by Nick Green
She used those words like a full stop. Ben tried to think of a reply as the gang strolled across the park, over the duck pond bridge, past the tiny enclosures of rare birds and butterflies. No-one seemed in a hurry to get back. Passing the playing fields he remembered Geoff’s urgent words: This may be about more than saving a few missing kids. He decided to seize his chance while Hannah was talkative.
‘What was that punishment you had to do? Night Duty or something.’
‘Night Shift,’ said Hannah. She had tensed.
‘What were you doing? Was Martin with you?’
‘Just some work. He wanted it done.’
‘In a Tube tunnel?’ Ben tried to recall their conversation. ‘You said you were near Embankment. On the Northern Line.’ He thought he knew Embankment. Wasn’t it at the end of a bridge across the Thames?
‘Dunno where we were.’ It was as if shutters had closed behind Hannah’s grey eyes. ‘It was nuffin’ much.’
‘Thomas talked about a drill.’ Ben was sure of this. As sure as he was that Thomas’s fingers had been grimy with dust. ‘Drilling. You drilled in something?’
‘Oi, who are you?’ Hannah glared at him. ‘The Ferret’s put you up to this, has he?’
‘No, listen, I–’
‘You’re not gonna catch me out. I’m saying nothing.’
She trotted to the front of the pack to walk with Alec. Ben tried to catch up just as Thomas looked round, nailing him with a stare. He stooped by a park bench and pretended to tie his shoelace. Fantastic. He’d lost his only two friends in the space of an hour. That was impressive even for him.
A WALK IN THE GARDEN
The slope pulled their feet down through the wood until a mossy rooftop peeped through the leaves. Above the chimney floated a gibbous Moon, shimmering as ghosts of smoke lazily uncurled.
‘That must be her house,’ said Yusuf. ‘Bang on the door.’
Tiffany shook her head. Susie elbowed her.
‘Go on! What’s the worst that can happen? I mean,’ – she wilted in Tiffany’s glare – ‘apart from what just did happen.’
The house seemed to crouch, its stout walls bulging. Upstairs windows glowed dimly, sunk in stone under drooping eaves. A ring of trees whispered around it.
‘Let’s go home,’ said Tiffany. ‘She doesn’t want us.’
Yusuf strode to the porch. ‘Hey. A cat door knocker. How original.’
His knocks echoed loudly. Silence refilled the clearing. They waited.
‘It’s not as if–’ Tiffany spoke huskily, ‘as if I knew her very long. Why should I mean that much to her?’
Yusuf left the doorstep.
‘She’s gone deaf, my friends. Or else…’ He spotted a flint wall skirting behind the house as far as the trees on either side. With a short run he boosted himself to the top of it. He whistled. ‘Look at this.’
Susie hurried over. Tiffany trudged. She could barely summon the effort to climb the wall. But what she saw on the other side took her breath away.
The wall enclosed an oval back garden, delving a hundred feet or more into the wood. It looked like a lake of milk. She needed no pashki tricks to see quite clearly, for it seemed as if the glow of the Moon had spilt upon the ground. It wasn’t milk. Nor, on this warm spring night, could it be snow, and it wasn’t smooth as snow would have been. She saw swirls and eddies of white, woven with darker patches in oddly familiar patterns.
‘Wow,’ said Susie. ‘A Zen garden.’
‘What?’ Yusuf frowned.
‘A sort of rock garden. They’re Japanese. I think that’s what this is. All that white gravel. You hang around in them and you get enlightenment.’
A spark of enlightenment hit Tiffany. The gravel’s snowy patterns resembled a tabby cat’s brow.
‘It’s not a Zen garden,’ she said. ‘It might be… a Mau garden.’
‘Or a giant litter tray,’ mused Yusuf.
‘What are those things?’ Susie pointed at a row of tall posts winding towards the end of the garden and back again. Tiffany had zeroed in on them too. Upon one post stood a statue. Her stomach flip-flopped as the statue moved, stepping off its post onto the next.
In awe Susie whispered, ‘No way.’
It was Mrs Powell. Mrs Powell was Eth-walking. But this was Eth-walking in its ultimate form. Tiffany had seen those posts in her mind countless times, imagining she was stepping from one to another. Never had she dreamed that they might, somewhere, be real.
‘I’m going in.’
