by Gabriel King
Now he was here, he had no plan.
There was a tangle of wire baskets on the warped old wooden floor by the door. Tag stood beside them, kneading the doormat with his front paws and looking up at the bulging legs of a human customer. Its big maroon coat smelled wet. Its shoes smelled of dog. ‘Everyone stocks them but you,’ it was complaining in a voice both mournful and accusatory. ‘Everyone.’
‘Hi,’ said Tag. He rubbed against its legs. Dull, he thought.
‘Will you look at that?’ it told the shopkeeper. ‘I never knew you had a cat.’
Tag withdrew shyly and slipped behind the wire baskets. Dull, dull, dull.
‘What cat? There’s no cat here. I hate cats.’
The customer was puzzled. It put its head out of the door and had a look up and down the street. Then it shrugged. ‘Well anyway,’ it said, ‘they stock them everywhere else but here.’ When it had gone, Tag came out again. ‘Got any tandoori chicken?’ he asked. ‘It’s orange.’
No answer. The shopkeeper was dull, too. Tag rubbed against the counter. He hoisted his tail like a flag. He had to crane his neck to see past the till. The dull behind the counter was reading a newspaper, so it couldn’t see Tag at all.
‘I’m down here.’
No reply.
Oh well, thought Tag, and he trotted along to the freezer cabinet at the back of the shop. It was bright in there, and all the food was wrapped. Strips of yellowing plastic hung down in front, to keep the cold air in. Tag stood on his hind legs and butted between them. Then he jumped in. He sniffed the white tubs and shiny packages. He could make out – as if from a long way off – the smells of cream and butter. He could smell bacon. Leaving the cabinet proved harder than entering it. The bacon kept tangling itself in the plastic strips. He dropped the first packet inside and had to get back in to fetch it. Then he dropped it again, when he landed on the floor outside. This gave him an idea. Soon he had quite a large pile of bacon. He wasn’t sure how he would transport it. But the shop was empty, so clearly there would be time to think about that.
He was taking the last pack out of the cabinet when three more customers, women bundled up against the weather, came into the shop and began to browse along the shelves, wire baskets over their arms. One of them, murmuring and hooting quietly to itself, headed slowly for the freezer, where it bent over and, looming above Tag like a sodden tree, began rummaging through the processed cheese, the wrapped sausages, the pepperoni in foil. Then it rummaged through the butter-free spread, the fat-free cream, and the Greek mountain yogurt. It touched Tag’s foot.
Tag pressed himself back into a corner. Should he run?
Too late.
The woman looked straight down at Tag.
Tag looked up at it.
It opened its mouth. Its broad, stubby hands reached in to grab him.
Tag fled.
On the way out he snatched up one of his packets of bacon and, half carrying, half dragging it, pelted down the aisle. Out the door he went, onto the pavement, skidding in the slush. Then he put his mind to it and ran. Behind him ran the shopkeeper, shouting. Behind the shopkeeper – although they soon gave up – ran the three customers, waving their great thick arms. The bacon kept shifting in Tag’s mouth. He would get a good grip in the middle of it, only to find that it had slipped to one side and begun to lever itself out. Or he would knock it on something as he raced around a corner, and it would be snatched straight out of his jaws.
‘Waugh!’
He looked back. The shopkeeper was still there.
Run, Tag! thought Tag. Run now!
In and out of passing legs. Dive into the gutter. Swerve into the roadway, head down, ears down, down toward the river! A wild white cat, caught stealing rashers from the Caribbean Road! When he next looked up, Tintagel Court lay in front of him, and the pursuit was no longer to be seen. Tag wheezed up the seeping stairs. When at last he dropped the package on the floor in front of Pertelot Fitzwilliam, his lungs were burning and his jaws ached. He had clung so grimly to his catch that his teeth had punctured the plastic. The Mau stretched and purred languidly. She was half asleep.
‘Mercury!’ she whispered.
*
Pertelot Fitzwilliam ate. Ragnar ate. Tag ate.
Ragnar sighed. ‘I can say. This was good! Though I am not sure about the tough bit on the outside.’
‘I didn’t eat any of that,’ said Tag.
