La Femme

by Storm Constantine

  Only as I came of age had I realised that she was not my mother, but something fascinatingly and eternally other. When confronted by her slender, snaking form, I had found myself gripped by guilty, powerful urges, many involving chasing and trees. Lu Lin had seemed to sense my change, but had taken a wilful pleasure in provoking me, seizing every opportunity to flaunt her toothsome allure.

  “Think. Can you remember this morning at all, before your walk? You can’t, can you? Let me explain. Matt didn’t attach your leash this morning, because he couldn’t see you. He thought he was going out alone.”

  I had an uneasy feeling that this was meant to reflect badly on Matt. I yawned and licked my nose, a nervous habit I have when I’m suppressing the urge to bite something.

  “Oh, I’m not casting aspersions on your precious fellow. In fact, right now I’m the best friend he has in the world – excepting you, of course. But let’s discuss this inside.”

  “I’m not allowed in when I’m wet and muddy,” I pointed out quietly.

  “Darling, all those rules are lovely in their way, but now is a good time to find out which ones you can break, and which ones you can’t. And don’t worry about the door. Just close your eyes and follow me.”

  I think I knew that all my choices rested on that one moment, that I could still return to my happy thoughtlessness. But along the other path stalked Lu Lin. Her every limb seemed as supple as a tongue, and moved as if tasting the air. Perhaps that blood-instinct that should have sent me chasing her to the high ground had been twisted out of shape, so that instead I felt compelled to follow her eternally. And perhaps that poisonous question mark of a tail had hooked deep into my soul, so that I too felt a need to ask questions. Even a terrier cannot be raised by a Siamese without ending up a little feline-minded.

  I closed my eyes and followed her into the dark. Something brushed past my muzzle, my flanks and my tail like a cobweb. I opened my eyes, and I was standing in the hall.

  “Go quietly here,” said Lu Lin. “Gerbil district. I’ll explain later.”

  The hall was darker than I expected. The lights were off, as they always were during the day, but the light from the window was blocked by a thousand tiny, tireless, winged bodies – flies, wasps, moths, a few blundering bees and a gangle of crane-flies. Occasionally a tiny body would tumble to the sill, spin giddily on its back, then find its feet again.

  I flinched when a goldfish swam slowly past through the air, gills slack and eyes lugubrious.

  “Poor thing. He’s trying to circle his bowl, but he can’t remember where it was.” Lu Lin laughed softly.

  “How long has there been a goldfish?”

  “Oh, it was before your time. There was a goldfish… for a while.” She narrowed her eyes so that the moonstones inside them glimmered. I smiled back, without knowing why. “Come, we need to get out of the hall. I think they’ve noticed us.” There were sounds of activity in the under-stair darkness, and the scrabble of tiny claws on wood.

  “But the gerbils…” I remembered a series of sad little lumps half-buried in sawdust. I recalled a hutch being scrubbed in ugly-smelling bubbles on the front lawn, and then taken away in a stranger’s car.

  “You’re starting to understand, aren’t you?” She looked at me dispassionately. “Poor darling. Let’s go into the lounge.”

  Here too the windows were black with maddened flies. Feeling the soft, cream-coloured carpet underpaw, I remembered my wet coat and felt a frisson at the wrongness of my presence. And, yes, it was a frisson not unmixed with excitement.

  Lu Lin leapt onto the arm of the vast, shabby sofa that stood before the fireplace, with a faint snick of claws catching in cloth. Tail erect, she inveigled her way through the cushions, here and there sinking almost chest deep in patchwork and satin.

  I trotted around the sofa and found her lying at full stretch. Her apparent ability to triple her length at will always fascinated me. My tongue stuck in my throat as I noticed that she had reclined belly-uppermost, an almost unprecedented gesture of trust and affection. I was almost driven to do something rash, like licking her across the nose, but I restrained myself.

  “Take a seat,” she said. “No, silly boy, not down there, up here.”

  “I’m not allowed on the sofa.”

