by Gabriel King
After that things grew blurred. He drank from any puddle he could find. For a while, he sat vaguely on a renovated brick wall, looking down at the moonlight on the river while he tried to wash crusty blood off the side of his face. But when he got his paw near the ripped ear the pain was quite sharp, and he soon gave up. Behind him lay a little cobbled arena – steps, a graceful leafless birch tree, two benches, and a waste bin. The cobbles had been laid in clever fans and circles. He was trying to describe the King and – especially – the Queen, as much to himself as the tabby.
‘She’s beautiful—’
‘I’m beautiful too! See?’
‘But it’s not so much that. It’s something in the way she needs help, and you want to give it. Of course, they’re both a bit vague. In fact he’s an idiot.’ He thought for a minute, then added, ‘She’s Egyptian. They can’t have gone far. They must be around here somewhere.’
‘I’ll find them,’ said the tabby. ‘I’m everywhere. Look!’ She started running in tight circles around the waste bin, apparently trapped by the pattern of cobbles surrounding it. To Tag, her shadow seemed a little slow, a little far behind, though it was clearly as attached to her as she was to Tag. She had followed him everywhere. He didn’t want her, and he kept forgetting her name. ‘I’m Cy,’ she reminded him. ‘Cy for Cypher, get it? I’m Cy. The one with the open mind.’ Her behavior had first puzzled, then upset him. She talked nonsense. She talked all the time. There was something wrong with her. She was full of energy but often quite uncertain on her feet. At the first opportunity she would try to eat unsuitable things. She had an attention span of perhaps thirty seconds. He felt too ill to be in charge of her.
‘I’ll find them for you!’
‘I don’t want you with me,’ said Tag.
Standing up and stretching, he swayed toward the water twenty feet below. Moon reflections welcomed him down. He kept his head and didn’t fall.
You’re not a kitten, he tried to tell Cy, so just go away.
He tried to tell her, I don’t have to look after you.
She seemed less hurt than puzzled.
‘But I’m looking after you,’ she said, as if he should have known that all along.
*
Later, in a steep narrow lane somewhere above Coldheath, where Tag had allowed himself a moment’s rest, she fell down and became engaged in an ungainly struggle with her own legs, at which she hissed and scolded as if they belonged to some other cat. The moon was down. The tarmac was romantic with rain. The gutters glimmered with it. From two distinguished gateposts at the side of the lane, a gravel drive curved away between well-grown trees to a house with creeper-covered white walls and faded blue louvered shutters either side of warmly lit windows.
Regaining control just as suddenly as she had lost it, the tabby got upright and headed off with a kind of groggy cheerfulness into the laurel hedge on the other side of the road. There she rooted noisily about until she had unearthed a large square of disintegrating linoleum. This she dragged out and began to gnaw at it with great energy, pausing every so often to look around and lick her lips.
‘Want some?’ she invited Tag.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave it alone; it’s lino.’
‘If you don’t want my food, don’t insult it,’ Cy said.
‘Go away,’ said Tag.
Cy dragged the linoleum back into the hedge and set about burying it.
‘I’m ill and you’re mad,’ he told her.
Turning himself around thoughtfully – if he moved too fast the world tended to spin – he caught sight of the white house with its blue shutters. ‘You know,’ he informed the hedge vaguely, ‘this place reminds me of somewhere I used to know.’ And off he staggered, downhill into the rain and the dark. All his joints felt stiff and hot.
‘Good-bye!’ he called.
For a moment or two after he had gone, the lane was silent. Then a gust of wind spattered raindrops across it. The little tabby cat burst out of the hedge, gave a fierce and filthy look around, and rushed silently after him.
*
In the end, Tag had to rest. He wasn’t going to find Ragnar and Pertelot that night, if ever. In fact, as the rat’s curse filled him up with fever like a glass with muddy water, he began to wonder if he had ever met them at all. The whole adventure had seemed headlong and unreal from the moment he came upon Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion hauling the faded purple cushion along that walkway in the sky. Nothing could be less likely than a King and a Queen in Tintagel Court.
‘They won’t go back there,’ Tag told himself. ‘Not now.’
