by Gabriel King
That kitten had come into their lives from nowhere, and passed in half a minute from a zero to a legend. Hopes they never knew they had were invested in him. When he hid, they looked away, in case his pursuers should follow their line of sight. When he upped and ran, their feet scrabbled and scratched uselessly in the cabinets. They were trying to run on his behalf, and at the same time catch for themselves a little of his wild speed and freedom. They were filled with elation and a kind of savage pride. The kitten was undauntable. He was all energy. No cat in there had ever put up such a fight. If it looked as if the pursuit had its hands upon him, he could always find another ounce of pace. He stretched himself and ran and ran. He leaned into the corners. He was under the examination table in the blink of an eye. He was behind the cabinets. He was up and down the aisles between them in blurred figures of eight with his claws scraping for purchase on the slick and shiny floor. When nothing else would do, he seemed to be able to run round the very walls in defiance of gravity itself. It was then that the silent cat on Animal X’s left spoke the only words anyone in that place had ever heard him say.
‘Did you see that?’ he asked, in a quiet but clear voice. ‘He went round there like the Wall of Death.’ And then, much louder, to the kitten itself, ‘Go on, my son! Give ’em the bloody Wall of Death!’ None of the cabinet cats had any idea what he meant by this; but they took up the call – ‘Wall of Death! Wall of Death!’ – and, in the aftermath of these events, for a few days at least, Wall of Death became the nickname of the silent cat.
If the kitten heard any of this, he gave no sign. Favourite son or no, he had his own motives. He had his own life to live. Even as they egged him on, he was losing it. Animal X saw with dismay how tired he had become. He had burned himself up, and there was nowhere left to hide. His efforts became increasingly desperate. Eyes rimmed white with panic, he threw himself repeatedly against the closed door. He tried to get under the cupboard but the gap was too small. Towards the end, trapped among the feet of the human beings, whining and bubbling angrily, he made them pay. He rocked back on his haunches. His claws shot out, his teeth flashed, drops of blood hung in the air like a spray of scarlet fuchsia. ‘Christ! It got me!’ they shouted, backing away with nervous skips and jumps, shaking their fingers, staring at one another in astonishment. But eventually one of them went and fetched a pair of scarred leather gloves and a needle full of sleep, and after that it was soon over. The glorious savage, brought to bay in a corner by the cupboard, suddenly became silent and passive and was taken away, dangling at arm’s length like the empty pelt of a cat, out of Animal X’s sight.
There was a shocked and empty pause in the cabinets.
Then someone whispered, ‘Did you see the eyes on him? Weird!’ And someone added, ‘He was something to catch, that one.’ And someone else said, ‘It’s a shame.’
Suddenly, full of excitement, they all began to talk at once, shouting from cabinet to cabinet across the white room of their captivity, brought together in a way they had never been before. Animal X said nothing. He was saddened by this proof that life is, indeed, only capture, silence and the cage: only pain.
*
For some days afterwards the laboratory was quiet. Things went back to normal. The sunshine moved across the white wall, beginning a little earlier every day, lasting a fraction longer. No-one seemed to know which cabinet the gallant kitten had ended up in, if it had ended up in a cabinet at all. There were those that whispered it had not; they hinted at worse. As this rumour spread, conversation between the cabinets died out. Their occupants shrugged to themselves and went back to the long haul. Wall of Death – who had said nothing more anyway – became again the Silent Cat and stared ahead of himself all day. The human beings, perhaps, had received a reminder. They were a little more wary of their charges; but there was no more or less dried food in the stainless steel feeders than usual. The cats were fed last thing, just before the staff left, so that every evening the room was full of a sound like stones being sorted in a tin. Animal X regarded listlessly this manufactured stuff, with its strong but somehow unappetizing smell of fish products, and then, as usual, ate half of it.
‘Sometimes,’ Stilton told him as they ate, ‘we’d have a nice bit of blue. That’s a mould of course, they get the cheese like that by encouraging a mould to grow in it.’
‘I think they’ve encouraged a mould to grow in this,’ said Animal X.
‘A bit of blue can make a nice change.’
*
Animal X often woke up before the other cats in the laboratory. Despite himself he loved the dawn. He loved the deepened silence around the first chirp of a bird, the edge of silver on things. He liked to be awake then, and know that everyone else was asleep. It made him feel warm towards them. Sometimes dawn dressed the room with pinks and golds; sometimes it stole in feathery grey, and a faint prickle of rain could be heard falling on the vegetation outside the unseen window; but, good weather or bad, it was filled with promise. No matter how ill he was, he couldn’t stop himself from feeling optimistic. He thought he had probably loved dawns in his previous life, too.
Four or five days after the arrival of the kitten, he opened his eyes and looked around puzzledly. The room was too warm. There was a kind of hush. He shook his head. Things felt wrenched: barely awake, he already knew the day was out of shape. It had broken the wrong colour, yellow on the edge of gold, increasingly tinged with a strange, hot, transparent green, like light falling through thick foliage.
