by Alex Howard
Substantiate; Authenticate; Exonerate or Repudiate Baxter’s statement.
Library Cat felt sick.
No wonder she’s confused. The professor is trying to intimidate her with the use of semicolons. Punctuation should communicate, not intimidate.
Feeling suddenly sad for the girl, Library Cat ventured in. He looked under the bed momentarily. Dust, single shoes and bus tickets lay variously scattered in its cavernous gloom, along with a single earring which Library Cat was sure the girl must’ve given up trying to find. He looked up at the girl. She sniffed and glided her finger along her phone’s oblong cube of light. She seemed despondent. Library Cat felt moved by her evident despair. Maybe I’ll say hello? He tiptoed silently along the foot of her bed.
“Meow?”
“What the F***!” said the girl scrambling to her feet in total shock, sending her phone smashing to the floor. Library Cat took to his heels and darted out the door and up a small set of stairs into the eves of an attic, his chest pounding and his paws prickling with rushing blood. A few moments later his eyes adjusted to the light. He took a few steps forward, his tail swishing curtly. The attic seemed a little like the Towsery but felt much colder, and had a peculiar herby smell. Mould crept up one wall, blooming in various daubs of grey and green like a Seurat painting, while on the opposing wall, a layer of paint flaked off the side of a stone-cold gas boiler.
Strange pictures hung on the wall – some old oils of the Highlands in moulded gold frames that looked like heirlooms, others plainer and more abstract of Scottish tenements. Clothes hung mildewed on a drying rack, and the carpet beneath his paws felt wiry and scratchy. Above, a skylight window held the moon in a slightly oblique frame – its platinums and black-blues seeming mysterious. Sitting on top of the window was a scattered array of bottles and little lozenges and Library Cat wondered how on earth they got there.
He suddenly felt calmer. Despite its dampness, the attic had a nice feel to it. Excitement and mystery seemed to commingle in its very atmosphere. What’s more, it was high up, and Library Cat enjoyed being high up. Sniffing along the corridor for mice, he heard a noise from a room. Walking over to the door in question, he paused for a minute, and pushed it with his paw. It swung open with a creek. A herby fug hit his nostrils. On a bed in the far corner, under the slope of the roof above, a boy lay on his bed in shorts, eyes half-closed smiling inanely as if in some sort of a trance.
“Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude”, he said lazily.
Indeed? thought Library Cat.
“Hahaha Duuuude”, the boy repeated again between laughs. “Duuude, how’d you get in, pussy cat?”
The Human’s voice sounded strange – sort of slowed-down, like a cat’s when initiating a fight. On the floor were many scraps of paper with countless bits of writing on them scrawled messily in an incredibly inelegant hand. Library Cat gazed closely at one of them:
The Meaning of Life: Discoveries while High
1... group love, communism WORLD SEX PEACE be happy [illegible]…
2…. Ireland is an island!!!!!!
Library Cat paused. The Human is clearly a moron, he thought turning to leave. And charming as it is, this place is incredibly cold. It is no place for me to make my new life. They have books, I grant them, but their ways are too bizarre for me. This is their “down time” and yet they have found very odd ways of relaxing. I wonder if most Humans descend into madness behind closed doors?
As Library Cat moved discreetly towards the stairs, something else struck him about the way in which the student Humans live. Up until now, he hadn’t noticed the plethora of notes pinned up everywhere on various walls. Beneath the clothes horse in the hall, for instance, was one that said the following:
ATTENTION FLATMATES:
Throwing my stuff on the floor when it is not yet dry is NOT OKAY!!!
Wait til it’s dry or use the other rack.
Cheers lovelies,
Tiff xx
Upon the door of the bedroom he’d just left was another note, much longer, written on a torn piece of paper:
Lawrence: Last night we came home to find a window open,
and the washing up still not done. If you look at the rota,
you’ll notice that you have not done chores for the past
two months. There’s mould in the bathroom,
OPEN THE WINDOW AFTER YOU SHOWER. Also you still owe us £55 for the new washing machine that YOU broke
by trying to wash jeans with coins in the pockets.
