“Of course boy, you do your job well and you shall inherit nothing less than my estate.”
“But you have so many children sir, by six wives, if I believe myself to be correct, and that I do.”
“It is that precise correctness which wins you your inheritance child. Yes, I do happen to have a vast quantity of children, 18 by 6 wives indeed, how divisible of me! But alas they are grown and gone and none of them ever so much as hinted at your level of assured correctness. If there is one thing to desire from the world, it is the stability of knowing one’s truth, of being sure of oneself and of getting it right repeatedly, and you, my boy appear agent to all of these factions.
You know Constantin, I do believe your demeanour to be something of that which I had searched for in the cat, how ironic that I should pay such funds for a false preconception and then go on to find exactly what I had anticipated on a whimsical trip to the local market last Friday.
There you were, my boy, selling candles and matches and oil lamps, with such assured correctivity. And I said to myself, Cornelius, you simply must employ this boy. You amuse me Constantin in the way I desire to be amused and yet you evoke my respect, if I believe myself to be correct and I do, I should say you have a splendid combination about you.”
Now do not be fooled at this stage dear reader. Constantin certainly is not. He knows as well as the old man knows that the dusty damp home isn’t worth a thrupence. He also knows as well as the old man knows that the last of his dusty old gold was spent on that cat. Constantin is no mind reader. But the old man’s resentment for the feline was apparent, which made the sum of his price apparent. Constantin just added it up.
“Sir, you have done the right thing for sure. I am indeed your cat, as it were.”
“Indeed you are, in fact I know longer require your offer of a portrait. Why look at a paintings misrepresentation when I can just look at the painter.”
“Your rationale is quite valid,” replied Constantin, with a nod of the head, “that way, we can get on with the main business of sorting these manuscripts.”
At that moment, the cat appeared at the doorway and tip toed his way somewhat shyly to the red rug before the fire. He commenced a cattish stretch, arching his back, before toppling to the side in an oafish fashion. He did not get up and recommence his stretch, but lay as he fell, blushing under that grey cinder like fur before the fire.
Cornelius rolled his eyes in the cat’s direction and sported a perturbed look upon his face.
“Don’t mind the cat,” said Constantin.
“I won’t mind the cat,” he replied with another origami smile, “now let us begin. Surrounding us, Constantin, are not just a bunch of dusty old words but the final knots of my life. Just because I am this near the end, it does nothing to diminish their lock sure grip. They have grown up as nothing but a gaseous by-product of my ultimate touchdown mission. You see, between wives and children I asserted myself to capture the sense of living in its glorious entirety on a single manageable manuscript: The best words ever written.”
“And you never got it.” Notice how Constantin doesn’t question because he already knows the answer.
“No boy. I never got it.” Cornelius replied, predictably, “I have won a great many prizes on my way and been considered something of a writer by more than most, but look at these dusty old things. They remain as humble as that confounded cat.” They cat looked round with a hurt expression. And Cornelius scowled at it before whispering, “He is so sensitive!” to Constantin.
“Why are we bothering to sort the manuscripts if they are nothing but by- products? Don’t you just want to be rid of them? Wouldn’t you like to burn them, there in the fire?”
“Alas I would love nothing more, but I’m afraid the museum wants them all. They expect me to drop off any day now. And the race is on for me to get these manuscripts to the museum before my family do. I can see them all now, those little tykes of mine, ordering in their roadsters, their 0-100mph in 60 secs. They’ll be having their own family grand prix on the way down here, once they hear the old man’s popped off. I’ve arranged with the museum to deliver them tomorrow, sorted and labelled accordingly.”
And so the two set to work. Constantin took a stack to the leather armchair and sat leafing through them one by one. Before long he was covered with the papery dust and it shingled through the air and made the cat sneeze.
Cornelius became in worse and worse spirits as the day wore on. It seemed revisiting his perceived failures and organising them by date order was a task that did nothing for a bad mood. After asking abruptly for Constantin to leave the room, tears had welled up in his dusty old eyes. Cornelius doesn’t see that Constantin stands still in the corridor just outside the main cavern. But we can see him there. Waiting and watching.
Watching Cornelius, as we watch him now. Descending into a rage. He pulls out the stacks from the shelves. He knocks down the plants by his window. He turns over his top heavy desk. And if we look down Constantin’s line of vision, he is looking at the cat which remains unmoved. Which remains on the rug. Cornelius sees it too.
“You bastard animal!” He exclaims. He is crazed by this point. His already dusty vision is all the more blurred. Now do not get Cornelius wrong. He is not a bad man. But a desperate man. A man gone wild. A man who spent a vast sum of money on a legendary cat. A cat known throughout all of Russia to be fabricated from the manuscript containing the best words ever burned. Cornelius was a man who wanted to go out with a bang. To finish on a high point. He wanted those words. His glorious entirety. And this thing. This cat. Had given not a thing away. He had had it for three weeks now, poking and feeding it all variety of nourishments. Bathing and preening it. Walking and talking with it. Dancing and prancing, whirling and twirling. Sharing his Cider on the heath from a wicker basket on a tweed blanket. And nothing... he hadn’t seen so much as a single syllable.
