My eyes popped open in horror. I stared around wildly, my vision obscured by the flickering corona of the dream. The tree was somehow below me. The dream was carrying me. I hung on harder, and the pressure thus exerted caused the contents of the globe to spew out, so that the dream jiggled wildly, lost upward momentum, and started to fall. From here, I found I had an incongruously clear view of the house and its grounds. There were formal flowerbeds and several ornamental trees, and as if hidden behind the towering old brick and timber structure, a complicated-looking arrangement of dark shrubs. To one side, a tennis court and some outhouses; the glint of moonlight off a car’s roof. As we floated down closer to the house itself, I could make out, between the complex slopes of roofs and tall chimneys, what appeared to be an enclosed courtyard – a confusing place of shadow and metallic gleams, as if someone had piled dozens of cages there; then the dream shifted in my grip and all I could see was a pair of humans coupling, the woman astride a man tied to a bed with what looked to be cords made out of her own black hair. I blinked, confused, and the dream wriggled again, allowing me a sight of the skies above.
There, the moon gazed down, unperturbed by the drama going on below. Silver-edged clouds drifted past that blank face, their passage unruffled and serene.
Great Cat, I thought suddenly. Great Cat, whose silver eye sees all, help me now!
I had never before been prompted to seek divine intervention; indeed, had considered all of Hawkweed’s tales to be no more than moral entertainment for foolish kittens; but now I felt a desperate need to believe I might be saved.
The dream began to plummet. As it did so, the faces of the man and woman rushed out at me, lips fused together so that they appeared to form a single freakish entity. As one, they turned to regard me, their pupils dilated to gleaming black pits – with terror or passion or enmity at my intrusion? It was impossible to tell. I thought I recognised them, though the fiery corona distorted their colouring, throwing wild shadows across the plane of their faces. I bit down harder. The woman sighed and her lips came free of the man’s. Her eyes locked upon mine and I felt a second of the purest fear; then, in a writhing arc she pushed past the tear in the dream’s sac and boiled out into the air, dispersing in tiny pixillated bursts of light into the darkness.
As if it were the presence of the woman alone that had formed its ballast, the dream stopped its downward trajectory and began to float unsteadily, like a rudderless boat.
I took a moment to secure the claws of my hind feet upon the globe and looked down again with trepidation. I was perhaps ten or twelve feet above the ground: soft grass, an easy landing.
With grim determination, I sat my jaws to work once more upon the casing of the dream, and with a gush of foetid air it surrendered itself to me. We hit the ground together with a gentle thump. Secure upon the earth again, upon the saving body of the Great Cat! I could hardly believe my very great luck. With the momentous feeling that I owed the world something in return for my life, I resumed my task. I bit and swallowed. Even though the main image of the woman in the dream had escaped, there were still afterimages: the couple in a remarkable diversity of sexual positions, ripples of sensation and musky smells that reminded me of Liddy... I fought the thought away, and chewed grimly on until at last it was all gone.
I lay there after that, weak with exhaustion. Exhaustion gave way to despair and a nagging sense of futility. Why had I left Liddy to chase this particular globe? Served up bliss on a tea plate and all I could so was to abandon it for the wilder temptation of a human dream! And then to risk my life so heedlessly, climbing to the top of the tallest tree I had ever seen, for no good reason. If the dream had stayed trapped there, it would surely have dissipated in time, of no danger to anyone and certainly too far from any wild road to wreak any of the havoc I had sensed in it. I shook my head sadly.
Liddy was right: I was the most untrustworthy and depraved of creatures.
*
It was a sad, drained Orlando who pressed himself through the cat-flap at Anna’s cottage much later that night. I dragged myself across the kitchen to my food bowl and stared at it empty-eyed.
I was still standing there, head down, dog-tired, some minutes later when my sister came trotting down the corridor. Seeing me, she stopped dead, nose twitching at the stew of rank pheromones in the air. She started to hiss. I stared at her, bewildered.
‘It’s only me. Vita,’ I said softly.
Vita bared her teeth at me. ‘You smell,’ she declared.
Then she turned and fled upstairs.
