by Gabriel King
‘Well, hello, Furbag!’ called her next victim. ‘It’s been a while.’ He knew enough to flourish a sardine.
‘Furbag I ain’t,’ Sealink declared indignantly, ‘but I’ll have that there fish.’
She reared up on her hind legs and accepted the offering from his outstretched’hand. It vanished. She twined herself around him, and by this shameless vamping procured two more sardines.
‘Oh my,’ she chided herself. ‘You are such a bad girl.’
Then she was off again.
The men loved her. In and out of their clumsy feet she wove in a kind of teasing dance. A dance like that required more than grace: it required a constant eye on the crates being slammed to the ground around her.
Pertelot watched through the slats of the pallets until Sealink had disappeared where the crowd was thickest. Loneliness swept over her. She had no idea where she was. Her head ached with the sounds of stamping human feet, raucous human shouts. Where had Sealink gone? In the end, she could only close her eyes and shut everything out. Cats go easily from despair to sleep. She settled back into the shelter of the pallets and dozed fitfully.
She woke cold. For a moment she was looking up into darkness. A shadow had fallen across her. It was accompanied by an acrid smell. When her eyes adjusted, she found herself staring at a huge pair of rubber boots, the tops turned down to reveal a canvas interior splashed with drops of reeking blood and intestine. Dread froze its way through her chest to the pit of her stomach. Above the boots she could see a long rubber apron – and the silver glint of a knife.
The Alchemist!
There was nowhere to run. She would lose Sealink forever if she left the cover of the pallets. If she didn’t, the Alchemist would have her and take her back to its laboratories! It moved, so that light fell into her hiding place. Had it seen her? She shrank back. She was breathing so loudly, surely it would hear her!
I won’t go back! she thought dully. I won’t bear all that again –
She thought, Oh, Rags, where are you? Come back and help me now!
Then the figure turned away abruptly, strode across the market and out onto the quay, revealing itself to be a man in later middle age, gray and balding, white stubble on its florid jowls. Its rubber apron glittered with fish scales. Its boots were old and green, too large for its feet, so that they slipped as it walked. Its face split into a grin as it acknowledged a call from a colleague out on the dock, and then it was away, out into the raw January sunshine.
Pertelot watched it go. ‘You see?’ she told herself. ‘Perte-lot, you’re such a bag of nerves. It looked nothing like the Alchemist!’
In her relief, she threw up the fish, which lay there on the cobbles in a warm, accusatory puddle.
‘Didn’t you want that, then, my dear?’
It was not a voice she knew. Pertelot spun around.
Sealink had returned, looking remarkably cheerful, and with her she had brought an old mackerel tabby with a crinkled coat. He had a squint in his left eye and a grizzle of gray around his nose.
‘Meet Pengelly,’ said Sealink.
‘Hello,’ said the Queen.
The mackerel tabby looked her up and down. ‘I’m charmed and honored, my lover,’ he declared. And he looked as if he was.
His coat was thick but short and tufted in places with a density that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. When she leaned forward to sniff him, he smelt of tar and fish and brine. It was an attractive odor, both comfortable and bracing. He was sturdy and fit despite his years, and the way he cocked his head on one side and waited for her response suggested both humor and confidence.
They touched noses in greeting.
‘You’m the Queen of Cats, I hear,’ he encouraged her in his measured way.
She laughed rather wildly. She liked him, and he made her feel safe. ‘Does the Queen of Cats throw up so?’ she asked. ‘I am if she does.’ Then, ‘It’s been a trying day,’ she apologized. ‘You’ll have to forgive me.’
‘My dear, I’d have done exactly the same,’ said Pengelly, eyeing the remains of her breakfast. ‘That fish weren’t what I’d call fresh.’
Pertelot gave Sealink a look. ‘Some people will eat anything,’ she said darkly.
Sealink laughed. ‘Strong stomach makes a strong cat,’ she said. Then she announced happily, ‘This here Pengelly is going to take us on a sea voyage.’
10
Recriminations
It’s no use crying over lost kittens or spilt milk.
