by Tanith Lee
When she thought of the Trip, which constantly she did, Susan felt sick. When she thought of Wizz she felt sick.
The flat throbbed with induced nausea.
All that summer break she had been roaming about with Jo, her half-friend from school, a looming, argumentative, ungainly girl who wore glasses. Susan was tired of Jo by now, and anyway, it would only take one long bus-ride to conduct her back in time, to the land before Wizz and America.
When she turned into Constance Street, the aura of its familiarity was sharp, almost surreal. Dazed, Susan gaped at the old houses and the tall dusty trees, so well remembered, the garish off-licence on the corner, the Chinese take-away, the post-office. Here it all was, still intact, the past. But then she came to the wall of the house where she had lived with Anne, and the wall was there but the house was not.
Susan stood in the open gateway, staring up a tarmac drive parked over with cars, to a five-storey modern block of flats. On either side, the other houses rose aloof, entire. Only her own building, hers and Anne’s, had been eradicated. It was like a plot against them, to expunge their image, pretend they had never been, and if they said they had – they lied.
A woman flounced out of the flats. She wore a white suit and a lot of gold jewellery. She unlocked a bright red car, got in, and presently drove out right past Susan, still standing gawping in the widened gap in the wall, where once a gate had been.
Susan walked along the street. She stared up into the burnt green clusters of the chestnut trees. Everything was there, just the same, except for the house where she and Anne had lived.
Turning into Dunkirk Street though, Susan found some trees had been planted along the pavements in wire cages. Someone had white graffitoed over the Dun of Dunkirk and written in above, Capt.
Susan walked, not knowing whether to turn back, to see if her own building had reappeared. But that was silly. So she kept walking, and Capt. Kirk Street led, sooner than she recalled, into the park. Susan bought an ice-cream, from a van in the park, with a chocolate stick stuck in it. This was to compensate for the demolishment of her roots, and also for all the times she had been dragged through the park and not allowed to stop.
The park still looked big, but swept bare. Had it always been so bleak, even in summer? Long blank vistas of lawn, the groups of trees standing well back to the sides, as if unwilling to ask each other to dance. Among the trees in the left hand areas were the public toilets, and beyond, the path which led to the shrubbery and the Long Pool.
Susan finished the ice-cream, even the less-appetising cornet. Then she walked through the park and straight into Tower Road.
“I don’t want to go up there,” she had said. And Anne had always made her.
I don’t want to go to America and live with Wizz.
Could Anne make her do that too?
Tower Road, the prehistoric riverbed, roped its way among the cliffs of mossy, tree-hung walls, the cascades of foliage. It was midday, the sun directly overhead and raw with fire. Grasshoppers scratched among the hot stones. There was the antique sound of water, hidden behind brickwork, trickling, and in the blue-black recurring shade, a visual silence.
Why go on? No one was making her, now. There was no reason. The reason had been found on a bench, in a crochet of white frost, four years ago, dead.
“Hello – are you Helen Colly?”
“No.”
“No, I thought you weren’t. I think she’s older. And delayed, obviously. But it’s okay anyway, if you want to come in. The more the merrier.”
They walked up the drive.
The thing that struck Susan first, when the door was open, was the excruciating reek of cats’ urine. It was like a blow, so she grunted involuntarily and put her hand over her mouth, then took it down, because that would be rude.
“Yes, sorry about the pong,” said the woman, unconcerned. “We do our best, but we’ve got around two hundred on our hands now, and a lot of them aren’t litter trained as yet, or neutered. It’s the males spraying that’s the worst.”
She was about thirty-five, slim and boyish in her jeans and T-shirt, with spiky brunette hair, a clear sandy complexion and aquamarine eyes.
The stink, and the sight of several black and white cats among the bushes outside, now augmented by three tabbies cantering almost in tandem across the wide hall like a chariot team, provided recollection.
“Oh, the cats’ charity.”