Oh and don’t leave bowls in the kitchen unwashed.
Last night I saw two mice!
Thanks.
That’s it I’m staying! thought Library Cat impulsively upon learning that mice inhabited the flat in plentiful numbers.
Then a new thought occurred to him. Why do Humans over-communicate when it comes to nonsense and under-communicate when it comes to serious things? And why do they use their voices freely when it comes to nonsense, but resort to the pen and paper when it comes to reasoning? He looked over the two angry notes… He noticed how one was signed by “Tiff” and seemed angry but also quite warm, whereas the longer one wasn’t signed by anyone and referred to “us” instead of “me”. This seemed to give the vague impression that it spoke for, or was trying to look like it spoke for, the feelings of an entire group. Consequently, it possessed a certain heavy-handed gravitas, and a warmongering feel. A rhetorical flexing of the muscles. It gave the impression that the “war-on-household-chores” was not equally weighted on each side, but instead much more powerfully weighted on the side of the “us”, and thus aimed to intimidate Lawrence into action by suggesting he might alienate himself even further in this barren, cold, lonely, draughty upstairs part of the flat lest he fail to respond appropriately.
Yet downstairs it was all babble and fun, and the chatter stood as irrefutable proof that any one of the downstairs students could just as easily have come upstairs and told these things to Lawrence face-to-face, but chose not to because the anonymity, and reason, and rhetorical power of a good note nails the point home further, and is served with a bonus of a side order of ostracism. Suddenly Library Cat felt lonely, as if Lawrence’s peculiar isolation up here was seeping out through the bottom of his door and across the landing and into Library Cat’s skin like an airborne disease. He felt sorry for having thought him a “moron”. I bet he’s colder up here as well, considered Library Cat beginning to shiver himself. Trotting down the stairs, he tried to think about Puddle Cat to cheer himself up, but her beautiful image was lost amid the clamour and cold. He went towards the front door, looked up at the lock and mewed until someone came to his aid.
“The cat wants to go out…”
“No, no, don’t let him go out! Is he OK? He might get lost. Guys I think we should call Animal Protection. What if he gets hit by a car?”
Look, I’d rather just go, thought Library Cat, feeling suspicious at the Human’s sudden fit of righteousness.
“I’ll take him downstairs.”
Library Cat felt himself being scooped up, and bounced down the great echoing stairwell of the tenement, feeling more relieved with each descending storey until he was by the front door.
“Bye bye, puss, take care!” said the student disingenuously, closing the door behind him and leaving Library Cat alone and cold once again.
Recommended Reading
The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown.
Food consumed
Anchovy pizza.
Mood
Curious, becoming lonely.
Discovery about Humans
Humans can be alienating and cowardly when it comes to speaking their mind.
…in which our hero fails to recognise himself
And then some days, everything is strange.
Just over a week had passed since Library Cat’s attempt to go missing. His old home returned to him in a sort of embrace with each vase and box of books seeming to apologise for having stood by silent duri
ng his untimely exodus. Nothing was said about the library books; they stood in his bedroom stacked up just as they usually did. With each afternoon that passed a heavy, grey rain lashed the windowpanes like a malevolent ghost, harder and harder as winter sunk its jaw deeper and deeper. Ginger-coloured leaves started to blacken and rot. People stopped going outside. Cats stayed in the warm.
And yet this particular day saw Library Cat on a long walk. Something was scurrying in his mind, around and around day and night, keeping him awake. A walk was always an attempt to purge such cog-spinning moods.
They always seemed to help. They always seemed to ease things…
At this hour – 4 am – the drizzle had given way to a velvety, clear night. The moon hung freshly in the sky above, decorated with countless stars that flickered like lighthouses across a misty, calm sea. On the fuggy Cowgate, the moon’s whiteness illuminated the backs of mice and rats as they scurried behind bins and down drains.
And yet Library Cat hardly noticed them.