16
For the next few days, I stalked around the cottage and the gardens, tail lashing, a permanent half-growl rumbling quietly at the base of my throat. I felt at odds with myself and everyone else. I had gained access to another world, a place where all I had ever wanted would deliver itself up to me with a purr and a wave of musky scent; and had stupidly turned my back on it and run away. I knew I could never find my way back.
For this reason, I avoided even thinking about Lydia. I avoided the canal. I avoided Hawkweed and the highways.
Dellifer and Vita avoided me.
*
‘You live your own funny little lives,’ Anna said to Dellifer, ‘don’t you? You cats?’
Dellifer purred contentedly.
‘What do you think about, all day long?’
It was Saturday night: comfort night. Orlando was out. These days, in fact, he was rarely in. His whole demeanour was that of a cat with important business. He rushed about. He rushed his meals. ‘But we don’t care about him,’ Anna said. ‘Do we, girls? Because we’ve got comfort night.’ She had fetched fish and chips for an early supper, and now, while Vita dozed contentedly in the kitchen, waking occasionally to lick the ghost of grease off her paws, Anna and Dellifer were sitting on the sofa in Anna’s tiny front room, watching Casualty on the television. Anna sighed happily. She had beside her a cup of mocha which she had made half-and-half with drinking chocolate; and a moment ago one of the more competitive of the young doctors had been rushed into his own emergency room with a suspected rupture of the spleen after an ill-considered rock-climbing weekend. What more could you ask? Dellifer yawned, and rearranged her long, scrawny body on the sofa so that her head rested on Anna’s forearm.
Suddenly she raised her head.
A moment later, Anna did too.
‘What’s that awful smell?’ she said: ‘Orlando!’
She phoned Stella Herringe.
‘He’s done it everywhere,’ Anna said, ‘and I’ve got no idea how to clean it off.’
Stella laughed. ‘My dear, he is a tom,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want a smelly house, you’ll have to have him snipped. How old is he?’ and when Anna told her, ‘Well, he’s a little early, but there it is. You can get it done in Drychester,’ – here, she gave a strange laugh – ‘but it’s so straightforward you could probably do it yourself.’
Anna discounted this bizarre possibility. ‘I suppose I’ll have to have them both done,’ she said.
There was a silence, then the click of a cigarette lighter. Stella inhaled and said in the same breath: ‘Oh no, dear.’
‘But—’
‘Has she come on yet?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what to look for.’
‘You’d know,’ said Stella. Another laugh. ‘Well, look, think about it. It would be such a waste. She’ll just make the most wonderful kittens.’ Then, before Anna could object that she had enough kittens in the cottage already: ‘And I’ll take them all off your hands at six weeks. Earlier if you like. How’s that for an offer?’ She blew smoke into the receiver at her end. Anna could almost smell it. ‘Or you can bring her up here and I’ll organise the whole thing. But do have the little boy done, because we don’t want him as the father.’
Anna barely considered this. ‘It would be hard to split them up now,’ she said. ‘They’re so used to each other.’ To soften her refusal, she added: ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
/>
‘You do that, dear,’ said Stella. ‘But let’s not have an accident.’ She left rather a long silence, and then to Anna’s surprise said in a more hesitant tone, ‘Have you seen that awful cousin of mine this week? Or is he off at some symposium on the spirituality of Eskimo Nell?’
‘Do you know,’ lied Anna, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Not sure if you’ve seen him, or not sure where he is?’
Anna laughed uncomfortably.
‘Never mind,’ said Stella. ‘Look, I thought I’d have a supper party a week on Friday, and of course you’re invited if you want to come. Hello? Now’s the time to say. How nice, I’d love to, dear.’
‘Sorry?’ said Anna. ‘Oh, of course I’ll come. Thank you.’
‘Good. Eight for eight-thirty. And, dear? If you talk to John before I do, tell him I’d love it if he could be there too. Will you tell him?’
‘I will. Of course I will.’
The phone went down at Stella’s end.
Anna stood with the handset to her ear for some seconds. She thought: I’m not sitting in night after night watching TV with my cats. I’m not. For the first time since their disagreement in the churchyard, she dialled John Dawe’s number.
