The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  Thus engaged, she did not notice the large ginger cat that had been sitting silently for some time on top of the fence slip soft-footed to the ground behind her. The tabby markings of his coat swirled like a great, furry magnetic field in gorgeous, complex patterns from shoulder to tail – storms of ochre and orange and cream, marmalade and sienna, converging as if drawn by some powerful force to a nexus at his neck.

  The calico’s hindquarters swayed provocatively as she pursued the last remnants of meat deep inside the chicken. Her glorious tail waved in the air.

  The ginger cat made himself comfortable on the warm planking and watched this show with considerable pleasure.

  ‘Well, well,’ he mused aloud. ‘My afternoon has brought me a number of blessings. A gentle breeze on a humid day. Half a boudin sausage down at the park. The remnants of a fine chilli dog just by the tram-stop. And now – just as my contemplations reach the conclusion that I am a sorry no-good vagabond with whom no self-respectin’ female is ever likely to spend her time – I come down here and what do I find?’ He fanned his whiskers appreciatively. ‘Why, a calico cat with the most entrancin’ rump that I ever did see. My day sure is lookin’ up. Tell me, honey: what brings a beautiful lady like yourself down to this sad shore?’

  Deeply entrenched in the parson’s nose, Sealink heard his words as a hollow blur. ‘Hold up, honey. My attention is engaged elsewhere right now,’ she muttered. She got hold of a last strand of meat and wrestled to extract it. Her considerable haunches swayed and jounced. This was too much for the ginger cat. With a growl of desire he launched himself upon her, burying his teeth where the back of her neck should have been – only to meet two-day-old chicken-bone and slippery sinew. Feeling his unsolicited weight and plain intentions, Sealink howled in outrage. She backed out of the carcass, and, whirling like a dervish, fastened herself to his throat. He shot skywards until gravity intervened and Sealink was detached, spitting with fury.

  Down on the boardwalk again, he backed carefully away from her, a shocked expression on his strangely-marked face. Sealink noted how an irregular black patch spread itself across one ear and eye, lending him a distinctly untrustworthy air.

  ‘What d’you think you’re playing at?’

  The marmalade cat stretched out his neck, cleared his bitten throat, looked shifty.

  ‘Well, honey, it sure looked like a invitation to me.’

  Sealink growled.

  ‘How could any red-blooded male resist? What could be more alluring than the sight of such a fine, mature queen offerin’ herself like that?’

  Sealink gave him a hard stare. He looked back at her and the lazy eye in the middle of the black spot drooped, so that for a moment Sealink thought he had winked. She felt the short fur on the top of her head bristle.

  Suddenly she thought, ‘Why, he ain’t but a boy,’ and laughed.

  ‘Honey, I was eatin’! I wasn’t offerin’ myself, to you or any male. And I don’t take too kindly to bein’ called old, either.’

  The tomcat, embarrassed, set about an elaborate toilette, starting with his face and front paws.

  ‘So what’s your name?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Red.’

  ‘Figures.’

  ‘And where do you call home, babe?’ she enquired.

  ‘This burgh is where I first seen the light of day,’ Red explained. ‘But foreign places have not been foreign to me, I confess; and though I return here every so often, home is just ’bout anywhere I lay my head.’ And indeed, despite his Southern drawl, he had a smell the calico recognized. It was the smell of docks and truckstops, cardinal points on the long, genial road to nowhere. ‘My story’s easy told. I’ve been places where the nights are sweet with lilac, and places not so sweet. I’m a cat you don’t meet every day, a cat of no fixed abode—’ he gave her a look that had already shattered a heart or two along the way ‘—and I like it like that.’

  Sealink smiled into her fur at this callow Delta spiel, culled from the monologues of the travelling toms Red had met on his journey: it was one she had rehearsed a time or two. She warmed towards him in consequence, and found herself saying, ‘I know that feelin’. I’m from just about anyplace myself.’

  She deliberated for a moment, then, deciding that she might trust him with her difficulties, went on, ‘I come back here looking for kittens.’

  Red treated her to his sensual, lop-sided stare.

  ‘Might still be able to help with that,’ he offered.