Susie chewed a thumbnail. ‘Do you think you should?’
Tiffany hesitated. Mrs Powell’s words still smarted in her ears. Here was a high flint wall to keep her out. But the garden below twinkled in the darkness like day.
She dropped to the white stones, light on her feet once more. Her footsteps crunched across the garden till she stood below Mrs Powell on her pole.
‘You can’t get rid of me,’ said Tiffany.
Mrs Powell appeared not to see her. She moved a pace farther off, leaving one stick-thin perch for another. The empty post shuddered. In her jeans and football shirt she cut a bizarre figure. Tiffany coughed into her fist.
‘I lost a cat once. Before I had Rufus. Her name was Cleopatra. She was a tortoiseshell. She disappeared one day.’ She strode to catch up with Mrs Powell, the gravel sucking at her feet. ‘I didn’t know what was worse. Thinking she was dead, or wondering if she was alive somewhere. If she was alive but had decided to leave me. I worried what I’d done to upset her. I was eight.’
Mrs Powell said nothing, though she had stopped moving away. Her eyes gazed over Tiffany’s head.
‘Never mind,’ said Tiffany. ‘I didn’t come this far to tell you silly stories. I came because we need you. Ben needs you. He’s in terrible danger. And I thought, I had this crazy idea, y’know, that you might be interested.’
Mrs Powell glanced down in a puzzled way. Abruptly she pivoted and carried on walking along the poles. Tiffany lifted her foot to stamp it in fury, then stopped.
Of course.
She retraced the row of poles to the cottage’s back door, where there stood a tall stone plinth. She climbed the steps leading up to it and stood on top. The first of the wooden posts was a stride away. As narrow as her ankle, as tall as herself. This was the scene she pictured every time she Eth-walked. There was only one difference: here the stakes were real.
A deep breath in, a long breath out. A twitching left calf muscle; she rotated her foot clockwise and anti-clockwise to soothe it into stillness. From up here she could see that each post had a painted cat’s paw-print on top. She mingled two catras, blue Ptep for balance and green Mandira. Her Mau whiskers tingled to life, countering the feeling that she was standing on nothing. She stepped into the void.
Her right foot took her weight and she wobbled. The stick beneath her wobbled too. The trembling fed on itself, shaking her harder and harder until she had two options: fall, or take another step. She stepped. Again she swayed, wheeling her arms while her perch shivered uncontrollably. She nearly despaired – she was dressed for hiking, not acrobatics. Then she realised she was trying to balance like a human. With the next step she forced herself to be still. Nothing existed outside the ball of her foot. Another step. If she closed her eyes she could see the poles more clearly. Another. Just a blink between strides to check where she was.
Then she found the next post occupied. Mrs Powell looked her full in the face.
‘Nobody knows I’m here.’ Mrs Powell’s soft voice was the night’s only sound. ‘Not a soul. I’m very curious to know how you found me.’
It was Tiffany’s turn to be speechless.
‘You had your hair done,’ Mrs Powell observed.
‘Uh.’ Tiffany flushed. ‘Yes. Cost my mum a fortune. The rain’s ruined it.’
‘It’s nice.’
A solitary bat lapped the garden. They blinked at one another.
‘I thought I’d never see you again.’
Tiffan
y lost her balance. It was Mrs Powell who had said it. Windmilling her arms she fell to the gravel. Mrs Powell dropped beside her.
‘Never mind. Everyone falls.’ She helped Tiffany up. Her eyes were full of wonder. ‘You can’t be here, young lady. At least, I know of only one way that you could be.’
Tiffany nodded, shakily.
‘But that is…’ Mrs Powell shook her head. ‘Terrifying. The Oshtian Compass can only work if… Dear oh dear, Tiffany. What have I done to deserve such love?’
‘I was beginning to ask that myself.’
Mrs Powell smiled. All of Tiffany’s pent-up tears blew away in a flurry of laughter. Mrs Powell touched her forehead with her own, then withdrew. The gesture seemed more intimate than a kiss.
‘From the day I met you,’ said Mrs Powell, ‘I dreaded this happening. Friendships can appear at the most awkward times. And friends will do such silly things, like risking their lives for you. That’s why I had to leave, Tiffany, why I had to disappear. And why I’ve been doing my best to make you go away. And why I never taught you the Oshtian Compass.’ She steepled her fingertips. ‘Is there something you’ve forgotten to tell me?’
