The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  But the bird pretended not to hear him – though he was certain it could – and unable to bear its smug proprietorial air, Tag sat down, curled his tail around himself, and closed his eyes. After a while, he fell asleep, thinking confusedly, My mouse. This seemed to lead him into a dream.

  He dreamed that he was under the Welsh dresser, eating something. Somehow, the dark gap beneath the dresser was big enough for him to enter; he had followed something in there, and was eating it. The soft parts had a warm, acrid, salty taste, and he could hardly get them down fast enough. Before he was able to swallow the tougher bits he had to shear them with the carnassial teeth at the side of his jaw, breathing heavily through his mouth as he did so. That was enjoyable too. Just as he was finishing off – licking his lips, snuffing the dusty floor where it had been in case he had missed anything – he heard a voice in the dark whisper quite close to him, ‘Tag is not your true name.’

  He whirled around. Nothing. Yet someone was there under the dresser with him. He could almost feel the heat of its body, the smell of its breath, the unsettling companionable feel of it. It had quietly watched him eat and said nothing. Now he felt guilty, angry, afraid. His fur bristled. He tried to back out from under the dresser, but now everything was the right size again and he was stuck, squeezed down tight in a dark space that smelled of wood and dust and blood with a creature he couldn’t see. ‘Tag,’ it whispered. ‘Listen. Tag is not your true name.’ He felt that if he stayed there any longer, it would push its face right into his, touch him in the dark, tell him something he didn’t want to hear…

  ‘Tag is my name!’ he cried, and woke up – to a loud, rapid hammering noise near his ear. While he slept, the magpie had flown up from the garden. It was strutting to and fro on the ledge directly outside the window, screeching and cawing, flapping its wings against the glass, filling the whole world with its clamor. Now its face was right next to his, and its chipped, wicked beak was drumming against the glass and it was shouting at him.

  ‘Call yourself a cat? Call yourself a cat?’

  And he fell off the windowsill and hit his head hard on the floor.

  Everything went a soft dark brown color, like comforting fur. When he woke up again, the bird was gone and he could hear the dulls preparing their food downstairs, and he thought it had all been the same dream.

  *

  Tag had lived in the house for two months. It seemed much longer, a great stretch of time in which he was never unhappy. He never wanted for anything. He doubled in size. His sleep was sound, his dreams infrequent and full of kitten things. All that seemed to be changing. Now, as he curled up on the velvet sofa, he wondered what would happen when he closed his eyes. Each time he slept, he lived another life – or fragments of it, a life of which he had no understanding.

  In one dream he was walking beneath a sliver of yellow moon, with ragged clouds high up; he heard the loud roar of some distant animal. In another, he saw the vague shape of two cats huddled together with heads bowed, waiting in the pouring rain; they were so hungry and in such trouble that when he saw them, a grief he could not understand welled up inside him like a pain. In a third dream, he was standing on a windswept cliff high above the sea. There were dark gorse bushes under a strange, unreal light. There was a sense of vast space, the sound of water crashing rhythmically on rocks below. In the teeth of the wind. Tag heard a voice at his side say quietly, ‘I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that.’ It was the voice of a cat. Or was it?

  ‘Tintagel,’ it said. ‘Tag! Tag! Listen! Listen to the waves!’

  All the dreams were different, but that voice was always the same – quiet, persuasive, companionable, frightening. It wanted to tell him things. It wanted him to do things.

  All the dreams were strange; but perhaps this was the strangest dream of all.

  He dreamed it was evening, and he was sitting on a windowsill while behind him in the room, the dulls ate their food, talking and waving their big arms about. Tag stared out. It was dark. There were clouds high up, obscuring the waning moon, but the moonlight broke fitfully through. Something was happening at the very end of the garden. He couldn’t quite see what it was. Every night, he sensed, animals went along the path down there, entering the garden at one side and leaving at the other. They were on business of their own, business to enthrall a young cat. It was a highway, with constantly exciting traffic.

