by Gabriel King
She bent her head to the knot of string. The problem with manoeuvring the object was not just its weight, but its awkward size. There was no dignified way to proceed. Following the two sisters to the rear door of the storeroom, Sealink put her back into the task, dragging the parcel until her teeth ached.
*
‘Let’s open it.’
Red snuffed at the thing he and Sealink had half-carried, half-dragged the length of Orleans. Behind the St Louis Basilica, they had ducked into the cool, shady gardens of St Anthony, out of sight of human passers-by. The package lay between them, stubbornly enigmatic. Red pulled experimentally at the chewed string that bound the parcel, but it refused to budge. Bending his head lower, he started to tear at the ripped outer layer.
‘No!’ Sealink’s howl was outraged. She launched herself at him, knocking him away.
Red hissed at her, hurt and puzzled.
‘Oh come on! You know you’re just as curious as I am. We’re cats, ain’t we?’
Sealink fixed him with a savage scowl. ‘Get your goddamned teeth off it. Mess with this here box-thing and I’ll never find my kittens. You fancy explaining to the Bitch-Queen of New Orleans why her precious cadeau had arrived all in bits? You recall her inviting us to open it up, help ourselves? Huh? Do you?’
Red fiddled with a strand of string that had become stuck between his teeth and said nothing. He looked belligerent.
‘Besides, it smells wrong: I wouldn’t even want to know what’s in here.’
‘We could just take a peek. Wrap it up again…’
Sealink bit him.
‘Ow.’
*
Kiki regarded her cadeau avidly. She drooled. Having delivered the package she had resolutely and single-handedly dragged all the way from the garden behind the cathedral, Sealink stepped away, feeling light-headed and nauseous. Little black stars flared and died in her vision.
‘So.’ She tried to sound casual. ‘My kittens. What do you know about them? Where are they?’
The yellow queen could barely tear her eyes away from the parcel. She smiled. It was not a pleasant sight. When she lifted her head, her pupils were black pits of desire. ‘Closer than you think.’
‘Where?’
‘Cher, you performed a task for me and now I owe you a little bit of truth; but sometimes truth can be a painful thing. Maybe you not want to know what I know.’
Sealink sensed a double-cross. ‘And why would that be?’
The yellow queen rearranged her vast bulk, as if settling into some long tale. ‘Not all litters care to acknowledge their maman. Believe me, kittens can be mighty ungrateful, cher, their hearts as bitter as wormwood.’ She wiped what appeared to be a completely dry eye with her paw. ‘It can be most hurtful, when your very own kittens will not show you the love and respect you deserve. Soixante jours. Sixty days you carry them inside you. Sixty days of discomfort and anguish. You feed them; you give and give and give – oh, they suck so hard, it make you sore!’
She screwed her eyes tight shut and when she opened them again she had somehow contrived to make them shine with tears. Sealink looked on, unmoved and impatient.
‘Cut the crap. Where can I find them?’
‘Be polite!’ the old queen admonished. ‘You want them, you hear me out.’ Her eyes flashed dangerously. ‘And sometimes those who call you mother are not your own; and these are often the most grateful of all.
‘You had five babies, hein? They were taken away very young. Taken and cast aside. The humans who had taken you into their home left your babies avec le docteur, to be disposed of in, as they say “a humane fashion”; but the vet’s assistant, he is a greedy man. He save the money on the drugs that give them peaceful sleep: he leave them, just a few days old, out on the levee, wait for the tide to take them. That’s where I found them. Two were almost dead, gasping out their last breaths. I watched, watched them die. Yes: I was their last sight, les pauvres bébés. For the other three, I was their mother, cher: pas toi. Three babies, and all so fine they became. Fine and big like the mother who ran away.’
A thought started to form in Sealink’s head. It was unbearable. Kittens. When she thought of her kittens, it was as tiny scraps of fur: little balls of fluff no bigger than her paws, the way she had last seen them. Not as great big grown cats – cats with tails like plumes, hugely-furred tabby cats with an offensive manner—’
La Mère watched Sealink’s dawning realization with satisfaction.
