by Gabriel King
That first day on the old wild road, they didn’t know how to stop. By noon it was clear they would never find anything to eat there. Neither would the road let them rest. If they halted for too long, they soon began to feel anxious and ill, disoriented by the echoing spaces, the impatient wind, the dizzy rush of ghosts…
Eventually, it was late afternoon. They had no idea how they knew. They had no idea how far they’d come. More by luck than judgment they got on to a little local trackway and later found themselves tumbling down a steep bank, earthy yet overgrown, outside some downland village. They had left the weather behind. The air was damp and raw down here, but it smelled of rain and earth. Twilight crept out of the tangled roots of holly and hawthorn and crab apple. The remaining light lay in streaks of peach and ruby across the western sky or shimmered, trapped for a long moment, in the unearthly bright green of lichen. When the three cats looked back, they shivered to see the great chalk ridge to the south of them against the horizon. They could hear the wind bumbling across it; and it was capped with snow.
‘We’d better walk,’ said Tag, and so they did, past slumped old wooden gates, fields softly glimmering with the last of the sunset, half-timbered houses draped with ivy or half hidden in thickets of leggy hydrangea. The lanes were narrow, winding, steep. The afterglow – a sudden enthralling flare of peppermint – gave itself up to darkness. There was a smell of coal smoke. At the curve of a lane, latticed windows lit up, warm and orange-yellow. But the houses were few and far between; and in any case. Tag’s band didn’t dare go near. Local cats stiffened and slunk off evasively in the dark or sent them on their way with raucous threats. ‘And don’t come back!’ By now, they were hungry and tired. Mousebreath grumbled. The tabby sang tunelessly to herself or pulled great loops of old man’s beard out of hedges, which she tried sulkily to eat. Suddenly, with a roar and a cough and a soft explosion of actinic light, a car rounded the corner in front of them. For an instant they were in its path. Its tires rumbled and stank. Its white glare turned every shallow pothole into a trench, and cast paralyzed feline shadows infinitely long on the gray lane.
Tag and Mousebreath shouldered the tabby out from under the wheels. They fled, spitting up the bank with her, and stood, trembling blindly together and looking away as hard as they could, their spines in the curve of fear. Behind them the thing slowed down briefly. A human hand waved out of one of the windows. There was a faint shout of laughter, and something white and heavy flew through the air for a long moment before it burst in the empty road. The car accelerated. The cats followed its progress as it went away from them, around all the corners, up all the little hills they had already walked. Eventually the night was quiet again, though the lane still stank of petrol.
Mousebreath was the first to disentangle himself. He approached the object in the road, gave it a smart tap with his front left paw, jumping backward in the same gesture in case it was alive, then touched it cautiously with his nose.
He laughed. ‘Well, look here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Will you just look at what we got here—’
Sandwiches. It was a packet of sandwiches, wrapped in greaseproof paper.
Mousebreath sniffed. Tag sniffed.
They looked at one another in wild surmise.
Tuna fish and mayonnaise.
They ate the sandwiches. They ate them, bread, crusts, and all. Even the tabby ate some. They licked and licked the paper. They licked their lips. Then they slept in the hedge with their faces buried in each others’ fur, and early the next morning they were on their way again.
This became the pattern of their lives.
They were never sure how far the wild road would bring them each day or where it would bring them to. They often abandoned it out of simple anxiety; yet somehow it never abandoned them. The wild road is the Old Changing Way, and it knows its own. Days came and went, like the shadows of clouds passing quickly across the slope of a plowed field. Snow came and went. They saw many extraordinary things. Chalklands stretched out before them, hillock and tumulus, sweet high valleys carved long ago by ice, shallow quarries scattered with flint cores…
And there! A single thorn tree on the skyline, with a rainbow curving away from it into black cloud!
