‘Well don’t hang about, laddie, or there’ll be none of the damned thing left!’ So saying, Hawkweed applied himself to his meal again and the rest of his unwelcome pronouncements came to me though muffled chewing— ‘...least you can do to show your appreciation of your old granfer’s efforts... still show you spineless youngsters a thing... might just give you some backbone...’
I approached. Now the smell of the prey was not so strong, for the night air had cooled the carcass. What lay before me now, gleaming softly in the moonlight, bore no resemblance at all to the image of the rabbits I carried in my head. I closed my eyes and tried to think of it as something that might have slipped out of a can. Not being able to see it helped, and soon I was tearing away at the rabbit as if I had not eaten in days. It tasted different to the food I was used to: salty and tangy in a way that made my tongue buzz with sensation; then after a while I was shearing and swallowing without even registering the taste, and my fur was sticky with blood. Sated, I reeled away.
Hawkweed was sitting at a spectator’s distance, with his tail curled neatly around his hind paws. The sleeked fur of his head looked newly groomed and his snaggled teeth glinted in a grimace that lay somewhere between a leer and an ironic grin.
‘The warm ones are the best, ah yes; the warm ones are the best.’ He leaned forward. ‘That’ll be the easiest kill you ever eat, laddie, but just remember: the first one’s free.’
*
Half an hour later, I had finally managed to strip my whiskers of the last of the rabbit-blood and Hawkweed was becoming impatient.
He shook his head sadly. ‘The Great Cat Herself was never so clean. Shake a leg, laddie, and let’s be off. They’ll all be dreaming by now.’
The moon had sailed clear of even the highest trees so that their shadows preceded us as we walked across the marshy corner of the common, crossed a small stream and made our way into the woods.
The wild road we entered on this occasion was very different to the one I had dreamed of. It was smaller, for a start, and the winds inside it were neither so strong nor so cold. However, the sensation of pushing my way through the initial resistance felt exactly as I had originally imagined it, and once inside I could feel my body responding to the demands of this strange place, taking on the larger, wilder form I recalled so well. I regarded my huge new paw with grim satisfaction, and felt the blood of the great cats flow through me. This time, though, I felt oddly comfortable with this curious state of affairs, as if I were returning to my proper element.
Already, there were golden lights in the highway.
I gazed at them, remembering.
I remembered the thing that had hovered over Vita’s head. I thought about the shapes I had seen in it, and in those others on the wild road.
I thought about the one I had eaten.
I considered the yellow on my paws.
I recalled the story of the hawkweed and the Great Cat’s sigh, and although the connections still eluded me, dancing as erratically in my head as the golden globes danced against the roof, I could feel the shape of a theory forming—
‘There!’ Hawkweed leapt ahead of me, head as alert as any pointer’s watching the kill fall from the sky. ‘See there, laddie: that’s one!’
I started, my mind shaken once more into randomness, the thoughts falling this way and that, like a child’s snow-globe turned upside-down.
‘Wh— what?’
‘Now you earn the rabbit, laddie. Now’s your chance – bring it down; go on!’
Up above me, hovering in the gloom, was the largest golden light I had so far seen. It wobbled in the air currents, distorting to left and right, as if something inside it were struggling to get out. Its edges had started to flare into the fiery corona I had learned to recognise as belonging to those dreams most destructive to the highways. And indeed, where it bounced against the side of the wild road, it burned and smoked, releasing a horrid stench into the air. Already I could see the damage it had done, for the outside world shone more brightly beyond it than it should. I could feel the way the energies around me, inside me, were drawn to that thinning, as if they wished to pour themselves away into the night. What then? I thought, still confused by my granfer’s lesson. If the wild road were to burn through, here and now, would we be ripped out into the world outside, unnatural in our giant forms, there to wisp away to nothing? Or would we fall choking on the ground, two small domestic cats, defeated by forces beyond their control?
