Cat Kin

by Nick Green

  ‘It’s almost like I’ve got…whiskers!’ gasped Tiffany.

  ‘You have.’ Mrs Powell gave one of her rare smiles. ‘Your Mau body has them, and you have helped them to appear. Mau whiskers work like an extra sense, reaching beyond your head.’

  Susie snorted. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Implausible,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘Like everything else in nature.’

  At that moment Jim trotted into the studio. Mrs Powell miaowed at him. Swishing his tail, he padded through the bead curtain into the kitchen, leaving a trail of clammy grey paw prints.

  Mrs Powell sighed. ‘What’s impossible is training your cat not to go sitting on the modelling clay.’

  Clissold Park stayed open on these early summer evenings. Ben had an urge to wander around the ponds. He didn’t like admitting to himself that he was putting off going home. The flat was no longer a cosy place. Mum had grown so snappy.

  He stroked his face. The last part of the class, learning to develop Mau whiskers, had left him light-headed. When he fused those blue and green eyes in his mind, had he really felt the air stirring to life? Imagination could do a lot. Yet it was as if musical strings had been strung to his skull, each buzzing with its own note. And those notes had translated to pictures in his head, as if he were seeing the whole studio as a landscape of vibrations. He could see (feel? hear?) the people around him, blurred shapes through a fog, growing fainter with distance. For those brief moments he could have run blindfold around the room. Had Mrs Powell hypnotised the lot of them? Or was it something more?

  Wandering by the deer enclosure, where a baby-faced doe nosed up to the wire, he toyed with his mobile phone. Dad had hinted that Thursday might be D-Day on the Stanford front. Ben had been half-expecting a call all afternoon. His voicemail was empty. He selected Dad and pressed the green key.

  Brrrr brrrr

  He let the deer nuzzle his fingers through the fence.

  Brrrr brrrr

  Dad hated a ringing phone. He always picked up by the third ring.

  Brrrr brrrr

  Ben looked at his watch. Five to eight. Too early for Dad to be at the pub. The phone continued to ring. Might he be eating out? There was always the possibility—galling though it was—that Dad had a girlfriend.

  Brrrr brrrr

  He moved his thumb to the red hang-up button.

  ‘H-hello?’

  ‘Dad!’ Ben grinned. ‘Did I get you out of the bathroom?’

  ‘Er—yes.’ There was a moment’s silence on the line. ‘You okay, Ben?’

  ‘Yeah, great. So…any news?’

  No answer. Ben started to feel uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s not a bad time to call, is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, Ben. It’s just…’ Dad cleared his throat. ‘I guess you want to know if I spoke to Mr Stanford.’

  The line was thick with static. No, not static. But Dad’s voice sounded odd. Slurred. As if he’d had a lot to drink.

  At eight in the evening?

  ‘Hello?’ Ben held the phone more tightly.

  ‘I’m here.’ Dad’s breathing rasped in the earpiece. ‘Ben. I have to tell you something important. Listen. You and your mother can’t stay in that flat. You must get out. I can put you up at my place for a while.’

  ‘What? But Dad—’

  ‘Ben, this is important. Tell your mother to accept Mr Stanford’s offer. Sell the place and cut your losses.’

  Thell the place. It sounded like thell. Cut your lothes.

  ‘Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m sorry Ben. I really am. I made a mistake. Try to help and I only make things worse. I’m…I’m not much of a dad, am I.’

  The concrete path seemed to wobble under Ben’s shoes.

  ‘What happened? Did you go round there? What did he say?’ A horrible thought took shape. ‘What did he do? Did he—’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’ Dad paused a moment. ‘Stanford had this guy with him. A big bloke. I wasn’t about to start any trouble with him there. I wasn’t.’

  A big bloke. That caveman Toby.

  ‘Did he…hit you?’

  Dad made a sound, like a shred of a laugh.

  ‘I’m okay. Still here.’ He went silent for a while. ‘People mend.’

  Ben sucked in deep breaths. He knew that as soon as he turned his phone off he would throw up all over the footpath.

  ‘Dad…We’ve got to tell the police.’

