BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  Rainwater had melted these things. Blood had no effect at first. When he’d repeated the ritual over several days, and a dry rusty crust had accumulated around the disc, it split open. Something came out, and fed on the rich strange fare, and grew; and grew.

  The man moved it to an old goldfish tank and went on feeding it. It was always hungry, but always struggled to avoid contact with the blood until it had dried (which led to some contortions, after a while). This behaviour, seeming like a delight in deferred gratification, rather thrilled the man. He felt he’d found a kindred spirit.

  ϔ

  Lulu and Stella often popped-in at the Pop-Up Garden, on the way to school, or on a weekend afternoon, through that spring and summer. There were no urban plant health issues, the Guerrilla Gardeners knew what they were doing. It was just a nice place to take the children.

  Flowers and vegetables flourished, in old tyres, in railway-sleeper raised beds, and on well-mulched, shallow-dug contaminated ground. The temporary fence along the pavement blossomed in colourful banners, messages, drawings and photos; the local free-sheet ran a feature. A primary school started visiting. Office workers and pensioners, including Joseph’s Nan and grandad, became volunteers. Lulu’s short contract was coming to an end, but she began to hope that the Pop-Up Garden might endure for a while; maybe even for a year or two.

  It was not to be. A Fuel Tank Services company turned up at last: did a survey and set a date for the removal of the tanks. At the height of the summer, just before the raspberries were ripe, the Guerrillas had notice to quit. The fence broke out in messages of mourning and regret. Some locals vowed to fight: but the guerrilla cadre rejected these plans. Keep smiling and move on was their motto. “There’s always another garden”, said Sid, the old man with the gingery white beard, a retired architect in private life. “Never pick a fight you can’t win.”

  On a Saturday afternoon in July, Lulu came along to help with the dismantling. There were seeds to be collected, prepared, and packaged for distribution; vegetables to be harvested; perennials to be rehomed. The two children were with her, as usual.

  Stella had never said so, but the Pop-Up Garden made her uneasy. Maybe a guilty association had lodged in her mind since the day the tall girl laughed at her, and she’d gone out of the gates when she shouldn’t. While Joseph, more independent now, settled happily to digging holes, looking for the fuel tanks, Stella dragged a stick along the fence, so it rattled – up and down, her back to the beds of flowers and vegetables. Joseph’s Nan, a semi-retired theatre nurse called Judith, and a Pop-Up regular, wanted to show Lulu a strange weed she’d found when she was harvesting her onions: a whiteish, bristly underground growth with a stranglehold on the fattest bulbs.

  “Put a spade through it,” said Lulu.

  “Have a go yourself. It’s tough as nails. Worse than bindweed.”

  Lulu had a go. The root was very tough. “Secateurs,” she decided.

  Judith grinned, and slapped her own pair into Lulu’s palm.

  “Secateurs, doctor.”

  But the blades made no impression. The root, or growth, was made up of many, many glassy, transparent strands, invincible in their collective strength. You’d have to separate them, and chop them one by one… Lulu recalled her mild concern that the Pop-Up might harbour something noxious.

  “D’you mind if I dig this stuff right out?”

  “Good luck,” said Joseph’s Nan. “I couldn’t find the end of it.”

  Lulu couldn’t find the end of it either. Mystified, she tracked the glassy rope, like a vein of metal in soft rock. Where the hell was this stuff coming from? Where was the plant, if this was a root? She straightened her back and looked around. The glass rope was heading for Frankenstein’s Monster: a painted scaffold, built from forecourt debris, that served as a “sunny wall” for the dilapidated philodendron, a couple of rescue tree ferns, and two or three scraggy palms.

  Philodendron sellorum, notorious secret sprawler, had done well. It looked happy as a clam: a glossy green Ent, presiding over the other hardy tropicals as if in some humid forest glade in its native Argentina.