– PROVERB
Tag woke.
Darkness and chaos. Fumes.
He was sliding in unpredictable arcs across a metal surface. At the end of each arc he bumped into something. Brilliantly colored sheets of light flickered behind his eyes. He braced himself arid tried to get up; a violent lurch rolled him over. He dug his claws into the floor; it was unyielding. He opened his eyes. Pain and nausea forced him to close them again before he had seen anything.
He drifted in and out of consciousness for what seemed like a lifetime. It was hard to distinguish the waking world – with its booming and shaking, its smells of hot metal and rubber – from the inside of his own head. It all ran seamlessly together, dream to reality, in one long fluid moment of discomfort. This state was interrupted by a single clear image, which he took to be a dream and which he was to remember for some time.
He opened his eyes. He was in a kind of slick white metal room, with ribbed and canted walls, ceiling ventilators, and two blackened windows at one end high up. A little gray light leaked between the double doors into which the windows were fitted. The enameled floor was dusty, rust pocked, stacked toward the back with empty, white-painted cages. There was a long orange canvas bag, a square chipped wooden box. A thick sack lay in its own pool of water, exuding a strong smell of wet cats. In the floor, in the cages, in the very walls, lingered an older, staler smell – cats confined, cats fearful and depressed. The room was stiller than it had been – though it shook rhythmically – and a steady, muffled vibration came up through the floor.
On top of the stack of cages sat Cy the tabby. She looked at home.
Her paws and coat were glossy clean; her eyes shone with a kind of amused intelligence; her cobby frame was full of both repose and energy. Around her, tiny lights came and went – little motes, mostly white as ash drifting up from the embers of a garden bonfire on an autumn day, but some colored faintly red and green. She cocked her head alertly on one side to listen. Tag listened too, and thought for a moment he heard a distant voice. Perhaps music. Then nothing. Motes came and went. A sharp smell invaded the room. This was followed by a faint unaccountable blue radiance that, though it seemed to spring from every wall, came from a fixed point somewhere beyond them, so that the stacked cages threw acute ultramarine shadows and a pool of shadow grew about the wet-blackened sack. Cy looked around her with delight and began to sing, in a low, crooning unmusical way. Tag had the impression that she was in the room but somewhere else at the same time, as if the new light had imposed some other landscape on the walls.
‘Cy?’
She stared at him suddenly. The spark plug in her head pulsed and flickered.
‘Sleep now, Ace,’ she said.
The spark plug drew in motes of light from all over the room. They floated toward it like cinders in a draft, like moths to a lamp. Tag grew confused and could only imagine he was back in some Coldheath delirium – rat dreams, bad food, dirty water.
‘Cy…’
The tabby smiled. ‘Sleep,’ she whispered.
The room snorted. It stank. It lurched into life, throwing everything back toward the doors. Empty cages jumped and rattled precariously. Tag’s head throbbed with nausea, and he slept.
*
He woke soon after. She had gone.
Apart from the occasional lurch, the room was still; it hummed. Bright white light flooded it irregularly from the crack between the doors. Tag realized that he was in the back of the cat catchers’ van, r
acing down some human road amid the roar and rage of human traffic. He had lost the Queen, an unknown number of his friends were in a sack, and he was lurching wretchedly toward an uncomfortable fate in the night.
He groaned and let sleep overtake him.
No more dreams.
Wow! he thought, next time he woke. Still alive! Then he thought, Or am I?
Stiff and bruised from head to foot, he could barely lift his head from between his paws. He was freezing cold; but if he allowed himself to shiver too energetically, sharp little pains crackled up and down his rib cage like flames. Where the cat catcher had kicked him, he felt brittle and swollen at the same time. When he looked down at himself he shuddered. He thought he could see a lump. His coat was bedraggled and wet, stiff with dust and grease it had picked up from the floor of the van. And when he bent around instinctively to lick at the bits that hurt, the effort made him dizzy.
Still, he thought, you haven’t had it till you’re dead.
Or have you? Anxiety for his friends made him miserable. Anger at his own failure made him bitter.