  “No one will ever know.” The tip of her kinked tail often seemed to move with an independent will. Right now it was flicking to and fro, half-teasing, half impatient. “Look, Matt is in the most desperate danger and trouble, and I’ve just about made up my mind to tell you about it, but I won’t breathe a word until you’ve joined me up here.”

  I was tortured by the image of Matt rapping me on the nose, his face patient but reproving. However, I gathered my will and with a swift kick of my back legs I was up. The sofa was soft and shapeless, subsiding in unexpected ways beneath my weight. It smelt of Matt and spilt bolognese. And Her, of course. Lorraine.

  The silken bulges of the cushions were cool against my nose, and I struggled to concentrate.

  “Matt’s in danger?”

  “Mm? Oh. Yes.” Lu Lin narrowed her eyes again, but this time not in a smile. “Do you remember the ‘bad man bark’ you sounded a few nights ago?”

  “Yes – bad man in the garden. Bad man.” I growled a little. “I scare him away.”

  “Oh, don’t go doggy on me again. Try to focus. The bad man is a friend of Lorraine’s. She and he have been making kittens. I know the smell, even if Matt doesn’t.” I did not really understand what she meant, but I kept listening. “Anyway, you bad-man-barked four nights in a row, when Lorraine’s friend was coming to help her make kittens, so she put something in your food. Something to make you dead.”

  Dead.

  My mind squirmed away from the word. I felt my muzzle pucker, trembling between a growl and a whine. A bitter taste came into my mouth, and with it a memory of eating at Lorraine’s feet while she tousled the fur of my neck.

  I felt a sick lurch, a sinking sensation. Like the treacherous cushions, my happy, little world was giving way under my feet.

  “I’m sorry, my sugar mouse,” Lu Lin said quietly. Perhaps she really was. “But you need to listen. Because now she’s putting it in Matt’s food. She’s trying to make him dead.”

  That was something I could hold onto. Something I could sink my teeth into and grip.

  Matt was in danger. That was all that mattered.

  Matt was in danger, and… it sounded as though I was allowed to hate Lorraine at last.

  “But you…” I struggled to think clearly. “You were always Lorraine’s friend. Me with Matt, you with Lorraine. Why… why are you changing sides?”

  “I have my reason. In fact, you’re sitting on it.” Lu Lin extended a single claw and plucked at the worn corduroy of the sofa arm. “I’ve known Lorraine a long time, and recently she’s been laying strips of cloth against everything.”

  I stared at her.

  “It means that she’s going to change everything,” Lu Lin explained. “Old things go out, new things come in. She wants to make the whole house her territory, and smell of clean.” She looked up and dazzled me with those luminous eyes. “Oh yes, she had a comfortable lap and was good at stroking, but she wants to get rid of my sofa, so she has to go.”

  I thought this over, with great care.

  “Do I bite her?”

  “Oh, you’re sweet to offer, but it wouldn’t do any good. I’ve experimented, and she doesn’t notice, though it does seem to make her nervous. But… if I put my mind to it, I can move things.” She kneaded idly at one patchwork cushion. “Providing I used to toy with them when I was alive, that is.

  “Now, listen, Benjamin. Lorraine keeps her Bottle of Bad Death in her handbag. You used to fetch that bag for her, didn’t you? That means you can still move it. I need you to take it from Lorraine’s room while she’s sleeping, and spill it over the floor where Matt will find it when he gets up. Simple enough?

  “You will have to be careful, though. The hal
lway and the stairs are gerbil districts. Oh, most of the gerbils just hover in the air where their hutch used to stand, and quiver a lot. But the others… have started taking orders from the radiator in the utility room.”

  I shook my ears a little, but the words they had heard remained the same.

  “Is it a… ghost radiator?” I asked.

  “No.” Lu Lin narrowed her eyes. “Radiators don’t have ghosts. But for some reason that radiator is unusually talkative. I don’t know why – the gerbils won’t let me get close.

  “I would get Lorraine’s bag myself, but I was never allowed to touch it. She didn’t trust me, you see.” Lu Lin smiled at me with two blinding azure slits, then contracted herself into her usual dimensions and sat up. She laid one paw in play-fight fashion against my muzzle, the very tips of her claws resting on the skin under the fur. “You will do this for me, won’t you?”

