by Various
Piers Torday
The first mistake Doctor Aziz made was to open the door. The second was to look down. For there, by the light of his lantern, was a small kitten curled up on the doorstep, mewling fit to wake the entire river bank. A short-haired tabby, with an uncommonly long tail.
‘Well, well. A surprise gift! Let us see what my little Duchess makes of you.’ He rested the lantern on the floor, and, pulling on his smart kid gloves, scooped up the poor kitty, marched straight back indoors and presented it to his frowning daughter.
The little Duchess, or Mary Anne (to give his daughter her correct name), wrinkled her nose. Another mouth to feed was the last thing she needed. She was hard pressed as it was keeping their curious old home, Glasshouses, from looking back to front all the time. It was nestled deep in some tangled woods on a forgotten, overgrown edge of the River Thames, and was named Glasshouses for its preponderance of windows in the strangest places, and mirrors in the darkest corners.
Mary Anne truly thought she had the worst of jobs. While her father got to spend hours hidden behind tottering piles of paper in his study, she was expected keep the multiple windows and mirrors of the house sparkling clean, not to mention preparing the meals, sweeping the floor, washing his clothes . . .
Life had not always been so, of course.
Her parents, Doctor Abdul Aziz and her late mother, the much-missed Mrs Rose Sedley Aziz, had met in India before Mary Anne was born. Political causes had brought the ever-campaigning Mrs Aziz back to England, her scientist husband in tow. Shortly after their arrival at Glasshouses, their one and only daughter had been born.
What a blissful childhood it had been! The long games of chess with her father in his study, while he puffed away on his beloved hookah pipe. Walks by the river, games of cards on rainy days, her mother teaching her how to bake pastries in the kitchen . . . Mary Anne’s eyes misted up at the memory, and she had to turn away.
‘What is it, my little Duchess?’
‘Nothing, Father,’ she lied.
Nothing, in a way, had been the cause of it all. Or next to nothing, in the shape of a humble fly. An insect that had visited her mother one summer night and left its red mark upon her skin. A fly that her scientist father had observed upon her and left unharmed. For this gentle soul of a man had often been described as someone who ‘wouldn’t hurt a fly’.
The kind-hearted Doctor had taken this description as an instruction, an ideal to live up to so long as he lived. But the fly had no such honour, no compunction in harming the Doctor’s wife.
Its bite contained the seed of a mysterious fever, which grew and grew, resisting all draughts and ointments, until it swallowed Mary Anne’s mother clean up, lost forever. Her father, lost in grief, mused obsessively on his decision not to hurt the fly in the first place.
‘No one,’ he swore in his diary, ‘will ever make the same mistake with the English language again.’
For Doctor Aziz did not blame himself for his wife’s death. He certainly did not blame his wife, and he did not even blame the fly. He took issue with the English language itself. It never actually rained cats and dogs. Not one farmer of his acquaintance counted their chickens before their eggs were hatched. And which hunter yet born had developed the skill to kill two birds with one stone?
If he, the great Doctor Aziz, did not act now, then further tragedy was inevitable! The risk for misunderstandings such as this was too great. He would save the English language from itself, through the only means available to him:
Science.
Clear-headed, logical, rational experiments would rid the country of these dangerous colloquialisms. Once everyone saw the evidence, they would mend their ways. No one needed to pay for anything with an arm or a leg ever again.
So he began work on his greatest ever experiment, the experiment that would take over their lives and their home, the experiment after which nothing would ever be the same again.
Doctor Aziz filled Glasshouses with animals, beginning with a hare. Standing at the end of his long, flower-filled garden, studying his pocket watch, he set the creature to racing with a tortoise up and down the lawn, to see whether slow and steady did win the race. It didn’t.
Then the Doctor spent a very long time persuading a white rabbit to climb into his top hat, to see if pulling him out was as easy and as magical a solution as people so frequently suggested.
‘A solution to what?’ Mary Anne had asked.
