by A. N. Wilson
The place of my imprisonment was the very ‘laboratory’ of which Tom-Cat had taught us to be afraid. I had often heard the white-coated oafs refer to it as the ‘lab’, a word they also seem to use sometimes for the well they sit on. After they had treated me for fleas, and decided that I was a ‘fine specimen’, I was separated from my fellows and locked in a small cage. I will say this for the lab: they did not starve you. To that extent it was a good deal more comfortable than the pet shop. And although I hated being shut up in a small cage, I began to think that things might be worse. How right I was. For the second day, some glistening human faces appeared at the bars of the cage and began to peer in at me.
A couple of white-coats were talking.
‘Is that enough lipstick?’ one was asking.
The other white-coat was making that horrible noise with his mouth which he called laughter.
‘You can’t help laughing when you see a cat with its mouth covered with lipstick,’ he said.
‘I can,’ said the other white-coat. ‘In fact I think it’s a horrible business.’
‘Oh come on now. Don’t get all high and mighty!’
‘I’m not. But I don’t think that a laboratory like this should be wasting its time on lipstick, that’s all.’
‘What does it matter what it wastes its time on? It’s all research, isn’t it?’
The nastier of the white-coats seemed to set a lot of value on searching for this ree. I have asked several cats as fluent in catching human speech as myself what ree is, but none has been able to tell me.
‘Those cats in there are being smothered with lipstick just so that cosmetic firms can make money out of silly women,’ said the nicer white-coat.
‘I suppose you’d rather we tested the lipsticks on people,’ said nasty. ‘Would you like your wife’s lips to become like that poor moggy’s mouth in there?’
‘I don’t want anyone’s mouth to become like that: not my wife’s, nor the cat’s. There is no need to have lipstick, if it can only be got with suffering like this. Now if we were testing the animals for medical research, to help us cure terrible diseases, or something of that kind, I would understand it. But we aren’t. That row of cages is lipstick. Over there, it is meant to be psychology, but we know perfectly well, we are just playing games with these animals. Look at those rats, smoking in there.’
‘Oh, cut it out, Gerry!’ said nasty. ‘If you feel like this you shouldn’t be working in a lab. Go and join the Animal Rights nutters if you’re so sorry for a lot of stupid animals.’
‘I’ve half a mind to do just that,’ said less nasty, and he walked away in anger. It was left to nasty to open the door to my cage and call out to another white-coat, ‘It’s shampoos in here, isn’t it?’
‘I think so,’ said the other one.
‘Go easy with the stuff,’ he added. ‘We don’t want too many bald, blind cats on our hands. Remember the last lot?’
‘Do I not?’ laughed nasty, and he set to work. He got some soapy liquid out of a bottle and began to rub it into my fur in small patches. Then he locked me up again. At first this was not too bad, but after a while it began to itch and sting like crazy. And hour after hour, day after day, the brute came back with lots of little bottles and rubbed the stuff into my fur until at length I was stinging and sore all over. Nasty seemed interested in the ‘results’. He entered them into some sort of chart or other with his pen, and after a few days, he exclaimed, ‘Well, it may cure dandruff, but it will bring you out in such sores, you’d wish you’d never used the stuff. Back to the drawing board.’
He lifted me up. I thought I was for it, and I struggled. He took me over to a sink, and started to run the tap. I was sure that he was trying to drown me, and I scratched and fought for all I was worth.
He hit my face and told me to stop that game, but I was determined that it would take more than Nasty White-Coat and a sink full of water to bring me to the Great Stillness. But, oddly enough, he lowered me into the water and simply rinsed me until all the nasty soapy substance was removed from my fur. Then he rubbed me roughly with a towel, and took me back to the cage to dry off and gave me, I remember, quite a palatable bowl of mice to eat. But by then I knew enough not to imagine that the torture was ever finished. They might leave you alone for a few hours, or a few days, but they would always come back to torment you some more.