He told himself, ‘I must go on too.’
He fell asleep, only to jerk awake – perhaps a minute later – to the sound of his own voice, which whispered hoarsely, ‘The Half-and-Half! No! The Half-and-Half!’ He had a fading impression of terror, mistaken assumptions, pursuit. The Half-and-Half! Since he ate the rat, this image had dominated his fevers. It jumped out at him from every corner. Sometimes it was Majicou, sometimes Pertelot’s owner. Sometimes it was both.
Sometimes, it was a cat’s head impaled on a stick, ribbons blowing out beneath it in the wind.
He shivered.
Had Majicou betrayed them all?
‘Pertelot!’ he called, his voice echoing across Coldheath. ‘Ragnar!’
At this the tabby woke up and made a loud grating noise – much like someone using a food processor – in his bad ear. It was her idea of purring.
‘Lick me,’ she demanded sleepily.
It was nearly dawn. He had only the most confused memories of leaving the river. His ear hurt less, but everything else felt worse. He and Cy were curled up together in the back of a bus shelter to get out of the weather. He hadn’t the energy to discourage her anymore. It was comforting to have someone near anyway. She did most of the sleeping. For his part, Tag stared rather dully in front of him, watching the rain turn to sleet and then back again into rain. The odd car shushed past.
‘Wash me. I’m nice.’
‘You’re not nice,’ he grumbled.
But he did his best.
Her ears were smelly. When he tried to clean them she shook them in his face, so he gave up and moved on to the crown of her head. There he found a hard object that tasted metallic on his tongue. He was fascinated. He licked the fur away from it to get a better look, and there it was: a short stud made of something shiny, embedded in the skull. Her skin had grown up tight to the base of it. He cleaned around it, then without thinking took it between his teeth and pulled. Cy shot to her feet, banging him in the mouth. ‘Arouw!’ she said. She began to whirl around and around in a very tight circle among the discarded candy wrappers, bits of chewing gum, and cigarette butts on the bus shelter floor. After a second or two she scuttled out into the falling sleet and stared expectantly upward.
‘Sparks!’ she said. ‘Sparks falling from the forge of God! Sparks, get your headphones on! Message from the dead: Stay home wet days! Over and out.’
She fell down.
Tag wearily pulled her into the bus shelter again. There she blinked and gazed at him happily.
‘I’ve got a spark plug in my head!’
‘Go to sleep now.’
*
The next morning, they fell in with some cats who lived rough under the arches of a disused rail bridge somewhere on the western edge of Coldheath.
Coldheath wasn’t much of a place. Tag didn’t know how long he stayed. It was more than a week, less than two. Whatever disease he had caught from the rat took a firm hold as soon as he got there, and time started slipping about in his head, and for much of it he was barely conscious. Of the dozen or two dozen cats gathered on the bleak apron of grass in front of the bridge, he would in the end remember little but the names that leaked in and out of his brain like groundwater after rain.
Names are free. Owning nothing else, the Coldheath cats awarded each other names capricious, baroque, and indulgent. There was Iggy the Fish. There was Tumbledown Tom.
There were Bedroll, Razor, and Clint the Mint. There was a slow cat from the provinces called Stilton. Then there was the cat who insisted on being called Also Known as Fitz, as if he had once had some other name he wanted to keep to himself. It was AKA Fitz who greeted them the day they wandered in from Coldheath. His coat was an off-white color, except for his tail, which was black, and one black patch partway down his left side. His head and shoulders were as big as a bull terrier’s. His large round face was covered with scabs. He liked to fight.
He looked Tag up and down. ‘Who’s the tart?’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
‘You deaf? I can see you’re sick. We’re all sick here. Nothing new about that. I said. Who’s the tart? But never mind—’ pushing his face into Tag’s ‘—because all the tarts here are mine.’
Tag stared at him.
‘Not that I can fancy the little ones much,’ said AKA Fitz, glancing at Cy. And he stalked off.
Tag watched him go. He thought, We’re all sick here.
