by Nick Green
‘Where did you find the key to the office?’
‘Didn’t. Got a way with locks. Simple ones.’ Geoff wiggled a finger mysteriously.
‘You’re a – I mean, you know –’
‘Sssh. This lot aren’t exactly hard of hearing either. Down here.’
Geoff dropped off the platform into the railway trench. Ben, bursting with questions, followed him at an Eth-walk into the tunnel. The dimly glowing opening behind them had shrunk smaller than a fingernail before Geoff made another sound.
‘Through darkness I walk in day,’ he murmured.
Ben steadied himself on the blackened brick wall.
‘You’re a pashki master.’
‘That certainly would explain a lot,’ said Geoff.
‘And now you run a pub?’
‘Nah.’ Geoff chuckled. ‘Earning pennies behind the bar. A nice thought, mind you. Landlord of the White Lion. It’d suit me, do you reckon?’
‘I suppose.’
‘One day, then. If I ever settle down. Now–’ He froze in mid-step. ‘Did I catch your name back there?’
‘Ben.’
‘Yes, I did. Great. Answer me this, Ben. How well can you see?’ He pointed. ‘Can you make out those chalk marks on the track where it curves?’
Ben widened his eyes. ‘One. Seven. And the letter J.’
‘Ha! Twenty-twenty night vision. Only three people in the country could have taught you that. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. I’m going to guess.’ He looked hard at Ben. ‘Felicity. You’ve been around Felicity Powell.’
Ben had to nod.
‘I knew it!’ Geoff’s cry echoed alarmingly. ‘Didn’t I know it right away. Never say I’m losing my touch.’
‘You know Mrs Powell?’
‘As well as anyone ever has.’ Geoff’s voice sank again. He tightrope-walked along one steel rail. ‘We wore away footpaths together. Over rooftops, through jungles. Yes, I know her. Or I did.’
He blinked his blue eyes.
‘It’s been so long. Tell me, Ben. How is Felicity? How’s she doing?’
Ben felt the night dump all its weariness on him at once.
‘This could take a while,’ he said.
THE COMPASS
The knees of Tiffany’s jeans had gone grey. Her dustpan rattled with grit, fluff, crayon bits, biscuit crumbs and two plasters. Welded to the hardwood floor she found a wad of chewing gum, which she picked off with her thumbnail, grimacing. The shiny patch underneath showed up the grime everywhere else. Should she get a mop? There wasn’t time.
She put away the dustpan and cast a critical eye round the church hall. The Sunday School’s drawings looked more out of place than ever. Maybe she could take them down for this evening. First she had to change her dusty clothes. It also seemed important to get her face-print just right, with no smudges. She was checking the tabby markings in her hand mirror when she heard the door crash. Ben walked in.
‘Hello.’
His expression was mysterious – as mysterious as his phone call yesterday morning. It had gone something like this:
‘Ben, Hi! Ouch, it’s only seven a.m. I meant to say, I’m sorry about what I said the other day.’
‘What?’ said Ben. ‘No, no, forget that.’
‘O. . .kay. That means you’re sorry too, does it?’
‘Yeah, of course. Listen. We need a Cat Kin meeting tomorrow. You have to book the hall for Monday evening.’
‘I have to?’
‘Yes. Can’t explain on the phone. Too tired. But there’ll be a special guest.’
‘Guest? Did you say guest? We can’t let other people –’
‘Trust me. This is someone you really want to see.’ It was this tantalising hint that had persuaded her and made her come here far too early to start a frenzy of cleaning. Now she did her best to decode his face. Despite the twinkle in his eye he looked frayed around the edges, as if he’d had a hard day at school.
‘So,’ said Tiffany. ‘What’s the big surprise?’
‘Wait for the others.’
Olly, amazingly, was one of the first to appear, and even the usual stragglers showed up on the dot of seven. Yusuf put his face round the door. ‘Someone having a birthday?’
‘Did Ben say we’ve got a visitor tonight?’ Cecile asked, and Tiffany could only shrug.
Susie cried, ‘Tickle him till he tells!’
‘Cut it out!’ Ben pushed her off. ‘He’ll be here in a minute.’
‘He?’ said Tiffany. A hope inside her, so frail she had barely noticed it, fell like a tree’s last leaf.
