by Gabriel King
‘Oh, I know very well what you think,’ she chided him before he could answer. ‘You think, “This fragile spinster”. You think, “This pet cat who came from nowhere in a furrier’s van”. You think, “However did she make herself the village queen?” Well, I wonder that myself sometimes!’
‘I think you are all steel underneath, and always were,’ was Animal X’s quiet reply.
‘It’s not a bit of use you speaking,’ she said irritably.
At that moment, two houseflies, borne on some ecstatic updraught of which they were only partly aware, blundered onto the warm stone in front of her and began immediately to copulate. Locked together in that way, they looked like an iridescent enamel brooch in the sunlight. Every so often they buzzed groggily and lurched into a new position. Cottonreel stood up, stretched, and examined them lazily.
‘I don’t think I could eat them while they were doing that,’ she said. ‘Do you? It seems unfair.’
She dabbed at them until they flew away.
Suddenly she said, ‘You’ll leave us soon, Animal X. Oh, no, don’t protest. You pretend to be calm, but you are the most driven cat I ever met.’ She stared out over the treetops. ‘Though perhaps not the angriest,’ she continued in a softer voice. And then, ‘Will you do me a favour as you go about the world? Will you look out for a black cat?’
She ran her eyes over Animal X.
‘He is rather bigger than you, if that’s possible. Longhaired, and with a great tangled mane. I only met him the once. He was very dirty, rather fine and gentle yet quick to act on behalf of weaker animals. If you ever see a cat like that on your journeys,’ she said, ‘remind him of me, will you? Tell him that Cottonreel sends her love.’
Later she said, ‘Is it me, or is it a little cooler? Shall we go down?’ And then, on the stairs, ‘You will be careful with Amelie’s feelings, won’t you?’
*
Amelie was never very far away. When he saw her by day, he remembered her in the night; when he watched her in the night he thought, ‘Nothing like this will ever happen to me again.’ Moonlight barred the vestry floor, glissed her eyes, hung like mist in her fur. She sat staring into the mirror, identifying tranquilly the signs that she was no longer young. A fleck in the copper-coloured iris; a squaring of the muzzle.
‘Are you happy here?’ she asked.
She visited him less often, and looked so directly at him when she did. The days stretched out. Did she know too?
She said, ‘You seem restless now.’
When he didn’t answer she said lightly, ‘At least your friend is well again.’
Indeed, Stilton grew daily less frantic. He stopped trembling. He had found temporary accommodation with two or three other cats from the laboratory, in a tarred chicken hutch belonging to the old woman who ran the village shop. He fed all over the village, on back doorsteps and in fitted kitchens, ruthlessly exploiting the sympathies of human beings until his spine lost its nervous curve, his ribs vanished one by one, and his flanks filled out. Food and rest completed the job begun by the golden kitten’s tongue: Stilton’s burns healed, and a thin but determined growth of fur appeared in their place. It seemed quite grey at first, but soon an engaging tabby pattern showed through. When Animal X went to congratulate him on this, he said, ‘You should come down and join us. We’ve got quite a good thing going in that shed!’ And he began to talk as tirelessly about his new companions as he had about his made-up life and favourite cheese. Everything they did struck him as amusing or apt.
‘Old Runcer!’ he said. ‘Don’t talk to me about him!’
‘I can’t say I know him very well,’ said Animal X, who didn’t know Runcer at all – though he thought he had seen him in the village, a small black-and-white with sticky fur and a disconnected gait, who scuttled from one safe spot to the next, staying close to the walls. ‘He seems nice.’
‘Oh he’s an entertainment in his own right, that cat!’
But if he had exchanged cheese for friends, food was still the axis of Stilton’s life. He had eaten so many new things! He described them to Animal X, one by one. ‘Bread and milk, now,’ he sighed. ‘That’s quite something the first time you have it. Then somehow you can have enough of it.’
He looked thoughtful for a minute. Then he brightened up. ‘And as for seafood cocktail with coldwater shrimp! Have you ever had that? As Runcer always says, “Seafood cocktail. That’ll make your bowels come up.” It slips down well, a bit of the old seafood cocktail. It really hits the spot—’
‘So you’re happy here,’ interrupted Animal X.
