I AM THE CAT

by William Stafford

  “And do you know, Puss? This might sound a little bit crazy to you - I mean crazier than me having a conversation with a talking cat - I could make out the sound of bells, just faintly, in the distance. I don’t know what church they were ringing from but if I shut out everything else, all the commotion of the ship, I could hear them carried to me on the breeze that fills our sails. And they seemed to be speaking, speaking to me! And do you know what they were saying?”

  He seemed to be expecting an answer. “I can hazard a guess; ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well’?”

  “Oh, ha ha. No. They were saying, ‘Turn again, Whittington; Whittington, turn again.’”

  “Spooky!” I said with more sarcasm than he could stomach.

  “You think I’m imagining it.”

  “Perhaps -”

  “Well, perhaps I did,” he cut me off. “Perhaps I’m just thinking I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life. Leaving London. Leaving...Alice.”

  “Oh, now, kiddo...” I tried to bring him up to speed but he wasn’t listening. He picked me up and thrust me unceremoniously into his shirt.

  “Come on, Puss,” he said, as if I had any choice. “Let’s go and find dinner. Just keep your head down, will you? Don’t want our esteemed captain throwing a wobbly and you overboard with it.”

  “Listen, kid -” I tried again, but he wasn’t listening.

  He carried me through the hold and beyond the livestock - already reduced in number by one pig - and made our way to the mess, adjacent to the galley. In this narrow, low-ceilinged room, the rude smells of the farmyard were replaced with the more palatable, irresistible aromas of cooked meat and hot fat. I strained against the Boy’s shirt with an overriding impulse to break free and inhale all the smells, devour all the food that was making those smells and, more than likely, kiss the cook into the bargain.

  The meal was in full swing. The men, in good spirits to be at the outset of adventure, banged tankards together. The heady scent of rum accompanied the splashes of rich liquor and their hearty cheers. Ebullient laughter ebbed and flowed, as several factions competed to find who could sing the sauciest shanty. In fact, it seemed to me there was far more in the way of liquid refreshment than the more solid varieties. The Boy cringed with the distaste of the sober among the inebriated, ducking and dodging stray items of foodstuff that were hurled through the air by overenthusiastic revellers.

  The Boy kept his arm firmly clamped around me until he found an empty stool at the far end of a long table, as far away from dear old Cap’n Codd’s more ornate seat across the room.

  Once there, he released me from the confines of his clothing and set me under the table between his ankles under strict instruction that I was to keep out of sight. He would feed me titbits from his own platter as surreptitiously as he could.

  “Arr, Dick lad!” the captain’s gruff voice boomed from across the room, over the din of the other diners. On either side of me, the Boy’s legs tensed. “Come sit you ’ere,” the captain bellowed, “For it is an honour to be invited to the cap’n’s table.”

  The room fell quiet. I could imagine all eyes were turned towards the Boy, this newcomer in their midst.

  “Oh, kiddo,” I muttered, “it’s another fine mess you’ve got us into.” Hah!

  The Boy stood up and moved away. I was free of the vice of his ankles. I sprang up onto the stool, hoping to be able to see his progress across the room to join the bearded behemoth, in full view of the men. How would they react to this open granting of the captain’s favour? Would they ostracise the Boy or treat him with more respect?

  I decided to get a little closer so I could overhear the conversation, if indeed they were to have one.

  “Ar, Dick lad!” Codd repeated when the Boy arrived, breathing boozy fumes into his face. The Boy tensed up, hugely uncomfortable. Codd hooked his corkscrew into the Boy’s sleeve and tugged him roughly to a seat beside him. The captain swigged thirstily from a bottle of rum. Trickles of the treacly liquid ran into his beard only to be trapped there and absorbed like a riverbed in a drought.

  The captain dug his corkscrew into the leg of pork on a platter before them, ripping off chunks and then shaking them onto a pewter plate in front of the Boy. Turnips were similarly skewered and dropped from a height. Codd nodded encouragement; the Boy was to tuck in and while he was doing so, would pay for his dinner by listening to one of the captain’s taller tales.

