The Golden Cat Read online

Like her own litter, in that other existence of hers, in another country, another world. I’m still alive, she thought. Perhaps they are, too. Her own kittens! In that moment, she knew that there was only one journey she could make now. The world could never be whole again; but she would damned well recover from it what she was owed. We make our lives, she thought. There ain’t no magic: just teeth-gritting, head-down, eye-watering determination. She stood up slowly, but with a new resolve; stretched her neck, her back, each leg in turn. She felt the warmth of the sun penetrate her coat.

  ‘OK,’ she said quietly.

  She turned to the two foxes.

  ‘Let’s move on, you guys,’ she said. ‘No use waitin’ around here. Places to go; things to do. I’m goin’ home and find my kittens!’

  They stared at her.

  *

  Some way down the coast, another cat sat drowsing on a warm rock while her brood played on a sunlit headland above the sea.

  Her fur was a pale rosy colour. Her eyes were as deep as Nile water. Faint dapples and stripes made on her forehead a forgotten symbol. She was the Mau – a name which, in a language no longer used, means not just ‘cat’ but ‘the Great Cat, or wellspring, that from which all else issues’. Only months before, she had been the pivot around which the whole world moved. Even now, when she blinked out to sea, it was as if the world was somehow peculiarly hers. The Mau’s blood was half as old as time, but she was newly a mother; and her husband, who was less in awe of her than he had been in those hectic days, called her Pertelot.

  Pertelot’s kittens were named Isis, Odin and Leonora Whitstand Merril (‘Leo’ for short); and after some encouragement they had run a mouse to earth in a patch of gorse that smelled like honey and cinnamon. The mouse – which, she reflected, had so far shown more acumen than all her children put together – had quietly retreated into the dense tangled stems and prepared to wait them out.

  ‘Leonora,’ advised the Mau quietly, ‘it would help if you kept still and didn’t keep rushing in like that.’

  ‘I want to eat the mouse,’ said Leonora.

  ‘I know, dear. But you must remember that the mouse does not want to be eaten. She will not come out if she knows you are there.’

  ‘I told you not to push in,’ said Odin. ‘Remember what the rat told Tag: “It’s your dog that chases. Your cat lies in wait.”’ Then, to his mother, ‘Tell her she’s no good at this.’

  ‘None of you are very good at it yet.’

  ‘She just wanted to get in first.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I did not,’ said Leonora. ‘I’m bored with the mouse now,’ she decided. ‘It’s rather small, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re just no good at hunting.’

  Leonora looked hurt.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I bite your head,’ said Leonora.

  The kitten Isis stood a little apart and watched her brother and sister squabble, making sure to keep one eye on the place where the mouse had disappeared. Isis had her mother’s eyes, dreamy and shrewd at the same time.

  She suggested, ‘Perhaps if we went round the back?’

  The Mau blinked patiently in the sunlight. Her kittens perplexed her. They were already getting tall and leggy, quite fluid in their movements. They had no trace of their father’s Nordic boxiness; and, if the truth were told, they didn’t look much like Pertelot either. They had short dense fur of a mysterious, tawny colour. Every afternoon, in the long golden hours before sunset, the light seemed to concentrate in it, as if they were able to absorb the sunshine and thrive on it. ‘What sort of cats are they?’ she asked herself; and, unconsciously echoing her old friend Sealink, ‘which of them will be the Golden Cat?’ As they grew, the mystery, much like their colour, only deepened. Paradoxically, though, it was their less mysterious qualities that perplexed her most. The very moment of their birth had been so fraught with danger. The world had hung by a thread around them. Yet now—

  Well just look at them, thought Pertelot a shade complacently: you couldn’t ask for a healthier, more ordinary litter. Leonora, suiting actions to words, had got quite a lot of Odin’s head in her mouth. Odin, though giving as good as he received, had a chewed appearance and was losing his temper. Claws would be out soon. The Mau shook herself.

  ‘Stop that at once,’ she ordered.

  She said, ‘Isis has had a very sensible idea.’

  Leo and her brother jumped to their feet and rushed off round the gorse bush, shouting, ‘My mouse!’

  ‘No, my mouse!’

