George had told me I’d be made welcome, and I was. He’d told me sailors had always had a friendship with cats, because cats kept sailors safe, having miraculous powers that could protect them from dangerous weather. He also let me know that sailors generally were a very superstitious bunch, and that if I walked up to one of them, they’d feel lucky. Of course, the flip side of this was that if I walked away from them, they’d be unlucky, so I might want to think before deciding to do that. He also told me (though while assuring me he didn’t believe such nonsense) that back in the ‘olden days’, whatever they were, some sailors also believed cats had storm-repelling magic in their tails.
Best of all, however, was the news that if anyone considered throwing me overboard they would think twice, because throwing a cat overboard would cause a great storm to sink the ship and kill everyone and should any lucky ones survive they would have nine years of further bad luck to look forward to.
In any event, it was all rather good news, I decided, as was the captain’s announcement that he was giving me a ‘roving commission’ as an ordinary seacat, with my number-one duty – as well as the bringing of luck and magic – being to take control of all the vermin.
Quite apart from all that, the captain seemed to have taken a shine to me personally. He would tour the decks, whistling, and it soon became obvious that sometimes he was whistling specifically for me, as I’d often hear him calling out his name for me as well. This put me in mind of the old lady in the big house on Stonecutters Island, and the way she’d often whistle to call my mother. It also reminded me of the affection she’d always shown us, and how my mother had once told me it was a cat’s way to reciprocate, and to return such a compliment wherever possible. (Even if I knew full well that, in her book, such feline displays of affection definitely didn’t include allowing yourself to be picked up and hugged, much less slung over a naval captain’s shoulder.)
I would therefore always hurry to wherever he was and show myself, and he would express such delight at my having come ‘at his command’ that I made it my business to hurry to him any time I heard him calling ‘Simonnnn!’, or whistling for me to come to him. And it wasn’t just because of the ease with which he could find me sardines, either. I was equally delighted to have made a new human friend. I thought perhaps my mother would have been, too.
Making friends very soon became the order of the day because it seemed everyone on the Amethyst wanted to say hello to me. Wherever I went I was greeted with the same affection George had shown me back on Stonecutters Island, and I quickly got used to being picked up and cuddled.
It was a very different life from the one I’d been living in Hong Kong. But I was still my mother’s kitten and, for the most part, her words of advice still made sense to me. I would do as she’d always advised when it came to relations with other creatures; return the friendship my new human friends were extending to me by becoming the best ratter in the Navy. And so what that I lacked experience? I would make up for that easily – with enthusiasm, dedication and courage.
It felt good to have an ambition. To be given a role in life. To strive for something more fulfilling than just survival. And I couldn’t wait to get underway. There was just the one detail that was holding me up. In order to kill the ship’s vermin, first I had to track them down. And in this I still felt woefully lacking in skills or experience, bar half-remembered snatches of half-remembered information from my mother – that fresh rat’s urine was so revolting that it made your whiskers shiver, and that they scuttled around the most at dawn and dusk.
So it was that on the fourth or fifth night after getting my orders I was still prowling optimistically below the waterline at dawn, having had what was shaping up to be a very productive night – my first true lead in what had become a rather lengthy campaign.
Ever since I’d joined the crew, I’d been trying to work out where I might find the promised enclave of marauding rodents, but up to now I hadn’t had a great deal of success. I could often smell them (fusty and musty, like mice, only more so) but that had been as far as I’d got. Which didn’t surprise me. If they were one of the evils – indeed, the very curse – of His Majesty’s Navy, it seemed sensible to assume they were as crafty as any rodent, and knew their way around a ship a lot better than I did.
I also wondered if they’d got wind of my own presence. I’d only encountered rats very fleetingly, as one of the rules my mother had been at pains to have me heed was that I was forbidden from having anything to do with them. She had been clear in the utmost on how much danger a rat posed to a kitten; I was too small still, too weak, too inexperienced and too curious, and she assured me that when the day came when she deemed me no longer all those things, she would be the first to tell me.