However long they ran, they never grew tired. After all, the Old Changing Way is to run, and bound along in that endless stride, and never tire. But toward the end of each day some part of them began to hunger for the real. ‘You feel,’ as Mousebreath put it, ‘as if you was being run away with. You begin to wonder where it’ll all end.’ Paradoxically, after all that running, they wanted to stretch their legs. Fed up with being tigers, they wanted ordinary ground beneath their feet, ordinary air to breathe. So, though they could have traveled vast distances, they settled in the end for a few miles a day. They slept in barns and spinneys. Mornings and evenings they searched the lanes and villages on either side of the Ridgeway for food. Food was important to them. They were just ordinary cats, after all. Or Tag and Mousebreath were.
The tabby was another matter.
Tag caught her looking at him with an expression bold as brass. She brought him things from ditches. She sang him lullabies in languages of her own invention. He woke at night and she was watching him. ‘Sleep now, Quicksilver,’ she would whisper, as if she had care of him, and not the other way around. He grew fond of her despite himself. He watched her washing in the endless chalkdown dawns; composing herself for sleep under the glimmer of starlight. In return, she collected and assembled objects for him – wafers of silver paper, mirrors, anything that held water. Small discarded bits of motor cars from verges. All of them made one sign, and it was this:
*
If he tried to join in, she bit him smartly in the head. He didn’t know what she wanted from him. She liked Mousebreath, but it was Tag she wanted to be near. When Tag walked away, she followed. When he followed her, she boxed his ears. The tortoiseshell watched them with the kind of gentle amusement you reserve for kittens, and when Tag tried to talk to him about her, would only say, ‘Have to sort it out yourself. Eh? Sort it out!’
But how? thought Tag.
She was a mystery to him. He liked her smell.
Things came to her, on and off the highway. In the deep night she was often surrounded by lights; at midday, when she thought herself unobserved, by tiny colored birds of no species Tag recognized. Up on the ridge, ghost kittens danced along beside her, only to fade sadly away after a mile or two, as if to say, This was where we lived, so long ago. This was our village. See?
Tag woke in the small hours and there she was, sitting quite still a little way away from him, looking attentively upward, her head tilted to one side. Her ears seemed bigger than he remembered. Her spark plug glittered brass and diamond. Around her the air was crowded and vibrant, aflutter with the most glorious summer moths, their massive blunt brown-and-cream heads thick with fur, their eyes like cheap red jewels. From the tabby’s eyes poured a light the color of streetlamps in the city. One by one, the moths were flinging themselves into it, to crackle and vanish. She was so preoccupied she couldn’t know Tag was awake; yet he thought he heard her warn him softly, ‘Don’t watch me now, Silver. Nothing to see here.’ Suddenly he felt very tired, and the world began to spin.
He awoke the next morning to find himself under a bush: stiff, wet through, and with an animal of unknown origin snuffling about on the grass only a yard or two away from him.
*
Leaving the highway late, lost in a maze of subsidiary tracks, they had done without supper and stopped for the night in the first place that looked acceptable. In the wet gray light of the winter morning it turned out to be the garden of an empty bungalow. A newish birdbath, a lichen-stained patio, two shallow flights of steps. At one end, a lean-to conservatory with two panes gone from the roof. At the other, sleet billowing through a gap in the bleak leylandii hedge.
At first Tag thought the animal was some breed of cat he had never seen before: long-backed, reddish, b
rindling toward its hindquarters and long tail. It moved haltingly, close to the ground, full of nerves. After a minute or two it found the bird-bath and, standing with considerable difficulty on its hind legs, lapped from it at length, staring around every so often. Then it moved into the middle of the lawn, where the autumn leaves had been left to rot. There, it scraped a few times at the acrid mulch with one foreleg, got down stiffly, and tried to roll about on its back. This movement only caused it to yelp out loud. It sat up and yawned. Its tongue was long and red. Suddenly Tag realized what he was looking at.
A fox, with tawny yellow eyes.
A big dog fox, which blinked and stared vaguely into the leylandii hedge and called, ‘I know you’re in there.’