  “Damn it,” muttered Lulu. She’d found the Philly a Public Spaces home, but this weird root development was a difficulty. How much of it could the plant afford to lose? The rope reached Frankenstein, took a right-angled turn and rose, wrapping itself around the Philly’s main trunk – almost invisible, except where the sun caught it. The plant that loves trees was not guilty. On the contrary; it was getting loved to death by the mysterious alien. Lulu poked and tugged until she shifted the rope a little, and was relieve to find there were no suckers actually digging into the Philly’s tissue. It seemed to be using the big stem only for support. But where was the plant?

  “What’s my devil root getting up to now?”

  Joseph’s Nan had followed her, intrigued.

  “I don’t know… yet. The plant must be hidden in the Philly’s crown. I need a good knife.”

  “Scalpel, doctor,” said Judith, slapping down her own pruning knife.

  The knife was heavy and sharp, but made no impression at all. “I think I need to talk to someone,” said Lulu, taking out her phone. “See if we can identify this thing.”

  ϔ

  On the pavement outside the fence there was a man looking at the pictures and messages. He and Stella walked up and down together, keeping step. It became a silent game. The man smiled. Stella, with a firm hold on her stick, and safely inside where she ought to be, smiled back.

  “Hallo, Stella,” said the man. “A friend of yours is staying with me.”

  The little girl shook her head. “Not my friend. You don’t know me.”

  “Yes I do, Stella. You live on the floor above your friend Joseph, in Linden House. Your mum’s called Lulu. She works for the Parks, and your dad drives a red Passat.”

  Every word of this was right, including the red car, though Stella wasn’t sure about the Passat. “How do you know all that?”

  “I told you. We’ve got friends in common. I know all about you.”

  They talked for a few minutes. It was okay, because Stella stayed on her own side of the fence, and the man was not a stranger. Meanwhile Lulu was having an unsatisfactory conversation with her boss, who stung Lulu’s feelings by saying she would arrange for “an expert” to have a look at this possible noxious pest species.

  Joseph stayed behind with his nan and grandad: Lulu and Stella walked home. Lulu, in a gloomy mood, stopped at the Deptford border to stare over the railings. It was low tide. The river Ravensbourne, here known as Deptford Creek, lay like a sluggish, replete, eel-coloured snake between its mudflats; in no hurry to join the Thames. I am an expert, she thought. I just don’t have the letters after my name. It was taking her so long to finish her doctorate… The day was humid; news headlines had been romancing all week about a tropical future. Lulu imagined West African swamp lilies, rising from the London ooze. As she looked east towards the Isle of Dogs, present reality slipped for a moment. She saw a drowned world, a luminous green future: the fantastical spires and towers of the city, rising mysterious, from rainforest canopy—

  Would it be so terrible? she murmured.

  “Would it be so terrible?” growled a small voice, “If I went to see Daddy and Emmie on a few more Saturdays?” Stella was kicking the toes of her boots, one by one, bitterly against the railings.

  Lulu’s ex was married, and the couple had a new baby. Lulu found this depressing. She struggled with thoughts like, why didn’t I think of us getting married? And what was wrong with my Stella, if he likes little babies? But Stella, inevitably, was besotted with the new arrival, the most desirable cuddly toy in the world, and pined between visits—

  “Of course it wouldn’t be terrible, my Star. I’ll see what I can fix up.”

  “I’ll see what I can fix up,” muttered Stella, rebellious. She didn’t have to wait for Mummy’s unreliable “I’ll see”. She had a friend.

  ϔ

&nb
sp; For a while, when the adventurous root had disappeared into the crack behind the window frame, Stella had stopped, turned around and looked up, every time she left Linden House – thinking of Adam’s pictures of rainforest orchids, and hoping to see a wonderful flower spreading its petals in the sky. But nothing happened, so she stopped looking, and only remembered the invisible plant when her mother suggested throwing the yoghurt pot of dry soil away, an idea Stella furiously rejected.

  One day in the school holidays the children were playing in Stella’s corridor, waiting for Lulu: who had work to finish and would not let them go outdoors until she could sit with them. Stella kept running to the windows. Her friend from the Guerrilla Garden had said he would drop by, when she was playing out. He wanted to tell her a secret. He knew Stella was clever at hiding, and that Mummy wasn’t looking all the time.

