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  Lydia made a grumbling sound and twisted up against me. She had started to dream. I could tell this not only by the way her nose was twitching, but because I could see the substance of her dream appear in the form of a pale golden ball in the air above her head. There it rose, trembling as if shy of the world, and in its centre the matter of her dream twisted and pulsed, like frogspawn in its translucent gel.

  I leaned forward and gazed into the globe. Of all creatures, only cats have the ability to see another’s dream; of cats, only a dreamcatcher and then only through a trick of birth. My grandfather had been a dreamcatcher, and his before him, and so it went, always skipping a generation. Old Hawkweed; Granfer. Strange how I missed him, when for so long he had been my bane…

  Lydia’s dream hung there, a paw-span or two above her head, for a few moments – offering me the prospect of a cat’s pink tongue licking ice cream off a carton lid; then jaws crunching down on a virulent-looking orange snack dropped by a child’s hand and finally a golden muzzle pressed down firmly into a bowl of ‘seafood delight’: Liddy’s favourite tinned treat.

  And then it popped, just like a soap bubble. Liddy’s dreams were always like this – hazy and fragile – as if her inner life had no more faith in itself than to focus on where the next meal was coming from.

  I smiled. For all her complexity and fractiousness, she was blessed with the simplest of dreams. I sometimes wondered – or perhaps consoled myself with the thought – whether it was because she knew I could see into the very heart of her world that she was so awkward with me.

  Unlike the kittens. They were fascinated by my gift.

  ‘What was I dreaming about. Uncle O?’

  ‘Could you see me?’

  ‘Did I fly?’

  The questions were constant.

  In the early days, when they were no more than a few weeks old, I would often amuse myself by sitting over them as they lay in their affectionately tangled heap and watch their dreams forming. At first they had been vague and broken: inchoate images of teats and noses, toes and tails; barely recognisable versions of the world of which they were trying to make sense. Tall dark shapes with waving arms: trees, or humans? Flickers of light before a dark background – the swift passage of bird, bee or butterfly? Something huge and fuzzy that could have been anything from a cat’s head seen up close to a person’s looming hand. Now, though, their dreams were the usual dreams of young cats: as boisterous in sleep as they were when awake; chasing and tussling; eating so enthusiastically (they were their mother’s daughters, after all) some ghost meal that you could see the saliva gathering in the whiskers on their chins.

  They always cheered me up, the girls. They loved life. They ate it all up.

  Abandoning Lydia, I trotted off across the garden in search of their hiding place.

  *

  I found them some minutes later, tucked in among the roots of the big cedar where I had once chased the dream that had interrupted my one and only night of sexual congress with their lovely mother. They were all curled together as was their preference, in an endearing jumble of furry limbs.

  That fur! I could never quite get used to it. I had seen nothing like it on any cat in the village. It was a short, dense blue-grey – the colour of an August thundercloud, or the wing of an elderly nuthatch. It was regal and striking, and as far from their mother’s showy gold as you could possibly get. Liddy, in a moment of unusual amity, had once told me a little about her parents, no doubt to establish her social superiority over my own questionable origins. Her mother, Nefertiti, Flower of Egypt II, had been a pedigree Abyssinian who had won prizes at cat shows up and down the country; her father, Coromandel Ozymandias, a seal-point Siamese. It was from these two that she had inherited her mystique and fabulously exotic colouring, she had informed me, with no apparent sense of irony. And a golden-furred mother and a seal-point father gave no clue as to the bizarre blue appearance of her offspring.

  Thug and Beetle and Squash, I thought fondly. These were, of course, Millie’s names for the kittens; not Lydia’s. Their mother had failed to name the three girls for several weeks. It was as if by leaving them nameless she somehow repudiated her part in their birth, even though they had suckled and butted and mewed and had left her in no doubt at all as to their continued presence. Since then, of course, she had bestowed far grander titles upon them. Thug had become Letitia (Letty for short); Beetle, Arabella (Belle – or sometimes Belly); and Squash, Caterina (Cat). I did not think their new names a great improvement on Millie’s, but the girls seemed happy enough with them.

  I sat down quietly beside them and curled my tail comfortably around my feet. It was hard to tell them apart, when they lay all tangled up like this. Cat had an odd little bony lump on either side of her head just below her ears, as if she had decided to grow horns there and then given up on the project, and Letty a pale star in the middle of her forehead, as if someone had deliberately set about decorating her; but all three of them had their heads turned away under their paws, so there was no sign of these markings. Belle’s fur, in certain lights, was a shade darker than her sisters’ and she had one white foot – but how to tell whose foot was whose in this great heap?

  Even their dreams were hard to distinguish.

  A welter of tiny golden globes were even now bobbling around above the three of them, bumping into the serrated bark of the tree, blundering into one another and bursting in tiny little explosions of air that only I could hear. Like their mother’s, their dreams were pale and shimmering, lacking the hot, fiery edge that denoted a dream that might do damage, and even on closer inspection they yielded up little further detail that might help me tell them apart. Even the subject of their dreams tended to similarity – blue paws, blue-grey muzzles, blue tails – for if the girls did not dream of themselves, they dreamed of their sisters, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Peering closer, I could make out a chase going on in one globe; a tussle with a length of pink wool, which I recognised as part of an unravelling garment that someone had brought for the child Ellie only last week, and which Letty and Cat had stolen. In another globe a small brown bird skipped and fluttered, darting here and there to avoid a questing blue paw. The first one drifted away, only to be replaced by another offering a glimpse of milk in a bowl, bubbles rising where the greedy dreamer had immersed her face in it.