‘Mais ouai, cher. You already met your daughters.’ The evil orange grin split her face. ‘Très nose-in-the-air for a pair of bastards!’ She wheezed. ‘I called ’em Puce et Guêpe – Flea and Wasp – for they was covered with fleas most they lives, and when they was tiny they was striped: but they never liked that much! They started to call theyselves Venus and Sappho: very grand names for such a trashy heritage! Moved up-market, soon’s they could. Got theyselves adopted at the Golden Scarab. Got they collars, had the op—’ she made a vulgar gesture, ‘—but they still has a healthy respect for La Mère. Very trustworthy, those two, I find. Very useful little princesses.’
Sealink’s heart felt like a lead weight, cold and gravid. ‘And what about my third kitten?’
Kiki La Doucette regarded her with slit eyes. She shrugged. ‘Two’s enough pain for now, ain’t it?’
The calico nodded dumbly. She turned to leave. Her eyes felt hot, and there was a terrible constriction in her throat. When she turned back to ask another question, the yellow queen was standing over the parcel like a predator with its kill. She sawed at the string with her appalling orange teeth, and the brown paper wrappings started to fall away like a sloughed skin: only to reveal glorious gold within: a box shaped like a figurine. La Mère scraped at the box. Gold paint flaked into the air. When she squinted, the calico could see that someone had punched apparently random holes in the sides of the box. From her vantage point, they looked almost like a face. As she stared, her curiosity for a moment getting the better of her pain, the box moved. Kiki La Doucette’s court drew round it. Their eyes were as empty as a moonlit sky, and they were waiting for something—
That was enough for Sealink. Ears back, head low, she fled.
*
Later that night the calico lay curled in an old favourite hollow beneath the boardwalk, dozing peaceably. When she opened her eyes just a slit, so that the world was comfortably blurred, she could see the moonlight on the Mississippi, a silver sheen like a secret wild road across the river. Kittens. What need did a cat of her age have of kittens? Let alone vast, snooty, tabby ones? Her trek from the Old World to the New had been no more than a wild-goose chase: a flurry of fuss and feathers. Well, she was still Sealink, and she would come to terms with this new disappointment. She shifted position, tucking her nose under her tail for added warmth, and was just starting to drift weightless among the stars when she became aware of another cat. Before she had time to register the scent, it had joined her in the hollow.
‘Hey, gorgeous,’ it said, its face obscured by the dark. ‘Move over, make room for a cold and lonely boy.’
The calico grinned into the night.
Red felt her grin like the tiniest change in air pressure against his whiskers and rolled against her back. And in that position they fell asleep, head on each other’s haunch, two cats alone against the world.
9
The Walkers
Animal X stood blinking in the sunshine.
At first, he couldn’t make much of what he saw. The ruined laboratory, and the small tidy new road that ran away from it in a straight line, were held in a quiet fold of land from which broad, gently sloping pastures rolled in every direction to skylines crowned with thickets and oak-hangers. The sun was hot. The sky was very blue and tranquil, except where, above one of the distant coppices, a lot of tiny black specks were wheeling and diving, calling out to one another in a kind of raucous cheerful creak.
Animal X watched them for some time. ‘That would be bedlam if you we
re close to it,’ he thought. For some reason the idea made him shiver.
The word ‘crows’ came unbidden into his mind. He examined it, then, nothing occurring to him, let it slip away. Immediately, it became available to him as a description. He looked up at the crows in the sky. ‘I’ve seen them somewhere before,’ he told himself. ‘But I can’t think where.’ That was the next step with everything, he supposed: to remember it. ‘You can call a thing a crow,’ he reflected, ‘but it’s no comfort if you can’t recall the last time you saw one.’ Over the next few days, many little pieces of his past would come into focus like this; while, however hard he tried to recover it, the past itself remained resolutely locked away from him.
A faint, pleasant breeze moved in his fur.
He had no idea where to go.