‘Go on, Orlando!’ My grandfather’s voice broke through my grim reverie, and his face was avid and urgent. ‘Catch it, laddie; embrace your fate!’
I felt my spine prickle, as if every hair there were rising to meet a challenge: rising not from fear, but because of some other emotion, something that burned inside me, something that buzzed in the deep cavities of my skull. The golden globe smelled like prey. It gave off the bitter tang of the hunted and the terrified.
At once I was all predator.
Unbidden, my hind legs gathered and, muscles bunching and releasing, I leapt high into the swirling air and took the thing cleanly in my jaws.
It squirmed briefly in my mouth.
I laid it upon the ground of the highway and held it down, quite professionally, I thought. I was just examining my catch more closely and congratulating myself on the dexterity with which I’d carried out the whole manoeuvre, when the yellow sphere pulsed like a trapped jellyfish. I dug my claws in tighter—
As I did so, something dark rushed up at me, so that I jerked my head away. It was a dog! A dog inside the golden light! I recognised it with the instinctive dislike of his species, but still I managed to hold on. A scarred muzzle was pushing at the membrane of the globe, distending it. I trod down harder, and the muzzle withdrew. I rolled the sac under my foot, and saw a human running. The perspectives were all wrong: the human was tiny; the dog running after it, mouth agape, a soundless bark wrenching spasmodically at its head, was vast and threatening. Suddenly, the human fell over and its skirts flew up, revealing veined and lumpy legs, stockings ripped – by teeth? The dog, triumphant, stood over the fallen figure with menacing intent. Its jaws worked furiously, but no sound came out. I could see the whites all around the human’s eyes, the muscles stretching fear across its face. It was the woman who ran the local post office, an old human whose clothes smelled musty and of long-dead cats, who could be counted on to open a can of sardines for you if you mewed outside her kitchen door. Overcome by horror, I sank my teeth into the globe, felt its outer surface break beneath the carnassials I used for shearing through food. Something wriggled against my gums, then it burst in my mouth with a foetid rush.
Appalled I leapt back, shaking my head from side to side to try to rid myself of the taste. Little globules of yellow spilled across the highway.
‘No!’ A cry of utmost dismay from my grandfather.
I whirled around.
‘Catch it! Catch it!’ Hawkweed’s voice was pitched high with panic.
Bewildered, I turned back to do as I was told, only to see the tiny black dog shrugging its way out of the clinging shreds of the golden globe. Or rather, the once-tiny black dog: for as it emerged from its prison into the winds of the wild road, it was growing, and growing...
‘Kill it!’
I stared in horror, as the creature grew from the size of a shrew, to the size of a vole, to a rat—
Then I was knocked sprawling to the ground. Hawkweed hurled himself at the dog, catching it awkwardly by the leg; but as he did so, its swelling muscles prised his jaws open and it escaped again. Now it was the size of a small cat and where it touched the highway, its fur singed and smoked, and the tunnel walls caught light.
‘Help me, Orlando!’
Suddenly my paralysis evaporated. I wanted to flee in the opposite direction, putting as much distance as I possibly could between myself and this wild road, my grandfather, the horror I had accidentally released. Instead, I found myself leaping at the snarling beast, jaws wide and fur
y flaming through my veins. I remembered the rabbit. I clawed my way up the dog’s shoulder until I reached its neck and sank my teeth down into the bones there. My head bumped against Hawkweed’s. Together we bit down with the primordial power of felidae jaws and the beast howled. Foul juices ran down my chin. Then there was a sharp crack and the thing fell limp beneath us.
It was as large as a pony.
At once, the acrid flames that licked the walls of the wild road smouldered and died, leaving scorch and thinning in their wake. The creature on the ground beneath us seeped slowly away, until only the foulest of smells remained.
*
In a cottage on the main road of the village, the widow Lippincote turned in her sleep and pulled straight the bedclothes that had become twisted around her feet as she fled from the avatar of her nightmare. After a few moments, her breathing eased and she started a new dream: one of summer meadows and a young man with cornflower-blue eyes, running his hands up legs that were smooth and young and varicose-free.
