The Cat Read online

  The Cat jumped down from the window-ledge to the floor of the attic room. In the corner stood an old radio, its knobs dusty. The Cat’s eyes scanned the radio, and curiously he took a few turns around it, feigning disinterest.

  ‘Hilversum,’ he breathed, reading the words on the dial. ‘Athlone!’ Then, clumsily, he fumbled with the knobs, but his paws failed to gain purchase, and the radio remained silent, despite his earlier success with the plug.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TALKING RADIO WITH MRS DIGBY

  The first sign of something wrong had been the stillness, as if the entire garden was holding its breath in the mist. Then there had been an overpowering sense of another presence, a presence that even the Mouse in his agitated state could not fail to notice. The banks of mist seemed alive with sinister potential. All sorts of notions coursed through the Mouse’s mind: of creatures of impossible size, and purpose, inspired by memories of old stories his mother had told him as a boy, stories in the main with horrible endings.

  Then the Mouse saw the Tom, pacing noiseless, sideways on, his brindled flanks like the side of a camouflaged warship passing through a channel fog. The Tom stopped, and his head turned very slowly towards the Mouse, and he dropped on all fours. Then there was another sound, a silent, velvet whistling in the air, coming from behind the Mouse, and perceived too late for the Mouse to be able to react in any way other than to scream a silent ‘No’, and he felt a violent blow on the shoulder, which spun the Mouse high in the air, upside down, then right way up, and he landed, winded, between the two cats.

  ‘I suppose you think you’re clever,’ said the Tom.

  The Mouse gasped for air and closed his eyes.

  ‘What d’ye know of Rat?’

  ‘Rat?’ said the Mouse, keeping his eyes closed. Images of his final demise flitted softly behind his eyelids. At least he would stand up, he decided, stand up and be killed with his eyes closed. But with his eyes closed, things were more frightening. He opened his eyes, then snapped them shut. He tried to stand up, but the Cat reached out and pressed him face down into the lawn with his paw.

  ‘Rat’s got a dodgey past,’ said the Cat.

  ‘Morally degenerate. Lives by the labours of others,’ said the Tom.

  ‘And worse,’ added the Cat.

  The Mouse could smell the earth, and the scent of wet grass, and feel the weight of the paw, like a heavy settee on his back. The claws, however, were in, and the paw was curiously soft.

  ‘Finish ’im,’ said the Tom’s voice.

  ‘Not yet,’ said the Cat. ‘I’m absolutely stuffed, Tom. Couldn’t eat another thing.’ The Mouse breathed. ‘Let’s have a laugh, eh?’ said the Cat, and with that, the Mouse was flicked upright, and felt a cruel blow to the jaw which spun him round twice before he collapsed back on the lawn.

  ‘Not so cocky now,’ said the Cat.

  ‘We could kill you,’ said the Tom.

  ‘But we won’t,’ said the Cat.

  ‘It’s Mr Rat you’ve to watch out for.’

  ‘His tastes, that’s what you need to watch.’

  The Cat chuckled mysteriously. Then there was silence. The Mouse, in the blackness behind his closed eyelids, awaited the end. Was he expected to say something? Everything was very quiet. When he tentatively raised one eyelid the garden was once again deserted; both cats had gone, vanishing with a silent whoop and a flash of the tail into the night mist, leaving the Mouse gasping and bemused upon the grass.

  The next day the Cat made a number of spectacular advances. At around noon, he was playing idly with the controls of the old radio in the attic, still frustrated by his inability to get the thing to work. Annoyed, at the tenth attempt, he had attacked the radio with several vicious paw swipes, one of which had switched on radio four. The Cat listened carefully, with his head on one side. The voices gave him a feeling of confidence, of superiority. If only he could speak like that, every avenue might be opened up to him, he thought. The Cat looked back at the door, to check he was entirely alone. His lips moved slightly, and he experimented with a few sounds. A miaow, tortured and uncatlike, came forth from his mouth. The Cat listened more closely to the radio. He compressed his lips, and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  ‘It’s one o’clock,’ he said, mimicking the radio in what he took to be a clear pronouncement in standard English. Thrilled, the Cat skipped down the stairs, intoning softly:

  ‘It’s one o’clock,’ and out onto the patio. There he had his second revelation of the day, whilst witnessing an intriguing meeting of fieldmice.