  An orange van pulled up, and a man in matching overalls got out. When he appeared on the third floor corridor, tramping heavily out of the stairwell doors, Joseph retreated to the safety of Lulu’s flat.

  Stella ran up to the stranger in case it was her friend in disguise. It was a different person: bigger and fatter, with a browner face, but she stayed to find out what was going on. Old Mr Lee in the corner flat came out and unlocked the roof-space ladder from the wall. The orange overall man climbed up, opened the hatch, and disappeared into that unknown space.

  Mr Lee’s nice wife had died. He’d been sad and cross ever since, and Stella was not supposed to pester him, but she thought it was okay to ask what was happening.

  “Wasps,” said Mr Lee. “They have a nest up there.”

  “Is the man going to kill them?”

  “He has to look and see. I tell him, you think I don’t know what a wasp nest looks like? A big round grey lump! They have to be smoked out, quickly, by Pest Control. You like to see a wasp nest smoked, Stella?”

  Stella hated wasps. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she’d heard that they sometimes chased children and stung them to death. She ran to tell her mother. But when Lulu came out, dragged by Joseph, who did want to see the great event, there was nothing going on. Just Mr Lee, talking to a man in orange overalls.

  “It’s definitely not a wasp nest,” said the man.

  “What else could it be?”

  “All I know is it’s not an insect nest. It’s rock solid. If you’re worried, get it looked at by Building Maintenance. It’s not my department.”

  “But I hear them buzzing! They keep me awake at night!”

  “I didn’t hear anything, but maybe it’s different at night, less other noise. Could be something to do with the new cabling you’ve got up there. As I say, better have it looked at, but not by me.”

  “Cables? I don’t know anything about new cables!”

  Lulu, although she was stopping the children from playing on the lawns, stayed to talk, and Joseph stayed with her. Stella retired, feeling uneasy. The mad root, forgotten for so long, had jumped into her mind.

  She went to her room, shut the door and checked the yogurt pot. It was still behind the curtain, and she could still feel something invisible growing in it, when she tugged. Had her plant got up into the roof? Was it making grey lumps? Was it keeping grown-ups awake? Maybe she ought to own up, before there was more trouble.

  But Mr Lee got upset about strange things, since his wife died, and usually they weren’t true, or just something somebody could easily fix. She decided it would be all right to say nothing.

  ϔ

  Stella’s friend, the man at the fence, loved delay and anticipation, but all things must pass. He prepared himself, magically and materially, and planned the next moves in every detail. The little ones never put it into words, but he knew Stella was ready, too. Watching and waiting, he thought of nothing else but that perfect moment when she would run to him, put her soft hand in his, and scamper with him to the waiting car. He completely forgot about the blood ritual.

  The thing that had been housed in a goldfish tank was still growing, changed out of all recognition by its alien diet. When the man stopped feeding it, purely from forgetfulness, it was soon very hungry. It crept around, breaking down barriers, determined to secure the food it knew was close. The first source of living blood it found, imprisoned behind one of the walls of the man’s home, it rejected. It no longer dreaded liquid, but having been reared on cruelty and madness, it disliked the taints of fear and pain. When it found the nutrient it preferred, it easily overcame the food-source’s struggles, fed until it was sated and moved on: into the fabric of the city, to seek out and devour more of the same.

  What happened to this curious vigilante is a story yet to be told.

  ϔ

  The Guerrillas held a farewell Tea Party and set off on their next adventure. On the day the underground tanks were due to be removed, Lulu got a call from Joseph’s Nan, summoning her urgently to the site.

  “You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here,” she said. “No, I can’t explain. You have to see it, Lulu. Or you wouldn’t believe me—”

  There was nobody to take care of Stella, so the little girl had to come along: in a temper because she’d been promised a trip to the South Bank Beach. There was a crowd in front of the vacated Pop Up Garden, but thankfully no police in sight. What could be wrong? All Lulu could think of was a protest. Somebody, possibly Joseph’s grandad, who was a bit of a firebrand, had chained himself to something—

  She pushed her way to the gates, keeping a grim hold on Stella’s wriggling hand. To lose a small child in a crowd is every parent’s dread, and there was a new London horror story this summer (located miles away in Morden, thankfully). Three children had been abducted one by one, and just this week a man had been found dead, with the decayed bodies of two of them under his floorboards. The third victim had been recovered barely alive—