  In the dream there was an animal out there, but he couldn’t see it clearly or hear it. For a moment the moonlight seemed to resolve it into the shape of a large black cat – a cat with only one eye. Then it was nothing but a shadow again. He shifted his feet uneasily. He wanted to be out there; he didn’t want to be out there. Clouds obscured the moon again. He put his face close to the glass. ‘Be quiet!’ he tried to tell the dulls. ‘Watch! Watch now!’

  As he spoke, the animal out there seemed to see him. He felt its eye on him. He felt its will begin to engage his own. He thought he heard it whisper, ‘I have a task for you, Tag. A great task!’

  Behind him in the room, the dulls laughed at something one of them had said. Tag shook himself, expecting to wake up. But when he looked around, he was still in that room, and he had never been asleep. As if sensing his confusion, the female got up and, putting her face close to his as if it wanted to see exactly what he was seeing, stared out into the darkness. It shivered. ‘You don’t want to go out there,’ it said softly. ‘Cold and dangerous for a little cat like you. Brrr!’ It stroked his head. The purr rose in Tag’s throat. When he turned back to the garden, the one-eyed cat had gone.

  *

  Early one morning, before the household was awake, Tag saw the sun coming up, carmine colored, flat and pale with promise. A few shreds of mist hung about the branches of the lime trees. Soon, three or four sparrows and a robin had alighted on the lawn and begun hopping about among the fallen leaves. This was all as it should be. Tag hunched forward to get a better look. My birds! he thought. But then they flew up suddenly, to be replaced by his enemy the magpie, who strode on long legs in a rough circle around the birdbath, shining with health and self-importance. It stopped, stretched its neck, opened its beak to reveal a short, thick purple-gray tongue, and let forth its abrasive cry.

  ‘Raaark. Raaark.’

  Oh yes? thought Tag. We’ll see about that!

  But what could he do? Only jump on and off the windowsill in a fever of frustration. At last he heard the dulls getting up, and there was something else to think about. He raced down the stairs and stood by his bowl in the kitchen.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he demanded. Chicken and game casserole! ‘In here. Put it in this bowl. Breakfast!’

  Chicken and game!

  That was a smell he would remember later on.

  Two minutes after he had got his face into the bowl, one of the dulls opened the back door without thinking. Tag felt the cool morning air on his nose. It was full of smells. It was full of opportunity. And the magpie was still out there, strutting around the lawn as if he owned it.

  My lawn! thought Tag. Breakfast later!

  And he was out in a flash, straight between a pair of legs, across the lawn – scattering leaves and hurling himself at the bird, who turned its sly black head at the last moment, said clearly, ‘Not this time, sonny,’ and flew like an arrow through a hole in the fence, leaving one small white body feather floating in the air behind it. Tag, enraged, went sprinting after, his hind feet digging up lawn and flower bed. He heard the dulls shouting after him. Then he was through the fence and into the garden next door. The magpie was sitting on a fence, regarding him amusedly from one beady eye. ‘Raaark.’ Off they went again. Every time he thought he had caught it, the bird only led him farther afield, until, when Tag looked back at his house, he couldn’t see it anymore.

  He hesitated a moment.

  ‘Call yourself a cat?’ sneered the magpie, almost in his ear. ‘This is where you belong, out here in the wild wor
ld – not a toy cat on a windowsill!’ But when Tag whirled around, ready to renew the chase, it had vanished into thin air.

  Tag sat down and washed himself. He looked around.

  New gardens! New gardens that went on forever. Through one and into the next, forever.

  Out! he thought. I got out!

