Cat Kin

by Nick Green

  Avril went paler. ‘How high is it going to be when it’s our turn?’

  ‘She knew we’d go to the back of the line, didn’t she?’ said Tiffany. ‘Evil, muppet-haired witch.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘Should’ve thought of that earlier.’

  Tiffany closed her eyes and reminded herself that, in forty minutes, Miss Fuller would be nothing but a bad memory. But the ignominy of being the class lump wouldn’t pass so easily. Week after week she’d come here to be humiliated. How could she be good at pashki and so useless in school sports? Yusuf, she had discovered, was one of the year’s top footballers, yet at Cat Kin she could run rings around him. Last lesson she had wowed everyone at by Eth-walking the long, winding course Mrs Powell had set for them in Clissold Park. Tiffany had done it in under a minute, beating Ben’s time by one second and everyone else by a mile. But in PE she was like a different person. A different species.

  ‘Emma! Go,’ shouted Miss Fuller. Tiffany heard bare feet run to the springboard, judder off it and land with a wettish smack on the mat. Emma grunted, as if she had fallen badly. Tiffany’s knees almost buckled under the weight of the butterflies in her stomach. She heard Miss Fuller raise the gym horse still higher.

  Then, in the blackness of her own eyelids, she saw cats’ eyes. Mrs Powell had encouraged them to practise their catras until they appeared at will. An indigo eye swam into view (that was Ailur, Tiffany recalled), merging with a golden one, Parda. Why these should appear to her now, and what they meant when combined, she couldn’t think. But their presence was comforting and she felt strength in her again.

  ‘Excuse me? Tiffany? Thank you for coming, pet, but can you wake up now?’

  Tiffany started at the sound of Miss Fuller’s voice. She opened her eyes to find herself at the front of the line. Everyone was staring at her, grinning like a pack of wolves. In her confusion she had lost sight of the gym horse. She looked left, right, turned round and finally saw it. With no time left to be nervous, she ran at it and prayed.

  The vault turned out to be easier than it looked. She bounced up and skimmed over the frayed green padding on the crown of the horse. There was the tiniest jolt as she touched down on the wooden floor, and that was that. She raised her hands above her head for good measure, the way gymnasts did on television, and walked to the back of the line, heart thudding with relief. She’d done it as well as any of them.

  It took her a moment to notice how silent the gym had become.

  ‘Tiffany…’ Miss Fuller’s voice sounded different. Almost human.

  ‘What did she just do?’ one of the boys whispered.

  ‘That was the wrong way round,’ said someone else.

  ‘Tiffany…’ Miss Fuller was peering at her like a mole faced with an exam paper. ‘Why did you do it that way?’

  ‘Miss?’ Tiffany had no idea what they were on about. She wondered if she’d cut herself and glanced at her arms and legs.

  ‘The springboard’s on this side,’ said Jason, frowning in confusion.

  ‘Did you see that?’ cried Avril.

  Tiffany stood bewildered as the gym dissolved into uproar. She looked back at the apparatus and understood. Somehow, being muddled, she had run at it from the wrong end, jumping with no springboard to launch her and no mats to cushion her landing. Yet the horse now towered on its highest notch, as tall as she was.

  ‘Can you, er, do it properly next time, please?’ Miss Fuller stammered at last.

  CLAWMARKS

  ‘I think you should get down from there,’ Tiffany whispered for the second time. She was in the Hunter crouch, peeping through the bushes.

  ‘The guy won’t mind, will he?’ said Ben. ‘He’s dead.’

  He shifted his position on the back of the marble lion and peered between its rain-bitten ears. The two policemen were in the open now, talking to a young couple who were taking a walk through the graves.

  ‘I meant, they might see you,’ said Tiffany.

  ‘They might hear us, if you keep talking.’

  That hiss was Tiffany blowing through her teeth. Ben ignored her and tried to pick up the policemen’s conversation. By concentrating on the green catra, Mandira, he could make their voices seem louder. The older officer, a thickset man in a too-tight uniform, asked the couple if they had seen anyone lurking in the cemetery. They hadn’t.

  ‘If you do,’ said his partner, ‘we advise you not to approach them. It’s probably kids, but you never know.’

