by Gabriel King
‘Nice to get the views of an expert,’ said Leonora. ‘Everything you say makes me feel a lot better.’
‘No-one can know everything,’ Tag said.
‘I’m finding that out. Have I hurt your feelings again?’
‘A little. What did you do next?’
‘Everything had gone grey. All the life, the beauty, the worth had gone out of everything,’ said Leonora. ‘I don’t want that!’ she said. ‘I’m young, I want the world to be worth having! So I danced. I made a dance for myself, and I was in it. Look.’ She jumped down out of the tumble-drier and danced on the laundromat floor, less, Tag thought, to show him than to remind herself. ‘Very slowly at first. Point one toe, place one foot. Very slow, very measured steps, no jumps or pounces. Then faster, faster, until I felt strong.’ She laughed. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Like this,’ she said. She said, ‘I danced my way into that space. Tag, until it belonged to me again. Then I danced down the wild roads, and made them go where I wanted, just like you. I could choose.’
She stopped dancing and sat looking up at him.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Choice is good.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘But there’s more to this story. Or have you already explained how you came to be covered in pigeon dung?’
It was Leo’s turn to look hurt.
‘Choice is good,’ she insisted.
‘So. What did you choose to do?’
‘I chose to go back to the House of Uroum Bashou.’
*
By the time she got there, it was dark, and a thick yellow rind of moon hung above the dormered roof of the Reading Cat’s domain, spilling its light across the littered garden but leaving the boarded-up windows in the dark. Leonora made herself comfortable in a tangle of rusty bicycle-frames and their shadows, as far away from the back door as she could get. There she waited. The moon rose higher. The house was quiet, but did not seem quite empty. After a time there was a stealthy but assertive thud from the cat flap, and the verminous Kater Murr stuck his head out into the night.
His yellow eyes moved from side to side like the eyes of a mechanical cat in a funfair, empty of intelligence and yet at the same time full of it. He did not push his way out of the cat flap onto the doorstep: he bunched up his evil hindquarters and sprang out on a wave of his own smell, ready for any kind of violence. He sat there scratching for a minute or two and murmuring to himself. ‘His paws are split but he welcomes that. His bollocks itch but he welcomes that. Kater Murr is no humdrum tom.’ After a while he scraped up some of the moonlit dirt beneath the old kitchen window and excreted copiously. ‘Kater Murr is in love with his own paradox,’ he congratulated himself, turning round to sniff what he had produced. Then he raised his disfigured muzzle. The moon glinted off rictus grin and snaggle-teeth. A low, penetrating yowl issued forth, to curl over the spoiled lawn, briefly lick Leonora’s bones, then float away across the surrounding streets. Almost at once, three or four brutalized-looking tomcats appeared on the rotten board fence at the bottom of the garden. After a brief conference, they jumped down as one and swept off into the Midland night with Kater Murr at their head.
‘Looking for any kind of trouble,’ thought Leonora; and her sympathy went out to the innocents they met.
As soon as she was sure they weren’t coming back she scampered over and popped her head through the cat flap. The house rang with Kater Murr’s smell, suspended like a foul bell in the latent heat of the stairs. By fits and starts, in the jangling moonlight-and-dark, she made her way up to the ramshackle gallery at the very top of the house. She peered round the door of each empty room on the way. On the second-floor landing an open window banged to and fro. She froze. She ran. ‘Take care, Leonora,’ she told herself, just to hear a familiar voice. ‘Now this way. Quick now! Make no sound!’
Moonlight filled the Library of Uroum Bashou, pouring in so brightly that she could make out the black lines of print on the pages of the opened books. There were dark bars and smudges of shadow across the dusty floor, the dry, faded wainscoting, the otiose velvet cushions: the darkest of them was the Librarian himself, a skinny black comma (as he himself would have said) in the Great Text of Life. Spread out in front of him on the dusty floor – as if he could read them too – the remains of a pigeon made a scribble of bones and feathers. The room was full of a strange, thready humming. Broken quarter-tones rose and fell. Leonora cocked her head and laughed softly. Uroum Bashou had recently finished his dinner and was purring to himself as he washed in the moonlight.