  *

  He forgot the magpie. He forgot his home. For the rest of that day he was as happy as he’d ever been. He explored the new gardens one by one, moving farther and farther away from the dulls and their house. There were gardens overgrown with weeds and elder, in which the sun barely struck through to the earth and the dusty, powerfully smelling roots. There were gardens so neat they were just like front rooms. There were gardens full of rusty household objects. Tag had a look at all of them. They were all interesting. But by late afternoon he had found the garden of his dreams. It was wilder than his own, a narrow shady cleft between old brick walls, sagging wooden trellis, and overgrown buddleia bushes, into which reached long bright fingers of sun. It was full of ancient flowerpots and white metal garden furniture green with moss. At one side was a bent old damson tree, its sagging boughs held up by wooden supports; at the other a well-grown holly. Tag sat in the sun between them, cleaning his fur. A family of bullfinches piped from the branches of the damson. A bee hummed past! After it he went, whacking out with his front paws until he could clutch the stunned insect inside one of them. He put the bee carefully into his mouth and let it buzz about a bit in there. What a feeling! Then he swallowed it. ‘Not bad,’ he told himself. ‘Good bee.’ For a while he patrolled an old flower bed now overgrown with mint, in case he got another. After that, he went to sleep. When he woke up, he was hungry. It was late afternoon, and he had no idea where he was.

  *

  Two hours later, he was huddled – hungry, cold, and disoriented – on someone’s back doorstep. Afternoon had given way to evening as he made his way from garden to garden, recognizing nothing. At first it had seemed like a great game. Then the fences had got higher and harder to jump, the tangled rose briars harder to push through, the smells of other cats more threatening. Human beings had shouted at him through a window – he had run off thoughtlessly and got turned back on himself, ending up in the garden he had started from. Now he was so tired he couldn’t think. He knew it wasn’t his own house. But he was grateful to sit on the doorstep anyway. He was grateful for the old damson tree, spreading its branches over the white garden furniture glowing in the dusk. These things were familiar, at least. He gave a little yowl now and then, in case someone came home and let him in.

  As he sat there, the light went slowly out of the sky. The sun was a great cool red ball behind the garden trees. Rooks began to settle their evening quarrels – ‘My branch, I think.’ ‘No, my branch!’ – the whole ragged ignoble colony of them whirling up into the sky to wheel and caw before settling again, one by one, into silence. Suddenly the air was colder. Shadows crept out of the box hedges. The garden seemed to change shape, becoming shorter and broader. The lawn, the shrubs in their borders, the lighted windows of the houses yellow with warmth and company – everything seemed closer and yet farther away. The apple trees faded to a uniform gray.

  Night had come. Tag had never been out in it before.

  He knew the night only from warm rooms behind double-glazed windows. Then it had seemed exciting. Now it was only menacing and strange. As human activity decreased, the real sounds and smells of the world came through: the sudden low twitter of a bird disturbed, the slow tarry reek of leaf mold from under the hedges, the bitter smell of a rusting iron bucket, a dog barking somewhere down at the end of the road, thickly woven odors of snails eating their way through the soft fleshy leaves of the hostas. And then, suddenly, from the gloom at the very end of the garden, came a smell that made Tag’s heart race with fear and excitement! His head went up. Almost despite himself, he sniffed the air. Something moving down there! It was a highway, like the one that ran along the bottom of his own garden! Something was trotting down there, fast and purposeful, its paws moving silently across the broken, lichenous old flagstones as it made its way from left to right along the tunnelly overgrown path between the flower bed and the sagging board fence. Tag could barely keep still. He wanted to make himself known. He wanted to hide. Every part of him wanted to say something. Every part of him wanted to stay silent.

  In the end, though, he must have moved, or made some sound, because the animal on the highway stopped. It sniffed the air for him. He heard it. Terribly afraid, he huddled into the doorway. Too late. It was aware of him. He could see a dark silhouette, a thick black shadow with four legs and a blunt muzzle, its head turning this way and that. A single bright, pale, reflective eye that seemed to switch itself on suddenly, like a lamp. It was looking at him. There was a long pause. Then a wave of scent, a sharp, live, musky reek in the garden air.

  ‘Little cat,’ it said in a soft voice. ‘Your true name is not Tag. Do you want to discover your true name? If so, you must undertake the task which lies before you.’

  He shrank back in the doorway until his head was pressed so tightly into the corner his face hurt. To no avail. The thing that inhabited that shadow could see him whatever he did. There was a low, grunting laugh.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the voice. ‘Come with me now.’

  Its owner took a pace toward him.

  He cowered into his doorway.

  There was a sudden impatient sigh, as if the creature had been interrupted. It paused to listen, then, purposeful and urgent, it loped off into the night without another word.