‘I suppose I’d better just start walking,’ he thought, and that was what he did. The first thing he passed was a signboard which said, if you could read:
LABORATORIES
Winfield Farm Site
After that, the little tarmac road gave way to a lane heavily shaded by trees. The lane wasn’t so neat. There was a narrow verge of vetches and couch grass; dog rose and nightshade, threaded through with old man’s beard, made tangled screens through which the glitter of water could sometimes be seen where it ran shallow and clear in the sandy bottom of a ditch. Insects launched themselves clumsily out of the flowers and blundered past, scattering pollen from their feet and wings. The thick, drugged scent of meadowsweet came and went. ‘I like this,’ thought Animal X. A minute or two later, he remembered Stilton and the kitten. He turned round and found they were walking a few yards behind him. Stilton looked frail and tired already, but he was talking excitedly to the kitten. The kitten seemed puzzled. It was less distraught, though; and there seemed to be less anger in its silence. When he listened. Animal X could hear Stilton say, ‘What you can get, you see, from the factory shop—’
They walked like this for some time. New sights waited round every corner. They saw human beings off in the distance across the fields. They saw a lake, green water that looked solid enough to stand on, with lily-pads and a heron on a post. They saw how the heat shimmered and danced above the land in the middle distance.
Towards midday the lane led them up to a broad black road down which huge energetic shapes roared and rushed. Waste paper blew up into the air, settled, blew up again. It was a very human place. There was a smell. Animal X and Stilton stood for a minute or two at the junction, wrinkling their noses, rocked dangerously by the passing airstream. Then they averted their faces in embarrassment – because they had forgotten, if they had ever known, what all this meant – and turned away. The kitten confronted things more stoically, as if it was determined to understand only the worst about the human world. It blinked its single eye.
‘Come on,’ said Animal X. ‘This is no good. We’ll find some other way to go.’
‘I’m hungry,’ Stilton said to the kitten. ‘Aren’t you?’
The kitten didn’t answer, only stood up straighter in the rushing dirty air: so they left without it. A moment later it shook itself violently and ran after them. Thereafter they kept to the lanes, where the world seemed safer and less dirty. They were thirsty as well as hungry, but still pleased to be out on their own. Dusk brought them to the outskirts of a village: chestnut trees; a grey church; a handful of red brick cottages between which the lane dipped gently until it encountered a stream. For a few yards the shallowest of water flowed over the road, glittering busily in the fading light. Two or three quarrelsome mallards were splashing about in it, saying things like:
‘My water.’
‘No. All this water’s mine.’
‘Well it’s never the same water anyway.’
‘So what?’
‘I’m just saying, that’s all. How can it be yours if it’s not the same water?’
Warmth hung in the air in the soft grey shadows beneath the chestnut trees.
By this time, Stilton was very tired. The bottoms of his feet had developed blisters, and the blisters had burst. He limped, and his head nodded up and down in time with his limp. He had been sick twice because he kept trying to eat things he found in the road. Every so often his back legs would fail him; he would sit down suddenly and say, ‘I think I’ve got heat stroke.’ Now he added, ‘I’ve got to stop. I really have.’
Animal X was staring at the stream. For some reason, despite the tranquil look of it, he was reluctant to cross. He had no idea why. Insects bobbed and hovered above the surface. He watched the mallards stamp off to deeper water, sit down, fold their ruffled dignity, and float off with the current, still arguing drowsily with one another.
He said, ‘We’ll stop here then, Stilton. We’ll sleep if we can’t eat.’
Lupins filled the garden like candles. There was a scent of roses; of lavender. Everything was drowsy with summer air: the pony dreamed in its paddock, the dogs in their kennels dozed, the human beings murmured contentedly from their kitchens. The golden kitten stared into the twilight after the vanished ducks with a kind of absent-minded irritability, then followed Animal X and Stilton back up the hill, every so often shaking its head. Eventually they stood, the three of them, in front of a small weatherboard outhouse. White paint blistered, tarred roof entangled in honeysuckle, less a home improvement than an afterthought, this construction leaned amiably up against one of the cottages. From its partly open door – like beckoning human fingers, like tendrils of weed waving in deep water – issued smells both inviting and dangerous. Stilton raised his nose in the air. He drooled a little.