The group sat in awkward silence. Perhaps they had wondered the same as her. Feeling more and more foolish, Tiffany rubbed her wrists across her mouth, the way Rufus did when he fell off the sofa while napping. How could she have been so silly as to imagine, even for a second, that. . .?
There was a knock. Instantly Ben was on his feet to open the door. In stepped a man in a black leather jacket. Tiffany caught her breath. She had seen him before. But where?
‘Here we are, Geoff,’ said Ben. ‘Our little team. Everyone, this is Geoff White.’
The newcomer stood still, taking in the room, the stacked chairs, the high windows, the Cat Kin sitting in a loose semi-circle. Then he wandered over with a tentative wave.
‘Interesting place.’ He looked round some more. ‘Nice finger-paintings.’
Tiffany saw puzzled faces. Yusuf mouthed a question. She helplessly shook her head.
‘Floor’s uneven.’ The man scratched a scar on his cheek, a pale path through the stubble that was almost a beard. ‘Narrow. Bit grubby. And those pictures. . .’ He turned to face the group at last. ‘You realise you can’t possibly learn pashki in here.’
‘Ben, who is this man?’ Tiffany demanded.
‘I beg your pardon.’The interloper squatted among them, his feet flat to the floor. ‘Felicity Powell called me Geoffrey, mostly. But Geoff will do.’
‘Mrs Powell?’ Daniel exclaimed.
‘They’re old friends,’ said Ben.
‘Less of the old in my case, please,’ said Geoff. ‘But yeah. Friends, associates, comrades-in-arms. . . and teacher and pupil, both ways round. I could tell you some tales. . . and I will. Only not tonight. More important is the story Ben has for you.’
‘Wait,’ said Tiffany. Things were running away from her. ‘You can’t just walk in here. We don’t even know you. And I saw you–’ now she remembered, ‘lurking outside my house!’
‘You must be Tiffany. Sorry. You got me bang to rights.’ Geoff held out his wrists, as if for handcuffs.
‘Why were you watching me?’
‘Because they don’t list the Cat Kin in the Yellow Pages.’
She returned his blue gaze, determined not to blink.
‘You’re cautious.’ Geoff blinked first. ‘Good. And you want proof that I am who I claim to be.’ He chuckled. ‘Well. I could tell you lots of facts about Felicity. She hates dust and clutter. She subscribes to the National Geographic. She has a beat-up old radio that she keeps repairing. Etcetera. I know all that. Does it prove I’m her friend?’
Foreheads wrinkled as they tried to follow his meaning.
‘Of course not,’ said Geoff. ‘No more than Tiffany can prove that her cat belongs to her. Friendship is hard stuff to get hold of. So it’s no good me just telling you who I am. That’s for you to decide.’
Tiffany felt a twinge of recognition. She’d known someone else who said things like that. With his scarecrow hair, taxi-driver’s accent and sturdy, powerful build, this man seemed almost a different species from the sleek Mrs Powell. But it was the difference of pepper and salt – in that she could, so easily, picture them together.
Geoff pulled up a chair and sat on it back to front.
‘This is sudden for me too,’ he said. ‘I will make time for us to get to know each other. Now there are more important things. Ben, go ahead.’
Ben stood up.
‘I, er. . .’ He laug
hed nervously. ‘I had a bit of an interesting weekend.’
Ben’s tale upset Tiffany in two ways. The first shock was how much it got to her. She saw Susie’s incredulous face, Daniel craning forward. Yes, they looked alarmed, but no more than if Ben had been telling a ghost story round a camp fire.
‘How long was you tied up?’
‘Ugh, you’ve still got the marks. . .’
‘Didn’t they give you any proper food?
‘You went to fight this kid and he beat you. . .?’
‘But who was it in that room under the stairs?’
‘If I’d heard that scream I’d’ve been outta there. . .’
They were lapping it up. For Tiffany it was different. It came too close. The more Ben talked of his ordeal, of loneliness and helplessness, darkness and captivity, the more her own nerves rang, like a glass, in the note that would shatter them. This made the second shock even harder to bear. When Ben revealed that his prison was a derelict station called Hermitage, Tiffany fled the church hall in tears.
‘I knew where you were,’ she said the next day, when an anxious Ben phoned her from his school during morning break. ‘Something in me knew.’
