by Pat Gray
Shortly they saw Mrs Digby slip silently from the house, while the Cat returned to the sofa, where he sat, sphinx-like and immobile, almost until mid-night, when sleep overtook him, and he rolled over on his back, snoring, with his tail hanging over the edge of the sofa.
‘Such luxury,’ breathed the Mouse.
‘Fair shares for all,’ whispered the Rat, unsheathing half a pair of nail scissors from his belt. ‘Come on Mouse, let’s go!’
Once upon the sofa, the Mouse and the Rat picked their way around the Cat’s outstretched paws, lain nonchalantly upon the cushions. In the darkness, the Cat’s face was a blur. His nose gushed and sucked the night air. His whiskers tingled, stiff and white. A tiny drop of saliva fell from his dark lips. His tongue protruded slightly. The Mouse, as he passed swiftly by, could see every pore, and the Cat’s face, contoured with tabby, brown like a high altitude ordnance map, smiling the smile of sleep. How strange a thing a Cat was, thought the Mouse, and swiftly passed on.
Reaching at length the arm of the sofa, the Mouse struggled to keep his self-control as he laid out the iron hook and rope that trailed from it. Already he could feel himself becoming dangerously excited, elated, and his judgement slipping.
‘Cheese,’ he sighed, and grinned foolishly, his whiskers lopsided. ‘Oh cheese!’ The Rat gave him an impatient look, as if tired of his weaknesses. And then he hurled the hook curving upwards, flashing briefly silver in a stray moonbeam before hearing it slam down on the surface of the Cat’s new table. The Rat hauled in on the line, drawing the hook across the polished surface with a loud scraping noise, until it lodged firmly in a crack in the beading. The Rat nodded, and the Mouse began to climb, arm over arm, up through the moonlight, becoming more lightheaded as he went. A foot or so below the overhang leading to the surface of the table he unwisely looked down. The smell of cheese and Chinese food was overpowering, a strange, exotic cheese, like the Jaarlberg that the Professor had once bought to celebrate the publication of one of his papers, and duck too and chestnut sauce. The living room swept crazily around beneath the Mouse, as if glimpsed from a high flying plane.
‘Cheese like the old days!’ chuckled the Mouse. Below, on the sofa, the Rat strained anxiously to see in the darkness.
Reaching the table edge, the Mouse levered himself up and over. Once on top, he lay for a moment on the smooth polished surface.
The table was cluttered with massive trays, like builder’s skips. Amongst them the steel springs of a mousetrap lay coiled back.
‘Come on, Mouse … get on with it!’ hissed the Rat from below.
The Mouse felt his way forwards in the gloom, his feet slipping in some spilt wine that the Cat had unwisely sampled.
‘What’s up there, Mouse?’ The Rat leant back, trying to see, but could only make out the dim outline of the Mouse’s back and the glimmer of tinfoil. He heard the Mouse mutter the word ‘Cheese’ and then the Rat let out a great bellow – which but for the wine he had drunk would have wakened the Cat – and shinned up the line and shouldered the Mouse aside just as his small pink paws reached clutchingly towards the very centre of the trap the Cat had set.
The Mouse slid on the highly polished tabletop.
‘Watch out, Mouse! For God’s sake, its a trap!’ shouted the Rat.
‘Trap?’ muttered the Mouse, with a hint of grievance in his voice. The Rat bent down and pulled him up onto his feet again. The Mouse stepped round the wooden board on which the cheese rested, to examine the apparatus. The Rat, more cautiously, held his tail, to prevent him inadvertently stumbling forwards to set it off.
‘If you touch it that little lever there is released and the iron hoop up there comes down and breaks your neck, Mouse,’ the Rat explained cruelly, pointing to the various parts of the mechanism, impatient at the Mouse’s naivete. The Mouse, who had never before encountered such a thing, was incredulous.
‘It’s a cheeseboard,’ he said. Indeed the scent of the cheese was causing him major problems. Even now he could feel the Rat’s words becoming more distant, as if through a thin veil of benign vapour, which drained them of meaning. Even now, the prospect of death in the machine, weighed against the taste of fine cheese, seemed strangely romantic.
‘Mors in Fromagium,’ he breathed, and tried to hurl himself forwards one last time.
‘Get back!’ shouted the Rat. ‘Mouse you idiot!’ The Rat grabbed the Mouse’s tail more firmly, and pulled him back, feet sliding, away from the scent.