‘When you’ve let everyone down,’ he told himself eventually, ‘the least you can do is get up and help them out of the sack.’
This turned out to be easier said than done. In his sleep he had managed to wedge himself between two of the cages. With an effort, he dragged himself upright, stretched until the pain warned him to go no further, and poked his head out.
Nothing.
The sack lay on the floor, wet and rumpled. His friends were nowhere to be seen. When he looked around everything was as it had been. Orange bag. Wooden box. Cages with rusty wire fronts. He dragged himself stiffly out of his bolthole and, balancing against the tricky motion of the floor, approached the sack. Lips curled in disgust, he found the open end and pushed his head inside. He sniffed. There was a strong wet reek of sack. Cats had been in here recently, but they weren’t there now. He was backing out – puzzled and anxious, and with a growing sense that he was always somehow behind events as they developed – when he heard a familiar voice say, ‘You done us now.’
He stared around. Nothing.
‘You really done us now.’
‘Mousebreath?’
There was a blaring sound from outside. The van swerved and rocked. It slowed suddenly. High up in the rattling wall of cages, a door was dislodged and began banging to and fro. Tag looked up. Curled so tightly together inside the cage that they looked like a single bedraggled animal, were three cats. Out of this undifferentiated mass of damp fur rose a tortoiseshell head with one orange eye and one blue: the orange eye looked angry. Mousebreath got his front legs under him, disentangled himself, sat up. Deprived of his warmth, the other two cats curled tighter together, clutching their paws eloquently to their eyes. ‘Let us sleep!’ Mousebreath blinked. His blue eye was discolored, and there was blood caked down that side of his nose. He dragged the rest of himself out of the pile and stared down at Tag. The cage door opened and shut between them with a mournful, repetitive clang.
‘Where’s the next stop, eh?’ inquired the tortoiseshell.
And, judging the swing of the door to a nicety, he jumped down. He was followed by the somewhat less agile Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion, whose seventeen pounds hit the floor with an audible thud. Ragnar was favoring his right front leg. Cy the tabby came out last, with a yawn and a neat, composed little leap. She looked a lot less cold than Rags and Mousebreath – perhaps they had kept her warm between them. She looked a lot less disheveled – perhaps they had groomed her as she slept. ‘Hi, Ace,’ she greeted Tag, sticking her tail in the air and sniffing his nose. ‘Nice fur.’ She gave him a little sideways look that reminded him of his dream.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mousebreath. ‘You done us now, Ace. Eh?’
Tag thought, I was happy to blame myself for this, but I find it unfair when Mousebreath blames me too. He thought, You learn something about yourself every day. ‘This wasn’t my fault,’ he began. ‘How was I to know they would find us? I don’t know any more than you do.’ And then he went on, surprised to hear how hurt his own voice sounded, ‘You might act as if you were pleased to see me.’
Mousebreath laughed sarcastically. ‘I’ve already had to sleep in a sack. Why should I be pleased to see you? It was you what got us into all this. Next stop the laboratory.’
‘What’s a laboratory?’
‘You don’t want to know. Not if half of what I hear is true.’
*
The night passed. The light flickered. There being no sign that the van would stop, the three cats sat swaying patiently as it rattled toward its unknown destination. Tag listened as Mouse-breath told him what had happened at Piper’s Quay.
‘The first thing we noticed was the weather,’ he said.
The air temperature had dropped suddenly, driving them in from their celebrations in the square. Clouds were roiling in over the old docks. Thunder growled like a dog in the distance. Everyone was hungry and irritable again. Then One for Sorrow, who had been left dozing triumphantly on his perch on top of the lamppost, shot through the doorway at the height of a human head squawking, Raaark! Raark! Close the door!’
It was far too late for that. Instead, they had tried to hide. The magpie fluttered up into the exposed joists of the ceiling and became as still as a carved bird. Cy scampered into a corner and pushed herself under an empty plastic sack. Ragnar got Pertelot by the scruff and began trying to drag her behind a stack of hardwood window frames. But it was too late for Mousebreath, and when the huge shouting figure with the sack burst through, he was caught in the doorway and kicked in the face.
