The Golden Cat

by Gabriel King

  Thus, tacking to and fro into the psychic weather, he forced the ghost-roads, and came to the old pet shop at Cutting Lane. There, stripping his claws impatiently, he waited an hour or two in case any of his proxies brought news. But the pieces of the puzzle remained scattered. Out he went again, and – hoping he might relax enough to give his thoughts a chance to think themselves unencumbered – took himself to familiar city gardens at twilight, where lupins plumed in the warm air and the night insects were just beginning to blunder across the recently-mown lawns. From there he could watch the common human goings-on. Suppers were being served. Televisions were flickering in corners. Here and there a cat slept on a sofa. And from one lighted window a kitten gazed out owl-eyed and curious into the evening. He took to it for no reason he could see. It was such a nondescript little thing, saved like them all by the gawky elegance of extreme youth. Square lines, fluffy sparse fur a pale ginger colour, the tiniest paws Tag had ever seen. When he jumped onto the outside window-sill, it blinked; held its ground; then with a jerky, determined motion reared up and beat its front paws softly on the glass. In the wake of this announcement they stared at one another.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Tag.

  The kitten fluffed itself up.

  ‘Why would I be?’ it said. ‘I’m bigger than you.’

  ‘I didn’t notice that at first.’

  ‘This light is poor,’ the kitten acknowledged comfortably.

  After a moment, he wasn’t sure why, Tag said, ‘When I was about your age I was taken away on a great adventure. I lost my home and my life was changed for ever. Was it a good thing or a bad thing? I still don’t know.’

  ‘I would like to go on an adventure,’ said the kitten wistfully. ‘Have you come to fetch me?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said Tag.

  He was horrified. ‘Stay at home,’ he advised. ‘What are your owners like?’

  ‘Dull. Nice, but dull.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I expect they give you pretty good stuff to eat, though,’ Tag said. ‘Game casserole, meat-and-liver dinner, fishes in tins, all that sort of thing?’

  The kitten examined him.

  ‘Anyone can get that,’ it said.

  Tag, who had experienced such confidence himself, felt there was a further argument to be made. Somehow, though, it escaped him. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘You want to stay in, where it’s safe.’ He jumped down off the windowsill. ‘Another thing, never pay any attention to what a bird says.’ Suddenly unsure of what he had achieved here, and looking for some final expression of a position fatally un-thought-out, he added, ‘Eat as much as you can.’

  The kitten stared down at him.

  ‘Oh I do,’ it said. ‘Still. An adventure—’

  Hands appeared from nowhere and carried it off before it could say more. Tag yawned. He sat in a corner of the lawn thinking, ‘Why did I do that?’ Night fell. Cars passed in the street the other side of the house. A thrush continued to sing. Tag heard snuffling and rootling noises, as of forced passage, in the tangle of woody rose-briar, rotten old trellis, sycamore saplings and Russian vine that separated the garden from the one next door. ‘Hedgehog,’ he thought automatically – they were such determined noises – and wrote them off. But a moment or two later the undergrowth shook and a large dog-fox shouldered its way out onto the lawn, where it stood panting with effort just outside the parallelogram of diffuse yellow light cast by the window. It was a gnarly, experienced-seeming animal with yellow teeth, a long pink tongue, and on one haunch a pure white patch. Every time it looked towards the house, its amber eyes gleamed, restless and cunning, in the darkness. Tag’s heart began to pound so hard it rocked him to and fro where he sat. After a moment of astonished silence, he said, ‘Loves A Dustbin? Is it you?’

  The fox limped over, set itself down next to him as if nothing much had happened since they last met, and stared out over the garden. It scratched thoughtfully beneath its chin.

  ‘I wondered if I might find you here,’ it said.

  Then it said, ‘The past is the past. Tag. You can’t bring any of this back, you know. None of us can.’