‘Well now,’ he asked himself, ‘what’s this?’
The light intensified as he watched. It fizzed and crackled silently, like a burning fuse. The laboratory warmed under its touch. It was like high summer, ‘Like the light,’ he found himself thinking, though he had no idea where the thought came from, ‘in some foreign land.’
It was hot now. It was very hot. All around him, the sleeping cats were bathed in light. It thawed their strained, uncomfortable attitudes. They sighed without knowing it, and relaxed, and did not wake, but for the first time in many months rested as if they had forgotten where they were. The light flickered about them, full of the power and humour of itself. Here and there it seemed to gather and spark. It glittered and crackled. It drew itself away for a heartbeat, during which Animal X held his breath. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he told himself. ‘Never. I know I would have remembered anything like this.’ Outside, every bird in the world began to sing suddenly. The fuse of the dawn burned and burned, then ignited in a great soft roar. A green flame exploded beneath the ceiling, spread rapidly, roiled down and across the laboratory floor. Everything in its path caught fire. Everything it touched was engulfed. Everything in the room began to fly apart, in complete silence. The cabinets were pulled to pieces and thrown about; equipment toppled through the burning air; the very walls tumbled outwards and away, pulled and twisted, as they went, into dust and detritus and falling bricks.
Animal X heard a voice say, ‘Even this.’ All the air was sucked out of him and he too was whirled away. He went end over end through the sky – forelegs splayed in front of him, feet spread, claws out as if they could find purchase on the air to slow him down – and landed in a vague, unending dream of kittenhood. He was very young. His mother was close. His brothers and sisters tottered and fought around her. They bounced and sprang. They were so safe! surrounded by something that stretched away in all directions and yet cupped them like a hand. He could feel it. Was it love? What was it? It cupped Animal X too tight, and everything he knew was taken away.
*
When he woke again, he was chilled right through. His fur was wet. The light was grey. He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the laboratory door. Something was wrong with it. It was hanging off one hinge, leaning into the room like a drunken man into an alley. He stared for a moment, then, not yet able to understand quite what he was seeing, let his gaze be drawn away. The laboratory had been opened up in a dozen other places. The windows had blown o
ut, the ceiling had sagged and split. Loops of cable hung down. The floor was thick with splinters of wood and shards of glass, the air with plaster-dust through which fell a fine cold rain. The examination table, site of so many indignities and so much pain, lay buckled and barely recognizable at the foot of a wall. It looked as if it had been thrown there by some enormous angry hand, which had gone on without a pause to dissect every cabinet into its component panels. Barely damaged, these lay distributed across the floor in curious, eddying patterns, like hundreds of playing-cards scattered on a table-top.
In the aftermath of the explosion, it was clear, many of the captive cats had taken their chance and fled the laboratory; but many others, too far gone to move, had been released by death. Animal X stood shivering in the wreckage. He gazed out dully over the windrows of silent animals, cats of all colours, coats clotted with neglect, patchy with eczema, sodden with the falling rain. Damp air moved over them and brought Animal X the sour simple smell of mortality. He felt an awful cry of misery and rage well up inside him, then fade away unexpressed. What would be the point? Intervention had been welcome to all these animals made old and miserable before their time. They lay in relaxed postures among the tangled wires and detached implants of their captivity, happy to accept the embrace of the green fire. Many of them had stretched out their forelegs in welcome, the way cats sometimes do when they are rolling in the sunshine.
Without the cabinet around him. Animal X felt alone and exposed. He stood shivering dully in the wreckage – his spine a bony, uncomfortable curve, his tail tucked tightly into his hindquarters – trying to make sense of it. He had been there as long as any of them. He had seen it all come and go. Why was he alive? What was he to make of that secret dawn and jungle light?
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ he kept telling himself. ‘I don’t know what’s happened.’
Suddenly he said it out loud.
At that there was a stealthy movement in the remains of the cabinet. With considerable struggle and disconnected effort, the cat called Stilton hauled himself into view. He was coated in greyish dust. He looked down at himself in horror, made three staggering steps forward and fell over.
‘Are we dead?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ said Animal X. ‘All these others are.’
‘Come and sit here,’ said Stilton.
They curled themselves as tightly as they could around one another. Shaking fits passed through them. They tried to lick one another clean, but their bodies were so relieved to feel the touch of another cat again that they fell asleep immediately. They stayed that way for much of the morning, unwilling to leave the site of their old cabinet – though they kept a distance between themselves and the bodies of the cats they had shared it with. Animal X found himself remembering those three with more affection and less discomfort than he had expected. ‘The Silent Cat had given up speaking because he didn’t have anything left to say about life,’ he thought. ‘Death must have been a release for him.’ Then he reminded himself, ‘I never knew the others, though I heard them talk. They might have been interesting cats.’ He thought, ‘I would have known them better if they’d been next to me in the cabinet.’ His memory was already garbled and confused, so that some repeated phrase of theirs had become mixed up with the luminous dawns, the rattle of hard food in a tin tray, the flutter of paper on the cork board by the door. It all seemed one, and surprisingly like a life.