‘I won’t know till I try,’ said Doctor Aziz, gripping the poor creature by its ears as he tried, in vain, to persuade him to leave the warm shadows of the hat.
There seemed to be a new arrival every day. Could a bird in the hand truly be worth two in the bush? Doctor Aziz unwisely tried to find out with a pigeon and a couple of ducks, with predictably noisy results.
But as Mary Anne patiently bandaged up his pecked hand, the Doctor was already planning his next scientific test of popular proverbs. Later that afternoon, he wrote to London Zoo to ask if he could borrow three of their brightest and pinkest flamingos. Arriving on a horse and cart the next week, they were installed on the Doctor’s beloved croquet lawn that same evening, while he lay in wait, out of sight, with a pair of binoculars and a notebook to see if the ‘early bird really did catch the worm’.
‘Being bright pink, as they are, there is no chance of me missing them,’ he explained to his baffled daughter. (The fact that flamingos of course only eat fish, rather than worms, seemed to have escaped his attention.)
Then a bright-eyed puppy arrived one afternoon, panting and wagging its tail, only to be knocked out immediately with a sleeping draught. Doctor Aziz carefully laid the slumbering pup out right at the top of the stairs, just as Mary Anne approached with a tottering tea tray piled high with cups, saucers and a cake stand.
Writing up his notes later, the Doctor remarked, ‘In conclusion, we should not let sleeping dogs lie. Mary Anne is in most firm agreement on this point.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Mary Anne, grimacing and wondering when this madness would end. But by the time she had tidied up the broken tea things, her father was standing on a chair, heaving a glass cabinet off a case housing a carefully stuffed dodo.
‘Now, let’s see how dead you truly are,’ he said, a syringe of adrenaline clamped between his teeth, as he rolled up his sleeves.
It was into this madhouse of zoological and proverbial experimentation that the innocent and ill-fated cat had wandered.
‘You’re just another mouth to feed – I hope you know that. You must work for your supper around here. We have a problem. Lots of little problems with tails, in fact.’ Mary Anne glared angrily at the Doctor, who looked at his polished shoes in shame.
‘The mice, I assume,’ he said.
‘Yes, the mice!’ she said.
‘But what about my test? I have a particularly good phrase lined up for our new feline friend. For they say that—’
‘The mice, Father!’ Mary Anne said again.
One of the Doctor’s more bizarre recent installations (even by his standards) was a doll’s house populated entirely by mice. It had all the usual accoutrements (carefully made model beds and cupboards; tables covered in crockery), as well as several very unusual additions (miniature tennis rackets and balls, a tiny chess set, packs of cards, a dressing-up box and even a doll’s-house-sized piano).
‘You see,’ Doctor Aziz had said, carefully lowering the piano into the first floor of the house, where a rodent waited with open arms to chew it to pieces, ‘I simply must find out whether when the cat’s away—’
‘The mice will play?’ Mary Anne had said in disbelief. ‘Out of your head, is what you are. Out of your head!’
As she feared, the mice had only played in one way. There were holes in the skirting board, droppings on the rugs, and barely a morsel of food in the larder left untouched by their little inquisitive teeth.
But at last, here was an animal arrival to Glasshouses who might be put to some practical use.
‘Can I keep this one, Father?’ she implored. ‘Can’t he just be a normal cat that might actually be some use around this madhouse of ours?’
‘Oh, but don’t you see, my dear Mary Anne, he will be of the greatest use.’ Doctor Aziz peered through his glasses at the tiny kitten, who stared straight back in grumpy bewilderment. ‘He will be of use to science. For I intend to study this feline and find out, once and for all, whether—’
Mary Anne shook her head in a way that brooked no further discussion.
‘The only thing this poor little mite is going to find out is what’s good for him. Beginning with a saucer of milk in the kitchen! Now be off with you, Father, and back to your flamingos or dodo, or whatever it is now, before I really lose my temper!’
With that, she whisked the young kitten off, leaving Doctor Aziz standing speechless in the hall, marvelling at how much his only daughter reminded him of his late wife.