  *

  They talked and talked, two old comrades silhouetted bluish-black against the house light, now facing one another, now sitting up side by side again. The fox snapped at a passing moth; the cat licked its tail suddenly. To begin with there was a kind of shyness between them. It was a shyness born of events, of separation; but also the shyness of creatures who are so close they don’t know how to express it. In the end the fox told his story first: how, after the battle at Tintagel, he had travelled across the country with Francine and, for a while, Sealink. How Sealink and Francine had bickered and fought. The discovery of the dead badger. Francine’s tumble into the rabbit trap, and the consequences of that. It was a long story and finally a sad one, a story of hard travel, mismatched companions, happiness fading to puzzlement.

  ‘When we set out,’ he said, ‘we were so hopeful. The Alchemist was defeated. We had our lives to live.’ He stared across the lawn. ‘Then Sealink and Francine began scratching away at one another like that. I knew they didn’t get on, of course. I knew that from the start. But I thought—’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know what I thought. My life had been given back to me in more ways than one. If I was free of the Alchemist, I was free of Majicou too. I was changed, and I expected everyone else to be. There was such a spirit of generosity on that headland after we won the battle. And yet within days those two had frittered it away! I couldn’t blame either of them. That calico cat, she’s in full sail the moment she wakes up – she never gives an inch. She’d lost her mate and she isn’t good at loss. She was full of guilt – even as she left us, she was transferring it to some obsession with kittens she had abandoned long ago. I wonder where she is now? She’s a tough old thing, but she can’t bring back the past any more than you can.’ There was a silence. Then he shrugged. ‘As for Francine, well, Francine had her faults. I’d be the first to admit it. Her world was narrow, she never understood the events that caught her up. She was just a fox. But Tag, I never saw a fox so beautiful as her!’

  He fell silent and stared at the floor.

  ‘What happened?’ Tag asked him.

  No answer.

  ‘We can’t help who we love,’ said Tag. This made him think suddenly of Cy, off somewhere in the deep world without him. He surprised himself further by adding, ‘Love lies in wait and forces us to care.’

  The fox gave Tag an anguished look, then stared hard into the dark as if the past still lay there, just out of sight.

  ‘What happened?’ Tag repeated gently.

  ‘When Sealink left, Francine seemed to perk up a little. We decided to go on. But the highways were unreliable and we were forced to walk again. It was hard going, hour after hour of clay soils, deep woodland, steady drizzling rain. We had no idea where we might be. All this time her leg was swollen, hot to the touch. The wound leaked an ugly fluid. It smelled of nothing good.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I know that smell!’ he said. ‘That night she was full of fever, by morning she was raving. I got her to the edge of a stream, and sat by her for three days and nights. She wouldn’t drink. She thought she had cubs. She kept saying, “I want to go home. Please take me home.” The rabbit trap killed her after all.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘She was just a fox from the suburbs. She came because I called her, and died in a place she hated. We can’t help who we love, you’re right. But Francine’s death was my responsibility. Since then my head has been on fire, and I am wounded worse than I was by the gun.’

  He stared at Tag.

  ‘I looked up from her agony, and the world was full of green flames. What was that, Tag?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Green flames were on every tree, like leaves. The fire sprang from branch to branch until everything roared with it, and it filled my head, and I couldn’t hear my own
voice. Do you want to know what I think?’

  He stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said wearily. ‘I haven’t had anyone to talk to.’

  ‘No,’ said Tag. ‘Tell me. I—’

  ‘I think the world has seen enough deaths like hers,’ the fox said.

  *

  They were silent after this. A sense of separateness returned to them, less comfortable than before. At length, Loves A Dustbin shook himself and went over to the grey stone bird-bath raised two or three feet high on a plinth at the centre of the lawn. There he got up awkwardly on his hind legs, and, with his front paws resting either side of the water, drank from it, lapping noisily for what seemed like some minutes. When he had finished he dropped onto all fours again and walked stiffly to the far edge of the lawn.

  ‘Are you going?’ said Tag. ‘Don’t you want to hear what happened to me?’

  The fox looked back at him.

  ‘I am trying to work the arthritis out of my leg,’ he said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So then tell me.’

