Cat's Paw

by Nick Green

  ‘You mean the character off Eastenders?’ said Ben. ‘The school teacher?’

  Hannah nodded. ‘The actor who plays him is Tony Sherwood, innit?’

  ‘And he’s Thomas’s dad. . .’

  ‘Right. So Thomas always watches it if he can. In case there’s a Keith Grogan bit.’

  What had Thomas said to him, back in his prison cell? A maddening riddle that had gnawed at his mind. I see my daddy. . . several times a week.

  ‘It’s really great that you came back.’ Hannah made a beeline for the fridge.

  Tiffany’s class milled upon the platform in the mighty glass cavern of St Pancras International, humming with pent-up energy like the waiting Eurostar trains, all except for Olly who sat alone, nervously sipping his Diet Coke. At least, Tiffany imagined that he did. She was not there. Yusuf, Susie and she were far across town at Waterloo station, sitting aboard the 9:20 for Exeter St. David’s. The platform clock read 9:18 and had done, it seemed, for the past three minutes.

  ‘Come on,’ Tiffany muttered.

  Last-minute passengers scurried past their window. Yusuf leaned back in his seat, trying to peer out without being seen himself. No-one was likely to recognise them, but if anyone did. . . Susie fiddled with the tag on her backpack.

  ‘There’s still time.’

  Time to change their minds, she meant. Time to leave this train, hop on the Tube and rejoin their Paris-bound classmates.

  ‘Don’t be dense,’ breathed Yusuf. ‘We’re not on their list anymore, remember? We gave them those letters to explain why we can’t go.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Susie bit her nails.

  Tiffany was surprised that these two were here at all. Surprised and grateful. When she’d told Yusuf of her crazy plan, it was only so that someone else would know where she’d really gone. She hadn’t dreamed he would offer to help. That he would forfeit his own place on the Paris trip, fake a letter from his parents to tell the school he was unwell, and come with her. And then of course Susie had found out, and Yusuf was going nowhere without her.

  The clock clattered to 9:20. Tiffany shut her eyes. The moment balanced on a knife edge. At last she felt the brakes release and she sighed with them. The train eased clear of the platform.

  Susie giggled. ‘Au revoir.’

  ‘The scary thing,’ said Yusuf, ‘is that this isn’t the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.’

  ‘What if a teacher saw us on our way here?’ Susie wondered. ‘Or, or – no, this is the best one! – what if someone we know is actually on this train? Going on holiday to Exeter? And we run into them at the other end, and they go, “Fancy meeting you here!” and we’re all like uuuhhh–’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something to say,’ said Tiffany, sourly.

  Yusuf made settle-down gestures. ‘We’ll be fine. This plan is watertight. Ten out of ten.’

  The train threaded through Clapham Junction and Tiffany dared to hope he was right. The trundling wheels spun out their soothing rhythm. Yes – for Olly’s idea had been the cherry on the cake. He’d found a London gift shop that sold postcards of the Eiffel Tower for tourists too lazy to travel any farther. Tiffany, Yusuf and Susie had written in them, saying how much fun they were having. Olly would post the cards from Paris when he’d been there a couple of days.

  Susie passed round a bottle of fruit-flavoured water.

  ‘You do know where we’re going, right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Tiffany secretly crossed her fingers. Five months ago Mrs Powell had vanished with a pantheon of big cats in tow, and now there were reports of beasts on the moors of south-west England. That was all she had.

  ‘I still say we should have told Geoff,’ said Yusuf.

  ‘No. He’d have talked us out of it.’

  She very nearly had told him. About to ask him one last time to teach her the Oshtian Compass, she had finally understood that he would never agree. Geoff knew what she wanted the Compass for and made no secret of his disapproval.

  She had to believe she could succeed without him. If she’d done it once by accident, she could make the accident happen again. She had tried for hours at home, convinced she was close to cracking it. Picturing Mrs Powell’s face in her mind, she summoned Oshtis and joined it with Mandira, then tried it with every other catra. She even attempted tricky groups of three. Mostly nothing happened, or she merely felt strange. Once, she could have sworn that a ghost wandered through her bedroom, in the shape of a young boy, making her yelp. Stuart lurched in on his cyberman legs.

  ‘Did you see a mouse?’