While I ate the mice, however, my ears pricked up. Nasty was talking to the other white-coat about the less nasty one called Gerry.
‘Fancy old Gerry leaving us,’ said Nasty.
‘I always did think Gerry was a bit bonkers,’ said the other.
‘That’s right. A bit of a loner, Gerry. Liked to make up his own mind on things,’ said Nasty.
‘Like I say, a nutter.’
‘Did you hear about the letter he wrote to the local papers?’
‘No?’
‘Yes. The boss is livid. Furious. Says it’s a breach of security, professional something or another. Furious the old man is. Gerry has written to the local papers saying that the existence of this laboratory is a scandal to the town. He says that we are cruel to animals.’
‘I always get bored when people go on about cruelty to animals,’ said the other white-coat. ‘As if there weren’t enough suffering people in the world, without worrying about animals. Oh shut up!’ he shouted, at a cage from which the most terrible screams were proceeding.
‘Anyway. Old Gerry’s taken my advice,’ said Nasty. ‘He says in this letter that he has joined the nutters.’
‘Not the Animal Rights Group.’
‘Right,’ said Nasty. ‘Said he would do all in his power to bring cruel experiments on animals to an end. Said the law should be changed. Said if necessary he’d break the law.’
‘And get past the security guards and the police, and the guard dogs. I don’t see old Gerry doing that. Half the time he even forgot to hand in his key after work,’ said the other one.
‘That’s a thought,’ said Nasty. ‘I wonder if Gerry handed in his keys when he left us?’
It was not a question which interested me. I am completely baffled by the human taste for locks, and for shutting things. Doors and windows are useful enough. But not if they are shut. I hear your human minders shouting at you and your mother sometimes, and I wonder how you put up with it. ‘Are you coming in or aren’t you?’ they call. ‘Oh don’t just stand and hover by the door, make up your mind!’ Well hovering is the most sensible thing to do by a door if it is the only way to stop some fool human from shutting it in your face.
These questions were far away in my cage. When I had dried out, and finished eating my mice, Nasty approached once more and started work with a different set of bottles. This time, instead of rubbing the soap in my back fur, he rubbed it on my head, and on my face. He even deliberately put soap in my eyes, and this process was repeated over the next fortnight with a dozen different bottles. When you are in pain, the whole world gets blotted out. All the sensations which are natural and joyful, all your awareness of the world itself is gone. Eating is no pleasure. Sleep is hardly possible. You can only think of the ache or the sting or the agony. And that was what it was like for me in that fortnight. I was in constant pain, and I felt powerless. And many a time in my agony, I came half to long for the Great Stillness, or, what was an almost equal condition of despair, to remember with a nostalgic sweetness, my days of safety when I was a slave of Tom-Cat’s in the Commune.
chapter fifteen
But then, everything changed, quite suddenly.
While I was sitting in my cage, and thinking the blackest thoughts that a cat ever thought, and smarting in the eyes, and hating my captors with a weakness of hatred that only the victims of such cruelty would fully understand, there was a violently loud crash. Glass was being broken, a door was being battered down. There was a sound of human voices yelling and baying. My feelings of rage and desolation and despair sharpened into sensations of acute terror. The monsters in white coat
s were our enemy. That was for sure. But already, there was something half-reassuring in knowing them to be our enemy. Can you begin to understand this? We knew where we were with them. My hatred for them could not change. It will never change. And yet, between us there had grown up a relationship of mistrust which had such routines and boundaries and fixities that it was almost as reassuring as a relationship of trust! Hatred, like love, has its routines. The most terrible element in fear – uncertainty – had been absent in the previous weeks, days or whatever they were. Now, uncertainty entered in once again. Who was making such a din? Why? I came to the front of my cage and looked through the wire. I could see a curious vision. A man with fur growing from the bottom of his face, as well as sprouting from the top had entered the laboratory. He had very long fur, tied in a pigtail at the back: he had a bright red shirt and blue trousers and a wild look in his eyes. He was accompanied by a woman with short lank yellow fur growing on her head and she too was wild.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ she was saying.
