The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  Cats were everywhere. The dark, empty flats were alive with them.

  They crouched skinny and hot-eyed, hungry and full of rage, all facing in different directions as if they couldn’t bear to look at one another. By day they scavenged the nearby streets. After dark they patrolled the ramps and walkways. From a community of mislaid souls – nonjudgmental, loosely knit, maintained without visible consensus – a handful of rag-eared toms commanded what was at best a nominal fealty. Tooley, the Big Gib, Septum, and the rest cared less about society than sex; their disputes were as princely as their coats, and fights only broke out between them when one of the less scabrous females came into heat. Midnight on some concrete walkway in the sky: snarls and wails echoed out over the courtyard, followed by a prolonged hiss and hasty scuffle as tonight’s loser made another dignified exit. Maculate toms and their glamorous queens! The outfall of their liaisons fizzed and tumbled everywhere, such quaint scrawny little kittens, nipping at one another with predatory milk teeth, pouncing silendy – leaping back in mock fear – collapsing in heaps of multicolored fur to wheeze and dream until hunger, itchy ears, and runny noses woke them up again.

  Despite the old cat’s memories, life wasn’t good in the barrens of Tintagel Court. None of those cats had enough to eat.

  They were used to it. Few of them were strays, in any meaningful sense of that word; they were feral. To those who had ever had a home, home was long ago and far away; by now they had given up on that whole idea. The rest had never had an idea to give up on. But among them at that time you could find two cats who had strayed, and knew it. Their eyes were huge with shock. They jumped at every sound. They had the air of being marooned among tribes. They lived in an unlit corner far from the fights and noise, kept themselves to themselves, and stayed as close to one another as they could, especially at night.

  At night, something very strange indeed was going on in Tintagel Court.

  *

  When he poked his head around the corner of the arch and looked in, Tag knew none of this.

  Clearly, though, he was in the wrong place.

  He scanned the concrete walkways looming above him. He sniffed disgustedly the thin, subtle smell of feline misery, the rank ashes and human rubbish in the corners, the soft dead leaves of the Norway maples like gray fingers rotting down in heaps. By the time he got there, the sky had a strange dull pewter sheen above the river, and the wind had moved into the north. Cold air sat like a sheet of dirty glass over it all, and through it fell a few dry flakes of snow. The court was empty of any worthwhile kind of life. No King and Queen would ever live here. Better not stay. Better try and find the Tintagel of his dreams.

  Yet as he turned to leave he heard a noise from above.

  Something was moving up there.

  ‘Hello?’ called Tag. He thought, Now that was stupid.

  Before he could check himself, he had said it again. ‘Hello?’

  A faint echo. No answer. Then a kind of muffled dragging sound.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ called Tag. He thought. What do you mean? No you’re not.

  Too late.

  His feet had found a staircase. Enclosed and smelly, littered with plastic bags full of hardened glue, it was under an inch of dirty old rainwater. On every landing Tag had to pick his way gingerly between piles of sodden newspaper. As he neared the top, he heard movement again, less furtive this time. Then an outbreak of yowling and spitting. Half a dozen cats were up there, maybe more. Run away, Tag thought. Run away now. Instead, flattening himself carefully so as to remain unseen, he stuck his head over the final step. This action put his eyes at the level of a walkway that stretched away from him in bleak, puddled perspective, lined with boarded-up doors and windows. About halfway along it, a very large black cat had got itself surrounded by some other cats and was now spitting and bubbling defiantly if rather helplessly at a closing circle of enemies. They were led by a stocky, one-eared marmalade tom. Every so often, this animal would inch forward stiffly, head down, fur abristle, and unsheath a pawful of razors honed to a gleam. At this, the rest would close in too. The black cat didn’t seem to know what to do. It had eyes the brightest green Tag had ever seen. It had a tangled leonine ruff of immensely long fur.

  It appeared to be sitting on a purple velvet cushion.

  ‘Waugh,’ said Tag quietly to himself.