In the dead of Saturday night she had stood in Hermitage Road, drawn by a gut feeling. Turning to the internet she proved her guess correct. In the 1960s, when the Victoria Line was dug, a station had been planned between Finsbury Park and Seven Sisters, before construction was abandoned for reasons unknown. It would have been on that very spot.
‘I was right there,’ said Tiffany. ‘Directly above you. And I left you down there to rot.’
‘You didn’t know I was missing, remember?’ said Ben. ‘It’s okay. Geoff got me out.’
Yes, exactly, Tiffany cried inside. It should have been me. Not some stranger. Her cruel words to Ben had turned out to be true. ‘I said you’d never get any help from me. And you didn’t.’
But she was wrong about that.
On Friday she dragged herself to the pashki class, arriving last of all. Geoff White was there again. His leather jacket and jeans had been replaced by a rumpled black outfit he called a pashkigi, its sleeveless tunic showing off arms that looked hard as iron. He asked her if she minded him taking the lesson. She sat in silence while the others pelted Geoff with questions: who were the sinister kids who had abducted Ben? What was that Hermitage place? He quelled them with a stare.
‘No,’ he said. ‘First you’ve got to give me something. I don’t like wasting my time, and I don’t like putting minors in danger. So I need to know. How well did Felicity teach you?’
Better than you ever could, thought Tiffany. Geoff lined them up in the Sitting Cat pose and put them through their paces. He watched Daniel’s Chasing the Bird, Olly’s ungainly Felasticon, Susie’s Tailspin and Yusuf’s Ratbane Lunge. Most of the time his face was unreadable, although when Ben ran up the wall to place a glass of water on the high window ledge, he clapped.
‘Nah,’ he said, when Ben offered to fetch it down. ‘Let the Sunday School figure it out.’
Tiffany felt as if she were watching her snowman melt. It wasn’t fair. She was the one who’d kept this club going. Who’d booked the stupid hall and collected – tried to collect the money. Who’d vainly trawled the net in search of new things to teach the class. Her class.
As for her, nothing went right. Her balance wavered and she couldn’t feel her whiskers. It was like being back in Miss Fuller’s P.E. class. When Geoff brought round a plank of scratched chipboard to test their Mau claws, her heart sank. Summoning that invisible cutting energy at one’s fingertips required total concentration, and hers was miles away. She bodged her way through the remaining exercises, sat down and sulked.
Geoff held the chipboard aloft and, with a flick of his wrist, scored his right hand across the four deep marks made by Ben. The top half fell off with a splintering sound as Geoff’s Mau claws cut clean through. The class gasped. Their teacher gave a slow blink.
‘You’ve got some promising talent here,’ he said. ‘Felicity must’ve been thrilled to find you, Ben. Yusuf, nice footwork, tight circling. Cecile, good sharp senses. The rest of you. . . ah, you’ll soon be up to scratch.’
Tiffany sat with her chin in her hands, wondered what TV she was missing tonight. She felt a touch on the head.
‘Hey now.’ Geoff winked at her. ‘An off-day, was it?’
‘Dunno.’
‘I think so,’ said Geoff. ‘You’re better than this. When did you learn to use the Oshtian Compass?’
‘The what?’
Geoff looked perplexed. ‘Ah. Felicity may have called it something different. The Lodestone of Pasht?’
His words meant nothing to her.
‘Interesting,’ Geoff purred. ‘You’ve no idea what it is. Yet you used it anyway. Like a great jazz pianist I knew. Never had a lesson, couldn’t even read music. But a wizard on the keys.’
He orbited them on tiptoe and they craned their necks to follow him.
‘You know what cats are famous for, Tiffany? I mean apart from the falling thing and the indestructible thing and the mice thing. . . all those things. Look, what should you do with a cat if you move house? Shut them indoors for a week. Or they go looking for their old home.’ He paused. ‘And they will find it. Cats have this homing instinct, as strong as a pigeon’s. Ten miles, a hundred miles, it doesn’t matter. If the cat loved his old territory, he’s likely to find his way back.’ Geoff made a sudden bound, springing over their heads to land crouched before them. ‘It’s another skill we’ve copied from them. The Oshtian Compass. And it was helping us to get around long before they thought of Sat-Nav.’
Olly chuckled. Daniel elbowed him into silence.
