The Blue Cat

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  The big face that formed the entrance to the park was at the bottom of a hill right on the harbour. It was monstrous, with lurid cheeks, wide glaring eyes and hair that spiked upwards, rays of an unfamiliar sun. On either side of the face were two pink and grey towers reaching up into the clouds, like pictures we had seen in newsreels of the Empire State Building in America.

  Above our heads was a sign in bendy writing:

  We walked in through the open mouth of the face with its crimson lips, right under the bared teeth like sharp piano keys, ready to snap shut. I glanced at Ellery, and wondered – had he ever seen anything like this before? He looked excited and his eyes were glowing.

  We stepped into another country, of burning sugar and machinery oil and soldiers and women in bright skirts, of the music that never stopped and engines that growled and clicked over, of screeches and bellows blown away in the wind.

  The ferris wheel swung over the glassy water. The riders were trapped in open carriages in the vast cloudless sky. Someone, right at the very top, waved a long arm with a gloved hand. We waved back. Would they ever come down again? Painted hands showed the way to the Big Dipper, the River Caves, the Ghost Train and the Mirror Maze. A man in a blue hat and coat with golden buttons and cuffs was playing a trumpet and someone dropped a bag of peanuts and they scattered everywhere like pebbles.

  ‘Let’s go look at the merry-go-round!’

  We ran after Hilda, Ellery and I, weaving through the crowds, to the turning wooden horses and golden carriages. We stood, glimpsing ourselves in the mirrors as they flashed past and the music grew louder and faster. But the horses themselves were still and docile, like the milkman’s horse that took sugar from my flattened palm if I got up early enough in the morning when the milk cart ambled down our street.

  Hilda pushed heavily on my shoulder.

  ‘I wish we could go on it,’ she muttered.

  ‘You have to pay,’ I said.

  We had to buy tickets, if we wanted to go on. We had no money, at least not our own.

  ‘We came to find the cat, remember?’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Hilda, sighing.

  How could a cat be here, in Luna Park? I didn’t believe it. There was too much noise and movement for a cat.

  ‘Look!’ said Hilda. ‘Isn’t that Hal?’

  A jumble of riders was leaving the merry-go-round, pushing past each other, rushing, always rushing to the next line. People hurtled from one ride to the next in a fever of hurry.

  Was that Hal? He was crushed between so many other soldiers, all in their green and grey uniforms, their short hair, their teeth, their laughing mouths.

  ‘But he got on the ferry.’ I frowned. ‘They were going back to the camp, in town.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t,’ said Hilda. ‘Maybe he was pretending.’

  We were silent. We were thinking the same thing. Was Hal going to run away from the war? We had heard of soldiers doing this, but only from whispering adults, who stopped speaking when they saw we were listening.

  If it had been Hal, he was already gone. The new riders were leaping onto the horses, swinging round on the poles.

  ‘We’ve got to go to Coney Island,’ said Hilda, forgetting Hal. ‘That other soldier said he saw the cat in Coney Island. Remember? He said he saw it when the siren went off.’

  ‘You have to pay,’ I repeated.

  Once you were inside Coney Island, you could go on anything you liked, as many times as you liked. But you needed a ticket to get in.

  ‘My brothers always get in without a ticket,’ said Hilda. ‘They just join the queue and then they make a run for it. Nobody ever stops them.’

  I could see Hilda’s brothers doing that, strong, quick, fearless.

  ‘It’s not allowed,’ I said. ‘You have to pay.’

  ‘Come on, Ellery,’ said Hilda, grabbing his shirtsleeve. ‘Don’t listen to her. She’s a spoilsport. Let’s go.’

  So we went. Of course we did.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  AN ATTENDANT stood in uniform at the entrance to Coney Island, next to the turnstile, ready to take the tickets. A crowd filed in a long line, waiting to get in. We squeezed into the depth of the queue, among the jostling people and the hefty adult legs. We felt invisible.

  But then:

  ‘What are you kids doing?’ I heard a voice say.