‘Who’s going first?’ he said.
‘We should think before we do anything,’ said Animal X.
Stilton sat down.
‘I’m afraid anyway,’ he said.
The kitten shouldered past them both.
‘Wait,’ recommended Animal X. ‘We—’
Too late.
There was a scuffling sound inside, followed almost immediately by an outbreak of fierce yowling from the kitten. Behind that could be heard a deeper, more guttural complaint – the angry speech of some large unidentified animal. Stilton ran away down the garden. Animal X ran after him. When they stopped to look back, Stilton was still ahead but not by very much. Animal X felt ashamed of himself.
‘We shouldn’t let the kitten face whatever’s in there on his own,’ he said.
‘No,’ agreed Stilton.
‘At least one of us should help.’
‘You,’ said Stilton. ‘You go.’
The noise continued unabated, then rose to a crescendo. Animal X had crept halfway back down the garden path, and was crouching in a border of overgrown mint, when the door of the outhouse creaked and shifted and something black forced its way out into the gathering dusk. He couldn’t tell what it was. It smelled strongly, even from that distance, and its white-rimmed eyes were the colour of liquid chocolate. It might have been a dog. If its outline had been less fluid – if it had been more clearly formed – Animal X would definitely have described it as a dog. It paused momentarily, half-turned, as if it might return to the argument, then, hearing the bubbling yowl of the golden kitten inside, clearly had second thoughts. It shook itself and limped out into the lane. If it was a dog, it only had three legs.
A minute or two later Animal X poked his nose cautiously round the outhouse door. It was almost dark inside. Strong smells rose from the litter of human stuff spilling out of the corners and across the floor – sawdust, straw, empty sacks, garden tools, a smear of burnt oil from some machine – but they could not disguise the pervasive odour of its previous occupant. The kitten stood awkwardly in the middle of everything, lips peeled back off white teeth, fur still bristling along its spine, the arch of its body still presented to a vanished enemy.
‘It’s me,’ Animal X said placatingly. For good measure he added, ‘I don’t want to fight.’
The kitten stared at him.
‘You don’t know what to do next,
do you?’ said Animal X gently. ‘Look,’ he went on. ‘There are two dishes in that corner. We should taste what’s in them. In case it’s food.’
The kitten growled faintly.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
Nothing.
‘Well, I’m going to try,’ said Animal X.
Very carefully, footstep by footstep, his head turned aside so that he represented no threat, he picked his way through the junk towards the corner. There was a moment of anxiety as he brushed the kitten’s flank. But at his touch he felt its taut muscles quiver and relax suddenly. ‘There, you see?’ he said, more loudly than he had intended. ‘We’re all right now, you and me.’ He ran the last few steps out of sheer relief, pushed his face into the nearest of the bowls, and began eating. He had no idea what the stuff was, but his mouth didn’t care. After a moment or two he became aware of the kitten standing next to him. He moved over.
‘I don’t know what cats eat when they’re out on their own,’ he said. ‘But we can eat this. Go on, try some.’
The kitten tried. It ate slowly, and then faster. It raised its head and purred suddenly.
‘You’ve got it all over your mouth,’ said Animal X.
A little later, they both made room for Stilton.
‘I like this,’ Stilton said. ‘It’s almost as good as—’
‘Shut up, Stilton.’
*
Outside, the dog – if indeed it was a dog, or had ever been one – stood completely still in the middle of the village. It was as large and as shapeless as it had ever been. It stood there, and it was the Dog. Its shapeless smell filled the summer air, overpowering for a moment the odours of honeysuckle and night-scented stock; and, to anyone walking past, its outline would have seemed to waver a little in the dusk.
It was thinking, ‘I was comfortable in there.’
After a moment it thought, ‘I would have eaten that stuff in the bowls.’ It thought, ‘Now those cats will eat it instead.’ Finally it thought, ‘The New Majicou – who is not the Old Majicou – asked for news of two golden kittens. There is one in that outhouse now. I know that. But one golden kitten is not two.’ The dog mulled this over. ‘There is no reward,’ it concluded, ‘for one golden kitten.’