Stilton looked puzzled.
‘I suppose I am,’ he acknowledged, as if Animal X had shown him something new about himself. Then he laughed. ‘But do you know, there are nights I wake up and miss the cabinet?’
Animal X said he found this hard to believe.
‘That wasn’t a good place for cats,’ he pointed out.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Stilton. ‘There was some real companionship. And the stories we told one another! Those weren’t such bad days.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Animal X. ‘Perhaps they weren’t. Think how bad the food was, though.’ While to himself he said, ‘Stilton is beginning to forget: that is how I know he is cured.’
He said, ‘I was thinking of leaving soon.’
Stilton stood blinking at him in the sunlight.
*
At night Animal X watched the chains of laboratory cats, still a little bemused by the change in their lives, wandering through the moonlight. Their eyes were like small oval lights in the fields down near the water. Sometimes they were like a living carpet, wheeling down from the woods to silently fill the village street. They had been released, he thought: but not released. They were waiting for something more. He was like that. He saw and heard with absolute clarity, he could see dew form on a leaf: but everything was at one remove. Ever since his talk with Cottonreel, he had felt it stealing over him. He had had a life before this one – he wanted this one to lead him to it. He wanted to be following the river to the sea. Green dreams plagued him.
The kitten, too, chafed. It could be found grooming itself ferociously in the morning, pacing to and fro in the middle afternoon when the sun beat straight into the church doorway. It rarely left this position. When it did, it seemed to have no real objective, and only ranged with a kind of awkward dignity down the village street, occasionally shaking its head as if it had received some errant signal from its stitched-up eye-socket. The other young males promptly tried to draw it into squabbles over status and precedence, being rewarded first by regal incomprehension, then by levels of violence they could hardly credit. ‘Be fair,’ they temporized, backing away. ‘It was only a joke.’ But the one-eyed kitten’s understanding of the world was too remorseless for jokes; it roamed the surrounding woods and fields incommunicado, ambushing any cat it found. Animal X, watching it return from these expeditions, felt helpless.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he told it one evening. ‘You’re not a force for good at the moment.’
Then he went on into the church, where he found Amelie waiting for him under the east window. The air pooled cold and still, strong with the odours of metal polish, dust, beeswax and white lilies. The tall window glowed above her, its deep reds and blues slashed here and there with sudden sharp yellows and greens. When she moved, lozenges of coloured light fell upon her coat, confusing and softening her outline. He tried to make sure that he would remember her. He tried to take her in, for ever. In that moment his awareness of her was so great it only seemed to sharpen his senses further, so that he could smell the faint balsam of the yew trees outside and hear from up among the ceiling beams the feathery echo of his own footsteps on the floor of the nave. He found that, rather than hindering, all those other sensations helped.
‘I am leaving soon,’ he said.
‘You would be bound to go. To find the sea.’
‘Will you come with me?’
�
�No,’ she said, as if it was a decision she had made some time ago. ‘Part of me would like to. But something is happening in the world. Is it good or bad? Who knows what it will mean to all these half-healed cats?’ She turned to face him. ‘I want to be here when it happens.’
She said, ‘They will still need my help.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t come,’ said Animal X.
‘Part of me would like to,’ repeated Amelie. She said. ‘I hope you find what you want, and that your life is a good one.’
‘Perhaps I’ll come back and see you.’
She laughed.
‘Perhaps you will,’ she said.
*
He left with the kitten a few days later, in the undecided light of early morning. A few birds sang. Later, the air would glitter: now it was dove-grey, and so damp as to be palpable, an air on the edge of being mist, through which had recently fallen a steady drenching rain. Stilton came out of his chicken hutch to say goodbye to them, and they all three stood looking awkwardly at one another for a moment. The kitten lurched unhappily about, bumping into the others, licking Stilton’s head one minute, hissing at him the next, in the confusion of whatever it was feeling. Then Animal X, with too many things to say and no way of saying any of them, rubbed his cheek against his old friend’s and told him, ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘I’ll miss you too,’ said Stilton.