‘Can we be friends again?’
‘My God, I thought you’d never ask.’
Emptying out with relief, her heart pounding, Anna said carefully, ‘I’m working quite hard at the moment, but if you like, we could meet at Stella’s dinner party next Friday,’ and waited to see how he would answer.
*
Anna seemed to be upset that I had sprayed inside the cottage. She chased me out of the kitchen door, flapping her hands and shouting at me, by which I understood my presence was not welcome inside the house. I went and sulked, holed up on the dark, dry earth under the bay tree. I dozed. I slept. Every time I felt a dream brush soft as feathers against my mind, I woke and shook it away. Later, with the moon shining through the fragrant leaves above me, Anna came out and called my name. She stood there on the step, the golden light behind her making a halo of her hair, and stared uncertainly into the darkness. In one hand she held a dish which she rang repeatedly with a spoon – clearly, I noted with suppressed fury, to signal my suppertime. This went on for some minutes, while I wrestled with greed and an inchoate desire for revenge, until eventually with a sigh she turned and went back inside.
Unseen, in the depths of my refuge, I glared with ferocious satisfaction at her retreating form. It felt like a victory of sorts, until I heard the unmistakable sound of the cat-flap being locked.
Shortly after that I realised I was starving.
*
Later, at the Green Man, Anna told Alice: ‘He didn’t know.’
‘So?’
‘It means he really hasn’t been there. He hasn’t seen her since I shouted at him.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so happy.’
Anna emptied her glass. ‘Yes you do,’ she said. She went over to the jukebox, put coins in, and pored over the menu. She knew what she was looking for.
‘You’re jealous of her,’ called Alice from the bar. ‘I know that.’
Anna thought of John Dawe the first time she had seen him, in his grey Levi’s and black cotton sweater, insisting, ‘No one ever owns a cat;’ then on the Magpie, grimly searing tuna, shaking oil and vinegar for salad dressing; finally in the graveyard, admitting his dependence on the Herringe money. She thought of Stella, whose voice had been edged with such an unaccustomed anxiety when she said, ‘If you talk to John before I do—’ She thought of herself on the phone, lying to Stella, lying to John. The not-so-small dishonesties of love. She grinned at Alice over her shoulder.
‘That too,’ she admitted.
A group of regulars, pushing open the door of the Green Man a few minutes later, found her dancing dreamily away in the middle of the floor, to the old Rolling Stones track John Dawe had selected that strange rainy night with Stella in the bar. As she danced, Anna was thinking, he ignored her easily enough then. She was thinking, why should the Herringes have him, them and their money? I can make money, too. She was thinking, he’ll clean up very nicely if I can just get his self-confidence back.
*
‘You made the house smell!’ Vita declared gleefully when Anna finally let me in for my breakfast. ‘I ate your supper.’
Of course, it was not long before I was drawn back to the canal. How could I have thought I could keep away? My love – my lust – for Lydia called me.
The narrowboat cats regarded me warily. I recognised most of them as the opponents I had tangled with on that fateful night; indeed, some of them still looked a bit the worse for wear. One or two hissed their hostility and danced sideways on their toes to demonstrate that they were ready for a second bout, should it so please me. But when I failed to rise to the challenge, staring back at them blankly with the sun shining off my slitted eyes, they soon cheerfully ignored me, and sloped off to sit around in tight little huddles licking their fur and laughing quietly, I suspected, at my expense. Any threat I might have posed to the social order had obviously dissipated; I wondered, even, whether the delightful Liddy had shared with them the shameful circumstances of my precipitous departure.
Of that little queen, however, there was no sign.
I sat there, quite still, for several hours. The sun sailed overhead, bright and impassive, slipped once or twice behind high clouds, and began to drop towards the horizon. Chilly shadows chased one another across the surface of the canal, and still nothing stirred. Eventually, I settled down with my head on my paws, and waited for night to fall.
I may have dozed: for when a voice disturbed my rest, it was full night. It was a female voice, yet it seemed to be coming from behind me. I was disorientated. The narrowboat, and its occupants, lay dark and quiet in front of my nose. I started up and looked around.