  “So, there was I,” Codd announced to no one in particular, “marooned on this itty bitty spit o’ land, slap bang in the middle of the Caribbean. Water full of sharks. No food but the clothes on my back. You’ll never guess what happened.”

  The single eye swivelled and fixed the Boy with a stare. The Boy swallowed a lump of poorly cooked turnip and coughed.

  “Um - you survived?”

  The captain’s jaw dropped. His scar flashed angrily. “However did you know that, me lad?” He got to his feet and thumped the table, roaring with suspicion at his crewmen. “Who...told...you?”

  The Boy, visibly wilting, backed away from the accusing jabs of the corkscrew. Then, as quickly as it had come upon him, the captain’s anger ebbed away. He sat down again, looking a little confused. He rapped on the tabletop with the handle of his knife.

  “Boy! BOY!” he cried, his wide eye rolling. “Here, boy!”

  “I’m - I’m right here,” the Boy waved, eager to appease this volatile fellow.

  “Not you, boy,” Codd spoke as if the Boy was an idiot. “This boy!”

  The hand-substitute lashed out like a cobra and seized upon the arm of a cabin boy who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. You know and I know who this was but the Boy didn’t appear to recognise his precious Alice, out of context and with her hair cropped shorter than his. The captain pulled the cabin boy right up to his beard and barked for more rum. Alice, to her credit, retained her composure, nodded her ‘aye aye, Cap’n’ and was about to scurry away when she found her other arm grabbed by the Boy.

  Recognition had dropped into the Boy’s mind like a penny in a piggybank.

  “Al -!” he began, leaping to his feet.

  “Alan!” Alice cut him short, looking him in the eye with an unspoken plea.

  “What?” The Boy was clearly taken aback.

  “The name’s Alan,” said Alice, keeping her voice as low as she could, in terms of both pitch and volume. “And you are?”

  “’Alan’?” the Boy tried out the name but couldn’t fit it to the disguised Girl in front of him.

  “No...” said Alice through gritted teeth, “I’m Alan.”

  The Boy was gaping in disbelief. “If you’re Alan, I must be Debbie,” he scoffed. This won him a swift, sharp kick to the shin.

  “You told me your name was Dick, lad,” said Captain Codd, his beard bristling with befuddlement.

  “What are you doing here?” the Boy whispered harshly.

  “I’m cap’n of this vessel,” Codd obliged.

  “Not you!” Dick groaned. “Her - him!”

  Alice narrowed her eyes but did not take them from the Boy’s. “Why, I’m working as a cabin boy. Isn’t. That. Obvious?” Each of these last three words was accompanied by a kick to the Boy’s shin. He winced and hopped around.

  “Stop kicking me!” he complained. Oh dear; he wasn’t very good at subterfuge after all.

  The Girl jerked her head, indicating a move away from the drunk but attentive captain, a move around to his deaf side at least. Out of earshot, she dropped all attempts at disguising her voice.

  “I had to come, Dick,” she was a picture of anguish. “My father’s a pig.”

  “But...” the Boy couldn’t stop staring. “Your hair! Your lovely hair!”

  The Girl’s hand flew reflexively and stroked her cropped head. “It’ll grow again,” she said,
flatly. “I got a good price for it at least. It’ll probably end up as a wig for the Baroness de Quince. I have to pretend to be a boy for safety reasons. A ship like this is not safe for a young girl alone.”

  I glanced over at Codd who was absently hurling empty bottles at his crew.

  “A ship like this is not safe for anyone,” the Boy observed, having witnessed the same behaviour. Then his jaw dropped and his face lit up. “You cut off your lovely hair for me!”

  The Girl frowned. “What?”

  “I can’t tell you what this means!” the Boy was laughing, wide-eyed, delighted. But the Girl was shaking her head.

