The cat known only as Animal X passed his time with four other cats, in a five-chambered metal cabinet which left only their heads free to move. There were other cabinets nearby – though Animal X couldn’t see them – and other cats in those cabinets. Some of them had been afraid when they were first brought here. Some of them had been angry. Now they accepted their situation. The only thing they couldn’t get used to was not having enough mobility to groom themselves. The strain of this left them dull-eyed. Their necks were chafed into sores by the enamelled edge of the cabinet. In an attempt to relieve the irritation this caused, they stared outwards away from each other all day while human beings came and went around them, treating them as if they weren’t there and saying things like, ‘Hanson wants the work-ups as of yesterday, but he won’t say why.’ Or, ‘We can do the blood now, on its own, but it won’t show anything. Doesn’t he know that?’ These people never touched the cats in the cabinets. They didn’t need to.
‘Doesn’t he know that?’
Of all the things the human beings said this interested Animal X the most, because he knew so little.
He had no idea who he was. He certainly didn’t know himself by the label Animal X. The life he lived did not require anyone to call him anything. It only required him – so he supposed – to feel pain. He woke up and he was in pain; he was in pain and then he slept. Something had been done to him. He felt a fool at having to stand there in one place all day, he felt as if it was his own fault. ‘Somehow I got caught,’ he would tell himself. He smelled his own smell suddenly, and a kind of shame went through him. He was dirty. Worse, there was a soft place in his field of vision where whatever it was had been done to him. He didn’t remember it, that was the odd thing. Sometimes he kept very still in case it was done to him again. ‘I want to avoid that,’ he thought. Thinking was difficult for Animal X. Thinking had been taken away from him with everything else. The soft place in his visual field was matched, somewhere deep in his head where thinking should have been carried on, by a kind of lesion. Some days everything was sucked into that gap or black wound and he was hardly there at all; others, at least he knew he was alive. On his best days he thought of himself, in his confused way, as a voice in a vacuum, a monologue filled with the facts of a dull life. He didn’t know who he was. He barely knew he was a cat. But his body remembered, and, at night, in the cabinet, where no-one could see them, his weak, withered legs kicked and trembled as, in dreams of their own, they tried to run him away from his prison.
*
A window was set high up in the room somewhere behind Animal X’s head. He had never seen it, but he knew it was there by the parallelogram of sunlight projected onto the white-painted wall in front of him. He knew that shifting flattened lozenge by heart. He had watched as it changed shape stealthily, hour to hour, across more days than he could count. At the end of the long afternoons the light from the window warmed each object it found, making everything, even in that place, seem friendly and familiar. The air became a rich, creamy-golden substance, less like air than pure colour. You forgot the ammoniac smell of the trapped cats around you. Light fell through the air in a single slanting bar; dust motes fell gently through the light, like dandelion seeds.
Animal X thought, ‘Dandelion seeds!’
He thought, ‘I wonder if—’
He thought, ‘No.’
He had forgotten what a dandelion seed was, if indeed he had ever known. But he enjoyed the words as they drifted up out of the soft place in his head, then back down again, slowly losing their shape and coherence. And, whatever else he thought, he had no doubt that the words, and the light – especially the light – reminded him of some other life he had once lived. Things stirred and flickered just out of sight at the back of his mind. He couldn’t remember what he was remembering: but whatever it was had been part of a more comfortable existence – any rate, a more interesting one. These fragments of memory made him both happy and inexpressibly sad.
*
On a good day Animal X could just see, out of the very corner of his eye, the heads of the nearest cats to him in the cabinet. (A better view could be had by turning his head, but if he did that he was given a sharp reminder of the sore that went round his neck like a collar.) Next to him on his right was a cat so depressed it never spoke. This cat had replaced a very lively female, dimly but fondly remembered by Animal X as ‘Dancey’. (Dancey – Animal D – had never stopped talking. Everything she said began with the announcement, ‘As soon as I get out of here—’) On his left was Stilton, Animal B. He liked Stilton and the silent cat. Living so close, they were important to him. If they smelled a bit strongly, it was a smell to wake up to, a dependable smell. If there was something odd about the shape of their heads, well, something had been done to all the cats here, and perhaps there was something wrong with the shape of Animal X’s head too.