*
So it went – for two or three days, perhaps a week. Pertelot and Ragnar hid from the world; and though their supper came more often from a garbage bag than a freezer cabinet, Tag looked after them. Sometimes, waking up cold in the drifting gray dawn or shivering to and fro across Tintagel Court to the dustbins, Tag thought guiltily of Majicou and the search for the King and Queen. But no one had ever depended on him before, and he knew that he couldn’t abandon his new friends now, however exasperated they made him.
Every day, he visited his new dwelling. No one ever came there now, human or cat. One or two silent pigeons eyed him from the gutters, ruffling their feathers in an uncomfortable way, as if he made them embarrassed.
The problem that took up his attention as he hurried home each day was this: the new flat was safe, but how would he get Pertelot Fitzwilliam inside? He had already quarreled with Ragnar over this. Clearly, the Mau was too weak to jump through the ventilator. Though food had improved her condition, she still slept for twenty hours out of twenty-four. When you woke her she sneezed until she was exhausted. Her nose ran. Her eyes ran.
‘This place doesn’t help,’ Tag said grimly. ‘Look at it!’
Damp hung in the air. The wallpaper sagged with it. There were mushrooms growing, yellow and tough and shaped like human ears, in every corner. ‘We ought to move her to the new den now. I’ll think of a way in.’
Ragnar disagreed. ‘She can barely stand,’ he pointed out. She would be vulnerable. She would be slow on her feet. It would be a disaster. ‘I think we would be discovered and ambushed so easily.’
Tag was disgusted. ‘Ambushed by who?’ he said.
‘Who knows?’
‘I’m not afraid of the feral cats.’
‘So.’
‘Are you afraid of them?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re afraid of leaving,’ accused Tag. ‘You hate it here, but you’re afraid to leave.’
Turning away, Ragnar said quietly, ‘I am afraid of nothing. But if we leave here, Pertelot’s owner will find us, and that would be a disaster for everyone.’
‘I don’t believe in owners,’ said Tag. ‘If you want to make something of yourself in this world – forget it, if you only want to eat in this world – you’ve got to make it as yourself. Not as someone else’s property. That’s what I think.’
He appealed to the Mau. ‘Don’t you?’
But the Mau only said suddenly, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t heard a word of it, ‘The owner! He mustn’t find me!’
This was too much for Tag. ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ he suggested.
*
In the end the decision was taken away from them anyway. Tag woke one night to find Pertelot Fitzwilliam in a high fever. She was lying on her side, writhing to and fro like a garden worm that has been cut in half. She had tom her newspapers to shreds and pulled the stuffing out of the purple cushion. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth, and her coat was streaked black and damp. As he woke, Tag had the impression that someone had been in the room. Bad light flickered across the walls. The ghosts of words hung in the dark damp air, as if they had been spoken over Pertelot Fitzwilliam while she slept – as if they were being spoken still. But only Ragnar was there, licking the Mau’s head to reassure her, his green eyes huge and desperate in the gloom.
‘Ragnar! I thought—’
‘I too. But nothing is here.’
‘Ragnar, lights! Lights on the walls!’
‘I think only the moonlight.’
Tag heaved himself to his feet. H
e felt slow and heavy. He felt like some other cat. He couldn’t get his head to work. Dreams chased themselves away from him, gray and feathery, very menacing. At length, he made himself say, ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘Tag, I think we have had it here.’
‘She’s still alive,’ said Tag. ‘You haven’t had it while you’re still alive.’
He thought. ‘Water!’ he said. ‘Get water!’
‘How?’
‘Do I have to do everything? Ragnar, I don’t know how!’
Just then, Pertelot Fitzwilliam woke, yowling mournfully. She jumped to her feet and, before either of the other cats could move, fled from the room. Tag and Ragnar stared at one another. Regular thudding sounds issued from the kitchen. They found Pertelot there, throwing herself repeatedly at the outside door. She stopped suddenly and sat down. ‘Raggy,’ she said, in a clear, reasonable voice, ‘please show me how to get out of here. I don’t seem to know.’ Her front legs buckled. She tumbled onto the dirty linoleum, a startled expression on her face. ‘Do help,’ she implored. ‘I’m stuck in myself. You mustn’t let him find me.’ And she seemed to pass out again where she had fallen. Her mouth gaped in wonder at what she was seeing. Her breath came fast and shallow. She said something that sounded like ‘Golden cat.’