  Isis followed more carefully. The Mau listened to them arguing for a few seconds, then yawned and looked out to sea. In a minute or two, if she thought they had worked hard enough, she might go and catch the mouse for them. For now it was nice to rest in the warm sun. She lay down, gave a cursory lick at her left flank, and fell asleep. She dreamed, as she often did, of a country she had never seen, where soft moony darkness filled the air between the palm trees along a river’s glimmering banks. At dawn, white doves flew up like handkerchiefs around the minarets; a white dove struggled in her mouth. Then suddenly it was dark again, and the bird had escaped, and she was alone. ‘Rags?’ she called anxiously, but there was no answer. All round her an indistinct violence, the darkness spinning and churning chaotically, as if the very world was tearing itself apart.

  ‘Rags!’ she called, and woke to the warm air enamelled with late afternoon; to the sound of a voice not her own, also crying for help. Rounding the gorse bushes, she found the two female kittens distraught. There was no sign of the male. On one side, short upland turf, luminous in the declining sun, fell gently away to the cliff at the edge of Tintagel Head. On the other, the dark mass of gorse smoked away inland, aromatic, mysterious with flowers. ‘Quickly now,’ she ordered the kittens. ‘Tell me what has happened!’

  They stared helplessly at her. Then Isis began to run back and forth in a panic, crying, ‘Our brother is gone! Our brother is gone!’

  Pertelot thrust her head into the gorse. ‘Odin!’ she called into the dusty recessive twilight between the stems. ‘Come out at once. It’s very wrong of you to tease your sisters like this.’ No answer. Nothing moved. She ran to the cliff and looked down. ‘Odin? Odin!’ Had he tumbled over the edge? Could she see something down there? Only the water stretching away like planished silver into the declining sun. Only the sound of the waves on the rocks below.

  ‘Our brother is gone!’

  *

  If you had been in Tintagel town that early summer evening, you might have seen a large black cat half-asleep in a back street in a bar of sun. He was a wild-looking animal, robust and muscular, who weighed seventeen pounds in his winter coat, which had just now moulted enough to reveal stout, cobby legs and devastating paws. His nose was long and wide, and in profile resembled the noseguard of a Norman helmet. His eyes were electric, his battle scars various.

  He was Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion: not merely a king among cats but the King of Cats. No-one went against him. His name was a legend along the wild roads, for mad feats and dour persistence in the face of odds. But he was a great-hearted creature, if a dangerous one. He exacted no tribute from his subjects. He gave more than he received. He was known to deal fairly and honestly with everyone he met, though his accent was a little strange.

  Kittens loved him especially, and he loved them, pedigree or feral, sickly or well-set-up. He never allowed them to be sickly for long. One sweep of his great tongue was enough. He could heal as easily as he could maim. Toms and queens fetched their poorly children to him from all over town. There were no runts in Tintagel litters. There was barely a runny eye.

  Everywhere Ragnar went, kittens followed him about with joy, imitating his rolling fighter’s walk. Dignified sixteen-week-olds led the way. Tiny excited balls of fluff, barely able to toddle, came tumbling along behind. Slowly, like a huge ship, he would come to rest; then turn and study them, and muse with
Scandinavian irony, ‘They all can learn how to be kings from Ragnar Gustaffson – even the females!’

  This evening, though, he dozed alone, huge paws twitching occasionally as in his dreams he toured the wild roads, bit a dog, retraced some epic journey in the face of serious winter conditions. Suddenly, his head went up. He had heard something on the ghost roads, something Over There. Seconds later, a highway opened three feet up in the bland Tintagel air, and Pertelot Fitzwilliam of Hi-Fashion jumped out of nowhere, followed closely by what remained of the Royal Family.

  ‘Rags! Rags!’ she was calling.

  While Isis cried, ‘Our brother Odin is gone!’

  And Leo complained darkly, ‘It wasn’t my fault. He just had to go in there after the stupid mouse—’

  *

  For Sealink, Francine and Loves A Dustbin, the next day started innocuously enough. They awoke to the sound of woodpigeons and the cawing of crows as the first light rose over the hill to shine through the trees like a great, splintered prism.