‘It’s for your own good, Mouse you know. Now just watch this.’ Carefully, the Rat picked a matchstick from a box by the ashtray and slid it into the mechanism, breathing softly as if seeking the combination to an extremely dangerous safe. The trap banged shut with a vicious sound of metal on metal. The match was chopped clean in two, the upper half ignited and flung high into the air like a warning flare, illuminating the expanse of the living room below, and the Cat fast asleep. A pall of blue smoke drifted across the table. The Mouse coughed. The Rat stepped forwards through the smoke.
‘There you are Mouse,’ he said, with a tone of great satisfaction. ‘Now do you see how hard the world can be.’
And with that he picked the cheese off the trap, sniffing his fingers as he did so, and handed it to the grateful Mouse.
‘Thank you, Rat,’ said the Mouse, humbly, and bit into the cheese. After several large bites, he paused:
‘But its mediaeval, Rat,’ he said. ‘So damned mediaeval. Who would think up such a thing? Look at it. Its a paradigm of our post-human existence, is it not? Curiously symbolic, promising reward, but in reality offering its opposite, a perfect synthesis, a dialectic, a …’
‘Yes Mouse,’ said the Rat shortly. ‘Let’s go!’ The Mouse stood up, unsteadily, his eyes unfocussed, and tried to shake the cheese loose from his coat, conscious that there had been some important question he had wanted to ask the Rat, yet unsure what it was, and why it was so important.
‘Coat’s all messed up again, Rat,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’
‘Why don’t you come back to my place, Rat, eh?’ he said. Perhaps at home, the question would come to him. He did not want to be alone, either, he realised. ‘Let’s forget all this.’ He waved expansively at nothing in particular.
‘We can’t Mouse,’ said the Rat, suddenly angry, and he reached forwards and slapped the Mouse around the cheeks a few times. The Mouse’s vision cleared momentarily. His cheeks stung. He felt sick.
‘Come on, Mouse, for God’s sake pull yourself together.’ The Rat seemed angry, the Mouse could see that. Angry with what? Angry with him? Before he could ask, the Rat seemed to leap off into space. The Mouse blinked and peered down towards the sofa below where he could see the Rat with the scissors held before him, tiptoeing past the sleeping Cat.
‘Rat!’ he called ‘Wait for me!’
The Mouse stumbled to the table’s edge, and, senses blunted by excess, threw himself off into the night air, landing with several hard but entertaining bounces upon the sofa underneath.
*
The Cat slumbered on, deep in a dream in which he and Mrs Digby danced across a magnificent polished floor, set curiously within a seaside guesthouse. From time to time the cry of gulls could be heard wheeling overhead, amongst the fake chandeliers. Mrs Digby held the Cat gently in her arms, apologising for her shortness with him, as they glided together across the floor, all to the strains of an eight piece band playing a modern up-tempo version of the ‘Four Seasons.’ Then, regrettably, one of the gulls dropped a fish head by Mrs Digby’s foot, and the Cat had instantly wrenched himself free from her grasp, to gulp it down upon the floor. When the Cat looked up, Mrs Digby had gone.
The Cat awoke. It was morning. A glaucous grey light filtered through the curtains. His mouth was dry. Mrs Digby had gone. He stumbled stiffly to his feet, unaccustomed to wine and the comfort of a sofa upon which to sleep it off.
But even as he awoke, the Cat became aware of a faint scent, of socks perhaps, or books or chicken. His nos
trils twitched. He stretched forwards, and sniffed the sofa before him, stretched upwards, and sniffed the very tabletop itself upon which he and Mrs Digby had dined.
‘Mouse!’ he breathed. Then he noticed an ugly, jagged scratch, running across the polished surface, where the Mouse’s grappling iron had slipped.
‘Damn them!’ he cried, and ran his paw gently over the scratch, with his claws held in.
CHAPTER SIX
BETRAYALS
The Mouse hummed as he walked, his tummy satisfactorily full. Carefully, he slipped the catch on the secret door, which dropped down behind the skirting, into the curious underworld below, and which led from there, by way of many twists and turns, to the air vent by the hydrangea bed, next to where the bins had stood.
The Mouse jangled his keys as he went. It was unusual, he admitted to himself, to have to pass through the underfloor void, but then, of late, the Cat had seemed especially well-informed about his movements.
