The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  They were sitting by a stream with a cat-lick of ice at its reedy edges. He had given her the front half of a bank vole for breakfast, but it was the first time he had spoken willingly to her since the death of Majicou. Straight away she came up close to him and began pushing her face against his. ‘My cat. My cat.’ Her purr was like a rough engine breaking into life. She had grown muddy again, especially about the bib, but her eyes were bright.

  ‘I can’t think,’ Tag said. ‘And I’m afraid of my dreams.’

  ‘Whoa, Silver!’ she advised him. ‘Don’t despair. We’ve got CB. ‘Hello? Hello?’ I’ll dream those dreams with you!’

  ‘That will help a lot,’ said Tag wryly.

  But from then on she did seem to be in his dreams, and it did seem to help. The Majicou no longer acted out the pains of his hard death. Mousebreath slipped away, with a sly wink of his country eye and a ‘Don’t wait for me, mate.’

  Over there on the dream roads Cy was cobbier and more kitten-shaped. She was cleaner. Her ears were bigger. She was always laughing. She was always running off ahead of him, only to wait with one paw raised under a domed sky the color of his coat. She chased everything that moved. She taught him to navigate. She taught him to speak to ghosts: echoes flew about like dragonflies. She tried to teach him about her ‘magic,’ and – though he would never have allowed this in the waking world or on a real highway – he tried to learn. Lights did seem to dribble from his mouth – they were hot and cold at the same time; they tasted as musty as they looked – or drift toward him like amber sparks. But after that his efforts only drew shadows out of the shadows, hulking things that, though they had form, reminded him too much of the vagus. Perhaps, he thought, magic was a thing only female cats could do. ‘You got no talent, Jack,’ the tabby was forced to agree. And when in the deep of the night he heard one of the shadows use his name, he grew afraid and would try no further.

  ‘It said I was the Majicou,’ he tried to explain to her when they woke the next morning. ‘But I know that I’m not.’

  She regarded him with huge eyes. ‘Woo,’ she breathed. She said, ‘You know. Silver: awake, you’re a different cat!’

  The world was a different world.

  As they made their way west the land seemed to shift in sympathy with the tortured highways that crossed it. Long pleasant sweeps of chalk earth fell away to be replaced by a country of complex, intimate little valleys cut into honey-colored stone that, even at the end of a chilly afternoon in early spring, seemed to glow with warm light. These in turn gave way to the deeper, more somber valleys of a limestone upland, where full winter still reigned along the narrow rock-walled riverbanks and the water was gelid blue with cold. There, the day came late and ended early. There was no line of sight. But if their course was meandering and uncertain, it was dictated less by geography or whim or even by the wretched state of the wild roads than by Tag’s poor vision. In the end they extricated themselves from the dissected plateau and climbed up onto the rolling granite moors with their poor acid soils, bracken slopes almost scarlet in the sun, and abandoned human workings.

  ‘Whew!’ said Cy, looking anxiously back as they crossed a spoil-whitened quarry floor choked with rusty machinery. ‘I thought that refrigerator was a horse!’

  Tag shrugged.

  The weather had improved daily, but his headache hadn’t improved at all. By now he had seen so many sheep that looked like boulders, so many gray rocks that got up and walked away as sheep, he was quite used to an equivocal style of relationship between the animate and inanimate. As the wild roads grew more tangled and debatable, forcing the two cats to make their way on foot, there were days when he not only mistook rocks for sheep, but when he became so confused he couldn’t walk at all.

  At these times the tabby had to care for them both. She took her duties as seriously as always, but in practical terms this meant he went without. She would eat ‘real’ food if he insisted. Left to herself, she supplied them with a diet of interesting objects. She fetched acorns, polished by the wind to a lustrous gray-brown. She brought knots of plastic baler twine and sheep’s wool. She brought him part of a gate.

  ‘Nice,’ he said, so as not to discourage her.

  ‘How can you expect to get better,’ she grumbled, ‘if you never eat the food?’

  And then late one morning things changed.

