Cat Kin

by Nick Green

  She bounded one big stride along the slender branch and landed on it hard. It bent right down to the dead limb where Yusuf hung. In that instant Tiffany sprang back up, stretching out. Felasticon. Her fingertips found the oak’s rugged hide just before its trunk knocked the breath from her body. She hung there, dizzy, a rainbow of catras strobing in her head, until the world swam back into focus.

  Getting a proper grip on a squirrel’s hole she looked over her shoulder. Yusuf had done it. The supple branch, with her weight gone, had pulled him up as he grabbed it. Reaching the safety of a three-way fork he slumped, panting, on a pillow of ivy. Never had she seen anyone look so relieved, unless it was Olly, now down on the ground picking holly leaves out of his shirt. High in the oak, Tiffany found a comfy place to sit. She found she was grinning like an idiot.

  ‘That,’ said Mrs Powell, ‘is not what I told you to do.’

  ‘Right,’ someone muttered.

  ‘Let’s hear it for…for disobedience,’ Yusuf panted. ‘Ten out of ten, Tiffs.’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Powell shot back. ‘Disobedience is what got you into that mess, Yusuf. If you’d done as I said neither you nor Oliver would have fallen.’ Her tone became softer. ‘Still. That’s what happens when you train people to be cats. As Akhotep points out, cats heed no words.’ She paused. ‘So there’s no real point in saying, well done, Tiffany.’

  Mrs Powell rubbed a hand absently over her mouth. They rested again before moving on at a gentler pace. Olly stayed at ground level, Yusuf keeping him company.

  Tiffany was walking on air. Daniel wouldn’t shut up about what she’d done, telling it over and over, complete with sound effects. Cecile said she was officially the Cat Princess, and Susie was speechless. Though she tried not to bask in it too much, Tiffany became aware of a swagger in her step as she moved from branch to branch.

  Her Mau whiskers vibrated. Ben was crackling through the twigs of a nearby tree.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘That’s not on the route, is it?’

  ‘What if it isn’t?’

  ‘Only the ones with painted eyes, remember,’ said Tiffany. ‘Come on. We don’t want any more accidents.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t, do we?’

  The scorn in his voice practically shook her from her perch.

  ‘What’s got into you, Ben?’

  ‘I bet you thought that was clever.’

  ‘What was?’

  Ben crouched on a crooked beam, seeming to bristle. Why? Tiffany looked round. Mrs Powell was busy helping Cecile cross an awkward gap.

  ‘It was worth the risk, was it?’ said Ben. ‘To make yourself look good. There’s a time and a place for showing off.’

  ‘I wasn’t showing off!’ She crossed into the forbidden tree. ‘I was helping Yusuf.’

  ‘Mrs Powell told you to help us. We could have dropped Olly.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Tiffany replied. ‘And my plan worked.’

  ‘By a fluke, yeah.’ Ben flicked a wing-shaped seed off a twig. It helicoptered down to the undergrowth.

  ‘I’d no time to think,’ said Tiffany. ‘Anyway, even if Yusuf had fallen, he’d have fallen on his feet. Cats always do.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘You are unbelievable. So sure everything will turn out all right. Let me tell you now, it doesn’t. You fall too far, you don’t get up again.’

  ‘And you’re the expert.’

  ‘I haven’t grown up wrapped in cotton wool, no.’

  That hurt. For a second Tiffany wanted to scream at him.

  ‘I can’t help it if I’m actually good at something, can I?’ she hissed.

  ‘Is that so.’ Ben stepped onto the end of his branch, so that it dipped like a rollercoaster rail. ‘You’ve got a point to prove? Come on then, prove it.’ His eyes were slits, utterly feline. ‘Last one back to the dell is dog food.’

  The branch shuddered like a diving-board as he leaped, plunging into the waterfall leaves of a willow. Before the green ripples had died he was scrambling up the steepest bough, calf muscles creasing with the strain.

  Tiffany was convinced she would do the sensible thing. To follow him would be stupid. For one thing, it would play into his hands, and for another, Mrs Powell would skin her alive. Not to mention the perils of straying off the route. It was the silliest, most childish thing imaginable. So it came as a real shock to find herself sprinting along the sycamore’s arm and springing after him.