  Seated on his customary window-ledge from whence he could see and not be seen, the Cat observed two mice to whom he had recently sold some rather unnattractive property, situated slap up against the fallpipe from the bathroom washbasin. The two fieldmice discussed the state of the patio.

  ‘Damned thistles,’ said one, rubbing his forearm ruefully. ‘Damned thistles got to come down.’

  ‘Can’t get the thistles down without the humans. Bain’t our job,’ said the other.

  Then another fieldmouse had come up, and he too had complained about the thistles. Shortly, there was a whole crowd of fieldmice, discussing the thistles, unaware of the Cat slumped on the widow-ledge above.

  Following this, the Cat was surprised to see one of the fieldmice strip down to the waist, and begin to dig, followed by another and another, until they had dug up and upended one of the largest thistles and dragged it away, well clear of the patio. And after that, another thistle followed and then another, until the entire patio was clearer than it had ever been in the Professor’s day.

  The Cat sat on the ledge all afternoon, immobile, except for the occasional turn or satisfied belch, while the fieldmice laboured and sweated and scratched themselves on the vicious spines which covered the thistles, and strained and sprained themselves to clear the patio. As dusk fell, the Cat’s eyes gleamed with a strange light. A natural equilibrium! Natural order from individual effort. Initiative, enterprise, power! It was so simple! And there was the pile of felled thistles to prove it.

  *

  The Cat was so overwhelmed by the amazing discovery of speech that he quite overlooked the disappearance of the Rat and the Mouse. He spent his time frisking around under the hedgerows, practising small phrases and conversational gambits in a variety of styles and accents, or occasionally humming signature tunes from the better known programmes. He was however hesitant in demonstrating his newfound powers to those who really mattered; he was not without an awareness of the effect it could have; for years humans had been conditioned to an image of Cats as cunning, decorative, but limited creatures. The shock of speech (and learned speech at that) the Cat reasoned might well prove too much for them, and they might react with vicious repression, or ridicule, or both.

  On the first occasion he tried merely a solemn and deep ‘Hullo’, as he stepped into the kitchen of the house next door. It was a ‘Hullo’ he had tried many times, and practised in front of the mirror, a bourgeois, sensible and unthreatening hullo, with a mellow edge to it. It was completely ignored by Mrs Digby (the woman of the house), indeed so much so that the Cat thought perhaps he had misjudged his own capacity for speech. ‘Hullo!’ he bellowed. ‘Good morning. It’s nine o’clock’.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mrs Digby said, surprised, her kind oval face looking down at him, abandoning the breakfast dishes.

  Then she leant down and stroked the Cat, and the Cat looked up at her, purring and beaming.

  ‘I’m a Cat,’ he said. ‘I’m the Cat.’

  Mrs Digby frowned, disconcerted by the sudden clarity of the Cat’s pronouncement, and by the undeniable glint of acquisitive intelligence in his eyes.

  ‘CAT!’ shouted the Cat. ‘My name is Cat.’

  Mrs Digby bent down, and her hands swept the Cat up and away into her arms.

  ‘My, you are a curious beast,’ she said. Being one of those who believe Cats to be more human than humans themselves, she was not greatly sur
prised to find a cat who appeared to be able to speak. More – in the dreamy half-world of domestic duty, when the mind so often wandered, almost anything was possible for her.

  But now, taken by surprise by her sudden closeness, the Cat stiffened, and all his claws came out, gripping Mrs Digby’s arm. Mrs Digby stiffened too, squeezing the Cat, and triggering his escape impulse. Unable to control himself, the Cat’s paws spun, claws out, scrabbling at her bare arms, and she threw him away from her across the kitchen, where he landed awkwardly on the linoleum, distressed and upset. Yet in the brief moments he had lain in her arms, he had felt the warm press of her breasts against his fur, and the soft scent of her hair against his whiskers, and her grey eyes, for a second had smiled at him.