‘It’s easy to see now,’ said Mousebreath, ‘what we should have done. Outside, they wouldn’t have caught a one of us. Cooped up like that, we didn’t have a chance—’ He laughed. ‘I was half out of it anyway,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see well for a minute or two.’
But he did see Loves a Dustbin, leaping and snapping in the bad light, drive the human into the room until he had it cornered. It was an amazing performance. The fox’s eyes were glazed and mad. His black lips were drawn away from teeth as white as bone; slobber dripped and flew from his rolling scarlet tongue. He seemed to double in size. The human was astonished.
‘They got a dog!’ it screamed. ‘There’s a dog in here!’
Hands to face in the reeling gloom, it dropped its sack and backed as far away from the fox as it could go, only to step on the tabby. It had already lost its composure. Now, as Cy writhed and spat beneath its feet, its balance went too. While its attention was distracted, the fox leapt. A streak of red and white in the gloom, and teeth were fastened in its forearm. For a second, man and animal tottered about together in a kind of grotesque dance in the gloom – the fox at full stretch on his hind legs, the man sobbing as it tried to wrench its arm away – while the tabby fizzed and spat like a firework between their legs and Pertelot ran madly about, yowling. Seeing that it would never end unless something was done, Mousebreath forced himself dizzily across the room. He let them waltz backward and forward in front of him until, judging his moment, he could step in and trip the human. It fell on its back with a gasp and a thud, the breath knocked out of it. There was a momentary silence as it raised its head and stared disbelievingly at its shredded sleeve and bloody hand. Then the fox was at its throat, blood and foam around his leering mouth.
It was still shrieking for help when the van driver stepped coolly into the room with its gleaming black stick. There was a huge noise. A stink of chemicals. A short yellow tongue of flame lit up the walls and fixed each cat in the instant of fear. Then the explosion seemed to pick the fox up by his hindquarters and smash him against the opposite wall. He made a high yelping noise like a cub, scrabbled upright, and tried to throw himself back into the fight.
His rear legs folded up under him.
‘Majicou!’ he said, ‘I—’
With a string of puzzled little diminishing cries, he collapsed.
‘I ain’t s
een him since,’ said Mousebreath. ‘None of us seen him after that. After that it were just kicking and chasing and being shoved in a sack.’ He shook his head. ‘We none of us seen him after that.’
Suddenly, he looked worn out and sad, a tough old cat who had had enough.
‘After that,’ he said, ‘they just ran around kicking us, hitting us with sticks, dragging us out from behind things by the legs. We was all in the sack then.’
‘One for Sorrow tried to help you,’ said Tag. He added proudly, ‘And I bit the driver in the leg!’
‘About the bird I don’t know anything,’ said Mousebreath, ‘though I heard him from inside the sack, just before the Queen got out. But I reckon we’ve seen the last of the fox. I reckon he’s dead. He’s got to be, after that. I’ll tell you what, though,’ he promised. ‘He was a hell of a fighter. I’ll give him that! Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘that’s how we ended up in a cat catchers’ van in the middle of nowhere’ – here he treated Tag to a wry look – ‘with no plan, no food, and no future.’
‘Look,’ said Tag defensively, ‘I—’
Ragnar Gustaffson had listened to Mousebreath’s tale with approval, nodding here and there, but now he seemed to lose interest. He turned instead to a methodical investigation of the inside of the van, working forward along one wall and then back along the other, scraping in the rusty corners, sniffing at the lid of the wooden box, putting his face up close to the gap between the doors until the cold draft there made his eyes run.
He said in a thoughtful voice, ‘I think we are here as you might say, for some time.’ He limped over to Mousebreath. ‘In any case these recriminations of yours are unimportant. What should you be asking Tag, in my opinion? Why, this: After she escaped, where did the Queen go?’ He thought it over, nodded to himself. ‘Also: How we are getting out of here to rejoin her! Hm,’ he decided. ‘Your answer: Quite!’
Then he lifted his hind leg and began to lick energetically at it.