‘Tag!’ said Ragnar. ‘We must—’
But even as they moved toward her the Mau got lightly to her feet and pushed her head through the hole in the door.
‘Not out there!’ called Ragnar. ‘Pertelot, come back!’
She ignored him. Only her tail was left in the kitchen. Ragnar sprang on it, all seventeen pounds of him. He held it tight between his teeth. There was a shriek of rage from the other side of the door, and the tail became violently agitated. Then abruptly it relaxed, and a calm voice said, ‘Ragnar Gustaffson, how dare you?’
Ragnar looked guilty and defeated. He held on a moment more, then opened his mouth. Instantly, the rose-gray tail withdrew.
‘Thank you,’ said Pertelot.
‘I’m sure,’ said Ragnar.
‘Idiot,’ said Tag.
He raced across the kitchen and got his head through the door in time to see her ascend the nearest staircase, then scamper along the walkway and descend the next. The night was cold with moonlight. It was clear air and clouds high up. Pertelot cut across the courtyard, then back again. Did she know where she was going? Tag wasn’t sure. She would slow to a trot, tail raised and tip curled, look around, dash off again. She seemed relaxed, rational yet vague, as if the fever had less receded than somehow clarified itself within her. Soon she had visited every part of the building but one.
It was a strange chase.
The Mau fled silently through the moonlight, her shadow long and oblique. Tag followed her. Ragnar followed Tag. No one spoke.
They were running, the three of them, down a flight of stairs on the river side of the building, when somehow the entire staircase twisted out of shape, elongating itself and angling upward, so that it seemed like a horizontal tunnel. Tag stopped, confused. If he looked forward, the tunnel went on forever. A strange noise echoed back toward him. If he looked back, he found that all he had done was descend half a quite ordinary flight of stairs. There was Ragnar behind him, head on one side! Ragnar was equally confused.
‘I’m not seeing this,’ he said.
Tag said, ‘There’s a landing down here somewhere.’
Then he remembered which landing it was.
‘Quick!’ he said.
But they were too late to catch her. By the time they arrived, she was approaching the ‘highway’ in reluctant little runs and pauses. Since Tag had last seen it, it had pivoted upright and, reaching from floor to ceiling, occupied most of the landing. It was six or seven feet in diameter, a filmy tube full of bluish-brown gases moving upward in random pulses. Sometimes these dissipated before they reached the ceiling. Sometimes they seemed to solidify, like chemicals fused and welded into a vibrating colored mass, streaked and marbled with the most beautiful deep blues and reds.
It was a highway. It wasn’t a highway.
It was alive.
When it saw the Mau, a shudder passed through it. Lights flickered deep inside. Suddenly it bellied toward her like a fire in the wind, breaking up into grayish sparks and wet-looking cinders. There she stood, dwarfed, a lean silhouette of a cat looking up. There was a deep groan. Then chanting began. Something was chanting in there. At this, Pertelot went rigid. All along her spine the fur was up on end. Stiff legged, a pace at a time, she moved toward it. In response it pulsed and roared and shot up in a towering fountain of strange colors and lights.
‘Come on, Ragnar!’ urged Tag.
But Ragnar Gustaffson was staring back up the stairs.
‘Look!’ he called.
Cats were pouring along toward them! Cats in waves, cats like a sea: every cat in Tintagel Court that night had crowded onto the walkway above. There must have been a hundred of them – black cats, white cats, black-and-white cats; cats gray, brown, and marmalade; tabbies, tortoiseshells, and smokes; cats male and female and somewhere in between; one-eyed ginger toms and their three-legged skewbald queens; unwise cats with the moon in their eyes; cats large and small, old and young, sick and healthy… Now they stood at the top of the stairs and slowly, like milk just beginning to boil over the edge of a saucepan, began to descend.
‘We can’t go back!’ cried Ragnar.
Pertelot Fitzwilliam had no intention of it. Pace by pace, shaking with delirium, her eyes lit up from within like lamps, she approached the thing on the landing. Suddenly, the colors died away, leaving only a column of milky, translucent light veined with startling Nilotic green. There was some kind of music from within – bells, a reed flute, small drums arrhythmic and perverse. There were movements, as of a dance. A human voice said, ‘Come to me. Come to me now.’