Tiffany felt the keenness of her gaze. ‘I mostly worked the Compass out for myself.’
‘Mostly is the word I heard, girl.’
‘Er.’ She felt oddly reluctant to mention him. ‘We met an old friend of yours. Geoff White?’
‘Geoff.’ Mrs Powell looked suddenly up at the Moon. Pearls glinted in her tilted eyes. ‘Geoffrey,’ she whispered. ‘My cat Geoffrey. White Cat Geoffrey. You old rogue. Where have you been wandering?’
‘She knows him, then.’
Tiffany found Susie at her side. Yusuf hung back, trying to peer in through the cottage’s windows. Mrs Powell rubbed her wrist across her mouth and, fleetingly, over her eyes, before turning to face them.
‘You three have a lot of talking to do. I’ll make the coffee.’
They sat at a freshly sanded wooden table that wobbled under their elbows. One glance round the kitchen told Tiffany that this was a million miles from Mrs Powell’s old Hackney flat. The floor was a field of flagstones. The low ceiling sagged towards a lumpy black beam. Three quarters of the walls were buttercup yellow, the rest dirty white beyond a ragged tidemark. A paint tin and brush rested on the sideboard, overhung by syrupy wood cupboards with cast iron hinges and handles.
There was so much she wanted to ask. How had Mrs Powell survived being shot? How she had made herself and all those jungle cats disappear? But Ben was in danger and that was more pressing. Hearing about Martin Fisher, Mrs Powell made a face. She knew of Geoff’s ex-pupil, she said, but had never had the pleasure of meeting him. Her brow creased in alarm when she learned of Ben’s undercover work (‘Geoff asked him to do that? Are you sure?’).
Fisher seemed to interest her far less than Geoff did. She asked questions that Tiffany found hard (how was Geoffrey? Did he talk about her?) or irrelevant (was he managing not to smoke?). By the time the clock on the plate cabinet chimed the last quarter of ten, Tiffany was still trying to steer the conversation back towards the polecat problem.
Then she opened her mouth and only a yawn came out. Mrs Powell’s finger combed the milk froth from the inside of her coffee cup. Tiffany found her voice.
‘I think Geoff could use your help,’ she managed, lamely.
Mrs Powell licked the froth off her finger.
‘It may be too late.’
‘Huh?’ Yusuf looked up.
‘That is –’ Mrs Powell blinked, as if she too were half asleep. ‘That is, too late to do anything more tonight. We’ll sort things out in the morning.’
She left the room to switch off all the downstairs lights. Her last stop was the kitchen.
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Powell, discovering them still at the table. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘Er,’ said Susie.
Mrs Powell huffed. ‘There is space upstairs, I suppose. I warn you though, I don’t cater for visitors. You’ll have to make your own beds.’ She breezed out, remarking over her shoulder, ‘You’ll find the hammer and nails in the cellar.’ Then, from halfway up the stairs, ‘That was a joke.’
Yusuf gallantly took the cramped attic with its camp bed, and Susie won the toss of a coin for the single mattress in the guest room. Tiffany, tired out, found a pile of coats comfy enough and slept like a fossil. She stirred once in the small hours to see through a window the Moon setting behind the trees, and felt the tickly rumblings of a curled cat by her head.
‘Jim,’ she murmured. A whiskered snout caught the moonlight. So Mrs Powell’s silver friend had followed her out here. Tiffany slipped into comforting dreams.
Jim was gone when the sun prodded her awake. The house seemed afloat on a sea of birdsong. Without disturbing Susie she rose, performed a few cat stretches and crept downstairs. From the kitchen came the burble of a radio show, the clink of spoons and crockery. Entering she saw Mrs Powell, wrapped in a lilac dressing gown. On the sideboard sat Jim, scrubbing his whiskers. Mrs Powell swirled hot water in a teapot.
‘Morning!’ chirped Tiffany. ‘Can I help with anything?’
‘Ssh.’ Mrs Powell fiddled with the radio on the table. A gentle pop song grew louder. Tiffany eased the door shut behind her. Mrs Powell stood very still as a fluting, celestial voice sang of finding its way home. Tiffany, though she never listened to old stuff like this, felt a lump in her throat, and even the cat’s ears were pricked. The tune swelled, lonely yet triumphant, only to vanish in a cloud of static.
