The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘This is my chicken.’

  ‘A fox like you can find a chicken anywhere.’

  The fox looked pleased. ‘True,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then give me that one.’

  The fox put his head on one side. ‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Why?’

  ‘I need it for someone else,’ said Tag. ‘I’ve just rescued two cats. One of them isn’t well. The other’s an idiot.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Loves a Dustbin.

  He scanned the empty street warily, as if to make sure no other fox was watching, then picked up the chicken and dropped it at Tag’s feet. ‘Cats!’ he said. ‘Cats are always out of it. Right out of it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know why I like you. I must be out of it too.’ He trotted off in the direction he had come from. ‘Never tell anyone I gave you that,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘Wait!’ called Tag.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I don’t know how to get back to Tintagel Court.’

  The fox sighed. ‘I’ll come with you as far as Tintagel Street. You’re not fit to be allowed out.’

  Tag was delighted.

  He picked up the chicken. It was heavy. It was still warm from the oven.

  After a few minutes of companionable walking, he looked up at his friend and said around the chicken, ‘It’s hard for me not to eat this. Was it hard for you?’

  *

  The fox would not go into Tintagel Court.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said quietly, and slipped into the shadows. ‘I hate this place. There’s something wrong here.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’ called Tag.

  ‘Not if I see you first.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Be careful. Tag.’

  ‘I will,’ said Tag.

  Only then did he realize that they had not spoken a word about Majicou.

  ‘Wait! The black cat! I—’

  But the fox had vanished. Tag, whose jaws had gotten quite tired, picked up the chicken for the last time and fled around the edge of the court. His shadow was thrown briefly onto the walls, but no one noticed it. Up the stairs he went, careful not to drop his prize. He crept along the walkways, freezing at the slightest sound. When he arrived, both the other cats were asleep in the moonlight that seeped between the window boards. Ragnar had dragged the purple cushion onto the newspaper, and now lay curved so that Pertelot was safe between him and it. Tag, who had expected them to be waiting for him, was disappointed.

  ‘Wake up!’ he said.

  Two bright green eyes snapped open, there was a quick hiss, and suddenly Ragnar was in Tag’s face, teeth bared. At that distance, he looked less of an idiot.

  ‘It’s me!’ said Tag. ‘Food!’

  ‘You should be more careful,’ Ragnar said. ‘That is my advice to you.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  ‘To shout is not always good. You see?’

  ‘I see that, yes.’

  ‘So that is my advice to you, to be careful not to shout—’

  ‘Shut up, Ragnar.’

  Pertelot could eat nothing at first, though they shredded the chicken very fine. But they managed to get her to take some of the juices. She licked feebly at what they offered and fell asleep again immediately. Sleeping in snatches, turn and turn about, they watched her until near dawn, when she woke up without warning and began to eat ravenously.

  Shortly afterward she was as sick as a kitten. But she had kept some of it down; and by the time the dim gray daylight had filtered in, she was awake and able to speak. Properly open, her eyes were revealed to be almond-shaped and green. A pale and elusive green one moment, Nile-green the next – the green of water pouring into some sacred vessel, lit from within by its own life-giving power. On her forehead she carried a strange mark. She stared from Ragnar to Tag in a kind of delighted wonder.

  ‘Who is he, Raggy?’

  ‘As you see, he is a cat,’ said Ragnar.

  ‘Did he bring this food?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘You’re so beautiful!’ she said to Tag. ‘What do they call you?’

  Tag drew himself up.

  ‘I shall call you Mercury,’ she said, before he could speak, ‘because of your color. I shall call you Mercury.’

  ‘I’d rather you called me Tag.’

  4

  Feral Life

  There is some truth to the assertion that the cat, with the exception of a few luxury breeds… is no domestic animal but a completely wild being.

  – KONRAD LORENZ

  Pertelot Fitzwilliam was asleep again.

  Tag and Ragnar measured each other silently in the growing daylight. Tag saw a large, squarish cat as big as a fox, robust and muscular, with sturdy legs almost hidden by a long black winter coat. Ragnar’s nose was long and wide, and in profile resembled the nose guard of a Norman helmet. Electric eyes, upright bearing, flowing tail, and prominent whiskers. An impressive animal.

