The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  ‘Oh, quaite,’ said Mousebreath.

  ‘Shut up, Mousebreath,’ Tag said.

  They stared unblinkingly at each other. After a moment, Mousebreath looked less amused.

  Tag said, ‘Ragnar, I don’t know what’s happened to her. I saw her escape from the bag. I saw her run away.’ He paused, bewildered by his own sadness. ‘It was dark. The weather was bad. Ragnar, I saw her fall into the canal!’

  The King stared ahead. ‘Ah,’ he said.

  After that he went off and sat by himself for a while and wouldn’t talk.

  *

  The van bumped and swayed along, its tires booming in the night. While the tabby slept with her front paws curled up like neat white shells, Mousebreath and Tag tried to make sense of their situation.

  ‘Where are they taking us?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘We’re going west though, I’m sure.’

  ‘We’re going west all right.’

  There wasn’t much to add to that.

  ‘At least the little one seems okay,’ said Mousebreath.

  ‘She does. She seems okay.’

  ‘But I seen this sort of thing. I seen it before. Not exactly like this, but close.’

  ‘What have you seen, Mousebreath?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Everyone tells me I don’t want to know. I hate it. I do want to know!’

  Mousebreath nodded. ‘I can understand that,’ he admitted. There was a long pause, as he organized his memories. Eventually he said, ‘I seen the way cat catchers spoil a life. You been lucky not to meet them before. Spoiled my life before it started,’ he said bitterly. Then, ‘Nah. Nah, that ain’t true. I made a good thing out of my life despite them, especially since I met that old calico queen—’ He shook his head impatiently and tried to begin again. ‘Look, this is how it is—’

  Cat catchers, he explained, worked the feral communities on a rota. ‘Come summer, come winter, they’ll be there. Take the kittens first, then come back when the older cats have forgot. Get any you missed.’ Cat catchers worked the garbage dumps, the wasteland, the heating ducts and boiler houses under big public buildings – anywhere there was food or warmth. They worked with nets or traps baited with the barest smell of something good. They gassed the sick and the old after they had caught them and kept only the healthy. ‘In fact, they prefer domestics to ferals. Your domestic’s healthier and generally less trouble to handle. Anyhow, as a kitten, I lived in Coldharbor, on a barge…’

  Scores of barges, he said, huge, rusty, blunt-nosed metal things, placid as cows in a field, were moored on the south bank of the river, just east of Coldheath. Loaded to the gunwales with the waste of the city, they were then towed downriver once or twice a week to the sprawling estuarine landfills at Jubilee.

  ‘You should see them!’ enthused Mousebreath. Clustered at their moorings, he said, overhung by a constant pall of brown dust, the barges were like a floating country, always rich, always ripe for picking, disputed by scarred gray herring gulls that wheeled and squabbled above them even at night and by barge cats grown huge but not lazy on everything from butter paper to half-empty tins of ghee or coarse Belgian pate. ‘You should smell them boats through the fog on a cold March morning!’

  The barge kittens were something to see, black-and-whites for the most part, with markings – as Mousebreath put it – ‘as mixed as a bag of licorice allsorts.’ They were born daft. They skirmished with rodents and seagulls three times their size. They were dirty and infested and down by the river. They knew no law. ‘There were that many of us! We run about over them mountains of garbage dawn to dusk, fighting and chasing. Oh, we had some laughs! Half the time we couldn’t stop shitting, the other half we could barely see from runny eyes. Oh, but we had a few laughs!’ Among them, one little female shorthair stood out for animation and daring and fun. She had the pelt of a seal, and she loved the river. At the age of two months she fell in and floated back to the bank on a raft of plastic packing, her eyes full of laughter. By three she could swim like a rat. ‘Smelt like one, too!’ By five months, no question of it, she was Mousebreath’s darling. Every time he looked at her, she took his breath away. When he looked at her, his own life welled up inside him like a pain, and he could barely breathe with delight. She knew it too! She perched on the rusting prow of the barge in the dawn, trying to see her own reflection; the mucky river water rippled away like gold beneath her!

  ‘Her name was Havana.’