  “I can tell you what this means,” she said, rather sternly. Uh-oh, I thought. My Boy is heading for a fall... “I didn’t cut my hair for you, lover boy. I did it for me. For the money. I had to get away from home. Things were closing in on me.”

  “But I thought -”

  “Then you thought wrong. Now,” she composed herself and pushed the Boy out of her way, “if you’ll excuse me, I have to pour rum down hairy men’s throats.”

  The Boy caught her elbow. “Alice -”

  She gave the fingers clamped around her arm a cold stare then lifted her eyes to meet his. I could almost feel the temperature drop. The Boy stepped back, open-mouthed and empty-handed. The Girl slipped away and was soon lost among the carousing sailors.

  Only then did the Boy see I’d been watching this exchange. He reddened and stormed out. I followed - of course, I followed; my Boy was upset.

  I caught up with him on the deck, leaning over the rail. At least he hadn’t chucked himself overboard. Not yet anyway. I bumped my head into the back of his leg. He barely glanced at me.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked the setting sun. “To think that someone like her would care for someone like me? I really overestimated myself there. Imagine: I was going to make my fortune in the mystic East then go back and claim her. What an idiot!”

  The Boy’s emotional seesaw seemed to be weighted unevenly, giving him more downs than ups, lurching suddenly and lifting his spirits only to cast him down in an equally sudden swing, to bring him crashing rudely to Earth.

  I began to fear he would chuck himself over the rail and into the ‘briny’ as our illustrious, cat-hating captain called it.

  “Bloody hell, kiddo,” I scratched him (but gently) through his leggings. “Your face is longer than I can remember. What’s up, Dick?”

  The Boy cast me a glance over his shoulder. He stooped to give me a tickle. “You might be able to talk, Puss,” he sighed, “but you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me!”

  He opened his mouth then changed his mind and closed it again. He walked away, leaving me to pretend I didn’t give a monkey’s and to wash my fur.

  At least I’d got him away from the railing.

  I decided I’d give him some ‘alone time’ in his bunk so, when I was nice and clean, I patrolled the deck, which was a very different place by evening than during the day. The rocking motion of the ship didn’t trouble me - a cat can sleep anywhere, after all - and with most of the men down below, I had the freedom to move around without being trodden on or petted within an inch of my life.

  I’m no expert but everything looked, um, shipshape and seaworthy to me so I nestled down on a coil of thick rope in order to give my eyes a bit of a rest.

  A movement across the deck snatched my attention away from my thoughts. A rat! I was suddenly alert, my irises wide. (I could feel the Cat coming to life, like a machine or device being switched on and powering up. I watched and I waited. The moving thing returned, rolling back the way it had come. I pounced!

  How foolish I felt to pounce upon a discarded rum bottle! My extended claws clinked against the glass and I found myself trying to sink my teeth into its neck to kill it.

  “Stupid cat,” I scolded my instinctive self. I walked nonchalantly from the bottle with my tail held high so that anyone watching would know nothing foolish had happened, oh no, and went back to the coil of rope.

  I was on edge. The Boy’s broken heart was enough to worry about but there was also the matter of my ever-loving brother at large and on board.

  What was he up to? What was he planning? Waiting for him to make his move was wearing me down. When it came, whatever it was, it would be a relief - among other things.

  The further out to sea we sailed, the less likely it seemed to me my brother would attempt something on the ship. I persuaded myself he must be waiting until we reach the mystic East. Not even he would be reckless enough to take action in the middle of the ocean...

  I’ve been wrong before.

  I did a spot inspection of the hold. Every box, crate and chest was still intact. My brother was somehow keeping his minions in line. Or perhaps they were just terrified of me, their natural predator? Oh yes! I sprayed the corners to refresh their memories.

  I sought out the Boy in his bunk. I planned to vary my routine and return to the hold at random intervals. Part of me - the cat part, of course - wanted to catch the thieving vermin in the act and tear their little heads off. The other part didn’t want any trouble.

  The Boy was in a hammock. He had evidently conquered its precarious nature and appeared to be comfortable enough. I looked down at him from a beam.

