Those days rolled past in a haze of warmth and scent: first the patio roses and the foxgloves; then the delphiniums and mallows; the lady’s mantle and the montbretia; and all the while Vita waited for me to remember she was there.
*
Late one afternoon, on my way to join my peer group at the garages, I was practising pouncing techniques on a fantastically iridescent rosechafer beetle I had found on the dusty path behind the house. I had now perfected a leap into which I had incorporated an elegant half-twist, the added torque of this manoeuvre transferring considerable power to my landing paws and to the eventual ‘kill’. I was looking forward to showing off this new weapon in my hunting arsenal: I thought Fernie, in particular, would be impressed by it.
Thus engaged, I did not notice a long dark shadow bend sinuously around the corner of the house and slink up behind me.
‘Hello, laddie. Been avoiding your old granfer, have you?’
Shocked out of the perfection of my inner game, I landed awkwardly. The rosechafer picked itself up out of the dust and, lifting up its great green wingcase like an old woman raising her skirts, legged it into the long grass with considerable relief.
‘No, of course not, Granfer,’ I lied.
The old cat’s muzzle split lopsidedly into an unattractive grin, but his eyes remained hard and cold. ‘Glad to hear that, laddie. Wouldn’t like to think my own blood was trying to dodge me. Especially when there’s important work to do.’
He cuffed me lightly across the top of the head, but whether by design or accident his thumb-claw nicked the edge of my ear.
I winced. ‘How do you mean, Granfer?’
‘Come with me, laddie, and find out.’
The old cat set off at a deceptively fast lope across the gardens so that I had to run to keep up with him. We passed the garages where Ginge and Fernie, Feisty and Stripes and Seamus were leaping up at a snail upon the brick wall. When they saw us, they all stopped what they were doing and stared. For a moment, I had a vision of them as kittens playing together in a carefree world, a world from which I was excluded; then I trotted obediently after my grandfather, the weight of five pairs of eyes upon my retreating back.
Hawkweed led me behind the cottages, along the side of a wire-netting fence surrounding a tennis court, across a well-manicured lawn scattered with metal hoops, across a gravelled driveway, over a rickety close-board fence, in and out of the intricately planted bean canes in a vegetable garden, and through a tiny hole in the hawthorn hedge that bordered the common.
In the middle of a stand of crab apples and goat-willows, he stopped and sat down so suddenly that I nearly ran into the back of him.
‘Well, Orlando,’ – and at this I shivered, for my grandfather rarely called me by my given name – ‘do you have any questions for me? Anything that might have concerned you since that night we ran together?’
My mind went blank. I stared down at the ground. Woodlice bumbled through the soft leaf mould. One of them ran up to my foot, turned round and scurried back the way it had come. I looked up suddenly.
‘I do have a question, Granfer.’
‘Well ask it then, laddie: don’t delay. Life gets shorter every second you waste, though you’re too young and stupid yet to realise it.’
I looked him in the eye. ‘Why, since that night I came with you in your dream, have my paws gone yellow? And how can I make them white again?’
Hawkweed laughed evilly: ‘That’s two questions, laddie, and a statement that begs a few more. That night you came into my dream, eh? What a fool you are, laddie, to think it a dream. I see we have a long way to travel together: a long way indeed. But all you want to ask is why your feet have gone yellow?’
I nodded emphatically. At this precise moment it was the only thing I wanted to know.
‘That’s not just a stain on your fur, laddie.’ The old cat leaned forward and leered at me. His snaggled teeth were startlingly white and sharp. ‘It goes right through to your soul.’
I felt my mouth fall open, at first, I thought, in shock: but then a shout of laughter broke out and flew into the air. I closed it again quickly and the laugh was abruptly silenced. My grandfather was staring at me, and I noted with a certain grim satisfaction the light of surprise that had appeared in those baleful yellow eyes.
Hawkweed recovered himself with alacrity. ‘You may laugh now, laddie, but you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face soon.’
