by Gabriel King
But Tag answered, ’Empty speech, Kater Murr. Empty promises. A cat like you can’t hurt the Majicou.’ Then, quietly, to Leonora, ‘Don’t follow too closely. Just in case.’ The cat flap opened – a thick, sour smell poured out, like old food and ammonia – and closed again behind him.
Silence.
Leonora waited as long as she dared, looked fearfully round the yard in case Kater Murr had associates hidden among the buddleia bushes, then pushed her way inside. It was a kitchen, almost dark, with a few lines of grey light falling across a worn tile floor and a shallow stone sink full of green mould. Human beings had stopped using it years ago. That sour, disturbing smell hung over everything: but the kitchen was empty except for Tag, licking himself unconcernedly in a dim corner. Leonora felt let down.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
‘He won’t bother us now until we leave. He is the gatekeeper of this place.’
She didn’t like the way he stressed ‘this place’.
‘It looks like a house to me,’ she said, in an attempt to appear unconcerned.
Tag raised the paw he had just washed. He eyed it with approval. ‘Then come this way,’ he invited, ‘and I’ll show you the Great Library of Uroum Bashou.’
The empty house murmured with traffic noises, as though a decade of passing cars lived in its peeling wainscots and half-open cupboards. Leo followed Tag up narrow flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs varnished years ago a sticky brown colour. Each landing was lit by a small dirty window; off the landings, doors opened into rooms empty and broken-looking – rooms with stale charred grates like open mouths – rooms which looked as if birds had taken up residence in them. ‘What is that smell?’ asked Leonora, wrinkling her nose; and when Tag advised, ‘You shouldn’t ask “what?” but “who?”’ stared over her shoulder as if the walls had quietly sprung to life behind her as she passed.
She was unprepared for the top of the house – where everything had been knocked into one huge room, now lighted by the dull gold-and-orange wash of a setting sun, which ran like hot metal through a series of skylights and onto the scene below – or for the animal who greeted them there.
Uroum Bashou had once danced and scampered in the alleys of Morocco – or so he claimed. Now he lived in some state, albeit in the cold north, and books surrounded him. Books large and small, books bound with green and brown leather or orange paper, books in drifts, books in rafts. Closed books, open books, books swooning into piles, books whose wings and backs seemed broken. Books had slipped from the walls and slithered across the floors like the moraines left behind by some strange retreating glacier from a vanished age of print. Among them, like a pasha on a cushion on a souk, sprawled the Reading Cat, a browny-black, short-haired, skinny, long-legged old thing, who nevertheless exuded the dignity of the expert, the confidence of the emeritus professor. The fur around his ears was threadbare, as if he was a toy from the little sharp head of which someone had thoughtlessly rubbed the velvet. His eyes, a dim amber, were flecked with the many things he knew. When he spoke, though, his voice was light and fluting, the voice of a eunuch like a musical instrument in a closed courtyard; and he often spoke of himself in the third person.
When he saw Leonora, he began to purr.
‘Uroum Bashou,’ he greeted her, ‘welcomes you, my dear. How can he help?’
‘We are looking for two kittens—’ Tag began.
Uroum Bashou ignored him.
‘I see,’ he said to Leonora, ‘that you are admiring the Tail of Uroum Bashou.’
She was indeed looking at it, but not perhaps with admiration. It was as skinny as he was, and there was something wrong with the tip of it.
‘Come closer. This is the story. In brief, a cat is born, a cat with a knot of tangled vertebrae at the end of its tail. Do you see? This is not a malformation, but rather the world trying to remember something. All well and good, you might think, and it is. But now things go immediately awry: because when a human hand is run lovingly down this tail, and catches in the knot instead of sliding smoothly off the end, well then, many things come to mind, and the owner thinks, “I must buy dates, or have dates bought for me.” Or it remembers, “I must have someone’s hands chopped off in the market today for thievery.” As a consequence, that cat’s first name, his given, or kitten-name, is Handkerchief.’
Uroum Bashou’s laugh was reedy and contemptuous.