  ‘Was she beautiful?’ Tag asked.

  Mousebreath considered. ‘She was brown,’ he decided with satisfaction, as if that said it all. He said, ‘There was nothing like her on the barges. I never seen anything like her before or since.’ For a moment it seemed as if he might add to this, but in the end he only shook his head. ‘Brown,’ he repeated.

  It was enough.

  ‘Anyway—’ he said. But instead of beginning again he let a silence draw out.

  ‘Anyway.’

  Coldharbor. July. Late afternoon. The sky was brass. For once, the herring gulls were out to sea, planing in the maritime air, dreaming of cold silver fish like coins spilled from a net. An unctuous, appetizing rankness lay on the barges; the cats lay in a stupor. Everywhere you looked, there were silent parliaments of adults blinking at one another in the drowsy buzz of flies – the sound of the summer sun – cabals of kittens with fat little bellies turned up to the light. Then engines! Doors slamming! Shouts! Men in waders, plowing through the thigh-high garbage!

  ‘Oh, we scuttled and ran,’ said Mousebreath, with a kind of amused bitterness. ‘You should have seen us run!’ He was silent again.

  ‘They got the lot of us,’ he said eventually. ‘Everyone except me. I hid. I never forgave myself for that.’

  ‘Anyone would have hidden,’ said Tag.

  Mousebreath looked at him emptily. ‘Would they?’ he asked. ‘Anyway, they got the lot of us.’

  ‘They got Havana?’

  ‘They got her last of all. I never seen a cat so frightened or so brave. She ran; they was always there. She hid; they found her. She’s calling out for me – Marsebref! Marsebref! She waits as long as she can. In the end, when I don’t come, she jumps in the river and swims out into the middle. Brave? That brave!’

  ‘She escaped!’ said Tag.

  Mousebreath shook his head. ‘You’d think she’d be swept away,’ he said, in the voice of someone talking to himself. ‘That great huge river that cares for no one. You’d think she’d lose her strength eventually, paddling out there while they waited for her on the bank. Drown or be swept away. But no. She’s too alive for that.’

  Silence.

  ‘Mousebreath! What happened?’

  ‘They waited her out,’ he said simply. ‘It was a big joke to them. They sat there on the bank and waited till she got cold and hungry and swam back in again because she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.’ He looked at Tag, and his mismatched eyes were full of despair. ‘Then they hit her on the head with a stick and took her away.’

  ‘And that was the last you saw of her?’

  ‘I wish it had been.’ After a moment he asked himself, ‘What could I do after that? I did the only thing I could do. I made a life without her.’

  After Havana, the barges smelled of wet ash, and all Mousebreath could hear in the morning was the groan of the conveyor belts that filled them. Human shouts. The shriek of an angry gull. He traveled with the barges up and downriver. He grew into a strong young tortoiseshell tom who never lacked for mates – mostly cheery black-and-white queens who adored his mismatched eyes and didn’t remind him of her. He fought a lot. He got a bad reputation among the barge cats. He threw himself into anything that was going, but – at least to begin with – left it all every evening to sit and watch the sun go down over the upstream reach, to dream of Havana and wonder what became of her. In the end, though, life worked its magic, and he did what any cat would have done: he forgot her and went on. Then one morning
– it was perhaps six months later – he got up in the dawn to inspect the new garbage. It was colder now, and the sky was a paler blue. The barges had returned the day before from Jubilee, and were still riding high in the water. The great fixed conveyor belts roared and shook and poured the rubbish into them. Over them the gulls wheeled and fought like scraps of rag on a blustering wind.

  ‘I went to have a look at what had arrived. It were black bags.’

  Black bags. Hundreds of fat black garbage bags, pouring off the belts; and in the very first one he tried, cats. All the cats he had ever known. He ripped it open and there they were. They had lost legs or eyes, or their jaws were bolted together. They were shaved in patches, drilled in the head. They had abdominal scars held together with rough black stitches like zippers. Among them was Havana. She had grown since he last saw her, and her body was long and beautiful as she spilled stiffly out of the ruptured sack in front of his face. Her fur was a lighter brown than he remembered, and her skin beneath it a tremulous pink. ‘She had the most beautiful paws’ said Mousebreath. ‘That’s the change you noticed most.’