  ‘No!’ There was something in Dad’s voice he had never heard before. Fear. ‘No, you can’t do that. I’m not going into details. Stanford made it clear. You tell Mum to take whatever he’s offering and pack her bags. Tell her. Do it for me, Ben. Or I won’t sleep at night.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’ Raymond Gallagher’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  FELINE FACES

  ‘Hurry, slave-girl. Fetch me my drink.’

  ‘At once, your Excellency.’ Tiffany bowed before the electric wheelchair as Stuart trundled into the living room. ‘Will it be nectar, ambrosia or Ribena?’

  ‘Naah. Ginger beer,’ grinned Stuart.

  Tiffany skipped into the kitchen and opened the cupboard, to see Dad’s hand-written sign inside the door: Cups are a renewable resource. She banged the cupboard shut with her head and grabbed two used glasses off the draining board. Today was better than Christmas.

  It had all happened so quickly. Three weeks ago the first batch of Panthacea had arrived through the post. Dad had been suspicious of the bottles at first and wouldn’t even let Mum taste one of the chunky green tablets herself. But Stuart’s doctor Sanjeev had no objections.

  ‘I am being sceptical of miracle powers,’ he said. He had read about Panthacea, and warned them that it was probably no more than a cocktail of A, D and B-complex vitamins, with added herbal ingredients ‘for that all-so-important ethnic street-cred’. This put Mum’s nose out of joint, so she showed him an article where Panthacea was championed by an Ayurvedic doctor.

  ‘As you know, Ayurvedic healers focus on prevention rather than cure,’ she said.

  ‘Very wise, I am sure,’ said Dr Bijlani. ‘So, if you visit this doctor with a broken leg, does he say, “Ah, well you shouldn’t have gone skiing”?’

  Such comments aside, he was sure that the supplement would do Stuart no harm. ‘And I am seeing people get better swallowing nothing but sugar pills and clever advertising,’ he said. ‘The mind is a most exquisite healer.’

  Perhaps the doctor was right. Still, after just two weeks of taking the tablets (which he said tasted bitter) Stuart was able to play for longer, talk without getting out of breath and even climb into his wheelchair by himself. He was more cheerful and his pneumonia had cleared up. It probably helped that Mum and Dad no longer sat by his bedside quarrelling with each other—they were all smiles, real smiles at last. But Tiffany kept fingering the humble little bottles, reading the labels in growing wonder. Panthacea: For strength, for health, for life. Dr Bijlani could be as sarcastic as he liked. The fact remained: Stuart was coming home.

  Tiffany set down the ginger beer and grabbed the hand that he waved in her face.

  ‘Arm wrestle!’ Stuart cried.

  ‘Ugh, aargh, no more, it’s an unstoppable machine,’ Tiffany gasped, pretending to collapse under the puny force her brother was exerting. He knew, of course, that she was acting, but cheered in triumph anyway.

  ‘I rule!’

  ‘Now you get to thump me on the back,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘At last. Revenge is mine!’ Stuart made a fist. ‘Take that! And that. And—’

  ‘Tiffany, that’s enough.’ Mum made shoo-ing gestures. ‘Stop crowding him, love, you’ll tire him out. Doesn’t your room need tidying?’

  ‘We’re only playing. He loves it, don’t you, Stuart?’

  ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that soon enough,’ said Mum. ‘Room, please.’

  Huffing her annoyance, Tiffany trudged upstairs.
>
  Cecile peeped out from behind the chunk of plaster in her hands.

  ‘What do I look like?’

  ‘Awesome.’ Tiffany wished she had a mirror so she could see her own face. The marbling of red and white makeup on Cecile’s ebony complexion had turned her into another being. ‘You look just like a tortoiseshell!’

  ‘A tortoise—?’

  ‘That’s a kind of cat,’ Tiffany added hastily.

  ‘You’ve got the tabby markings,’ said Cecile. ‘Like Jim. I can see the M shape on your forehead.’

  From the moment she arrived, Tiffany had sensed that this pashki class was special. She had puzzled over those clay moulds they had made of their faces. Here was the answer. Mrs Powell had created a plaster cast from each mould, then made plaster moulds from the casts. Inside each she had glued pieces of felt in curious patterns. She showed them how to wet the felt with coloured paints. Then they simply pressed the moulds over their faces and, when they peeled them off, the skin of their foreheads and cheekbones bore striking temporary tattoos.

