Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  I was too groggy to be disappointed right then. All I could manage was something like, “Oh. Where’s Dorset?”

  “I’ll show you on the map tomorrow,” Sally said. “It’s Thomas Hardy country, Evan says it’s utterly beautiful, you’ll love it. And there’s the Cerne Abbas Giant, and we can go to Salisbury Plain and see Stonehenge—and we’ll be living on a big old estate, a real manor, Jenny. I know you had your face fixed for London, but we can get to London anytime we want. This is special, baby, this is better than London, believe me.”

  Mister Cat got up and walked across my legs to say hello to Sally. He always ignored Norris completely, from day one, but he likes Sally okay. She rubbed her knuckles against his head, the way he loves, and I could feel him purring in the bed. She said, “Yes, you old street guy you, yes, you’ll love it, too, yes, you will, you’ll go wild. All the turf in the world to pee on and patrol, all kinds of new little creatures to chase, dozens of English lady cats looking for a fling with a hip Yank like you. Just a few weeks in nasty quarantine and you’ll be back in business, we’ll have to call you Sir Cat.” She was pushing it, even sliding back down into sleep I could tell that, wanting me so much to love the idea of living on some farm in the west whatever of England. Sally just gets to me sometimes, like nobody else ever. Even Tamsin.

  And I’d probably have mumbled, “Oh, okay, sure,” and been asleep halfway through, except that Evan said something that woke me up faster than ice cubes down my back, which is how Sally used to do it on desperate Mondays. He said to her, “I’m afraid it’ll be more than a few weeks, love. It’s a full six months he’ll have to stay there.”

  This next part is hard to get down, because no matter how I write it, it keeps coming out really embarrassing, like a lot of things in this book already, it seems to me. I’m hardly even started, and if it’s going to be like this all the way through, with me looking like a supreme idiot every ten seconds, I may just quit the whole thing, never mind what I promised Meena. I’ll keep at it a while longer, I guess, but I’m just warning everybody now.

  Anyway. What happened was that something I hadn’t even known was ready to go just snapped. I screamed and I yelled, and I was shaking, and I grabbed Mister Cat away from Sally and jumped out of bed and kept on yelling. “I’m not going without him! That’s it, forget it, I’m not going to England if he has to be in a cage for six months! The one thing I’ve got in the world, and I’m not leaving him in any damn cage, he’ll think I’ve abandoned him! Forget it, no chance, no way, I’m calling Norris, I’ll find someplace to stay, but I am not going to fucking England without my cat!” There was a whole lot more of it, but that’s all that’s getting into my book.

  Sally didn’t yell back at me. She just sat there, looking as though she’d been punched in the stomach. Once she said, real low, “Jenny, I didn’t know, I really thought it was just for a month,” and I knew it was the truth, but I screamed at her anyway. And that part is not going in, I don’t care.

  Evan stopped me. He just finally looked at me and said, “Jenny, that’s enough. Don’t talk like that to your mother.” He never raised his voice, but I stopped. Evan can do that. He said, “Let’s get this silly crap out of the way, Jenny. Like it or not, you’re coming to England, because that’s where Sally’s going, and she’s in charge of you until you’re eighteen years old. And yes, your cat will have to spend a full six months in quarantine, I’m very sorry. But he’ll be at a kennel as close to us as possible, and he’ll be treated well, and I promise you can go and see him there whenever you like. I’ll take you myself.” He grinned at me, and that was the first time I noticed that his eyes turn practically blue when he smiles, not gray or hazel at all. Evan said, “Come on, girl, this is England we’re talking about. Don’t you know they let animals vote in England?”

  I didn’t laugh or smile back. I’d about have died first just then. But I didn’t yell anymore. My throat and the back of my mouth hurt so I couldn’t even swallow. Mister Cat stretched low against my ankle and dug in his claws very lightly. He doesn’t ever scratch me, but that’s what he does when he’s mad at me. Then he jumped down off the bed and left. I told Sally I was sorry, and she hugged me, and Evan got me some orange juice for my throat, then they went away. I left the door a little way open, but Mister Cat didn’t come back in, not all night.