  Another globe had been obscured behind its fellows all this while, but now, as one of the kittens – a glimpse of that little fawn star identifying her as Letty – stirred and yawned, her dream popped out of existence, leaving the other open to my view. And as if revelling in its sudden exposure, it swelled a little and glowed brighter, revealing a dark orange corona that flared along its circumference. I leaned in closer. No grey-blue fur here, but a kaleidoscope of colours, all as sharp and vivid as those that showed themselves on the big black metal box that John and Anna would sometimes sit in front of in the evenings, the one that made voices and animal speech and birdsong, even though it gave out no scent of other life.

  I squinted, then drew back, alarmed. The dull glint of a cage had caught my eye, the bars gone from silver to a brutal grey, where years of anxious faces and paws pressing against the metal had worn away its sheen.

  No cat likes a cage, even in another’s dream – and I had seen such cages before. I dreamed of them still, on those bad nights, especially in the middle of winter, when the aches came upon me and I smelled again the char of wood; the singe of fur. Fascinated and horrified in equal part, I watched as a hand came towards the bars. I saw how its long pale fingers with their oddly shiny nails – opalescent pink and white-tipped – made complicated motions with the device that controlled the door of the cage; saw how the latch at last sprang open and the hands came in, fingers spread like an owl’s talons when it stoops for a mouse, ready to grasp and to carry away. I saw how the hands came towards me. Unable to help myself, I shied away.

  The view changed. Now I was confronted by a human face, far too close for com
fort. It was hard to gather detail from that blurred impression, but what I could glean made the cold trickle through me as if I had swallowed an icicle. I knew those green, green eyes, the way the hands felt, tight and uncompassionate about my ribs, as if a bruise or two would do no harm; for it was not me she wanted…

  I struggled.

  The face went away, to be replaced by those white hands coming at me with black webbing trailing between the fingers; and this image was superseded by a sense of struggle, of force employed, of constriction, and then I was looking down at my own paw, stretched out tight and flat against a white surface, mesmerised by how the black strap cut into the grain of my golden fur—

  ‘Uncle O!’

  My head shot up.

  ‘Uncle O – you were spying on our dreams again!’

  Suddenly they were all awake and the tangle of limbs had resolved itself into three handsome young female cats, all trace of kittenhood gone from those lithe blue-grey bodies, mocking black lips and alluring orange eyes. I shook my skull to dislodge the image.

  Letitia, forehead and star all ruffled and spiky from being squashed up against her siblings, came over and butted at me affectionately. She sniffed. ‘What’s the matter. Uncle Orlando?’ she said softly, regarding me with her head on one side. ‘You smell afraid.’

  I blinked. ‘Nothing,’ I lied smoothly, though I was taken aback by her perspicacity and by the fact that somehow, somehow, one of the girls appeared to have the ability to channel her mother’s nightmares. But two years of hiding my true feelings from Lydia had not gone to waste.

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  I said no more about the dream at the time; there seemed no use in it. It had rattled me, certainly, that sense of capture, of defeat, of incipient horror, especially coming out of the blue as it had and from a youngster whose life till now had been marked by no greater tragedy than the temporary loss of a catnip mouse. Besides, there was no way of telling – from their demeanour, at least – which of the girls the dream belonged to; they were all as blithe as ever, apparently untouched by the shadows it had cast in my mind, and I had no wish to alarm them.

  Or make them think you stranger than they already do, a small voice reminded me. Uncle Orlando, doing his weird thing again. Foolish as it may seem, I cared about how the girls perceived me, preferring to appear to them solid and genial and trustworthy, as opposed to disturbed and tetchy and somehow adrift from the world, and this also had some bearing on my decision to let the matter lie. But over the days that followed I found myself returning again and again to those dark images as to the itch of an old wound that can be relieved by a swift rasp of the tongue, a scratch with the claws. The sight of those eyes had left me anxious and jumpy in a way I had not been since the weeks immediately following the fire.

  A few days later I decided to go and visit the Besom in an attempt to understand why such dire images were haunting me again and, I hoped, to put them to rest at last.

  *

  I owed Millefleur for my recent acquaintance with the Besom. She was an odd old soul who lived a couple of miles out of Ashmore village, but she was the best listener and the wisest cat I ever met. Millie had run into her on one of her many journeys away from Nonesuch and had returned one evening about a year or more ago, brimming over with enthusiasm for her new friend, saying that at last she’d found a cat who knew about the world and its ways, and that I should go straight away to see her and ‘get my head sorted out’. Of course, that had just served to make me bristle.

