by Gabriel King
One bank was heavily undercut. Back-eddies had made a sloping wet beach of the other, and that was where the cat lay, a sodden bundle of tortoiseshell fur among all the other rubbish that had washed up. Its lips were drawn back off its yellowed teeth in a snarl of pain. It had been quite a large, powerful animal before the river had taken charge of it and cast it up here with its back legs entangled in a cheerily-printed supermarket bag. Recent injuries about the head and neck had left its fur sticky with blood which the water had failed to lave away.
It was clearly dead: but the crows were still cautious. They had spotted it at first light, while they were still squabbling – ‘Craa! Craa! Craa!’ – in the tops of some beech trees two fields away on the other side of the river. Since then they had been swaggering about in a heavy-shouldered way in the mud, every so often working themselves up to a floundering run, circling their way in as their confidence rose. Fights broke out among them. When they settled down again, they were always a little closer.
Mid-morning, the cat opened its eyes suddenly. It blinked and coughed. At this, the crows boiled up into the air and circled in disappointment above the sodden fields. A single black feather drifted down.
‘Cark-cark! Craaa!’
That was how the cat woke from death: to the sound of crows, to the darting black shapes, the beaks, the wings buffeting the air above. It raised the front part of its body and looked at the world – mud, bushes, somewhere it had never been before. ‘Tag?’ it said, in a thick, surprised voice, and fell back. ‘There’s something on my legs.’ Where was this place? A question which soon dissolved into unconsciousness.
The sky opened, and rain poured down for the rest of the morning, smearing the air, trickling through the cat’s sodden fur. It was cold, large rain; the river-banks were like sponges with it. The crows returned, and – inch by inch, less quarrelsome now, more focused – moved upon their meal. Towards noon, when a faint yellow sun began to be visible behind the clouds, two or three of them became too hungry to wait any longer. They darted forward, ready to hammer at the cat with their big black beaks. Crows will hammer all day long to get what they want, work for ever over a bit of bone, the rag of a lamb in a bare field. Sensing something of this, the cat dragged itself awake again. Its eyes were mismatched, one blue, one a strange sodium-orange more fitted to city streets than country lanes. Through them the cat saw painful flashes and arcs of sunlight, mixed up with sleek, jostling, intelligent heads. A crow can hammer all the way to the heart of things if necessary – get the good bits before they go cold. The cat gathered the last of its strength. It dragged itself partway out of the encumbering plastic bag and went for its tormentors, teeth and claws bared. ‘Cark! Aaargh!’ they sneered, from the safety of the air. A crow always has the last word. The cat looked up, in anger and fear. Then, the remains of the supermarket bag still trailing from one rear leg, it made off at a kind of lumbering trot along the muddy bank and up onto the nearest road where, after walking for about a mile, it was brought down again by its wounds.
Half an hour passed. The sun had broken through. The cat lay in the gutter near some trees, not thinking much. The supermarket bag fluttered idly. A vehicle came into view. It was a white-panel van with rust marks around the doorsills. It passed the cat at high speed, then stopped suddenly. Two men dressed in light blue overalls got out and, talking in low voices, walked back to where the cat lay in the gutter. They looked down thoughtfully, and one of them began to pull on a pair of thick, worn leather gloves.
‘Any good?’
‘Nah. It’s well stuffed, this one.’
‘It’s alive.’
‘That’s about all you can say. What are they going to do with it in this condition?’
‘You never know.’
‘Well, you can pick it up. I’m not touching it. They’ll never want this.’
‘I wonder how it got tangled in that bag.’
Throughout this exchange, the cat remained conscious but too tired to think. They picked it up and put it in the back of the van, where it passed out from the pain of being handled. That was the last time it remembered its own name. When it next woke, it would be a different animal altogether. The van pulled away quickly and disappeared down the road. On its side, if you could read, you might have read:
LABORATORIES
Winfield Farm Site
When he awoke from this dream, Animal X was surprised to find himself still alive, and in the lee of some rocks a little way back from the clifftop. It was a fine day with a few clouds high up; he felt tired but light-hearted and hungry, as if the fit had finally washed something out of him. He considered things. Clearly, the grip he had felt on his neck as he hurled himself over had not after all been the jaws of death but those of the golden kitten, which now sat a little way off, regarding Animal X with a wary respect. Its eyes followed every movement he made – in case, perhaps, he tried to jump again.