  ‘So. You rescue us,’ he said at last. ‘Now I might ask, What kind of cat are you?’

  ‘Just a cat,’ said Tag.

  Ragnar tilted his head to one side. ‘Not just any cat,’ he said, ‘I think.’

  There was a friendly pause while Tag absorbed this compliment. ‘Thank you,’ he said at last. Politeness made him add, ‘What kind of cat are you?’

  Ragnar nodded formally, as if he had been waiting for just this question. ‘Pleased to meet you. Norwegian Forest cat. Grand Champion Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion. This breed – do you see? It is a Viking cat, the Norsk Skogkatt! – must be big. I am very big. Seventeen pounds show weight. And the profuse neck ruff? Oh yes, this is important for a career on the show bench. And to be very straight up. Very square.’ He demonstrated. ‘Large paws with heavy pads. And we have the double coat for warmth and waterproofing. Very oily guard hairs. Very rugged and hardy, dries out in fifteen minutes. Although,’ he was forced to admit, ‘we spend most of our time in houses.’

  Tag thought for a moment. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what a cat show is.’

  Astonished by this ignorance, and shouldering it as a burden of his own, Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion was unsure how to proceed. ‘Well then,’ he kept repeating puzzledly. ‘Well then.’ He busied himself with Pertelot’s cushion and newspapers. After a good deal of tugging and scraping, sure that she remained comfortable and there was nothing more to be done, he announced, ‘I suppose I must be explaining even now.’

  ‘I suppose you must,’ said Tag.

  It took some time, and much of Ragnar’s explanation had itself to be explained, but in the end Tag was able to visualize the huge hall where a cat show was held, the batteries of fluorescent lamps above, the smell of human food, the dense air overheated to keep drafts off the hundreds of fragile animals in their display cages beneath. Cages! Well, he could easily imagine those, row upon row of them under the pitiless lights, separated by narrow concrete aisles packed with the human beings who moved to and fro with a kind of reverent bustle – that, at least, was how Ragnar put it – to take care of the cats inside. Like the pet shop cages, they were perfectly good – airy, clean, even comfortable – but, as he said to Ragnar, ‘A cage is a cage is a cage, and you’re better off outside one than in.’

  Harder to understand were the cats themselves.

  Oh, he could imagine them, as beautiful and different and myriad as their names – Korat and Birman, Ragdoll and Snow-shoe and Russian Blue. Pewters and lilacs, longhaired and short, cobby or long boned, with eyes the color of glass or grass, eyes of colors to which he couldn’t give a name. Striped cats, spangled cats, self-colors; cats, like the naked Sphinx, radical or bizarre. Cats enriched rather than bowed down by the weight of their own beauty and strangeness. He could see Ragnar and Pertelot there among their peers, standing tall on the show bench. What he couldn’t understand was how they came to be there or why.

  ‘It is to see who is the best,’ Ragnar tried to explain. ‘To understand this, we need go no further than ask ourselves, Who
has the purest bloodline? Who has the perfect shape, the perfect conformation?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘We are bred to do this. By our owners. By human beings.’ Tag shook his head. ‘Bred by human beings?’ he repeated incredulously.

  Ragnar sighed. ‘I must assert, ‘Human beings own cats, and that is the way of it.’’

  ‘No one owns me,’ Tag told him.

  And they left the subject there. Casting about for something else to say. Tag went on, ‘And Pertelot Fitzwilliam? What kind of cat is she?’

  ‘Mau,’ said Ragnar.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Champion Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion,’ he recited, ‘first in class at many shows: Egyptian Mau. Excuse me. She is a very old kind of cat.’ It was a fact that didn’t seem to cheer him. ‘Perhaps the oldest kind of all,’ he proposed. Then he sighed and added, ‘Also, she is now the most dangerous cat in the world.’

  That was hard to make anything of, so Tag ignored it politely. Instead he asked, ‘And the mark. The mark on her forehead?’

  Ragnar was silent. A Scandinavian gloom descended on him, full of fog, ice, and long dark nights above the Arctic Circle. From out of it he explained at last, ‘It is the scarab. This is the image of – I can only ask, how to say this? – the sacred beetle, drawn by the Egyptian gods on the forehead of the first Mau. A pretty good story! you say. I say, This is the sign of the Mau.’