Underneath the floorboards, the gloom was pierced only by a clear and watery shaft of winter light from the air vents, from which there wafted a faint scent of the garden beyond. Carefully, the Mouse picked his way over piles of broken brick, the water main, and crumbling newspaper left by Edwardian builders many years before. Giant bugs whooped and crashed away through the dust as the Mouse stumbled on.
‘Tsk! Tsk!’ he said, in annoyance, as the grime began to cling to his only jacket, and the cobwebs catch in his nose. ‘At least I’m safe here,’ thought the Mouse, reaching the rusting air vent that kept the timber dry beneath the floors, and levering it wider with the key, confident that the Cat at least would not be there.
But the Cat was there. His eyes, and face, like the Man in the Iron Mask, looked through the air vent at Mouse.
‘Mouse,’ breathed the Cat. ‘Its me again, Mouse.’ Then the Cat’s paw swept past the opening to the outside world, the noise of the claws scratching fruitlessly on the grille, with a dry, bony kind of sound which set the Mouse’s teeth on edge.
‘He seems to know where I am all the time, Rat,’ said the Mouse.
‘Hmmm,’ said the Rat, thoughtfully, leaning against the fireplace in his burrow, dressed in plus fours and an old Harris tweed cap. The smell of frying sausages filled the place, and the Mouse could see the rocking chair drawn up by the fireside and a half empty bottle of dandelion grappa standing on the kitchen counter. The Rat’s face was slightly flushed, his nose more shiny than usual, and the Mouse was surprised to see that the Rat had done up the buttons on his jacket in the wrong order.
‘Sausages?’ asked the Mouse. ‘Where’d you get sausages from, Rat?’ The Rat started guiltily.
‘Sausages, old boy,’ he said. ‘One of the many benefits,’ he added vaguely, poking at the pan with a stick.
‘Benefits?’ asked the Mouse. ‘I haven’t had any benefits.’
‘Oh well, yes, Mouse, there are some benefits you know from all this.’
Overhead, the Mouse could hear the thunder and rumble of the Cat, pushing his new lawnmower to and fro in the garden.
Then, the Rat turned and strode towards the Mouse, and placed an arm around his shoulder.
‘Mouse,’ he began. ‘We’ve stuck together a long time, haven’t we, and you trust my judgement, don’t you.’
‘Oh yes, Rat, absolutely,’ said the Mouse.
‘And you know I’ve never been wrong. Old Rat’s never been wrong in anything.’ The Mouse hesitated to reply.
‘What’re you driving at, Rat?’
‘Well,’ said the Rat, drawing breath, and pulling the very strangest face the Mouse could ever recall. ‘I don’t think we’re going to beat the Cat,’ he said. The Mouse felt as if the Rat had pulled his whiskers out by the roots.
‘Listen to him now. Listen to his lawnmower up there. The animals are impressed,’ bellowed the Rat, before the Mouse could speak. The noise of the mower stopped. ‘And, well, frankly let’s admit it, I’m impressed by the Cat too,’ shouted the Rat.
‘Here, d’you fancy some cheese, Mouse. He’s given me some cheddar for you.’
‘He’s what?’ said the Mouse, incredulously. The Rat held out a large chipped blue plate, with a sizeable piece of farmhouse cheddar laid upon it, well-matured, with its surface a little cracked with age.
‘You could get cheesed up, Mouse, like you wanted,’ said the Rat. ‘And forget all about it. I rather lost my head you know, the other night.’
The Mouse glared at the cheddar.
‘I took it the wrong way, y’see, Mousey,’ explained the Rat. There’s nothing wrong in the Cat having things, don’t you see. He can have as much as he likes.’ The Rat boomed so loudly, that the Mouse had to move away.
Maybe the Rat thought he’d gone deaf. Maybe the Rat himself had gone mildly deaf in old age. Why was he speaking so loudly? The Mouse examined the cheese. The old feelings: the yellow glow, the false gloom, the philosophising began to steal upon the Mouse. He seemed on the point of taking the plate, then suddenly, in one angry movement, the Mouse dashed it to the floor.
‘I don’t want your damned cheddar, Rat,’ he said.
The Mouse walked quickly, without looking back. Bitter tears filled his eyes. This time not merely abandoned by the Rat, but betrayed! He strode along, through the garden, cutting across fences, and boundary walls, the tears blinding him. How could that be? The Mouse halted. The garden swam into focus, empty except for a few birds, high in one of the old lilacs that overhung the lawn, and the Cat, sitting on his window-ledge, washing his paws, with what seemed to the Mouse to be a smile upon his lips. But something was not right, thought the Mouse. Something, somewhere was not quite as it seemed with the Rat.