  Tag began by describing the oceanarium, and how he had lived there with Cy and been happier than at any other time in his life. He touched briefly on the domestic arrangements of the King and Queen. How they too had prospered. From there he moved on to the inexplicable loss of Odin and Isis. He drew the fox’s attention to the mysteries attendant on this: the signs and symbols he could not interpret; the journeys which seemed to fold into themselves and reveal nothing; the proxies who brought back no answers. He spoke of the hard death of Uroum Bashou. ‘Something is wrong in the world,’ he said, ‘and I am followed everywhere I go. I fear the worst. Who does the Great Ray serve, and why did it take the Mau to Egypt? Where is Cy? What is happening along the wild roads?’ He sighed exasperatedly. ‘The clues mean nothing to me, and I am in a fog,’ he concluded. Then he sat back and waited for the fox’s opinion.

  But Loves A Dustbin only said, ‘It was clever to take the third kitten as your apprentice. The Old Majicou would have appreciated that.’

  ‘I feel the weight of these responsibilities,’ Tag prompted. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  The fox greeted this admission in silence, its eyes yellow with some emotion Tag couldn’t interpret. Then it ordered, ‘Come with me,’ and, plunging immediately through the overgrown hedge, set off across the gardens at a pace Tag soon found difficult to maintain. They squeezed between the loose boards of fences. They trotted down the passageways at the sides of houses. There was a road – ‘Come on, come on!’ urged the fox – and then more gardens. Eventually Tag found himself sitting in an arbour or summer-house of old grey wooden trellis, twined inside and out with clematis and climbing rose. Moonlight poured into this frail structure, giving a curious depthless shine to its inner rear wall, which had been made from a single large mirror.

  ‘But—’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the fox. ‘You’ve been here before.’

  ‘This is where you showed me who I was.’

  ‘You were a kitten. You had only just poked your nose outside a house, and you were already half dead of starvation. Now look at you!’ said the fox, with satisfaction.

  Tag looked. The animal in the mirror was long-bodied and elegant, having a silver mask striped in charcoal grey, in which were set eyes of a pale green colour darkening towards their enlarged pupils. It was self-possessed if wary, muscular and durable without being heavy, and carried its head high. It was alert to night sounds. Some half-forgotten adventure had robbed it of part of one ear.

  ‘Did I do you a service, back then?’ asked the fox.

  ‘Of course you did. You showed me myself. Everything changed after that.’

  ‘Good,’ said the fox grimly. ‘Because everything is going to have to change again. You have been sheltered from the worst of it, down there on the coast. Your own power protects you. As if that isn’t enough, the glamour of the King and Queen surrounds you. Even the name Tintagel is a kind of shelter, while the place itself is a magic made to last a thousand years. But the news along the wild roads is this: animals not so fortunate are dying. They are dying, and no-one is helping them.’

  ‘You’re angry with me,’ said Tag.

  ‘I am not,’ said the fox. ‘I am trying to make you understand something. Look! Look in the mirror, who do you see?’

  ‘Tag.’

  ‘Well I don’t. I see the New Majicou. That is the cat who must act now!’

  ‘I would act if I knew how.’

  ‘“If I knew how”!’ mimicked the fox. ‘You hoped Uroum Bashou would tell you what to do. You hoped I would.’ He stared contemptuously up at the lighted house. ‘And what can you learn here, sniffing around after your kittenhood?’ He sighed. ‘You are the New Majicou,’ he said heavily, ‘like it or not. I can serve you as well as I served the old one: but you must make yourself worth the effort. Everyone depends on you.’ There was a long pause, in which the two animals stood looking defiantly at one another. In the end, Tag blurted out the thing that worried him most, the thing he had been trying to keep from himself:

  ‘The Alchemist is still alive.’

  It was a relief to have it in the open.

  ‘We didn’t save the world back then,’ he said. ‘We only thought we did.’

  The fox stared at him.

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’ he demanded. ‘Francine and One For Sorrow and all the others: are they going to have died for nothing?’

  ‘I would not allow that,’ said Tag, holding the fox’s eye with his own. ‘Did you imagine I would?’

  The fox looked away.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said.

  ‘Then let’s not quarrel any more. I must speak with Ragnar Gustaffson. We may not be too late if we act now. One avenue remains, and I will need his support, as well as yours, if I am to explore it.’