At this, two things happened. Tag threw himself between Pertelot and the ruseating column. And Pertelot, clearly recognizing the voice, bolted.
Tag stared at the thing looming above him and lost the use of his legs.
‘Waugh!’
Huge hard hands went around his ribs and, when he clawed and bit, around his neck. Pliable with fear, his dignity gone, shock creeping through his blood, Tag hung from those hands like a kitten in its mother’s mouth. Before he was snatched away, he had time to see the Mau and her consort fighting their way back up the staircase side by side, like two small gallant ships at sea. ‘Pertelot! Ragnar!’ he cried. Wave after wave of cats engulfed them. Yet they breasted each one with ease, and met little resistance. The ferals weren’t interested in them. They were intent only on the column of misty light around the feet of the figure. Into this, as soon as they reached it, they threw themselves a dozen at a time like cats onto a medieval bonfire, their voices mingling in a thready yowl of delight and despair.
Tag shuddered. Around him was white. There were smells he hated. Sounds came to him from a long way off, muffled and mangled. Something brown and rubbery was clamped over his face. The grip on his neck shifted. Fingers pinched up the loose skin there. He felt a sharp pain. He writhed once, then hung down again, two feet of creamy-white pelt, like a dead ermine. Before he lost consciousness he heard file words, ‘Wrong one! Wrong cat!’
*
When he woke, it was to find himself stretched out on cold, dirty concrete, staring into a scorched-looking corner that smelled of ammonia. His head hurt, and though his heart was calm, his soul still seemed to be hammering in panic. When he got up, he hurt. ‘Yow!’ he said. He was alone. The landing was empty. Everything was quiet. A few strange sparks blowing about on the concrete soon turned out to be flakes of snow in the wind. It was late, and Tintagel Court was as silent as death. Limping and stiff in the moonlight. Tag made his way back to the apartment, to see if Ragnar and Pertelot were there. But the feral cats were in possession. The door had been ripped open. A smell of fire came out. Up and down outside, like a wild animal at the entrance t
o some blackened desert cave, paraded the marmalade tom Tag had fought with on his first day at the court. Tag watched for a few minutes, then left quietly.
Daylight found him tired and desperate. He had been over every inch of Tintagel Court, but there was no sign of his friends. He had peered into blackened waste chutes. He had teetered on the edges of the huge unused dustbins under the great archway. He had scoured the surrounding streets, paying special attention to coal bunkers and garden sheds, wrecked cars with broken windows – any bolt-hole into which their panic might have sent them. He had roamed up and down the river, upstream to the Fantastic Bridge and downstream as far as Mayflower Docks and Observatory Quay.
Nothing. It was as if they had vanished into the air.
Eventually, he was so tired he fell down in a foul-smelling corner as far away from a stairwell as he could manage, and slept. But his sleep was full of bad dreams. Dark shapes fluttered and whispered. The one-eyed cat stalked him as if he were a bird. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Tag begged. ‘Because you have failed me,’ answered the familiar stem and hollow voice. Somehow the Majicou had become mixed up with the thing Tag had seen in the pillar of light. In the dream, Tag was walking past a highway behind the Caribbean Road. Morning, full daylight. Something that was the Majicou from the waist up and Pertelot’s owner from the waist down reached out without warning and pulled him in. ‘Wrong cat!’ it screamed. It was like drowning. After that he didn’t dare sleep again. Instead, he settled himself as best he could, his paws tucked up under him and his nose almost resting on the cold floor, and tried to think about what to do next. All that happened was that he fell into a reverie of his vanished friends. They were lapped in a clear hallucinatory light, a little more real than real.
The Mau, her fur turning from rose to taupe in the light of dawn, her ancient profile carved in stone. Ragnar, boxy and determined, facing off the ferals to protect a purple cushion. ‘I shall call you Mercury,’ he remembered Pertelot whispering. How proud he had been then, and how he had tried to disguise it! He remembered Ragnar complimenting him, ‘Not just any cat, I think.’ He remembered the story they had told him one quiet afternoon soon after he arrived, of how they had escaped the cat show together.