  ‘In your dreams, sonny. I come back looking for some kittens I already had.’ Sealink appraised the territory. ‘I have to say I find things changed. Soon’s I leave the market highway, I get set upon by some old white mog with his skin hanging off him like a second-hand coat. Jeez, did he smell! Then this little scrawny female tells me I gotta check in with Madam Kiki ’fore I walk the boards of this town. Now I come down here, a place known to swarm with cats, and all I find is you.’

  ‘Guess you just got lucky, babe,’ said Red. Then he shrugged. ‘Cat’s don’t pass their time here no more. Folks ain’t so friendly as they were.’

  ‘Honey, this is the City of Cats. There are darn near a million of us here: every one fed, directly or indirectly, by human bein’s: what are you tellin’ me?’

  The marmalade cat regarded her askance.

  ‘You been away too long,’ he said.

  4

  The Laboratory

  The cat known only as Animal X passed his time with four other cats, in a five-chambered metal cabinet which left only their heads free to move. There were other cabinets nearby – though Animal X couldn’t see them – and other cats in those cabinets. Some of them had been afraid when they were first brought here. Some of them had been angry. Now they accepted their situation. The only thing they couldn’t get used to was not having enough mobility to groom themselves. The strain of this left them dull-eyed. Their necks were chafed into sores by the enamelled edge of the cabinet. In an attempt to relieve the irritation this caused, they stared outwards away from each other all day while human beings came and went around them, treating them as if they weren’t there and saying things like, ‘Hanson wants the work-ups as of yesterday, but he won’t say why.’ Or, ‘We can do the blood now, on its own, but it won’t show anything. Doesn’t he know that?’ These people never touched the cats in the cabinets. They didn’t need to.

  ‘Doesn’t he know that?’

  Of all the things the human beings said this interested Animal X the most, because he knew so little.

  He had no idea who he was. He certainly didn’t know himself by the label Animal X. The life he lived did not require anyone to call him anything. It only required him – so he supposed – to feel pain. He woke up and he was in pain; he was in pain and then he slept. Something had been done to him. He felt a fool at having to stand there in one place all day, he felt as if it was his own fault. ‘Somehow I got caught,’ he would tell himself. He smelled his own smell suddenly, and a kind of shame went through him. He was dirty. Worse, there was a soft place in his field of vision where whatever it was had been done to him. He didn’t remember it, that was the odd thing. Sometimes he kept very still in case it was done to him again. ‘I want to avoid that,’ he thought. Thinking was difficult for Animal X. Thinking had been taken away from him with everything else. The soft place in his visual field was matched, somewhere deep in his head where thinking should have been carried on, by a kind of lesion. Some days everything was sucked into that gap or black wound and he was hardly there at all; others, at least he knew he was alive. On his best days he thought of himself, in his confused way, as a voice in a vacuum, a monologue filled with the facts of a dull life. He didn’t know who he was. He barely knew he was a cat. But his body remembered, and, at night, in the cabinet, where no-one could see them, his weak, withered legs kicked and trembled as, in dreams of their own, they tried to run him away from his prison.

  *

  A window was set high up in the room somewhere behind
Animal X’s head. He had never seen it, but he knew it was there by the parallelogram of sunlight projected onto the white-painted wall in front of him. He knew that shifting flattened lozenge by heart. He had watched as it changed shape stealthily, hour to hour, across more days than he could count. At the end of the long afternoons the light from the window warmed each object it found, making everything, even in that place, seem friendly and familiar. The air became a rich, creamy-golden substance, less like air than pure colour. You forgot the ammoniac smell of the trapped cats around you. Light fell through the air in a single slanting bar; dust motes fell gently through the light, like dandelion seeds.

  Animal X thought, ‘Dandelion seeds!’

  He thought, ‘I wonder if—’

  He thought, ‘No.’

  He had forgotten what a dandelion seed was, if indeed he had ever known. But he enjoyed the words as they drifted up out of the soft place in his head, then back down again, slowly losing their shape and coherence. And, whatever else he thought, he had no doubt that the words, and the light – especially the light – reminded him of some other life he had once lived. Things stirred and flickered just out of sight at the back of his mind. He couldn’t remember what he was remembering: but whatever it was had been part of a more comfortable existence – any rate, a more interesting one. These fragments of memory made him both happy and inexpressibly sad.