‘To put it shortly, I was that kitten, and you see him before you, not much aged. That was before I learned to read, and understood my task. I am the Great Aide-Mémoire. Through me the world remembers. But what? What am I here to signify? I do not know.’
He shrugged a little.
‘That is my tragedy,’ he said.
Leo, who thought he had finished, opened her mouth to speak.
‘Oh, I know,’ he interrupted her. ‘You think me obsessed. I am. I will probably remain so.’ He brooded. ‘They called me Handkerchief, but what is that? Only the name of a kitten. So I learned to read. I read this: “Imagine a prince, handsome, gentle, black-haired; in his hand he holds the stripped and polished skull of a cat;” and this: “weasels”. I read: “smoke”, “sensuality”, “meringue”, “mystery!” I read everything I could find, and when I came into my power I called myself Uroum Bashou, the Elephant. The Elephant never forgets – I have read that.’
Leo stared at him. This time, she realized, he really had finished, and was waiting for her to say something. All she could think of was, ‘Have you seen my brother?’
At this he seemed to lose interest in her immediately, and turned to Tag.
‘What does the Majicou know?’ he asked.
‘Nothing that Uroum Bashou does not,’ Tag said. ‘The world turns—’
‘As ever.’
‘—as ever. But the wild roads… The wild roads are uncomfortable, Uroum Bashou. They have begun to take where they should give. One day they are reliable, the next day they are not. Something is out of joint.’
Uroum Bashou nodded his little threadbare head.
‘You walk wild roads,’ he acknowledged, ‘while the Elephant stays among his books: that is good. What does the Elephant know? This: there is more than one prophecy that speaks of a Golden Cat. This: the Golden Cat may not be what it seems. This: the Golden Cat may not be all of it, or the end of it. Do you see? I see that you don’t. And yet: there is a fuse burning in the world today. I do not know who lit it, or how. But something quite new is coming, and not just to us cats.’
Leonora inspected one of her front paws modestly.
‘I have often thought I might be the Golden Cat,’ she suggested.
Their heads went up, and they stared at her for a moment or two; then they went back to their talk.
‘Don’t mind me, I’m sure,’ said Leonora.
She reminded Uroum Bashou, ‘It must be one of us, you know.’
But he only said, ‘I believe all this began in Egypt, where we began the fatal relationship with men. Whatever happens will be one end of a great arc across the history of cats and human beings.’ And he urged Tag, ‘Don’t let yourself be diverted, as I believe your predecessor to have been, by simple oppositions. If the world is to be made new, the Golden Cat must be more than some simple piece of magic. To heal the world it must do more than cure the ills of cats, or settle their old scores.’ It was advice he had given before.
They spoke of such generalities for a moment, then Tag said, ‘This is no longer a matter of theory, Uroum Bashou. Now that kittens are missing, it is vital that you make the books reveal what they know.’
‘Missing kittens are never a good thing.’
‘A cat must take note of that,’ Tag suggested, ‘where he might ignore other things.’
Uroum Bashou inclined his head to show that he agreed. ‘I will interrogate the books,’ he promised. ‘On behalf of the New Majicou.’
After that there was a silence.
‘Your caretaker becomes more and more self-willed,’ said Tag eventually
. In a corner of the room, away from the fierce gold light of the evening, he had noticed a pile of books which looked as if someone had recently tried to pull them to pieces. Pages were scattered about like mauled doves; there were toothmarks on some of the board covers. ‘Did he do that? You should have a care, Uroum Bashou.’
A light laugh.
‘Kater Murr? There are days when his jealousy of my work is so great that he runs amok among the volumes, compelled to earn his name. He tears them with his great yellow nails. He does not understand them, so they are his rivals. He is barely feline. But he will never leave me.’
‘Don’t underestimate him, my friend.’
‘I am quite tranquil about the whole thing,’ said Uroum Bashou.