As I was considering this possibility, wondering whether this was how one laughed when one’s face had been smashed about as my grandfather’s was, my world turned upside-down. In an eyeblink, the old cat had launched himself upon me and was gripping my throat between teeth that stopped just short of drawing blood. I could feel the pinpricks of those sharp points through my fur, the power of those jaws around my windpipe. Just one bite, one prolonged application of pressure, and I knew I would be choked to death. Black stars danced in my eyes and the inside of my head felt soft and heavy. My legs, which had been resisting frantically, began to relax. Then something in the balance of the world changed and the compression around my throat receded, and as I began to come back into myself, I heard a voice deep in my head, intoning:
‘Enough of this foolish defiance. There are things in this world which I know and you do not, and it is time for you to learn them. There will be times when you want to run away and forget you were ever the wiser; times when the weight of your knowledge will bow your head down and make your heart stiff with grief. Other cats will spurn you: some will fear you; many will despise you – I know, for so it has been for me. But you cannot – you must not – turn aside from your fate. I, for one, will not let you. You may be young and thoughtless now, but soon you will be old and careworn, like me. Enjoy the time between the two, Orlando: the transition is precious and fleeting: and you have a great deal to learn if you are to survive the pitfalls of the journey.
‘Now, close your eyes and pay attention to what I say.’
I did as I was told, but deep in the recesses of my body my heart raced like a cornered mouse. The voice droned on above and beyond me, and soon I was not listening to it at all: rather, with my head pressed hard against the ground, I found I was listening to the blood beating around my body, the thump and pulse of my heart, and then my senses became attuned to different, deeper rhythms below me; below the leaf mould and the centipedes, the worms and the mites; and at the same time above me, in the trees, the clouds and the sky. It was as if I could feel the heartbeat of the world: powerful, firm, inexorable. The voice went on, and I found that as I lay there, my own heart beating steadily in time to the rhythm of life itself, the words fell into my head like some complex backbeat.
‘...wild roads, Orlando. The animals’ highways. Invisible to the eyes of humans, they run wherever there is life: they are life, laddie – they carry it through the body of the world, and without them we are nothing. If they fail, all life fails: if they wither and die, then so do we. We are all wild things on the face of the world, and how we live and fight and dream together determines the health of that world. Listen to me, Orlando, and learn.’
And, in a strange sing-song voice I had never heard my grandfather use before, Hawkweed told a tale passed from one cat to another through the history of the world, and there amongst the scrubby undergrowth of a small English wood, caught in the beating heart of that world, I listened.
*
‘Long, long ago, before the world was born, the Great Cat lay lazy in the darkness and groomed Herself. And one day as She groomed, the realisation dawned upon Her that She was lonely. She licked and smoothed and considered this matter. Aeons passed, and still She groomed. She groomed until Her fur gleamed; She groomed until Her tongue ached; and still She was lonely. For millennia. She licked Her gleaming flanks, and at last as She licked, so hills and woods and plains emerged where before there had been stripes and spots and whorls; She licked until rivers and seas and lakes became established in their beds and courses. She
made a world for Herself, of Herself; a world to cherish and groom forever. But still She was lonely. So She reached down into the wildest part of Herself and She dreamed. Dreams are powerful things, and the Great Cat’s dreams were the most powerful of all; for they were true dreams that bore with them the gift of life. She lay lazy in the darkness and She dreamed of creatures who would inhabit Her world and keep Her company: She dreamed of birds and fish and insects, mice and rabbits, frogs and magpies; voles and fleas and fledglings, hedge mice and moles; ducks and corncracks, shrikes and shrews and stoats; all manner of beasts. She dreamed them into being: and then She dreamed of Herself, enjoying the world She had made, and out of Her dreaming eyes there leapt the cats.