  ‘Don’t you scratch me, you nasty Cat,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ said the Cat, licking himself. ‘I couldn’t help it.’ One day, he said to himself, he would have a kitchen like hers. He would invite her round, and show her. He would impress her with his conversation, and talk of the many things he had so recently learnt from the radio: the music of Bartok, lawnmowers, the price of farm mulch, and the works of God in everyday life. She would come to understand what a Cat was capable of.

  Mrs Digby for her part was not altogether a happy woman, being married to a Mr Digby who had a taste for work, home improvements and the latest kinds of motor car, while she herself had had an upbringing which had been eccentric enough to endow her with a wider view of the possibilities within the real world.

  Accordingly, once the initial shock of the talking cat had worn off, she found she quite relished his visits on the lonely mornings and evenings when Mr Digby was away, and the sense of illicitness that his company engendered. Here, at last, was something special that Mr Digby could not buy in shops. And the Cat’s limited powers of speech, restricted largely to announcements about the time, and fragments of news and current affairs, yet studded with occasional insights which could not all be merely accidents (or repetitions of things heard elsewhere), encouraged her to fantasize at length about what he might achieve if permitted to reach his full potential.

  The Cat meanwhile redoubled his educational programme. Every night he would switch on the radio, and roam the airwaves, seeking information. His untutored mind, hitherto empty of all knowledge, now came to thrive, to grow, like some amoeba, feeding nightly on the world’s thoughts. He listened to the serialisations of Dickens, ‘Today in Parliament’ and ‘Question Time’, ‘Woman’s Hour’ and ‘the Archers’, all thrown into the void together.

  As he listened, the Cat became not human, but full of human things, convinced of the value of thought, not for its value in itself, but through an appreciation of volume, and the sheer dull weight of it.

  Then one day in spring he turned to the old telephone in the corner. Within minutes he had dialled a number. Pretending to be Dan Archer, he ordered a credit card down the phone, and gave the Professor’s details from a bill he’d found.

  The Mouse’s fur was drenched with dew. He turned at the end of the garden and climbed to the top of a tall grass stem to look back over the house. Somehow it seemed foreign to him now, with the lawns overgrown and slates blown loose from the tiled roof. The windows were dusty and barely reflected the light from the full moon which hung over the meadow. The Mouse did not wish to go home to the echoing empty spaces, and the velvet footfalls of the Cat, nor even to the Rat and his constant plotting. Not just yet.

  The Mouse sniffed the air deeply and began to climb down the stalk again, back to earth. His stomach rumbled unpleasantly and noisily, so on the way down he plucked a few grass seeds and chewed them, placing some in his pocket for later in the night, when he might have need of them.

  ‘Need space to think,’ muttered the Mouse, stepping down carefully to ground level. The grass stems seemed to block out the moonlight, but the Mouse found a solid enough path underneath, as he walked sadly away from ‘Chez Maupassant’.

  It was much later, and further out in the meadow that the tired Mouse first heard the sounds of marching feet. At first he mistook the sounds for those of cows, munching, but then he heard a hoarse voice, crying his name:

  ‘Mousey! Mousey! Where are you Mousey!’ and glimpsed a faint glimmer of light between the grass stems, weaving its way towards him. The voice shouted out again:

  ‘No! No! Not that way. Starboard! Port! Over here!’ and a small party burst out of the undergrowth headed by four sweating voles, their pockets stuffed with food, and finally the Rat himself, puffing, resplendent in military fatigues and carrying a small compass.

  On seeing the Mouse, the Rat stepped firmly forwards and hugged him, almost knocking the Mouse over.

  ‘Mouse,’ he cried. ‘What the devil are you doing out here? Quick, men, give the Mouse a blanket!’ The Rat’s eyes glinted in the moonlight. He seemed much thinner, thought the Mouse. The bristles along his snout were turning grey.

  ‘And have you seen my briefcase Mouse?’ he asked. ‘And the folding table? Where are they? You damn fool Mouse, where have you been?’