“How do I get it out of you, you confounded thing!” He dived on the animal. And in a flurry of anger screamed, “that’s it, to hell with you!” And then threw the protesting yowler onto the fire. And as the words of the manuscript flickered up in the flames. Cornelius’s heart stopped beating, and he fell stone dead to the floor. Dustier than ever.
Constantin sees the old man fall. And knows upon arrival that the old man is dead. He sees the cat emerge from the flames. The words having shown themselves and burned themselves all over again. Down into cindery fur. The cat rearranges itself on the rug.
He knelt down and felt the ashen fur, still warm from its trip in the fire. And Constantin, with a level of assured correctively picked up one of Cornelius’s manuscripts from where it rested from the old man’s flurry, and flung it towards the fire.
The thing frazzled swiftly in the heat. And out emerged. A second cat.
The third manuscript he made an aeroplane and into the flames it flew and emerged as feline as the next cat. And the next one. And the next.
Now how does this work? Constantin knows. He knows that if you burn a word it ceases to exist. So the greatest words ever burned will in fact be forgotten with each burning, remembered by nothing other than these cats. So any words that are indeed burned. Will be the greatest. They are the only. It’s all a matter of being correct.
Constantin continued to burn all he could. Leaving only a few hundred volumes which he thought were two good to commit to a cinder cat. The museum could have those. He left them beside the old man. And headed outside with his band of cats. He picked up his barrow from the outhouse, that Cornelius had found him wheeling about the market place, last Friday. He fitted as many of the cats in as possible and the others he packed into crates, and the original followed at his heels, with his head down. Such diffident cats, Constantin remarked.
He set his course for the Famous Moscow Market, and endeavoured to keep a particular eye out for a Mr Jacob Colt, and that is how Constantin made his fortune in the selling of Cinder Cats.
So why did Cornelius pick a boy who sold objects of fire to
come and sort his manuscripts. Did he, on some level anticipate the answer to the question that had plagued him, How to extract words from a cinder cat. Or was it all a case of irony. And would the old man’s dusty old sense of humour have stretched so far as to see this?
Well... I’d like to think so.
And you will just have to make do with that.
Because I can’t say for sure, I can’t guarantee correctness. I’m just the writer.
Black Magic Woman
By Brian Wright
Following the divorce, Jacobson was struck by how shrunken his world had become: the hovel of a new home, the rust–bucket that was the only car he could now afford to run, his bank balance.
Even his ambitions had shrivelled, pulverised by the knowledge that Norma was putting the screws on the kids, turning them against him. When the girls first showed signs of not wanting to see him anymore, the landscape of his existence was reduced for a time to the one insane notion involving retribution and death.
It was another idea that saved him.
He would find a woman, preferably young and beautiful, and make sure Norma saw them together. It would drive her wild, the jealous old cow. If it provoked her into doing something stupid, enough for him to sue for custody of the kids, so much the better.
How to go about it, though? The work colleague he’d been sleeping with – adultery the reason for the divorce – was now reconciled with her husband. And wasn’t Norma pleased about that! She’d actually phoned in the middle of the night to spew out her poison. ‘How does it feel to be on your own? You bastard!’ Shrieking out the words.
Jacobson wasn’t getting any younger, he was starting to lose his hair; his whole life seemed to be a case of diminishing returns. What chance did he have of attracting his dream woman, his means of revenge? He’d tried – how he had tried! – using the personal columns of the local and national press, even a dating agency. None of it had worked.
The problem was the old, old one. The women he liked were exactly the ones who never wanted to see him again after the first fact–finding date. Only the frumps showed any interest. But a middle–aged female with curves in all the wrong places wasn’t going to upset Norma; she would just be someone his ex–wife could identify with, perhaps feel sorry for. Norma might even be pleased, believing he couldn’t find anyone better. That didn’t bear thinking about.
Then he read a newspaper article about a man who’d found a wife in the Far East via the internet. The virtue of doing it that way, so the story alleged, was that it saved on expensive air fares, gave the chance to get to know the other person via e–mail, assess her personality, judge her standard of English. There was a wedding picture of the happy couple. The man was even balder than him; more importantly, the woman was young and slim and extremely attractive.
His home computer was one of the few possessions left to him – mainly because Norma hadn’t wanted it – and he was soon gazing at a website which consisted of a series of colour images of olive–skinned young women, feeling like an adolescent thumbing through a lingerie catalogue. Some of the girls were more nubile than anyone he had ever met.
When he spotted a particularly beautiful face, framed by a mane of lustrous black hair and captioned Elena, he sent off an e–mail expressing his interest. He received a reply saying the girl would be happy to correspond with him and asking for an up–front charge of one hundred pounds.
That made Jacobson uneasy. Although the website blurb said the introduction agency was owned by one Trevor Campdown, an Englishman based in Manila in the Philippines, he knew that anyone could claim to be anything in cyberspace. He felt he had no choice, however, but to send off the scrapings of his bank account.