  They had spent the night in a narrow lane constructed like a ditch, with a stone wall on one side and a steep turf bank on the other, which had once been part of some human boundary. Now it gave some respite from the upland wind. Weak sunshine flickered through spindly trees and onto the turf where the sheltered wildflowers cautiously displayed their buds. Tag was curled up in the sun, trying to sleep his headache away, when Cy trotted into view at a gap in the wall. She stopped, looked around, and ran down the bank. She was chattering excitedly through a mouthful of something he couldn’t identify. He could tell she had begun talking to him long before that.

  ‘Eat!’ she called. ‘Eat!’ His heart sank. ‘Hold on, Ace!’ she said. ‘I got the dibs!’ And she dropped something in front of his face.

  He couldn’t see her – the world was a wash of greens and browns – but he could smell her. He could smell what she had brought.

  ‘It’s a mouse,’ he said.

  It was about as big as one of his paws.

  ‘It’s your first mouse!’

  ‘You can have it all,’ she said.

  He hardly knew how to answer. From the beginning, he had cared for her only reluctantly. But her faith in the world – the inner picture of things she maintained despite everything the Alchemist had done to her – made no allowances for that. She had taken Tag at her own valuation. This small gray object, bedraggled and coated with spit, was her thank-you for a love he hadn’t known he felt.

  ‘I’ve never seen a fatter mouse,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I can get these any day.’

  *

  Broad southerly winds blustered out of a blue sky full of sailing white clouds. Birds had begun to sing again in the little woods.

  The days grew longer. They grew warmer.

  The tabby followed her prey west across the moor. Tag followed the tabby. When his headache allowed, he watched her.

  ‘What do I see?’ he asked himself. Only the same small, sturdy, short-coupled tabby cat he had once dumped unceremoniously at the side of the Caribbean Road in the rain. The same symmetrical black marks curled like flames all down her ribby sides. When she tilted her head it was still as if she were listening for a voice no one else could hear. She still had the same white socks. But now, in the mornings, she smelled of fresh egg. She would look up, tousled, at birds moving against a cloud, her little pink tongue still visible and her yellow eyes full of a secret mischief and delight. Later in the day she had a dusty smell. It might have been the dry, licheny smell of the moor itself. Or it might have been the smell of the gold ticking scattered across the thick fur behind her ears. A smell of gold.

  She had other smells.

  One evening, they found themselves at the top of a little hill in the extreme west of the heathland. All day the still air had been filled with an almost summery warmth, like a glass with honey. Horizontal light sent long shadows across the rabbit-cropped turf, and lent a gentle, tawny resonance to the piled sloping rocks of the tor itself. There, when she turned to him, she smelled of gorse in flower. It was a smell of heat and spice and vanilla, a smell that spoke. He could hear speech in it.

  ‘Come on, Ace,’ she said. ‘You never play.’

  There was that fleck in her eye, that extra color he had noticed in the bright tapestry when he pulled her out of the road all those months ago!

  ‘You never play. Are you old?’

  ‘No,’ said Tag, affronted. ‘I’m young.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘Chase me.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Mind you,’ she warned him, ‘I shall bite.’

  So he chased her, even though sometimes he could barely
see her, and they fought a little and rolled about for each other, and the warm air was the exact color of tabby fur, and she said, ‘Now I do this: see? Well, come on, then! Now you have to bite me!’ So he bit her quite hard, and suddenly he was inside her. It wasn’t anything like looking out of her eyes. But he was inside her.

  Later, she said, ‘Well? Did you enjoy it?’

  Tag walked a little way away and sat down to stare west into the golden light.

  ‘I’ve never done anything similar,’ he admitted. Then, cheerfully, ‘I can see better now.’ While to himself he thought. As well as everything else, she bit me, and I liked it. Perhaps liked was the wrong word? ‘No,’ he told himself. ‘I liked it.’

  The tabby purred loudly. ‘You did like it!’ she agreed.

  She rolled on her back, keeping her tawny eyes on him.