*
‘This was all very ill-advised,’ said Tag.
‘I know,’ said Leonora. ‘And don’t think I wasn’t nervous. I was. But you know, he’s not such a bad old cat. He wants to boast, that’s all, and tell you things you don’t know, and just be sure you’re listening. Not much different than my father, if you ask me.’
‘Leo!’
‘Well, of course. Father is rather better-looking. But the Reading Cat was kind. He made me sit down, and offered me what was left of his pigeon, which I didn’t much fancy since Kater Murr must have killed it, and showed me where to get water from the tap that still drips into the broken basin at the far end of the room, and told me stories about his own cleverness until I could get his attention. That took a minute or two, I must say.’
‘Hm,’ said Tag, who recognized the difficulty.
‘Anyway,’ said Leonora, ‘you have to imagine this—’
*
Uroum Bashou had emptied himself out. She had heard the stories of his kittenhood in Morocco – muezzin-call at dawn, an education in reading, how he had been given to chase the little twist of light focused by a lens on a white courtyard wall; how it tasted to eat small birds glazed in spices; how the scents of the bazaar stole over a household with an intensity no kitten could disdain – and, for a second time, the story of how he came by his name. She had encouraged his opinions on date-palms and drains, anchovies, mice and the proper care of the kidneys in the older animal. She had heard his versions of the biographies of notorious human beings, among whom only Catherine the Great interested her. Now, they sat facing one another in companionable silence across a strip of dusty floorboards, and she judged it the moment to ask, ‘Uroum Bashou, then, can read anything?’
*
The tide was up, to gurgle and shoosh in the pilings on the seaward side of the esplanade. Sunshine the colour of cowslips struck down through the mist, failing for the moment to warm the cottages on the hill. A door opened here and there, to release smells of porridge, milk, bacon frying. You could hear the shriek of kittiwakes following the fishing-fleet back into harbour.
In the Beach-O-Mat, Tag asked Leonora, ‘And what had he found, the Reading Cat?’
‘A single book, very old, its pages made of something thick, yellow and fragile which had been mounted on ordinary paper. He thought it came from Egypt; and that it might have started life as something else, only to be made into a book later, to preserve it. There, among many others, was the symbol! It was faded and rather oddly proportioned, but I recognized it immediately.’
‘Ah,’ said Tag.
He leaned forward suddenly.
‘What else?’ he urged.
‘He said that there was no explanatory text. He said that symbols like this appear very early in the history of men and cats, though never earlier than something he called “the Missing Dynasty”. He said they are associated with the celebration, or “bringing down”, of a goddess.’
‘And?’
‘He thought for a long time and then said that he was sure he remembered the Old Majicou asking him the same question.’
‘Nothing about the Golden Cat? Nothing about kittens?’
‘No,’ said Leonora.
Tag sighed impatiently.
‘Then we are still no further forward,’ he said. He stared out of the laundromat window at the mist and the sea.
‘Don’t you want to hear what happened next?
’
*
When he was reading, Uroum Bashou customarily used his paw to keep his place. As soon as he removed it from the pages of the very old book, tensions in the binding caused them to turn over at random, like a deck of cards spilled upon a polished floor. When this process finished, another symbol was revealed:
Leonora touched the book. It was warm. She felt a faint, electrical sensation. The flutter and whirr of the turning pages had captivated her, like a whisper in the night, pigeons’ wings in some mysterious dawn. It was as if the book itself had showed her something.
‘And this?’ she asked Uroum Bashou. ‘What does this symbol mean?’
The Reading Cat shrugged.
‘Oh, that is a lot less interesting,’ he said carelessly.
He gazed at the door to the stairs.
‘You will have to go!’ he urged. ‘He is almost upon us!’
