Cat Kin

by Nick Green

  Her brother, on one side. On the other, a room full of wild animals. Surely it was no contest? Tiffany dug her nails into her palms. No, she would not accept that. Stuart, she felt sure, would not accept it. He was the only young boy she knew who would rescue spiders from the bath rather than drown them. He even pitied the fleas she occasionally combed from Rufus’s coat, crushing their armoured bodies between her fingernails. Stuart cared. No matter how magical Cobb’s potion might be, the mere thought of the pain it had caused would be enough to bring him crashing down to earth.

  And that wasn’t all. Her brother might even be in danger. Those pills seemed to be doing him good at the moment, but she would never trust anything that had been touched by that dreadful skeletal scientist. Cobb did not care. Awful side-effects might kick in any day.

  A thought struck her. It was Monday. Dad was in the City crunching numbers, and although Mum would be working from home she rarely surfaced from the study. Stuart, by the sound of it, had the telly on.

  In the bathroom Tiffany found the current batch of Panthacea, a package of three jars. She found the fourth jar, half-full, in the kitchen. She went back upstairs and stared at the hatch in the landing ceiling. It was so high that Dad was the only one in the family who could reach it and lower the heavy wooden ladder.

  Tiffany closed her eyes and let the catras boil through her like bubbles of light. She leaped. Her right hand found the lip of the hatch, the Mau claws letting her hang for one instant while she flicked the latch and pushed the trapdoor open. She dropped back onto the landing with the lightest thump. From the study came the tap-tap of Mum sending emails. Breathing deeply yet silently, Tiffany gathered up the pill jars and crouched under the open hatch. She focused on two catras, blue and indigo, and launched herself upwards.

  Felasticon. Her whole body stretched as it threaded through the hatchway, and she had to duck to avoid banging her head on the roof’s rafters. She landed on the balls of her feet at the very edge of the trapdoor, heels jutting out into space. Not bad for the class PE wimp.

  All their junk had been stowed up here in the attic: boxes of old-fashioned vinyl records, winter clothes, her once-cherished doll’s house. She prowled across the rafters, taking care not to let any creak. At the very edge of the eaves she found a box crammed with a spaghetti of wires and dusty bulbs. She buried the pill jars deep inside.

  Mum was still typing away in the study. Biting her lip with the strain, Tiffany managed to close the trapdoor softly behind her as she lowered herself down, dropping the last few feet. She’d done it. The Panthacea was hidden where they’d never dream of looking, a place Tiffany could never have gone by herself. And if they ordered some more, expensive as it was, she would hide that batch too.

  She returned to her room and picked up a magazine. It was done. She leafed through the pages without reading them. For some reason she didn’t feel any better.

  DECLAWED

  The music pounded in Ben’s ears loud enough to bruise his brain, but at least that stopped him thinking. Encased in the din from his earphones, he sleepwalked round Clissold Park and almost didn’t see the two figures practising balances under the chestnut trees. Before he could take evasive action, Yusuf waved. Ben pulled off the earphones.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, Hey, Ben!’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Look, Olly, the maestro’s here. Want to join us?’ Yusuf sat on the grass and hooked one foot behind his head. ‘We were just—ugh!—running over some basic stuff.’

  Though he’d tried to avoid them, Ben now felt glad to see them. It seemed like years since he had talked to anyone without either arguing or having to keep something a secret. With these two, neither felt very likely. In happier circumstances, Olly would be guaranteed to make him laugh at least twice, with his clownish comments and a tone of voice that could turn the twelve times table into a comedy sketch. And there was something disarming about Yusuf, both in his brazen un-English vowels and the way he just got on with things, to the point of risking his life in the woods. Yusuf himself joked that he got this attitude from his father, who had once been Captain Mansour in an armoured division of Iraq’s Republican Guard (at least, Ben assumed it was a joke). For the moment, Ben was just grateful that he had found his friends.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll…sit this one out,’ said Ben. His ears were still ringing and it was hard to think of a suitable lie. ‘Don’t want to wreck my jeans. I ripped one pair already doing Chasing the Bird.’

  ‘Good excuse,’ grinned Olly. He winked at Yusuf. ‘I told you. Ben’s out of our league. To him we are but lemmings who fall out of trees.’