  ‘I can do that again anytime,’ she said.

  Tag went over and licked her behind the ear. ‘You’re still as dirty as you ever were,’ he told her. He added, ‘You can hear what I’m thinking, can’t you?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Can’t everyone?’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ said Tag. ‘We came all this way before I realized.’

  ‘Let’s do it again now,’ said the tabby.

  *

  Two days later, they reached the sea.

  It began as a long line of violet glittering at the very edge of things. Huge clouds, suspended above the water, tugged gently at invisible moorings. Shadows darkened it. Breezes ruffled and scatted its surface. It was every color of gray and sil ver. The sea! The oyster-silk, mackerel-tabby sea! Standing stupefied and silent before it, Tag remembered the calico cat. ‘Ain’t nothin’ like the ocean, hon!’ she had told him on their last good walk together at Piper’s Quay. ‘You were right, Sealink,’ he whispered to himself. ‘You were right.’ And he hoped she was still alive and would come safe to this ocean.

  They made their way off the heath down a steep valley patched with different crops, scattered with cottages painted in pastel colors, and thickly covered with tangled vegetation that looked exotic even in its winter dress. As they wound their way down to the shore the cottages huddled closer and closer, into a maze of little streets and alleys. The air smelled of salt, tidal mud, and weed, a smell that grew pungent and rank. It smelled of fish.

  ‘Woo!’ said the tabby.

  They stepped around a corner and there was the harbor. Nylon fishing nets were piled like blue candy floss on the setts of the stone mole where it followed protectively a curve of steeply shelving beach. The tide was out. Canted at all angles on the sand – all colors like a box of candy, red and blue with fluorescent pink fenders, green and yellow and white – lay the fishing boats. They were tubby and made of wood. Pennants streamed from their masts in the breeze. Gulls shrieked and skirmished. A young woman in green rubber boots and a head scarf walked across the sand and climbed into one of the boats. It disappeared below for a moment, then returned, to shade its eyes against the sun and stare at the place a hundred yards away where the sea lapped the land like a kitten.

  Tag was enraptured. He thought, If I could find somewhere like this, I’d live in it forever. But outside the harbor a northerly wind was ripping the tops off the waves as they broke, so that the spray smoked away like a burning fuse. He shivered. If the Alchemist doesn’t kill us all, he thought.

  ‘He won’t kill us,’ said the tabby, sniffing the salty air. ‘We’ll kill him.’

  She said, ‘Can I come too?’

  *

  Tag tried to find out about Tintagel. He was back to asking cats in doorways.

  ‘You’m a way to go yet,’ they said. ‘Oh ar.’ And went back to their own business, which was gossip. They were plump housecats with wide, satisfied faces, blinking amiably in the sunshine as they polished up already-polished coats. They had never heard of the Alchemist. A little put out, perhaps, by a temporary dislocation of their traditional pathways to and from the fish dock, and wary of strangers as a result, they seemed quite oblivious of the threat that had gathered over their world. And after all, why not? thought Tag. We can’t all guard the life we love – or there soon would be no life left to love but being a guard. And he thought, If I lived here. I’m not sure I’d tell my tale to a pair of scruffy nomads. Especially if one of them had a spark plug in her head!

  ‘Belay that,’ said the tabby, who had been down on the dock conversing with sea cats. And she bit his ear.

  *

  They were in the village for two or three days. There was no need to hunt. Cy was up at dawn, scrounging fish heads at the quay. Tag slept late and one morning awoke to find that his headache had gone. It was a whole new world now that he could see again. As soon as the sunshine had fairly warmed the little esplanade, he went to see what the litter bins might hold. They could be unpleasant, but he soon perfected a method of balancing three-footed on the rim of the bin while he raked about inside with the fourth. He rarely had to climb in all the way, and there was no competition for the fine out-of-season haul he made of discarded sausages, chips in tomato sauce, and bits of battered cod. At noon he met the tabby in an empty bus shelter facing the sea and they split their take. They slept or asked questions in the afternoon.

