BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Yes… How d’you find him, by the way?”

  Sage shook his head. “He’s still losing weight; and getting weaker, I think.” Eval’s bandmates saw his current care notes, but had no contact with his medical team. “But his mood’s good: he enjoyed his excursion.”

  “I’ll see if we can do more of that,” offered Bel. “If he’ll let us.”

  “Thanks.”

  Finding the great hall unoccupied when Sage was supervising the cremation-fest the next day, Fiorinda tried the Steinways. One was a tragic case, the other in perfect tune. Eval came into the vast room while she was playing.

  “D’you know, The Banks Of Allan Water, kiddie?”

  “I think so…” She played the tender little folksong, decided she liked it and spun it out in variations, while the stricken king sat smiling.

  “Would yer like a piano? You c’n have that one for free, I shan’t be needing it, I’m planning to get out more.”

  “Not really. I prefer my own.”

  “Suit yourself, cheeky kid.”

  He spun around: the hall doors opened before him, and he was gone.

  Early on the third morning, in a cold, persistent rain, they escaped: taking the short road again; Fiorinda driving. At the crossroads below Small Tor, he asked her to stop.

  “You want to say goodbye to your friends?”

  “Nah. That’s done. There’s just something I need to check.”

  The dawn flit had been unnecessary, they had hours to fill before the relatively good connection they might find at Bodmin Parkway.

  “No problem. I’ll read my improving pamphlet.”

  “Won’t be long.”

  Jog trot, hood of his drab fleece well down, he gave the buildings of Smallstones farm a wide berth: avoiding horizons, using the landscape the way they’d learned to in Yorkshire, when he and Ax were fighting the Islamics. He approached the pool where he’d been shown the panther print from the opposite side of the Tor, and hunkered down, parting the cotton sedge. The tarp was still there. He moved Tris’s stones, peeled it back, and the skull’s grin broadened. Sage had looked into the Beast of Bodmin story rather carefully once – two years ago, in another world.

  Nice try, Bel, but that’s an enormous big cat.

  Whereas we’re thinking a small, probably female, melanistic leopard. If we were ever thinking anything…

  He replaced the tarp and the stones and looked up, turning slowly to recover his line of sight from the last time. There: the hint that had caught his eye. He climbed, and found what he’d glimpsed, or guessed at, the other morning – a smaller pugmark, not half so perfect, on a near- vertical patch of shale and mud. He stared at it, and then set off again – circling the Tor as he climbed, but finding no other traces – until he reached a field of boulders under a sheer face of granite, where water, braided white, fell down the dark rock. A black slot at the top, masked by birch scrub. He turned his back to the slab and leaned there, tucking his fists away. What’ll I do? he wondered.

  Had he seen the dead wolf scrabbling to its feet? The vicar on her knees, holding up her hands like a born-again prophet? The little crowd dumbstruck and the yew trees walking? It was there, and then it wasn’t. It happened, and then it didn’t; had never been—

  Was that my neurological warning? Do I have to quit the experiment?

  Or was there another explanation?

  Maybe he should’ve asked Grace. The vicar had turned up at Eval’s again, after the trip to Recluse Wood: bringing a stew with dumplings and a medicalised chocolate drink in her padded bags. Eval had already been put to bed, tired out. Sage and Fiorinda had eaten pizza (a food they both despised) the night before, and felt their work was done. But the vicar hadn’t seemed to notice that her treats were spurned. She was distrait; she kept peering around, as if she’d mislaid something. And sneaking little scared looks at Fiorinda. Unless that also was Sage’s imagination…

  Fiorinda – Sweetheart, I love you. I want to protect you. Won’t you please, please tell me what’s going on?

  Sweetheart – maybe not. I want to protect you; unadvisable. I love you, out of the question… But there was no right way to approach that conversation. So, what? Talk to Ax about the issue?

  Tried that, it doesn’t work.

  Better just wait and see.