  With a yawn, Sealink uncoiled herself from the depths of her feathery tail, and, shaking each leg out in turn, went off to find some breakfast. She was filled with a sense of anticipation, the prospect of a new life, a new journey. Sealink was a travelling cat. But previously she had travelled without a goal, letting her watchword be ‘the journey is the life’, and going with the flow from America to Amsterdam, from Prague – which she pronounced to rhyme with vague – to Budapest, Constantinople and the Mystic East. But returning to New Orleans, place of her birth, to look for her kittens: well, that was altogether another kind of venture. It was a whole new experience: and that was just what a calico cat liked best.

  Sniffing lazily around amongst fern and nettle, dog’s mercury and sorrel, she found herself day-dreaming about Cajun shrimp and chicken gumbo, and thus it was more by luck than by judgement that she stumbled on a sleeping vole. She was just about to deliver the killing blow when Francine the vixen woke up, saw that something nasty was going on, and raised her voice in disapproval.

  The vole sat bolt upright, took one look at the hungry cat looming above it and legged it down a convenient hole.

  ‘Hot damn,’ said Sealink.

  Francine had grown up in the suburbs, where food came neither on the hoof nor out of trash cans but was reverently placed on trimmed lawns at owl-light, at close of day, by children. In that well-planned zone between the wild and the tame, no-one wanted to kill foxes. Where Francine had tumbled and played as a cub, the risk was less death than photography. Even though the badgers, those untamed civil engineers, were threatening it all by undermining people’s gardens and getting themselves a bad name, human beings were still out there every night with long lenses and photomultipliers. In cubs this bred a certain sense of security, on the heels of which often followed a demanding temperament and, paradoxically, a less than satisfactory life. Francine knew what she wanted, and though she was aware of death, her idea of nature had never given it much room. Nature was trimmed once a week. It featured fresh rinds of bacon, orange-flavoured yoghurt, a little spicy sausage. It had neither the addictive jungly glitter of the city, nor the darkness of the wild. Darkness never fell in the suburbs; and everything that was there one day was there the next day, too. You had to face things, of course, but nothing could be gained by dwelling on them. A steely will gave you the illusion of control.

  As a result, Francine divided the world into the wild (nasty) and the tame (nice). Wild food – live prey, the sort you caught yourself – was nasty. The scraps left out for you on lawns were nice. The people who prepared food like that were nice. People were, on the whole, Francine believed, nice. They were civilized. On the other hand, the animal roads (being wild by definition) were uncivilized and nasty. The primal state was not something Francine aspired to. What she did aspire to, Sealink suspected, was matriarchy. Francine wanted Loves A Dustbin back on familiar ground, where she could encourage him to ‘settle down’. She seemed an unlikely mate for him, given his dark history and adventurous life.

  ‘I reckon he didn’t have too much choice in the matter,’ was Sealink’s assessment. ‘And once she’s given him the cubs, he’ll have even less. No more adventuring with cats.’

  Particularly with cats like herself. Sealink had a distinct intuition that – as an attractive, intrepid and unencumbered female, albeit of an entirely different species – she was herself encompassed by Francine’s definition of ‘nasty’, too, with plenty of room and to spare.

  This morning, she wasn’t disposed to be patient. She was hungry. Worse, she could hear the vole, safe underground, incapable with laughter as it boasted to its friends about her incompetence.

  ‘Honey,’ she told Francine, ‘I’m gonna try one more time here. Read my lips: YOU ARE FRIGHTENING THE DAMN FOOD AWAY.’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘OK?’ she said sweetly.

  ‘You call that food, do you?’ said Francine unpleasantly.

  ‘Suburbanite.’

  ‘Trollop.’

  At this point, the dog-fox intervened.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Bickering isn’t going to get you to Ponders End,’ he told the vixen; ‘or you,’ he said to Sealink, ‘back to your kittens. There’s a highway entrance here, and we’d better take it.’

  Behind his back, Francine made a face.