‘I can,’ said he. ‘I can believe it all too easily.’
‘I feel so – so angry,’ she said, with passionate intensity, ‘that I could do violence to them. I could really. I could tear them limb from limb.’
Now, it did not occur to me that this wild woman was talking about our human tormentors. I thought she was talking about us, the tormented. I assumed that she was a madwoman who had burst into the laboratory with the intention of tearing me limb from limb, and I began to let out uncontrollable howls. Suddenly, life seemed very sweet; even life as hellish as the existence which my tormentors made me live in the laboratory. Better a life of having shampoo rubbed in my eyes morning and afternoon, than the Great Stillness.
‘Look at that one,’ said the woman, ‘it’s got such sore eyes. Yes, you,’ she said, suddenly looking at me and addressing me in tones of such tenderness that for a moment I thought of Granny Harris and Sister Caroline Mary. ‘You’ve got sore eyes.’
Other people had come into the laboratory – men and women. One said, ‘We’ve let the monkeys out in the next room, and the rats. They’re in boxes. We are carrying them out into the vans. But what about the cats?’
‘They’ll have to go too.’
‘Oh, my God!’ the woman was screaming now. ‘Just look at this one. She was peering in the cage next to mine. Because it was next to mine I had not been able to see inside it, but she now opened the door of his cage and brought out my neighbour for her friends to see.
I still did not understand that these people were my friends. I mewed and miaowed furiously. I had heard my neighbour screaming all week; I did not know exactly what he had been through, but it seemed monstrous to me that he should have been tortured by the scientists, and had his life spared only to be tormented by these wild people.
But the woman was crying. Her eyes looked as red and sore as mine felt, and I could see her holding my poor neighbour to her breast as though he had been one of her own babies. And then I knew that these people, strange as they looked and seemed and smelled, were our friends, and the dreadful fear which their entry into the laboratory had caused me changed to excitement and joy. But it was a joy very decidedly shot through with sorrow. For the sight of my neighbour, held up by that poor weeping woman was a shocking one.
The scientists had cut off his tail – presumably it got in the way of one of their infernal machines. And now I saw what he meant, as he cried out, day after day, ‘I cannot close my eyes! I cannot close my eyes.’ For they had cut off his eyelids. At first I could not make out what was strange about his eyes. I thought that they had just been smearing them with shampoo and making them sore, like mine. But he was not testing shampoo, he was testing ‘sleeplessness’.
‘They’d put him on a treadmill,’ sobbed the woman. ‘They’d strapped him on a treadmill and forced him to go on and on, without... without any eyelids.’
I could hardly recognize that animal which she held in her arms. He was so mutilated that there was almost nothing left of him. But in my memory of the sight of him, I become more and more certain that this poor creature was Tom-Cat himself.
‘It’s one of the most notorious experiments,’ said the man. ‘They are testing the effects of sleeplessness. We must hurry, we must get all the cats out. And the birds, and the mice. But we must be careful not to get them all out at once. It wouldn’t be very kind to the mice or birds.’
I cannot tell you how those words cheered me up. For they reminded me of the pleasures which I thought would be denied me for ever and ever: the pleasure of being free, and out in the open air; free to chase a bird or a mouse, free to run and hop and jump about. It had not been long, the period of my incarceration. By the measurements of men, I guess it would not have been two or three weeks. But already I had given up hope of ever leading a normal feline life again. Indeed, ever since I had left the Sisters, and become caught up in the ‘feral community’, I had rather forgotten what normality was. But it was the man’s joke about the hunt which brought my mind back to reality, and there stirred within me a passionate longing for the sun, for the air on my fur, for aloneness. No, it was not just a longing to be alone. It was a desire to be myself. Everything that had happened to me since my brother died had somehow or other contrived to stop me being myself. Yes, even in the happy days of recovery with the Sisters. And in that simple reflection of the man – that if I was let out of my cage I would want to chase the mice – there breathed an echo of that far-off country in which I had always been the citizen, but which I had never known or seen: that place whither, from my exile, one day I would be bound. Whether it was a place or a cat, I did not know.
