The Golden Cat Read online

  ‘But the Alchemist is dead. I saw him die. Him and the Majicou, both.’

  The fox shrugged. ‘There was always the chance that his magic would dominate the highways for a while. They’ll be cleansed by use.’ But he seemed unconvinced by this explanation. He had a fox’s nose, and an understanding of the Old Changing Way second only to that of his original master. Old evil has a thin, faded reek; evil newly-done smells as pungent as dung. If anyone knew the difference between the two, it was Loves A Dustbin. ‘Perhaps it’s just some disease,’ he said.

  This caused Francine to step smartly away from the corpse.

  ‘Oh dear! Come along now,’ she advised. ‘It’s only something dead. We know these things happen, after all. We don’t have to rub our noses in them every day.’

  *

  The next morning promised better things. Sunlight crept down through the ghostly breaths of mist in the river valley and burned them away to a sheen on the grass. Birds called in the ash trees. The light was pale and bright, so that everything looked brand-new, as if someone had come by in the night and retouched the reeds and butterbur, the broom and the jack-in-the-hedge, the golden celandines and wild thyme from a fresh palette of watercolours.

  They came out onto heathland amongst lazy bees, and rabbits which bolted at the first scent of them, white scuts bobbing away over the close-bitten turf. Thwarted by the rabbits but fuelled by the warmth of the sun, the foxes took to play, ambushing one another from behind trees, chasing and biting each other’s brushes.

  After a while, Loves A Dustbin trotted back to the calico, his long red tongue lolling humorously out of his mouth.

  ‘What a life, eh, Sealink? What a life!’ He laughed wryly. ‘Bet you never expected to see me acting like this. I never expected it myself. I thought my death was waiting for me behind every tree, watching in every shadow.’ He chuckled. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? You think your life’s over, and it’s only just beginning.’

  Sealink was unprepared for the misery this evoked. A protective inner shutter slammed down. Too late. Suddenly, all she could see was the gleam of a pair of mismatched eyes – one an honest speedwell blue, one a wicked sodium orange. All she could smell was dusty tortoiseshell fur, aromatic, peppery.

  The fox saw what was happening.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I—’

  Sealink stared past him, her face lit with memory and pain. She swallowed hard and opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out. Eventually she reassured him.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I—’

  Suddenly, there was a high-pitched shriek from the rabbit runs behind them.

  ‘Francine!’ called Loves A Dustbin. ‘Francine!’

  *

  They found her lying on her back, her head thrashing from side to side. Wild with panic, her limbs waved in the air, and something appeared to be attached to her front foot. As she thrashed, this something glinted in the sun, and she wheezed with distress, tail thumping the ground in hard, rhythmic thuds. Blood oozed from a barely visible line above the ankle-joint. A metallic line stretched from the vixen’s foot to a peg hammered into the ground some distance away beneath a twist of bramble.

  Sealink stared at it puzzledly.

  ‘What’s happening here, hon?’ she asked Loves A Dustbin.

  ‘A rabbit-snare,’ he said angrily.

  He bent to lick at Francine’s face, making strange, chirruping noises in the back of his throat.

  Sealink inspected the snare. It looked far too simple to be a problem. She bent her head to it and bit down experimentally. It tasted cold and steely in her mouth. She applied her back teeth to it, an awkward manoeuvre, since cats have few molars, and rarely chew. Even after some minutes of concentrated biting, the wire remained unchanged except for a slightly more silvery sheen. She pulled at it until it came taut. At once, Francine emitted a thin, high wail that crawled under the skin and along the spine. Sealink leapt away from the wire in alarm.

  ‘You do it!’ she called to the dog-fox. ‘You can dig, honey. You’re damn near a dog, after all.’

  Clouds of earth flew up from the fox’s paws until finally the peg came free and the wire went slack. Francine opened pain-dulled eyes. Twitching the stricken leg, she found at last that she could flex the foot without the wire’s terrible pulling. She sat up and started to lick at the hurt place, but even though the peg was out the snare was still biting deep into her flesh, invisible beneath fur and welling blood. They stared at the wound.

  ‘Try and stand, babe,’ Sealink urged, at the same time as Loves A Dustbin suggested, ‘Now just lie there, and be still.’

