by James Barrie
R E A R G A R D E N
or
The Cat Who Knew Too Much
by
James Barrie
SEVERUS HOUSE
YORK, ENGLAND
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
This edition is published by Severus House publishing
Typeset in 10/11.5pt Garamond
Cover illustration by Robert Clear of London
Cover design by Burak Bakircioglu of Istanbul
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author
The right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2018 by James Barrie / Severus House publishing
[ TheodoreCat.com ]
Contents
Welcome to God’s Own County
Constantine Crescent
Wally’s Big Mouth
The Watcher & the Watched
The Morning Rush
Soup Selection
Going to the Dogs
A Nation of Peeping Toms
Suburban Psycho
The Writing on the Doors
Geoffrey Offers to Help
Verge Wars
Curtains for Sandy
The Beginning of the End of the Roman Empire
A Spot of Gardening
North by Northwest
Scots in Space
Bad Friday
The Cat Who Knew Too Much
Rogue Window Cleaner
Voyer!
Easter Sunday
Like the Stamp
The Great Barbecue Disaster
Dr Theodore
Theodore Plays God
Emily Packs Her Bags
Dance How You Like!
The Origins of Marmalade
The Evidence
As The Crow Flies
Vertigo
Welcome Back to God’s Own County
Stuart Turns a Corner
Why Patrick Only Has Three Fingers
Humour and horror are like Siamese Twins
Stephen King
Welcome to God’s Own County
She takes a last drag on the cigarette and drops it from her bedroom window, down the gap between the house and the shed, like she has done a thousand times or more, but this time, rather than smouldering out with the rest of the butts, the shed explodes with a bang.
Her dad staggers out. He’s on fire. He stands in the middle of the lawn. He flaps his hands against his clothes, trying to put out the flames. He turns and faces the back of his house. He looks up at her bedroom window. ‘Hell,’ he shouts. ‘Hell fire!’
She is 14 years old. She has unicorns and princesses on her curtains, pink and blue. She has grown out of them but her dad has promised her new curtains, yellow ones. She wonders if she’ll get the yellow curtains now.
From the bedroom next to hers, she hears her sister scream. She is three years older, about to go off to university.
Then she sees her mum run outside, wet tea towels in her hands. ‘Get down on the lawn,’ her mum shouts at her dad.
Her dad lies down on the lawn and her mum pushes the wet tea towels against the flames and smouldering clothing. Her dad has stopped screaming and she knows he is dead. His mouth is open; his gums peeled back to show off his yellow teeth.
There is a corpse, with blackened, blistered skin, clothes burnt onto flesh, lying in the middle of the neatly trimmed lawn.
Her mum shakes out one of the tea towels. It is streaked with soot. She lays it over her dad’s face.
The tea towel has rolling green hills and winding blue streams on it, and bares the slogan: ‘Welcome to God’s Own County’.
Constantine Crescent
He had already been incarcerated for several days, or so it seemed. He had no way of knowing for sure. There was no clock on the wall and he had no means to tell the time.
His cell was a carpeted room, five feet by six. A small window without curtains, too high for him to look out of, was set into the wall. The door was shut. There was no way of escape.
He’d been left water and biscuits by his captors. He turned his nose up at the paltry offerings. He paced the room. At least they wanted to keep him alive, he thought, for the time being at least.
After pacing the carpeted floor for what seemed like hours, and relieving himself in a corner of the room, he settled on a makeshift bed in the opposite corner. He soon fell asleep.
When he woke the door was ajar. He stood in front of it for some minutes. It might be a trick.
Then he nudged it further open.
There was a landing, in the same mauve carpet as the room in which he’d been held. As he headed to the top of the stairs, he saw a cat. He turned to face it.
Its fur was silver and white, tinted charcoal. Its eyes were emerald green. Its nose was the brown of cooked liver. Its left ear was curled over, the result of a fight with another cat.
He stared at the cat and the cat stared back. The hair along his spine bristled and his tail stood up straight. The other cat did likewise.
Theodore approached, hissing, and the other cat approached, hissing back at him. It was quite a formidable foe, Theodore thought, and quite a handsome specimen.
It was him after all, he realised, as he came nose to nose with his reflection. He glanced behind the mirror, leaning against the landing wall, just to make sure. He raised his tail and carried on along the landing.
He examined the mauve pile of the carpet; noted the strange odours left by previous occupants, the dark stains, the strange brown sticky patches. Then he padded downstairs to investigate this new domain further.
In the kitchen he discovered his water bowl and a fresh bowl of cat biscuits in the corner. He ate several. They tasted no different to how they had tasted that morning, back at his old home in Clementhorpe. At least somethings did not change, he thought, approaching the back door.
There was no cat flap. He stared for a moment at the lack of an opening in the door, his tail raised high. He miaowed.
