by Nick Green
He’d been eight years old, walking with Mum and Dad, back in the days when they were still together. Then he lost them in the labyrinth of graves. Sighting a church spire above the leaf-line he headed towards it, for he knew his own way home from Stoke Newington church. To his shock and bewilderment, the path took him not out of the graveyard but to a clearing, where stood a hollow-eyed chapel he had never known was there. Its doors were planks, its rose window broken. It seemed to howl with loneliness. Lost. He had turned in terror, running through a nightmare of ivy-bound headstones until Mum and Dad’s distant shouts finally brought him back.
‘He’s right!’ Daniel, clinging to the rose window, peered out through the stone petals into the thicket. ‘This place rules.’
‘Well. It’s still a church.’ Tiffany’s voice rang flatly.
‘A shell of one,’ said Geoff. ‘No-one’s used it for years. Most classes we can hold outside, so long as you hide from passers-by. Then if it rains we can exercise in here. We are allowed to be wimpy about the rain.’
Ben wandered up the twilit nave, long since stripped of pews. He had to admit (with a twinge of disloyalty) that Geoff had found the perfect headquarters: secret, vaguely sinister, walled in by woodland. They didn’t even have to bring three pounds. The old chapel was tiny really, far smaller than the horror-film abbey in his memory. Funny to think he had once been scared of it. Then the gloom brought to mind a similar place, a lost and forgotten Tube station, and the laughter stayed inside him.
‘Duh-duh daaaaah!’ Arms raised, Olly mimed playing a huge church organ.
‘It is a bit creepy,’ Susie frowned.
‘Hey, if there were ghosts around, I’d see ’em,’ said Geoff. ‘Everyone find a space to stretch.’
During the rigorous warm-up, Ben noticed something interesting. Geoff had his own way of performing certain pashki movements. For instance, he did not kneel for the Sitting Cat pose, preferring to squat flat-footed instead. In his Hunter crouch he curled one hand flamboyantly behind his head. He showed them a new Freeze stance which he called Siamese Stone. Other moves he performed exactly like Mrs Powell. He had learned a lot from her, Ben guessed – but not only from her.
They poised for a long minute upon their left toes while Geoff studied them, pacing up and down. ‘And. . . sprawl at ease.’
Down they sank upon their sky-blue yoga mats. A blackbird twittered from the rafters and whirred off through the pointed window.
‘Hey! No dozing,’ said Geoff. ‘That was meant to help you concentrate. You know all those questions you’ve been bugging me with?’
Everyone sat up.
‘I’ll be straight with you.’ His uneasy glance flicked towards Tiffany. ‘Not everyone is thrilled to have me here. I know that. But I won’t throw a strop if you don’t like me at first. All I ask is that you hear me out. Because this is to do with what happened to Ben. And it’s one story I really don’t like repeating.’
Fourteen autumns ago, in the village of Kings Langley, it was a grey and misty morning. It was too grey, too misty, around an old farmhouse. Fire had left only a shell of charred beams. The house’s registered occupant was Charlie Gladwell, an elderly recluse with no family or friends. Firemen found his blackened skeleton in the bathtub.
Nearby was a large shed untouched by the blaze. The first man inside was a paramedic and the stench made him throw up. The building was stacked with what looked like rabbit hutches, though nearly all contained ferrets. Later the RSPCA also counted four mink, twelve polecats, eight stoats, a pine marten, a blind weasel in a box and one dead bitch otter. The hutches looked as if they’d never been cleaned. However, the paramedic found somebody cleaning one.
It was a boy. He looked under ten, though later guesses put his age nearer fifteen. Pictures of him taken at the time were considered too upsetting for the newspapers. Police also photographed chains and shackles bolted to the shed wall. It seemed that Charlie Gladwell had kept this boy imprisoned here. For how long? There was one clue. The boy wailed and struggled when they tried to take him outside, only calming down when he’d fetched a scrap of rag, which he cuddled tight. Later, when hospital staff got a look at this comfort blanket, they saw it was a tiny frayed shirt. The label inside said 2–3 years. A nurse was taking the stinking thing to the incinerator when a doctor stopped her and put the rag, filthy as it was, back in the sedated boy’s arms.