  We ducked under the barrier and bolted, all three of us. We sprang up the painted steps, two at a time, along the narrow hallway as it slanted upwards then downwards then suddenly upwards again. We tripped and we hung on to each other, along the rickety wooden bridge and we came falling out into the pavilion itself, panting, hearts thumping, onto the great wide floor of Coney Island. We’d done it! Just like Hilda’s brothers!

  Coney Island was huge, huge and high, the ceiling crisscrossed with beams of metal and wood. The walls were lined with ugly funny pictures and there were no windows, so it was hot and noisy, enclosed from the outside. Voices thrummed through loudspeakers and more music, fast and scratchy, never stopping to breathe.

  ‘Let’s get away from the entrance,’ said Hilda, ‘in case someone comes after us.’

  We clambered over each other and the various obstacles until we reached a kind of walkway of moving floorboards that slid from side to side and up and down. You had to hang on to the shifting banisters to stop yourself falling over.

  Ellery dropped his book and picked it up again and hung on to it somehow, we all hung on somehow and kicked our legs high in the air and collided and slipped until the force of the people behind us bumped us off again and we ran down the stairs back to the middle of the room.

  ‘I’m going on that!’ cried Hilda.

  She was already running towards a big flat disc that you had to to sit on top of with everyone else, as far into the middle of it as you could. Then when it was full up with people, it started to spin around and around, faster and faster, until everyone came sliding off bang! into the cushions on the side. Whoever stayed on the longest was declared the winner.

  I shook my head, very definitely, at Ellery.

  ‘I hate rides that go round and round,’ I said. ‘They make me dizzy.’

  Ellery’s eyes flickered.

  ‘Let’s look around,’ I said. ‘Come on!’

  We made our way through the crush of people. There were mirrors that made you enormously fat or enormously thin, there were machines with lights that you pushed or put coins into to see how strong you were or with flashing hearts to see how romantic you were. There was a kind of jungle of rubber tubes that you had to fight your way through, as the floor gave way and blasts of hot air came up from underneath. And there were three giant slides, big, bigger and gigantic, and we felt the whoosh of air as people sped down them, wailing, on mats.

  We climbed up another wooden staircase and down and came to yet another spinning ride, a wooden tunnel in the shape of a giant barrel of beer that turned round and round. You had to run through it, trying not to trip over, until you got out the other side. Ellery tugged on my arm.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I told you, I don’t like things that go round and round.’

  Ellery kept tugging. He pulled me towards the queue.

  ‘You can go on it, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll hold your book for you if you like.’

  I leant over and prised it out from under his arm. After a moment’s resistance he let it go. Then, as though a thought struck him, he knelt down and took off his watch. He reached forward and held my hand, for me to pull him up. He fastened the watch around my wrist. The clasp snapped and it pinched my skin, like the sting of an ant.

  I stared down at it. How strange to be wearing a watch, for the first time in my life!

  ‘I’ll look after it,’ I said, nodding at Ellery. ‘You’re right, it might get broken in there.’

  He let go of my hand. The barrel was brimming with soldiers and skirted women. Ellery was small but he was not afraid. He waited his turn, patiently and calmly as
he did everything. Just before stepping inside, he turned and looked at me. An expression passed so quickly across his face I didn’t know what it meant. He stretched out his arms and legs in a star shape and fell in.

  Round the barrel turned, and the bodies tumbled and fell and Ellery disappeared into the dark chaos.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  I WALKED AROUND to the other end of the spinning barrel, to wait for Ellery who would come out in a few minutes.

  I realised my head was aching and I was hungry and thirsty and I thought with longing of my sandwich in my satchel back at school, and of the cold water of the bubblers. We had to be back before the end of lunchtime, if we didn’t want to get into trouble. Where was Hilda?

  I sat down on a step near the wall, with Ellery’s book. I spread my hand over the top of it, feeling the leathery cover under my fingertips. I opened it and let the pages fall, one after the other. It smelled moist, like something hidden inside the hollow trunk of a tree.