  ‘Hardly.’ She shook herself to clear her head.

  ‘You’re up to something weird again.’

  ‘If you must know, I’m trying to make a sort of compass. It’s difficult to explain.’

  ‘Oh, I know how to make a compass,’ said Stuart. ‘You float a needle on a slice of cork in a saucer. I wanted to try it but I can’t cut the cork.’ He stopped to think. ‘No, wait, you have to magnetise the needle first. You get a magnet and you stroke the needle with it, over and over, until it has its own north and south pole.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ mumbled Tiffany. He wanted to help so much, but what did her brother know?

  The train rushed onwards. The great city began to dissolve at the edges, tightly-packed office blocks and terraces giving way to houses with big gardens. Flooding into the widening spaces came green seas of parks, woods and farmers’ fields. The morning sun flashed gold on water and Tiffany identified the river Thames, miles and miles upstream, looking unbelievably young and slim.

  Yusuf unfolded a computer printout.

  ‘I found these youth hostels. We can stay there without an adult so long as we’re fourteen or over.’

  ‘But I’m still–’

  ‘Fourteen.’ Yusuf looked her hard in the eye until she nodded.

  ‘Then what?’ asked Susie. ‘Hope we bump into Mrs Powell out walking her tiger?’

  ‘Devon’s quite a thin bit,’ said Yusuf, studying his pocket map. ‘How hard can it be?’

  It was time to think positive, Tiffany decided.

  ‘We’ll know where to go. The Oshtian Compass will guide me.’

  Susie looked doubtful. ‘I still don’t see why Geoff couldn’t track her down for us.’

  Tiffany had reflected long and hard upon this.

  ‘I don’t think he can,’ she said. ‘Not anymore. He and Mrs Powell have spent too long apart. They don’t have that link anymore. If they did, I think he’d have traced her years ago.’

  ‘But now he doesn’t want you searching either,’ said Yusuf. ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘Search me. Maybe he’s afraid I’ll be disappointed too. Or maybe. . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I wonder if it’s pride.’

  ‘Pride?’ said Susie.

  ‘You know. If your parents fight ever. No-one wants to say sorry first. Mine can go silent for hours. Geoff’s like that sometimes. When he talks about Mrs Powell. Sort of prickly.’

  ‘So they argued about something?’ said Yusuf.

  Tiffany shrugged.

  ‘Smashing,’ said Susie. ‘We could be walking into the middle of the world’s longest sulk. That’s if we don’t starve to death on the moors first. I knew we should have gone to France.’

  On they pressed from station to station, through level crossings, racing traffic on the roads, scattering rabbits up steep grassy cuttings, walloping past farmers on tractors. Tiffany leant her head against the window.

  ANIMAL MAGNETISM

  The longer they waited, the more Tiffany wished to be on her bunk bed at the hostel with a mug of hot tea. The wooden post beside them was looking less and less like a bus stop and more like a practical joke.

  ‘Why doesn’t one come? Susie lamented.

  ‘I expect there aren’t so many buses in the countryside.’

  ‘Huh.’ Susie kicked the dubious bus stop, which wobbled. ‘There aren’t any. And they’re not even the right colour. B
uses are red.’

  Yusuf squinted at a faded timetable nailed to a stump. Tiffany zipped up her waterproof. Stern grey clouds were peering above a stand of fir trees, in a sky so much bigger than she was used to.

  Any minute now, her friends would be fed up with her. After going to such trouble and coming all this way they’d done. . . what? Arriving after lunch on Friday, they had made their base at the Exeter Youth Hostel and hired some bikes. That was when Tiffany realised. She had no idea what to do next.

  But she could hardly tell them that. So she’d jingled her bicycle bell and set off in front, leading them along the west road towards Moretonhampstead. If it was true that there were big cats loose on Dartmoor, and if she was right to think that this was connected with Mrs Powell (two ifs so big it was hard to hold them in one head) then it made sense to look in the villages close to the moors. Didn’t it?