‘All the wild things of the world ran and hunted and played; and when they were tired they slept and in turn they dreamed: natural, ingenuous dreams that mirrored the running and hunting and playing of their days. But the Great Cat dreamed too long, and soon She became trapped in the toils of the first nightmare. Before She could swallow it down, something else struggled up through Her dreaming mind, and swam towards the light of the world. And as it fought its way out, it learned. It learned the power of the Great Cat’s dreaming, and it, too, coveted the ability to make the world anew in the form of its dreams. And so it was that humans entered the world – as wild as all the other creatures, but with the wildest power of all: a ferocious imagination.
‘The humans imagined themselves kings of the world; and so they became. They hunted and killed as many of the other creatures as they could find, and even though the Great Cat dreamed hard. She found She was powerless to stop their destruction, for they were so many, and She was only one. And so She dreamed into existence the wild roads, for Her creatures to travel out of the sight of humans and carry with them the natural energies that would keep the world alive and well.
‘But She had reckoned without the wildness of humankind. No matter how “civilised” the humans became, still there was a part of them that was drawn to these highways. When they slept, their dreams would rise up out of them and fly out to join with the other wild things on the wild roads. And there they caused terrible harm: for the wildest dreams of the wildest humans were too powerful and corrosive for even the wild roads, or the cats who travelled them, to contend with. Dreams of greed and lust, hatred and revenge: they invaded the highways; and where they settled, the fabric of the roads was fatally damaged, poisoned and twisted by their force. Where the worst dreams corroded the highways, they burned right through, so that the clean energies of the world spun away into the darkness, and creatures sickened and died. And as the best of the world was poisoned and dissipated, so the balance was spoiled, and fear crept out into the night. Fear gave way to anger, and anger generated violence, and violence brought death and pestilence in its wake.
‘And so it went on, night after night: the humans dreamed and the highways succumbed to a more powerful and more savage force.
‘The Great Cat looked down upon Her dying world in despair, and She sighed. Her breath drifted out over the wild, forgotten places of the world, where it passed like a breeze, until it fell upon a small, insignificant-looking yellow flower, a flower borne up by a furry green stem and leaves covered in a soft mousy down – and it was these hairs that caught and held the Great Cat’s breath. All the yearning that She felt for Her world to be safe was drawn down through its leaves and stem, down into its roots. And when it reached the roots. Her sigh spread to the next plant. And where roots could spread no further, the plant sent downy seedheads to drift upon the winds to establish new plants, here, there and everywhere it could avoid the invasions of humankind—’
‘It’s hawkweed!’ I interrupted, scrambling upright.
The cat who shared its name now regarded me steadily, his ruined face stern. ‘It was indeed that plant which placed its mark upon you. You’ve been initiated to your task, laddie: now it’s time to learn what it means to be a dreamcatcher. Do you understand?’
I could feel my brow furrow. With my eyes open and my airways operating normally, back in the recognisable world again, the story seemed implausible and infantile, the meanderings of an old cat trying to persuade an idiot youngster to save him an unpleasant chore. Moreover, I suspected some perverse, unfair motivation, and probably another cruel trick. My throat ached where the old cat had gripped it. I examined the tell-tale stains on my paws, then stared belligerently at my grandfather.
‘I wanted an explanation, and all you give me is a fairy tale—’
The old cat silenced me with a look. ‘If you had not interrupted my fairy tale, laddie, you might have learned its true conclusion. Since you have, you deserve to remain at a disadvantage. Let that be a lesson in itself, Orlando: do not leap in where a little thought might save the day.’ He clicked his teeth in disgust. ‘There’s no respect any more. You youngsters think you know it all, when you hardly even know how to lick your arse clean.’ He turned away, splayed his back legs and started suiting action to words.
I watched out of the corner of my eye, a little revolted by my grandfather’s crudity. I was, however, rather sorry that I had interrupted: obviously there was more to the tale than I had realised. While Hawkweed groomed, I tried to make sense of it all; but yellow flowers and murder and horror and enormous cats and a world made from fur and spit all got tangled up in my head so that I was left more confused than I had been to begin with.