Not that I’d even fully understood what she’d meant. That last bit, for instance. Shouldn’t cats be curious? Wasn’t that what cats were supposed to be? As a kitten, it had all been such a puzzle to me. In what way could being too curious about something as lowly as a rat pose a danger to a rat-hunting kitten? What could a rat – just a big mouse, really – actually do to me? They were grain-nibblers. Scurriers. Made for footling, not fighting. Whereas I had the tools for an altogether different kind of life. Speed and stealth. Grace and agility. A predator’s teeth and claws.
And then I’d met one for myself, back on the island, and though I was only little then, I was still not convinced. Because my memory was not so much of a terrifying adversary, as of being a bold, courageous kitten, cruelly thwarted. That what I’d spotted had been a rat had been without question. Fat, dung-coloured rump. Scaly tail, like an earthworm. Unquestionably a rat – just like a mouse, only bigger – and I couldn’t have been more excited. And having spied it scuttling away (another thing rats are good at), I simply did what a kitten is naturally compelled to do. I sank down almost to my belly, took aim, rehearsed my pounce in my head and then –
‘KITTEN, STOP!’ My mother’s hiss pierced the air with such force that the entire rat, already aquiver, completely left the ground. And once back in touch with it, streaked away as if propelled by a hurricane, to go on and live – and to steal – another day. And I’d been cross – just as any thwarted kitten had a right to be, in my book. Humphing and harrumphing and generally mewling my displeasure at what she’d done. Oh, how I sulked! Till I was finally chastened by my mother – by her explaining at great length that a rat was, in reality, not at all like a mouse. That the fat-bottomed rodent I had set my sights on killing could just as easily turn around and kill me.
I trusted my mother, so was still slightly nervous as I padded along the passageways in the bowels of the Amethyst, nose up, whiskers twitching, reading the air. For all that the captain had assured me that I’d make a very fine ratter (though how could he know that?), my mother’s stern warnings couldn’t help but nag at me and neither could the memory of that scar on her nose. So the business of whether I was yet big enough, strong enough, experienced enough to deal with one – all of those were the questions I had yet to resolve. Without her to tell me – because she’d died before that day she’d mentioned happened – I would just have to judge for myself.
I was in no doubt about one thing – that I must be curious. I knew I’d be ratting no rats otherwise. Without curiosity, I would fail to even find one. The Amethyst was a place of secrets, a place of nooks, crannies and corners. Many of them places, presumably, where my human friends couldn’t go – which was why rats, evil scavengers and skulkers in shadows, could set up home there and take things that weren’t theirs. And as the captain’s ratter – which responsibility I took extremely seriously – it was down to me to seek and find them, to get into all those places and (with luck as well as courage, both of which I knew I would need a lot of) take control, thin their numbers, make kills.
It was with that very much in mind that I stalked my first ship’s rodent, which I came upon, finally, in the space between the flour sacks and pipes, at the very back of the dark, silent st
ores. It was its route I noticed first. I knew all about routes. This route was a rat run if ever I saw one. And though I could hear my mother tutting as I thought it, I thought it anyway; that it was exactly like a mouse run only bigger.
The evidence was clear. The husks of grains, the crumbs of bread and swede and carrot. The foul-smelling pellets that rats, being entirely without hygiene, drop thoughtlessly, randomly, disgustingly, in their wake. Then that odour – that once smelled was never forgotten odour – which was now making such an assault on my nostrils that it was almost like a magnet, reeling me in . . .
And then the prize, as I slipped round the edge of a metal bin. The rat itself, with its back to me, front paws up to whiskers; those whiskers twitching in a way that a cat’s whiskers never would, rhythmically, quiverishly, furiously – marking the movement of jaws that were munching on food it had no business munching, that it had absolutely no right to steal. The captain had been right, I decided, as I watched it – it was the very curse of His Majesty’s Navy.