*
Chest heaving, I turned to face my grandfather.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re dreams, laddie, the golden lights. Only cats see them. Cats like you and me. Everyone dreams, Orlando: cats and humans and horses and elephants. But some dream worse than others. Some dreams, they’re as light and sweet as butterflies, but some are dark and vile. Those are the ones you have to watch for: they’re the ones that do the damage. It’s human dreams that do the worst hurt, laddie. Humans think they’re civilised—’ He laughed bitterly. ‘They think they’re better than us: stronger, wiser. Oh yes. But dreamcatchers, we know the truth. We’ve seen it all – the gluttony and the lust and the terror, and the things they do in the name of those emotions: the stealth and the hate, the violence of it all. Civilised? Hah! What they don’t ask, people, is where their wildness went.’ His eyes flared briefly in the reflected gold of another dream as it drifted by. ‘Doesn’t just vanish. Oh, no. Nothing ever vanishes, laddie. Nothing is ever lost.’
He fell silent, considering this proposal. I shifted uncomfortably. Biting the dog had made my stomach twist with repulsion. I thought I might throw up. But my grandfather was not yet finished with his lecture.
‘Humans are every bit as wild as the animals they despise. Wilder, I believe. Wilder and more dangerous than the maddest dog—’
‘Then why,’ I butted in, ‘did we just save the old woman from that one?’
Hawkweed regarded me with disgust. ‘We didn’t save her, you fool. That’s not our job.’ He clicked his teeth angrily and his eyes glittered. ‘We’re here for the wild roads, for the health of the world, to keep the highways safe from the corrosive power of their bloody dreams. If we didn’t do this, my lad, you’d soon see a difference. It can start small if the damage is slight: lack of sleep and niggling tempers, minor illnesses that just won’t clear up; little creatures running slower than usual. Soon it’s arguments and fighting; children hit for no good reason; animals run over for the sheer hell of it; a malaise fallen over an entire area; even the weather becoming unnatural. But once you get the really nasty dreams out there, the true nightmares, then it’s plague and violence and death, laddie. Plague and violence and death.
‘We do the Great Cat’s will, Orlando, keeping Her highways clear and healthy. And how does She reward us?’ He retched and spat. ‘She curses us, laddie. That’s how.’
*
Back home later that night I passed the food bowl that Anna had put out for me in the kitchen. Tuna imperial, my nose told me, the one with shrimps and other seafood mixed in with the fish. I bent to sniff it, but suddenly the sight of a piece of squid obtruding from the mixture reminded me of the rabbit; and when I remembered the fur of the rabbit, suddenly the taste of the dog was in the back of my throat.
Gagging, I raced back through the cat-flap, feet slipping sideways on the slippery quarry tiles, made for the first flowerbed I came to, and threw up with considerable gusto. I stood there for several minutes afterwards, heaving and blinking. Up had come most of the rabbit: I had expected that. What puzzled me was a mass of longer black strands.
They looked like dog hairs...
Ashmore Dreams
Summer
Now summer dreams are flowing along the Brindley canal, pooling in the quiet places where the current runs slow, seeping under the bridge, swirling upstream around the lock-gates.
Venetia Hall, an elderly painter who lives on one of the narrowboats and has that day returned from her annual visit to the Tate, finds herself swimming, a young girl again, in water almost tropically warm. It is night, but garden candles burn in tall cressets, illuminating apple trees full of cascading roses. Around her, lilies, floating on pads as large as plates, have opened to spill their heavy perfume into the summer air. She can hear laughter and voices and the clink of glasses; music drifting lazily from the bandstand. She turns to float on her back, and it is then she realises that her feet have become entangled in the lily roots, and that the man she has been swimming with has disappeared from view...
*
Up on Village Road, the McEwan twins, each, alone, have dreams of flying out of their dormer window. Separately, they step from the ledge, spiral and fall...