Stilton had been in the cabinet longer than any of the others. He predated both Dancey, whose departure Animal X had witnessed, and ‘the Longhair’, a cat Dancey herself had often remembered fondly. Stilton had got his name because he always talked about Stilton cheese. He would stare into space for a bit and then say, as if he was continuing a conversation that had already started, ‘Now, what you can get if you go to the factory shop (well, what my owners used to get anyway), is seconds. A bit overripe perhaps, you see. A bit runny. So for seventy pence you can get this great wheel, this whole cheese. It’s a lot, but they’d split it with their friends. I’d seem them eat it after their supper, lumps as big as your head. Lumps that big.’ But, however much Stilton liked his favourite cheese, he couldn’t finish the imaginary piece he always had with him. ‘Look at that!’ he would say in astonishment, and then offer some to Animal X. ‘I love Stilton, but this is just too much.’ His voice was full of the regretful awe of the truly great eaters when they are forced to acknowledge defeat. ‘Can you imagine eating this much Stilton? It’s not often I’m stumped. I’ll say that.’
Animal X could never think how to respond to this.
‘It is big,’ he would try. Or, ‘It’s certainly big.’
But what he said didn’t seem to matter anyway, and after a moment or two Stilton would go on, ‘Never mind. The old girl’ll come by, she’ll be along soon enough.’ He nodded to himself in a satisfied way. He was always waiting for the ‘old girl’, who seemed to be his mate – or perhaps one of his owners. The old girl liked Stilton almost as much as he did. ‘She’s bound to come by. She’ll help us polish it off.’
Silence would descend for a moment before he added reminiscently, ‘Oh yes, I love Stilton.’
‘I hate it,’ said Animal X.
This exchange took place daily. Sometimes, to vary things, and so that his friend shouldn’t feel too hurt, Animal X would reply not with, ‘I hate it,’ but with, ‘I suppose I quite like it sometimes. For a treat.’
He wondered if – in the days before his own arrival in the cabinet, in the golden days of Dancey and the Longhair perhaps – Stilton had ever talked about anything else. He wondered if he should admit that he had no idea what Stilton was, no idea what ‘pence’ were. He wasn’t even sure about cheese, though he thought he remembered something like it.
*
The two cats on the far side of the cabinet rarely joined in. That was the nature of this kind of captivity: in the cabinet, two animals were always behind you. But Animal X knew they held their own conversations. He heard them talking in the night. They asked each other the same question all the cats asked: ‘Can you remember who you were? I mean, before the cabinet? Can you?’ Neither of them could, although they tried hard enough. After all, they were cats: they knew how to persevere. They tried so hard that, in the end, they were making up stories about themselves. They tried out memories the way a human being tries on clothes, picking them up and then putting them down apparently at random.
‘I was a town cat, me. Oh yes. It was back yards every night, back yards and singing and bad sisters, out on top of the wall where everyone could see. It was one long party for us, and no regrets!’ Then, after a pause, ‘I’ve got a bit of a funny neck now, but I’ve got no regrets.’ Next night, the same cat would be claiming, ‘Sometimes I think I must have lived on a farm. You know? Because I remember the smell of straw, and the warm breath of the cows.’
‘You remember that, do you?’
‘I do. Sometimes I think I do remember that.’
So their bemused dialogue droned on into the night, thoughtless and obsessive, broken by longer and longer pauses, until near dawn it petered out.
‘Can you see what colour I am? I’ve got this feeling I was a tortoiseshell.’
By then, though, Animal X was asleep.
Sometimes he believed he had had another life than this one, sometimes not. One thing was clear: when he tried to remember the things that happened to him before he came here, his head hurt even more. Generally, he accepted that his life now would always be pain.
*
Plenty went on in the room, even if you could only see directly forward from your cabinet. There was a white door with a small square of glass in it, and people came in and out through that at most times of the day, though rarely at night. They were always talking. With a sigh and a shake of the head: ‘Figures that simply don’t mean anything unless they’re backed by observation.’ And then: ‘I know he said that. But look at his track record.’ They all had the same white coat on, but each one had a different smell, and their shoes creaked on the polished wooden floor. Animal X knew every dip in the shiny, pitted surface where it stretched between him and the door. He had even seen into the corridor outside: that was like a country in itself. And what a day when an insect got in, and you could follow its long, puzzled, looping passes across the room! He knew by heart the objects in front of him. An examination table on which were arranged a clipboard, a thermometer, and a powerful long-necked lamp; two white metal cupboards with glass fronts through which he could make out cardboard cartons, brown glass bottles, complex, sharp-edged shapes; the white door with its scuffed kickplate and satin-finish handle; then, on the wall itself, a cork board covered with pieces of paper which lifted and rustled in the draught when the door was opened or closed.
*
One day the door opened and a human being in a white coat came in from the corridor carrying a wire cage. It walked across Animal X’s field of vision from left to right, called something to one of its colleagues, and passed out of sight. Animal X heard it talking behind him, then another door opened and closed, and it was gone. The whole transaction took place in a minute, but remained sharp and clear in the watching cat’s mind. The human backed awkwardly in through the door, banging the cage against the door-frame. It crossed the room, its gait made awkward and lopsided by the weight and size of its burden. It exchanged a few words, then dropped the cage and left. It seemed relieved. That was that: but, in those few moments. Animal X’s life had begun to change again, although he couldn’t know that.