“That’s us. Cat Samaritans. I thought that was why you were here, to have a look and choose one – or preferably six or seven of the buggers. Aren’t you?”
“Sorry.”
They stood in the hall. Meows sang through the upper air.
Aside from the cats, it was not as she remembered, not really. It seemed more empty, lighter. Bars of sun fell dramatically across the floor, which had new lino of a cold beige. Some of the trees had been cut back, by the walls, that was it, allowing the sunshine to pass in. The drive, though, had been if anything more overgrown, all but a central strip where the wheels of jeeps had recently smashed through the weeds.
The house itself, seen from the outside, as Susan had stood there on the driveway – the house… Somehow she had kept looking and looking at it, trying to see it, for somehow it wasn’t there, just like the flats in Constance Street. Somehow, the house had vanished.
And yet – they had just walked through the door. They were inside the house.
The woman, who had come around the non-house and advanced toward her, mistaking her for the delayed Helen Colly, now said, “Oh come and have a cup of tea anyway. If you can stand the smell.”
“It’s all right, really. I like cats.”
“Yes,” said the woman. “I like cats better than people, frankly. There’s five of us here at the moment, on the team. But I’m the only real peoplephobe.”
“I’m people…” said Susan inanely.
“Oh, you’re all right. You’re a cat really,” said the woman, strangely. “I’m Jackie, by the way.”
“Susan. My grandmother used to live here.”
They were in the kitchen by then, the lower kitchen right at the back of all the sunken regions of the house. They had waded there through waves of cats, which came rushing, screaming, towards them. Every one had a name, by which Jackie greeted them. Some had only three legs, or one eye, but all looked spruce, well-fed and healthy. Snake-like, they rubbed their soft fur over the women’s legs. And when Susan sat down at the long wooden table, two jumped as one into her lap.
“Just put them off if they bother you.”
“No… they’re great.”
“Let me get this straight. Your grandmother was Mrs Wilde –”
“Mrs Catherine Wilde.” Susan smoothed the cats, which slapped her under the chin with their tails, trampling her knees down to the proper consistency. Then she smoothed the kitchen table. It was the library table. That was where she had seen it last. In the book-room with the pale jaundiced dish on it, reflecting back her own round, half-formed, twelve-year-old face.
“She left us the house,” said Jackie, “as you know. It was an absolute godsend, I can tell you. We were trying to do this out of two basement flats.”
The lap-cats settled, edges and tails overlapping.
The rest of the tidal sea of fur ceaselessly moved back and forth through the kitchen, reminding Susan of the Countess Gertrude in Gormenghast. All the dim chambers of the house rang with meowing, purrs, snarls and screeches, sudden skitterings and thumps.
“I remember that plant. I used to call it Martian Rhubarb. It’s got much bigger.”
“Yeah, there were a lot of plants left. We take cuttings and start new ones, sell them when we have a jumble sale for the cats.”
Another woman stalked into the kitchen, older, with long grey hair and a cross face.
“Do you know where the tablets are for the Putney Six?”
“Try behind the rag-cupboard like last time.”
“That window needs fixing again
upstairs. And that knocking’s started again.”
She marched out. Susan drank some of the tea Jackie had put before her. She was becoming used to the urine-reek, noticing it less or not at all.
“Must seem strange to you. Us being here now.”
“Yes.”
“I gather she was quite a character, the old lady.”
Susan didn’t know what to say.
The strawberry-red leaves of the Martian Rhubarb, either the original, or a cutting, and now a massive three-foot high in a plastic tub, stirred suddenly, whispered to each other, rasped like dry old skin.
Jackie glanced at the plant.
“Did you want to look around the house?”
“Oh – maybe.”
“Go ahead, if you want.”
“Oh, but –”
“Frankly, Susan, I trust you. And even if you were a thief, we haven’t got much to steal, apart from the cats. And providing you can prove you have a good home for them you can have as many of those as you want, free.”
