The Wild Road

by Gabriel King

  It was a bravura performance. The fishing boat rocked gently at its buoy as if welcoming him aboard.

  ‘Well, hon,’ Sealink murmured to the Mau, ‘off you go, now. And try not to miss your step. I could do without another ducking.’

  Pertelot looked out across the river in dismay. So many obstacles and so much water between them. She looked back at the calico cat. Sealink’s expression was closed and unhelpful. Of Pengelly there was no sign at all.

  She could remember in clear detail the sense of sailing through cold air before hitting the ice on the canal, the sensation earlier that morning of sliding on the weed of the rotting jetty. Neither memory was encouraging. She considered the problem again. Then before she had any conscious idea of how she had gotten there, she found herself among the nets on the first boat, already poised for her second leap. With a considerable sense of surprise, she was in flight, sure and elegant and economical as only a cat can be – muscles bunching and flexing, limbs outstretched, skin taut with effort, legs bending slightly to absorb the shock of landing on the rigid fiberglass. By the time she had arrived safely on the deck of the Guillemot, her body felt fluid and agile – a delight to move in. A surge of well-being coursed through her, a sense of achievement and pride. Her bloodline might have been attenuated through centuries of calculated design, but she was still Felidae; and no amount of breeding to purpose could erase her essential nature. Beautiful, lithe, and vital, she was the Queen of Cats.

  What fun! she thought. Oh, what fun!

  When Sealink arrived, it was via a series of efficient, powerful jumps, her long coat bouncing and rippling as if she were loosely enclosed by a completely separate animal. Movement was bread and butter to her. As soon as she touched down she was off about the boat, nosing about among the crab pots and netting, around the engine housing and out onto the foredeck, where ropes lay in coils like vast, rough, sleeping snakes and steel cleats gleamed among the wood and hemp.

  Pengelly’s efficiency was conservative. It lay in knowing to a hair how much effort was required for a task. He already had made himself comfortable out on the bow. At first, you thought he was asleep, but a glint of light in the slit of his left eye showed he was still open for business and watching the distant quay with lazy attention.

  Sealink flopped to the deck beside her old friend and gave herself a wash. Then she rolled heavily on one side and turned her amber gaze upon him.

  ‘What now, babe?’

  He squinted at her. ‘We wait till Old Smoky comes back. Though if he’m drunk, my handsome, he won’t be getting back here tonight – too ockard to get the rowboat out across the river to old Guilty. So he’ll kip down on the dock. Or pass out, more like. Now, if he’s only had a few, he’ll probably reel down here and make it on board somehow. But mebbe he’ll not have made enough from his catch to wet his throat at all. In which case he’ll be back shortly. That being so—’ here he winked confidingly ‘—he may not be the best of company.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, hon,’ said Sealink.

  Too late.

  Crouched in the shadow of the wheelhouse, Pertelot listened to this ominous exchange. Her newfound confidence ebbed away. How had she let herself be stranded on a leaky fishing boat in the middle of the water, awaiting the arrival of some angry human being?

  Oh, Ragnar, she thought, where are you? Ears flattened to her skull, she fled below.

  Down the dark steps she went, into the cabin, where she burrowed her way into the darkness beneath Old Smoky’s berth. There, she turned her back to the world, curled up, and pushed her face into the tangle of bedding – faded woolly blankets, a quilt made up of hundreds of tiny crocheted squares in different patterns and colors – that had been stored there. It smelled of tobacco and Pengelly. Hairs, human and feline, had woven themselves into it over the years until you couldn’t tell one from the other.

  The conversation above was comfortably muffled by layers of wool and wood, by the creak of the timbers and the gentle sloshing of water in the bilges below.

  Soon she was asleep.

  *

  Hours passed. The sun slipped between dull layers of cumulus cloud – lending them a muted, opaque light that seldom broke the surface – and arced its way methodically across the leaden sky. With each hour’s passage, a new corner of the cabin was illuminated, and the light made its acquaintance with Old Smoky’s eccentric accommodations.

  It glinted off a pair of gimballed brass oil lamps on the wall and found beneath them a basic galley: a blackened stove smelling strongly of charcoal and stale food, pots and pans restrained in bulging mesh nets. Farther down the cabin, it investigated a sink and a cubicle clad with a piece of old toweling, after which it passed on to a jumble of clothbound books, their covers feathered with salt and mildew, and to a wedge of oilskins and tarry jumpers that had been stuffed into the gap beneath the cabin steps. It examined all these things, then turned and shifted and lay as quiet as the cat beneath the bunk.