Who was he? No relative of Gladwell’s, that much was clear. The police re-opened every case of missing boys as far back as a decade and a half. Blood tests were carried out on three families. All were negative and the boy went unclaimed.
Emma Leech, the psychologist on his case, held little hope. Living in chains, in the dark, alone except for caged animals. . . what would that do to a child? This boy, instead of crying, wailed like a polecat. He gibbered, he hissed, he curled up to sleep. With a mind as starved as his body, he would be a feral child, lacking human speech, probably insane.
After a week he startled Dr Leech by throwing his uneaten sandwich at her and demanding, ‘Mouse.’ He could speak. She found, to her astonishment, that he had a reading age of six. Apparently Gladwell had read him newspapers, not so much to entertain the boy as to lord it over him. While the old man basked in the sound of his own voice, his sharp-eyed prisoner was learning to read, literally behind his back.
Charlie Gladwell thought his captive docile. He was wrong. After months of patient work, the boy filed through his chains with a stone. That night he stole into the house and torched it with white spirit. True escape proved more difficult. Terrified by the vast outside he fled back to his shed, to the warmth and cosy stench of the ferrets.
With proper food and medical care he grew quickly, filling out into a tall teenage boy. His carers had called him Adam but he hated this, so Dr Leech encouraged him to choose his own name. By now he had a favourite book, all about the mustelids – animals such as ferrets, pine martens, fishers and minks – and soon his choice was made. But carers quit their jobs in tears rather than look after young Martin Fisher, who seemed more beast than human. The slightest upset could spark off his temper, and in one savage tantrum he bit through Dr Leech’s index finger (it was successfully reattached). On other days he would curl into a ball at the mere sight of human beings. Emma Leech was desperate for someone who could help. Unfortunately, she got Geoff White.
Geoff took a swig from a water bottle. The blackbird was back on the window ledge, its beak full of fluff.
‘I’ve tried many day jobs over the years,’ said Geoff. ‘At that time I’d found a niche in mental health. St. Hubert’s in Middlesex had a top psychiatric unit, so that was where Martin Fisher ended up. Given his background, they wondered if animal therapy mightn’t be a way to reach him. You know, traumatised kids can express their feelings with pets –’
A phone made a noise like an air-raid siren. Tiffany blushed and answered it.
‘Yes. . . No. . . Yes Dad. I’m at Susie’s house, like I said. What? That’s because we’re in the garden. Yes. Yes I will. No I won’t. Okay. Bye.’ She shut the phone with a loud snap. ‘Sorry.’
‘Pets,’ said Geoff, petulantly. ‘Animals have a calming effect. That was my thing, my specialist area. I found a good-natured calico kitten to see if Martin would enjoy handling it. You live and learn. I had to put the poor thing out of its suffering.’
Cecile winced.
‘I probably cared too much,’ said Geoff. ‘About helping Martin. See, I had no kids of my own. Still don’t, come to that. Never met the right girl. But. . . where was I?’ He stared at the window, where budding blossoms were peeping in. ‘Yeah. I was ready to try anything. I thought I’d teach him some pashki exercises, to relax him. Simple ones like the Omu meditation. No good. Cats made him freak out. The only time his face lit up was when I gave him a ferret. Which is how I hit upon my genius idea. My ingeniously stupid idea.’
Geoff had wondered for some time. Was pashki unique? Ancient Egyptians revered the cat, so they had
made an exercise system to awaken the feline inside them. But suppose they’d worshipped a different creature? Might other animal selves lie hidden within us, waiting to be discovered? Geoff saw a chance to answer this question and help Martin at the same time.
He bought two more ferrets and an illegally-trapped Welsh polecat at no small expense. For many weeks he watched Martin interact with them, and stayed up whole nights to study their movements. Geoff read every book he could find on the mustelid family. Step by step he adapted pashki routines to reflect these animals’ whip-like movements. As he gained confidence he began sketching plans for a whole new system. At the time it did not seem crazy. He was younger, keen to prove himself, anxious to help this poor boy.