  ‘That’s more like it!’ applauded Loves A Dustbin. ‘Good!’

  Tag laughed. His spirits lifted. Friendship had returned to him the energy leached out by frustration. He felt like a giant. He remembered the fox, long ago, dancing round a lamppost in winter light and sleet. He remembered a black and white bird, so full of itself it fell off a post.

  ‘Creatures of Majicou!’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, “We must be quick.’”

  ‘Then it’s the mirror for us!’ cried the fox, and sprang towards the back of the arbour. With a feral grin and a tongue lolling like a yard of pink ribbon, his own image leapt to meet him in the glass. At the last moment, when collision seemed inevitable, there was a sound of fabric tearing. The mirror was breached. Great prismatic rings of light rippled the length of the fox’s body. Everything slowed down; speeded up again. Then he was gone, and Tag had jumped in behind him. The summer-house vibrated softly for some minutes after they had vanished; one or two rose petals drifted down on a sudden breeze.

  *

  The wild road is a dream. It began as part of the long, subtle species-dream of the cat: but by now it is a dream of its own. If you travel the wild road too often, the dream touches everything. Every time you disembark, a little of the dream flows out into the world around you. The world soaks up the dream and seems none the worse for it. You soak it up, and seem none the worse for that. Yet something is changed.

  When Tag returned to the oceanarium, he thought he was dreaming. The light had modulated to a hot greenish-gold. The air was suffocating. Ragnar and Pertelot, composed in formal stances facing away from the great tank, stood as if painted onto a background, shoals of silver fishes suspended behind them like glittering regalia in a museum. Between them their remaining daughter, her coat gilded by the strong illumination, sat in the ancient pose of the felidae – front paws together, head held high, eyes narrowed, tail wrapped round – judgemental, ironic, proud. The fox was kneeling awkwardly before her, his neck stretched out, his eyes glittering feverishly. It is this hard for one species to honour another. The silence was palpabl
e.

  Tag swallowed. Though he shook his head to clear it, his friends remained stubbornly heraldic. Then there was a commotion in the tank. The mackerel turned and fled as one, the water swirled with thick white pelagic mud and began to slop down the outside of the glass, as if displaced by something monstrous.

  At the same time he heard a joyful voice call, ‘Hey Ace! I’m home!’

  15

  A Message

  ‘Well, that got me a whole load of nowhere,’ the calico grumbled bitterly.

  The Mammy’s pronouncements had left her feeling quite defeated. Tough-spirited and enterprising, Sealink would never normally have given herself up to self-pity, but now, surrounded by hostile swamps, in a country she no longer recognized as home, having travelled perilously to seek the answer to a problem not of her own making, and that ‘answer’ having proved utterly impenetrable, she found her usual optimism slipping like a spider down a plughole. Everything was so much larger and more complicated than she had ever expected. She saw herself suddenly, with unprecedented objectivity, as a tiny mote of life spinning, lonely and desolate, in a void.

  ‘You lost, ma’am?’

  Alerted as much by a strange, musky scent as by the question, Sealink’s head shot up. Staring inquisitively at her was the second of the guards she had encountered earlier at the bone-pile. She recovered her composure with impressive speed.

  ‘I guess so. Lost in all senses of the word.’

  The guard made a sort of hoarse snuffle. ‘The Mammy has that kind of effect on folks. Bet you’re no nearer knowing what to do than you were when you came here, huh?’

  Sealink shook her head. ‘Whole loada stuff she sang out. Can’t recall more’n a few words here an’ there, and they’re not all that indicative, y’know? Don’t help none that a lot of it was foreign.’

  The guard made a stiff little bow. ‘Allow me, ma’am, to introduce myself more politely than when we first met.’ He extended a cool, clawed hand. The calico sniffed at it uncertainly. ‘My name is Cletus. I believe I may be able to cast some light on the Wise One’s auguries. I’ve had some experience with the poor, befuddled souls who come away from her ladyship. Try me.’ The creature sat back on its shell and crossed its little arms on its plated chest. It looked ridiculous in this posture, but Sealink was in no mood to poke fun.