  He was there in the morning, though, lying on his back between my feet with one leg sticking straight up in the air. When you’re as cool as he is, you can look as stupid as you want, and it doesn’t matter.

  Four

  Probably it was getting the visas that made it real. You need a visa to go to England if you’re staying longer than six months, and Sally made a big point of us making sure we got them right away, because we were going to be residents, not just tourists. “We’ll still be there when they’ve all gone home,” was what she said, and my stomach turned right over and froze solid, because I could see it. The sky getting darker and darker, and everybody but us gone home.

  Or maybe it was Mister Cat’s red label finally arriving. Sally was going to handle all the quarantine stuff, but I told her I’d do it. I didn’t want to, but he was my cat. So I wrote off to England, to MAFF (that’s the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), and they sent me an import license application to fill out, and another thing for Customs, and a whole long list of specially approved kennels and vets and what they call “carrying agents”—people who could pick up Mister Cat at Heathrow Airport and take him to wherever he was going to spend the next six miserable months. Meena says she had to do the same thing when her family came to England, and all she had was a white mouse named Karthik. If I’m spelling it right.

  So then I wrote to every one of the kennels in Dorset, and they all sent me their fancy brochures with color pictures of where they kept their animals, and actual menus of what they fed them, and how the runs and cages were heated, and what days the vet would come for checkups, and what days they did worming and grooming and all. (I crossed out that last part, because you don’t groom Mister Cat—you could lose an arm trying. He does that himself.)

  Evan wanted to help me pick a place, but I wasn’t talking to Evan then. I chose one myself, called Goshawk Farm Cattery, because they said you could come and visit anytime without calling ahead, and Sally said not to worry about the cost, because she was feeling guilty, which was fine with me. I picked a carrying agent myself, too, and I hunted all over to find the right kind of travel cage, with enough ventilation and two water bottles. And I filled everything out and sent it off, and after a long time MAFF sent back what’s called a “boarding document” and a red label to stick on the cage. When I put it on and just stood there looking at the big number and the small print—I don’t know, maybe that was it. When I knew we were really going.

  No, the piano, I think the piano’s what finally did it. Because everywhere we’ve lived, everything’s always been centered around Sally’s piano. Always. First you figure exactly where the piano wants to be, then you worry about how you get into the bathroom. Everything took second place to the piano being happy, I can’t remember when I didn’t know that. And the day I got home and the piano was gone, shipped out, out the window, the way it came in, it felt like a steam shovel had crashed in and scooped out our apartment—like a lot more had vanished than just the piano. And I knew that piano was on its way to some English farm somewhere, and I edged around the space where it had been and got to my room and started packing for real. Because we always followed my mother’s piano, that’s one thing I understood.

  And after that the boxes started going, all the stuff Sally, Louise and Cleon had been taping up, day by day, faster and faster, like it was all getting sucked out through the hole the piano had left. I guess it was worse because I’d put such a lot of effort into not noticing what was being packed. I got up one morning and every book in the house had disappeared in the night, along with most of the towels and bedsheets. Or I came home late another time, and there we
re three chairs left, and no silverware. My footsteps actually echoed in the living room, because all the paintings by Sally’s friends were gone, and the big rug Grandma Paula gave her and Norris when they got married. Dinner was Sally and Evan and me at the kitchen table, eating Italian takeout with plastic knives and forks. Then the table went, and we sat on the floor to eat, because the last chairs were gone too. I remember the weather was really hot that summer, but that poor scooped-out apartment just kept getting colder and colder.

  But Sally loved it. The emptier the place got, the brighter and livelier she got. She said it reminded her of how things looked when we moved in, and she kept telling me, “Jenny, it’s an adventure. Everybody needs to start from scratch once in a while. Just to scrap all your security, all the things you’re sure of, and step right off the cliff. Look, here we are, right now, falling through space, and all we’ve got to trust is each other and Evan. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Wild,” I said. “Mister Cat can’t sleep at night because of all the noise, and he’s going bananas because his dish and his box aren’t in the same place two days in a row. And he hates that travel cage, I can’t get him to go in—he just braces his legs and pees on it. He knows what it is.”