‘It’s a free country,’ answered a voice like a ratchet.
‘I can see you quite clearly.’
‘I’m not trying to hide.’
The fox digested this.
‘Hah!’ he said. Encouraged, the voice from the hedge went on, ‘You need help.’
‘I don’t care,’ said the fox. ‘You’re not coming near me with that beak.’
He got to his feet and limped hurriedly across the lawn. Close to, he looked emaciated. Clumps of his fur had fallen out, to leave dusty gray skin. He stank – but not of fox. One of his haunches had been flayed to a kind of angry-looking raspberry color, with soft yellow scabs the size of grapes. Lower down, the hock joint was stripped to bluish-white bone. Only one fox in the world could have injuries like that. Aghast, Tag jumped to his feet.
‘Loves a Dustbin!’ he cried. ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I’m not sure I’m not,’ said the fox.
He sat down in a flower bed and began to shiver violently. His eyes were clogged with mucus, and his entire muzzle had gone gray. ‘I’m quite glad to see someone, actually,’ he said. ‘Majicou’s not here, is he?’ A squall of rain splattered across the garden. The fox regarded it bleakly. For a moment it looked as if he would try to get up and seek shelter. Instead, in a gesture of simple unapologetic weariness, he put his head down in the flower bed near Tag’s feet and closed his eyes.
‘Just don’t let that bloody magpie near me,’ he begged.
*
But in the end they had to.
He lay like an old fox fur all morning, like a skin from which the fever had burned every ounce of flesh.
‘Stay calm,’ he advised himself.
Then, ‘Where is this?’ like a puppy in the dark. ‘Help me!’
The cats gathered around him in the flower bed. He called their names. He had saved his strength until he met them, then let go. They didn’t know what to do for him. Cat spit cures all, their mothers had taught them. Lick it on! But who would lick a dog? Then Tag discovered they could enter the conservatory through a broken pane low down behind the water butt; and Mousebreath found the strength to drag the fox inside. Loves a Dustbin woke up and snarled at him.
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,’ he warned.
‘Any time you’re ready,’ Mousebreath reassured him patiently. ‘For now, could you at least try to walk?’
*
After that, there was nothing more they could do. They stared at one another helplessly. They stared at One for Sorrow, who by this time had hopped down out of the conifers to stick his narrow head and beady eye diagnostically into the fox’s face.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to do it,’ he said. ‘But if I don’t he’ll die.’
‘He is unconscious,’ Tag pointed out.
‘But how long for?’
In the end, they had to do it.
‘You’ve only got to smell him,’ reasoned One for Sorrow.
‘We’ll be okay as long as he’s unconscious.’
Tag sat on the fox’s head. Mousebreath sat on his emaciated ribs. The magpie stropped his pitted black beak back and forth a few times on the sour concrete floor. He took a deep breath. He took aim. They all got ready to bolt if the fox woke up. An hour later, twenty-three lead pellets lay on the conservatory floor. They reeked of death. No one would go near them but the tabby, who liked the heavy rolling sound they made. She patted them about desultorily, then grew bored. The fox’s leg looked as if it had been eaten by rats. But the wounds were draining, and he hadn’t stirred once.
*
When he regained consciousness six hours later the fox’s eyes were clear, however, and the fever had abated. He dragged himself out to the birdbath for a drink, then back in again for a sleep. Then he told them what had happened to him after the fight at Piper’s Quay.
‘I don’t remember much about being shot,’ he said, ‘just flashes of light. Shadows on the walls.’ Shock had put everything at one remove. ‘Everything went quiet,’ he said puzzledly, ‘after the bang. But at the same time—’ he looked around at the assembled animals as if they might confirm this experience ‘—it was all still going on in my head.’ Flashes, lines of sudden white light. The fluttering shadow of the magpie, the shadow of a raised human hand. Cats being stuffed into sacks. ‘This filthy smell.’ Anyway, he said that he had lost all feeling in his back legs and for that reason alone was afraid to move. ‘There was blood splashed up the wall, all mine. I thought it was still there,’ he said, meaning the human. ‘I was terrified it would find me.’ He looked around the conservatory, shivered with horror. ‘Does this seem stupid? I didn’t want it to kill me again.’