The Cat, observing, saw only his tears, and laughed to himself. Old Rat was not so bad after all, thought the Cat, bending now to groom his parts. Old Rat knew which side his bread was buttered.
‘In material matters,’ said the Cat, later in the day, ‘You can see how well-appointed I am.’ The Rat nodded ingratiatingly, and nibbled a cocktail sausage.
‘Oh yes, Cat, you’ve done fabulously well. The house is a triumph,’ he said unctuously.
The Cat eyed him suspiciously. The Rat was unduly effusive in his praise, he thought. He would not have dreamed that the Rat could be so easily persuaded, and yet, yes, he had always known him to be weak and opportunistic, thought the Cat. And, anyway, surely the Rat’s conversion proved how right the Cat’s ideas had been all along!
‘I particularly like the clock. The clock you have bought is especially impressive. You have done some amazing things, Cat. I was slow to see it, but yes, the sheer style …’ The Rat applied flattery, and the Cat’s suspicions almost melted. Incredible. His most implacable opponent! How powerful his ideas had become indeed, and how persuasive was the ostentatious show of wealth. Yes, thought the Cat, he and the Rat had far more in common than he had imagined. Was it not true, that all ideas, at heart, came together anyway, into one single way of thinking, synonymous with his own innermost thoughts and urges?
The Cat stared out at the garden, while the Rat stuffed himself with the food he had provided, greedily, clumsily, the Cat observed, and without decorum. A silence fell, and in the silence, the Cat felt a certain sadness fill him. Would the like of the Rat be his companion for ever? What certainty was there?
‘It’s the spiritual side, Rat,’ said the Cat, suddenly deciding to unburden himself, yet ill at ease and awkward as he felt his way towards the topic which most oppressed him, encouraged by the confidences of the Rat, and knowing as he did the Rat’s reputation for judgement in affairs of the heart at least.
‘Mrs Digby?’ asked the Rat softly, sensing the opportunity he had waited for so patiently. Immediately, he adopted a professional, caring attitude, as if the Cat and his feelings at that point were the most important thing in the world to him.
‘Is it Mrs Digby?’ he prompted, helpfully.
‘I would have thought she would at least like me,’ said the Cat.
/> ‘Like you?’ murmured the Rat. Then, swiftly seizing the initiative, he leant forward.
‘I’ll speak frankly,’ he said. ‘From my experience your women enjoy brute force,’ he said. ‘That and smart cars driven fast. And you need to wear something more dashing, if you’re to win her over.’ The Cat listened intently. These were the words he liked to hear. He licked his lips. Rat was right. Rat knew about these things. The Rat seemed deep in thought.
‘A velvet smoking jacket, or, no, hang on …,’ and here the Rat seemed to pause, as if some utterly brilliant idea had just struck him. ‘Look, why don’t you DRIVE over to Mrs Digby’s place? You did say you could drive, didn’t you?’
The Cat eyed the Rat again. The Rat’s face beamed goodwill, enthusiasm and support.
‘You could drive round. Sweep up in a velvet smoking jacket.’
‘It goes deeper than smoking jackets and driving,’ said the Cat, gloomily.
‘I’m a cat and she’s a human being.’
‘No, no!’ The Rat disagreed. ‘You are what you are, IN HERE,’ he poked the Cat in the chest. ‘Show her the depth of your feelings. Talk to her about who you are.’
The Cat stared blankly at the Rat. And yet nothing else he had tried had been any success. He had a large house with a blender, a mower and all the rest, and he was still a Cat. He could talk in cultured ways …
‘I’m learning French,’ he said. ‘On the radio. I’m quite good …’
‘I know, I know,’ said the Rat soothingly. ‘I know how you feel, Cat. Really I do. But think about driving, Cat. Vroom! Vroom! A masterly gear change. Toot! Toot! Fabulous. She’ll be eating out of your hand.’
After the Rat had gone, the Cat took a few leisurely turns around the house, trying to revel once again in the soft tread of Berber beneath his paws, and the comfortable quilt upon the bed. At the upstairs bedroom window he halted, and looked out upon the garden of the house next door, where Mrs Digby was watering some azaleas, in a quiet and reflective kind of way. The Cat’s eyes surveyed the scene for quite some time, and he seemed to be lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, he turned, as if a decision had been made.