The moonlight was spectral, green-tinged, bright. It slid off the Reading Cat’s dust-runny eyes. His little black velvet body only needed a red velour collar to qualify him as some human toy. He was quivering with nerves. Who was the master here? Nothing he had said on their last visit made any sense. ‘I am quite tranquil about the whole thing,’ he had said; but Leonora thought to herself, ‘Rubbish! He is afraid of that awful animal and who wouldn’t be?’
Aloud she said suddenly, ‘Come away with me, Uroum Bashou. Come and be looked after in Tintagel by the sea.’
He blinked at her uncertainly for a moment.
Just as she thought he would agree, he said, ‘What you have found here is only the symbol for gold. We see it in many texts of this kind – often, of course, associated with the Alchemist. Now that he is no more, it is of little interest.’
‘What if he wasn’t defeated?’
The Reading Cat stared at her. This momentary confounding of his assumptions made him look so vulnerable she could only try to persuade him again. ‘Uroum Bashou, please come to Tintagel.’
‘You are a sweet and thoughtful kitten,’ he said, recovering himself. ‘A kitten like you might after all heal the world. But go now, quickly, before he finds you here. Tell the Majicou I still do his work among the books! Hurry! Hurry! Go!’
And suddenly she was running from the room in the slick light, full of the Reading Cat’s fear. Out on the stairwell, she stopped: sniffed. Nothing. She slipped down a flight, raised her nose again. There was a soft thud from somewhere out of sight. Was it the cat flap? Perhaps it was nothing. Down she went. (Where was she going to hide? There was nowhere he couldn’t find her. She would end up like an air-dried pigeon in the base of a cupboard.) It was light for a little way, then dark to the second landing. She could hear her own breath so loud she never heard his. And, anyway, how could it have been him? Without any warning at all there was something huge and made of metal, hurling itself up the stairs towards her with hallucinatory speed, in a rage at being so confined, its broad brassy chops full of teeth promising her death every time the stairwell brushed its ribs on either side. Its bared red tongue was bigger than her head! Its face was a foot and a half wide and its claws were taking chunks out of the fibrous old wooden risers as it came. Suddenly it was on the landing with her, pacing up and down, giving a great coughing snarl, weaving to and fro in the slippery light. Up close, the metal appeared to give way to fur, coarse and orange. With every bunch-and-pull of its huge muscles, violent markings of a slightly lighter colour roiled down its sides like painted flames. It stank of ammonia, pheromones, death. It lifted its head and roared.
Leonora backed away.
The open landing window banged to and fro above her. She jumped out of it.
For a while she seemed to float. The night air pressed up against her. She turned over and over as she fell, so that first the sky, then the street passed slowly through her field of vision. Below her was a basement area with its pointed railings. Further out, parked cars. She thought she saw three or four shadows milling about down there between the wheels; but, by the time she could look again, the street was empty, lunar-silent. Suddenly, everything speeded up. She looked down. ‘The railings!’ she thought. ‘The railings!’ Then they were past, and she had landed heavily on a pile of wet cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags, liberally spattered with the produce of the pigeons which lived on the window-ledges above. The breath went out of her, along with everything else.
When she woke up, she felt light-headed with her own luck. Her first thought was: ‘Still alive!’ Her first instinct was to look up. She would not have been surprised to see her pursuer burst out into the air after her in an explosion of glass, the window-frame a few sticks of wood clinging round its massive shoulders. Nothing, not even a head thrust out. It was silent up there. Limping and sore, she made her way out of the basement area and into an alley, where she took the first highway entrance she could find.
*
‘So here I am,’ she said. ‘Safe if not entirely sound.’
No trace of mist remained in the bay. There was a great keening and crying of gulls, where the fishing-fleet was tying up in a gauze of daffodil light. The new day was starting, and she was glad to be home for a change. She felt a great uplift of her heart.
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘Has the apprentice done well?’
Tag sighed.
‘I would like to know how much of this we are ever going to be able to tell your parents,’ he said. ‘Were you tired again on the return journey?’