Mary Anne slung an old blanket over an armchair by the fire for the kitten’s bed and gave him balls of wool to play with. Day by day, the kitten’s fur grew less patchy, and his meows less strident. He began to explore his new home and enjoyed curling up on the Doctor’s lap of an evening, as his master perused his latest volume of scientific research (a very boring one, without any pictures, the puss noted).
Brewer’s Phrase and Fable, read the cat silently to itself, because this cat was remarkably inquisitive, a fact that neither Doctor Aziz nor Mary Anne had bothered to discover for themselves.
‘You are a very affectionate creature,’ remarked the Doctor. ‘I wonder what we should call him, my dear?’
‘Mousecatcher, if I have anything to do with it,’ said Mary Anne, inspecting a lump of Cheddar cheese on her plate, which more resembled Swiss cheese, on account of the holes in it.
‘A most curious thing, though,’ noted Doctor Aziz, as he stroked the ball of fur on his lap. ‘This cat does not purr.’
‘You’re probably just stroking him the wrong way.’
‘But have you not observed, dear child? He never purrs. Not when he dozes in the sun. Not after supping from one of your saucers of milk. Not even after a dozen gentle strokes.’
The cat sat comfortably but silently on his lap, keeping his thoughts on the matter to himself, as cats like to do.
‘Give him a chance – he’s only small.’
‘I wonder if he even smiles?’
‘Cats don’t smile!’ declared Mary Anne, taking a large bite of her hole-ridden Cheddar.
‘This one certainly doesn’t. Perhaps a name would help. A name for a cat that doesn’t smile.’ He tickled the scruff of the creature’s neck. But the cat didn’t close his eyes or purr, or make the approximation of a human smile that other cats did.
‘Cheshire!’ said Mary Anne suddenly.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Cheshire!’ she said again. ‘Great Aunt Agatha lives in Cheshire, and she never smiles. Ever.’
‘Indeed she doesn’t!’ crowed Doctor Aziz with approval. His late wife’s great-aunt was not inclined to jollity of any kind. ‘Perhaps she and the cat are related?’
And that settled it. Cheshire the Cat it was.
He twisted himself between their legs, tail flicking this way and that.
‘Now you are named, you must start earning your keep,’ said Mary Ann, tickling him behind the ears.
For the Doctor’s mice were now running rampant throughout the house, chewing their way through parcels of cheese, sacks of grain and loaves of bread as if there was a war on. (There wasn’t. At least, not one involving mice.)
But Cheshire was not interested in catching things.
Like the Doctor, he had only one approach to the world around him.
He was curious.
It was true, he did not have the training of Doctor Aziz, his years of experience, knowledge and books. Cheshire had no study or laboratory. He was entirely oblivious to the principles of fieldwork, and he could no more write a detailed report for the Royal Society than he could boil an egg.
However, he did not need to.
For when it came to the scientific study of animals, Cheshire had one crucial advantage.
He was one.
Under a tree in front of the house lay the hutch where Doctor Aziz kept his racing hare. The tortoise lived in a crate under some lettuce leaves next to it. Cheshire simply strolled across the lawn and tapped sharply on the hare’s hutch door with his claw.
‘Excuse me, Hare,’ he said, in that voice only other animals can understand. ‘I am curious. Why do you always beat the tortoise in a race when the stories suggest otherwise?’
‘Because he cheats!’ piped up the tortoise from under his lettuce leaf.
‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Cheshire. ‘Hare, why do you win?’
The hare sidled up to the cage door, his eyes rolling, his lips pulled back over his teeth in a crazed grin. Cheshire took a step back. The poor creature was clearly insane, perhaps driven so by his endless unnecessary races against an irritable tortoise.
‘Which month is it?’ asked Cheshire suspiciously.
‘March!’ said the hare, pretending to box an imaginary opponent.
‘That settles it,’ said Cheshire. ‘You must be mad. Mad as a—’
‘Hatter?’ said the hare.
‘Something like that. Now, curious as I am, I have another question for you, March Hare. Between a cat and a hare, who would win that race?’