After a long time, understanding at last that he was alone, he had dragged himself out into the sleet.
‘The piazza was dark. I could hardly stand up, but I could smell the river.’
For the next three days, he had wandered dazedly about Piper’s Quay, hiding if he heard a sound. Pain and fever moved him slowly and steadily away from the piazza into the abandoned, weedy spaces of the old docklands. His wounds became infected; by the third afternoon, he was hallucinating, too weak to eat, licking up rainwater. He found himself in a factory yard, then in a tiny back garden with a young human female backing away in horror from his smell. ‘I think it wanted to help me, but I didn’t know how to stop baring my teeth.’ For thirty-six hours he lay like a dead thing on the edge of a shallow industrial pond, his muzzle just touching the water, while a heron watched him ironically from a rotting log. He had no idea how he had gotten to any of these places. By now, his voice was but one among many in his head. They all told him something different, but in the end he found a highway entrance – a blur of light between ragwort and broken bottles at the base of a wall.
‘It opened onto a maze. I was hoping to find the pet shop in Cutting Lane – the way through to Majicou – but every time I moved, I only got pushed further away. All but the biggest highways are knotted up now, wriggling like half a worm. Once, I was on the seashore, and it was summer. Was that delirium? I don’t know.’
Since then, he said, he had been traveling at random, pursued latterly by the magpie, who had come upon him – quite by chance, as he searched the city for Sealink and the Queen – lying in a puddle of his own urine between two cardboard boxes in a rainy street. He reeked of infection. He was raving. Above all, he was alone. His spirit, so at ease with pain or danger, had wasted under the impact of loneliness.
To make things worse, something was following him.
‘I sensed it as soon as I entered the highway. Something dark, shapeless, and never far away.’ He shivered. ‘I never saw it, but it follows me still.’
‘A vagus!’ cried Tag. ‘A vagus followed me, too,’ he claimed proudly.
The fox stared out of the rain-slashed windows.
‘I don’t think it is a vagus,’ he said bleakly. ‘I think it is my death.’
Then he shook himself. ‘We must go on,’ he said. ‘We must all go on.’ He looked around. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’ He laughed. ‘I tried to eat the bird when he found me,’ he said. ‘But we got along well enough after that.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ said One for Sorrow darkly.
Mous
ebreath winked at him. ‘Tandoori bird,’ he said. ‘Eh?’
‘In your dreams,’ the magpie promised.
‘Behave yourselves!’ ordered Tag.
‘Tandoori bottle top,’ said the tabby. She had juggled one of the shotgun pellets into a corner until it became wedged behind a fat terra-cotta pot, then – bored perhaps by the fox’s story – spent the next twenty minutes trying to lever it out again. Anything she couldn’t have, she wanted immediately. ‘Tandoori bedstead.’ She carried the pellet over to the fox and dropped it in front of him. ‘Eat that,’ she said.
‘I nearly did,’ the fox said.
‘Whoo!’
*
He was some time recovering. They looked after him as best they could, and kept to the conservatory, which was dull but warm and dry. The wind dropped. The sun came out. After a day or two the magpie had to leave.
‘Majicou will expect to hear about this,’ he said.
Tag went out to see him off.
‘Must you go?’
‘I’ll leave the fox. He’s no use to us until he’s well again.’ Tag, who had expected the black cat’s agents to solve his problems, not add to them, said, ‘What can I do with him?’
The magpie cocked his head. ‘You can make him feel he’s alive again,’ he said. He added, with a kind of patient scorn, ‘Have you got anything better to do?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Look, when I found him he was babbling to this thing he thinks is following him. He’d given up. He’s never been so low, and I hate to see it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tag.
‘He’s my friend.’