  Pertelot woke lulled; smelled fish, diesel, nicotine, ammonia. Drowsily she began to groom these odors from her fur, beginning with her velvety tail and haunches. A minute or two later, she sighed and fell asleep again.

  Out on the foredeck, Sealink and Pengelly were also dozing. They had curled together, face to tail among the ropes, in a shellacked yin and yang.

  The sun went down slowly behind the far bank of the river, outlining the spires and tower blocks in a wicked red light, and winked out suddenly, like the closing of a lizard’s eye.

  As darkness fell steadily across the city the lights came on one by one along the quayside. Some were streetlamps, with their gauzy haze of sodium. Others were small and quick and low to the ground – a glint here, a glint there, then gone into the night.

  They were like the dreams of the city.

  *

  In her dreams, the Queen was running for her life, and someone who might have been Ragnar was running with her.

  Behind them swelled a sea of farouche cats, ghostly gray and white, translucent and shifting, their limbs writhing in pursuit, faces bleak with menace. They were dead. The moon shone out of their cold and empty eye sockets. They wailed and wailed at her, but no matter how hard she tried she could not understand their warnings. Then, out of the midst of them there rose a vast, forbidding shape. Pertelot’s paws were hobbled. She could not run away. Her companion was gone. She twisted and fought, but the dead cats held her fast. Darkness towered up. A great cold shadow fell across her –

  And then she woke, her chest fluttering with sharp, ragged breaths. Her feet were caught up in the folds of blanket. It was dark, and for several moments she did not know where she was.

  The smells of the cabin tranquilized her, the subtle rocking of the boat at anchor, the quiet of night falling. But no sooner had she calmed herself to a point just south of panic than there was a lot of splashing and swearing outside the boat, and a commotion broke out on deck, and two faces appeared at the cabin hatch.

  ‘Are you okay, hon?’ Sealink inquired.

  Pengelly ran down nimbly and jumped on top of the berth.

  ‘Here comes Old Smoky,’ he declared. ‘Best hide yourselves for the time being, I’d say. Never know how he’ll welcome company when he’s had a few jars. Sometimes he’m companionable, and sometimes he ent. If he’mreally doddered, he’ll probably set sail tonight. He don’t much like towns.’

  Sealink romped cheerfully down the steps. ‘He’ll have brought some stores, though,’ she explained to Pertelot. ‘Pengelly says he never forgets, no matter how drunk.’ She wriggled underneath the berth beside the Mau. ‘Babe, I could eat a whale.’

  Thumps and crashes from above. Pertelot looked up anxiously. The Guillemot rocked, once, twice, and the water in her bilges slapped and gurgled. Heavy breathing. The sound of wood dragged along wood, then a further thud and a curse. White light scythed across the hatchway.

  ‘He’ll have dropped his torch,’ Pengelly said matter-of-factly. ‘Bit cackhanded at the
best of times. I do hope he ent going to cook. Can get a bit fierce around here when there’s fat flying.’

  A pair of huge boots appeared in the torchlight at the top of the steps.

  ‘Pengelly?’

  A grizzled white head dipped into view, the hair as thick and crinkled as Pengelly’s coat.

  ‘Pengelly? Where you be, boy?’ Then, ‘Ah, there you are now.’

  Pengelly had jumped lightly off the bunk to mark his human with much enthusiastic rubbing of cheek on boot.

  A massive, calloused hand reached down and kneaded the Rex’s head so roughly that Pengelly’s eyes briefly took on an unusual and Oriental slant. To Pertelot’s amazement, he seemed to enjoy this. It made him purr blissfully and cast himself at the fisherman’s feet, where he proceeded to roll on his back with his front paws tucked up like a rabbit’s. The hand buried itself in the soft fur of his belly, and Pengelly’s eyes closed in delight.

  It was an extraordinary display for a grown cat.