  That, and the snarl of pain, the empty eye socket, the protruding wires.

  ‘All them poor buggers,’ he said.

  Then, after a silence, ‘At least she were dead. Two or three of them were still alive. If you can call it that. That’s when I first heard laboratory. I heard that word over and over again from one of them till he died. It was all he could say.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stood there a long time,’ said Mousebreath. ‘I had one more look at her. It was getting dark by then. I ‘ad one more look at Havana, then I walked away and never went back there again.’

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘I loved them barges,’ he said. ‘But I was never a kitten again.’

  In the silence that followed this story, Ragnar spoke up. ‘People would not do this,’ he claimed. ‘No one would do this to another animal.’

  Mousebreath stared at him.

  ‘Got you there,’ he said. ‘Because human beings aren’t animals, are they?’ A kind of morose triumph swam in his orange eye; while the blue one still contemplated with sad delight his beautiful brown friend of long ago. ‘They ain’t got the decency of an animal.’

  ‘Some have,’ insisted Ragnar. ‘I must believe this.’

  ‘More fool you.’

  *

  Midnight. White light shifted and flickered. The van sped on.

  Dispirited by the story of Havana, worn out with fear and motion sickness, Mousebreath, Ragnar, and Tag sat silently staring into nowhere. Soon, two of them slept.

  The tabby cat looked down on them from her perch and purred.

  *

  Mousebreath’s paw, dabbing at his face, woke Tag to confusion, darkness, bitterly cold air. The van seemed to be swaying and lurching its way through a maze. He slithered helplessly about for a bit, then the two of them managed to wedge themselves across a corner, eyeing with anxiety the cages that tottered precariously above them.

  ‘Not far past midnight,’ said Mousebreath, ‘and we got a problem here.’

  It was darker than it had been, but not too dark to see Ragnar Gustaffson crouched at the back of the van, where he was patiently attempting to lever the metal doors apart. He wasn’t the cat they knew. With his powerful haunches braced, his back arched, and his tangled, dirty fur sticking out against the cold, he looked like something much wilder.

  ‘Ragnar!’ called Tag.

  Ragnar glanced up briefly, only to give a kind of bubbling snarl and return to the doors. He had split a claw to the quick. Blood was caked in his paw and smeared on the metal.

  ‘Help me here if you are anyone,’ he demanded.

  ‘Ragnar!’

  ‘No help for this,’ said Mousebreath.

  When they tried to draw him away, he stared sightlessly at them. When they insisted, he spat. His size made them cautious, but the misery in his eyes was worse. ‘Don’t you see?’ he appealed. He plucked and plucked at the doors. ‘She may still be in the water. Or by now they may have put a wire into her eyes. We must find her!’ While they slept Ragnar Gustaffson had lain awake, staring straight into the darkness at his worst fears. With no one to talk to, he had dreamed awake; and in his dreams Pertelot Fitzwilliam’s fate had become inextricably entangled with that of a barge cat called Havana.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Tag said.

  ‘He’s lost someone he loved,’ Mousebreath replied, ‘and he wasn’t sure what that meant till I told him.’

  ‘So what do we do with him now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was a decision they never had to make.

  As Tag spoke, the van stopped so suddenly that for one strange, extended instant everything inside it seemed to be floating. The air was full of loose, incongruous things – nuts and bolts, dirt from the floor, some grayish wooden wedges, a blue metal box snapping its lid and spilling shoals of rusty objects. A length of frayed blue rope writhed past, curling and uncurling sensuously. Cat cages clattered in strange orbits through the pitch dark, flapping their wire doors like poorly thought-out wings.

  Tag had time to see Cy revolving solemnly among this stuff – dabbing at one thing and another with velvet paws and an expression of puzzled delight – before the van crashed to earth again with a tired groan and slithered to a halt, catapulting the three male cats in a single writhing bundle toward the front. There Tag lay, the breath knocked out of him, trying to make himself as small as possible as the reluctant cages gave up their brief fantasy of flight and exploded into the bulkhead wall around him.