  Tiffany glided from her hiding-spot like a draught. Once she was in her black pashki cat-suit and tabby face-print it was almost impossible to make her walk normally.

  ‘I warned you back there,’ she whispered. ‘That lady in her garden saw you.’

  ‘She saw both of us.’

  ‘I was careful.’

  ‘Please accept my humble apologies.’

  Given the choice, Ben would rather have been paired with Yusuf, Daniel, or perhaps Attila the Hun. But over the weeks Yusuf had tended to hang out more with Olly, which was kind of inevitable since they both went to the same school, and Daniel had surprisingly latched onto them. Ben had started to wonder what was wrong with him, only to realise, as the long holiday wore on, that he was simply getting too good at pashki. The Cat Kin were spending more time outside, trying out new moves and routines in the parks and streets, and Mrs Powell had ordered Ben and Tiffany to practise together. They were too far ahead of everyone else. Ben could see the logic of this. It was just a shame that Tiffany was an expert at rubbing him up the wrong way.

  The policemen drew nearer. Ben slid off the lion monument and alighted on the grass, for the moment still hidden. The ivy-robed trees cast the ground in green shade, the sun dripping through like rain into an old tent. Shadows of tree trunks wove among the graves, vaults and petrified angels. Ben Eth-walked after Tiffany to a denser patch of undergrowth. This must be how it felt to be a burglar. A cat burglar, ho ho.

  But they hadn’t been stealing. Or rather, they had only been stealing space. Territory, said Mrs Powell, was a vital part of a cat’s being. A cat built up a store of special places where it owned (it believed) every breeze and grass blade. This was the fifth rudiment of pashki: Laying Claim. Mrs Powell sent them out to find unfamiliar territories and pass through them unnoticed, while getting to know them and absorbing their essence. ‘And do try,’ she added, ‘not to get arrested.’

  That was starting to look likely. The two officers had parted where the path forked and the thin policeman looked as if he might pass within arm’s reach of their hiding-place.

  ‘Keep still,’ whispered Tiffany.

  ‘It’s lucky I have you to tell me what to do,’ muttered Ben.

  ‘Quiet.’

  The policeman’s radio crackled. He ignored it, but Tiffany, who was already tense, jumped. The leaves shook and the officer turned.

  ‘You! Stop there!’

  ‘Run?’ whispered Ben.

  ‘Yes.’

  They scarpered. In his panic Ben forgot everything he’d learned. Robbed of the agility of pashki he blundered towards the nearest path, running as if through tar or a bad dream. He could hear the younger officer jabbering into his radio as he chased.

  Was he jinxed or something? To be caught by a copper would be the final straw. Over the past few days he and Tiffany had crept through people’s gardens, across walls and over garages, travelling whole streets without setting foot on a pavement, and had hardly drawn a glance. Ben found that pashki let him move, if not invisibly, then unobtrusively. He could cross someone’s field of vision and they would simply ignore him. Only rarely had they been spotted. Once a man had bellowed from his bathroom window and they’d had to hide behind his chimney-stack. And just now a woman had yelled as they crossed her garden, forcing them to scramble over a lopsided wall and drop ten feet into the cemetery. That they did these things without thinking amazed and alarmed them both.

  Mrs Powell had organised extra lessons for the su
mmer holidays, and Mum had remarked, grumpily, that Ben seemed to be doing little else nowadays (though as far as she knew, it was just an ordinary self-defence class). His mum had a point. He’d stopped playing pinball altogether. But amongst the Cat Kin, Ben found he could relax. He could forget about John Stanford’s threats, Mum’s ever-blackening moods, Dad’s disastrous attempt to help.

  His favourite lessons were in Ten Hooks. One of the nine pashki rudiments, Ten Hooks was non-contact sparring, based on the way cats fought. Whenever he practised the dreamlike slashes, lunges and kicks, usually with Tiffany, he could go as long as five minutes without dreading what was going to happen to his family.

  It was when he thought of Mum, working extra hours in the organics shop or sitting alone in the flat that now felt like a prison, that the guilt came, clawing at his conscience. He should be at home comforting her, not wasting his time being taught tricks by a half-mad old woman.