‘That got your attention, then,’ said Animal X.
‘Pardon?’ said the kitten.
It was Animal X’s turn to stare.
‘Well, well,’ he told himself softly. ‘Here’s a turn-up for the book and no mistake. Surprises all round, today.’
‘Why did you do it? Jump off like that?’
‘I’m not sure I know,’ said Animal X. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘You would have been killed.’
‘I thought of that.’
The kitten said, ‘I don’t want you to die. For one thing, I need your help.’
‘Well, that’s heartening,’ said Animal X. There was a silence. ‘Could you speak all along, then?’ he said. ‘I wondered if you could speak, all along.’
‘After what happened to me,’ the kitten said, ‘after the indignity of what they did to me in that place—’ It seemed to lose its thread, and for some seconds stared out to sea. Then it began again. ‘Human beings snatched me from my sisters. I was dragged under the earth and stuffed in a sack. They took me away in a boat and then some filthy vehicle brought me to that place. They took my eye!’ it cried bitterly. ‘They took my eye, they took Stilton’s wits, they took your memory! After what they did to us all in that place, my throat would not speak.’ And then, in wonder, ‘It would not speak, however hard I tried, until I was home again.’
‘They took nothing from me,’ said Animal X gently. ‘I took my own memory away because I wasn’t ready to face it.’ As he spoke, he was studying the clifftop with new interest. There were pools of ruffled water among the rocks; tufts of salty grass; not much else. ‘I can’t see how a cat lives in this wind,’ he said. ‘How does a cat get a living here? You live here?’
‘Near her. My name is Odin, and I am a prince. I believe we are all in terrible danger. Will you help me find my mother, the Queen? I promise she is near.’
He sniffed the air.
‘Home is so close,’ he said quietly. ‘Over that headland, or the next.’
As soon as he heard the word ‘Queen’, the healing of Animal X was complete. He laughed softly to himself. ‘I remember that one,’ he thought: ‘I remember the tongue on her!’ He knew who he was now. He knew the meaning of the crow-dream stitched like a loop into the middle of his life. He understood the irony of his journey to this clifftop; he remembered his friends; he wondered what had become of the world he knew. He was filled with energy when he thought about it. ‘It must have worked out, one way or another,’ he told himself. ‘All that. It must be gone like a dream now. Something new will be going on now.’ He would find out about everything. ‘I want to be in on it,’ he thought; then he said aloud, ‘I want to be in on it!’ The sound of his own voice, now that he recognized it, made him laugh out loud. Then he had another thought. He passed one of his front paws over his head as if to groom it. The thing they had put in his skull was gone! Green fire had gently eased and melted it away while he slept, like warm winds melting an icicle in spring. There was already a bridge joining past to present across the undependable g
round inside him.
‘I can think again,’ he thought.
He looked at the kitten, first out of his blue eye, and then out of the orange one. A huge sense of warmth spread through him.
‘I knew your mother before you were born,’ he said. ‘You’re already bigger than she is. But you’ll never be as good-looking.’
Odin was so busy talking he barely heard a word.
‘I wanted to tell you how fine you were,’ he was saying. ‘I wanted to tell Stilton how brave and decent he was. I wanted to tell all those cats how well they had done in that place. But I couldn’t speak!’
‘Well,’ said Animal X. ‘It’s the thought that counts.’
‘I didn’t want you to die,’ Odin said. ‘You looked after me. You looked after everyone. My anger went away when I thought I would die.’
‘We all looked after each other,’ said Animal X. ‘We did the best we could.’ That made him think of Stilton. It made him think of Amelie.