  He tipped his head back, blinking rain from his lashes. “If by chance you’re up there…” he said, aloud but quietly. “Thanks for killing the worrier, you did right an’ I’m sorry I’ve brought trouble on you. I hope you’re okay to leave the rest of my pack alone?”

  The embodiment of Nature’s return made no response, except that a pebble dropped from overhead, tapped him on the cheekbone, and went dancing away, in tiny silver spurts, down the soaking wet hill.

  Sage laughed, set off leaping after it to the foot of the Tor, and jogged back to the crossroads. Fiorinda had exhausted her pamphlet and was pondering other areas of study. Electricity Easily Explained would be a good one. Maybe I could take my GCSEs, and deep down thinking I had to do it, but no more like that, I must go to ground, hide, hide… Sage knocked on her window, and shook himself before clambering in a mess of long limbs into the passenger seat. He wiped rain off his face and dragged skeletal hands through his hair, spattering her freely. “What was it you said to Grace, Fiorinda? Just before we left the miraculous wood?”

  “I told her resurrection is an incredibly stupid idea, that’s all.”

  “Haha, yeah. Even Jesus came back weird.”

  And they returned to London; to the man they both loved.

  In her den on Small Tor the big cat licked her cub, purring. She was nearly eighteen years old: a very wise old lady, who’d recently returned to the moor after a sojourn in Scotland with her mate, and awhile spent in Birmingham, among humans; eating well on urban foxes. They’ve changed, she thought. We might even be able to live with them now… If they can just get through this part.

  Stella And the Adventurous Roots

  I wrote this story for an anthology of botanical science fiction, commissioned by an outfit called Wayward Plants, but I had not done my homework. “Wayward” is a very respectable concern, and they didn’t care for my ragged-trousered guerrilla gardeners. They also found one strand of this alien-seed in Deptford story distasteful. So I got paid, and the story remained unpublished, status undefined… But I like it.

  Lulu had walked her daughter Stella and Stella’s friend Joseph along Creek Road every school day since the inseparables started nursery school. The derelict service station they had to pass had always fascinated the children, but lately this amenity had become even more interesting. A band of Guerrilla Gardeners – responsible for the unilateral appearance of flower tubs and tree pits in the streets nearby – had moved in. The holding company had no objection, as long as the Guerrillas cleared out when the developers could start work (the underground fuel tanks still had to be removed, a complex process). The Council didn’t object either, on the same terms. Lulu, currently a Project Worker with responsibility for urban plant health, had a professional interest.

  One day, when she’d collected the children from school, she introduced herself at the cheerfully-decorated, makeshift booth where the gardeners had their office; under a sign that read ‘Pop-Up Garden. Please Pop-in’. The Guerrilla on duty got someone to show the visitors around.

  The gardeners were clearing plots by tearing out buddleia growth and herbaceous weeds: which was fine. There wasn’t much else going on as yet, but Lulu made a note of three wind-sown young ash trees, clean and sound she was glad to see, that might need replanting later, and checked the donations that had been coming in: bundled seed-packets; a pallet of winter flowering pansies from a local supermarket; bags of spring bulbs, fragile vegetable seedlings, sacks of topsoil… A huddle of discarded houseplants, including a huge, apologetic-looking philodendron, looked like stray dogs in a pen: sad, and slightly suspect.

  Most of the plants in this last category simply weren
’t going to make it outdoors, but Lulu had a good look anyway, in case something alien and invasive was being let loose.

  Joseph stuck close to Lulu, keeping an uneasy eye on the Guerrilla who escorted them. He was just three and a half, a bright but nervous child, and he was afraid that gorillas had guns. Stella, Lulu’s daughter was nearly four, and enterprising. She embarked on her own inspection, an imaginary clipboard in one hand, a real pen in the other. She spotted some people in gardening clothes brewing up over a portable stove, and interrogated them.

  ‘Will you be sad when the builders come and take everything away?”

  “Nah!” said a lady in overalls and wellies. “We’re nomads, here today, gone tomorrow. There’s always another site.”