  I couldn’t read it, with all those jagged black letters like an old Bible. Of course, it wasn’t in English, so I wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. But at least I could look at the pictures to pass the time while I was waiting. There were quite a lot of drawings in the book, every twenty pages or so. They were all black and white, of old-fashioned sailing ships and men with swords and guns and ragged clothes and funny round hats like Captain Cook’s. They looked like pirates. One drawing was of an old man with a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder. I know this story! I thought suddenly, I’m sure I do. But for the moment I couldn’t remember what it was called, or what happened in it.

  One page had a drawing of three men kneeling down on a beach. They looked as though they might be praying, with their hands raised up towards a ship far away on the ocean. I turned the page. Now there was a boy lying flat on his stomach in a rowboat, peering over the very edge of it. What was he doing? Was he hiding? Was he looking for someone? Was he afraid? It was impossible to tell.

  I turned the page again.

  This time it was half a dozen rough, sad, angry men with guns and axes. The man with the wooden stick was there, but I couldn’t see his parrot. Three birds flew above them all in the open sky. But nobody noticed them. The men were staring down at a skeleton, laid out at their feet. Its arms were stretched out above its head and you could see the bones of the fingers. I stared at the drawing for what felt like a long time.

  I slammed the book shut. What was keeping Ellery? He had to be out of the barrel by now. Could he have run right past me while I wasn’t looking? Perhaps he hadn’t understood I would be waiting for him. Or maybe he was still in there, one of those people who, instead of bolting straight through, lie down, leaning back against the swinging wall.

  I pushed my way to the front of the line, muttering in explanation, ‘I’m looking for my friend.’ I got as close as I could to the edge of the giant turning cylinder and the scramble of limbs.

  ‘Ellery?’ I called out. ‘Ellery?’

  But he wasn’t there. I could see that at once. Nobody as small as Ellery was in there. There were soldiers and there were men who might be soldiers soon and there were women with fair hair in ribbons hanging upside down from their heads. Round and round it turned, back and forth back and forth.

  Ellery must have come out just at the moment I went to find him! I ran quickly back to the step at the exit where I had been waiting. But he wasn’t there either.

  No Hilda and no Ellery. I looked right and left, up and down. Where were they? They wouldn’t have just left without me. Would they? I felt a rising panic. What time was it, anyway? It was no good looking at Ellery’s watch, strapped around my wrist. The time wasn’t right, that’s what his father had said. It told the time in You-Rope, not here. Perhaps it had even stopped. I put the watch up to my ear to hear it ticking. But I could hear nothing but the mounting clamour of Coney Island.

  And then, as I stood there in the middle of the echoing room, it was as though there was a sudden hush, as if some great authority had put a finger to her lip and said Shhhh.

  At the centre of the silence I heard a sound.

  It was the mewing of a cat.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  IT WAS the blue cat.

  The cat that had jumped ship and swum to shore through the seaweed and jellyfish; the cat that had struggled up from the beach, crawling, tearing its feet on the sharp rocks; the cat that had followed Miss Hazel home from the wharf in the darkness; the cat that disappeared during the air raid siren; the cat that the red-haired soldier had seen, sleek and smooth, on the floor in front of him in Coney Island.

  I looked up and I saw it, crouched in the space between the top of the wall and the high roof of the pavilion. A shape, a shadow. The line of a tail, an empty gaze. Then the shadow leapt away, out through the gap of sky. It sprang into nothing.

  I forgot about Hilda and Ellery. I forgot about going back to school. I was going to catch the cat. I would chase it, I would bring it back to Miss Hazel and Miss Marguerite!

  I ran through the crowds to the exit sign of Coney Island. I ran past the turnstile, straight back out into the grounds of Luna Park.

  The sky that had been so clear had clouded over, and now it was thick and almost dark purple, a great expanse of half-darkness, like twilight. The water of the harbour was flecked with moonlight – no, not moonlight, how could it be – it must be the light from the park, from the ferris wheel turning overhead.