  Ben flushed. ‘It’s not like that. It’s—’ It was just that his last pashki-related memory was of knocking Mum across the kitchen. If he so much as tried the simplest Eth walk right now, he knew, he would see her face. The idea of practising a routine at the moment was unthinkable.

  ‘No sweat,’ said Yusuf. ‘We know it’s true.’ He straightened up, stretching luxuriously. ‘Wait up. We do have something to show you. Ol, shall we let him in on our plan?’

  Apparently this meant going to Olly’s house, a bus ride into a smarter patch of North London. Squeezing into Olly’s bedroom, which was large but a total bombsite, the three of them picked their way through a jungle of empty boxes, paint tins, laundry piles, rolls of paper, broken CD cases and two easels.

  ‘Check these out,’ said Yusuf. He grabbed a pile of A3 sheets from the computer desk and spread them across the available floor space. Ben peered at them out of politeness. Someone had been busy. Every sheet bore a laser-printed design, each one different: neon paw-prints, the silhouette of a cat’s head, a sea-green eye on a black background, several logos with fancy lettering, saying Cat Kin, Pasht or Mau. One especially striking design showed a spray of thin, curved lines that looked familiar somehow. Ben was impressed in spite of himself.

  ‘These are great, Olly. Did you do them?’

  ‘Yeah. Yusuf says some of the concepts are his, but he’s a big fat liar.’

  ‘You’re a brilliant artist.’

  Olly went pink.

  ‘Anyway, you get the drift?’ said Yusuf. ‘Judo teams have their own uniforms, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t. This way we can make Cat Kin more of a club.’

  ‘And here is the prototype,’ said Olly. From under his bed he pulled a black T-shirt and a pair of stretch running trousers. The shirt was printed with the curious pattern of radiating lines. ‘Yusuf’s idea, if you believe that for one nanosecond.’

  ‘It’s good.’ Ben frowned, still trying to place the image.

  ‘It is good. In fact it’s the cat’s whiskers,’ said Yusuf.

  Of course. Those lines were like the spray of hairs from a cat’s snout and eyebrows, making one imagine an invisible cat face, with only the whiskers glowing in the dark.

  ‘Mm.’ Ben pretended an enthusiasm he couldn’t feel. All this talk of Cat Kin only made him think again of what he’d done. The fear that Mum would never forgive him was like a constant pain. He could imagine how those caged animals felt, with the torment of the tubes in their flanks…

  No. Best not to go there.

  ‘He’s a hard man to impress, isn’t he?’ said Olly to Yusuf.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ben. ‘It’s a great idea. I’ve just got a lot on my mind.’

  ‘Nothing as important as this, I bet,’ said Olly, feeding a CD into his computer. ‘You know that new game, Cygnus X-1? Voila! Pirated two weeks before release. I had to kill for it, too.’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Ben. ‘I should be getting home.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Yusuf slapped his head playfully. ‘This is an advance copy. Not even Prince Harry has this one yet.’

  It wasn’t fair to be miserable around these two. The joy of the summer holiday was still pumping through their veins and the world would be paradise for a couple more weeks yet. They deserved to be rid of him.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ said Ben.

&nbs
p; ‘Okay.’ Olly and Yusuf exchanged a puzzled glance.

  Riding the bus back to Dad’s in the afternoon sunshine, Ben knew he could wait no longer. He had to see Mum and sort things out. He jumped off two stops early and ran across the park. As he wove between pushchairs and dog-walkers he tried to rehearse what he would say. ‘Sorry,’ was as far as he could get. Perhaps it was enough.

  Approaching Defoe Court he glanced at the clouds. It sounded like a storm was coming. Another rumble followed the first, this one tinnier, as if it weren’t real thunder but the kind made by stagehands using sheets of metal. He quickened his stride. Something about the view was different. A tall pylon-thing was rising behind the rows of houses. A crane. A third boom reached his ears and this one definitely wasn’t thunder. By the time he reached his street he was sprinting.

  Boom.