  “She’s lying,” said a tall girl with dark braids, in a rainbow striped jumper. “We’re fierce guerrillas with a desperate cause. Our aim is to spread the greening of London, until we take over the whole city. We mostly work at night, secretly. You can join up, if you like.”

  “It’s going to be housing,” said an old man with a gingery white beard. “We might convince the developers to let us do the landscaping; make their project look good and Green. It’s happened.”

  He offered Stella a chocolate biscuit, but her hands were full. There was nowhere to put her clipboard, and she didn’t want to let go of her pen. She got confused, and the tall girl laughed. Stella walked away, annoyed, without a biscuit.

  She peered into old tyres filled with earth, and stared at heaps of fuel-stained concrete shards. A Royal Borough Parks van had arrived, with a donation of leaf mould. Stella sidled closer, peering inside the big bags. The leaves were soggy and dark, like incredibly muddy washing. “No-mads,” she muttered. “NO-mads! GO-rillas and NO-mads!” She snarled and curled her fingers like a fierce gorilla.

  The Parks agency worker grinned at her, but next moment forgot about the child. Stella slipped through the site’s gates, onto the pavement.

  People were passing, heads down and shoulders hunched against the wind and the coming rain; eyes fixed on phone screens. Stella stomped to and fro with her own head down, pretending to text, in front of the gates. Not a step further: or she knew there’d be trouble. But there were some bright things scattered among the feet of the passers-by: shiny, coppery discs, swollen in the middle, crumpled around the edges. To Stella they looked like the chocolate money she’d found in the toe of her Christmas stocking. She bent down – but there was a man on the other side of the busy road, watching her. She jerked her hand back. She shouldn’t be out here, and she wasn’t allowed to pick things up from the pavement. The coin rolled away, to vanish into a dark fissure in the shattered concrete of the forecourt: the man went on staring. Defiantly Stella grabbed another piece of chocolate money, stuffed it in her coat pocket, and darted back into the Guerrilla Garden, before she was missed.

  Stella had her tea with Joseph’s family while Mummy worked, and later a snack watching cartoon television with her mother, as usual on a school day. She only remembered her coin at bedtime. When her mother had kissed her goodnight she waited a few minutes, to be on the safe side – then leapt out of bed, retrieved her contraband, and dived back under the duvet, grabbing her rabbit nightlight on the way.

  It wasn’t chocolate. The shiny wrapper didn’t come off. Deeply disappointed, Stella spent a while picking at the crumpled edges, to no avail. Whatever was inside was out of reach: like the inside of a big bean, before you soaked it and it split open and grew…

  Stella knew about plants from her mother, and she’d grown beans at school. Suddenly she realised what she’d found. It was a seed. She had found it, nobody else. She would grow it, in secret, and not let Mummy help. She would be a GO-rilla NO-mad gardener! Burning with pride, she fell asleep with the strange seed clutched in her hand.

  Stella and her mother lived in Linden House, a cosy block of ex-local authority flats close to Deptford Creek. The block had trees and lawns, but no tenants’ gardens: Lulu grew flowers and vegetables on their tiny balcony. Next day, after school, Stella sneakily raided the gardening supplies. She poked a little hole in the bottom of a clean yoghurt pot, took dry soil from a bin. Setting the bean on some of the soil she covered it with the rest: carefully smoothed out the scooped place, so Mummy wouldn’t know, and hid the pot behind a photo of her daddy and the new baby; on her own windowsill, where she could look at it often.

  The missing ingredient was water, but Stella knew from experience that water and secrecy don’t mix. She decided the seed would be okay. She could put it out in the rain, when Mummy wasn’t looking. Lulu, drowning in screens of Project Worker paperwork, didn’t notice a thing.

  ϔ

  London was pelted with cold, torrential rain all that week, but Stella forgot to give her pot a shower. Nevertheless, a whiteish, pointed shoot appeared. It swiftly got bigger. Stella thought her secret plant might be a cactus, because she could see tiny, tiny spines. But the shoot didn’t turn green, and this worried her. Plants have to be green. She looked at pictures, on her tablet and in her mummy’s books, and worked out what was wrong. The white shoot wasn’t a shoot. It was a pale, hairy, groping little root. Plants can’t see, but Stella knew they can sense things. They know up from down and light from darkness; they seek food and water and defend themselves against enemies. But this plant had no sense.