Only to find a long-legged tabby-and-white cat regarding me with her head on one side and a strange half-smile on her face. She had a small silver hoop in one ear, and a spiky crest of fur on her head, rather like that of a jay.
‘I said, you should give it up.’
I stared at her. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said you should give it up. Call it a day. It’s stupid, waiting around for hours and hours for Miss Lydia just to have her wrinkle up her little pink nose at you. She is,’ – the tabby-and-white paused, searching for the right expression – ‘a prize coquette.’
Then she winked at me. The white patch that looped across the left-hand side of her face became a perfect snowy disc. She was without doubt the oddest-looking cat I had ever seen.
‘A what?’
‘A coquette, a vamp, a philandress.’
I was none the wiser.
The tabby-and-white sighed. ‘Honey, she’s a tart.’
I demurred, but the odd-looking cat carried on, impervious.
‘She is – how can I put this? – anybody’s.’
I have to admit I was shocked.
‘Whereas some of us,’ she considered, ‘are extremely choosy.’
‘You don’t seem like the other cats around here,’ I said at last.
‘I know. I’m not from round here.’ A broad grin spread across the patched face. She rolled her eyes, ‘Thank the stars.’
I regarded her with a frown. ‘You’re not very polite.’
The tabby-and-white cat threw back her head and laughed, a generous sound that echoed off the moored boats. The silver ring jounced merrily in her ear. ‘Polite? What’s polite? It’s just something for those with nothing better to do. Polite is for cats who care what others think. Me, I don’t give a damn.’ She cocked her head. ‘You know, for a dreamcatcher, you are a bit of a fool.’
For a moment, I was deeply affronted. Then I said, ‘If I am a fool, then you are a freak.’
Her eyes gleamed dangerously. ‘A freak? What do you mean?’
I nodded towards her earring. ‘To mutilate yourself like that.’
She laughed, rat
her bitterly. ‘You think I have done this to myself? Then you really are a fool. A man thought he owned me once and he did this to me to prove it to himself. I left, of course. No human can own a cat. My mother taught me that: no one ever owned her.’
An edgy silence developed between us as I thought about this. Then something else occurred to me: ‘How do you know I’m a dreamcatcher?’
The long-legged cat shrugged. ‘My dear, if anyone knows anything round here, everyone knows it. To be a dreamcatcher, well—’
‘I know.’ I hung my head. ‘It’s not my fault, though,’ I rushed on. ‘It was my granfer made me eat that stuff, and now I seem to be stuck with it. Look at my paws...’
She bent to sniff at the yellow-stained fur around my toes, and a strange look came into her eye. She had very shiny eyes, I noticed suddenly; shiny and rather wicked.
‘Ah. Hawkweed.’
I stared at her. Did she mean my grandfather or the little yellow flower? ‘What?’
She laughed at me. ‘You act as if you’re ashamed of it. Where I come from dreamcatchers are like royalty: all the girls want them. A dreamcatcher’s family always know when trouble’s coming, that’s what my mother said. And she should know: she mated with one.’
‘Your father’s a dreamcatcher?’
‘Sure. One of the best. Or he was.’
‘What happened to him?’
She avoided my gaze, bending her head round to tease goosegrass out of her haunch. The movement of her tongue made the spiky crest rise and fall like some kind of warning signal. When she raised her head again, her eyes were distant.
‘He disappeared one day: out the door one night on his usual rounds, and never came back. There’s more to it than that, but it’s not something I talk about, especially with someone whose name I don’t know.’
‘Orlando,’ I said quickly and immediately pressed on: ‘Did he disappear on the wild roads?’
The strange cat surveyed me coolly. Then she shrugged. ‘Who knows? To be sure, it is none of your concern. You are a very determined cat: really, quite pushy.’ Then, seeing my uncertainty, her eyes lost their topaz glint and she grinned. ‘My name is Millie. Short for Millefleur, which means yarrow, or something in French. My mother liked to give the impression that she travelled a bit, you see. She didn’t, of course, but you can’t catch a dreamcatcher by being dull. It is nice to meet you.’