Not the End of the World

by Kate Atkinson

  Boreas’s bellowing lungs exhaled and his breath tore children from their cradles. When he inhaled, fishes and frogs were tugged right out of the rivers and lakes and into the skies. When the winds finally died down, the flying fishes and the flapping frogs and the newly fledged children were rained back down on the town, only now they were all jumbled up so that, instead of his own screaming infant, a distraught father would find himself clutching a wriggling trout or a fat salmon (or, in one case, a surprised porpoise), while small children were discovered everywhere—floating on lily pads, entangled in the reeds and rushes, or riding the waves as adept as dolphins.

  Heidi was not concerned with the fortunes of amphibian creatures, she was simply trying to get home from work and shut her door against the wind and the freezing rain. The route that Heidi would normally have taken home had been mysteriously blocked for days now by barriers like wire cages decorated with blue-and-white crime tape that fluttered as merrily as maypole ribbons. The detour took Heidi down the kind of dark lane to which evil and dread are compulsively drawn. The dark lane was a funnel of wind-crazed chip papers and plastic bags and newspapers that danced along, slapping themselves unpleasantly against Heidi’s legs as she hurried to regain the sodium lights of civilization.

  As if it had been waiting for Heidi, the cat slipped out from between two large refuse bins and slalomed around her ankles. A rag-and-bones tom, a bedraggled monochrome tiger, barred and striped with the colors of the night and conjured out of darkness. Heidi made the mistake of talking to him, speaking the glamorous feline tongue (“Poor old kitty”) before she hurried on her way. Too late—the words had worked their magic and the charmed cat was already cantering after Heidi’s heels, dodging the flying newspapers and chip papers, with the stubborn air of an animal that was prepared to follow forever. When Heidi unlocked the front door to her block of flats, the cat slipped past her and raced up the stairs to the top floor as if he already knew where she lived.

  “No,” she said firmly to the cat as he tried to weave his way into the entrance hall. He feigned nonchalance by licking a paw. He looked like a washed-up prizefighter. “No. Go home. Shoo.” The cat gazed up at the skylight in the roof with great interest, as if a chandelier of mice was suspended there, quaking and trembling in the updraft from the stairwell. Heidi shut the door.

  At three o’clock in the morning, she crawled out of bed, shivered her way along her hallway, and let the cat in.

  Heidi was not even particularly fond of cats. She had never had a cat of her own as a child, never dressed up a disgruntled tom in baby clothes and wheeled it around in a pram, never curled up with a kitten and listened to its tiny snoring engine, so she was surprised when this down-on-its-luck cat made her anxious for his welfare. She worried over how thin he was, and to fatten him she mashed tinned salmon and warmed saucers of cream. She gave him an old woolen shawl to lie on and watched while he slept as if he was as novel as a new baby to a first-time mother. Occasionally, the cat would open his pale jade eyes and stare indifferently at Heidi, giving her the uncomfortable feeling that she had already been judged and found wanting by the clandestine court of some invisible cat order.

  “He looks sick,” Missy said. The cat was curled up tightly on the sofa, ignoring them both. “And even if he isn’t sick,” Missy continued, “he should still see a vet. He’s very thin, he’s probably got worms. And fleas. Yes, look—there’s one.” The cat opened one eye and gave Missy a considered, if rather piratical, look.

  “I phoned the RSPCA,” Heidi said, “and the PDSA and the Cat Protection League and the police. Nobody seems to be missing a cat. Or rather, half the world seems to be missing a cat, just not this one. You wouldn’t like him, would you?” she added hopefully. The cat flicked the tip of his tail to show he wasn’t as sound asleep as he looked.

  “I’m more of a dog person,” Missy said, “and anyway, the cat chose you. You should give him a name.”

  “No,” Heidi said firmly. “Once you’ve named a cat there’s no going back, it belongs to you.”

  “Gordon.”

  “Gordon? Gordon Marshall,” the veterinary nurse said, tapping the name into the computer. “We don’t have a Gordon. We’ve got a Trevor and a Roger, a David and a Clive, a Henry, a Harry, a Vernon, a William, a Desmond, a Bertie, a Charlie, and a George. But no Gordon. Until now.”