‘You’re not going anywhere, Theo,’ Emily said. ‘You’ve a litter tray over there.’
Theodore looked over at the covered tray in the corner. He swished his tail from side to side. For Bastet’s sake, he swore under his breath, invoking the name of the Cat Goddess. How was he to maintain his dignity while having to relieve himself in a plastic tray with a see-through flap? How would a human like it?
‘It’s only for a couple of weeks,’ Emily said, arms folded across her chest and shaking her head.
Emily’s attention was then drawn to the litter tray and its contents. ‘Jonathan,’ she said. ‘You bought the wrong type of litter…’
‘The wrong type?’ Jonathan said, looking up from his mobile phone. ‘I just bought the cheapest one.’
‘I can see that,’ Emily said. ‘It turns to sludge.’
Theodore miaowed in agreement.
‘Well, I’m not going out again to buy more litter. He can make do with what he’s got for now… Next time I’ll know. How long do we need to keep the litter tray inside anyway?’
‘Just until Theo knows where his new home is,’ Emily said.
‘And how long will that be?’
‘A fortnight,’ Emily said. ‘He’s not going out before then. He’s got to get used to his new hom
e. Two weeks… That’s what they say. Then we’ll need to butter his paws…’
Theodore stared up at her, his eyes wide in disbelief. Buttering paws? What sort of barbaric nonsense was this?
‘It will fly by,’ Emily said, reading his feline mind, before bending down to stroke his head. ‘I’m going to unpack some more boxes,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to unpack themselves.’
Some minutes later Jonathan, still on his mobile, watched as Emily struggled into the kitchen with a box.
‘This one weighs a tonne… What’s in it?’ she said. ‘Rocks?’
‘That’ll be my fossil collection,’ Jonathan said. ‘I was going to put them in the front room.’
‘We’re not having rocks in the front room,’ Emily said. ‘They can go in the garden. You can make a rockery with them.’
‘But they’re valuable,’ Jonathan protested. ‘They took me years to collect.’
Emily opened the kitchen door. ‘I think rocks belong in the garden,’ she said.
She placed the box outside the kitchen door and returned inside.
There was a knock at the front door and Emily went to answer it.
Theodore followed at her heels. It may be an opportunity to gain a few minutes of freedom, he thought.
‘I’m your neighbour,’ a man with shaggy grey hair under a red cap said. ‘I brought round a little house-warming present.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Emily said, opening the door a little further to take the punnet of red tomatoes. ‘They look nice and ripe.’
Aware that Theodore was standing behind her, brushing up against her bare calves, she held the door open only enough to accept the house-warming present.
‘My cat,’ she explained, ‘I can’t let him out.’
‘What was that?’ her new neighbour said. ‘I’m a bit hard of hearing.’
‘My cat,’ Emily said loudly. ‘I don’t want him to get out.’
‘Good,’ her new neighbour said. ‘They can make an awful mess.’
‘Mess?’
‘In gardens. You see, I’ve got green fingers and I’d prefer to keep them that way.’
He opened his mouth and laughed showing off a large gap between his middle teeth.
Emily looked down at the blood red tomatoes in the little green box and then back at her grinning new neighbour.
‘They’re very red,’ she said, ‘the tomatoes.’
‘Yes,’ the grey-haired man replied, nodding his head, still smiling. ‘It’s the bone meal. I make my own bone meal.’
‘I see,’ Emily said. ‘How quaint…’
The man laughed.
Emily felt Theodore’s fur once more, against the backs of her bare calves, and felt her skin begin to prickle. She inched the front door closed.
‘The cat,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him to get out.’
‘No, he’s best kept indoors,’ the man said. ‘Like I said… Well, I need to be on my way. Errands!’
‘Well, thank you for the tomatoes,’ Emily said.
‘It’s Walter,’ the man said. ‘But everyone calls me Wally.’
‘Well, nice to meet you, erm… Wally. And thank you again for the tomatoes. We can have them with our dinner.’
‘The pleasure is all mine… Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Emily,’ said Emily.
‘A pleasure indeed,’ said Wally.
‘My boyfriend’s in the kitchen,’ Emily added, and then pushed the door to.
It was evident that Wally didn’t like cats. He was probably a mouse in a past life, thought Theodore, staring at the back of the front door.
He stayed staring at the front door for a long minute. It was only April but his new neighbour had already managed to grow his own tomatoes. Theodore wasn’t too familiar with horticulture having spent his youth in the backyards and cobbled alleys of Clementhorpe, but something did not seem right.
So far April had been a bipolar month – swinging between sunny days to others overcast with icy showers of rain. Was it possible to grow ripe tomatoes in April?
He turned round.
On the vestibule door, Emily had hung a small sign.
A
HOUSE
IS NOT A
HOME
WITHOUT A
CAT
He pondered the words for a moment and then padded into the front room and, from up on the windowsill, he took in the street.