  ‘She’s very beautiful, isn’t she? That’s the first thing you notice.’

  ‘I love her,’ said Ragnar.

  After a time he went on, ‘But the human who bred her didn’t want this. It had other plans for her. She and I, we have very pure, very ancient blood. The lines are not supposed to mix.’ He dipped his head shyly. ‘But we saw each other and we did not care about anyone else’s plans. We wanted to be together.’ He looked down at the Mau. ‘I love her,’ he repeated simply.

  At that, Pertelot Fitzwilliam awoke. She lifted her perfect rose-gray head, blessed – and cursed too – by its sacred mark. ‘Or perhaps we were,’ she corrected him. ‘Perhaps we were meant to be together and that’s what frightens them so. It frightens me sometimes.’ She sneezed. Then she said, ‘Oh, Rags, do you really?’

  Rags! thought Tag. Cat show!

  ‘Eat more chicken,’ he ordered.

  *

  Tag was a practical cat, a cat with a simple heart. Puzzled – if rather charmed – to find his life webbed so suddenly into the lives of others, he shelved his curiosity and followed his nose. He had promised to feed them, and now he had done that. He had promised to find them a better place to live, and now he would do that, too. Quick and clever, filled with energy, unafraid of the ferals, he ranged the cold acres of Tintagel Court seeking new accommodation.

  He found it on the third afternoon.

  The upper north side of the court, with its airy situation and extensive views across the river, had been the last to be abandoned. As a result, the flats along that side, especially those served by the very top walkway, were still intact. Doors lay unforced behind brand-new straw-colored chipboard. Windows remained unbroken. The whole floor seemed uninhabited and quiet. Even the air seemed fresher. The problem was how to gain entry. Tag marched up and down with his tail in the air, demanding, ‘Me in now!’ Surprisingly, the doors held. He sat at the top of the stairs. He wrapped his tail around him. He looked down the walkway and pondered.

  After a moment or two, he heard an irregular tapping sound. This he traced to a broken ventilator cover, opening and closing in the wind high up on a kitchen wall two or three flats along. It was a hinged metal grille not much bigger than his own head. An athletic cat, a cat of agility and power – a cat like himself – might reach it by a diagonal leap from the front room windowsill. Tag settled himself there at once and, at the first opportunity, jumped. The wind banged the ventilator shut, midleap. Down he fell, all the way to the concrete. No good! he thought. He had given his head a knock. He picked himself up. Had anyone been watching? Too bad. He twisted around to lick briefly and energetically at a patch of fur on his back, then climbed onto the windowsill again. The pads of his front paws hurt.

  He waited. He watched. He judged his moment and his jump. He thrust his head into the gap behind the grille and got his front paws over the edge. For thirty seconds he struggled on the lip like that. Then he fell off again.

  Third time pays for all. The wind opened and closed the ventilator. Would it be blocked on the inside? Find out soon, thought Tag. He leapt, scrabbled, hung. He tucked up his back legs, scraped the brickwork until his claws caught on mortar, and began to haul himself through. His shoulders jammed. Half a cat was hanging out of the wall. The other half was stuffed inside a dusty hole, its head gargoyling over a deserted kitchen.

  How undignified.

  ‘Go forward,’ he instructed himself.

  A wriggle, some desperate squirming, and he was in.

  ‘Yes!’ he congratulated himself.

  He found the layout familiar. Kitchen, passage, front room. After that, nothing was the same. The kitchen was clean and cheerful, the glass connecting door unbroken. Best of all, perhaps, it was dry. Tag sat in the middle of the front room and purred. He had a wash. He viewed the rest of his acquisition. River light poured over him as he nudged open the bedroom door. Since not even a monkey could climb the featureless outer face of Tintagel Court, they had left the windows unboarded on that side. Tag blinked slowly. From the window he could see everything. The tide was in. Gulls banked and planed, white and graceful on a brisk wind, about the towers of a fantastic bridge – he called it that to himself the moment he saw it, the Fantastic Bridge. A big white machine chugged and bumbled along the river toward the heart of the city. You could stay here and watch all day. For a moment. Tag was as happy as he had been with his dulls. He imagined Pertelot Fitzwilliam, asleep in the water light. She was well again. Her delicate feet trembled in some perilous dream of ‘Egypt.’ Later she would wake and say, surprised all over again, ‘Tag, you’re so beautiful!’ And from his perch on the windowsill, Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion, who was keeping an eye on the gulls as they dipped and dived beneath the arches of the Fantastic Bridge, would have to agree.