“Wish I could,” said Susan, politely.
She didn’t know if she wanted to go over the house. She had never, so far as she could recall, even come this distance, in her grandmother’s day, never seen the lower kitchen or the scullery. But now she supposed she must, must look at the house. It was full of an ocean of cats. No longer as it had been. No longer – here.
As she flexed her legs, wondering how to remove the two sleepers without jolting them, both woke and instantly sprang from her, indifferent to the passage of humans and random fate.
Was this a bit like having to go round a stately home on a school visit, something she had to do, and pretend to be interested in? How many rooms were there? They had been added on decades before, the house – already large – extending in all directions. Some rooms even no longer had windows, being trapped between outer rooms which did, or so Anne had once said. Susan found none of these. But Anne hadn’t seen much of the house, had never lived, consciously in the house. The grandmother, Catherine, had conceived Anne unexpectedly in her late forties. And then World War II had happened, and Anne, only about four or five, was sent to a well-to-do aunt, (her father’s sister) on a farm outside Lincoln. She never came back.
But really, Susan knew nothing about all that, as Anne seemed not to. Susan knew nothing about her – about Catherine. Nothing.
Of the cats, with which the house was now mainly furnished, Susan met all kinds, even a pair of Persians on a landing, who stared at her with demented apricot eyes.
Once she saw another human, a thin hurrying girl in trousers, who simply muttered “Hi” and trotted past.
A few doors were shut, and Susan left them alone. In some open-doored rooms were large cages, with single cats in them, presumably segregated due to ailments or unsocial temperament.
But the house – room on room, corridor on corridor, steps, annexes, was, despite cats and absence, still a vegetable house, a pumpkin: the Labyrinth.
Then somehow, coming down a crooked back stair, Susan emerged into a wide room empty of all furniture. Trees pressed at the windows, fir, pines, bays, and beyond lay an unexpected growing wall of garden, turning back from a once-pruning into a jungle.
This was the room, still cased in its emerald light, where Susan and Anne had last seen the old woman alive.
Cats lay in patches of sun on bare boards. Marks of territorial cat sprayings decorated the plaster, to an impressively high point.
But it was still that room.
Susan stood there.
She had thought she was lost in the house, had even uneasily wondered if she could find her way down to the front again, and if not would she be unable ever to get out?
But here she was.
The room was full of an immense stillness. Nothing moved that made any sound, not even the cats. Before a window, standing on the floor, another Martian Rhubarb, darker and greener than the other, raised its heavy flags to the scattered sun.
One by one the cats lifted their eyes, some their heads, looking all one way, towards a vacant spot in the room where a shaft of light faded slowly, perhaps unaccountably. The cats watched. They looked steadily up into the air, where nothing was, and followed it with their gem stone eyes.
Fine hairs rose on the back of Susan’s neck.
After a moment, the light changed again. A cloud must have crossed the sun. The cats resumed former occupations, mostly sleeping. Two began to fight. One bounded into the pot of the plant and urinated.
Jackie was standing talking in a room off the hall, with a big woman in a Laura Ashley dress. “Oh, yes, I’d like to adopt three, even four.” Helen Colly? That was all right then.
Near the front door, the grey-haired woman bent over a hamper with kittens in it.
“Thanks for calling,” she said to Susan, harshly. “Thinking of joining the team? It’s a tough life, you know. We’ll be out again tonight, all night, I expect, trying to catch ferals and bring them in. And every cat needs to be thoroughly checked over, you know, neutered, some need drugs. Look at these, abandoned in Hawthorne Road.”
“Poor things,” said Susan. She gazed at their milky grey eyes.
“Oh, they’ll be all right now. But it costs a lot. We do like a donation, where possible.”
Flushing, feeling like a criminal, Susan rummaged for a pound note and gave it to the woman. She imagined over and over, as she walked back up the drive, the woman saying to her colleagues, “Flash little bitch, handing me a pound like some duchess.” Or, alternatively saying, “Mean little cow. Only gave me a quid.”