Constantine Crescent is a tree-lined street built by the Quakers mainly in the early 1920s, though construction had started in 1914 before being disrupted by the First World War. It is horse-shoe shaped, beginning and ending on York Street, Acomb – York’s largest residential suburb.
The houses are a mixture of detached and semi-detached, with a few bungalows thrown in. Not one house on the street is the same as another. The Quakers understood that people are different and they like their houses to be different too. The trees that line the grassed verges are all lime. They had yet to sprout their waxy leaves.
Many of the houses had net curtains across their windows. Theodore sensed many eyes looking back at him from behind their veiled screens. A net curtain twitched from behind a display of Pampas Grass from the house in front.
Suburbia…, thought Theodore. How boring.
Then he noticed his new neighbour, Wally, mounting his bicycle and launching himself into the road; off on his errands, Theodore presumed, the bottom of his brown trousers tucked into his brown socks.
As Wally passed by, he turned and waved at Theodore, smiling his gappy smile. The world slowed down for a moment. Theodore blinked and then Wally was gone.
Then along the street, from the other direction, an ice cream van approached. It was driven by a fat, balding man, who toted a fat cigar. As it neared, the chimes played The Funeral March of a Marionette.
I make my own bone meal, Wally had said. Theodore’s brow furrowed. What was bone meal made out of? he asked himself.
Bones, he answered. Whose or what’s bones?
The hair along his spine began to bristle.
Perhaps he made his bone meal out of cats’ bones…
Wally’s Big Mouth
Later, as Emily and Jonathan ate their chicken dinner, Theodore sat below the table. Emily had been known to drop the odd scrap on the floor in the past. That was before she had moved in together with Jonathan though. The dynamics had evidently changed.
He loitered hopefully, flicking his tail against Emily’s bare calves from time to time to make sure she knew he was there, waiting.
Neither Emily nor Jonathan spoke while they ate. They had hoped to move into the house on Constantine Crescent before Christmas but it was almost Easter by the time they finally moved in.
The last few months their lives had been in suspended animation; their possessions in boxes in their respective homes, caught between two worlds with little to talk about apart from the upcoming move. So it was with a sense of relief that they had finally signed the papers in the solicitor’s office, had a moving date confirmed, booked the removal company and, with a big sigh of relief, it was done.
As anyone who has listened to others talk about moving house knows, it is only interesting to those who are actually doing the moving, so it was also a huge relief to those who knew Emily and Jonathan that they had finally moved in.
Jonathan was chewing on a chicken wing. ‘The Chinese believe the wing to be the best part of the chicken,’ he said.
‘I like best those little bits from underneath,’ said Emily.
‘The oysters?’ Jonathan said.
‘Is that they’re called?’
‘That’s what I call them.’ Jonathan took some salad from a bowl in the middle of the table. ‘Did you use the tomatoes our new neighbour brought round?’ he asked.
‘Yes, why?’ Emily said. ‘They looked very ripe. I thought we should use them straightaway.’
‘They taste a bit beefy.’
‘Beefy?’ Emily took a slice of tomato and chewed on i
t. ‘Perhaps they’re beef tomatoes,’ she said.
‘Not sure I’ve had beef tomatoes before,’ he said.
‘He said something about making his own bone meal.’
They ate in silence for a minute, pondering the significance of making your own bone meal.
‘I’m in Derbyshire tomorrow,’ Jonathan said, changing the subject. ‘Looking for sinkholes...’
‘Sinkholes?’ Emily said, picking up a leg and taking a bite.
Jonathan explained that the area was prone to limestone dissolution.
‘Oh, sinkholes,’ Emily said, licking her greasy fingers. An image of a field with buried kitchen sinks scattered around came to her mind.
‘A nice walk in the countryside and being paid for it,’ Jonathan went on. ‘It doesn’t get better than that.’
‘Well, just be careful,’ Emily said.
‘Of what?’
‘The sinkholes, stupid. You might trip up in one.’
Jonathan laughed. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
Theodore looked at the bare floorboards. Not a scrap of chicken. He flicked his tail against Emily’s bare calf, aiming the tip at the back of her knee.
Emily’s hand appeared below the table. She flicked the back of her fingers against his side. ‘You be patient! You’ll get some later…’ she said.
Theodore exited from beneath the table. He headed into the hallway and then made his way upstairs. He added his own scent as he went, rubbing himself against the steps. It wouldn’t be too long before his own smell dominated the new house.
On the upstairs landing he paused. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. The front bedroom was Emily and Jonathan’s. One of the back bedrooms was crammed with cardboard boxes, waiting to be unpacked. The other back bedroom he knew too well; he had spent half the day locked in it and had no desire to return. So he made his way into the room filled with cardboard boxes and navigated his way through this temporary landscape.