  But where was the ferris wheel? Everything was so dark. There was no sun. The world had turned to darkness. I thought of the Strangler, padding through the night, waiting patiently in the gloom.

  A bell began to ring, a deep clanging from the heaviest bell in the tower of a church. Not a church, but a castle, the castle where Sleeping Beauty slept surrounded by a dense wood and rose bushes, sudden streaks of red and green against the grey towers. The bell rang and the hands of Ellery’s watched ticked in time with my pulse and it was the middle of the night and Sleeping Beauty’s face was as still as waxwork, a statue of stone staring with blank eyes.

  Here there was nothing I knew. There was no harbour, but instead a river of deep black water with a low iron bridge across it. Tall buildings with tiled roofs lined the riverbanks in rows. Snowflakes were falling like icy shreds of dandelions onto my cheeks. And when I looked up, the sky was dotted with strings of alien stars.

  A woman came hurrying across the bridge. She was in a crimson coat and a soft fur hat. She held the hand of a child next to her, a boy, also dressed in coat and boots, and was bending down to listen to something he was telling her.

  Ahead of them were two men, one old and bent over, with a stick, finding it hard to walk, and the other with a bag over his shoulder. The man with the bag put his arm around the older man and hugged him to his body, almost carrying him. They were all hurrying somewhere, hurrying. Mother, father, grandfather and child.

  The sky was bright with flames. The buildings along the river and further into the city were burning and the air was filled with smoke. The father turned around and gestured to the boy and his mother pushed him forward and he left her and ran and took his father’s hand. The mother, now a few steps behind, wound her scarf around her face, as if she was afraid of being followed.

  They came right past me, but they didn’t see me. I was a ghost to them. I saw their faces in the light of the flames, as close to me as my own fingers.

  Ellery

  I said, but no sound came out.

  They were running now. There was a flash of a blade, the heavy stamping of the feet of soldiers.

  The family ran from the bridge into a side street, from there to a narrow lane, twisting through the burning city.

  Held tight by his father’s hand, the boy turned his head to see where his mother was.

  Ellery

  I said.

  But even if he had heard me, he would not have answered. It was not his real name.

  His mother had gone. The street behind them was
empty. What had happened? Had she stopped to catch her breath – had she taken the wrong street – was she lost?

  The boy broke away from his father’s grasp. He ran back into the black night. Back into the burning city, through the narrow alleys and the flames and the smoke, the wind and the dread. Back, back to his mother.

  I could hear the footsteps of the soldiers coming after him, louder and louder, past the high towers while the walls of the city collapsed.

  There! There she was! She was standing right there, in her fur cap, next to a half-open doorway. But she looked so tall and large, larger than she had looked before. And she was glowing, as though she was lit up by a candle.

  The boy slowed his pace. His mother knelt and beckoned to him to come to her. He stepped closer, his eyes fixed on her lips and her face with intense concentration. I saw her mouth opening and closing in the shapes of words.

  ‘I’m safe now,’ she said. ‘I’m safe. Nobody can hurt me any more. You must always remember that. I’m safe. And you will be too. You will all be safe soon. Remember.’

  But she was fading. Fading through the doorway, fading into smoke…The boy reached out for her, two arms outstretched, but she was becoming smaller. Smaller and fainter.

  ELLERY

  I said.

  The boy looked back. He looked right over his shoulder, straight at me, without surprise, as if he had known I was there all along. He smiled, such a sweet smile.

  And then Ellery too became smaller. Softer and smaller, smaller and softer, like a pale, feathery bird. He was gone.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  I DON’T remember what happened after that. Somehow the day disappeared, like water. I was back home again, by myself. I don’t know how. I know we didn’t go back to school that day. And that Ellery was gone.

  I tried to find him. I tried and kept trying. But he was gone.

  I even went to find him at Wallaringa, though that was much later. When I got home from Luna Park, there was something wrong with me. My mother made me stay in bed. She said I was sick. I was never sick. I stayed in bed so long, days and days. When finally she let me get up, I put on my sandals and made my way to the mulberry-coloured block of flats.