*
Fred Burbage and his wife Enid have been bickering more than usual recently, and always over the tiniest of domestic matters: now, he turns over in his sleep, his hands gripping the pillow as if it is his wife’s throat; and tomorrow morning when he wakes it will be with relieved surprise that he finds Enid still snoring gently beside him.
Another dreamer is visited by a long-backed fox, its fur all burnished copper, save for a grey patch on one flank. Its eyes are knowing, and wary. When it opens its wide black mouth, the dreamer hears it speak: ‘Take care of what you dream,’ it tells her, ‘for when you dream, your fears eat the world. Someone must warn you of the damage you do, awake and asleep. We care, and are watching.’
12
Outside the post office one sunny morning shortly after her visit to Nonesuch, Anna spotted Alice deep in conversation with John Dawe. They were standing on the other side of the village street, a little way down from the old almshouses. Alice had got in as close as she could and was talking animatedly. Though they were of a height, she had somehow arranged herself so that she was looking up at him. As a consequence she had to lift one hand to shade her eyes from the sun, and this gesture had given her upper body a relaxed, attractive tilt. She laughed at something he said; then, seeing Anna, waved and called:
‘Hey! Come and talk to us!’
Anna thought about it for a moment. Then John Dawe turned his head towards her and smiled tentatively, and that was that. She half-waved at Alice and, blushing, let her feet carry her rapidly away. Later, in the Green Man, she admitted:
‘I don’t know what comes over me when I see him. God knows what I must look like to him.’
‘Mad,’ said Alice. ‘I suspect he thinks you’re mad.’
‘Well, at least I’m not rude and violent and satisfied with myself,’ said Anna. ‘And what does he know about cats anyway?’
‘Play us another tune,’ recommended Alice. ‘We’re bored with that one.’ She went off down the bar to serve someone. ‘The fact is,’ she said when she came back, ‘you fancy him.’
‘What?’
‘You fancy him.’
Anna drank her drink. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Alice sunnily. ‘But you’ll find I’m right. You may not like him, but you already fancy him something awful.’ She wiped the bar.
All the way home, Anna puzzled over the implications of this. It was true, she decided: she was attracted to John Dawe, in quite a simple, physical way. She liked his shyness, so easily mistaken for bad temper. She liked his sudden smile. She thought frequently about his tanned, powerful forearms. But for some reason that only made her angrier with him. How dared he have such an immediate effect on her? It felt i
ntrusive. She might understand it if he was Max Wishart, or some other old lover – but someone she had never met before?
Nothing was solved.
*
Anna began to work energetically, if haphazardly, on her garden. When he could spare the time, Orlando was delighted to help. He sat around yawning louchely in the sunshine while Anna put in the hours, occasionally jumping on the bits of leaves and stick she pulled up in handfuls from the borders. Anna found herself grateful for his support: to her, even weeding was an adventure. Generally she worked from a book, or asked over the garden fence the advice of Old Mrs Lippincote. Her neighbour on the other side, Mr Thompson (an active old man, pink-faced and boyish at eighty-three, who wore thick woollen worsted trousers and still drank a pint or two of Guinness at the Green Man every morning), promised to help her plant her own vegetables, though he clearly expected to do much of the work himself. He was often more available than Old Mrs Lippincote, who would only talk during the ten minutes she took for ‘morning coffee’. She was, she intimated, too busy the rest of the time, re-doing her daughter-in-law’s washing.
‘And I wondered about this?’
‘Gold bless us, my girl,’ said Mrs Lippincote, ‘it’s sweet william, where were you born?’
‘I did think it might be,’ Anna apologised.
*
‘The fact is,’ she admitted to Alice Meynell in the pub that night, ‘I’ve just pulled up a borderful of biennials. I can’t tell the plants from the weeds.’
‘Who can?’ said Alice.
‘I think I’ll clean out the garden shed instead.’