  They scowled at one another. The fox nosed at the snare. He touched it tentatively, but his nails were too big and blunt to get behind the wire. Sealink shouldered him out of the way. ‘Leave this to Momma: she’s got the proper equipment,’ she asserted, and, bending her head to the wound, worked on it with a single razored claw until she had loosened it enough to get her teeth behind it. After that, it was like nipping a tangle out of fur: nip and lick, nip and lick, until her muzzle was a mask of red.

  ‘I got to say, hon,’ she told Francine, looking up with a ferocious grin, ‘that I never expected fox blood to taste so nasty.’

  *

  The wire, released at last from its bed of flesh, lay like a coiled snake on the turf, a jewelled circle of red and silver, studded with little tufts of russet fur. Once the snare was off, Francine would let neither her mate nor the calico near her, or it. She snarled at them indiscriminately.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Loves A Dustbin said tiredly. ‘She just won’t part with it.’

  ‘That ain’t healthy, hon.’

  It wasn’t.

  *

  The wheezing of the vixen’s breath through the night reminded Sealink of the sea breaking on a distant shingle beach. She drifted into sleep herself on this thought and dreamed of dark clouds racing across a stormy sky, the cries of seabirds like those of a cat mourning a lost child.

  *

  The next day, the flesh around the wound had swelled and Francine found it impossible to touch the foot to the ground. Loves A Dustbin made mournful figures of eight around her, murmuring encouragement; but it was clear that the vixen would not be travelling for some time.

  Sealink sat at a distance from them and wondered what to do. It seemed disloyal to leave the foxes to their plight; but the pull of her vanished kittens grew stronger by the day. She heard them at night, though she could barely remember their voices. In her dreams she was on the old boardwalk again, dancing under a phosphor moon, when she heard them mewing like Pertelot’s litter. Whenever she thought she had found them, they were calling from somewhere else! Everything was entangled, past and present, pride and hurt and abiding loss. She had never acknowledged her real reasons for leaving New Orleans. In the middle of reveries of Mousebreath, huge chunks of her early life had begun to come back to her, as if all that was part of one thing. Sealink had lost more than a mate: she had lost her sense of who she was. New Orleans, that Mother of Cats, might tell her. Would the foxes understand?

  She sat for some time, feeling the cool breeze riffling her fur, watching clouds scud high up in the sky. In the reeds at the bottom of the hill she could hear moorhens calling, and when she stood up she could see that they were shepherding errant chicks with impossibly large feet. She looked down at her own substantial paws.

  ‘These feet was made for walkin’,’ she said, to no-one in particular. ‘And that’s just what they’ll do… Lord knows what will have become of those youngsters of mine without their great big Momma to take care of ’em.’

  Not that they’d had much choice in the matter. But then, neither had she.

  *

  Ten minutes later, Loves A Dustbin looked up from his wounded mate to see the silhouette of a large-furred cat staring down on him from the hillside above, its tail tip-curled and its ears flicking minutely. He could read the signs.

  ‘Goodbye, Sealink,’ he said softly.
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for out there.’

  Francine whimpered at his feet. He bent his head to console her, and, when he looked up again, Sealink was gone.

  2

  Mysteries of Tintagel

  Darkness fell in a little seaside town a few miles along the coast from Tintagel. A yellow moon hung low over the maze of fishermen’s cottages on the hill above the harbour. There were thin clouds high up and wrinkles of light on the sea. It was the hour of fish teas, coal fires. Somewhere in the mazy cobbled streets, which smelled of seaweed and orange peel, in a corona of light high up where an old wall met an older roof, a cat flickered into existence out of nowhere. One quick glance around him and he was off again, trotting up against the pitch of the roof to vanish round a chimneypot. Moments later he could be seen leaping confidently from one roof to the next; lowering himself down an old metal drainpipe; scampering across the salt-damp setts and round a corner.

  Though they watched him covertly from gutter and doorway, the local toms issued no challenge. Only a few short months before, this hardboiled toff had stumbled half-blind into the village accompanied by a mad tabby female with a spark-plug in her head, and turned their lives into a long weekend of battle, disruption, and disorder. They were still trying to work out what had happened down the coast. They knew him as Mercurius Realtime DeNeuve and were careful not to catch his eye. He knew himself as Tag and he was wondering what was for tea.

