‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ I began hesitantly and gathered myself to face his rebuff; but the old cat just laughed grimly.
‘Of course not, laddie. Of course not. Why ever should you, when your time has not yet come? Why should you have to experience these trials so early in an unblemished life? Not for you the onerous task, the duty to all. No burden to bear for young Orlando, eh, boy? What care you that the humans’ dreams eat into our world; what care you if our highways are poisoned, if creatures sicken and die?’
I stared at him, unable to respond, not knowing what he wanted from me, but at last all he did was to grimace and then begin to retch painfully, a dry heaving which went on and on and on. I found myself wincing sympathetically. Hairballs could be a bastard, Ginge said. A real bastard. I hadn’t managed to produce a proper one yet; but the process fascinated me.
One more retch and the old cat leant forward and with considerable effort ejected something pale and fibrous on to the ground between us. It should have been as dark as his fur; so I knew with some deep instinct that this was no ordinary hairball. What it was, I didn’t know. I took a small step backwards.
The old cat spat and stretched his neck out as if it were distressing him.
‘Days of roses still for you, laddie,’ he continued at last. ‘Chasing butterflies in the sun, sleeping as soft as a little mouse with no thought for the swift destiny that awaits. Leave all the work to your elders, eh, laddie? Let the old ones taste the poisons of this world, keep the place nice and safe for the rest of you.’
The old cat hunkered down heavily and the wind pressed its sparse fur against a skull that I suddenly saw for the first time was frail and ageing, even in its wild guise. ‘Fifteen years I been doing this. Fifteen years. Kit and cat. There weren’t no one to take the strain all that time. It’s been a hard life, hard and unappreciated. Lonely, too. There’s a few of us old beggars around these parts, but we’re not much company for each other. What young queen wants to tie herself up with a dreamcatcher, eh? Well, a few, for a while maybe; but not the ones you want, no; always the dregs. That’s what I’ve had in my life, laddie. The dregs. But what do you care? Why should it trouble you if your old granfer goes on chasing the damn things till I drop down stone dead, broken in heart and spirit? Ha!’
Hawkweed got up and shook out each foreleg in turn with little galvanic convulsions. Then he started to walk stiffly down the tunnel.
I watched him go. About twenty paces away, he turned and stared back at me. Dull golden light shone off his great eyes.
‘Well? Come on then, laggard.’
*
Caught up in the weird internal logics of the dream, I found that I had little hesitation in following my unfamiliar grandfather deeper into this cold, windy place. When Hawkweed began to run, so did I. I felt the ground rushing past beneath my new paws and delighted in the power of my muscles as they propelled me effortlessly on and on.
After a while, I became aware of a subtle change in the light outside the tunnel through which we ran. It was an eerie effect, as if somehow I occupied two worlds: one which was dark and cold and urgent, full of blasting air; and another, less tangible but still visible if I narrowed my eyes: a world in which darkness gave way to streaks of red and gold and green; as if all colour that had once been here had somehow been pressed by the speed of our racing bodies out through the tunnel walls into the world outside.
Then we rounded a sharp curve and there, ahead, bumping against the unseen roof of the tunnel were a dozen or more yellow lights, vibrant in the gloom, giving off a faint, bluish smoke where they touched the boundaries of the highway. Sulphurous and acrid, it burned my nostrils, made my head ache. Hawkweed stopped beneath them. Their golden glow broke over his muzzle, haloed out around his ears. They limned his straggly whiskers and eyebrows with light, and gave back reflections of themselves deep within his unwavering eyes. An odd heaviness came over me as I watched Hawkweed scrutinise the globes, then stand up on his back legs to draw one gently out of the darkness. Pacing the small distance between us, he set it down in front of me.