  Sally looked straight at me. She said, “Well, that’s tough. He’ll survive just fine. We’ll all survive.” She’d never have said it like that once, that was Evan, no, that was her with Evan. It was really confusing, watching my mother leaving me, flowing into some other shape, the way they do it in movies. Sometimes, watching her, I felt like I was the only person in the world who couldn’t move, couldn’t change shape. Everywhere I looked, everything was being dragged away and not one damn thing put back. I’d have peed on my travel cage, too, if I could have gotten hold of it.

  I remember Marta and I were in Central Park one afternoon, watching people dancing to a salsa band, and both of us were sort of semi-lifted on some Hawaiian she’d found in her brother Paco’s coat pocket. It was a hot, clear, sunny day, with little kids and their dogs chasing each other around, and Frisbees slicing overhead, and people on rollerblades zipping past you like bullets everywhere you looked. I was saying, “Something’s going to happen. I don’t know what, but something.”

  Marta shook her head. She can look really wise when she’s high, because her face is so small and her eyes get so big and black. She said, “I’ll write every week. I promise. Jake, too.”

  “I’m scared about going to school there,” I said. “It’s just the pits, I’ve been reading about it. They beat up everybody who isn’t English. I’m going to get killed.”

  Marta laughed. “Come on, people think like that about this country. Just wear your grungy leather jacket, they’ll think you’re a big gangster.” She did a kind of Benny Hill English voice. “Ooo, ooo, nono, I don’t wanna mess with her, she’s from Noo Yahk.” She got to giggling then, and couldn’t stop, so that got me doing it, and we just sat there in the sun, looking at each other and giggling. The salsa band quit, and a couple of skinny tattooed guys started juggling torches and moonwalking at the same time. I said, “I’m really scared, Marta. I really am.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Marta said. She put her arm around me, which was awkward because of her being smaller than me, and we sort of snuggled, just for a little bit. It didn’t exactly help, but it was nice.

  And then it was three weeks to go, and then two weeks, and then like that, two days. I couldn’t believe it. Sally’s students were giving all kinds of good-bye parties for her and Evan, and she asked me to come with them every time, but I never did. Norris and his girlfriend Suzanne took me out to a fancy dinner at a French place on the East Side, and Norris gave me a genuine Burberry secret-agent trench coat, waterproof, for wearing in England. It was too big, but Norris said I’d grow into it. I actually have.

  Jake and Marta wanted to give me a farewell party of my own, which was when I realized that I didn’t want one. I just wanted to do exactly what we always did, so we settled for picking up gyros at the Greek’s on Amsterdam, and then just walking, going absolutely nowhere, eating and talking like nothing was different, just the three of us messing along the same as always on one more summer night, like being inside some kind of warm, sweet, sticky pastry. When we got to my place, we just stood there under the awning and looked at each other. They didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want to go upstairs, and everybody knew everything, and there wasn’t anything to say. So finally Marta just said, “You take care, vata,” and she hugged me, and Jake hugged me, too. He was crying a little. He said, “Man, when you’ve only got a couple of real friends…” and I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know already, get out of here, Walkowitz, go on.” So then they left.

  Mister Cat was home. I turned on all the lights, and we sat on a box by the window in my room. There were people working outside, tearing up West Eighty-third, same as they’d been doing for the last couple of years, day and night, except Sundays. They’re probably still at it. I listened to the jackhammers, and I thought about how noisy New York is all the time, everywhere, and how you get so used to it you never even notice. Maybe I was so used to it I wouldn’t be able to breathe someplace quiet, the way I already felt I couldn’t breathe in this empty apartment. I’d probably just die of quiet, over there on some farm in Dorset, and nobody’d ever figure out why. I started to cry myself, thinking about it. It felt great, but Mister Cat got annoyed at me sniffling and honking into his fur, so I quit, and we just sat there at the window together until Sally and Evan got home.