‘Let’s get you home,’ he said.
*
The Dog hid among the rocks. The damp had got into its bones during the night. Its eyes were sore in the salt wind. It watched the two cats walk away along the clifftop, the old hunter and the new one chattering excitedly to one another. It thought, ‘They talk about the best way of killing a bank vole. But a bank vole isn’t much.’
It thought, ‘Still only one golden kitten.’
After a moment or so it followed them.
19
The Beautiful Friend
The return journey was difficult and slow.
Well-known roads proved impassable, or were simply no longer there; those that still worked had turned into a maze of seeping corridors through nothing, opening suddenly onto bleak woods under grey, mucous airs, in country no-one ever visited. Leonora, compelled by each impasse to invent ever more complex dances, grew tired and muddled. The New Majicou, goaded by anxieties he would not explain, chafed at each delay, lost his patience with her, and tried to force passage where none existed. As a result, they lost their way. Later, at some point of decision so subtle they were past it before either of them guessed, they lost Loves A Dustbin and the New Black King too. Back by the sea at last, still alone, they found the night old, the moon down, squalls of cold rain racing landward across the bay.
Leo said they were lucky to have arrived home at all. That was her opinion, anyway.
She stuck her head into the familiar hole at the base of the oceanarium doors. Then she backed out again very suddenly without saying anything.
This is what she had seen inside:
A dozen verminous tomcats thrown into silhouette by the fish-tank’s brilliant glare, which, pouring between them, threw their elongated black shadows across the concrete floor and up the peeling walls. They sat in a half-circle idly stripping their claws (already as sharp as straight razors), scratching their foul ears, or staring with greedy puzzlement into the aquarium at the silent, mysterious, unreachable world within. Between them and the tank they had trapped Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion, Queen of Cats. Her head was held high, and if she acknowledged her captors at all it was only to look down her nose at them. Next to her crouched Cy the tabby, her tail lashing, her voice rising in a bubbling, angry wail.
All the tomcats were large, but one of them was rather larger than the rest. It never sat down. Some inner compulsion sent it restlessly to and fro across the seeping concrete outside the half-circle – sometimes shouldering one of the other cats aside to enter and pass close to the two females (who hissed and spat, though it rarely so much as glanced at them), sometimes disappearing entirely as it ranged around behind the bulk of the tank – unable to rest or stop talking to itself. It was a sore and mangy animal, marmalade in colour, with marks like dull flames roiling down its sides. Its tail lashed constantly, its eyes were inturned, its gait was lurching and painful. It suffered, too, an occasional blurriness or shifting of its outline unlikely under such a clarity of light, a sense of undeveloped potential, as though its boundaries were uncertain – as if it might be even larger than it seemed.
It stank.
*
Leonora was appalled.
‘It’s—’
‘—Kater Murr,’ said Tag.
‘How do you know? You haven’t even looked.’
‘I knew he would come here when I drove him out of the Alchemist’s house. That was an overconfidence I regret! I thought we would arrive first.’
Leo stared at him.
‘That thing was Kater Murr?’
‘Kater Murr was always at the heart of the puzzle,’ said Tag.
‘Oh, why did you let him come here!’ Leo cried.
He shook his head.
‘I’ve been at fault, Leo,’ he acknowledged. ‘This could have been prevented long ago – and Uroum Bashou’s life saved too – if I had asked myself a simple question.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Leo said. ‘What question?’
‘I should have asked: “Is there a highway entrance inside the House of Uroum Bashou?’”
‘And is there?’
‘No.’
‘So?’
‘Cats are larger than life when they leave the Old Changing Way: but they always return to normal in a minute or two. So how does Kater Murr maintain himself as the great brass animal you encountered, first in the Reading Cat’s kitchen and later on his stairs? If I had thought about that, instead of showing off to you—’
He sighed.
‘Kater Murr has a line of power,’ he was forced to admit, ‘the other end of which leads to the Alchemist.’
‘What are we going to do?’ demanded Leonora.