  There was a long, stunned moment of silence.

  What now? thought Tag. What are they going to do to us now?

  11

  The Wide Blue Open

  The sea is calm to-night,

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair…

  – MATTHEW ARNOLD

  ‘But why?’

  Pertelot Fitzwilliam, Queen of Cats, had never been to sea, could not understand the need for a voyage – nor indeed the reason to travel anywhere without Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion. Her green eyes were brilliant with anxiety. Her thoughts went around and around and ended nowhere.

  ‘Because,’ said Sealink, ‘it’s the safest way to go.’

  Pertelot stared obstinately away. ‘Go where?’ she said.

  ‘Tintagel.’

  ‘I won’t go there.’ Then, ‘Oh, I feel so alone, and no one will help.’

  Sealink sighed. ‘Don’t be spoiled, hon. We been through this. We don’t know where the rest of them are; we don’t know what they’re doing. We don’t even know if they’re alive, but Tintagel was agreed. Tintagel’s all we got.’

  ‘I won’t go any further without Ragnar. You said that if we came here we’d be able to find out what had happened to him.’ Pertelot looked around with contempt. ‘But these are only the same human beings I’ve been running from for weeks.’ She transferred her verdigris gaze from the Fish Market in general to the back of Pengelly’s neck in particular. ‘And anyway, it appears you had other plans.’

  If that brindled old salt felt anything, he wasn’t going to say. Neither was his hearing good at this time. As for Sealink, she only shook her head.

  ‘I asked all over, hon. No one’s heard about no cat catchers operating on the quays. And nobody seen anything last night. People see a fox, a magpie, and a bunch of cats, they’ll remember that. You know? We don’t know anything; so I suggest we move along before the Alchemist comes sniffing around you again. I got your interests in mind. You don’t want to look down that long nose of yours at me because I meet an old friend.’

  Pertelot dropped her head.

  ‘I’ll never see Ragnar again.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, hon. This ain’t no soiree. It ain’t no cat show. We ain’t got time to be cast down. You got the chance to take a boat trip – which you ain’t done before – away from the Alchemist, away from all
your worries. As for that tom of yours, he’d rather see you at sea than putting yourself at risk looking for him. Take my word on it.’

  The Queen thought.

  ‘Pengelly?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  His gaze was unwavering, if skewed. She wasn’t sure which eye to focus on – the one that seemed to be looking right at her or the one that glanced to the side. In the end she chose the former.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ she asked him.

  ‘Well now, my dear,’ he mused, in his soft West Country burr. ‘‘Tis clearly a situation requiring some thought. But I reckon I’ve always known which I’d choose, when it came down to the devil and the deep blue sea.’

  Pertelot shivered.

  *

  Down at the dockside ships of all sizes bobbed upon the water, ropes creaking, lines rattling in the breeze. Huge, barnacle-encrusted iron hulls reared up alongside tiny boats with varnish peeling off their decks. Arrogant-looking seagulls, their feathers clean white and gray, their yellow beaks sharp and avid, adorned the booms and bows. They eyed the three cats beadily, and their cries rent the morning air.

  Pengelly paid them no attention, but some way down the dock, he stopped and scrutinized the bobbing vessels.

  ‘See that little beauty out there?’ he said proudly. ‘That’s the Guillemot.’

  He was indicating a trim fishing boat moored beyond the renovated barges and pleasure cruisers. Her black-and-white paint was old and flaking, but her lines were clean and serviceable.

  ‘I see Old Smoky ent back yet. Tender’s still tied up to quayside. He’m probably getting rat-arsed.’

  All he received from Pertelot was a blank look.

  ‘Never mind, my lover,’ he said.

  And with an agility that belied his age, he leapt lightly down from the dock onto the deck of the first boat out from the quay. In quick succession he had made three more leaps – across a trench of murky water onto the bows of a larger craft whose decking was covered in piles of rope and net, then several feet onto the stem of a pleasure cruiser whose gleaming white fiberglass and polished wood contrasted sharply with the workaday craft around it, and from there, in one final huge neat bound, onto the deck of the Guillemot.