‘It’s best you stay, though.’
‘It’s best I stay. I never had a life before.’
‘You’ll be happy here.’
They stared at one another for a moment longer, then Animal X turned resolutely away.
He said, ‘I have to go now.’
He said, ‘The kitten is very disturbed now.’
‘Goodbye,’ called Stilton. ‘Goodbye!’
He followed them along the street, still calling. ‘Goodbye!’ At the river he seemed to lose his impetus, and stopped and watched them go. The river was looping and slow here, a deep green snake in the pale dewy water-meadows. On the other bank, the trees lay motionless. The sun, a faint yellow behind translucent white clouds, was trying to break through and make this the hottest, most humid day of the year. All the way out of the village, Animal X looked for Amelie and Cottonreel. They didn’t come. ‘I suppose they have already said goodbye,’ he thought to himself. ‘Still, I should like to have talked to them once more.’ But later, when he looked back at the church tower, he saw two cats up on the parapet. Distance made them tiny but he was sure they were cats. At that moment the cloud thinned, sunshine struck the top of the tower, and he imagined them up there, dazzled but warmed, already feeling better about the day, wishing him the best.
‘I wonder how things will go for them,’ he thought.
To the kitten he said, ‘Come on.’
*
Hills approached, fell back: the river valley expanded and contracted like a slowly beating heart. Conifer plantations gave way to lighter stands of oak and hornbeam. At first, the pastures were spangled with flowers and scented with meadowsweet; but then the landscape began to change subtly, unfolding into sandy heath above which larks sang from dawn to dusk in the hot bowl of the sky. Here and there, two or three wind-eaten pines kept watch over the bracken from the top of a steep little hill. Awed by the openness of it all, they slept by day and travelled at night.
But it was handy country for cats. Animal X cornered a mouse in a hollow in the turf and showed the kitten how to deal with it. ‘Look here,’ he ordered. He caught the mouse and let it go again. ‘See?’ The kitten blundered about behind Animal X’s back, making angry bubbling noises and trying to dodge in and take the mouse off him. ‘You’ll have to get up earlier in the morning than that,’ said Animal X.
Nothing happened for a day or two. He wondered if the lesson had taken. Then he woke out of his hot mid-morning sleep to find a half-grown rabbit staring him straight in the face, one agitated blowfly crawling over its glazed eye. After that, despite its obvious limitations, the kitten became an efficient, indeed merciless, hunter. Its movements retained an adolescent touch of exaggeration. But there was killing torsion pent up in the flex and spring of its body. Rage, unalloyed and barely diverted, informed the freeze into immobility, the sudden hyperbolic leap above the tangled bracken. Animal X winced at its violence: yet found himself recipient of an embarrassment of riches. One evening a pile of voles, an entire family of mice wiped out the next. The kitten never touched anything it brought him, so he had no idea what it was eating; but he had already seen it bring down a full-grown pigeon which was five feet from the ground and flying hard when the golden jaws closed on its neck.
Mile flowed seamlessly into mile. They rarely strayed from the river. But the surrounding land rose steadily until no river-bank remained worth speaking of; and they were forced to walk far above the water where dwarf oak and broken walls clung to steep ground, and a system of green lanes ushered them out onto spacious upland lawn, sheep-cropped, studded with tormentil, drenched in light.
Outcrops of rose-pink rock stood up out of the rolling turf, quartz-veined, surrounded by dense, wind-sculpted stands of gorse. The air was different up there: it went lively, unfixed, free. There was such a sudden sense of space. Animal X stared around. ‘We’re very high up,’ he thought. ‘But that’s not it.’ The turf stretched away; the sky was so bright it seemed to go on for ever; at the junction of the two lay a broad, supple, glittering band of silver. Then, racing towards him out of the dazzle and haze, a huge bird! It hovered for a moment, and swung away on the wind and disappeared, and all he had left was an image of its cruciform shape, its snowy body and strong yellow beak, its forlorn cry. ‘You can see further there,’ he remembered Amelie saying. ‘And there are birds that make the loneliest noise you have ever heard.’