‘Think for a moment.’
‘No! No! My mother is in there! Pertelot and Cy are in there!’
‘Yet if we rush in now, all will be lost. Kater Murr has achieved less than he imagines. The Alchemist has not so much empowered him as prepared him, like any other proxy, for some undisclosed purpose. Without his master, he could not stand against me for long—’
‘Then go in and deal with him!’ interrupted Leonora. ‘You’re the Majicou.’
‘—yet if I challenge him directly he will kill your mother before I can kill him,’ he went on gently. ‘Do you want that? I only know I would not like to lose Cy that way.’
Even as he spoke, Leonora was darting past him to squirm through the hole at the base of the doors. From inside he heard her mutter, ‘Leave it to Leonora, as usual.’ And then, ‘Tag?’
‘Oh Leonora, Leonora,’ he said.
*
It was hard to hide in the oceanarium. Since the only object in it was the giant glass tank, and since the lamp was positioned directly above that, there weren’t even many fixed shadows to be found: and they were all associated with the spiral staircase. Tag and Leo kept in among them, as far back as they could under the bottom tread. From that viewpoint, much was obscured by the curve of the tank. About half of Kater Murr’s tomcats were visible as anonymous black backs, or as faces bleached of any but the cruellest expressions by the harsh light. Of Pertelot and Cy, Tag could make out only a pair of rose-coloured ears, a sullen tabby muzzle resting on the dirty floor. Generally he could see more fish than cats. Kater Murr, though, was always in view. Up and down he ranged – his image as unsteady as a reflection in water, his gait disconnected and uneven, his rank odour coming and going like the reek of harbour mud on a humid summer day – rehearsing his endless monologue as he went.
‘—his bowels itch but he welcomes that. His brain hurts but he welcomes that. Kater Murr is something to see!’
So it went on, until Pertelot Fitzwilliam interrupted in a quiet but penetrating voice, ‘Kater Murr has a filthy smell.’
There was a sudden silence.
‘Hello,’ said Kater Murr, ‘what’s this? Royalty?’
He approached the Queen.
‘Are you royal?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Are you very royal, I wonder?’
Pertelot backed away.<
br />
Kater Murr watched this operation with interest, his head on one side. ‘Because I’ve heard you are,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve heard you’re very royal indeed.’ Then he said, ‘What you might ask yourself next is this: “Does he care? Does Kater Murr care how royal I am?”’
He sat down suddenly and scratched at one of his scabs until it bled. He seemed tired, as if it was an effort to keep control of his own boundaries. He looked around vaguely. ‘Kater Murr wonders where he is,’ he said to himself in quite a different voice. Then he leapt to his feet again – agile and energetic, hard as a bunch of rusty springs – and, pushing his great orange mask within an inch of Pertelot’s nose, pinned her gently but firmly against the fish-tank. Though she tried hard to turn her head away, she had no room to move. The aquarium octopus pulsed and flexed above her, shifting its suckers carefully upon the glass.
Kater Murr purred. His outline flickered.
‘Come to Kater Murr my dear. You’re enough to make anyone feel brand-new.’
At this. Tag told Leonora, ‘Stay here if you want to live!’ and stepped out of the shadows.
‘Empty speech, Kater Murr,’ he said.
*
Kater Murr became very still.
‘Is there someone else in here with me?’ he asked his companions. ‘I thought I heard someone speak.’
The tomcats stared at him then at one another, anxious to please but too full of testosterone to know what was happening.
‘Was it,’ Kater Murr wondered, ‘a fish?’
‘You know me, Kater Murr,’ said Tag. ‘I am the Majicou.’
Kater Murr stared hard at a shoal of mackerel. They moved uneasily behind the glass. ‘I think it was that one there,’ he said. ‘That was the speaking fish.’
‘You know me, Kater Murr.’
Slowly, slowly, Kater Murr turned his head until he was able to look at Tag out of one amber eye. Then he said, ‘I don’t need to know anyone now.’