It was the feeling that the old Major had awoken in me when he spoke of ‘taking to the road’.
It is a longing for home, which now and here no home could satisfy: it is a permanent sense of exile. In it, I was looking forward to the alluring and unknown future, but in that looking forward, there was this element of a return, the feeling that one day, at last, I would be back in that state of perfect happiness with which I had begun to be conscious: that state before I even opened my eyes, in the back bedroom of some unknown house, that profound state of security and love.
Is that what I felt? Or just an eagerness to be away? I stood on my hind legs and clawed at the wire of the cage, calling out with anguished excitement. They were opening other cages before mine, and I wanted to be free! Why not come to me! To me! To me!
At each cage, one or other of the liberators themselves let out exclamations of horror at what they saw there. My friend and neighbour who had been mutilated in the ‘sleep’ experiment was the worst off. But other cats there were in a terrible condition. Some poor devils who had been having the same shampoo treatment as myself had already gone blind, and staggered to and fro, uncertain of what was happening, calling out with anxiety. Were they free, as it felt? Or were they merely being led away to worse tortures and viler humiliations? Others could hardly cry out because their shaved fur had been smeared with the colouring with which some women paint their mouths. Only in this case, the colouring had been somehow poisoned, and their lips were swollen or cracked or deformed. Others – thin and limping – were losing their fur and stared out from bald scrubby heads like demented monkeys. It was the sorriest gang of cats that I ever saw in my life. A few of the younger kittens were frisky and started to run about the laboratory, and to do as the liberators feared: they had leapt up on to a shelf where mice and guinea-pigs were groaning in cages, and were callously thumping at the bars. Who could blame them? A young cat is a young cat, and acts on instinct. It was the other lot who were acting out of the normal. They allowed themselves to be herded like so many sheep, and directed into a neighbouring room.
‘They’re not going to survive, are they?’ one of the women was saying sadly. ‘The kindest thing we could do to these animals is to kill them here and now. Look at this moggy. Oh, my poor pet!’ And she picked up a thin, yelping balding wretch who wa
s coughing badly. This woman and a helper were lifting the cats into large laundry baskets. Could it be that after all, these liberators were not our friends, but our enemies?
I did not propose to find out. In any case, I still had enough energy and enough curiosity to want to run around into the other rooms and shelves in the laboratory, and to see what the young kittens were seeing. So when my turn came to be liberated, I bounded through the door, biting the hand which freed me, and scratching with all claws out.
‘He’s a wild one, this.’
‘Has he bitten you, Sebastian?’
‘It isn’t serious.’
But a glance behind revealed that there was blood pouring from the bearded man’s hand, and the interest which this created gave me time to get out. Instinct told me not to linger in that place. I could see all I wanted to see, and more, without loafing around the cages as some of the young kittens were.
‘Cor!’ one of them was saying. ‘Look at that rat.’
‘It isn’t a rat, it’s a gerbil.’
‘Hello, darling! Like to come out with me!’ called the cruel young cats to the terrified little creature in its cage.
‘You’ll never get through the door hammering like that.’
‘Oh, yeah! Well you try if you’re so clever!’
‘Cats!’ I called. ‘It isn’t worth staying there and quarrelling about a poor little animal in a cage. Probably if you ate it, it would poison you. We must get out.’
‘Pufftail’s right,’ said one of the young blades.
‘What did you say?’ I hissed back. ‘I am a cat of no name. Remember that.’
‘They all call you Pufftail,’ said the cheeky young tom – a ginger, it was. ‘We’ve taken to doing the same. We’ve seen you, pacing up and down in your cage as if you were a lion or something.’
‘You can stay if you like,’ I said, ‘but I am going, and if you take my advice, you’ll go too.’