  *

  Bitter and icy, the winds of the highways blew their fur the wrong way no matter in which direction they faced. All around, as far as the eye could see, ashen and inimical, stretched a landscape as old as time, and just as forbidding. Sealink watched as Dustbin raised his long, intelligent head into the worst of the blast and listened intently. Beside him, Francine trembled, unable to accept the descent into the wild life. One moment she was an elongated, russet-coated thing with pointed muzzle and fennec ears; the next just an ordinary vixen again, full of fear, her eyes closed tight against the wind. After a moment, though, the road took her, and she gave herself up to it. She was running.

  They were all running!

  Powdered snow whirled and eddied around them, lit by a preternatural moon. Outside the wild roads, glimpsed briefly through the flurries, Sealink could see fragments of countryside skim past, sunlit and fragrant, the pulse of nature as slow as the heartbeat of a hibernating dormouse. Inside, shades of grey whirled and flowed, shadows upon shadows, as their muscles bunched and stretched, bunched and stretched and they ate the ancient ground away stride by giant stride.

  Some time later – it seemed like hours, but how could you count time in a landscape without day and night, a world in which the sun shone through a haze, and the moon, shrouded by mist, hung always overhead? – Sealink could tell that they had covered a considerable distance. It was not just a sense of things shifting at speed, but also a feeling of enervation, of weariness achieved by long effort. And just as she had recognized the leading edge of this fatigue, a debilitating exhaustion crashed down upon her, sweeping through her like a cold, dark wave.

  The calico shook herself. She could never remember having felt so tired, particularly on the Old Changing Way, which channelled all the energy of the world. It was as if a hand had reached up through the earth and squeezed her heart. She could hardly breathe. The foxes had stopped, too.

  There was a voice, too, distant yet powerful, then the stench of something foetid. The voice seemed for a moment closer, and Sealink thought she heard the words, ‘Got you!’ Then the fabric of the wild road started to tear. Light from the ordinary world poured in like sand. The highway gave a great, galvanic convulsion, as if attempting to vomit, and suddenly Sealink and the foxes found themselves spun out of cold winds and icy plains into English woodland dappled with warm shade.

  Sealink picked herself up and looked around.

  ‘Damn! Ain’t never been spit out like that before.’

  Twenty yards away the foxes stood, blinking bemusedly in the sunlight, looking down at something which appeared to have fallen out of the wild road with the
m.

  It lay on its side at the foot of a beech tree, and it was bigger, even in death, than Sealink in life. Despite experience with the wildlife of fourteen countries, she had never before encountered its shaggy grey coat or striped face. She thought briefly of the racoons of her native land. ‘Your racoons, though,’ she reminded herself, ‘don’t bulk up anywhere near so big. Anyhows, this thing ain’t got no tail.’ Powerful claws lay drawn up under its body. Its face was a mask of terror, black lips drawn back defiantly from yellowed teeth. Its eyes were glazed. There was no sign as to how it had come by its sudden demise. Black flies buzzed in lazy spirals in the air; and the exposed roots of the beech seemed to close loosely around the corpse like a human hand.

  ‘Looks like it was good at life, this one,’ Sealink said to Loves A Dustbin, who was sitting by the corpse as if he might deduce something from the angle of its head, the slack gape of its jaw.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘So what exactly is it?’

  The fox looked up at her, but, before he could speak, Francine interrupted. ‘It’s a badger,’ she told Sealink. ‘Haven’t you seen one before?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Personally I never liked a badger. They’ve ruined it for everyone where I come from. I’m surprised you’ve never seen one before, dear, you having travelled so far and wide—’

  ‘Well, I’ll know him again,’ Sealink promised.

  (Thinking to herself: I bet you love this. You know somethin’ I don’t, oh I bet you love that.)

  ‘A badger, huh?’

  ‘Just a dirty old badger,’ Francine agreed complacently.

  Loves A Dustbin gave her an odd look, then said, ‘We must have seen a dozen deaths like this since we left Tintagel.’

  They had lain in the unlikeliest places, always at the outlet of their customary highways, amongst the trees of a peaceful copse, beside benign moorland streams – the inexplicable dead.

  ‘What do you make of it, hon?’ asked the cat.

  The dog-fox shook his head.

  ‘It’s the wild roads,’ he said simply. ‘There’s something the matter with them. I smell the hand of the Alchemist in this.’