  ‘Goodbye human face,’ said Mrs Powell, ‘hello cat. From now on, you start each lesson by putting on your face print.’

  Mrs Powell’s own cat face-paint was so subtle Tiffany hadn’t noticed it at first: spidery grey trails that followed the wrinkles of her brow, gathered to an M below her hairline. The class murmured, admiring each other’s markings. Susie had curves across her temples and cheekbones that drew out her inquisitive almond eyes. Dark and pale rings gave Yusuf a hunter-ish stare, similar to an Abyssinian, Tiffany thought. The pale paint on Daniel’s skin made him seem to be wearing a grey mask, which was set off surprisingly well by his specs. And Ben’s was a pattern of fiery ripples that looked almost tiger-ish. He was sitting apart and seemed too preoccupied to pay much attention to anyone else.

  ‘This is so cool,’ Cecile smiled. ‘You’ve actually got a cat, haven’t you, Tiff?’

  She made the idea sound as exotic as flamingos in the garden.

  ‘He’s just a moggy. A lovely moggy,’ Tiffany added, guiltily.

  ‘I’ve never had any pets,’ said Cecile. ‘Well, a guinea pig when I was eight. But that never moved and then it died.’

  ‘You should get one.’

  ‘As if. There’s not even room for people in my flat. It’s me and my little sister in one room and my parents and baby brother in another. And bikes and laundry everywhere else. If I was a cat I’d be out of there so fast…’ Cecile sucked her teeth. ‘You know I’ve never seen a sheep?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a sheep. Or a cow. Except at London Zoo. I’ve seen them on telly, yeah, but not cows and sheeps in fields and stuff. That’s what growing up in Hackney does for you. S’why I came here. I thought it was a nature trail thing. You know, catkins. This is even better though. I never thought I’d actually get to be like an animal.’

  Mrs Powell began the lesson. Over the weeks their pashki sequences had grown more and more dance-like: springing in graceful arcs, stopping dead and spinning on one toe, pouring oneself like water to the floor and rebounding as if suddenly rubber. For Tiffany every second was an ecstasy of movement and it looked as if Ben, too, had learned many steps to perfection. Everyone had made progress, even Olly, though he joked that he only kept coming because Mrs Powell would hunt down and kill anyone who tried to leave.

  ‘Always remember your catras,’ said Mrs Powell, circling them like a stalking lynx. ‘Your exercise routines prime you physically, and help to wake your Mau body up. But it is by invoking the catras that you help your Mau to grow. In most of you it is still just a spark. What we have to do is fan the flames. Yusuf, recite the catras for me.’

  ‘Uh—’ Yusuf glanced at Tiffany.

  ‘Abysmal,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘Heavens, there are only six. My old teacher in Kashmir…’ She trailed off, and stared for a moment out of the window, as if a stray grey thought had overtaken her. She recovered quickly. ‘My old teacher made us learn Akhotep’s catra chant off by heart. In the original ancient Egyptian. I know that it would bore you children to tears, and probably cause your heads to explode, so I have composed a much shorter version. In English. By the next time we meet, you will all have memorised it.’

  She slipped into her dreamy reciting voice:

  ‘Ptep is my head, the balancing blue sky;

  Mandira is my green all-sensing eye;

  Kelotaukhon, copper maw, my mystery;

  Golden chest of Parda strongly glows;

  Lower crimson Oshtis feels and knows;

  Nimble tail is Ailur, indigo.’

  The class chanted it back to her, hesitantly at first, then twice more. By the third repetition, Tiffany fancied that she was seeing each catra as she spoke it, like a neon lamp blinking on a blank screen inside her forehead, triggering warmth in the corresponding centres of her body.

  They finished the lesson by practising Pur, the meditation pose. Tiffany despaired of ever getting this right. The Sphinx crouch was easy, but that was only part of it. You did actually have to purr. The trick was to hum as low as you could possibly go. Then, somehow, you had to shift it even lower, so it was just a throb in your throat. Everyone found it impossible, but Mrs Powell insisted that it wasn’t.

  ‘Pur is important,’ she said. ‘Cats purr when they are happy, but they also purr when they are sick or injured. A cat will purr just before it is put to sleep by a vet.’

  Tiffany didn’t want to think about such horrible things.