*
Even as they spoke, Leonora Whitstand Merril was prowling the Reading Cat’s house alone. At first she felt quite bold. She heard the murmur of conversation from above, and was both reassured and irritated by it. Leo had a great appetite for the particular: for things in themselves. She liked to get her nose into them. ‘You can’t get your nose into a generality,’ she told herself, poking it instead round an open door on the floor below the Library. Nothing. In another room, strips of wallpaper hung damply off the wall. Beneath them a mummified pigeon flopped, beak wide, eyes gone, one long wing extended in the fireplace. She dashed in and had a look; dashed out again. She hung off the lip of an empty drawer: newspapers, two coins with a dull, brassy smell, a bit of string. Really, it was all quite fun: but then, lower down, the stairwells darkened and seemed too narrow, and were further narrowed by the pervasive odour of ammonia, spoilt food, pheromones, as if she were continually having to brush past some other animal. By the time she reached the stairs to the ground floor the air was rank and solid, a substance rather than a smell. Leo hesitated, and lifted her head to listen. The mutter of conversation from the Library had grown faint and comfortless; three more steps down and it faded altogether. She was alone in a brown gloom, in some sort of stone-floored hallway. When she ran she could hear the shush and patter of her own paws. She stopped. She half-turned back. She listened. Something touched her foot. She stiffened. She leapt away. It was the head of a discarded broom, as big as a cat, its bristles chewed off by time. She crept back, neck extended, to make sure it was dead. Other objects loomed in the hall: a bag of cement, half-empty; some broken floorboards; a dusty bicycle wheel propped up against the wall. An old coat on a hook looked like a human being.
Eventually she came to the kitchen. There she wandered about for some minutes, nosing into corners, pushing her head into a chipped enamel breadbin to inhale its ghosts of mice, jumping up to teeter along the rim of the old sink. She skirted a pile of old leather shoes. Until she was satisfied it was unoccupied, she kept to the margins of the room. Then she trotted into the middle of it to have a look at the kitchen table, with its ancient chequered-plastic tablecloth. The rank odour was thick and solid there. Leo looked up and saw her mistake. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. The hair went up on her back. Staring away from the table as hard as she could, she began to inch out of the room. No decision of hers was involved. She directed her eyes down and away; and, very stiffly, and slowly, and carefully, her legs began to take her towards the door. Ever since she came into the kitchen, the guardian of that place had been sitting on the table-top in the soup of his own smell, watching her.
‘And what are you?’ he said quietly. ‘What are you, I wonder?’
He was an enormous, dirty, half-maimed old marmalade tomcat, with a broad flat head and ears chewed to mere frills of flesh a dirty pink colour. One cheek had collapsed, bashed in perhaps by some hurrying car or angry human foot: snaggle-teeth protruded on that side and, viewed front-on, gave his expression a left-hand grin, widened, cannibalistic, matching in ferocity the yellow claws which would no longer retract into his huge, cobby paws. His front legs were as bowed as a bulldog’s, as if with the effort of supporting his hard-packed, muscular front end. His orange fur had once been on fire with complex, beautiful patterns – flames and bars and stripes which had curled and curved all down his flanks. As a kitten, on fire with life, he had been justifiably proud of those signatures. Now they were caked and matted, patched with pink and black where the fur had fallen out. His eyebrows, wrecked in fights, were running sores. His ears crawled with mites. His voice was a battered growl, his laughter like gravel shaken in a tin: his scent was a nickname sprayed upon a wall.
‘Hello,’ said Kater Murr.
And he jumped down off the table, his eyes a blazing, potent yellow in the gloom.
Leo backed away.
‘I’m not here alone,’ she said.
Kater Murr put his head on one side.
‘You might as well be,’ he said.
Then he said, ‘A question you might ask yourself is, “Does he care? Does Kater Murr care I’m not alone?”’ He sat down suddenly and scratched one of his ears until it bled. ‘Kater Murr lives in a house,’ he said to himself in quite a different voice. ‘His ears hurt, but he welcomes that. His bones ache, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr cares about nothing.’ Leo continued to inch away from him, only to find that on the word ‘nothing’ Kater Murr had somehow slipped to his feet, gone round behind her, and placed himself smoothly between her and the door. ‘The gatekeeper,’ he explained, ‘though powerful, is a cat of considerable subtlety. You come here,’ he went on, ‘as you say, not alone, a kitten of a barely-credible colour, with no credentials—’
Leonora drew herself up.