This time, I did not back away. Rather, I found my paw reached out to secure and trap the thing. My claws extended themselves and sank gently into its surface, which initially gave way beneath my toes with a strange passivity; then I met a faint but definite resistance. I remembered then how, when slinking through the bushes in the back garden, trying to ambush Vita, I had once trodden on a much-deflated rubber balloon, lying bereft beneath the hydrangeas. How its surface, slick with dew and slug-trails, succumbed to the pressure of my claws, but in its new, shrunken state, somehow managed to repel a puncture. The globe felt a little like that, but less tangible, as if at any moment it might change its nature and squirm between my toes and away into the night. And as I felt that insubstantial but defiant pulse beneath my paw, I became aware in that moment of two things: firstly that the fear I had felt for the great cat beside me had somehow changed its nature, too; and secondly that I was going to eat the golden sac, despite the whiffs of acrid fume that now spilled from it.
I bent my head to it and felt the approving gaze of my grandfather upon me. Inside the yellow light, shapes swam indistinctly. I rolled it over with a paw and peered closely.
There!
Something twisted sinuously. I ducked my head back, perturbed.
‘It ain’t going to bite you, laddie.’ These words emerged as through a half-stifled yawn.
I reapplied myself to my task.
As I watched, something protruded through the membrane of the globe.
An elbow!
Then, a foot!
I stared, fascinated. It appeared to be some sort of long, pale, many-limbed creature, but then as it moved again I realised that it had two heads. The heads separated, then came back together. The beast rolled; then half of it peeled away, and when I squinted I could suddenly see that what I had thought to be a single organism was in fact comprised of two, joined awkwardly at the hip.
I watched, amazed, as they rolled again, and then, quite suddenly, recognised the top half of the partnership. It was the man who lived behind the church. The young, rather heavy one who had chased Ginge off the comfortably warm bonnet of his beaten-up old truck, and had thrown a potato at me for digging for a beetle in his garden. (Even at the time I suspected the man had thought I was doing something else entirely.)
And now here he was, tiny and naked, determinedly positioned between a pair of long brown legs belonging to a young woman with ferociously short yellow hair.
I tapped the ball gently and it rolled along the windy ground. The young man held on grimly to his partner as if completely unaware that his world was turning end over end. His eyes were wide open, triumphant and delighted by the good fortune his dream had accorded him; the woman’s were shut.
‘Don’t play with the damned thing: eat it!’ Hawkweed commanded.
I squared my shoulders. I pressed down with one paw on the globe till the image distorted. When it was unrecognisable, I lifted it gingerly to my mouth and held it behind the bars of my teeth. A faint wriggling reminded me of its contents. Something in terms of perspective and world order seemed wrong in eating down two human beings, however tiny, but I did it anyway.
It slipped down my throat far more easily than I would have imagined, and I could trace its passage, cool and slippery, to my stomach. It felt rather as if I had choked down a small frog. Except for the aftertaste, which was like nothing else I have ever tasted.
‘Well done, laddie,’ the old cat said, and his voice was warm with approval.
I glowed. I basked. It was a rare moment, and I was going to make the most of it. As well I might: there were not too many more like that to come.
‘Your first dream swallowed. First of thousands: trust old Hawkweed on that; and probably one of the sweeter ones, too. Nothing quite like a bit of illicit lust to make it slip down easy.’ He laughed unpleasantly.
I stared at my grandfa
ther, bemused. Illicit lust. I had no idea what he was talking about.
No idea at all.
*
The next morning, I awoke, late and stiff-necked and feeling at odds with the world. The sunlight slanting in through the gap in the curtain made my eyes sting. The birds in the trees outside were singing their little heads off. At once, I was filled with irritation. With a groan, I rolled over to burrow under the cushions, and instead found myself nose to nose with my sister. The sun struck pale green lights deep in the iris of her eyes, making her expression quite unreadable. Then she gave a low growl in the back of her throat and reared up at me.
I rolled quickly on to my back and threw up my paws in defence. What a time to pick for a game, I thought wearily.
Then I stared.
Vita was saying something to me through a mixture of purrs and snarls, but I didn’t hear a word of it, transfixed as I was by the sight of my own feet.
My paws had gone yellow!
I stared harder, my mind churning. Somehow, since I had last looked at them, the scallops of white around my toes had taken on that same ugly yellow staining I had noticed on my grandfather’s fur.