  I spent the next hour barking at cars to clear my head.

  *

  Dusk crept in like a dingy stray. When Matt came to the front door in his stripes to put out the garbage, I crouched in the hall like a criminal and watched him.

  Matt smelt ill. His hands shook when he knotted the garbage bags. Only when he had disappeared back upstairs did I dare to move.

  A gerbil hutch had once stood on the high table in the hall, and this location was now a centre of tremulous, neurotic activity. Tiny, rounded, frantic forms scrambled over one another in mid-air, confined between floors and walls which could no longer be seen. One of them ran his legs to a blur in an invisible wheel.

  I passed their hutch without sparing them a glance, and approached the stairs. Already I was noticing traces of the other gerbils, the rogue element. Lu Lin was right. They had changed.

  Their scent was bold and fearless. Tiny, proud tooth-graffiti had been nibbled into the bannister base. From the shadows I heard the faint, grating sound of rodent snickering.

  Then I saw one of them, sitting in the middle of the fourth step, chewing on something that smelt like damp plaster. He watched me approach without flinching or blinking. When I came within lunge-and-snap range of him, however, he gave a high, sustained squeak. It was echoed by identical squeaks from the stairway and hall behind me.

  The first attack took me in the tail before I knew what was happening. Next moment my plaster-chewing friend had leapt for my ear, and a couple of his hutchmates had me by the hindleg. From the hallway more were coming, a legion of little claws fretting at worn wood and carpet.

  I sprang, twisting in mid-air, and felt the gerbil front-runners lose their tooth-hold on my fur and flesh. I leapt and scrambled my way up the stairs, blundering headlong into the murk of the landing.

  Lorraine’s door was always slightly ajar at night. I could just make out her door crack in the murk, a narrow slit of denser darkness.

  The gerbils had not followed me. As I panted, however, I realised that I was not alone on the landing. From the shadows ahead came a thick, breathy, liquid sound, like somebody trying to drink from a hosepipe.

  “No animals.” It was a slathering splutter of a voice. “No animals allowed upstairs.”

  “Listen, I don’t want any trouble.” I took a couple of shaky steps towards Lorraine’s room, towards the voice.

  There was a muffled scamper-thunder, and then a column of pale fur burst from the darkness and struck me in the chest. The impact rolled me onto my back, and then I struggling under the weight of a shapeless roll of carpet that seemed to have no head at all, just a neck with teeth. Sensing the precipice of the stairway at my back, I struggled free, and stared into a flattened face with doleful, insane, bulging black eyes.

  “But you’re an animal!” My nose was filled with the scent of another dog. Angry dog, sick angry dog.

  The Peke gave a thin, mad, “Yi! Yi! Yi!” of rage, and rammed me again. I fell backwards into space, then felt stair after stair bite me in the spine and flanks as I tumbled. I hit the hallway floor with a force that knocked the senses from me. For a long time I lay stunned and motionless.

  There was a dark and delicate whorl painted on the banister. It reminded me of Lu Lin. I watched it until I could almost imagine a kink in it, and a playfully twitching tip. At long last something in my own mind began to twitch and stir, and I started to think. I started to think the Lu Lin way.

  The little plaster chewer was back at his post when I approached the stairs again.

  “Hey, you.” I said.

  He stopped chewing.

  “Not going to run away, are you?”

  He started chewing again, but more slowly.

  “You off your patch, doggy,” he chittered after a moment. “Not welcome. You looking for trouble?”

  “No, I’m looking for answers,” I said, quietly. “Why don’t you take me to talk to the radiator?”

  *

  Once the radiator would have gleamed, creamy sleek. Now grey-furred cobwebs looped along the pipes, and a smudged hand-print on the paintwork had been commemorated in grime.

  As I drew closer, my nose twitched. Behind the smell of dust and the cold scent of water slowly working its will upon wood and plaster, I detected something else - the fatty, fulsome smell of singed fur.

  “Leave us.” The radiator’s rasping voice had a slight metallic echo. My gerbil entourage obediently melted into the shadows.

