruel, mean, horrible thing with blades that whirr around in the air put me on this flat place when I started to behave badly inside it.”
“Do you mean a helicopter?” asked the boy.
“Yes, a heli-wopter,” the Lion replied. “The thing with blades that rips the air to shreds. The humans driving it were upset when I reached for their picnics. I was hungry, having come all the way from one zoo and heading for another, so I reached into their area for just a little bit of picnic, and they screamed and shouted, and landed on this flat place and dumped me here.”
The Lion bent his head low and the boy felt sorry for him.
Then the boy had an idea. He took off his red shirt, climbed up one of the old television aerials, and tied the shirt to it, where it snapped and flapped in the wind like a flag.
“What in picnic’s name are you doing?” asked the Lion. “You’ll freeze like that.”
“This way someone will find us,” said the boy. “They’ll see the red shirt, and pick us up and take us home.”
The Lion put his chin on his paws. “I live in hope,” he drawled. “But people have not been kind, in my experience.”
The boy counted the lights in the buildings across the city to keep track of the time. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty, thirty, fifty. An hour.
Nobody came.
The boy’s arms had gone the colour of milk and he had started to shake. And that was when he realised the thing he should have realised at the very beginning, which was that a red shirt is no use at all at night, when nobody can see it, and that anyway, in all the years he had spent looking out of his window at other people’s windows, not once had he seen a single person look up.
Except one.
The boy turned to the tower opposite. Right at the top, on the twenty-first floor, three lights were still burning, and there she was — the painting lady, awake as she always was, standing over her enormous canvas with her back bent and her brush going furiously over the big canvas on her floor.
This time, she was looking down. Not up. Down at the sky she was making, instead of at the sky itself.
The boy waved both his arms above his head. She painted on. He shouted, and the wind took his voice and threw it off the edge of the building and into the traffic below. Then he had an idea.
“Lion,” said the boy. “Can you still roar?”
The Lion opened one eye. “I have not eaten in four days,” he said, “and I have been dumped on a roof like a bag of rubbish. But of course I can still roar.”
The Lion got slowly to his feet, which took a while, and shook out his mane, and stood at the edge of the roof with the whole city below him. Then he filled himself up with air until he was twice the size he had been, and he roared.
The boy felt the roar in his teeth and in the soles of his slippers. It rolled off the tower opposite and came back again, and rolled off the one behind that, and came back again, and went out over the rooftops and the roads and the tiny spaces where everybody in the city was asleep.
And then the lights came on.
Not all at once. One first, on the ninth floor of the tower opposite. Then two more beside it. Then a whole row, and then a floor, and then a hundred windows, and then the building behind that one, and the one behind that, spreading out across the city like a spill — thousands and thousands of little squares of yellow light going on one after another, all the way to the volcanoes, as every single person in the city sat up in bed and said: what was that? The boy even saw the janitor jolt awake.
The boy stood in the middle of the roof in his vest and turned all the way round with his mouth open. “Now I’ve got absolutely no idea what time it is.” he said.
High up on the twenty-first floor, the painting lady put down her brush.
She did what she always did when she wanted to know something. She went to the window and she looked up.
And there, on the roof of the building opposite, lit up by the light of ten thousand windows, she saw a lion. And standing next to the lion, in his vest, with his arms wrapped round himself, a small boy.
The painting lady did not stop to think about it. She ran across her studio, straight over the top of the canvas she had been working on all night, leaving dark blue paint-coloured footprints all the way from one side of it to the other, and she picked up her telephone.
Just as the boy thought he might take his shirt down and put it back on, a whirring sound got closer in the sky. The Lion cowered into his corner. “Not the blade chopper!” he exclaimed.
“Don’t worry,” said the boy. “I’ll make sure they take you straight to the wilderness. You won’t be left on any more rooftops.”
The blue helicopter came down onto the roof with ‘Police’ written along its side, making even more waves of wind than before, and the boy and the Lion had to shelter their faces from it.
A man opened the door. “We’ve had a call about a boy on a roof,” he shouted. “A lady across the way. Said there was a lion up here too, but we thought—”
Then he saw the Lion, and slammed the door shut again.
“Don’t worry!” said the boy. “This is my friend. He needs to be rescued. He’s been up here for four whole days and is terribly hungry.”
“He’s hungry, is he?” said the helicopter pilot. “Then he certainly won’t be getting into my tiny space with me, that’s for sure.” And he began to whirr his blades again, ready to take off.
“Wait!” said the Lion, for he had seen something in the helicopter when the pilot opened his door. “That’s a sandwich,” said the Lion, licking his lips, “isn’t it.”
“Yes,” said the pilot, nervously.
“May I ask… what sort of sandwich it is?”
“Just ham,” said the pilot.
“Just… Ham?” said the Lion, his eyes watering now.
“And a little bit of butter,” the pilot said, shaking slightly and his eyes wide with fear as the Lion paced up to his helicopter cabin.
“Is there a chance,” said the Lion, staring at the sandwich now, which he had spotted through the window of the helicopter, “that you might share a piece with me?”
“Have it,” said the pilot, and he threw the sandwich through the window.
The Lion pounced on the sandwich, threw it up into the air and ate it down in one big gulp. And then, at that moment, a smile broke out over his face. His teeth gleamed white in the darkness. His whiskers seemed to become electric.
Then the Lion bowed. “I am forever indebted,” he said. “Thank you. You two are some of the only humans who have shown me kindness.”
He turned to the boy. “You gave me your sandwich,” he said, “and I gave you my voice. That seems to me a fair arrangement between friends.”
With that the Lion and the boy hopped into the helicopter, which chopped its blades as fast as they could go and lifted up into the sky. Morning was just coming over the horizon. The lights were fading into the buildings as the sun replaced them, and the boy realised he had no idea at all what time it was, and hadn’t for hours.
As they lifted away the boy looked back at the tower opposite, at the top floor, where the painter lady was standing at her window with her hand up, watching them go. He waved at her, and she waved her paintbrush back.
The boy looked out over the city, higher than he’d ever been, seeing every ssingle building now. He looked at all the tiny spaces where people lived, at all the windows he didn’t know, and thought how wonderful it was that people could be kind.
Then a thought came to him with a jolt. It was his birthday. He would have a party later that day. With sandwiches for tea.