  So from Friday afternoon until sunset on Sunday they rode until their hands blistered, whizzing down lanes, puffing up hills, dodging tractors, stopping for snack breaks in tastily named villages like Drewsteignton, Hennock and Bovey Tracey. Susie complained that the air stank of farm animals, but the wind washed over Tiffany’s face and through her hair. There was a quiet so deep that it pressed on her eardrums. She found darkness here too, true darkness, so that waking in the dormitory at 2 a.m. she had needed her cat eyesight to find the loo. Tiffany peered up at the night sky, rinsed of city lights to an absolute black and dusted with inexplicable glitter. . . she boggled when she realised what this was. It was stars, hundreds. Back home she had seen a few dozen at best, and assumed that was all you got. This was like being flung out into space.

  Each morning they would get up, raid the hostel kitchen for someone else’s cornflakes, choose a village from Yusuf’s map and climb back on the bikes. Tiffany led, and with every push at the pedals she silently wished. She wished for the feeling to kick in.

  She remembered how it had taken hold of her, that night on the rooftops. A feeling somewhere between butterfly nerves and the ache from a punch to the stomach. Sending her out in search of Ben when she didn’t even know he was missing, homing in on him with an urge as strong as pain. Now she willed it to come again. She pedalled, she willed, she pedalled harder. But through mile after mile of chocolate-box countryside her heart’s radar screen stayed obstinately blank. Was anyone really here to be found? Or was she only chasing her tail?

  On Sunday afternoon, on their way to a new hostel closer to the moors, it bucketed down. Come Monday they were damp, weary, saddle-sore and poor. Their Paris spending money hadn’t stretched as far as expected. Unable to face the bikes this morning, they plodded to the bus stop and waited. And waited.

  ‘No buses, no tube trains,’ Susie grumbled. ‘Not even any black cabs. You’d think they’d have black cabs.’

  ‘We could hitch hike,’ said Yusuf.

  ‘I’m not getting in some yokel’s Land Rover,’ Susie snapped. ‘I’ve seen films. They’d lock us in a barn and pitchfork us and turn us into cattle feed.’

  ‘We’re only in Devon,’ said Tiffany.

  Susie shuddered.

  ‘Uh-oh, my friends, here comes the rain.’ Yusuf ducked under a tree.

  Surrendering, they trudged back through Dunsford. Halfway to the hostel the rain became a power-shower, forcing them to shelter in the local tea shop. By now Tiffany was thoroughly miserable and could only sniff at Yusuf’s gift of a cream tea. When she filled her cup, her flattened hair dribbled rainwater into the milk jug.

  The lady who ran the shop brought their scones.

  ‘Spread the clotted cream on first, then top it with the strawberry jam,’ she instructed. ‘In Cornwall they do it the other way round, but we don’t talk about that.’

  Tiffany ate three scones and tried to feel better.

  ‘It’s no good.’ She wiped cream off her nose. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you out here. This is ridiculous. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know if there is a needle.’

  ‘Finding a needle in a haystack’s easy,’ Yusuf remarked. ‘All you need is a magnet.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tiffany. ‘And I don’t have one. I’ve tried to make the Oshtian Compass every way I can think of. I know it must be the Oshtis catra plus Mandira. It has to be. But it doesn’t work. I don’t get any. . .’ She had to stop and swallow a mouthful of tea. ‘She’s not here, is she?’

  ‘It was a good guess,’ said Yusuf softly.

  ‘Wishful thinking. She’s gone. I’m never going to see her again.’

  Her tea spilled in the saucer. It reminded her. Mrs Powell used to pour tea into a saucer for her silver cat Jim to lap. She’d been funny that way. All ice and steel on the outside, melting with warmth underneath. You could never tell when she was joking, never knew if it was safe to laugh. Tiffany remembered the night she’d opened up, confessing the story of what had happened to her son, her green eyes bright with unshed tears. And how she’d tried to say goodbye, taking back her harsh words from before: I do care. I care very much indeed. How Mrs Powell had nurtured talents in her that no-one else could see. The smiles that said well done, as rare and reviving as January sunshine.

  Memories came like cramps, welling inside her until she wanted to burst. Mrs Powell saving Olly from falling in the woods. Mrs Powell fearlessly facing a gun. Mrs Powell being shot down. . . They truly did hurt, pulling at her insides, pulling –

  Tugging.

  She sat up with a gasp, startling the others.

  ‘Tiffany?’