  He and the tabby kept no fixed abode. They loved the coast and they loved each other. They loved the windy illuminated breadth of the beach, the smells of food, the jangling music from the tourist shops and amusement arcades. They had quarters in a bus shelter, or under an upturned boat. They liked it that way. They were friends to visitors and lost children. Sometimes they would spend time with a fisherman’s family, or in the steamy, scented fug of the Beach-O-Mat Laundrette, where the tabby would watch the clothes go round all day with a dreamy expression on her face. Her real name was Cy. Down at the quay, where she shamelessly courted the fishermen, they called her ‘Trixie’. At this hour, Tag knew, she would be waiting for him in one of her favourite spots – a round granite building near the top of the hill.

  Before these two adventurers turned up, no cat had entered that place. Not that they weren’t curious. (A cat is a cat, after all.) Throughout the summer it was packed with human beings. They stood in lines then shuffled in. They shuffled round inside then shuffled out again, blinking and chattering in the sun. ‘What do they do in there?’ the village matrons would ask each other, giving their kittens a good spruce-up. ‘With human beings it’s so hard to tell, my love. Don’t you find?’ All a cat could say for sure was that it was a taller building than the chapel, more spacious than the lifeboat station. Its roof was home to some fat-looking gulls. Above the faded green doors an old enamel sign announced to the reading public:

  OCEANARIUM.

  Tag ran up the steps and slipped in through a gap low down between the two doors.

  *

  A single octagonal glass tank filled the echoing space inside. Whole shoals of mackerel scintillated there in millions of gallons of sea water, lorded over by thornback rays and spiny sharks. The sharks were powerful, streamlined, slim, less than two feet long. They circled endlessly. They pushed their clever noses out of the water and into the hot glare of the electric lamp which hung above their domain. All the creatures of the sea were represented. There were octopuses and squids. Lobsters made their homes in the detritus on the floor of the tank. Though the room itself was kept dark, a kind of ocean light – filtered through the sea water until it became a cool pale glow – illuminated the concrete floor between the tank and the walls, where just enough room had been left for two human beings to loiter along abreast. Torn fishing-nets sagged in the shadows above. The air was still; not quite warm. At night there was complete silence.

  The tabby loved it. She had pushed her sturdy little head through the gap in the doors one day while Tag was out walking the wild roads, and there they were – fish, fish, fish! What cat could resist them? But here was the strange thing: even if the water had been empty, Tag believed, she would have been drawn back by the tranquil and yet penetrating quality of the aquarium light. If you looked long enough, its lucent interior depths began to seem more real than the world outside. This calmed her. Relieved of her madness by their friend the New Black King, she retained a hair-trigger awareness of unseen things. At night she whispered to the empty dark, and could still be seen accompanied by a cloud of little motes like moths. She was still a puzzle to Tag. Of that, oddly enough, he was glad. Every day they met all over again, and they felt brand-new to one another.

  This evening she was sitting up tall, eyes bright with reflected tanklight, gazing at a large ray. Its wings tip-curled and curved in lazy arcs, its eyes like jet beads as it hovered in the water so close to the glass you could see its gill-slits curl and palpitate, the ray was staring back out at her. Tag shivered a little. They seemed so mutually intent. What did they know? What could they have to say to one another? But he loved the way the light caught the set of the tabby’s head and the shape of her white bib. So he sat in the shadows and watched them, cat and fish, for a long moment before he said quietly, ‘You’ll never catch it.’

  ‘Ace,’ she answered patiently, ‘I don’t want to catch this fish. He stays in the water, I stay on the land.’

  ‘I can see the sense of that,’ agreed Tag. ‘Given how well you swim.’

  She looked at him oddly.

  ‘But can you see the perfection of it?’ she demanded.

  She spun around twice, reared up, and banged her neat white front paws on the glass in front of her. Taking this to mean that their encounter was at an end, the ray pivoted slowly on its vertical axis and banked away into the depths of the tank, trailing a few bright motes and strings of matter. Cy watched it go, then turned and cuffed Tag’s ears in delight. She rubbed her head against his. She purred.

  ‘I got you a special dinner,’ she said.

  His heart sank.