‘A little. Something tried to follow me home. I got so upset by that I lost my way again, forgot how to dance, and it took me all night to get home.’
She gazed at Tag for a moment.
‘There’s one thing I didn’t tell you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Uroum Bashou couldn’t place any value on the symbol the old book showed me. But I could. Remember that day you led me such a dance along the Old Changing Way? Well, I saw the symbol on one of the places we passed through!’ And she added cheekily, ‘How do you like that? Better than follow your nose!’
‘Well,’ said Tag. ‘Perhaps we were following your nose all along, not mine.’
Then he said, ‘You had better take us there now.’
They found the sign quite easily:
LABORATORIES
Winfield Farm Site
and walked up past it, along a tidy gated road between cow-pastures the broad gentle slopes of which were sprinkled with buttercups and dotted here and there with clumps of dark green thistle. Though the sky was blue and tranquil, it already had a metallic sheen, a promise of heat at noon. A few crows circled lazily in the shimmering air somewhere up ahead.
‘Such a beautiful day,’ said Leonora.
She said, ‘Here we are!’
The road made its way into a little intimate fold of land: stopped. At first, Tag couldn’t make anything of what he saw. The building had been split as if by a single clean stroke from some vast cleaver, its two halves then settling slightly, still joined at the base but leaning away from each other.
‘Stay here, Leonora.’
Cautiously, Tag approached one of the shattered windows. He sniffed, jumped up; peered inside. Loops of black cable hung down where the ceiling had buckled and split. Everything inside had been smashed beyond identification. The floor was thick with bits of wood, bent metal, warped plastic panels, stinking of char, coated with plaster-dust that days of rain had turned into a kind of cement. He identified a table, which seemed to have been thrown bodily against the wall; a white human garment with one sleeve torn off. Among the disordered objects, silent cats lay in windrows. The air over them was infused with the sour simple smell of death.
‘Leonora, don’t—’ Tag began.
Too late. She had jumped up beside him and was staring in.
‘Who would do this?’ she whispered.
She stared at him.
‘Who is doing this to us? The wild roads are spoiled. Cats are dying everywhere. Tag, I was so happy to be home this morning. But not
hing is what it promised to be!’
Before he could answer, she had jumped down and begun to sniff her way between the bodies. He knew what she was looking for, but he hadn’t the heart to help her. After a little while, he heard her say, as if to herself, ‘I don’t want to be a kitten any more. It isn’t worth it.’
At last she came back and looked up to him.
‘My brother was here,’ she said. ‘But he isn’t here now.’
‘Then he may not be dead.’
‘Tag, what can we do?’
‘We must talk again to Uroum Bashou,’ said Tag. ‘I begin to see a shape to all this. But with Loves A Dustbin gone, only the Reading Cat can confirm my understanding.’
He stared into the ruined laboratory.
‘Leonora,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid.’
12
Mammy Lafeet
For five thousand years the great Mississippi, Ouachita and Red rivers have wound their way through the broad plains of the South, shifting their courses, meandering lazily across the low ground like a sidewinder snaking across desert sands, in no hurry at all to reach their eventual destination in the Gulf of Mexico, for like Sealink they are aware, in some primeval consciousness beyond thought, that the journey is the life, babe. The journey is the life.
Late, very late, in this geological span, when men came to Louisiana across the sea from the Old World, they discovered a fine natural port and the potential for a great settlement, could the swampland but be drained and controlled. And so they built flood walls and levees to channel the course of the Mississippi, and there founded, according to a plan scratched by swordpoint in the ground, a perfect rectangular grid of a city. New Orleans: a most remarkable testament to human ingenuity and determination, to the power they had to change and rule the natural world.
So one might think even now, looking down upon the modern city, with its glittering towers, its freight liners and docks, the elegant houses of the Garden District, the vast mesh of automobile highways and oak-lined avenues, the fantastic causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. But when they trapped the main channel of the mighty river, the backwaters had their revenge.