  He saw walls, strangely familiar but topped by ragged summits. He saw windows, empty of glass, and through them holes of sky. He saw bricks heaped like snowdrifts. A giant metal pear hung by a hawser from the tip of the crane. As he watched, the pear swung, languid as a handbag, into the fourth storey of the block. The wall coughed dust and shifted out of line. Another thump from the wrecking ball and the brickwork buckled, showering in chunks to the ground.

  Boom.

  The pavement seemed to move under him like the deck of a boat. Where was he? He should have been standing outside his flat. Somehow he had taken a wrong turning and ended up at a building site. Instead of a block of apartments there was a semi-ruin.

  Then his brain woke up and pointed out that they were demolishing his home.

  ‘Mum!’ Mechanical roars drowned him out. ‘Mum! Where are you?’

  He ran into a chain-link fence that sprang before him like a spider’s web. The crane’s caterpillar treads had ploughed up the tiny gardens. Somewhere in the mud lay Mum’s cherished basil, rosemary and sage.

  Between skips and parked trucks he saw the dust-smeared windows. It looked like the flat was empty. Of course it would be. They couldn’t knock down a building with someone still inside it. Could they?

  ‘Mum!’ he yelled, so loud it hurt.

  ‘Oi!’ A man in a hard hat waved at him. ‘Clear off. Ain’t you kids got no sense of danger?’

  She had gone. But all his stuff would be in there. His clothes, his books, his computer, his favourite duvet cover. Would Mum have bothered to save any of it?

  He backed away, hypnotised by the swing of the wrecking ball. His eyes slid down the crane’s neck to the orange cab, emblazoned with the name Horton and Forrester. The driver sat tweaking levers as if playing a computer game. Ben watched a fissure open up in the wall and found himself staring into his bedroom. He peeled his hands from the fence and fled.

  Something bulky flumped through the letterbox. Stuart heaved himself off the sofa and hurried into the hall. Tiffany heard his grumble of disappointment and relaxed.

  ‘Not come yet?’ she asked.

  ‘Just some of Dad’s stupid CDs.’ He flopped onto the sofa with a dry cough. ‘If it doesn’t come soon I’ll end up back in hospital.’

  ‘You don’t seem bad today,’ Tiffany said, as brightly as she could.

  ‘I soon will be,’ said Stuart, ‘once the last lot wears off.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Know what I think? I think Mum accidentally threw the jars away when she cleaned out the bathroom. Not that she’ll own up to it.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  Tiffany turned up the television. This had been the most uncomfortable fortnight of her life. When Stuart first complained he couldn’t find his medicine, the first thing Mum did was ask Tiffany. And after searching the whole house she did everything but accuse her outright. Finally Dad took Tiffany aside and asked her to think, carefully, if she might have put Stuart’s pills anywhere…at which point Tiffany had to shout that they blamed her for everything and that she wasn’t her brother’s drug-dealer. That shut them up. It helped that Stuart was on her side. ‘Of course Tiffany can’t have lost them,’ he told his parents. ‘She never loses anything. Not even her swimming goggles, Dad.’

  Once every room and dustbin had been ransacked, her parents gave up and ordered a fresh course of Panthacea from the Only Nature’s Own website. The price had risen to seventy pounds a pack. Tiffany squirmed in silence. She’d just managed to put more money into Doctor Cobb’s pocket. And soon she’d have another batch to hide. You can hide a hundred batches, sneered a nasty inner voice. Those cats will still be caged.

  On Sunday Tiffany woke late and headed hungrily downstairs. Mum was ironing.

  ‘Hi!’ Tiffany poured oat crunchies and drowned them in milk. She glanced at Mum to see why she hadn’t answered. On the ironing board was something purple.

  ‘Isn’t that your nice silk blouse?’ said Tiffany. ‘The one you were looking for?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You found it, then.’ Tiffany was puzzled by Mum’s stony face. ‘Where was it?’

  Dad appeared in the doorway. He held three little boxes and a jar.

  ‘ I found it,’ he said. ‘In the attic.’

  The bowl slipped from her hand. Milk and china smashed across the floor. She groped for the nearest sink cloth.

  ‘Leave that.’ Dad put the Panthacea on the sideboard and came close, lifting her chin so she had to look him in the face. ‘I’m not going to ask if you did it,’ he said, ‘that’s clear enough. I’m not going to ask how you did it, though I confess you’ve got me puzzled. What I want to know, Tiffany, is why?’