  Not quietly enough. Every eye turned his way. Everyone’s concentration broke. The black cat made a dash for it, then changed his mind and went back for the cushion. It was instantly set upon by the tom and two others. The rest of them came down on Tag with a sound like a cold wind in December.

  Tag, who had planned to retreat if this happened, found his legs urging him forward instead. His fur stood on end all down his back. His lips peeled back from his teeth. Strident sounds came out his mouth. He looked spiny, twice his actual size, and completely mad. In that moment he was so angry he had no idea who he was. At the same time, he knew he was Tag. He was TAG! He leapt the top step with a foot to spare and met the first of them while he was still in flight. It was like running into a brick wall. The breath went out of him with a gasp. He was bowled over. He clutched his assailant tight in both arms, buried his teeth in its neck, and slashed rapidly with his back claws at what he hoped was its belly.

  ‘Tag,’ he told it. ‘I’m Tag, I’m Tag, I’m Tag!’

  ‘So what?’ it said.

  Something dragged down his cheek like hot wire. Teeth met in the muscles of his upper shoulder. Foul breath was in his face. For an instant he was looking straight into the flecked amber eyes and scarred features of some flat-faced fighter half his size. Then he had bitten its underlip apart just behind the chin, and with a howl it was gone, only to be replaced by another.

  How long did this go on? Seconds. It felt like forever, but it lasted seconds.

  Suddenly, everything had slowed down again. Tag found himself crouched in the center of the ring with the black cat. He was out of breath. There was fur all over the serviceway. In front of Tag stood the marmalade tom. It didn’t even look angry. And it wasn’t breathing hard at all.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ it said. ‘Beginners.’

  It raised a front paw and studied its own claws, which seemed to have become clogged with black fur. Behind it, from the staircases at each end, more and more cats were slipping down the serviceway. They hadn’t come to watch.

  ‘I think we’ve had it,’ Tag told the black cat.

  ‘I think you have,’ agreed the marmalade tom.

  Tag launched himself at its face. It welcomed him with a powerful embrace.

  What could Tag do? Despite his poor condition, he was a well-grown young cat: long and lithe, muscular. He was brave enough. But he lacked experience. And perhaps more important, he was just too good-natured. As a result the marmalade tom soon had him by the throat. However much he writhed and squawled, he couldn’t escape. Neither could he reach anything worth biting. Scrabbling with his back legs, he got a good one into the tom’s eye, but he only clamped his teeth tighter and said in a muffled but amused voice, ‘Tell me about it.’

  Strangled twice in a week, thought Tag, as things started to turn black. Not so clever. At this point something strange happened.

  A large black-and-white object, traveling fast, crashed into the ribs of the marmalade tom. Winded, the tom let go of Tag’s neck. Tag fell back, trying to focus. Whatever had arrived was angry and covered in feathers. He was anxious not to be in its way. Thrashing and squawking as if in its fury it had lost command of its own nervous system, it set about the tomcat’s companions, beating black wings in their astonished faces, stabbing at them with its big black beak.

  Unnerved, they turned and ran.

  ‘And don’t come back!’ called the enraged bird. Then it spoke to Tag. ‘Well?’ it demanded.

  It was the magpie known as One for Sorrow.

  *

  Tag stared up and down the serviceway. Empty, but for the big black cat. Without stopping to thank
anyone, this animal had straddled the purple velvet cushion like a leopard its kill and was now dragging it awkwardly away. Feathers, mixed up with bloodied fur, floated about its head in the cold wind. It vanished around a corner. Tag blinked. He shook his head. His vision was still poor. His face was stiff with a dozen cuts.

  ‘Well?’ repeated One for Sorrow. ‘What are you waiting for, little cat?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Go on, before they come back!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you?’ said One for Sorrow. He cocked his head in disgust. ‘Thank you!’ he said savagely. ‘Oh, they all say that.’ He hopped up on the guardrail and began to preen. His disarrayed feathers glimmered like metal in the bitter light. ‘They all say that.’