  “Mew?” I said, mindful of other hearers.

  “Here, Puss,” the Boy murmured. He raised his arms to catch me. I leapt at his chest.

  The hammock rolled, tipping us both to the floor.

  “Keep the noise down!” barked a nearby sailor, along with some more colourful words.

  Trying not to laugh, we climbed back onto the hammock and I snuggled my Boy until he went to sleep.

  ***

  The next week followed an uneventful pattern. The Boy’s role was largely an administrative one, counting out supplies to the galley, measuring out the feed for the livestock - this had to be recalculated often as the number of animals diminished. There was a bit of shovelling work, but that was nothing compared to his previous experience as a gong farmer and there was quite a bit of swabbing but then most of the crew took their turn at this. I detected a growing resentment towards the Boy from little Master Bobbin. Every time Mister Bottle grunted his approval at the Boy’s efficiency, Master Bobbin seemed to make a mental note, marking the incident in the ledger of his mind.

  Alice - sorry, Alan - kept to herself (himself - oh I’m can’t be bothered with the pronoun game) - she kept to herself, by which I mean she kept away from the Boy. The captain kept her busy with errands and so did some of the other officers. She was becoming popular among the sailors for her pretty face and pleasant manner. If anyone saw through her tissue-thin disguise, no one said so, but this is a thing with humans: they often see what they want to see. In this case, it worked in the Girl’s favour.

  As for me, I kept up my random inspections of the hold. Some of the men tried to pet me and make a fuss, showing me a softer side they wouldn’t dare exhibit in front of each other. I tolerated this attention, when I had a mind to - or rather when the sailor in question had squirreled away some morsel for me. I saw it was an exchange of goods for services and I think all cats operate in this manner. We are mercenaries for your affection; don’t see it as anything else.

  Gosh; that was cold.

  In contrast, day by day, as we sailed further south, past France and Spain, the weather became warmer and warmer. I spent a lot of time sunning myself on the forecastle. The men would conceal me or wake me so I could conceal myself whenever the captain was around. This was out of self interest; I was well aware of that. If something (the captain) happened to the lucky ship’s cat, they would all suffer the reprisals of fate. Had I the chance I would have disabused them of their superstitions. You humans can’t half be silly billies at times.

  One balmy
evening, I joined Alice in the galley, hoping for some extra scraps in return for a bit of attention. She was washing up and had much still to do before Alan the cabin boy could hang up his apron for the night. I mewed at her in greeting.

  “Oh, hello, Puss,” she glanced at me, returning her gaze to the basin before she could see my scowl. “Just wait until I’ve finished this little lot and I’ll see what we can find.”

  I sat and watched her work. We were alone and I think she was glad of the company and the chance to give voice to her emotions. This is one reason humans keep pets, of course. In a world full of people, so many people, so many people prefer to confide in their furry friends than to communicate with other humans. Pets are the draught excluders against the cold gusts of loneliness that can make a home so chilly. You can quote me on that; I’m becoming quite the philosopher.

  One by one, she held each greasy platter under water as if drowning some mortal enemy. “It’s ironic, don’t you think?” she said out loud. I knew better than to answer or react in the slightest. Let her have her say - I might hear something of comfort to the Boy and there was the prospect of snacks. “Here I am, far from home where I used to do the washing-up for my father, surrounded by strangers and washing-up for them. Am I any better off, I ask myself? Have I sacrificed my home and my hair for this?”

  I wanted to prompt her to speak further or at least to get to the point.

  “There’s my dad,” she said, throttling a ewer beneath the greasy suds. “Well, he’s always been insufferable and demanding. But there are limits and he reached mine when he was so mean to Dick -”

  She froze as if she had been caught swearing in church. She resumed her chores in silence for a few minutes but it was clear the monologue was continuing in her head. At last she could contain her words no longer. “Oh, who am I kidding?” she wailed. “Of course it was Dick! He’s the reason I came. I wanted to be with him, no matter what, and look how I treated him!”