They were. They had stiff joints, swollen lymph nodes, and mange. They had anemia, toxemia, septicemia, hematoma ear, eczema, runny eyes, and constant low-grade fevers. Their teeth were loose or broken. They were wormy. External parasites made them irritable. Not far beneath their misery they had that explosive glandular energy common to outcasts, and nothing to do all day but bicker. Thus a typical encounter between Iggy the Fish and Bedroll would go like this:
‘Stuff you, mate.’
‘No, mate. Stuff you.’
‘I know you, mate. Stuff that.’
‘Mate? You don’t know a mate from stuff.’
Then, to the other cats, who had assembled to watch, ‘You heard this stuffer?’
‘Stuff you, mate!’
And so on, until, sitting back on his haunches suddenly, one or the other would give a bubbling cry and, slipping his front claws, hit out so suddenly and so quickly that Tag could barely follow what had happened. An ear would rip, an eyelid would bleed. Fur, as they say, would fly, until the loser backed away, muttering as if he still had fight left in him, ‘Slip one on me, would you? Stuff you.’
And it would all begin again.
Often, though, they were too lethargic to do much at all, and like ferals everywhere simply sat hunched up, staring into the rain. They looked as if they were waiting for something. They were. Various human beings fed them, old men and women for the most part, barely better off than the cats themselves. Most days, by the time he got there, there wasn’t much food left. It was disgusting, mostly fishmeal dyed a kind of neon pink, coming apart in the teeming rain. He ate it anyway. His ear had healed, but he felt depleted. He sat alone in the rain, staring ahead of himself at nothing. He gathered with the others to lick the lukewarm fat off fish-and-chip papers people threw away under the rail arches. At night, the Half-and-Half ruled his dreams; by day it stalked his delirium. Refusing to give in to it, he huddled up and thought about Ragnar and Pertelot. What were they doing now? Would he ever see them again? How would the Mau get anything to eat without his help?
Cy the tabby stayed close by, though much of the time he wouldn’t acknowledge her. Her stream of nonsense soothed him. She cared for him according to her whim and as best she could. She would wash him inexpertly for a moment or two, then forget what she was doing and wander off. She would sometimes cuddle up to him at night. And she fetched him nourishing items from the railway bank beyond the bridge – one bicycle spoke, the lid of a shoe box, part of a long-dead pigeon.
‘Get that down you, Jack,’ she advised. ‘It’ll make a man of you.’
The Coldheath cats slipped in and out of Tag’s awareness, looming or distant according to his level of fever. They had, underneath it all, a strange durability. They saw themselves less as castoffs than as independent agents. Life under the arches was just the price they paid for freedom. The tortoiseshell with the collapsed cheek and glaucoma eye, the little black dying from feline influenza – if they had a motto, it was ‘Never Go Home.’ They knew Tag was a transient. They suspected he was a toff. But he was bigger than most of them and generally they left him alone. On the other hand, Cy – ungainly in her movements, forever giving the wrong response – brought out the worst in them. They drove her away when the food arrived. They set upon her when she was asleep. They backed her into corners. If she resisted, they ganged up. AKA Fitz took the lead. He called her Smelly Nellie, which drove her into impressive rages, for she was not a clean little cat and knew it. He bit her in the back of the neck until she submitted, then walked away without doing anything.
AKA Fitz took the lead in everything. Whenever Tag turned his head – however ill he felt – there was AKA Fitz, stalking across his field of view. AKA Fitz was always looking out of the corner of his eye, to make sure the other cats respected him. AKA Fitz let them eat. AKA Fitz filled the arches with his personality the way he marked the sodden brickwork with his stink.
It was a cloud of violence. As Tag recovered, he resented it increasingly. Also Known As! he thought with contempt.
Late one afternoon he woke to the sound of pigeons cooing in their roosts high up in the bridgework, from whence they peered doubtfully at the cats gathered around the banquet spread on the bleak ground below. Tag sat up. His vision seemed clearer. Over the next two days, his strength returned. Soon, he couldn’t get enough to eat; and one morning, he was Tag again. The rat, perhaps, had forgiven him at last. The Half-and-Half had vacated his dreams – though his doubts remained. He shook himself suddenly and had a thorough wash. Then, seeing AKA Fitz leave the arches, and curious to know where that animal might be going, he followed him.