  ‘Look,’ apologized Tag, ‘I’m sorry. But I’ve got to go and talk to that cat.’ He ran a few groggy steps, turned back. ‘Will you wait here for me?’ he said. ‘How are the gardens? I’m glad I didn’t eat you.’

  ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

  ‘Stop!’ called Tag to the black cat. ‘Stop! I won’t hurt you!’

  A few minutes later, still encumbered by the purple velvet cushion, the black cat halted outside a boarded-up flat somewhere in the maze of Tintagel Court. It looked carefully up and down the walkway, then backed into a hole in the front door, hauling the cushion in after it. The cushion wedged briefly. There was a ragging sound, and after a moment it popped through. The black cat’s head appeared, and it checked the walkway once more before withdrawing.

  Tag watched. When nothing else had happened for some time, he approached the hole.

  It was dim inside. He couldn’t see much, and what he could see was intensely squalid: ripped linoleum and broken furniture, wallpaper smeared with filth and graffiti, all decaying in a light that wouldn’t change much from night to day. The corners were littered. The whole place reeked. The front door, in the days when it still worked, had opened directly onto the kitchen, from which a short passage led via a glass door into the front room. There, sprawled across two or three sheets of yellowing newspaper in a single ray of wan light, was the most beautiful cat Tag had ever seen. She was perhaps a year old, and the fur lay on her long curved bones like softly flecked rose-gray velvet. When he looked closer he could see the faintest of brown stripes, like a watermark. Her ears, tall and elegant, extended in a medium as translucent as porcelain the sharp, triangular lines of her tiny head. Her feet were the most delicate feet he had ever seen on a cat. And her eyes! Had they been properly open, those eyes would have transfixed him forever. But something was wrong with her, and they were filmed, lidded, unaware. Her breath came too fast and noisy in the silent room. Tag could see every rib. And her face – as accurate as the head of an axe, the face of an ancient feline carved in stone – had the blind, weary expression of a week-old kitten.

  Standing over her, looking lost and puzzled in that filthy place, was the black cat. It had dragged the purple cushion as far as the edge of the newspaper, then given up the struggle. When it saw Tag, its great ruff bristled. It drew itself up in readiness. Then it recognized him and sat down tiredly.

  ‘So. You see,’ it admitted, in a soft, foreign voice. ‘We need help.’

  ‘That’s clear,’ said Tag.

  ‘I watched you fight. You are of very strong character, I believe.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Tag. ‘A fox once called me a tearaway, but I think now that he was joking.’

  ‘Even so.’

  Carefully, so as not to frighten her – so slowly and carefully he might have been stalking a mouse – Tag approached the cat on the newspaper. Some fever dream caused her to shift restlessly, and he was prompted to lick her worn face. He had no idea why. Only that his heart would break to see her like that and not do anything at all. She was hot. Her dreams were burning her from inside. He heard from her a faint trembling purr. But her eyes registered nothing. Milky and opaque, they lent that face such an air of intelligence and pain! It was as if she knew something about life Tag couldn’t know, and she could protect him from that knowledge only as long as he could protect her from the world.

  ‘What do you call her?’

  ‘Her name is Pertelot Fitzwilliam,’ said the black cat. ‘I have been trying to get her to sit on this cushion. It would be nicer for her.’

  Tag was horrified. ‘Nicer? Are you an idiot? She’s ill!’

  ‘I know this,’ said the black cat.

  ‘She’s ill,’ Tag repeated. ‘Is this the best you can do? If it is, I should have left you to that lot out there!’ After a moment he inquired, ‘And what do they call you? Prince Stupid?’

  The black cat drew himself up. ‘I am Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion.’

  Tag thought about biting him.

  ‘She’s ill,’ he tried to explain. ‘And you bring her a cushion to sit on.’

  ‘She would be more comfortable.’

  ‘When did she last eat?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Ragnar. ‘We aren’t good at these things, she and I.’ He stared around, puzzled, disgusted, defeated. ‘How do you live out here in the world? Who brings you your food? We ran away from a cat show to be together. We had no idea it would be like this.’