  For Mrs Powell got stranger by the minute. For three lessons now she’d been talking up something called Mau claws. She said that, just as the Mau body could extend beyond your head to create an effect like whiskers, it could also be forced out through your fingertips or toes, so you would actually seem to have claws for a second or two. This (she claimed) was extremely difficult and needed energy from all the catras in sequence, blue, green, gold, copper, red and indigo, to feed the Mau body to the point where it became almost a physical presence. To Ben it all sounded about as likely as bending spoons with telekinesis.

  Running through the cemetery, he felt a tug on his arm.

  ‘This way.’ Tiffany darted down an alley of headstones. Ben strove to keep up, trying to recapture the cat grace that had deserted him.

  ‘I didn’t think that cow would actually dial nine-nine-nine,’ he panted. ‘She must have a really boring life.’

  ‘Urk.’ Tiffany stopped so suddenly that Ben thumped into her. ‘Up ahead.’

  Alerted by his colleague, the fat policeman was running from the other direction.

  ‘Split up!’

  ‘Wait. I’ve got an idea,’ said Tiffany. She veered off into a thicket of tall graves.

  ‘That’s a dead end,’ hissed Ben. ‘Not that I’m trying to be funny or anyth—’

  ‘You don’t remember! Last lesson she showed us how to Freeze.’

  Ben shook his head. He wasn’t trusting in that mumbo-jumbo now.

  ‘We’ve got to try!’ said Tiffany. ‘Stand still. Focus on your Kelotaukhon catra. In your throat. It’s copper.’

  ‘I’m more worried about the coppers over there.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet. We spread out. I’ll stand here. Now Freeze.’

  Ben stood near a statue and tried to be one himself. He heard his heart beat slower. Through half-closed eyes he saw the young officer run past. Moments ticked by. The two policemen slowly returned to the field of graves, looking confused. Ben saw the thin one stare straight at him, and he held his breath.

  Kelotaukhon, copper maw, my mystery…

  The gaze slipped off.

  ‘They were right here,’ the officer grumbled.

  Eyes swept over him again.

  ‘Maybe it’s the vampires,’ chuckled the elder. ‘This place is meant to be full of them. Did you bring your silver handcuffs?’

  ‘Hysterical.’ His partner scowled. ‘I’m not seeing things, Trev. They can’t have gone anywhere else. I was right on their—’ He pointed straight at Ben. ‘Hey! There’s one.’

  Ben bit his tongue. Now he was cornered. Tombs reared on all sides and behind him was the sheer wall of the cemetery. Grinning, the constables advanced through the headstones. Ben glanced skywards in despair. Branches cut the clouds. A cherry tree grew near the wall.

  He jumped for the lowest bough but it was too broad to give a proper grip. His feet scraped at the trunk while the feeling drained from his hands. All that time he’d spent in arcades when he should have been learning to climb trees. One policeman chuckled. They were almost on him.

  Then his fingers found a knot or something in the branch. With a jerk of his elbows he was up in the leaves. Climbing as if hounds were after him, he saw the top of the boundary wall, leapt onto it and lowered himself over the other side, hanging from his fingers. Mossy brick pressed cold against his cheek. The policemen’s voices drifted over the wall.

  ‘Come out of the tree!’

  ‘He’s not in it, Trevor.’

  ‘What? Where’d he go?’

  ‘Search me. I’m not following him. People aren’t meant to move like that.’

  The older man let out his breath. ‘Who’d work in Hackney? You answer a call and you find yourself chasing Spring-heeled Jack.’

  The policemen went quiet.

  ‘Trev?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does this place give you the heeby-jeebies?’

  Another pause.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Trevor. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  When the silence told him they were far away, Ben lifted himself back onto the wall. He found Tiffany there, sitting on her heels.

  ‘Hey, Ben! That was really good.’

  Ben looked down and his stomach turned a somersault. That rickety cherry was the last tree any kid would try to climb. And you’d have to be stupid to jump from its branches across to this towering wall. Nevertheless, he appeared to have done both.

  ‘Look there.’ Tiffany spoke softly, pointing at the cherry tree’s bough. Pale lines, like knifestrokes, marked the crusty bark. ‘Do you think…?’