  The Cat found the old mail-order catalogue in the attic, amongst a scatter of papers and discarded bills. Idly, he flicked through the pages. The leather sofa caught his eye. How long was it since he had slept on a sofa, he wondered? And the next page showed a study, lined with books. An attractive woman, not unlike Mrs Digby, lounged in a steel chair, reading. The Cat skipped the bathroom pages and studied the kitchens in great detail.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  UNREQUITED LOVE

  ‘Rat!’ shouted the Mouse. He could not see the Rat. A staple gun cracked like an automatic pistol in the upstairs rooms, attaching carpet underlay.

  ‘Mouse is that you?’ The Rat’s voice answered him.

  ‘What’s happening!’ shouted the Mouse, and then the Rat appeared wading through the dense snow-white carpet, hacking at it to left and right as he went.

  ‘Mouse! Are you all right?’ said the Rat, panting as he stumbled up and dumped a bale of newly mown Berber down at the Mouse’s feet.

  ‘Nylon,’ he gulped, dismissively. ‘Where’s it come from?’

  Before the Mouse could answer that he did not know, there was a dull thud, and the largest sofa the two had ever seen was deposited in the middle of the living room floor by two removal men. A black lacquered far eastern style grandfather clock followed and was propped against the wall. Then they saw the Cat.

  ‘Looks crooked,’ said the Cat, in a language the animals recognised but had never heard him speak. He seemed much larger than the Mouse remembered, and somehow more powerful, as if he was both Cat and not-Cat, still physically one of them, at their level, yet a part of him elsewhere, where their world could no longer intervene in his.

  The animals took refuge in the Mouse’s doorway, as ‘Chez Maupassant’ began to fill with objects of every kind: they heard the upstairs windows being thrown open at the Cat’s command, and then a double bed was hoisted to the bedroom, followed by a wall mirror, framed in gilt.

  ‘Where’s he getting it all from?’ whispered the Mouse.

  ‘This is fraud. Classic short-termism. It won’t last. We’ll be back to square one in no time at all,’ said the Rat grimly, his eyes following each new item as it appeared, and was tallied by the Cat (who would remark from time to time that this or that item might have been slightly marked in transit, or be worth a few bob, or perhaps be needed in a different shade of beige or pink.)

  All through the day, the workmen toiled, gradually filling ‘Chez Maupassant’ from top to bottom. The Cat roamed around excitedly, zipping suddenly from one room to the other, shouting into the mouseholes:

  ‘There you are Mousey. You see? You see what can be done!’ At nine the workmen’s job was done, and ‘Chez Maupassant’ stood transformed in a bizarre melange of styles. Red velvet curtains jostled green patterned carpets. The laquered clock stood against a wall tapestry depicting the stag at bay. Then the Cat ordered a take away meal.

  �
�I’ll have the foo yung Peking Chinese style fried duck with squid,’ said the Cat. Rat and Mouse, by this time extremely hungry, were baffled by this strange and exotic request.

  Then they had another surprise. A woman’s voice answered the Cat. Looking out, the Mouse could discern the figure of Mrs Digby, lounging upon the new sofa.

  ‘I could eat a house,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘Get me one of these special barbecued suckling pigs in chestnut sauce!’

  Behind the skirting board, the Rat and Mouse fought to get a better view of what was going on, shoving each other aside as they peered out through the low doorway of the Mouse’s home.

  ‘He’s sitting on her lap!’ said the Mouse.

  ‘He’s got a nerve,’ said the Rat. ‘What’s a suckling pig anyway?’

  During the evening they observed as the Cat and Mrs Digby watched ‘Panorama’ together, the Cat seated comfortably, and being fed small fragments of food. From time to time, a grain of rice or slice of vegetable might fall on the carpet, and the Rat and the Mouse would note its position for later, when the Cat had gone to sleep.

  The Mouse watched as the Cat began to gently knead Mrs Digby’s soft wool jumper and tell her tales of how remarkable and proficient Cats were at a range of useful household tasks, such as the eradication of vermin and pests of all kinds. Mrs Digby stroked his fur, and remarked how shiny and sleek it had become, and the Cat, licking his lips surreptitiously, advanced further up her jumper.

  ‘Please, no,’ said Mrs Digby, as his face met hers, seeking a kiss. Then she stood up. The Cat fell from his comfortable position, landing awkwardly at her feet on his new Berber carpet. Mrs Digby smoothed her clothes, brushing cat hair from her skirt.