‘Why do you want to know, Cat?’
‘Let’s just say . . . I wish to study the world. I am curious!’
‘It is not a good idea for cats to be curious.’
‘There is only one way to find out if you are right,’ said Cheshire, and he hooked the catch of the hutch with his claw.
The March Hare bounded out, and within seconds Cheshire was fast on his tail. They raced all over the garden, the hare frantically looking for a means of escape. But the fast-flowing river at the end of the garden, and the dark, tangled woods on either side, did not offer any. Then, just as Cheshire was about to pounce on the hare, at the last minute, his prey disappeared into the wall of thorny briars that divided the lawn and the wild wood and did not reappear.
‘Come out – the race is not yet over!’ the cat called after the hare, but to no avail.
Cheshire skulked back to the house in disappointment, his frown deeper than ever before. As he did so, Cheshire noticed the white rabbit with pink eyes peering at him out of his top hat.
‘What are you looking at?’ he snarled.
‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ said the rabbit. ‘Please don’t eat me!’
‘I shall have to catch you first,’ said Cheshire, and pushed the top hat over with his paw. The white rabbit leaped out, bounding as fast as he could for the wood, charging into the prickly briars.
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Cheshire to himself.
Next, he asked the pigeons and the ducks whether if he ate a pigeon, that would make a bird in the stomach worth two in the pond, and they also fled for the thorny wood. One by one, creature by creature, he drove all the members of the Doctor’s menagerie away and into the woods.
He pulled a feather out of his mouth and picked some fur from his claw. Well, it was true, he had not fully satisfied his curiosity, but . . . it had been fun, hadn’t it?
Cheshire experienced a lovely new feeling.
A feeling that—
‘CHESHIRE!’
It was not so much a cry, as a scream of desolation. Doctor Aziz and Mary Anne had returned from their afternoon’s excursion and were standing at the edge of the garden, coats over their arms, barely able to take in the scene of devastation – the upturned hutch, the shredded top hat, the churned-up lawn . . .
‘What have you done, you wretched animal?’
The normally mild-mannered Doctor Aziz took all leave of his senses and lunged for Cheshire, who – understandably – ran away, round the side of the house. Followed by a remonstrating Mary Ann, plea
ding for calm, the Doctor chased him through the parlour. Cheshire knocked over the hookah and got tangled in the pipe, dragging it with him. He bolted into the dining room and crashed straight into an occasional table holding a plate of jam tarts Mary Anne had prepared earlier for their tea, which tipped on to the cat’s back in an explosion of pastry crumbs and jam.
Suddenly, it looked like the saying was right after all.
Curiosity was going to kill the cat.
Sticky with fruit, still dragging the hookah behind him, yowling for his life as the Doctor roared not far behind, Cheshire hurtled through the drawing room, scattering a pile of playing cards that flew into the air before showering down on to the cat’s jam-covered back, as he smashed through the French windows and out into the garden again.
The late evening shadows lengthened towards the river in darkening stripes. Cheshire was foolhardy but not foolish – cats could not swim. There was only one way out.
Cheshire tore into the brambles and disappeared.
Doctor Aziz and his daughter tried to follow him, but the thorns were too thick and sharp. Mary Anne looked up at her father, distraught. They had lost another life. Several lives.
‘It’s no good, Father – he’s gone. Like all the others.’
Her father was not distraught. He was already scribbling in his notebook with approval. ‘At last! I have proved a great saying correct, finally. My wife’s memory will not be in vain. The world is as we understand it to be. Curiosity did kill the cat, after all!’
But in fact, far on the other side of the hedge, which ran for several miles along the river bank, Cheshire the Cat stood by a tree, the hookah pipe still wrapped around his legs, cards and jam still plastered to his fur, and very much alive. He was looking at the bottom of the tree, where there was an enormous black hole.
He peered into the hole, whiskers twitching.
From far down below, he could hear the strangest sound.
A song, calling up to him, sung by a choir of animal voices . . .