‘We’re at the sea,’ thought Animal X.
The kitten came and stood beside him.
‘We’re at the sea!’ Animal X told it.
But the kitten wasn’t listening. It stood four-square, head high, coat turned to live gold by the liquid glitter of the ocean, and raised its nose to the laminated, vivid streams of air, as if it too might plane away on the wind.
Its entire body was trembling with excitement.
*
They slept in the salt winds that day, huddled up under leggy, bitten-looking gorse, half awake much of the time listening to the lonely shrieks of seabirds. Those cries led Animal X to dream. In the dream he was still young enough to need his mother. He tottered up to her and sat down suddenly in astonishment. She was so big and safe! He sprang contemptuously upon his runny-nosed brothers and sisters. What did he need them for? Yet he loved them more than anything. When he woke up it was night, and the kitten was gone.
Animal X poked his head out of the gorse. He felt lonely. The night had broken everything into shapes and planes. Bulky outcrops of granite leaned away from one another at odd angles. The gorse, though quite still, seemed to stream in the wind. Clouds raced across a moon-rinsed sky, their filmy, turbulent shadows agitating the land beneath; the shadows of the rocks, darker and more formal, came and went. After a moment, Animal X thought he saw the kitten, perhaps forty yards away, a brassy colour under the moon, stalking something at the base of the nearest rocks.
‘Hello?’ he called.
No answer.
Stretching and yawning, he left the gorse and looked around. ‘Hello?’
There was a muffled thud. The soft place in his head burst open like a door and the world was filled with hot green light. It was in the rocks and stones, in the gorse, in the air, it was in Animal X himself: all these different kinds of things fizzed with light, as if a fuse had been ignited within them. Expectancy glittered and crackled down the edge of every blade of grass. For a heartbeat everything paused—
‘Hello?’ said Animal X.
Birds flew up carking and cawing from their hidden roosts in the granite, their wings like black rags on a hot wind. They circled above his head. Like the light, they had be
en nestled down inside things all along, waiting for him to arrive in this place. ‘The crows!’ thought Animal X. ‘The crows!’
He felt the light try its strength, and leap out of the stones and flicker around his head. He flattened his ears and ran for it. Where could he go? Halfway to nowhere the fuse burned out. Green fire laced the gorse without consuming it. Flames roared silently across the turf, gathering into shapes he didn’t want to acknowledge. The crows wheeled and sideslipped above him, dipping down to strike at his head, their cries redoubled, plangent, coarse, full of some hateful irony. Fear drove him towards the place where the land finished, where the huge ocean awaited him, grey and lavender, touched with silver. Then he was right on the lip of it all in the reek of salt and iodine, staring down a hundred feet at rocks, foam, booming and turmoil far below. The land shook with every wave. Spray shot up in rainbow arcs. It was more water than he could ever have imagined. Animal X didn’t care.
‘I’ve seen enough now,’ he thought. ‘I’ve seen too much.’
And with a quiet sense of relief he threw himself over the edge. He would fall now. He would give himself up to it. He would escape the crows and whatever they were trying to make him understand. As he fell he had a brief, puzzling glimpse of something glorious and golden. Its jaws closed firmly on his neck, and he went quickly away from himself and everything else—
*
—to dream of a cat which lay beside a cold river.
It was morning, early. Winter greyed the air between the elder saplings; the tangled willows put up the undersides of their leaves in the breeze; dead bramble suckers and ground ivy thickened the river-banks. The water was gelid – clear, yet coloured at the same time, as very cold water often is, a kind of light green-grey. Its surface was dimpled with eddies. Hidden currents tugged, strong and amiable, at a stem of nightshade berries which curved into the water like an arc of bright red beads; fumed away from partly-submerged objects – the root-bole of some long-dead elm, a worn tractor tyre – to sculpt hollows in the smooth grey mud below the fringe of vegetation.