  Crooning meanwhile, ‘How’s my lad, then? How’s my lad?’ the old man straightened, thumped up the steps, reached blindly around on the deck, and brought down a paper-wrapped package that smelled strongly of fish. His warm, beery breath filled the suddenly cramped confines of the cabin. He sat so heavily on the berth that its horsehair stuffing compressed with a sad sigh and the underside bulged down upon the two cats beneath.

  ‘I brought us a fish supper to share, boy.’

  From the moment it appeared, Sealink had been unable to take her eyes off the parcel. Now she was drooling. Pertelot stared at her, then realized that she was drooling too.

  There was a lot of rustling, then a crumpled square of greasy paper landed on the slatted floor by his boots. Little flecks of white fish and golden batter were stuck to its edges. The calico cat fixed upon these alertly, her toes flexing with greed and intent. Pertelot shook her head – No. No.

  Sealink ignored her and got ready to pounce. The situation was saved – like many another, Pertelot guessed – by Pen-gelly’s sly paw, which steered a sizeable lump of fish over the edge of the bunk and into the shadows beneath. Haddock! It landed softly and in an eyeblink had disappeared.

  Three cats and an old fisherman chewed contentedly in the darkness.

  *

  The tide rose with the dawn and found the Guillemot chugging slowly downriver through clinging mist, her navigation lights a soft green and red haze at bow and stem. Sounds were muted, visibility poor, but Old Smoky maneuvered his craft without incident between buoy and barge. Moored pleasure craft – long since past their best – bobbed gently in their wake, paint feathering off to reveal old timbers silvered by the passing seasons. Fenders and buoys, once startling neon orange, now hung limply over gunwales, faded to a flat, bleached apricot.

  Out in the starboard channel, where the water moved more freely, the elderly diesel engine began to strain. Sealink and Pertelot crouched beneath the bunk, wincing at the noise it made. Pengelly lay sprawled on the wheelhouse chart shelf – a position he would often take up on mornings such as this, when the weak winter sunshine was barely warm enough to penetrate his fur. Behind him, the fisherman stood with one hand on the wheel and drew on a cigarette. Its end glowed briefly in the damp air, and, drawn out of the companionway by cool air off the water, the exhaled smoke spiraled lazily upward. January sunshine filled the mist – evaporating the fine detail of the riverbank into a luminous plasma – then eventually burned it away to reveal a clear sharp morning and a cool, dove-white sky.

  The city passed slowly by on either side, increasingly far from the boat across an expanse of sluggish, oiiy-looking water. Tower blocks and mirror-glassed office buildings gave way gradually to low-lying warehouses and acres of desolate concrete patrolled by iron gantries and huge, vigilant cranes, where rusting signs adorned the blackened brick walls of the abandoned warehouses.

  Now rotted pilings, dark with age and weed, emerged along the banks. Upon them, shaking their wings out in the new light, the gulls lazily surveyed the scene: the passage of the Guillemot, the water churning and spooling behind her; a police launch on its deliberate way upriver – no crimes, yet, to attend to; a smartly painted black tugboat making good headway against the current on a mission to usher some great container vessel into its dock.

  The morning passed like this, and as it passed, the landscape spread and flattened toward the far horizon. As the sun rose higher, it illuminated a panorama as inimical to cats as to humans – estuary waters, out of the unforgiving shallows of which rose gleaming banks of mud, glistening like the backs of whales in the sunshine. Reed beds fringed a wide shoreline beyond. There was no sign of life. Not even the gulls bothered with this part of the river.

  *

  At last Pengelly stretched and yawned, toes spread, head back. He jumped down between Old Smoky’s feet and down into the darkness of the cabin. Two pairs of eyes glinted at him.

  ‘How you doing, my dears?’

  ‘About time,’ Sealink complained. ‘When do we get out of here? This ain’t too dignified for a cat of my proportions. I ain’t used to skulking around when I travel. Babe. I like to take the air. Where’s the sense in moving if you don’t see where you’re going?’

  She explained, as if he had asked her, ‘Where you been ain’t so important. You been there.’

  Pengelly blinked. After a moment he said, ‘Best wait till Old Smoky gets us out to sea – don’t quite know how he might react to stowaways. Least if we’re out beyond land he won’t feel so disposed to turf you off.’ Motes of humor danced briefly in Pengelly’s uneven tawny eyes. No,’ he concluded, ‘he may be a grumpy old bugger, but I never seen him harm a cat. I doubt he’ll throw you overboard. Leastways, not without the life raft…’

  Sealink failed to take the bait.