By the time the old cat completed his cleaning routine the sun was starting to sink between the trees like some great distant fire, sending scintillas of red light shooting through the silhouetted branches.
Hawkweed surveyed the sky thoughtfully. ‘Time for a more practical lesson,’ he declared.
*
The moon rose over the hawthorns to light our way as I followed my grandfather with some trepidation into the middle of a gorse thicket. Scents wafted up out of the earth as if the night had released another, secret world; one filled with smells of extraordinary interest, smells that made my skin twitch and my nose strain. Rabbits! At this stage in my life I had never actually seen a rabbit, let alone caught one; even so, the image rose as instinctively into my mind as the scent rose from the ground. Soon my head was buzzing with excitement. It was dark, and here I was, out on the common with Hawkweed, surrounded by the scent of warm, wild prey.
The smell got stronger. Soon I could feel it deep in the bones of my face, fizzing around my sinuses, suffusing my skull. Saliva flooded my mouth. Blinking, I swallowed hastily before my grandfather caught me drooling.
‘Get down, laddie!’ Hawkweed hissed suddenly, dropping to a crouch, and I flattened myself hard against the earth. He moved along with jerky little jabs of his legs, elbows as high as his shoulder blades, like a badly wound clockwork toy: but his head and spine remained in a straight, straight line, and his eyes did not waver; only the tip of his tail twitched out of true.
The next thing I knew, there was a confusing flurry of movement. Light and dark furred shapes spun like dervishes. Stifled growling, as of a furious cat with its mouth full of something which squirmed and fought: then an eye-watering shriek that fled for a moment out into the night skies, only to be cut short by a terrible crack that echoed off the nearby beech trunks. Then nothing but an eerie silence.
I squinted into the gloom, the fur on the back of my neck and spine itching with curiosity. Cautiously, I edged forward.
Something in the darkness ahead began to hiss and bubble and I drew back, suddenly afraid that what I had just heard had not in fact been Hawkweed getting the better of a rabbit, but some other terrible predator which had lain quietly in wait for just such an opportunity to ambush my grandfather.
And when the moonlight fell squarely on the figure in front of me I was still not entirely sure this was not the case: for the creature that raised its head was a fearsome sight indeed. Its face was masked with gore, through which its teeth gleamed like the teeth in a death’s head. Its eyes glittered with inimical lustre.
?
??Chow down, laddie,’ it said. ‘You’ll need to line your stomach for our next task.’
The rabbit, neck broken and belly open to the night, steamed gently into warm air. I had never experienced anything like it before – chicken and game casserole, tuna chunks and minced turkey in gravy all came out of the can with a distinctly homogenous chill to them – so the sudden heat of fresh rabbit-blood on my tongue took me so greatly by surprise that I leapt backwards as if bitten. Hawkweed appeared to take no notice of my discomfort, engaged as he was in eating the rabbit’s head. He wrapped his jaws expertly around the skull, positioning the cutting edges with practised care, and bit down hard so that a second snap of bone echoed into the trees. This was followed by such grotesque crunching sounds that I thought I might just wander home while my grandfather was thus distracted and see what Anna was serving for supper that evening. Tinned food seemed rather more tempting than all this gory ravaging. For the first time I found myself wondering whether the lads at the garages had been scrupulously truthful about their hunting exploits. No one had ever mentioned the sound of a skull cracking, the snap of a neck breaking; the mess and heat of it all.
He who hesitates is lost.
I could have turned at that moment – while Hawkweed busied himself amidst convoluted tissue and dark cavities – and run swiftly and silently back through the gorse, out on to the dark common and along the road to the golden light at Anna’s kitchen window; I could have slipped through the cat-door into a world of central heating, processed food, ownership and dependence for the rest of my life. But just as I was about to turn intent to action, my grandfather’s eyes rose up over the corpse of the rabbit and glared right at me, and I felt myself flush with shame. All my self-will slipped away.