  Later she would ask herself why. Coming first at things didn’t interest her, or so she believed. Racing against a moody boy who didn’t even like cats was hardly worth risking her life. She would look back and think that, if it weren’t for this one rash impulse, things might have turned out differently. For now, it was as if some inner demon had taken control.

  Ben was clambering upwards, probably a good tactic for moving quickly through the wood. Tiffany wished she’d thought of the fingerless gloves—her own sore palms were traced with bark patterns. Ignoring the shout from behind her (‘Tiffany! Ben! Stop this instant!’) she jumped for the bearded willow, grabbed an armful of tendrils and swung like Tarzan through its horseshoe frame. She let go. There was a moment of terror as she sailed through emptiness. Then her inner cat kicked in, twisting her in mid-air so that she touched down on the willow’s outer limb. She looked up in time to see Ben hurtling, black against the sky, into the crowning branches of a…there was no time to tell what kind of tree it was.

  Okay, so he was pretty fast. She could do better. Though he had the altitude, down here the treescape offered more opportunities. A tree bearing bobbly green fruits fanned its branches like the spokes of an umbrella. She bounded from spoke to spoke, catapulting herself off the last branch. In a blink she was inside a cathedral of a horse chestnut, emerald light glimmering through leafy windows, its mighty boughs straining higher like a spire towards the sun. Up she dashed through the rafters as if ascending a spiral staircase, leaping out through a portal in the leaves.

  Twigs crashed in her right ear. Ben had landed on the same branch as her. He had the cheek to flash a smile before springing off, one jump ahead. They were in a piny evergreen that stuck out rafts of foliage like rainclouds. The rafts shook and thundered, showering needles and cones, as first Ben and then Tiffany bounced from one to the next.

  But, she saw, Ben had made a mistake. He had strayed too far to the right, where a gap in the woods made it impossible to continue. By cutting up the inside, around the trunk of the pine, she could nip into the next tree and take the lead. With a thrill of triumph she skidded down a nobbly branch and looked round for Ben. Her heart missed a beat.

  He was flying through the air in a mind-boggling leap. She stopped still, aghast. More than twenty feet of nothing yawned between the pine and the nearest safe landing, an oak. He would never make it.

  He made it.

  Her horror turned to disbelief. Foliage buckled and burst with the force of Ben smashing through it. Had he sprouted wings, she’d have been less astonished. She pursued, but with a sinking heart. If he was ready to dare jumps like that, she was not going to win this race. Now he was one whole tree ahead. Her catras kindled, Ailur for agility and Parda for strength, and she poured herself onwards. Ben was already gone. Surely he couldn’t have left her behind so quickly?

  She spun on one toe. The oak tree looked empty. Her eyes were drawn by a flock of ducks rising like smoke from the shrub layer, as if something had disturbed them. Her insides lurched. Something was wrong. Trembling, suddenly unsure of being up so high, she somehow struggled down to the ground and ran stumbling between the trees.

  She pushed through bushes onto the shore of a large pond, where she found herself surrounded by a dozen women in swimsuits. One tall, athletic woman covered in tattoos was wading out of the shallows, dragging some heavy floating object behind her. She heaved it up onto the wooden jetty and stood there pink-faced, panting with exertion.

  ‘Just what d’ya think you were doing?’ she spat, wiping her eyes. ‘Think it’s fun
to bomb into the water out of the trees, yeah? You could have killed someone. And this is the women’s bathing pond, as if you didn’t know.’

  Ben, his T-shirt and tracksuit leggings ripped and soaking wet, rolled over with a groan. His face was masked with mud and pond-weed, mingling with his cat-paint to turn him into some sort of water-goblin.

  ‘Sorry. He’s with me.’ Running to his side, Tiffany helped Ben to stand.

  ‘You can keep him. Little creep,’ muttered someone else.

  When they had limped through the trees a safe distance, Tiffany let him walk on his own. He crumpled onto his knees. For a second she worried that he was terribly injured. Then she saw he was laughing.

  ‘Come on, get up.’ She jabbed him with her foot. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You were wrong,’ Ben spluttered, still catching his breath. ‘I was right.’