As he climbed Borthwick’s Close towards the Royal Mile, a particularly foolhardy rat scuttled right across his paws. Yet Library Cat hardly winced.
As the clock of St Giles chimed the hour of 4.15 am, our little black and white cat was struck with a curious feeling. It washed right over him with the same speed it takes light to travel two inches, and in its vast soundless wake, a deep and profound tiredness seemed to spread through his body and sink down into his every limb. Somewhere, deep within the plumbing of his brain, a plug had been pulled. The elixir that swirled down the plughole, sparkling and unstoppable like the sand of an egg timer, was neither the iridescent manna of happiness, nor indeed the red, clotting molasses of fear or anger or jealousy.
It was, quite simply, the elixir of wellbeing.
Library Cat walked the length and breadth of the Royal Mile for several hours. It’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon. Something, and he wasn’t sure quite what, was getting the better of him. He skulked up past the gallant City Chambers and eerie Mercat Cross where foreign tourists had already started to congregate for the day’s first underground ghost tours. Several people spotted him and came over to tickle him.
“Here, puss puss puss puss!”
But Library Cat just walked on, not even stopping to see who they were. The cobbles felt tacky under his paws; some were lathered with spilt fizzy drink, while others were thickly rinded with food muck. Normally, these might consist of little snacks. But right now, Library Cat felt he hardly even had the energy to sniff them.
It must be made clear at this point, Human, that normally Library Cat felt perfectly comfortable in his own company. He would trot along with his mind stretched out alongside the warm embers of his thoughts. He would heat his soul by them and feel them diversify his emotions. They made him feel free and alive. But now his thoughts seemed to writhe like salted slugs, their churning a physical agony, and their twisted dance too ghastly to behold. Library Cat wanted rid of them. Loneliness started to tower up around him in great sheets of Perspex. He suddenly felt enclosed within the sheets. Life felt muted. Other Humans felt distant; even their chatter and coos of affection felt as if he was hearing them down a long, hollow pipe.
But the salted slugs writhed louder than ever in a froth of red, like the macabre death cries of a bloody war that no one else could see.
What’s going on?
As he turned the corner onto George IV Bridge, he noticed odd new thoughts rushing into his head that seemed to open and close absurdly like tiny little cocktail umbrellas. One such thought he had was to chase his tail, and that if he did, his mind would feel much better.
I outright refuse, thought Library Cat sternly to himself, the still-glimmering rational quarters of his brain kicking in. I’m not going down that road again. You can give that one up, Brain.
Library Cat had once had the misfortune to be struck down with a severe bout of tail chasing in his younger years. “Silly Cat!” the Humans would say, many of them laughing at the same time. “Probably got fleas… quit being daft!” What none of them seemed to understand was just how strangely addictive tail chasing was to the cat in question. Aside from knocking over various ceramic ornaments, tipping them precariously towards the fireside and setting many a plate of food flying, the tail-chasing cat in question would often be scolded by a proximate Human for “being so stoooooopid”. This was difficult to hear, when your brain was completely deluded and telling your paws and your mouth that your tail really was a mouse, when deep down you knew, really, something was wrong with your head but you couldn’t do anything about it, because your head was in charge of you, and yet it was short-circuiting like a snake devouring its own tail.
Nope, not going down that road again, thought Library Cat with conviction.
For a moment, at least, he felt better. The warm smell of butter and croissants hit his nostrils as he sauntered past the Elephant House café. Over in the graveyard behind Greyfriars Kirk, he could see a clutch of cats, skulking between the headstones. He wondered whether going to see them might shake off his foul mood; it would be a means of distraction after all. But something about the way the cats moved and hissed at each other suggested they were not especially nice cats, and so were probably not worth the time, and might make him feel even stranger. And he was simply not in the mood for a catnip tryst.
Home. Home would surely help. A warm radiator, some food, a read, and then maybe head for a nap in the turquoise chair and a trip up to the Towsery to hang out among like-minded cats. This would surely make things better. It was okay, he was in control.