  She tried to turn her head aside. The look in Dad’s eyes was unbearable, it was one she had never seen before. He held her fast. ‘Talk to me, girl. Why did you hide your brother’s medicine?’

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Mum burst out.

  ‘Are you trying to get back at him for some silly—’ Dad couldn’t even finish the sentence. ‘Because if you are—’

  The time had come. She had to tell. But, but…if she told them the truth they might never believe her, and if they did believe her it would be worse. Stuart would know what he had been swallowing these past months. The terrible way the pills were made. Her throat closed till she could barely breathe.

  ‘Young lady, you’re not leaving this room till you’ve explained yourself,’ said Mum. But Tiffany had tuned out. She couldn’t take her eyes off Stuart, who had entered the kitchen holding a book to his chest.

  ‘Tiffany?’ said Stuart. ‘You were only playing a joke, weren’t you?’

  She stared at the floor. The patterns on the tiles blurred with tears.

  ‘Don’t you want me to get well, then?’ Stuart asked. ‘Do you only like me when I’m ill, or something?’

  She pushed Dad’s hand away with a violence that made him gasp in surprise. She ran past Stuart, down the hall and out into the street.

  ‘Should we have let her do that?’ murmured Dad, agonisingly clear to her feline hearing. ‘Better to ground her.’

  ‘And give her what she wants? It’s attention seeking, Peter. Jealousy’s a terrible thing.’ A sigh. ‘And I thought she adored Stuart.’

  Slouched behind the wheel of the car, Ben lowered the sun visor as the sun sank to blind him. He floored the accelerator but, unsurprisingly, the car didn’t move. The Volkswagen was parked on top of another car, with another stacked upon its own roof, just one more wreck in a mountain of them. Ben knew Hamish’s Car Dump from when he and his rougher mates from the high-street arcade used to mess around on dull weekends. How he had ended up here today, alone in this metal elephant’s graveyard, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was the last place he could feel at home.

  Just once, he had plucked up the courage to go back to the flat. It wasn’t there. Even the rubble had been carted away. Yet home still called to him piteously. He had heard that people who lose a limb can still suffer pain in it. He believed that now.

  After watching the walls fall he had fled to Dad’s flat. There he found Mum, sitting on the sofa with a whisky glass trembling in her ha
nd. Bit by bit the story came out. It seemed that John Stanford had lost patience. Suddenly there were builders outside. There were lawyers in her home, bearing deeds that explained it was her home no longer. Lucy Gallagher had no time to wonder how Stanford had conjured this. She packed what she could fit into her car and the demolition crew closed in. Most of what she’d decided to save, it turned out, was Ben’s stuff.

  Dad was being a rock. He was managing to smile and joke. Mum kept repeating that she’d been a fool, now she’d lost everything, every penny. Dad refused to listen. He talked of court battles, of compensation running into millions of pounds. There was no question of it: Stanford had broken the law. Now they’d take him to the cleaners. Mum nodded. She didn’t believe it. Nor did Ben.

  Sitting down to dinner that evening had been weird. Ben couldn’t help noticing that Mum and Dad were back together. At least, they were sitting at the same table. But no-one ate or spoke much and Dad was clearly struggling to keep up the flow of good cheer. They hadn’t got back together. Mum was only here because she had nowhere else to go. Dad would sleep on the sofa. They weren’t a family. They were three shipwrecked strangers clinging to the same chunk of driftwood.

  The springs in the old car seat were like a bed of nails. Ben got out and climbed to the ground. A taste of rust hung in the air. He saw a metal bar jutting from a chassis and worked it loose.

  Stanford had destroyed them. Stanford and his sick friend Cobb. Their lives had been nothing, hedgehogs dazed and blinking in the fast lane of the M1. Now it was over.

  Ben swung the bar like a tennis racket. It connected with the Volkswagen’s near headlight and he had to cover his face as glass sprayed over him. He shook the fragments out of his hair and smashed the other headlight too.

  Hefting the bar he took a roundhouse swipe at a windscreen, turning it to crushed ice. Yelling, he walloped a door until it crumpled like foil. Hands black with rust, he beat at the cars until he had no strength. The bar dropped and he fell to his knees.