  Unsure – because her mother had told her plants can think, in their own way – where the limits were, she held up the tablet screen and tried to show her seedling the right ideas. “Roots come first,” she said. “And roots go down! Then comes the shoot, and the shoot goes up!”

  The plant, like a badly behaved baby, took no notice.

  “DOWN!” she yelled, stabbing down with her finger and losing her temper. “You have to go down! Or else I’m going to get ANNOYED!”

  “Stella?” called Mummy, from the living room. “Why are you shouting? I’m trying to work—”

  The upside-down root had broken out of the soil on a Monday. The Saturday after that Lulu was working at the University, and Stella spent the day with her daddy’s new family. When Daddy dropped her off in the afternoon Lulu was still busy, so he left Stella in the Plant Biology department, where she had friends. “Tell Lu I think she’s getting a cold,” he said. “She seems a bit mopey. Nothing serious.”

  Stella was consumed with anxiety about her plant. She’d hardly been able to enjoy being at Daddy’s house, or the glorious baby. She couldn’t think of anything but that mad root. She found her mother’s friend Adam working at his computer, and stared until she’d got his attention.

  “Adam, is there any such thing as roots that grow into the air?”

  “Yeah,” said Adam, kindly. He knew Stella, and never baby-talked her (because he didn’t know how). “There are aerial roots; air roots. It often happens with epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. Or grow on trees, like rainforest orchids.”

  “Is it wrong?”

  “No, it’s just different. They’re also called adventitious roots, because they can grow from an unusual site on the plant; a leaf node, maybe.”

  “Thank you! Thank you very much. That’s wonderful news!”

  “You’re a funny little sprout,” said Adam. “Where’s your mum?”

  “Coming soon,” said Stella. “Can I look at some pictures of roots in the air? Will you show me?”

  She was extremely relieved. Her plant wasn’t mad, it was adventurous.

  When she got home and checked the yoghurt pot, for a moment she was more worried than ever. The root had disappeared. She lifted the pot, to see if it had turned in the normal direction, and was poking out of the bottom (it had been quite tall). There was no sign of it, but she felt a tug, and caught a glint of something like a sunbeam, rising from the soil. The root had not reformed its behaviour. It was still heading up, but it had turned see-through, like a piece of Sellotape, and sneaked into the crack between Stella’s window-frame and the wall. Thoughtfully, she set the pot back in its
hiding place, arranging her curtains over the place for added security. She didn’t see how a piece of Sellotape could do any harm. And her plant might yet turn into a beautiful, gorilla orchid.

  Lulu, too busy to be a pernickety housekeeper, found the invisible plant in the end. But she loved Stella’s odd passions, and always tried to respect them. She left the yoghurt pot of dry, withered soil undisturbed, and spent the next many weeks cleaning around it, if ever she got round to wiping the windowsills.

  ϔ

  The man who had watched Stella, the morning when she found her seed, was not a random stranger. He’d had his eye on the chubby little girl with the big brown eyes for a while, and his interest was not healthy. Anticipation, caution and delay were this man’s watchwords, but he’d seen his little darling pick something up, and everything about Stella fascinated him. He’d crossed the road, as soon as she was back with her mum, and spotted the gleaming discs. They were melting away like chocolate in the rain, but one lay on dry pavement, in a bus shelter. He’d picked it up and taken it home.

  He didn’t do anything with his trophy for a while. One evening, when he’d cautiously followed the two children and the mother home from school – and been rewarded by a glimpse of his chosen one securely located, on the balcony of a third floor flat – he recalled the coin: his strongest connection with Stella. He took a sharp knife, put the disc on a saucer, and anointed it with his blood.

  Go and catch a falling star, he murmured. Get with child a mandrake root… There was something magical going on, he was sure of that.