  The whole trip to London is one miserable blur, and I don’t want to write much about it. Evan tried to put Mister Cat in his travel cage while I was still asleep, but he quit while he still had everything he was born with. So I had to get up way early and spend an hour talking Mister Cat off the ceiling and into my lap, and then finally into that little tiny box. He gave me a look, just one long yellow look, and then he walked in by himself and lay down facing the back, facing away from me. He was so mad at me. I can get depressed right over again when I think about that time, even now.

  It was four in the morning, something like that, and I was so out of it I never actually got to say good-bye to anything. Maybe that’s just as well, but I don’t know. I remember the limo sliding up to the curb like a submarine, and a couple of street people staring at Sally and me crawling into the back with suitcases stacked around us, because the trunk was so full. Evan got up front with the driver, and Sally put her arm around me. I had Mister Cat on my lap, and every now and then I’d bend down and whisper to him, “It’s all right, I’m here, it’ll be okay.” I could see his eyes in the darkness, but he wouldn’t talk to me.

  And that was all, that’s how we left New York. Nobody to wave to, no tears—no feelings even, exactly. Four in the morning, and it’s all just gone, nothing left to take with you except suitcases.

  I’d been on a plane one time before, when Norris was doing something with the San Francisco Opera, but I don’t remember any of the details because I was five years old, maybe six. They gave me a coloring book on the plane, and I loved the food in the little plastic trays. Not a lot of training for flying across the ocean to your wild new life, especially when you have to hand your cat over at the ticket counter like a damn garment bag. I saw other cats and one dog in cages like his, and that helped a little, because I knew at least he’d have some company in the baggage compartment. All the same, when I held the cage up for the last time and looked at him through the mesh, and he stared back at me and let out one single ice-cold miaow, it just went right through me, it was really awful. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sally put her arm on my shoulder, and it was all I could do not to slap it away.

  The clerk put the cage on the conveyor belt. It bumped slowly away, with suitcases and packages piling up behind it until I couldn’t see it anymore. The clerk tried to be nice. He said, “Your kitty’ll be fine, honey. They’ll take him off the belt and put him in a special safe place with all the other animals
. Everything but the in-flight movie.” He winked at Sally and Evan over my head. I can still see it, that fucking stupid wink.

  The only thing I really remember about the flight is taking off, because we flew in a long circle over the city, and I’m still sure I saw old messed-up Eighty-third Street, even though I probably couldn’t have. But I know I saw the Park, I know that much, so for just one second it was all right down there under us—Jake and Marta, and William Jay Gaynor Junior High School, and the crystals-and-auras place on our corner, and the tiny Jamaican market on Amsterdam where Sally used to buy mangoes and papayas, and I’d get my reggae tapes. The woman in the Navy pea jacket, walking up and down Eighty-first all day, jerking her thumb at the cabs, yelling at them, trying to get one of them to stop and take her out of here. The big blind guy with the nose rings, who liked to scare the people having their dinner outside the Columbus Cafe, and the two old men I’ve seen on Broadway all my life, shuffling along arm in arm, yelling at each other. The black woman who runs the newsstand, who saved piano magazines for Sally, and kept telling me how I should do my hair. And the Siamese Hussy, wondering and wondering where Mister Cat could have gone. All down there, my life under our wings.

  And after that it was all clouds, all the way to London. Nothing to see, no ocean, no sky, about as romantic as the IRT. I couldn’t sleep, but I wasn’t exactly awake either—I got one of those tiny pillows and crammed it up against the window and leaned my head on it, trying to get halfway comfortable. I tried to let my mind just float off, like it does in class half the time, but it kept seeing Mister Cat in the baggage compartment, lonely and crowded and being jolted around, not knowing what was happening to him, scared for the first time since he was a kitten and those boys were dangling him off the roof. I couldn’t stand to think of Mister Cat being scared, but I couldn’t think about anything else.