Nearly there, he thought as he saw the blocky university buildings stubbing into the grey sky above. Focus, focus, there are many cats who are much worse off than me, I’m sure…
But the moment Library Cat attempted to gain perspective by recalling all the other suffering in the world, a great mushroom cloud of all the global misery seem to splurge up into his mind: homeless cats, abused cats, cats maltreated by their Humans, cats living in slums, cats teased by their owners, cats with horrible life-threatening diseases… sacrificed cats. He soon began to feel ill-justified in having ever felt happiness at all, as if his suffering so paled in comparison to all the other greater sufferings on earth that his feeling unhappy was, itself, utterly indulgent, and that all the pleasures he’d derived in life so far – the reading, the strokes from Humans, the catnip, the treats, the books – were all a great sham, like the thin flaky crust atop a planet that really only conceals the simmering, churning mass of hellish mantle underneath it, ready to bubble up the moment the crust ruptures, and that to believe anything else was pure delusion.
Library Cat slowed his pace and looked down at his paws advancing on the pavement. Left paw, Right paw, Black leg, White Leg, Left paw, Right paw, Black leg, White Leg. New thoughts were now coming into his mind. Weird thoughts. Strange thoughts…
Am I those things?
… grey thoughts, bitter thoughts; a whole fog of putrid, multi-coloured thoughts that twisted inexorably through his brain like fairy light cabling. He turned off Middle Meadow Walk towards George Square, the nettles around its perimeters seeming to rise up and grab the air like eerie sea anemones. He had never seen them in that way before, but now felt like he couldn’t see them in any other way. They frightened him. Things seemed out of focus.
And still the temptation to chase his tail…
Don’t be silly, Library Cat. You know it’s futile and would make things worse.
And then it was upon him. An odd smell met his nostrils, cadaverous and brown and heavy as lead. It struck Library Cat strange that a smell could be heavy and brown, but this smell was undoubtedly both these things. So nauseating was the smell that a mere wisp of it across his nostrils, disturbing the otherwise chill air, sent a deep heat into him, making him gag.
And then he saw it.
Between where he stood and the warm refuge of the library was the Black Dog. It had caught Library Cat’s scen
t.
Library Cat felt his pupils widen and his back arch as an unspeakable terror shot through his bones. His gaze locked onto the Black Dog, snapping only right and left when he was brave enough to look for a tree to climb, or a something to bolt beneath. There was nothing. All at once the Black Dog’s head turned. In the cold air, Library Cat saw two tiny yellow eyes, as small as pinpricks, that seemed to strobe bluey-yellow like tiny fusing light bulbs. The fur was smarmed with what seemed like grease, twisting it in all directions – sometimes up in a tuft, sometimes flat along its back, and sometimes back on itself. It had no collar and Library Cat could not tell its breed. In fact it seemed difficult to suggest it had any breed in it at all, crossed or otherwise. There was something not-of-this-earth about the Black Dog.
At that moment, the Black Dog neared towards him, its back arched ready for combat. Its jowls drawled with grey saliva that bounced up and down as it panted. Directly above it, a set of drab clouds began racing over a darkening sky like nondescript items on a speeding conveyor belt. The eyes flashed wildly, bluer and more electrical as the distance between cat and dog closed. Its stench was indescribable. Finally Library Cat took a deep breath, opened his mouth, shut his eyes and let out a long sibilant hiss, as long and as loud and as threatening as he could possibly muster from his tiny cat-lungs.
And then silence. Everything except the grey clouds that scudded overhead became colourless and still. A kind of locked-in horror.
Library Cat opened his eyes. The Black Dog had fled.
Where did it go? Did I imagine it?
Ahead of Library Cat was a clear path towards the library. A car rumbled across the cobbles, and several satchelled Humans flitted in and out of buildings. A girl came over to stroke him.
“Library Cat, there’s no need to look so scared!”
The girl had blonde ringlets and weaved her fingers tenderly between his fur. She smelt sweet like oranges. Library Cat looked up at her eyes. They seemed empathetic. Despite his remoteness, Library Cat felt grateful for the company.