  “Sir.” I decided to direct my remarks at a central grease spot that looked a bit like an eye. “I understand that you and your organisation control the hall and stairway. I need free passage so I can reach the landing.”

  “Why, may I ask? For the pleasure of having your ears torn off by the Peke Pompadour?”

  “Next time I’ll beat him.”

  There was a pause.

  “Draw closer,” it said. “I want to see you.”

  I approached slowly, watching the wide, white surface for any sign of treacherous intent.

  “No, to the side. Come, put your head against the wall.”

  Somewhat perplexed, I obeyed, pulling my ears back, and sliding the end of my muzzle into the gap between wall and radiator. It smelt like a bonfire after rain.

  “Good,” said a dark blot that crouched among the pipes. “Now, do not attempt anything irrational or aggressive. One squeak from me and my young friends will run in and tear you apart.”

  The speaker was about the size of a grapefruit, and the colour of under-bed tumble-fluff. Through a faint, sickly pall of smoke I made out a grey-furred face riddled with deep wrinkles and grooves.

  “I must apologise for receiving you in this murky environment,” said the Chinchilla. “I have… an aversion to light and open spaces.”

  “Are you stuck?” I had noticed that the Chinchilla’s furred bulk seemed to nestle a little too snugly between the metal plate of the radiator and the slender pipe that ran along its base. There was a chill silence.

  “I am quite content with my location. I will confess that, once upon a time, shortly after I had abandoned my hutch in search of a darker and more private abode, I did find myself incapacitated by the dimensions of this aperture. Its extremities of temperature were also… inconvenient. Now that I have adapted, however, I find it perfectly agreeable.”

  I wriggled my muzzle in a little further.

  “I can try to get you out of there if you like.”

  “No need!” the Chincilla retorted sharply. “I have everything I require here. No light to offend my senses, no prying eyes, no gargantuan distractions. My young friends are my eyes and ears, and furthermore allow me to indulge at last my abiding love of strategy, something I do not expect you to understand. Every day I map a little more of this house in my mind’s eye, and plan its conquest.” The Chinchilla raised one tiny, grey talon before his face and wheezed out a lungful of smoke, then peered at me with coal-chip eyes. “So, how do you propose to best the Peke Pompadour?”

  “By persuading you and your friends to help me.”

  “Ah.” The Chinchilla laughed. “No doubt there is
some excellent reason why we should do so?”

  “Matt is in danger, and I need to carry a handbag down the stairs to save him.”

  “The heavy-treading male?” The Chinchilla’s tone was cold. “He sometimes scrapes the mud off his boots against the radiator tap.”

  “If he dies, Lorraine will own the house. She will want to change and clean everything - including your radiator.”

  “Humans cannot see radiators,” the Chinchilla pronounced with confidence. “I have made a study of the subject. They never clean them.”

  “So… your ‘young friends’ are afraid of the Peke?” I felt as if my stumpy tail might be snaking like that of Lu Lin. “Then how do they get past him to spy out the upstairs for you?” I saw a flicker of discomfort cross my host’s small, ravaged countenance. “I don’t think they’ve even seen them. None of your people can get past the Peke, can they?

  “But I’ve seen some of the upstairs rooms. If you help me, I’ll tell you all about the bathroom, both bedrooms and anything new I see while I’m up there.”

  The little pouches under the Chinchilla’s nose quivered as the tiny hands played lovingly along his whiskers.

  “What if you burn out before you report back?” he asked sharply.

  “Burn… out?”

  “Moving things expends your energy, your essence. Dragging a handbag all the way down the landing could burn you out like a candle. You must tell me about the rooms now, just in case you do not return.”

  “One bedroom now. The other bedroom and the bathroom when I get back safely.”

  Another flame-crackle of a laugh, this time in assent.

  *

  Two stairs down from the top, I belly-hugged the stair-carpet and listened. On either side bristled an elite squad of gerbils, noses a-quiver. From the landing above, we could hear the irregular, soupy sound of breathing.

  One twitch of the eyebrows as a signal to the gerbils, and then I took the last two steps at a bound.