  ‘She’ll be another of those poisonous old gossips,’ I had retorted to Millie’s suggestion. I was still stinging from the rumours about Lydia’s pregnancy. ‘Another old biddy with time on her paws and nothing better to do than spin tall tales.’

  But Millefleur had been insistent. ‘You need someone to talk to. Lydia’s hopeless in her state, I’m obviously not good enough for you’ – she shot me a direct look that made me wince – ‘so why not unburden yourself to a wise old cat who’s seen it all? You can’t just sit here and mope; it’s not healthy.’

  Which was easy for her to say, I thought bitterly; she hadn’t seen what was in the witch’s secret room, hadn’t witnessed her nearest relatives coming to grief right in front of her eyes, helpless to do anything to save them; and since she wasn’t a dream-catcher, she hadn’t been able to see the dream that had done such violent damage to Ashmore and its inhabitants, a dream that could distort place and time, a dream that had the power to wrap you about with fiery tentacles in which you were sure you could spy human hair, human eyes, human teeth… There was only one other cat in the world with whom I could have shared the cold shivers of my daytime reveries, the sudden clutch of terror in the middle of the night, the awful surreal flashes of memory – and that was my grandfather, dead, long dead.

  And that, paradoxically, had been what had persuaded me in the end.

  ‘You’ll like her,’ Millie had persisted in her characteristically blunt and determined fashion. Like a digging mole, Millie went straight through obstacles as though they deserved to occupy no space in her world, attacking them with a mindless energy that could leave you mentally bludgeoned and as weak as a worm in her wake. ‘She knew old Hawkweed. Rather well. I’d guess.’

  *

  So I had been persuaded out of the grounds of the old house for the first time in several months. During that time I had rather neglected my duties as the local dreamcatcher, but to no obvious ill effect in the world. I think it was partly a reluctance to use the wild roads that had held me back; the thought of venturing once more into regions that could play such tricks on you, could foster monsters and turn your sense of direction, your entire understanding of local geography, inside-out and upside-down, had been my greatest anxiety of all, and so that first time Millefleur had walked with me we had taken the human highways of Ashmore out to the isolated cottage where the Besom made her home.

  Even such a simple journey – plodding one foot before another down the long miles of sun-warmed road – was hard enough. Everywhere we went we were assailed by scents and sights that would signal to anyone else that daily life was continuing as normal, but to me they were powerfully unwanted reminders of the very nightmares I was seeking to dispel. The simplest of smells – the burned oil from the rumbling vehicles that passed us; the scent of a gardener’s bonfire, all wood smoke and licking flame – transported me back to the fire at Nonesuch, making me tremble and slink into the long grass at the roadside, my joints weak and my head buzzing.

  When we passed the cottage I had lived in since my earliest days, I remembered clearly how Dellifer, our nurse, would lie – a great, thin bolster of a cat – stretched out along the windowsill of the bedroom at the front of the house, just where the afternoon sun struck through the tendrils of clematis and climbing rose; but just as that peaceful scene was establishing itself before my eyes, it was abruptly displaced by the sight of her body – just as long and limp as if she were in repose – stretched out across the road where the witch’s car had struck her, a single line of bloody mucus dribbling from her nose. That was not precisely the last I had seen of old Dellifer; but that final image I kept firmly pushed away into the back of my head.

  Two people were out in the front garden of the cottage as Millie and I walked by on the other side of the road. They took no notice of us, caught up as they were in their task: they just kept shouting to one another and laughing, and as they did so, another plant would go flying through the air to join the heap of debris they were collecting there upon the brick path. I saw the rambling mint that had run riot through the cranesbill and giant daisies and had even tried to get involved with the hawthorn hedge, defeated at last, in a wilting pile by their car, a gleaming silver object with no roof. Trays of brightly coloured pansies and begonias were arrayed on its back seat and balanced precariously on its bonnet. The overgrown rosemary bush lay on its side next to the car, the earth already drying on its disinterred roots. Even from the opposite side of the road I
could smell that hot, aromatic odour, the scent of summer and roasting lamb; we always knew when Anna came out to pick a sprig that we would be in for a treat of titbits that evening…

  Then they started rooting up the leggy old lavenders that Anna had tended with such care, among which my sister Vita and I had played, chasing one another neatly in and out of the woody stems until we were overcome by the heady aroma of the herbs and fell asleep together in the same tangle of paws I so loved to see in Liddy’s girls…

  I had felt my heart leap painfully and hurried on.

  The pond – an almost opaque green in the strong light – was as tranquil as you could imagine. Half a dozen ducks promenaded serenely around the fringes, each on separate trajectories that seemed designed specifically to avoid crossing another’s path, as if some tacit agreement had been made that afternoon not to squabble or break the peace in any way. The willows swept down to the water like living curtains: between them, a heron had watched us pass with its cold yellow gaze.

  Despite the beauty of the scene I had not lingered. My last sight of the Ashmore pond would remain indelibly etched on my memory: the perfect white of the frozen surface marred by the crazed hole through which Hawkweed, my granfer, had vanished; the sight of the clawmarks on its circumference where he had tried to drag himself up again; the glow of his single orange-gold eye staring up at me from beneath the murky water. I remember shivering, for all the late summer sun.