  “Does everyone give their cat a man’s name?”

  “Only the women,” the veterinary nurse said. “Make of that what you will.”

  Heidi and Missy contemplated the cat as he washed himself, serenely licking the puckered sugar-pink rosebud beneath his tail.

  “He’s huge.” Missy frowned. “He’ll eat you out of house and home.” The cat did look considerably bigger than when he had first arrived.

  Heidi and Missy had done their training together at Guy’s. Missy had gone on to become a midwife and then a nanny and Heidi had eventually taken a short-term contract on a male geriatric ward and, although she still thought of this job as temporary, she was now the day sister and had been there for more than five years. Working with old men, whose main characteristic was a propensity to fall out of bed or to wander around with no clothes on—usually looking for the toilet—had influenced the way Heidi looked at the male sex. She had a tendency to think of them as helpless, toothless, and childlike, a tendency which had proved fatal for her relationships.

  Heidi had recently finished with her boyfriend, a television scriptwriter called Fletcher she had met at an Italian evening class. They had spent most of their time together planning a trip to Venice. They had gone out with each other for nearly two years and as time went on Venice became more of an existential metaphor than a holiday. Fletcher thought that Heidi finished with him because he was untidy and lazy (which he was) and listened to alternative country songs about dead skunks in the middle of the road (which certainly didn’t help), but really she left him because she hated the thought that one day he would be a little old man who would have to be tucked into bed all the time.

  To tell the truth, Heidi wasn’t really interested in having another relationship with a man; what she really wanted was babies. She wanted several but would have settled for one, for preference a girl and then it wouldn’t grow into a toothless, dribbling old man wandering the world looking for everything it had once known and now forgotten. Heidi wished for a baby every night before she went to bed, sitting in front of her mirror and incanting the word “baby” five times because her twin sister, Trudi, told her that was what you did if you wanted something very badly. Not that she believed Trudi. Heidi and Trudi didn’t get on very well. Heidi wasn’t entirely convinced, despite the undeniable evidence, that she really was Trudi’s twin—or, as she preferred to think of it, that Trudi was her twin. What if, she sometimes wondered, Trudi was not actually her twin but her doppelgänger? (And in what way would that be different exactly?) Her sister had once dated a weird guy, a journalist called Fielding, who was convinced that they were interchangeable and that whenever Trudi couldn’t go out with him she sent Heidi in her place.

  Missy and Heidi watched the cat roll and swagger like a nightclub bouncer across the carpet.

  “He’s a real bloke, isn’t he?” Heidi said doubtfully.

  “Just don’t get attached to him,” Missy warned. “You know what you’re like.”

  When Missy had left, Heidi frowned at the cat. “No, I don’t know. What am I like?” but the cat was too busy washing his ears to hear anything.

  The cat now bore no traces of the disheveled animal that had first accompanied Heidi home. Plump and with a sleek pelt, he spent his daylight hours on the bed, adopting a louche, leonine pose that reminded Heidi of a sultan at ease in his harem.

  His appetite had grown enormous. Heidi had to leave him two full bowls of tinned meat before she left for work each morning, both of which he had bolted down by the time she got out of the front door. He also displayed a taste (shared by Fletcher before him) for sugary dairy foods an
d Heidi found herself in the supermarket, picking out tinned rice pudding, sweetened vanilla yogurts, and cartons of ready-made custard “for Gordon,” like a thoughtful girlfriend.

  When she came home at night, he greeted her with raucous demands for more food, rooting ravenously in her bag to see if she’d brought him anything interesting while purring loudly in a brazen pretense of affection. Heidi knew it was only cupboard love but it was hard not to be beguiled by it.

  Yet if he was so hungry, why didn’t he eat any of the victims of his nightly pillaging? Every morning when Heidi let him into the flat, the cat dropped some small, bloody corpse at her feet with the air of one paying a rather tedious tribute. Perhaps it was some kind of tithe the cat was under an obligation to pay her. Heidi had no idea what the secret protocols of the cat order might be.