  Hearing him, Pertelot Fitzwilliam shivered suddenly in her ray of light.

  ‘Raggy,’ she whispered, ‘they mustn’t find us,’ and was silent again.

  ‘We can’t have this,’ said Tag.

  ‘Just so. You can help?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll do what I can.’ Ragnar made Tag feel competent. But he knew he wasn’t. He had no idea what a cat show was; and when he stared around that dismal room with its sweetish smells of illness and rubbish, a kind of exhaustion overcame him. ‘Some days,’ he was forced to admit, ‘I can barely take care of myself, let alone anyone else. Still.’ He gave Ragnar a look he hoped was determined. ‘Who are you, the pair of you?’ he said. And before the black cat could answer, ‘Never mind. Whoever you are, you can’t go on living here.’

  ‘Look for yourself, my friend. It isn’t so easy for her to move.’

  ‘Both of you need to eat,’ said Tag decisively.

  *

  He had intended to ask the magpie for help. By the time he found his way back to the right walkway, however. One for Sorrow had flown. Tag jumped up on the guardrail and teetered there, craning his neck. A single speck hung in the air, high up; but it could have been any bird. So he decided to go and look for food on his own.

  ‘You’ll find some dustbins around there!’ he remembered the old cat saying. And indeed the streets of occupied houses surrounding the court were full of them. Unfortunately, though, they had all been visited already. Some expert had surgically entered each black plastic bag, then pulled out its contents for investigation. All that was left was the smell. Working his way out in a widening spiral from the court, Tag wasted the afternoon sniffing things that would make a cat gag. Then, finding himself at the river, he averted his face from the biting wind and turned to follow the setting sun.

  That was how he ended up three or four hours later in a narrow cobbled passage. It was dark. The wind was cruel. Tag was completely lost. From one end of the passage, he could see a wide wet street, shop windows, the wavery reflections of lights changing from green to orange and red. At the other end, the night. And – running purposefully up from the slaty chill of the river toward the tree-lined graveyard of All Saints Church – a highway. He could see it rather like a plastic tube of movement, a discomfiting smoky blur of life. He had been sitting by it for fifteen or twenty minutes, trying to make himself step in. Perhaps it would be warm in there. It might lead him back to Tintagel Court. On it, he might find something he could take back to Pertelot and Ragnar.

  On the other hand, he thought, nothing like that happened last time. Last time, all I got was hurt.

  He was still weighing these things up when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a fox trot past the other end of the alley. It was a young, well
-set-up animal, long-backed, reddish, brindling toward its hindquarters and long tail, exuding a fine strong reek of fox. Tag thought he recognized it. He mshed to the end of the alley.

  ‘Hey!’

  The fox stopped halfway across the street. It looked back. Its mouth was stuffed with half a cooked chicken coated lovingly with charred orange spices and issuing to the windy night a powerful smell of tandoori. This it dropped, so as to be able to speak.

  ‘Go away, Tag,’ it said.

  ‘You remembered my name.’

  ‘I’m a fox.’

  ‘But you never told me yours.’

  ‘What use would a cat have for a fox’s name? Go away now. This is an open place. It isn’t wise to talk in an open place.’

  ‘I took your advice,’ said Tag.

  ‘Good. Now take it again.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  The fox looked proud and embarrassed at the same time.

  ‘Loves a Dustbin.’

  Tag laughed. ‘Everyone loves a dustbin,’ he said.

  Then he said, ‘Is that a chicken?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  The smell of the chicken had made Tag drool a little. He swallowed. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘‘This is my chicken,’ said Loves a Dustbin.

  ‘But you got it somewhere.’

  Loves a Dustbin grinned. ‘Down the road,’ he said. ‘Bengali takeaway on Arbor Street. Nipped in there, made my choice, had it away on my feet. Simple.’

  ‘Clever technique,’ said Tag. ‘I want that chicken.’