  *

  On a good day Animal X could just see, out of the very corner of his eye, the heads of the nearest cats to him in the cabinet. (A better view could be had by turning his head, but if he did that he was given a sharp reminder of the sore that went round his neck like a collar.) Next to him on his right was a cat so depressed it never spoke. This cat had replaced a very lively female, dimly but fondly remembered by Animal X as ‘Dancey’. (Dancey – Animal D – had never stopped talking. Everything she said began with the announcement, ‘As soon as I get out of here—’) On his left was Stilton, Animal B. He liked Stilton and the silent cat. Living so close, they were important to him. If they smelled a bit strongly, it was a smell to wake up to, a dependable smell. If there was something odd about the shape of their heads, well, something had been done to all the cats here, and perhaps there was something wrong with the shape of Animal X’s head too.

  Stilton had been in the cabinet longer than any of the others. He predated both Dancey, whose departure Animal X had witnessed, and ‘the Longhair’, a cat Dancey herself had often remembered fondly. Stilton had got his name because he always talked about Stilton cheese. He would stare into space for a bit and then say, as if he was continuing a conversation that had already started, ‘Now, what you can get if you go to the factory shop (well, what my owners used to get anyway), is seconds. A bit overripe perhaps, you see. A bit runny. So for seventy pence you can get this great wheel, this whole cheese. It’s a lot, but they’d split it with their friends. I’d seem them eat it after their supper, lumps as big as your head. Lumps that big.’ But, however much Stilton liked his favourite cheese, he couldn’t finish the imaginary piece he always had with him. ‘Look at that!’ he would say in astonishment, and then offer some to Animal X. ‘I love Stilton, but this is just too much.’ His voice was full of the regretful awe of the truly great eaters when they are forced to acknowledge defeat. ‘Can you imagine eating this much Stilton? It’s not often I’m stumped. I’ll say that.’

  Animal X could never think how to respond to this.

  ‘It is big,’ he would try. Or, ‘It’s certainly big.’

  But what he said didn’t seem to matter anyway, and after a moment or two Stilton would go on, ‘Never mind. The old girl’ll come by, she’ll be along soon enough.’ He nodded to himself in a satisfied way. He was always waiting for the ‘old girl’, who seemed to be his mate – or perhaps one of his owners. The old girl liked Stilton almost as much as he did. ‘She’s bound to come by. She’ll help us polish it off.’

  Silence would descend for a moment before he added reminiscently, ‘Oh yes, I love Stilton.’

  ‘I hate it,’ said Animal X.

  This exchange took place daily. Sometimes, to vary things, and so that his friend shouldn’t feel too hurt, Animal X would reply not with, ‘I hate it,’ but with, ‘I suppose I quite like it sometimes. For a treat.’

  He wondered if – in the days before his own arrival in the cabinet, in the golden days of Dancey and the Longhair perhaps – Stilton had ever talked about anything else. He wondered if he should admit that he had no idea what Stilton was, no idea what ‘pence’ were. He wasn’t even sure about cheese, though he thought he remembered something like it.

  *

  The two cats on the far side of the cabinet rarely joined in. That was the nature of this kind of captivity: in the cabinet, two animals were always behind you. But Animal X knew they held their own conversations. He heard them talking in the night. They asked each other the same question all the cats asked: ‘Can you remember who you were? I mean, before the cabinet? Can you?’ Neither of them could, although they tried hard enough. After all, they were cats: they knew how to persevere. They tried so hard that, in the end, they were making up stories about themselves. They tried out memories the way a human being tries on clothes, picking them up and then putting them down apparently at random.

  ‘I was a town cat, me. Oh yes. It was back yards every night, back yards and singing and bad sisters, out on top of the wall where everyone could see. It was one long party for us, and no regrets!’ Then, after a pause, ‘I’ve got a bit of a funny neck now, but I’ve got no regrets.’ Next night, the same cat would be claiming, ‘Sometimes I think I must have lived on a farm. You know? Because I remember the smell of straw, and the warm breath of the cows.’

  ‘You remember that, do you?’

  ‘I do. Sometimes I think I do remember that.’

  So their bemused dialogue droned on into the night, thoughtless and obsessive, broken by longer and longer pauses, until near dawn it petered out.