  Tag huddled on the doorstep until it was light again. Exhaustion made him shake; anxiety kept him awake. Every sound, familiar or not, seemed to threaten him, from the abrupt shriek of an owl to the patient snuffling and rootling of a hedgehog in the next garden. He was afraid to make any noise of his own.

  Toward dawn he fell into a restless sleep, only to dream of the animals on their highway. Tag could never be sure what he saw – what he sensed – moving along it. They were cats, certainly, although in the dream they seemed much larger than a cat should be, and they had deeply disturbing, shadowy shapes. They moved in their own powerful stink – vague, slippery, indistinct, always angry or excited. Their voices came toward him from a long distance, in the echoing yet glutinous speech of dreams.

  ‘A task,’ they told him, ‘a great task.’

  *

  The next morning he was stiff and tired, but the sunshine made him feel optimistic. Breakfast! he thought. He sat up, stretched himself, and gave a huge yawn. ‘Chicken and game!’ He jumped on top of a fence and looked across the gardens. They lay before him: a lawn as precise as a living-room carpet, bordered with regiments of red flowers; then rusty objects propped against a shed; then bedsheets flapping on a line. He jumped down, nosed around. There, on the concrete path as it warmed up in the sunshine, was his own smell from yesterday, faint but distinct!

  Follow myself home, he thought. No problem.

  But it was a problem.

  Chasing the magpie, he had taken an alarmingly random course, zigzagging, turning back on himself, often going in circles. In the night, other animals had passed; other scents had overlaid his own. While it was a good idea, the attempt to follow himself was doomed from the start. High old brick walls, espaliered with fruit trees, blocked his path. Abundant crops of nettles forced him to divert. He blundered into another cat – or rather the insane face of another cat was thrust unexpectedly into his own, screaming at him so loudly that he jumped in fear and ran off under some bushes and came out disoriented twenty minutes later to find himself trapped in a place that didn’t even seem to be a garden. The spines of dying foxgloves mopped and mowed against a tottering wooden fence. What had once been an open space was now a jungle: fireweed seeding down to ashes, a choke of brambles and old rose suckers bound together in the dusty heat by convolvulus and grape ivy. The air was thick, still, and oppressive, full of the sleepy drone of insec
ts. Eventually he pushed his way out. He was hot and tired and out of temper. The house in front of him had blue shutters, peeling to show the gray wood beneath, and a blue door. Not much else could be seen through the skeins of honeysuckle and wiry climbing roses colonizing its pebble-dashed walls. Its windows were of rippled glass, dim with dirt. Compressed between the wilderness and the house, the remains of its garden – the patch of yellowed lawn on which he stood, the beds overgrown with rubbery hostas, the tottering wooden shed that had also at some time been painted blue – would soon be engulfed.

  Tag sighed and sat down suddenly in the shade of some terracotta pots full of dead geraniums. It was already noon, and he still hadn’t eaten. He crouched down, tucked his front paws neatly under him, and let his nose rest on the ground. Not knowing what else to do, he slept. When he woke, the magpie was perched on a broken pot in front of him.

  ‘Raaark,’ it said. ‘On your own then, Kit-e-Kat?’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ said Tag.

  The magpie laughed. ‘Call yourself a cat?’ it asked. It added mysteriously, ‘I don’t know why he bothers with you. If he could find them on his own, he wouldn’t.’ Then it put its head on one side, regarded him with one beady eye, and said with measured nastiness, ‘Oh yes, you’re on your own now, Kit-e-Kat!’

  Tag was enraged. He jumped up and rushed the magpie. ‘My name’s Tag!’ he cried. ‘I am a cat, and they call me Tag, not Kit-e-Kat!’

  The magpie only bobbed its head wickedly and took flight. It flapped with a dreamy slowness up from the lawn and into the rowan tree. As it flew it looked less like a bird than a series of brilliant sketches of one. For an instant – while it was still rising but almost into the tree – it seemed to wear its own wings like a black, shiny cloak. Then it perched, quickly ruffled its feathers, and looked down at Tag, its head tilted on one side to show a bright cruel eye.