  From a niche at the base of the tank she withdrew one condensed-milk can (empty); one plastic clothes-peg; and two small fragile white shells. After some thought she added dry-roasted peanuts from the floor of an arcade, breadcrusts she had won off a herring-gull, and a square of milk chocolate still wrapped in blue silver paper. Tag thought he could probably eat the chocolate. He sorted through the rest with one paw and not much hope.

  ‘Come on Jack,’ she encouraged. ‘Don’t play with it. Get it down you!’

  Then, before he could answer, ‘If you liked that, you’ll love this.’

  With some ceremony she brought out her chef-d’œuvre and dropped it in front of him. It was a cigarette butt.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said, as enthusiastically as he could. ‘I think I’ll leave that for after.’

  The tabby pretended to groom herself. Then she sat back, eyes sparkling, head on one side. He realized she had been laughing at him all along.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

  She wriggled into the gap between the tank and the concrete floor until only her bottom showed; then, after some excited scrabbling about, backed out carefully and brought forth two pilchards. Their scales glittered. Their eyes goggled in the dim wash of light. They were plump and perfect (apart from the odd toothmark). They might still have been alive.

  ‘Tag,’ she said, ‘we got stargazey pie!’

  Though he loved her, Tag was suddenly a little tired. All the way home from the house by the river, he had felt he was being followed. In the tank a fish caught the light suddenly like sunshine on a coin, then vanished. An octopus hung high up against the glass as if pasted there, motionless but pulsing gently, waiting – even more patient and alien than the sharks – for that change in the nature of things which would permit it to take up its rightful place.

  ‘Let’s eat at the bus shelter,’ he said. ‘It’s nice out tonight, and sometimes this place ma
kes me shiver.’

  ‘I want to talk to my fish.’

  ‘Come on,’ Tag said gruffly. ‘You can see it again tomorrow.’

  After some thought, she was willing to concede this.

  ‘I can,’ she said. ‘Can’t I?’

  She said, ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  Outside, she added, ‘Oh, Ace, that fish is one old soul. It’s almost as beautiful as you. That fish is just, well, my friend.’

  *

  The weather was turning.

  The moon went down in a greenish glow on the horizon. A glutinous swell lapped the cement piles down by the lifeboat station. Out on the esplanade, rag-mop palms leant on the wind like old ladies surprised by a Sunday squall.

  But the bus shelter was warm, and soon decorated with two perfect ichthyoid skeletons, sockets jolly with mortality, wiry bones like cat’s whiskers in the live fluorescent darkness of the oncoming storm. The tabby licked her lips, gave her paws a cursory wash, scratched busily beneath her chin. There was an odour of pilchard oil and electricity.

  ‘Nice here,’ she said. ‘Curl up tight now.’

  ‘I hope you’re happy,’ Tag said anxiously, as he watched the tide steal in, a wave at a time across the dark beach. ‘Living here, I mean.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘It’s a fall-on-your-feet life, Tiger,’ she replied. ‘It’s sunshine every morning. It’s boats and cream and, I mean, there’s even mice here. I seen this life in dreams. How can you ask? Oh Tag, I like it fine!’ She flexed her claws and purred luxuriously. ‘Sleep now,’ she advised; so, reassured, he did. Only to dream of shoal after shoal of feathery pilchard skeletons swinging as restless as compass needles beneath the waves; and to be woken unceremoniously by a single clang of thunder.

  He sat bolt upright and craned his neck. Nothing landward. Then, as he turned towards the sea, there was a silent explosion over the beach, a split-second flare which faded instantly through all the colours of the spectrum to a black that was a kind of light in itself. Tag jumped to his feet. In the moment of illumination, he had seen the palms, the roiling surf, the wind whipping spray off the chop: and then a monstrous cat, which burst out of the naked air and began to forge its way in a kind of eerie slow motion across the beach towards him. Sand sprayed up from pads the size of dinner plates. Heat haze boiled round it. It came spilling the fire and anger of its life, waves of silent lightning, the ungrudging broadcast of substance into some space not quite the world we know. Its eyes were yellow. Its ears were flattened. Its great teeth gleamed white against a red mouth. Decreasing in size and speeding up as it approached, this fierce apparition hurtled up the three concrete steps from the beach. By the time it burst into the bus shelter, it was an ordinary cat: if you could ever use the word ‘ordinary’ of Ragnar Gustaffson Cœur de Lion, the New Black King.