  ‘Can you see what colour I am? I’ve got this feeling I was a tortoiseshell.’

  By then, though, Animal X was asleep.

  Sometimes he believed he had had another life than this one, sometimes not. One thing was clear: when he tried to remember the things that happened to him before he came here, his head hurt even more. Generally, he accepted that his life now would always be pain.

  *

  Plenty went on in the room, even if you could only see directly forward from your cabinet. There was a white door with a small square of glass in it, and people came in and out through that at most times of the day, though rarely at night. They were always talking. With a sigh and a shake of the head: ‘Figures that simply don’t mean anything unless they’re backed by observation.’ And then: ‘I know he said that. But look at his track record.’ They all had the same white coat on, but each one had a different smell, and their shoes creaked on the polished wooden floor. Animal X knew every dip in the shiny, pitted surface where it stretched between him and the door. He had even seen into the corridor outside: that was like a country in itself. And what a day when an insect got in, and you could follow its long, puzzled, looping passes across the room! He knew by heart the objects in front of him. An examination table on which were arranged a clipboard, a thermometer, and a powerful long-necked lamp; two white metal cupboards with glass fronts through which he could make out cardboard cartons, brown glass bottles, complex, sharp-edged shapes; the white door with its scuffed kickplate and satin-finish handle; then, on the wall itself, a cork board covered with pieces of paper which lifted and rustled in the draught when the door was opened or closed.

  *

  One day the door opened and a human being in a white coat came in from the corridor carrying a wire cage. It walked across Animal X’s field of vision from left to right, called something to one of its colleagues, and passed out of sight. Animal X heard it talking behind him, then another door opened and closed, and it was gone. The whole transaction took place in a minu
te, but remained sharp and clear in the watching cat’s mind. The human backed awkwardly in through the door, banging the cage against the door-frame. It crossed the room, its gait made awkward and lopsided by the weight and size of its burden. It exchanged a few words, then dropped the cage and left. It seemed relieved. That was that: but, in those few moments. Animal X’s life had begun to change again, although he couldn’t know that.

  In the cage was a creature of some kind. He caught such brief glimpses of it. It had glorious red-gold fur. Its eyes glittered a kind of hot jade colour, with unlikely specks of silver. It was very agitated, turning ceaselessly back and forth in its own length, spitting and hissing, often throwing itself against the wire so hard that the man carrying it staggered sideways suddenly and swore. Animal X’s immediate thought was, ‘It doesn’t belong in here, not with us. It’s too good to be in with us.’ After that his impressions were confused and contradictory. Was it a cat at all? If so, it was clearly a kitten. Yet, despite its leggy, slightly unformed lines and immaturity of face, it was bigger than many a full-grown tom – he had never seen a kitten so big. Before he could decide anything, it had vanished. But he was to see more of it, almost immediately. They had difficulty getting it out of its cage. And then, while they were trying to transfer it to a cabinet, it escaped.

  Much of this took place behind Animal X’s head. All he heard were shouts from the human beings – ‘Look out, just pull it out of there, can’t you?’ ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it, it’s OK.’ ‘Bugger!’ – and a bubbling, ululating wail which rose suddenly into the fine mad high-pitched shriek of outrage all those confined cats remembered so well. Then the new animal streaked into view, low to the ground, ears flat, eyes bulging. It stopped for an instant in front of Animal X’s cabinet to gaze back over its shoulder at the pursuit. It was a male kitten, all anger and beauty, piss and vinegar, but Animal X could see how much fear was mingled with its rage. ‘Hide now,’ he heard himself advise quietly. ‘You can get out later, when one of them opens the door.’ He was immediately aware what a counsel of despair that was. Sides heaving, hindquarters dropped protectively, every muscle bunched and hard under the short, velvety coat, body rocking to the beat of its own heart, the kitten stared up at him with a kind of empty defiance. For a moment he thought it would acknowledge him, tell him contemptuously, ‘I’ll never be trapped like you.’ Instead it spun round and rushed away, to be followed an instant later by three or four human beings, all hands and shoes and spectacles. Their huge dull faces red and sweating, they grunted and stumbled after the escapee; while, unknown to them, the cabinet cats cheered it on. ‘Go on,’ they called. ‘Go on!’