  As these memories scoured through her, it was as if they left something behind. Trails of force, gently tingling. What had Stuart said about making a compass? She should have listened. You have to magnetise the needle. . . You get a magnet and you stroke the needle with it, over and over. Could it be as simple as that?

  She shut her eyes. In the darkness Oshtis glowed ember-bright, Mandira flared emerald, and the pair fused at once into a bar of red and green. Even in the heartache of remembering, she exulted.

  ‘Where is it? Where’d you put it?’

  Yusuf recoiled in alarm as she scrabbled at his coat.

  ‘Your pocket map!’ Tiffany cried. ‘Give it, give it now!’

  ‘Take it easy!’ Yusuf fended her off with it. The tea-shop lady had paused in mid-cake arrangement to stare. Tiffany’s fingers tore through page after page.

  ‘Hey,’ Yusuf protested.

  ‘We have to go.’ Tiffany struggled to get the words out. ‘Mrs Powell’s not here.’

  Yusuf and Susie shared a glance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Susie. ‘We didn’t want to be the ones to say it.’

  ‘No.’ Tiffany slapped the map on the table and planted her finger in the heart of Dartmoor National Park. ‘She’s there.’

  They couldn’t check out of the hostel fast enough for Tiffany. There were bills to pay, bikes to return and bed sheets to hand in to the laundry, and the other two wanted lunch, though she couldn’t swallow any. Despite their dwindling funds she phoned for a taxi. By the time it had carried them along the moorland roads and up the lonely track to their new hostel, a grey stone building that Susie said looked like an orphanage, it was mid-afternoon.

  ‘We’ll start a search tomorrow,’ said Yusuf, and Tiffany nearly bit off his head. She was terrified her new-found sense would fizzle out. Packing essentials such as waterproofs, drinks, cereal bars and an ordinary walker’s compass, they struck out on foot along a track cut by walking boots and horses’ hooves. Very soon Tiffany strayed off the path, across the face of the hill on their left.

  ‘West-north-west,’ said Yusuf.

  The view from the hill’s crest was like the surface of the Moon, if the Moon had grown lichens and moss. It plunged and rose and rumpled every way until it fused with the sky, three hundred square miles if you believed the guide book – it looked like more. Tiffany felt a fleeting despair, then her feet moved again, carrying her down towards a shallow valley that sank under a veil of tr
ees.

  They walked for an hour. Often she changed course wildly, once nearly doubling back, deaf to all protests. By the time they reached the valley floor, their shadows were stretched long and the light had the quality of weathered copper.

  ‘I’m done in.’ Susie gulped water. ‘Let’s head back. Or we’ll be walking in the dark.’

  ‘Which bothers us how?’ Tiffany peered hard at the woods on their right. The spring foliage gleamed in the lowering sun.

  ‘It bothers me,’ said Yusuf. ‘Haven’t you seen The Hound of the Baskervilles?’

  ‘Where?’ Susie glanced all around.

  Tiffany made for the trees. They could follow if they liked. Her Oshtian Compass was thrumming, its needle quivering. She was close. As Yusuf and Susie caught her up, grumbling and stumbling, all three were nearly driven off their feet by a gust of wind that rolled along the edge of the wood, making the newly minted leaves roar.

  Susie said, ‘We’re not supposed to be here.’

  Tiffany hesitated, pricked by the same thought. But the pull of the wood was stronger. She walked among the trees, under a leafy canopy which seemed to be held up by a scaffolding of sunbeams. There were no real paths, only breaks in the thicket. The leaf mulch underfoot cushioned her step and her feet sank beneath a sea of bluebells. Wading more and more as if through a dream, she almost blundered into the chain-link fence that stretched between the tree trunks.

  ‘What’s this doing here?’ asked Susie.

  ‘Must be private property,’ said Yusuf. ‘Someone wants to keep us out.’

  The fence was more than twice Tiffany’s height and woven of stout wire that wouldn’t bend. It curled away from them at the top to create an overhang. Something about this struck Tiffany as odd. She slipped off her rucksack and threw it over the barrier.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ groaned Yusuf, sounding very American. Tiffany climbed the chain-link and swung her legs over. A Pounce Drop and the soft soil landed her light as an acorn. The others followed reluctantly, awkward in their walking clothes. They pressed on deeper into the wood.