  The cat was laying waste to the city, he was the barbarian inside the gate, and it was Heidi who had let him in. She had never previously suspected the variety of wildlife that lived in the city and which now turned up on her doorstep as a result of the cat’s slaughtering. And so many birds! The owls and larks, the robin redbreast and the featherweight wren, bushels of sparrows and pecks of pigeons, flocks of starlings and white doves, a secret cache of dodos, the odd phoenix or two, not to mention the unfortunate capture of the (surprisingly tiny) hawk-headed sun god Ra—an event which caused the world to go dark until Heidi helped him escape from the cat’s clutches.

  “Why?” Heidi asked the cat as she dropped the forever flightless body of a blackbird into the bin, but the cat was occupied with performing his morning toilette, sitting on the kitchen floor, one back leg extended like a cancan dancer, brazenly displaying his manhood in the form of a pair of tight testicles like fur-covered Maltesers.

  He didn’t spend his nights only hunting. Heidi was frequently woken by the noise of his dissonant caterwauling as he fought and rutted his way round the neighborhood. In the morning he returned, reeking like a deadbeat of takeaway food and diesel and rank tomcat musk.

  “He’s beefed up, hasn’t he?” Heidi said to Missy. The cat was now the size of a baby tiger. “But he’s not fat, he’s just big, he needs a lot of food to fill him. Maybe he’s one of those big American breeds.”

  “Maine coon?” Missy offered.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, whatever he is, he’s certainly very… butch,” Missy said. Heidi wished now she had given him a different name. “Gordon” was more suited to men who modeled knitting patterns in old-fashioned women’s magazines. She should have called him something more godlike—Narasinha, Raiju, Arensnuphis.

  “Arensnuphis?”

  “Egyptian. They were very keen on cats.”

  “I know. You should get him castrated,” Missy said. “There are enough feral cats out there without his progeny.” The cat gave Missy a cross-eyed look but she stared him down until he looked away and became incredibly interested in cleaning between his toes, extending his claws like a bunch of little flick knives, and tugging at the fur in between them.

  She couldn’t pretend anymore. Lying on the floor stretched out luxuriously in the warmth of the central heating, the cat was no longer the size of a baby tiger; he was the size of a full-grown one. Tins of cat food couldn’t sate his appetite anymore. If he didn’t get enough food, he prowled and growled around the flat like a moody Tudor monarch. His killing was getting out of hand. Squirrels and mink, seagulls and magpies, a small, rather sickly looking fox. Soon, Heidi supposed, he would be dragging home the carcasses of sheep and small horses. One morning he came home with the milk and the fresh bloodied corpse of a cairn terrier in his jaws. Heidi wrapped the dog in newspaper and thrust it into a builder’s skip in the street. She no longer worried about burglars.

  Heidi never invited anyone round to her flat anymore. There was nothing to guarantee that Gordon wouldn’t kill any visitors. Luckily, Missy had gone abroad with one of her charges. Before Heidi went to work every day she sprayed her clothes and her hair with Febreze in an attempt to mask the cat’s musky odor, more persistent than even billy goat. Heidi had once had an alarming encounter with a flock of goats on Crete but she had talked about it to no one, not to Missy, not even to her sister Trudi. Heidi had begun to wonder if she might be one of those girls who attracted unfortunate animal experiences, like Io or Callisto or Atalanta.

  When Gordon wasn’t asleep—and he slept an unbelievable amount—he had the irritable demeanor of a circus cat, forced into half-decent behavior against his will. He padded restlessly round and round the flat like a prisoner. The toys she had bought to amuse him at the beginning—the woolen pom-poms, catnip mice, and felt goldfish dangling from poles—had long since been ripped to shreds. Nothing pleased him now.

  One evening, impatient for his supper, he skulked around the kitchen watching her as she unwrapped the bloodied joint of beef she had bought at the butcher’s. Heidi had recently taken out a small bank loan to finance his carnivorous needs and didn’t see how this could go on much longer. Growls bubbled in his throat like the promise of an earthquake. Suddenly, his patience exhausted, he gave out a full-throated, no-holds-barred, big-cat roar—a noise so extraordinary and elemental that all the occupants ran out of the block of flats and into the street, believing that the building must be about to collapse. Heidi put her hands over her ears until he had finished. “Bad cat,” she reprimanded, and wondered how long it would be before he ate her. If only he would leave.