When Geoff explained his plan, Martin laughed for the very first time. Perhaps it was the one occasion when he knew happiness. Throughout his childhood he had watched the ferrets in their hutches, the only beautiful things in his world. He had loved them but he envied them too, because – abused as they were – they had Charlie’s love and Martin did not. No wonder he longed to be like them.
Geoff held secret one-to-one classes. They practised in the hospital’s basement rooms, or amid the expansive gardens, and no-one ever found them out. Martin attacked his training in the manner of a boxer with a grudge. He proved fiercely intelligent. In another life, with proper parents, he could have been anything – a Grade A student, an athlete, anything. Soon he was inventing moves of his own, forcing Geoff to work more nights writing up his notes. As the new system grew it became as much his creation as Geoff’s, though it was Geoff who named it mustel-id. He said this meant ‘Soul of the Polecat’, and Martin, who knew no better, devoured it.
Compared to pashki, refined by Egyptian priests and Eastern gurus over a hundred or more generations, mustel-id was brutishly simple. Against that, it was easier to learn. In less than ten months Martin had grown quick, strong and acrobatic. He could fit through spaces that looked narrower than his waist and could sniff out a coin in a pitch dark boiler-room, even though his vision would never reach cat levels. Mustel-id offered no equivalent of Mau claws, but still Martin’s fingers grew strong enough to tear the seams of a straitjacket. Trying to soak up this furious energy, Geoff adapted Ten Hooks to create a mustel-id fighting system, and they sparred for hours at a time. And Geoff, who would cheerfully face in combat any pashki master you cared to name, found Martin becoming quite a handful.
Then came the breakthrough. As Martin honed his polecat skills, he became at other times more like a normal teenager. It was as if his human and animal selves were drawing apart, so that they no longer waged war inside him. Martin let carers into his room. He would talk and read storybooks aloud to Dr Leech, even though he never seemed to follow the stories. He learned not to smash televisions, stopped asking for mice and grew fond of cookery programmes. Given a sketchpad he revealed a gift for drawing. The staff even introduced him to a visiting princess. Geoff patted himself on the back. He’d done it. Martin was calmer, healthier, and at least half sane. And Geoff had achieved something extraordinary: a brand new form of pashki based on one of nature’s deadliest predators. What could possibly go wrong?
‘To throw away a young life,’ said Geoff, ‘is an unforgivable thing.’
Ben had the nastiest feeling that he knew what was coming. Susie gnawed a corner of her yoga mat.
‘What happened?’ Yusuf murmured.
‘I betrayed him,’ said Geoff.
His words fell into silence.
‘Martin was transferred to a care home,’ said Geoff. ‘And how smug was I? I’d found his cure. He had a new room, his own TV, posters on the walls. He tolerated those around him. There was even this boy named Carl who knew how to cook real pizzas and who might have become his friend.
‘So I left. I didn’t say goodbye, I just stopped visiting. Because that’s what pashki masters do, right? We’re footloose. Free spirits. You look for us and one day we’re not there.’
Ben stole a glance at Tiffany.
‘I was three weeks and fifty miles away by the time I heard the news. The care home had been destroyed in a fire. One girl was dead and a boy was missing. Martin Fisher.’
Ben shaded his eyes. The chapel’s rose window was flowering, the intricate stonework catching sunbeams through the firs, so that it sprinkled green-gold light. The effect lasted seconds before the angle was lost, but its magic lingered in a sweet breeze that wafted down the aisle. Ben heard the bark of a dog outside, the giggle of young children, a pair of parents strolling a nearby path. He had a sudden longing to be elsewhere.
It was Tiffany who said it. ‘You know where he is now.’
‘I tried to track him,’ said Geoff. ‘He gave me the slip. For years he’s been off my radar.’
‘Then he found that empty station,’ said Yusuf.
‘He was bound to go somewhere like that,’ said Geoff. ‘All over the Underground there are stations that are no longer used – Aldwych, Down Street, City Road. Martin would have liked the name Hermitage. A home for a loner.’
‘Did you see him, Ben?’ asked Daniel. Ben shook his head. Somewhere deep inside him that scream was echoing still. GO AWAY . . .
‘All these years,’ Geoff mused. ‘He must be thirty by now.’