  We could live here until she’s better, Tag thought. I could get food for all of us.

  Fifteen minutes later a faulty ventilator grille popped open onto an empty concrete skyway somewhere in Tintagel Court. A minute after that, two paws and a small silver muzzle with faint gray tabby markings and a brick-pink nose squeezed themselves out into the windy afternoon. Tag jumped down with satisfying thuds, first to the windowsill and then to the ground. He looked one way and then the other.

  The situation seemed ideal.

  ‘But I’ll be back,’ he promised.

  At a different time of day, it might be another story.

  *

  A curious thing happened to him on the return journey. It was snowing again. Small hard flakes blew about the courtyard like sparks on a strong wind. The snow drifted stealthily into corners. It settled in the open stairwell landings, where it was received without enthusiasm or rancor. Passing quickly across one of these square bleak spaces in the growing dark. Tag noticed a disturbance of the air or, more properly, of the light. He stopped, puzzled. It was as if a wild road ran through the building itself and, exiting through the very brickwork, cut briefly and obliquely across the back of the landing. Rakes of snow drifted into the stairwell, trapped on slowly moving currents of cold air. As Tag watched, they were first attracted to, then repulsed by the strange smoky twist of light in the corner. The corner was breathing. Tag could hear it. Snowflakes went in and out. Then after a moment or two a small convulsion like a sneeze took place, a current of warm air passed across the landing, and everything returned to normal. Tag put his nose carefully into the corner and sniffed. Cat pee. Human pee. Well, that was normal. He sat for a bit, but nothing else happened, so he went home.

  *

  Pertelot Fitzwilliam at
e. Ragnar ate. Tag ate. The chicken lasted for three days. Then they were hungry again. A smell of tan-doori issued faintly from the very walls. Bones were scattered about the floor, brown with cooking, highly polished, of perplexing shape. Tag woke up, looked at Pertelot, saw how in the dawn her fur turned from rose to taupe along a complex and rewarding spectrum. He saw how she tapped the chicken bones lazily about with one long paw. He saw how beautiful she was.

  ‘This Egypt,’ he said. ‘What’s it like?’

  She turned her head slowly. The beam of light from the boarded-up window sprayed about her profile, coronal and savage, so that she seemed for a moment to be carved in stone.

  Mau! thought Tag. Egyptian Mau!

  ‘Mercury,’ she said gently, ‘how could I know? I was never there.’

  Tag purred. He was Mercury!

  ‘I think I’ll go hunting today,’ he said.

  *

  He had already chosen the site.

  It was about half a mile along the Caribbean Road in the direction of the Fantastic Bridge. Once, it had been a newsagent and tobacconist’s shop. Now the sign on the front read, if you could read: burgess supermart & deli.

  Tag had made his way through the morning foot traffic, creeping along between a pavement and a wall, crouching and veering to avoid pram wheels here, the grasping hands of a toddler there. He had been chased by a bull terrier so fat it could barely waddle. Worse, he had been splashed with freezing brown water by passing cars. Now he stood in the doorway, looking down the long narrow aisle of shelves, piled high with bags of chips, plastic tubs of butter, bread cut and wrapped, breakfast cereals in huge cheery boxes. He loved the bright colors under the flickering fluorescent lights. He loved the smells that poured out over him in the warm shop air. Dried pulses and spices, diced cold meat. Sliced fruit in sauces. Strange orange sausages, shriveled and dry. Sweet rolls, powerful cheeses, and faint flowery yogurts that reminded him of Pertelot’s perfect breath. It was all in there, ready to be freed.

  Tag was nervous. His pads were cold and dirty. ‘Don’t dither here!’ he told himself. ‘Don’t dither. Go in now!’