  ‘Let’s go. I don’t want to wait for them to come back.’

  ‘But don’t you see? You did it! You must have got your Mau claws to work.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Ben turned on her, suddenly angry without knowing why. ‘Those scratches are where the bark flaked off. You don’t believe everything Mrs Powell says, do you?’

  ‘So what are you doing here on a fifteen foot wall?’

  Ben found that he had folded his arms, both hands stuffed protectively into his armpits. Not that he was scared to look at them or anything.

  ‘That’s different,’ he mumbled. ‘Balancing and jumping you can practise. Those are possible things.’

  ‘Really? I’ve done some pretty impossible jumps lately. So have you. We could probably enter the Olympics and—’

  ‘Look, pashki’s just a weird martial art. There are karate experts who can smash bricks, right?’

  ‘I was reading my book with the lights off last night. Can they do that?’

  Ben hesitated. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been doing the same.

  ‘Tiffany, humans aren’t made to do these things. It’s…freakish.’

  ‘It’s fantastic.’ Tiffany lay down on the wall, watching the sky blow by.

  ‘Okay then. About Mrs Prowl.’

  ‘Our teacher’s name is—’

  ‘What does she want with us?’

  Tiffany laughed.

  ‘No, listen, just for once.’ Ben was warming up. ‘Why does she take the class? Not for the money. What we pay wouldn’t even cover her rent.’

  ‘So? She’s keen for us to learn. She doesn’t want pashki to be forgotten.’

  ‘But don’t you remember? She tricked us. We met at the leisure centre, but we haven’t been back there since. She’s nothing to do with that place. I’d bet you that no-one there has even heard of Felicity Powell.’

  He thought he’d got her with that one. Tiffany continued to stare at clouds.

  ‘I don’t think that’s suspicious,’ she said at last. ‘You have to understand how cats are. She could never be an instructor in a busy leisure centre. Cats are their own bosses. They need their space.’

  ‘She is not a cat. And she lied to us!’

  ‘Don’t be paranoid.’ Tiffany backward-rolled and stood, ignoring the steep drop either side. ‘Anyway, you like pashki. You’re streets ahead of everyone else. Except me.’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that.’

  Tiffany dropped
her eyes, as if she hadn’t meant to.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘what’s suddenly made you upset.’

  ‘Who’s upset? I’m not upset.’

  ‘Something is really bothering you.’ Tiffany met his gaze again. ‘It doesn’t take cat senses to see it.’

  She had a point. The idea that he had invisible claws was weird, but why should it make him angry? Maybe he was anxious more than angry. Maybe the word was afraid. It wasn’t just pashki. Everything he trusted in, his parents, his home, was shifting like quicksand around him. And now he was doing these inexplicable things. He felt the terror of losing himself, like a figure in a fog.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Tiffany asked.

  He wavered. He could tell her. It hardly mattered if she avoided him ever after. But tell her what? That he and Mum might be thrown out of their home before the end of the month? That he broke into a sweat whenever the phone rang? Or that he suffered nightmares in which rats seethed out of the toilet and changed into John Stanford, gnawing away the carpets, walls and floor before turning his grinning yellow teeth in Ben’s direction?

  He imagined telling her what it was like now that Mum never smiled. Now that she had given up her craftwork and only spoke to snap at him. How she’d punished him with two weeks of near-silence for getting Dad involved. Could he tell Tiffany about his last Sunday lunch with Dad, where he’d tried to ignore the bruises and missing teeth that were the work of Toby’s fists, so that they hardly said a word to each other all day? The more he thought about it, the more impossible it seemed. He couldn’t tell her any single thing. They were all tangled together in a lump. To answer her would mean spilling his guts.

  ‘Of course, I’m not a qualified therapist.’ She gave a little smile.

  That grin. At once he understood. She was after juicy gossip to feed her posh friends at ballet. To make them giggle with the story of a boy who broke down in tears. That was the only reason she was interested.

  ‘Hey, just forget it,’ he snapped. ‘Go and find some other cripple to help.’

  She drew in her breath sharply. It was as if he’d struck her. What had he said? Suddenly unable to meet her gaze, he picked moss off the wall for something to do. When he looked up a minute later, Tiffany had gone.