  ‘What do you mean? Right about what?’

  ‘Cats don’t…’ Ben stopped to spit out a string of algae. ‘Cats don’t always fall on their feet.’

  THE UNINVITED GUEST

  Sensible Jim had evaporated through the cat flap in the first heat of Mrs Powell’s rage. Ben wished there was a pashki trick for following him. Mrs Powell stopped shouting. He waited. As expected, she was only taking another breath.

  ‘Don’t think I’d be sorry if you broke your necks,’ she fumed. ‘I couldn’t care less, believe me. But if you kill yourselves with your games it is I who will go to jail. And I’m not spending the last years of my life locked in a cell.’

  Ben couldn’t look at Tiffany. He knew he would see tears on her cheeks.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘A feeble answer,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘You know full well what got into you. As do I. The point is, you control it.’

  Tiffany whispered some wretched apology of her own. Mrs Powell glowered a while longer. Then she said:

  ‘There once were two cats at Kilkenny. Each thought there was one cat too many. So they quarrelled and fit, they scratched and they bit, till instead of two cats, there weren’t any.’ She smiled thinly. ‘You two haven’t been getting along, is that it?’

  Ben shuffled his feet.

  ‘I know what got into you,’ Mrs Powell repeated. ‘Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to know who to blame.’

  ‘It was mostly my fault,’ said Ben. ‘You mustn’t blame Tiffany too much.’

  ‘Very noble, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘The fact is, you’re both at the stage when you’ll begin to ignore me anyway. The Mau heeds nothing but its own voice.’ She gave a humourless laugh. ‘You ought to feel sorry for me. It’s hard being a teacher when your ultimate goal is that your pupils will stop listening to you.’

  Tiffany showed no sign of understanding this any better than Ben did. He wondered if he would faint on the studio floor. He ached all over, his skin itched with twig scratches and he felt damp and rank as a compost heap. He longed to get home, soak in the bath and fall into bed.

  ‘Still,’ said Mrs Powell, ‘you’re alive. And possibly wiser. Perhaps I can enjoy a worry-free holiday.’

  She saw them out, peering intently into their faces as they crossed the threshold. Ben felt as if something had put its paw on his grave.

  ‘Cheerio,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in a few weeks. Meanwhile,’ her eyes glinted in the stairwell’s pale light, ‘stay out of trouble.’

  Ben had suspected that one day he might be attacked in his own home. But not by Tiffany.

  ‘Mostly your fault?’ she cried. ‘I like that. “Oh, Mrs Powell, you mustn’t blame her!” Damn right she shouldn’t. What did I do?’

  ‘Well…you did follow me.’

  ‘A good thing I did. Someone had to keep an eye on you.’ Tiffany flushed a little. Ben had been surprised to hear her voice on the entry phone, asking if she could come in. She was calling round, she said, to see if he was okay after his fall yesterday. Now, having satisfied herself that he wasn’t fatally injured, she was ripping into him.

  ‘I told her it was me,’ Ben protested. ‘What more do you want?’

  ‘But the way you said it made her think it was my fault!’ said Tiffany. ‘While you look good by offering to take the blame.’

  She’d lost him already. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Did I?’ she mimicked. ‘Yeah, Ben. As if you didn’t know. So now Mrs Powell’s hacked off with me, while you’re some kind of hero for owning up to something you didn’t do, when you did, and—ugh!’ She slapped her own head.

  Smiling certainly wasn’t a good idea. She glared at him but that only made it worse. Fighting the giggles, he backed away down the hall.

  ‘You’ve got to admit,’ he was cornered against the linen cupboard, ‘it is pretty funny.’

  For a second he thought he was a goner.

  ‘Shut up.’ A grin had caught her unawares. ‘You probably just ruined my life.’

  ‘One down, eight to go, eh?’ Ben slipped past her into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Mum’s friend Lorelei had dragged her out to dinner this evening, in a bid to take her mind off things, so it was sandwiches for Ben. He found a plate of them wrapped in cling film.

  ‘Then again,’ Ben couldn’t resist saying, ‘it kind of was your fault.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sandwich?’ He held the plate out. She ignored it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, dangerously.