  ‘Like OM in yoga,’ said Mrs Powell, ‘Pur aids relaxation. It acts as a pain killer and can keep fear at bay. It may even help cats recover from injury. Some say it is the secret of the cat’s legendary nine lives. So come along, concentrate. Purr with me.’

  She made the inhuman rumble that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and for the next eight minutes Tiffany sat trying to copy her and getting a sore throat. On the way out, as a consolation, she helped herself to two of the chocolate brownies Olly had brought for them to share. Good old Olly. He might not have the grace of a puma yet, but he understood about cat treats.

  When Dad called up the stairs to ask if she was coming to the hospital for Stuart’s physiotherapy, Tiffany, enjoying a Saturday lie-in, naturally said no. A moment later the front door shut. She listened to the silence in disbelief. No-one had bothered to mention that they were all going with Stuart. Mum and Dad had left her alone in the house.

  ‘Owwr-rree.’ Rufus galloped into her room. He butted her protruding bare feet, as if to say At least you’re still here.

  ‘Yes. Same old me.’ She crumpled his ears. What to do, then? There was drinking pineapple juice straight out of the carton and stuffing herself on toast. Then she phoned round her sprinkling of friends, but only Natasha was in and her family had the plague, or so it sounded from the sneezing. After an hour of mindless TV she ran out of ideas. She stomped upstairs and logged on to the internet. Mum’s Favourites folder was open. Idly curious, Tiffany read more of the articles about Panthacea and its inventor, Dr J. Philip Cobb.

  Cobb himself (she read) is a walking advertisement for his products. Even though his childhood accident in the wildlife park left him partially disabled, Panthacea has returned to him 70% use of his withered arm.

  ‘But I still leave the heavy lifting to my staff,’ he jokes. With the prospect of multi-million pound drug company contracts around the corner, and countless fellow sufferers standing to benefit from his research, this is one pill that Philip Cobb should have no trouble swallowing.

  Her heart leaped. If major companies wanted to buy up Panthacea, perhaps there really was something in it. You could fool a few desperate people, Tiffany knew, but not hard-headed businessmen. It looked like Stuart might get better. Really better. Maybe this time next year he’d be running round the school fields playing football. No, not football, he hated that…so maybe he’d be charging about with his friends, pretending to be superheroes. Maybe he would have some friends.

&nbs
p; Mum had left a jar of Panthacea on the computer desk. Tiffany unscrewed the lid and peered inside at the pills. Chunky ovals, the colour of dark moss, they looked nothing special. The jar had a funny aroma. Knowing she shouldn’t, she picked out a pill and touched her tongue to it. As Stuart had said, it was bitter, like aspirin, only thicker. Greener. On an impulse she popped the pill in her mouth.

  ‘What are you doing, Tiffany?’ she mumbled aloud, the tablet snuggling awkwardly in one cheek. The bitter taste spread through her mouth as the pill softened with saliva. She hurried to the bathroom and spat it out in the toilet. The lump floated in circles on the water, disintegrating. She watched it, queasy. What had possessed her to do that?

  Screwing the lid back on she returned the jar to its exact same place. But, as she surfed onto a chat room to kill another hour, she found herself wishing she had swallowed that pill after all. She wasn’t exactly Miss Universe herself. With the last PE lesson of the year approaching, and Miss Fuller ominously promising the class ‘a surprise’, she needed all the help she could get.

  ‘Ah, Rufus,’ she crooned. ‘Where’s my medicine, eh?’

  The ginger cat purred on her lap.

  ‘If this is Miss Fuller’s idea of a nice surprise,’ Avril whispered, ‘I pity her kids.’

  ‘If she ever has any,’ Tiffany whispered back. ‘She’ll have to catch a man first.’

  ‘And shut him in the cellar,’ sniggered Avril.

  ‘Locked in a cage.’

  Miss Fuller had set up the gym horse and springboard. Her treat was a vaulting contest. Whoever sprang highest or furthest without suffering serious injury got to take home a live tarantula. Or something. Tiffany hadn’t really been listening.

  ‘No way are we surviving that.’ Avril watched grimly as the first boy, Jason Wilks, rocketed over the horse.

  ‘And that’s just the lowest notch,’ Tiffany muttered. ‘Look, she’s putting it up. Typical.’