  The local gazette ran a piece about a “large cat” on the loose in the neighborhood. Several people, the article claimed, reported having seen a “gray tiger” creature skulking through the forests of the night.

  Gordon settled down a little. He no longer paced the flat like a caged tiger. His nightly forays had grown less frequent and he often spent the evening in, lounging regally in front of the television in his handsome purple coat. This coat, a kind of old-fashioned dressing gown, a morning coat, was an imperial affair—quilted velvet, purple with gold piping and braided cords and tassels and lined with silk. It was the kind of outfit that a gentleman at leisure from another era would have worn to sit in his study—opening the morning post, drinking coffee brought to him by a self-effacing servant. Or perhaps he would have donned it for an evening at home, enjoying a cigar and brandy in front of a blazing coal fire in the library while contemplating what delights his bed might bring him that night. It suited Gordon very well.

  Heidi had seen the coat in the window of a theatrical costumer she passed every day on her way to work and it had said “Gordon” to her, in the way that previously a Stüssy T-shirt might have said “Fletcher” to her. She acquired it after she first noticed the change in Gordon. It happened one evening when she had been watching television. There was a late-night science program on in which an astronomer was talking about weighing galaxies, an idea that perplexed Heidi so much that she glanced at Gordon for an opinion, but the cat was stoically working his way through a pint of Haagen-Dazs vanilla.

  And that was when she realized that he was not sprawled as usual on the floor, but was sitting next to her on the sofa. In an upright position. One leg crossed casually over the other. Just like a man. True, he was wiping the inside of the ice-cream tub with his paw, like a mindless bear, but the rest of his body language was ridiculously human.

  Heidi was struck by a sudden thought—what if Gordon wasn’t a cat at all, but a man under a spell? A man forced to don the disguise of a cat by some wicked enchantress? A man trapped in the body of a cat?

  Heidi knew there was only one way to break that kind of enchantment, so when Gordon fell into a doze, she leaned over and warily kissed his downy cheek. Gordon’s ear twitched and he stirred but instead of being transformed into a man he simply swiped her away with a sleepy paw. Heidi wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed or not.

  It was odd but once he began to lounge around like a man (rather like Fletcher, in fact), he looked embarrassingly naked. That was when she bought the purple coat.

  He
slept with Heidi now, not on top of the bed like a normal cat, but beneath the covers, his body rolling against hers in the dead of night, fur against skin, claws entangled in hair. His breath was meaty and warm against her cheek, his whiskers as itchy as a witch’s broom. He was a dead weight, heavier than any man she had ever shared a bed with. Yet there was something comforting about falling asleep with her fingers entwined in the long fur of his belly, her breathing counterpointed by his rumbling purr, as noisy as a goods train rocking through the night. Every night now she swooned into a dreamless sleep, her arms wrapped around his solid torso as his huge chest rose and fell. When she woke in the morning she felt as if she had been on a long, long journey, but she had no idea where the journey had taken her. Gordon slept on, long after she had left the bed. The chambers of his heart remained closed to her and she still expected to be eaten by him on a daily basis.

  Things had deteriorated. The flat was beginning to smell. Gordon was no longer so fussy in his habits. Heidi watched him, catnapping on the sofa, drooling in his sleep, and surrounded by the kind of debris that only a cat as big as a man could produce. Bloody bones, chip papers, cans of lager, fur balls like giant tumbleweed. She crept into her bedroom and whispered to the mirror, “Go away, go away, go away, go away, go away,” but very softly because Gordon could hear the wing beats of birds and the scurrying of rats in the tunnels beneath the streets.

  It was a wild night. A blizzard flew all the way from the north pole and threw snowflakes the size of dinner plates around the city. Siberian winds tore down electricity pylons and telephone cables. Buildings were lost in snowdrifts. Icicles hanging from gutters and sills fell on unsuspecting passersby like swords. Fountains turned to glass, suspended in time. Polar bears roamed the parks and padded on the ice-packed pavements. The queen of the north country visited the city, driving through the streets on a sleigh pulled by six white wolves. Ice crystals trembled like diamonds on her furs and when she shook out her cloak she left a storm of snowflakes in her wake.