I sank down slowly, feeling my belly fur almost melt into the floor beneath me, adjusted my position, and counted out heartbeats in my head. There was time, there was space, there was no way of escape for it. Two more heartbeats. Luck and courage.
I pounced.
The rat spun around, a blur of pale pink, black eyes and frantic whiskers, the spoils forgotten as it tried to scrabble claws at my face. But it was too shocked to do any more than slightly unbalance me, which – being a cat and not a rat – I quickly corrected, making firm, decisive contact with the side of its neck till its thrashing began to ebb and finally ended.
I waited, crouched and motionless, a full half-minute more till my heart slowed, my fur settled and the moment seemed right finally to relax my jaws and drop my prey between my paws. And it was only then that I began to appreciate just how heavy it had been. How one fat-bottomed rat had so much more bulk about it than a vole or a mouse or a shrew. How my mother had had a point when she’d cautioned against kittens taking them on. But I’d done it. I couldn’t believe it, yet I’d really done it. I’d killed it. I’d dispatched it for my captain and could not have felt more proud. I’d become big enough and strong enough and would soon be experienced enough. I couldn’t wait to take it to his cabin.
And I would have done so, except that fate intervened, and it seemed that someone else was destined to see it first. It was while I was on my way up top, moments later, that I bumped into him.
I was hurrying, keen that I should present it to the captain warm, and (I don’t doubt, since I was feeling particularly full of myself) trotting along with something of a swagger. It was perhaps that which caused the sailor (who appeared round a corner out of nowhere, a massive man-shaped silhouette) to place his hands on his hips and make such a noise about it.
‘Well, looky here!’ he boomed, his voice echoing off the walls and the ceiling (I mentally corrected myself; the bulkhead and the overhead, of course). ‘Look. At. You!’ he went on, seeming almost as proud of my kill as I was. ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Blackie? Is it what I think it is?’
He stepped nimbly over the small metal wall beneath the door between us, moving into the pool of what little light was left burning at that time of day. He had a piece of paper in his hand and a pencil behind his ear. The light gleamed on his teeth as he grinned down at me.
He squatted in front of me to make a closer inspection. ‘Good Lord, it is!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a clever little Blackie. Earning your keep already, I see!’ Before I could take any action to evade it, I was then ‘treated’ to a scratch of the space between my ears, which, with some effort, I just about tolerated.
It wasn’t that I had anything against him – as with everyone I’d so far befriended on the Amethyst, he looked nothing but overjoyed to have had the chance to meet and stroke me. But it’s no treat for a cat bearing prey to be touched. (Not even, might I add, by their mother.) It’s quite the opposite. And try as I might to believe that he didn’t mean to take the rat from me, certain feline instincts are way stronger than logic. Though I managed not to growl at him. Just.
But he seemed to understand anyway, because he stepped aside and made a dramatic sweeping motion with his arm. ‘On your way, sailor,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me hold you up. And if it’s the boss you’re after, you’ll find him on the bridge if you hurry. Blow me,’ he finished, now scratching his own head, using the pencil. ‘And you such a titch, and all, Blackie! Fancy!’ Then he laughed. ‘Peggy’ll be looking to her laurels!’
Even then, I didn’t pay it a great deal of attention – either to the business of who Peggy was, or what ‘her laurels’ might be. I was much too focused on the business in hand. Well, more accurately, the business at that moment in mouth – a dead weight between my jaws that was getting heavier by the moment, and that I had still to present to the captain.
As it was, I failed to find him, because he wasn’t on the bridge and, fearing the man up there – Lieutenant Berger, who was apparently not a ‘cat fan’ – I slipped away again, carefully, holding my head up as I went, so the rat’s scaly tail didn’t drag on the floor.
To the captain’s cabin, then, I decided, but he wasn’t there either, and it occurred to me that he might by now be back out on deck, doing the dawn ‘mustering’ that seemed to bring him such joy. Since it seemed a bit presumptuous to waltz up with it while he was busy giving orders, I decided that the cabin was the best place for my trophy. I sprang up to his bunk and left the body where I knew he’d appreciate it – on the pillow.