  Fragments of children’s drawings, tattered and rain-smeared, hung from the remains of the fence. On the stripped site excavation machines stood with lowered heads, like giant, tired horses. Men and women in site gear and hard hats huddled beside the great beasts, studying paper plans and scanner screens. One of them had stepped away to talk on the phone. Everything seemed quiet, otherwise. No protesters lying in front of the diggers, no disturbance at all. The smell of ancient petrol fumes hung in the air. Lulu saw Joseph’s grandparents, and hurried over to join them – no longer having to drag Stella, who was thrilled by big diggers.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Anybody’s guess,” said Judith, Joseph’s Nan. “It’s really weird.”

  Temporary soil, demolition rubbish and polluted earth had been gouged back in a great trench right across the site. The top surfaces of two cylindrical fuel tanks could be seen. One of them gaped like a peeled sardine tin, full to bursting with something: a silvery mass, a huge, swollen glassy bolus. The other was riven with cracks, like paving heaved up by tree roots, and the same glossy matter was bulging out.

  “What’s that?” demanded Lulu. “Did they fill the tanks with foam?’

  Joseph’s grandad, Big Joe, shook his head. “Nope. The tank guys thought the fuel tanks had been made safe, degassed, as they call it, long since. So they started cutting. Now it turns out the work was never done, and nobody knows where the fuel went or what that stuff is!”

  “Looks like we’ve all had a lucky escape,” said Judith. “If the tanks’d still had petrol in them, they’d have gone up like a rocket. Well? What’s your diagnosis, doctor?”

  Lulu hesitated. In a couple of days her contract would be over, and this wouldn’t be her problem. “Did the expert on pest species turn up?”

  Judith shook her head. “I suppose your boss didn’t get round to it. And the devil root seemed to vanish, after you attacked it that day.”

  “So maybe my hacking had killed it after all—”

  “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it retreated to its secret bases?”

  “Triffids,” said Big Joe, suddenly. “Not the sci-fi version, a real live menace. Noxio
us and invasive. Not your fault, Lulu, you tried.”

  “Has it done any actual harm?” asked Lulu.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Judith. “Joe and I came along early this morning, because it was the big day, and there’d been some talk. There were no protestors, but the guys over there had just found Carnegie: in a state which alerted them to the fact that the stuff in the tanks was not some kind of safety foam.” She pointed to the cracked tank. “He must’ve wandered in here last night. It’s swallowed him, choked him alive.”

  Carnegie, a friendly neighbourhood ginger tom, had been the Pop-Up Garden’s mascot. His head reared up, hardly recognisable, from one of the largest cracks, smothered in glassy devil-root.

  Lulu fumbled for her phone, one-handed, hanging on to Stella with the other. She didn’t intend to call her soon-not-to-be boss, they’d never got on, but someone, ideally Adam, should know about this. The glass root warranted further study, to say the least—

  Stella wriggled, trying to see the awful dead cat more clearly.

  Joe snorted. “Leave the Council out of it, woman. I know what to do, before it surges out and strangles a child. Stand well back.”

  Unknown to his wife, Joe had decided to take the law into his own hands. He’d slipped off home, earlier, when Judith and the tank removal team were discussing Carnegie’s horrible fate. Now he stooped and lifted a can that had been standing by his feet. Automatically, Judith and Lulu backed off, pulling Stella with them. The crowd at the fence retreated hurriedly too.

  “JOE!” wailed Judith. “Oh my god! Are you crazy!”

  “What are you doing!!” screamed the tank removals team leader.

  But big Joe rarely thought twice (or even once) when he’d decided something must be done. He twisted off the cap of his can, and tossed the fuel in a gleaming arc. He may have intended to strike a match and fling it after the liquid, but he never got the chance. Contact with a single drop of petrol was enough – for the glassy, obese over-growth that had been glutting itself, for months, on an outrageously rich diet. The whole gouged-out area exploded, with a huge, hollow-sounding WHUMP.