‘But Tiffany, you look puzzled. As you should. For what I’ve told you is only part of it. The easiest part.’ Geoff held all of their gazes with his own. ‘More remarkable yet is when a cat’s owner goes away. Leaving it behind.’
Her heart kicked. She’d read about this.
‘As bizarre as it sounds,’ said Geoff, ‘some cats can actually follow them. I met a Nottingham lad when I was in the army. He was three weeks into basic training when his cat Garibaldi showed up at the barracks, in Surrey. A hundred and fifty miles away. And he knew it wasn’t a lookalike because Gari was missing two vertebrae in his tail. These stories aren’t rare. I heard of one cat crossing the width of the USA, coast to coast, two thousand miles, just to find the sick lady who’d had to give him away when she moved.’
Geoff looked up at the lead-crossed window. Speaking in a murmur, he seemed to be addressing the night outside.
‘That the cat has such a power is astonishing, I suppose. I’ll tell you what’s more incredible. The wish. The will. What kind of force could drive a creature from warmth and safety, make it trek day and night across hostile wilderness, through illness and starvation, in search of one special person? That is what gives me chills.’
He closed his eyes.
‘That night,’ said Tiffany, beginning to grasp it. ‘Something was guiding me.’
‘The Oshtian Compass,’ said Geoff. ‘Drawing you to Ben.’
‘And someone. . .’ she groped for the memory, ‘was following me.’
‘Yeah, that was me.’
Geoff made a guilty face. He’d been watching them both, he confessed. He’d moved to this area after noticing signs that there were pashki students about. It was nothing much – distinctive footprint patterns in the park, a spent Christmas cracker on the church roof – but it got him searching. He set a simple test in the yard behind his pub, which soon netted a catch. After that he kept a watchful eye on Ben, and a good thing too. When Ben didn’t come home one Friday night, Geoff feared the worst (‘More than my dad did,’ said Ben, wryly). Geoff started shadowing Tiffany in case she too was in danger. He couldn’t believe his luck when she helped him by setting out across the rooftops.
‘Why didn’t you come and tell me?’ asked Tiffany.
‘Too risky,’ said
Geoff. ‘You were following the merest thread. You meet me, you’re distracted, it snaps. My best bet was to track you unseen. Turns out you did see me. What can I say. You’re good.’
A smile caught Tiffany unawares.
‘And it worked,’ said Geoff. ‘You led me right to him. To use the Compass without training is remarkable. The fact that Ben was in trouble might have helped.’
‘Can’t you do the Oshtian Compass, though?’ asked Cecile.
‘Course he can!’ chided Susie.
‘Actually,’ said Geoff, ‘the answer is yes and no. For Ben, I couldn’t. I’d only met him once, you see. And you couldn’t really say we bonded. In fact, I think you told me to get a haircut.’ He paused for the class giggle. ‘That’s why I talk about the will. It’s the driving force, the magnetism in the needle. To put it simply, your Compass can only point to a person if you already have a very strong bond.’
Tiffany saw Ben turn away. Were his ears normally that red?
‘Okay then,’ said Yusuf. ‘How did we score? Sixes? Sevens?’
Geoff frowned. ‘Come again?’
‘He’s talking about your side of the bargain,’ said Susie.
‘Are you going to tell us who those creepy kids are, why they kidnapped Ben, and why they’re living like moles in a hole,’ said Olly, ‘or have I just knackered myself out for nothing?’
‘Moles? No. They’re not moles.’ Geoff laughed darkly. ‘Okay. You’ve proved yourselves. And it is safer if you know. Though not much.’
His eyes darted around.
‘Not here. I can’t talk about this next to a drawing of Winnie the Pooh.’
‘Sorry.’ Tiffany felt frosty again. ‘This hall was the best place I could find. Or afford.’
‘I’ll find us somewhere better,’ said Geoff.
FERAL CHILD
Ben had always liked Abney Park Cemetery. There was no better place to chill out. Here in a walled-off corner of Hackney the evergreens grew thick as a witch’s wood. Trees and shrubs sieved out the street noise, letting birdsong bubble through the stillness. Sleepy, creaking boughs watched over the graves and the wind whispered with the rustlings of squirrels, foxes and field mice. This cemetery was a place of life, not death. Only once had it made Ben afraid.