Susie looked doubtful. ‘If this loony is such a hermit, what about the other people Ben saw down there? Those weird kids?’
‘Martin can’t bear human company,’ said Geoff. ‘But he must have found that loneliness is worse. So he recruited children and he trained them, just as I trained him. Maybe he thought he could tolerate humans if they too lived the way of the polecat.’
‘Good job it was Mrs Powell’s advert that we saw!’ said Olly.
Geoff glared, not amused.
‘Olly’s got a point, though,’ ventured Ben. ‘Martin didn’t put adverts in the Hackney Gazette. Where did his pupils come from?’
‘And how could anyone want to live like that?’ Susie demanded.
‘Think about it,’ said Geoff. ‘Not all are as lucky as you. Everywhere you see broken families, latch-key kids, waifs and strays. Kids whose lives came apart. I used to be one myself. There’s boys and girls out there who feel lost, with no-one to care. Until they meet Martin.’
Ben fidgeted. For a moment Geoff’s words had felt uncomfortably close to home. But then, who was he to feel sorry for himself? Mum and Dad might be cut off from each other, but they weren’t cut off from him. His was a happy life compared to some. What had that girl said about her family? I lost them. I got a new family here. Hannah and Thomas, his oddball guards. Both so distant, so afraid, so lonely. The way they stood trying to block his escape, pitifully defiant, threatening and beseeching him not to leave. Their faces of dread as he slunk out of the door.
‘We should do something.’ His own voice startled him. ‘We have to try and help them.’
Geoff looked at Ben as if he’d lost his mind.
‘But of course we do,’ he said. ‘Why else do you think I came to find you?’
HUNTING HUMANS
‘Tiffany. Tiffany?’
It was like hearing a dripping tap beneath a waterfall. Tiffany pictured a green cat’s eye and drew more deeply on Mandira, the face catra that governed the senses. It took a moment to tune in.
‘–we can walk to Covent Garden–’ ‘–amazing film that was–’ ‘–grab a coffee in the Square–’
The clamour of the ticket hall broke into its component parts, each one twinkling and clear. Her ears panned through the muddy mass of chatter, flick-flacking barriers and thrumming escalators, straining to find the voice saying her name.
‘Tiffany, any luck?’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘If I had more idea who I’m looking for. . .’
‘You know them when you see them. They wear black bandanas. And there’s this feeling they give you.’
‘Speak up!’ Susie’s voice floated on the din. ‘I didn’t catch a word of that.’
‘Nothing,’ sai
d Tiffany, glad for once that Susie’s listening skills needed practice. The seven of them were spread across the donut-shaped concourse of Leicester Square tube station. Daniel and Yusuf loitered near the exits while Susie, Tiffany, Olly and Cecile leaned at intervals around the circular office in the centre. A tense and twitchy Ben prowled everywhere else. Thanks to cat hearing they could talk across the noisy space, with only a little confusion from Chinese Whispers.
People poured in from the streets above. Escalators pumped crowds from below. Daytrippers surged in search of films, shows, fast food and Sunday shopping, ebbing and flowing in a ceaseless tide. Tiffany stifled a yawn. She could feel her weekend trickling away while thousands around her had fun. But Geoff insisted this was their best chance to watch Fisher’s children outside their lair.
‘He needs cash to keep everyone fed,’ Geoff had explained. ‘So he sends them out on thieving raids. The Tube is like a rabbit warren, which happens to be a polecat’s favourite hunting ground. They’ll target the busiest stations, the tourist traps. I want to know where they go, how far they range, how many there are – as much as you can tell me. And look for the misfits, the unhappy ones. They may come in useful.’
Tiffany was puzzled. It should have been exciting to work with the Cat Kin in such a good cause, a slightly dangerous cause at that. Why, then, did she feel so reluctant? Of course she wanted to help those poor kids, as much as anyone did. What she didn’t much like, she decided, was Geoff White telling her to do it.
Was she being a brat? It wasn’t as if Geoff was a bad pashki teacher. She no longer minded that he had taken over her class. He had awesome skills, a real sense of fun and a bucketload of patience to match. In fact there was nothing about him to dislike, except for the fact that he wasn’t Mrs Powell.