  ‘Well,’ said Ben, ‘you do sometimes lord it over the rest of us. Always trying to prove you’re the best. Which you probably are.’

  ‘That is so made-up,’ snapped Tiffany. ‘I don’t do that. I never expected to be any good at pashki. You’re the competitive one. And the—’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Well…a bit rude, since you ask. Acting like I’m not there.’

  ‘You don’t exactly chat much to me, either.’

  ‘Well, if you’d been less…I don’t know, wrapped up in yourself.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you were like.’

  They stared at each other a moment. Slowly, Tiffany broke into a smile.

  ‘We seem to be talking.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ben felt suddenly shy. ‘It doesn’t hurt that much, does it?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘Friends, then?’

  Feeling his face go a shade redder, he fetched two plates from the cupboard.

  ‘Want to share these?’

  They went into the lounge, where a pair of his boxer shorts were drying on the radiator. He snatched them off, stuffing them under a cushion as he sat down. They munched happily at tinned tuna and cucumber.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Tiffany spoke with her mouth full, ‘I really thought you were angry with someone. Me, or Mrs Powell. I guess I imagined it.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ said Ben. ‘I mean, I am angry. But not at anyone you know.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  She nodded. He looked at the wall beside her and told her everything. From the first appearance of John Stanford to the wrecked front door, to Dad’s beating at the hands of the thug Toby. As Tiffany listened, Ben felt a weight lift off him. Soon he was talking not to the wall but to her face.

  ‘Phew,’ said Tiffany, when he finally trailed off. ‘Can’t you go to the police?’

  He repressed a groan.

  ‘We did try,’ he said. ‘Apparently, no crime has been committed. Stanford’s too good at covering his tracks.’

  ‘But the door…your dad…’

  ‘This is Hackney,’ said Ben, bitterly. ‘The door could have been kicked in by any druggie. And my dad went looking for trouble and got it. Thanks to me. I should have kept my mouth shut.’ He picked at his sandwich. ‘Sorry. I bet this is a real downer for you.’

  Tiffany flicked a crumb at him. ‘Don’t go back to being like that. You should talk about it. I know what it’s like when…when no-one will listen.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes.’

&nbs
p; Now it was her turn to talk. She told him about her brother. Of a terrible, creeping illness, of hospital wards and empty houses, of parents pushed near breaking point. By the time she finished, the living room was darkening and the remaining sandwiches had gone crisp. Ben didn’t bother turning on the light. Both of them could see perfectly well.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ben, after a while.

  ‘S’alright. It’s nothing you did.’

  ‘I mean…I’ve been thick. I always thought you must have this perfect life, compared to me.’

  ‘I look at lots of people and think that.’ said Tiffany. ‘But there’s no such thing. Even if Stuart wasn’t ill…’ She looked sad, then brightened. ‘Anyway. He’s getting better. With this new medicine. So things probably are tougher for you.’

  ‘Not that we’re being competitive or anything,’ said Ben.

  They both laughed. Tiffany was okay, Ben decided. Maybe more than okay.

  ‘Do your parents know?’ she asked him, abruptly. ‘About the Cat Kin, I mean?’

  ‘As if!’ said Ben. ‘Well, Mums knows I take a class. It was her idea that I do self-defence. To her, pashki’s just a kind of karate. That suits me. As for my dad… well, I don’t really talk to him enough. So it’s never come up.’

  Tiffany gave the wryest of smiles. ‘Sounds ve-ry familiar.’

  ‘You keep it secret too?’

  ‘Ha.’ Her smile soured. ‘Wouldn’t matter if I didn’t. Wouldn’t matter if I recited Akhotep’s catra chant at breakfast. One day, I swear, I’ll climb the stairs in two strides and they won’t even blink. All my mum and dad think about is—’ She stopped.

  ‘Stuart?’

  Tiffany gazed at her feet. ‘I’m not, you know, jealous of him or anything. I—I love him. And he’s ill. He needs them more than I do.’

  Ben took a breath and found his mind had gone blank. He couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t sound stupid.

  ‘Of course,’ Tiffany went on, her voice sounding husky, ‘I never would tell them the real story. About pashki. But I do sometimes feel…it might be nice if they were a little bit curious, now and then. Don’t you think?’