“Had an okay day?”
“Mr V had one of his famous attacks,” said Anne, scathingly. “I get the feeling they’re going to fold the business up.”
Susan turned her head from the rescuing spectres of Wizz and America the Golden, glinting at the back of her mother’s silver eyes.
“Anne – tell me about Grandmother.”
“What? What am I supposed to tell you, after all these years?” Anne flopped gracefully back in her chair, drinking icy orange-juice from the fridge, shoes kicked off, her feet, with their perfectly enamelled nails, propped on the stool. Heat lay over the flat like damp washing. “I’m tired, Susan. I’m going to have another bath. The trains are bloody in this weather –”
“I’ll run the bath for you.”
“Thanks.”
When Susan came back, she said, “Do you remember anything about the house, Anne?”
“Which house?”
“The house in Tower Road. When you were little and lived there with Grand – with Catherine.”
“No.”
“Not even –”
“I’ve said, You’ve asked me before and I’ve told you all I know. I remember being about four, and saying, Am I four? And someone said Yes. That may have been my father, or her. I don’t recollect. And I don’t remember anything about the house, it was just a sort of space around things. I don’t even remember the garden, except a piece with roses growing up something. That’s all. I’m not putting you off, Susan. I truly don’t remember a thing.”
“But you remember the farm. The drive with the lilacs. And Lincoln. How it was so flat, except for the hill with the castle and the cathedral. And the Roman arch in that street. All that.”
“Oh yes. But I was there until I was in my twenties.”
“I went there today.”
“Lincoln?” Anne looked quizzical, waiting.
“The house. Her house.”
“My God. What sort of state was it in?”
Susan smiled. “It was full of cats.”
“Yes, it would be.”
“No, it was nice. They take care of them and find them proper homes and everything.”
“How much did you give them?”
“Only a pound.”
“That’s quite a lot at your age, on our income.”
“But they let me look round. I’d never seen so much of the house, and it’s so peculiar, and I couldn’
t make any – sense of it –”
“No,” said Anne. “They kept building on. It was a shambles. They were both mad, you know. Richard and Catherine. And then he got killed in London, when that bomb landed in the street. And that just left her to be mad on her own.”
“Did she want you back then?”
“No, she never wanted me at all. They didn’t want children, and she thought she’d never have any. And then, there I was. She was forty-seven, forty-eight. A horrible difficult birth. They had to sew her up. She told me once.”
“Oh – ugh –”
“You asked. So listen. I think she’d have given me away whatever happened, the War just provided a decent excuse. Before my late twenties, I saw her only once, when I was twenty-one. She came to my party. I didn’t know who she was. Aunt Margaret said, Here’s your mother, Anne. Can you picture it?”
“What did she look like?”
“Old. I was twenty-one, and she was – what would she have been – about sixty-seven or eight – nearly seventy. She had on a cream costume, and her hair was still fair, or she’d had it dyed, and it was permed in the latest fashion. Blood-red nails and lips. This was in the Fifties. Women looked like that then. But not necessarily old ones. She gave me a present. Oh, I’d had things before. They came by post. She handed me this.”
“What was it?”
“It was a cheque for a hundred pounds. That was real money then. Go and turn the bath off before it runs over.”
Susan went, shut off the taps, darted back. But now Anne looked at her moodily. “Look, Susan. I don’t really want to talk about this now. I didn’t know her, and suddenly she expected to be my mother. Margaret wasn’t exactly peerless, but she did her best. She was the closest I got. And then this dolled-up praying mantis appears before me.”
“You said –”
“I’ve said enough. Shut up. I’m going to have that bath. Oh,” pausing in the doorway, deliberate and cruel with her ace card, “thought any more about America?”
The phone rang when Anne was in the bathroom.
It was Jo.
“I tried you all afternoon,” accusingly. “Where were you?”