It was only when I jumped down and headed back to the rat runs that it occurred to me. I still had no answer to my question. Who or what was this Peggy, anyway?
Chapter 6
When you live on board a ship, as I very quickly came to understand once I’d joined the Amethyst, life is all about order and routine. This obviously holds true for every drama a ship might encounter, but it’s equally important on those days when there is none; those long days of ploughing steadily through the water, the sky above, the ocean below, the view calm and unchanging. That’s where routine apparently makes for ‘good order’, which was something the captain seemed to mention a lot, along with ‘shipshape’, which seemed relevant, even if not entirely obvious, and ‘Bristol fashion’, which meant not a jot to me.
But whatever the reason Mr Bristol had decreed it, his way of fashioning things created routine and structure, which made it quite unlike any day in my previous life. Back then, every dawn could bring entirely new challenges, many of them challenges I felt ill-equipped to face. Here, every new day was a copy of the one that came before it, and also a blueprint for the one coming after – each one so like the other that they soon began to blur; it would be only the ship’s log that would enable any distinction to be made, and some specific memory be pinned to it.
With one exception. The day I met Peggy.
News of my first kill seemed to blow through the Amethyst like a hurricane, and I made even more friends as a result. It seemed the captain hadn’t been joking when he’d told me what a scourge the ship’s rats were, because the first thing he did was congratulate me fulsomely. ‘Well, thanks VERY much for my gift!’ he said, chuckling as he did so. ‘What a TREAT it was to find it just before I had my breakfast! Absolutely DELIGHTFUL,’ and lots of other jolly things like that.
Everywhere I went, I was treated like a hero; applauded, roundly cheered, and given all sorts of food treats. In fact, the only dampening detail in the joy of my new status was that now I’d done it once I must of course do it all again.
And again. And then again. Which didn’t worry me that much – after my kill I was as full of confidence as I was of sardines (sardines being preferable to rat parts on any intelligent kitten’s menu) but enough to ensure that I wasted no time on pride and preening. Instead, I planned my next kill, just as I’d done when my mother had first died (even though I was no longer desperate for food); tried to hunt as much with forethought and in
telligence as with instinct, rejigging my watches, just as the captain liked the rest of the crew to do sometimes, so that I was always extra-vigilant at those times of day when the rats were most likely to be out and about. So it was that at dusk the following evening, most of the crew having just eaten their evening meal, I was patrolling the various passageways amidships.
It was the sound that came first, and it stopped me in my tracks, streaking through my body like a bolt of electricity.
‘You alright, Blackie?’ said my new friend, Jack, he of the first rat encounter. Jack was the youngest of the ship’s telegraphists, which meant he was in charge of communications, of which, on the Amethyst, there seemed to be many different kinds. He spent a lot of his time in a particularly pleasing place I’d recently discovered – the wireless office, which was situated forward, near the wheelhouse, and had a rather nice high place in it – a cosy kitten-sized nook. It was a warm wooden shelf and I had already taken quite a shine to it, both on account of its location and its proximity to various electrical items that beeped and tapped and often grew pleasingly warm as well.
Jack was at the stores today, seeing the quartermaster for a tin of herrings-in-tomato-sauce, and had obviously noticed my sudden immobility and stricken pose.
Was I alright? I realised I couldn’t provide him with an answer, because I wasn’t sure. Though my brain told me I was fine, other bits of me were disagreeing with it – which, as I learned early on, is often the way it works with felines; our ears and whiskers are laws unto themselves. I strained to listen, trying to believe I hadn’t heard what I’d just thought I had. But since no sensible cat refuses to believe the evidence of their own ears, I was already inclining to the view that I had indeed heard what I thought I had, when it came again, and then again, several times in quick succession, leaving me in no doubt that my terror was well founded. It couldn’t be, surely? But it was, even so. It was the sound of barking. There was a dog aboard the Amethyst!
Able Seacat Simon Page 4