*
The rain stopped. The sun came out. Mid-afternoon saw the two survivors poking about independently in the ruins.
Cabinet life had so wasted them that they had to teach themselves to walk again. Animal X’s progress was punctuated by unexpected skips and jumps, sudden shies and spasms of his depleted nervous system as it readjusted to the proper life of a cat. At first he felt rather excited by these sensations; but it was a vigour that proved illusory. He hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. Despite his excitement, despite the optimism the watery sunshine had brought with it, he had no stamina, no condition, no muscles worth speaking of. Stilton was worse. He limped. His fur, draggled into hard, crusted little curls, tasted of blood when you tried to groom him. There was something pushed-in about his ribs. Sometimes he forgot where he was and stood swaying and blinking and repeating quietly, ‘Now, my owners, you see—’
Once he called over to Animal X, ‘Aren’t we a pair, eh? What a pair!’
Whenever they met, they backed off and stared at one another, surprised all over again, trembling with fear of the future.
‘You’re a tabby then,’ said Animal X.
‘I’m starving.’
‘There isn’t any food left. I’ve looked and looked.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘It can’t hurt to try again.’
They were wobbling stiff-leggedly about in the dust when the golden kitten appeared. It walked up quietly out of nowhere and stood patiently in front of Animal X. Though it was clearly distressed, it couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. Oh, it was still all beauty and thuggishness, a kind of glowing, raging overstatement of itself. A week in the laboratory had done nothing to change that. The muscle still bunched and shifted beneath its sandy, luminous coat. It still moved with the kind of fluid absent-mindedness common to young animals. One eye still flickered with lights like specks of gold in jade. It had lost the other in the explosion.
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Animal X.
He couldn’t think of anything better to say. Despite a sticky discharge at the inner corner, he thought the wound looked clean. ‘What do I know?’ he asked himself. ‘You’ll be all right with us,’ he tried to reassure the kitten. It stared silently ahead. The lids were already drawing closed across the insulted eye-socket to seal it off. When Animal X looked closer, he saw that they had been sewn together some days before. Humans had taken the eye. The explosion wasn’t to blame at all.
‘Can you remember who you are?’
The kitten looked away from him. It trembled a little, then stood closer and, still looking away, began to purr loudly.
‘Come on,’ Animal X said tiredly. ‘We’d better get you out of here.’
5
Leave it to Leonora
Tag sat on a shelf in the abandoned pet shop at Cutting Lane.
It was the end of a wet afternoon, and the light was fading to brown the other side of the dirty, rain-streaked windows. Soon, the street outside would echo briefly to the sound of hundreds of human feet. The sodium lamps would turn it orange. Then the noise would die away, and the pavements would belong to cats again. ‘The night,’ his old mentor had once advised him, ‘is always the best time for doing the work of the Majicou.’ So – though he could have done that kind of work at any time from Cutting Lane, so central was it in the web of the wild roads – Tag sat on his shelf to wait.
‘Come on, night,’ he thought.
As soon as he had finished here, he planned to visit a pie stall three streets away and eat battered scallops, white pudding. In the meantime he got up, shook himself, and was just turning round to find a more comfortable position when he heard a noise at the back of the shop.
Scrape.
It was like claws on bare wood. He heard it once and then again. ‘What’s this?’ he thought. Scrape. Click. Scrape. Like a lame animal circling quietly in the back room.
Something had come along the wild roads to him, something that owed allegiance to the original master of Cutting Lane. Tag got to his feet and backed carefully along the shelf until he was hidden behind some thick spiderwebs. With no-one to teach him how to be the Majicou, he had learned caution early. Most of the proxies were harmless. Some weren’t. He never showed himself until he was sure.
Out loud, he said, ‘No-one asked you here, but you won’t be hurt.’
Scrape.
‘Come into the light,’ he said.
A thick voice answered, ‘I saw something the Majicou would pay to see.’
‘There are no payments her
e.’
‘Then there is no news.’
‘Come further into the light.’
Click. Scrape.
Perhaps it had once been a dog. Perhaps it had wandered onto the Old Changing Way and something had happened to it there, and it could no longer go back to whatever life it had once enjoyed. It was very old now, as if the wild roads had kept it alive too long. It was large and shapeless, and it had a large, shapeless smell. Coarse brown and black hair with an oily look. A misshapen head which nodded up and down as it walked on its three legs. Eyes milky with cataract. There was something indeterminate about all these things. Its voice was like a voice strained through kapok. Tag had dealt with it before.
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘You are not the Majicou.’
‘Yes I am.’
‘Then come with me.’
‘Why should I?’
‘What do you know about death?’
‘Less than I could.’
‘Then come with me and learn.’