  ‘I’m up on deck in five minutes’ time, babe. And your human had better get used to company, unless he wants me to take a crap in his bed.’

  At the word crap, Pertelot groaned.

  ‘You sound a bit crook, my handsome,’ Pengelly told her. ‘Can get a bit fumey down here, I know. Bloody old engine probably needs a look. Ent been serviced in my lifetime—’ he winked lopsidedly at Sealink ‘—and that’s longer than I’d like to admit with ladies present.’

  At this, Sealink rolled her head in apparent unconcern, proceeding to strip the old sheath from the claws on her right front paw.

  ‘Huh,’ she said.

  *

  The Mau did, in fact, feel rather ill this morning. The light hurt her eyes and her mouth was dry and furry. Moreover, she seemed to have eaten something that disagreed with her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry, I think I—’

  And she shot out from under the bunk and dashed unheeding up the stairs onto the companionway, where she was violently sick.

  At exactly the same moment, there was a clanking of steerage chains below as Old Smoky, sitting in a gentle hungover doze at the wheel, took action to avoid an iron marker buoy. The boat swung promptly to port. Pertelot felt herself slide at forty-five degrees down the companionway, toward the railing and the waiting river.

  She stared down at the sucking eddies barely two feet below. Her claws fastened themselves into the old rope-and-cork fenders strung along the side of the boat. No good: the depths beckoned avidly. Then she felt a set of teeth fasten themselves in the scruff of her neck, and she was carried without ceremony – her feet bumping like a kitten’s on each step – back down into the cabin.

  Pengelly set her on the slatted floor and stared at her.

  ‘I can tell you ent been at sea afore,’ he muttered. He was barely bigger than she was, but he had a thick, sinewy neck and his feet were steady as the Guillemot rolled.

  ‘You got to listen to the boat – you got to feel the way she moves herself in the water, specially when Old Smoky’s got a sore head. You all right now, my lover? Can’t have you getting seasick this early on; it won’t do at all. You this bad now, you
’ll be terrible out on the briny.’

  Sealink extracted herself from the space under the bunk.

  ‘Ain’t that the truth?’ she said. ‘Lord, honey, this here’s as peaceful as a puddle, and you go throwing up your good fish. What you gonna do when we’re out on the ocean wave? You get yourself used to it soon, hon, because there’s some stuff you’re gonna see out there. Oh yes,’ she said, and her voice had a sudden dreamy quality, the soft daze of the enthusiast. ‘The best and the worst, hon. The best and the worst.’ She shuffled until she was comfortable on the slats and had settled herself to her satisfaction in the feather boa of her tail. ‘I like an airplane, I truly do, but I came to your country on a boat—’

  ‘This ent my country,’ Pengelly declared crossly. ‘Cornwall is a country all its own; you should know that, being as well-traveled as you are.’

  Sealink barely noticed the interruption. ‘And Sealink is the name I got called here, so I guess I got a soft spot for them if for no other reason. But I’ve sat on a thousand rails if I’ve sat on one, watching those waves go past just like a New Orleans marching band – and, honey, I just don’t tire of it. All the sky and the sea stretching away the same color till you barely know which way’s up; and the land turning all faint in back like it’s going to just disappear, so that there you are – like a little boat yourself, alone in the middle of all that air and water. Honey, you’re gonna love it too.’

  Pertelot considered this. It made her feel sicker than ever. ‘I don’t—’ she said.

  But Sealink was off again.

  ‘Man!’ she exclaimed. ‘Travel! You know what they say? They say: Move, and the world moves with you. What do you think of that? Best saying I ever heard. Troubles behind you, and a whole new future out in front!

  ‘Hon, you gotta stop looking back over your shoulder at the bad things. That’s what traveling’s for – putting distance between yourself and your past will save you from many a sorry situation. The Alchemist, he ain’t gonna find you out here. Ain’t no way anyone’s gonna do that. So you just focus on having a good time and forget about all that stuff. We’ll cruise on down to Tintagel and you’ll meet up with your old tom, and I’ll meet up with mine, and we’ll be just fine. So relax, enjoy the trip. Take it easy, and you won’t be seasick at all. It’s an attitude of mind, babe – just take that from me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got to make a short visit up on deck.’