And when I finally was able to focus on what my sister had to say as she launched her attack on me, it confirmed my worst fears.
‘You left me alone!’ she cried. ‘You left me alone in the middle of the night. Orlando! Where did you go without me?’
*
The staining just wouldn’t come off, no matter how hard I tried, though I punished the yellowed fur with the roughest part of my tongue. Ashamed, I hid the marks from Dellifer when she came to groom me, feigning an impatience I did not feel, so that instead of her brisk but comforting attentions, she tutted at my fidgets and shyings and left me to myself. I retreated to the old sofa, curling up with my paws tucked uncomfortably tight beneath me, and felt as if I had been set apart from the rest of catkind.
*
‘I won’t be bullied in my own home by a cat,’ said Anna.
The old tom had stayed away for a day or so, as if to register his displeasure at Anna’s spying, then resumed his visits to the cottage. He no longer seemed at ease in the kitchen, however. He spat at Dellifer, ate nothing, and if Anna so much as spoke to him, would back into a corner and hiss until she returned to whatever she had been doing. She had put herself beyond the pale with him, and her attention was unwelcome.
‘If you don’t want to be here, you know where the door is.’
He yawned.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Anna.
Eventually a truce was declared – or restored – between them. But he kept a weather eye on her, and was careful never to be followed again. She would sometimes see him leaving the garden via the old board fence on the left, into the garden of her neighbour on that side, Mrs Lippincote – known in the village as ‘Old’ Mrs Lippincote to distinguish her from her own daughter-in-law, who worked at the florist’s in Drychester. Anna could hardly pursue him in that direction. One evening, drying her hair at the window of the spare bedroom (the electrical socket there was more conveniently placed than the one in her own room), she watched him slink across Mrs Lippincote’s lawn and disappear into a planting of cotoneaster.
She rapped loudly on the window. ‘I can see you!’ she called. ‘You needn’t think I can’t!’
He barely looked up. He was in no hurry. He knew he had got his own way. And to be honest, rapping on the window was no more than a gesture: though the old cat remained a puzzle, Anna was happy with her life at the cottage. She watched her kittens, she did her work. She ate well and slept late. If she thought about John Dawe, she admitted it to neither Alice nor Ruth.
9
Sunday evening, eight o’clock, and Anna – finding the refrigerator empty but for half a can of tuna, two cubes of feta cheese and some visibly suspect olives – had decided to have supper out. The Green Man was quiet and warm. Outside the wind bumbled and boomed over the downs, gathering its energies for the swoop into Ashmore, where it drove dense little squalls of rain across the duckpond, along Station Lane and into the deserted forecourt of the pub. ‘How exciting!’ said Anna, who had been content to let it blow her along too. ‘The cats have been running about like mad all day!’ It was so nice to be somewhere you liked. She looked with immense satisfaction at her drink, at the bar menu, at the firelight glinting on brasswork and polished wood, and told Alice:
‘I think I’ll have venison sausages.’
Alice said quietly, ‘I know how those kittens feel. I’ve got the wind under my tail today, too. I’d do anything to be away from here.’ She stared into the night. ‘There’s days you’d kill for something new.’ Her eyes were full of some youthful expectation Anna could no longer share. ‘Just one new thing.’
Then she shook her head as if to clear it. ‘I wouldn’t have the sausages if I was you,’ she advised. ‘The pot pie’s nice.’
‘Whatever you say, Alice.’