‘I’m a princess, actually,’ she began to inform him; but then thought better of it.
‘You’re what?’ said Kater Murr. ‘Speak up.’
‘Nothing,’ said Leonora.
The gatekeeper sat down and scratched himself again. ‘His skin itches, but he welcomes that,’ he mused. ‘His ears grow deaf, but he welcomes that. Kater Murr is a cat in a million.’ Waves of bad smell issued from him.
He studied Leo and concluded, ‘Come to Kater Murr, my dear. You’re enough to make anyone wonder.’
Leo turned her head away from him.
Somehow she had got herself against a wall.
‘Come to the gatekeeper.’
‘Empty speech, Kater Murr,’ said a voice from the hallway behind him.
‘Tag!’ called Leonora.
At that exact moment there was a flurry of violence in the kitchen, a savage hiss, a scratch and shuffle of claws on tile. Paws were splayed, teeth were bared in the gloom, aggressive postures struck then suddenly folded. Light flickered off the points and edges of things. Everything seemed confused, too quick, too real, and Leo thought she was trapped in the kitchen with two much larger animals, one made of brass and the other of silver. It was only for an instant. Kater Murr’s smell flooded sickeningly over everything – then another smell, of musk and winter, powder snow on an icy wind, washed it away. There was a distant, fading roar. Then the Majicou was standing amiably beside her and saying, ‘I think we can go now, Leonora.’
She stared at him.
‘Did you see that?’ she said.
‘See what?’
‘In here. I— Never mind. You couldn’t have seen anything from the hall.’
Tag shook himself to settle his fur.
‘Not from out there,’ he agreed.
In the yard, somewhat recovered, she asked him, ‘So: what have we learned?’
Tag considered this gravely.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said; ‘but I’ve learned that Uroum Bashou has a more unruly servant than I imagined.’
Leonora shivered.
‘Why doesn’t he just leave?’
‘Where would he go? Who would look after him? They are locked together, those two. Without Kater Murr, the Reading Cat would have starved to death long ago. At the same time, Kater Murr is bound to Uroum Bashou by some emotional bond which drives him mad with frustration. They were kittens together. He loves the Reading Cat and hates him in one and the same breath.’
He l
ooked sidelong at Leo.
‘That might be hard for you to understand.’
‘It’s not hard,’ she said; but she was quiet for a moment, and when she next spoke it was to change the subject.
‘How did the Reading Cat get all his books?’ she asked.
Tag considered this.
‘His memories are confused, and sometimes he will admit that he has rearranged them to his own liking. I don’t think he came from Morocco – wherever that is. Some human being brought them here long ago, books and cats together. Here the books stay. And Uroum Bashou stays with them: but not for much longer, I think. He is getting old. And Kater Murr won’t hold back for ever. One day we will come to this place and find the Reading Cat dead. Kater Murr will snuff him out in a moment of rage, and spend the rest of his life regretting it.’
‘Well I can’t say I liked either of them,’ said Leo. ‘What’s the next plan?’ Then, before Tag could answer, ‘I know, I know: “Love the world and follow your nose.”’ She sighed. ‘There must be something quicker than that.’
‘Let’s go home now.’
*
That night the wild roads were difficult to navigate, even for a cat of the Majicou’s experience. For some reason winter had come to them in full summer. It would be gone by tomorrow: but now it was like walking in a cold deserted house, down long, twisted corridors howling with ghosts. You had to have your wits about you. On the way back, Tag lost his apprentice. He couldn’t be sure when, or how. When he arrived at the oceanarium, glad to be at home in the warm seaside night again, Leonora wasn’t there.
After he had waited two hours for her, he had to admit she wasn’t coming. By then, he had other problems.
Everyone else had vanished too.
He prowled the oceanarium, or sat outside on its doorstep. He searched the lanes and rooftops round about, calling, ‘Cy! Rags! Pertelot!’ but he didn’t dare go far in case they arrived while he was gone.
‘Leonora!’ he called. ‘You bad kitten!’
While he thought, ‘It was wrong of me to tease her like that in the house of Uroum Bashou. I was just showing off.’