He had reservations, too, about the first e–mail he received from the young woman, giving some details of her background. He wondered if the whole thing wasn’t simply a trick – girlish messages from across the world which were really the handiwork of an international fraudster seeking to relieve the gullible and vulnerable of their cash.
It seemed too well–crafted for one thing, syntax and even spelling almost perfect. He carefully worded his response, complimenting her on her English while implying that she must have employed a ghost writer.
Her reply threw him.
‘Why do you think I cannot use your language. I was ten years at convent school, I am college educated. I am not a liar.’
Jacobson was hooked from that moment. No more doubts. Especially when subsequent e–mails were shot through with passionate honesty, full of expressions of longing for a new life, accompanied by further pictures of Elena in various innocent poses, showing off her slim figure and luminous smile.
He decided he had to go to Manila to meet her. The journey was necessary anyway, to clear the paperwork required to bring her back home as his wife. His wife. He pictured the look on Norma’s face when they ran into her in town, accidently on purpose. When they kept on running into her.
She would obviously work hard on the girls after that, but would overstep the mark with any luck. The children weren’t stupid or blind. Realising how happy their father was in his new relationship, the girls would be happy for him. The would want to share in his happiness.
The money for the trip was raised by cashing in his one remaining insurance policy, his sole triumph in the divorce was keeping it a secret from Norma and her lawyer. Having no more reserves of money should have made his horizons seem even narrower. But somehow it had the opposite effect when he stepped from the plane into the sweltering and colourful bedlam of a Manila afternoon.
The journey to the hotel, accompanied by Campdown, with brightly–painted jeepneys threatening collision with their taxi every few yards, the experience like a giant fairground ride, left him feeling exhausted but exhilarated. He wondered if Elena would be as exciting.
But when they met the next morning she proved to be the opposite of her e–mail persona - reserved, polite and cool. For a moment he believed his original suspicions had been correct. She soon won him over, however, with her prettily–accented, but almost fluent, English. And when she finally rewarded one of his fatuous remarks with a dazzling smile, he knew he was already close to falling in love.
He wondered, though, if there was a catch and mentioned as much to Campdown afterwards in the hotel bar.
“She does seem too good to be true,” agreed the other man, looking hot and clammy in spite of his white linen suit, “but what you see is what you get with these people. She’s only recently come on our books and you happen to be the first one to meet her. You’re a very fortunate man, that’s all.”
Accustomed to his luck being all bad, Jacobson felt like embracing the sweaty expatriate. Instead he handed over the various monies needed to carry through the arrangement, including the hefty agency fee.
In the days that followed, as he saw more and more of Elena, he started to believe things really had changed for the better. It was only at odd moments, lying on his hotel bed after an evening spent in her company in the open–air bars and restaurants of the teeming city, almost dizzy with alcohol and emotion, that the thought crossed his mind.
Too good to be true.
One reason for Elena wanting to leave the Philippines was that she had no relatives left there. None at all, she said, almost unheard of in a country where the bedrock of society was the extended family. Where every taxi driver seemed to have uncles or cousins in the vehicles he was attempting to drive off the road.
She explained that she came from a village in the north of the country and was the sole survivor of a mud landslide that had engulfed her community. A rich aunt in the capital and taken her in and paid for her schooling. But she too had just died and the beautiful young girl was completely on her own. Jacobson couldn’t help thinking her bad luck had turned out to be his own good fortune. It had to be destiny.
Before he left Manila, she showed him her apartment in a modest part of the city. It was spacious and well–furnished – if a little
old fashioned to his taste – but Elena evinced no great affection for her home. When they were greeted with curious and even hostile stares on leaving the building, he wondered if her neighbours were a cause of her unhappiness.
“The people here are not used to seeing foreigners,” Elena explained. But he suddenly felt he understood why she wanted to get away.
They parted reluctantly at the airport, but she would be joining him in a few weeks, as soon as the immigration formalities were completed. He was tempted to ring Norma, preferably at two in the morning, to tell her he was getting married. Perhaps even invite her to the wedding. No, he decided, best to make it a complete surprise, meet up in the street, turn it into a public humiliation.
But somehow it never happened. When Elena eventually joined him, he was so happy, taking her around, showing her the sights, that he had no time or inclination for further plotting against his ex–wife. He explained his circumstances to Elena, why he didn’t have much money.
“No problem, my darling,” she said. “You are enough for me.”
It already felt as if the boundaries of his world were expanding.
Elena had looked angry as he told her about Norma's bitterness and hostility against him after the divorce. But then his daughters let slip that his ex–wife was seeing someone else. He was surprised at how mellow she sounded when he rang her, minus the snarl she usually reserved for their conversations. “Yes, it’s true,” she said. “We’re thinking of getting married.”
Her reaction to his own news increased his astonishment. “Congratulations,” she said, without any trace of sarcasm.
Jacobson thought his happiness was complete when he married Elena in the registry office, with his two daughters as unofficial bridesmaids, permission granted by their mother. Elena had settled into her strange new lifestyle with astounding assurance; he sometimes found it hard to believe that she too was still almost a child.
Then Norma became unwell.
The Spinetinglers Anthology 2011 Page 16