Alice – whose favoured cuisine was a bag of chips, and whose idea of waitressing was to drop the cutlery in front of you and say, ‘There,’ or ‘OK?’ – had just served Anna with home-made steak-and-Guinness pie, peas, and new potatoes, when a big car pulled almost silently into the forecourt outside. Headlights slashed briefly through the streaming rain and died. Doors slammed, there was a faint laughter, and a moment later the wind ushered in a rather beautiful woman accompanied by two young men. She looked excited, and she was still laughing and saying something about the rain. Her age was hard to tell. She had a way of tilting her head to look at the men – who were tall but hardly taller than her – which seemed always to catch the right light for her very black hair and startling green eyes. Her companions were in their twenties, elegant, anxious to please. Anna had seen numbers of young men like them in London. They were middle management, but not in the City: something more creative, perhaps, to do with marketing or publicity. They wore almost identical Paul Smith suits, and glided round the woman with the grace a good education gives. They sat her down by the fire. While one took her expensive raincoat and hung it up, the other was asking her what she would like to drink. She put her hands out to the fire in a sudden girlish gesture of delight, and smiled around with the vagueness of someone who is used to being looked after. In the warm light of the bar, you saw how good her clothes were, how good her skin was. You saw a tiny, perfect line of animation and irony at each comer of her mouth. You saw that despite her liveliness, the green eyes themselves were almost without expression.
‘Who’s that?’ whispered Anna.
‘Stella Herringe,’ said Alice.
‘Good grief,’ said Anna.
‘Don’t stare.’
Anna looked down at her pot pie in confusion. ‘But—’ she began.
‘Oh yes,’ interrupted Alice with a kind of dour satisfaction. ‘Fifty if she’s a day.’
‘I can’t believe it. On the phone she sounded—’
‘Well preserved, isn’t she, our Stella?’
Anna shook her head. ‘So much for first impressions,’ she said. ‘All this time I’ve thought she was some dowdy old monster who kept cats.’
This drew a puzzled look from Alice.
‘Pardon?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Excuse me, dear,’ called Stella Herringe. One of the young men had approached the bar and was standing there expectantly in his beautiful suit. ‘We’re ready to order now.’
Alice made a face only Anna could see. ‘They’re ready to order now,’ she mimicked. ‘As you can hear.’ She went back to her place, picked up her order pad and, eyeing her victim with frank sexual displeasure, sighed heavily. ‘If you’re thinking of eating,’ she warned him, ‘the venison sausage is off.’
The rain eased, and village regulars began to arrive in twos and threes, taking off their coats and calling for drinks. A fat wet Labrador waddled into the middle of the room and shook itself energetically. ‘That dog’s barred,’ called Alice, deadpan, to laughter. A ga
me of darts began. Someone put money in the jukebox. Soon it was hard to hear yourself talk: over at their table by the fire, empty glasses collecting in front of them, Stella Herringe’s companions glanced around impatiently and raised their voices. What were they talking about? Anna thought she heard one of them shout, ‘I believe the company can afford to be quite open about that.’ It fascinated her that they would sit in the public bar of the Green Man at all, let alone try to talk business there on a Sunday evening. ‘After all,’ the young man went on, ‘it’s a perfectly good product.’ Stella Herringe gave him an indulgent smile, then shook her head. ‘Not now,’ she mouthed clearly. ‘Not here.’ She looked at her watch.
At half past nine, John Dawe came in.
He looked as if he had been walking all day. His face and hands were reddened by the wind, his black hair was full of rain. He hadn’t bothered to bring a coat. He ordered German white beer which he poured for himself, taking care to stir up the sediment at the bottom of the bottle before the last drop or two went into the glass. Anna watched this little bit of theatre and thought:
‘Oh, you again. So what?’
If he felt the weight of this judgement he gave no sign. Instead, he picked up his drink and found an unoccupied table in the corner near the jukebox, where he cleared a space among the empty glasses and crisp packets. He appeared not to have noticed his cousin and her friends; or if he had, he was deliberately ignoring them. What’s going on here? Anna asked herself. I thought these two knew one another. I thought they were supposed to be close. She tried to catch Alice’s eye, but Alice was in animated conversation with a local boy in cargo trousers and dreadlocks. Damn, thought Anna. Stella Herringe, meanwhile, her expression switching from irony to puzzlement, watched John Dawe drink his beer. She allowed the young men to distract her for a moment, turning to laugh and tilt her head for them. Her cousin searched his pockets for loose change, studied the jukebox menu, selected an old track by the Rolling Stones.