‘Oh blast, wretched thing.’ Mrs Powell pounced on the radio, prised off the back and stuck a dinner fork into its innards. She waggled the fork and the static cleared, but the song was over and a DJ was prattling about the cost of late-night taxis.
‘Nuisance,’ sighed Mrs Powell. ‘I rather like that one.’
Tiffany considered the radio. It had certainly been made later than the 1960s, though perhaps not very much later. Its aerial was a bit of coat hanger, its casing was as scuffed as a builder’s boot, and three of four knobs had fallen off.
‘New radios are quite cheap,’ she ventured.
‘Oh, I know I could replace it.’ Mrs Powell shrugged. A bell rang in Tiffany’s mind. Something Geoff had said to prove he was a friend of Mrs Powell’s. It had meant nothing to her at the time.
‘Why the smirk?’ Mrs Powell set down teacups and saucers.
‘Geoff told us about it,’ said Tiffany. ‘He said you had this battered old radio that you kept repairing.’
‘Really?’ Mrs Powell looked shocked. ‘But I haven’t seen him for at least fifteen years. It can’t have been so old then. Oh dear, perhaps it was. A new wireless it may have to be. Pity. I’ve rebuilt every bit of this one. It’s my baby.’
Felicity Powell with a soldering iron. It was hard to picture.
‘You’re smirking again,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘I’m allowed to have a hobby, aren’t I? Besides, I class cats as electrical animals. For one thing, they can feel electric fields. And I have a devil of a time stopping Jim from chewing the television cable.’
‘And there’s Ben,’ said Tiffany. ‘Cats give him electric shocks. Funny – his dad’s an electrician.’
‘There you go. Must run in families too.’
Tiffany finished her tea and toast. Yusuf and Susie still weren’t up, so Mrs Powell offered her a guided tour of her domain. Stepping out of the front door, their feet struck mists from the dewy turf and clouds of vapour rolled before their mouths. A steep trail climbed away from the cottage and into the wood’s grey light.
A gravel track ran across their path, an aged Land Rover parked on the verge. Mrs Powell took an umbrella from its back seat and walked on into the trees.
‘And then there’s Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘It was he who showed me how to change my first fuse. In the days when we shared a basement flat in Dalston…’
‘Mrs Powell. You just laughed.’
‘I was remembering something els
e he did. You see, we were penniless. I’d spent all my inheritance and had to work at a supermarket checkout. Geoffrey didn’t fancy getting a job, so he dreamed up a plan for saving money. Right outside our window was a street light. He rigged a wire from it to our mains electricity. Abracadabra, free heat and light! It worked perfectly. That is, until we got the bill.’
‘What bill?’
‘The bill for the entire road of street lamps. We’d made a mistake in the wiring. We got free power during the day all right, when the street lights were off. But when it got dark, and the lamps came on, the whole lot of them ran off our electricity meter. Geoffrey’s language when he opened that envelope…’ Mrs Powell watched blackbirds purl and knit through the highest twigs. ‘We moved out of there pretty quick. But that’s Geoff White. Infuriating, yet somehow –’
In silence they followed the twists of a new and narrow path.
‘One misses him,’ she concluded.
Tiffany hid a pang of jealousy. Time to change the subject.
‘The jaguar that chased us. Is he yours?’
‘She. No. She’s a cat. Frieda belongs to Frieda.’
‘But is she–?’
‘Yes. One of those we saved from Dr Cobb’s factory.’
Tiffany loved the way she said we.
‘I care for a few of them still,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘Most, thankfully, are off my hands.’
‘In the wild?’
‘Afraid not. They’ll never be up to that, after the life they had. But they’re comfortable. And the tiger, Shiva, is in India. Home at last.’
‘I’ve been longing to ask.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘How did you do it? Round them all up and disappear like that?’
‘With great difficulty. Ah, now here’s a view for you.’
They stepped out of the trees and Tiffany felt herself shrink to a speck. From this ridge the moor flung itself below her, almost frightening in its wild size. Distant lumpy rocks bit through the shadowed land, the low sun turning them to crooked yellow teeth. In the cold wind she shivered. Yet gazing farther she felt a homely warmth, for the hills on the horizon seemed to sit within her grasp, their flanks creased as though kneaded from dough, baking in the glow of the dawn’s oven.