AKA Fitz made his way against the grain of the back gardens north of the bridge, running nimbly along the board fences and skirting any open place. He stopped frequently to make certain he wasn’t being followed. This strategy brought him to a quiet street lined with parked cars in various stages of disintegration. AKA Fitz marched openly down the middle of the road, through a gateway about eight doors down, and jumped onto the low sill of an old bay window.
There, his whole demeanor changed. He looked around once, as if to make sure he wasn’t observed, then sat up straight, wrapped his tail neatly around his feet, and stared intently into the parlor the other side of the window. After a moment, a noise came out of him. ‘Ow?’ he begged. And again, ‘Ow? Marauow?’ And then, ‘Ow? Marauow? Marauow?’ And he went on like that for three or four minutes, until the front door was opened with a sigh and a sweet old voice said, ‘Pimpie! Pimpeeee? Is it a little Pimpie, then? It is! It’s a little Pimpie! Does he want his milk? Pimpie? Yes? Yes! Yes, Pimpie, little Pimpeee! Well, I suppose you must come in then, mustn’t you! You must come in, little Pimpie!’
Tag, who had hidden in a privet hedge to watch, was beside himself.
So much for AKA Fitz.
AKA Pimpie, he thought with delight. AKA My Little Milkie-Wilkie then.
And he slipped back along the gardens to the bridge to see if he could get anything to eat. The tabby was off on business of her own. She had left a small coin, two cigarette butts, and an empty chocolate wrapper in the place where he usually sat. He wondered where she was. He thought he would look for her on the railway bank and perhaps try his paw at a vole or two in the tangled couch grass and bramble colonies. An hour later, perhaps more, he found that though illness had given him all the patience in the world, any speed he had once had was quite gone. Even quite old voles were walking away from him. He yawned and got up stiffly. ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised them.
Cy was nowhere up on the bank; and when he looked out across the miserable grass strip, he couldn’t see her there, either. There wasn’t a cat in view. It seemed like a quiet afternoon for the Coldheath ferals. But as he came down the bank, he heard some voices raised; and eventually he found her.
They had penned her up on the charred, pigeon-dunged slope of earth in the back of one of the arches – Bedroll, Razor, Iggy the Fish, Bunco Rap, Spiky George the Sailor, Fort
une Smiles, and half a dozen more – and now sat in a half circle egging one another on and waiting to see what she would do. There was a vapor of testosterone in the air. There was bad will. There was rape.
Cy stared at them resentfully, as if they had interrupted an important message from outer space. She looked small. Blood had caked around the base of her spark plug and down the side of her nose. Water dripped onto her back from somewhere up in the curve of the arch, catching the light as it fell. Each time she shuffled uncomfortably and moved back, they moved forward. Soon she would be against the wall, and there would be nowhere else to go. At some other time, she might have reveled in their interest, rolling and purring like any feral queen. Now, her signals fatally mixed, she only said, ‘I don’t want you.’
‘You do,’ said Spiky George.
‘Let her go now,’ said Tag.
A dozen heads turned to him as one, then away again.
‘Stuff off,’ said Iggy the Fish.
‘No, wait,’ said another voice.
Out of the circle stepped AKA Fitz. His head was down, and his fur was up. With slow and stiff-legged gait, he made his approach. With slow and measured insolence he thrust that huge round face of his into Tag’s.
‘This toff wants a word with us,’ he said. His pale blue eyes were an inch away. ‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘Do you want a word with us? Because—’ suddenly thrusting himself even closer ‘—we want a word with you.’ He sat down suddenly, as if exhausted by this display, held one of his front paws up to his face, and inspected it clinically.
‘Slip him the old razors, Fitz,’ said Bedroll.
Spiky George suggested, ‘Slip him a pawful, Fitzy.’
While this was going on, Tag had crouched back further and further on his haunches, filled with fear and anger until his whole body felt wound up like a spring. Now, suddenly, all tension seemed to rush out of him. It was replaced, now that he knew what he was going to do, by a calmness hardly less unpleasant. He made himself look coldly at each of the ferals who had assembled in a half circle to watch their leader destroy him. He yawned, as if he were on his own and had just woken up.