  Tag’s favorite bin was in a little triangle of waste space at the corner of two lanes, chained off from the busy street and with a low parapet fronting the sea. There were some blue-painted benches and a red-and-white lifebelt. Tag’s bin – its characteristic sharp smell compounded of rotten fruit, alcohol, and a slurry of meat fibers dissolved in the dribbles from soft-drink cans – was mounted on the wall just beneath the parapet. He never knew what he might find there. From it he could see the whole harbor – fish quay, lighthouse, mole, and all – and behind that the clustered cottages of Fish Street – windows, roofs, and walls, tumbling up the hill as if gravity didn’t apply to them.

  Tag ran into the triangle one shiny, rain-washed morning, leapt onto the bench, and got his front paws on the edge of the bin.

  Just then, a head popped out of it.

  ‘Yow!’ said Tag. ‘My bin!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the occupant pleasantly. And he stayed where he was. ‘Besides which,’ he said, ‘someone got here before both of us today. You can have this if you want it,’ he offered, ‘because I wouldn’t, frankly, eat it with my eyes closed.’

  After a brief scuffle in the depths, he sprang straight out of the bin without touching its sides, made a neat landing on the bench to which Tag had prudently retreated, and dropped a liquescent brown banana in front of the Burmilla’s startled nose.

  This gesture revealed him to be a fine young tom, longbodied and with short, thick, springy ginger fur. His eyes were a color that balanced precariously between yellow and copper. He bristled with stiff white whiskers, and lively upcurled tufts of fur were set like muttonchops at each side of his face. He had long, athletic legs. He had three white socks and a white bib so clean you could barely look at it. Though he was clearly out on his own in this world – rakish and sharp, bursting with health, all burnt gold and red-sienna-bold – some human being had once tied a scarlet and blue silk handkerchief around his neck instead of a collar. Whatever this might have signified then, he wore it now as a challenge.

  Who could possibly own me? it seemed to say. You might as easily own the day, the sky, the sea. Just try! He was perhaps a year old. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I’ve smelt you around!’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘In the bins, mainly. I wondered who was getting the good stuff.’ He looked Tag up and down with an approval that was at the same time brusque and sly. ‘And I see why now. You’re not new at this game.’

  ‘I’ve done a bit of it,’ admitted Tag.

  ‘I admire you tough old guys. Up early. Out in every weather. Know just where to look.’

  Tag thought, Old? He thought, Me? ‘I’m not old,’ he said.

  ‘I meant ‘old’ in the sense of ‘experienced,’’ amended the ging
er tom. ‘Hey!’ he added, jumping up onto the parapet above Tag’s head. ‘It’s a great morning. Look at the sun! Look at the waves! Let’s do the rest of these bins together.’

  He ran along the sea wall, scampered tail-up and tip-curled across the triangle and under the chains. He looked up and down the road, then back at Tag. ‘What d’you say?’

  Tag was fascinated. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Come on then!’ called the ginger tom, and off he went. ‘We could even get down on the beach and try our hand at a gull,’ he said. ‘A couple of hard cases like us!’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Tag, running to catch up.

  They had a profitable morning. A light shower at eleven shone the esplanade pavements so they could see their own faces. They sheltered under an upturned boat, then hung about restaurant doors for an hour. They ate pizza from a plastic bin bag outside the amusement arcade. It was good; though, Tag tried to explain, nothing like as good as pizza topping, which he had once had with a friend. They ate a couple of scallops in batter they discovered in a gutter. The ginger tom talked freely, but not often about himself. Later all Tag would remember him saying was, ‘A gypsy cat like me, he likes to get around.’ Noon found them sitting in the bus shelter staring amiably out to sea, wondering what to say to each other next. On the tideline, a few oafish young gulls had found, among the soft-drink cans and tubey weed, a small dead dogfish with spotted fins. Next to the bus shelter, the dried-up fronds of a bewintered rag-mop palm were rustling stealthily in the offshore wind. The gypsy yawned and stretched.