In the cage was a creature of some kind. He caught such brief glimpses of it. It had glorious red-gold fur. Its eyes glittered a kind of hot jade colour, with unlikely specks of silver. It was very agitated, turning ceaselessly back and forth in its own length, spitting and hissing, often throwing itself against the wire so hard that the man carrying it staggered sideways suddenly and swore. Animal X’s immediate thought was, ‘It doesn’t belong in here, not with us. It’s too good to be in with us.’ After that his impressions were confused and contradictory. Was it a cat at all? If so, it was clearly a kitten. Yet, despite its leggy, slightly unformed lines and immaturity of face, it was bigger than many a full-grown tom – he had never seen a kitten so big. Before he could decide anything, it had vanished. But he was to see more of it, almost immediately. They had difficulty getting it out of its cage. And then, while they were trying to transfer it to a cabinet, it escaped.
Much of this took place behind Animal X’s head. All he heard were shouts from the human beings – ‘Look out, just pull it out of there, can’t you?’ ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it, it’s OK.’ ‘Bugger!’ – and a bubbling, ululating wail which rose suddenly into the fine mad high-pitched shriek of outrage all those confined cats remembered so well. Then the new animal streaked into view, low to the ground, ears flat, eyes bulging. It stopped for an instant in front of Animal X’s cabinet to gaze back over its shoulder at the pursuit. It was a male kitten, all anger and beauty, piss and vinegar, but Animal X could see how much fear was mingled with its rage. ‘Hide now,’ he heard himself advise quietly. ‘You can get out later, when one of them opens the door.’ He was immediately aware what a counsel of despair that was. Sides heaving, hindquarters dropped protectively, every muscle bunched and hard under the short, velvety coat, body rocking to the beat of its own heart, the kitten stared up at him with a kind of empty defiance. For a moment he thought it would acknowledge him, tell him contemptuously, ‘I’ll never be trapped like you.’ Instead it spun round and rushed away, to be followed an instant later by three or four human beings, all hands and shoes and spectacles. Their huge dull faces red and sweating, they grunted and stumbled after the escapee; while, unknown to them, the cabinet cats cheered it on. ‘Go on,’ they called. ‘Go on!’
That kitten had come into their lives from nowhere, and passed in half a minute from a zero to a legend. Hopes they never knew they had were invested in him. When he hid, they looked away, in case his pursuers should follow their line of sight. When he upped and ran, their feet scrabbled and scratched uselessly in the cabinets. They were trying to run on his behalf, and at the same time catch for themselves a little of his wild speed and freedom. They were filled with elation and a kind of savage pride. The kitten was undauntable. He was all energy. No cat in there had ever put up such a fight. If it looked as if the pursuit had its hands upon him, he could always find another ounce of pace. He stretched himself and ran and ran. He leaned into the corners. He was under the examination table in the blink of an eye. He was behind the cabinets. He was up and down the aisles between them in blurred figures of eight with his claws scraping for purchase on the slick and shiny floor. When nothing else would do, he seemed to be able to run round the very walls in defiance of gravity itself. It was then that the silent cat on Animal X’s left spoke the only words anyone in that place had ever heard him say.
‘Did you see that?’ he asked, in a quiet but clear voice. ‘He went round there like the Wall of Death.’ And then, much louder, to the kitten itself, ‘Go on, my son! Give ’em the bloody Wall of Death!’ None of the cabinet cats had any idea what he meant by this; but they took up the call – ‘Wall of Death! Wall of Death!’ – and, in the aftermath of these events, for a few days at least, Wall of Death became the nickname of the silent cat.
If the kitten heard any of this, he gave no sign. Favourite son or no, he had his own motives. He had his own life to live. Even as they egged him on, he was losing it. Animal X saw with dismay how tired he had become. He had burned himself up, and there was nowhere left to hide. His efforts became increasingly desperate. Eyes rimmed white with panic, he threw himself repeatedly against the closed door. He tried to get under the cupboard but the gap was too small. Towards the end, trapped among the feet of the human beings, whining and bubbling angrily, he made them pay. He rocked back on his haunches. His claws shot out, his teeth flashed, drops of blood hung in the air like a spray of scarlet fuchsia. ‘Christ! It got me!’ they shouted, backing away with nervous skips and jumps, shaking their fingers, staring at one another in astonishment. But eventually one of them went and fetched a pair of scarred leather gloves and a needle full of sleep, and after that it was soon over. The glorious savage, brought to bay in a corner by the cupboard, suddenly became silent and passive and was taken away, dangling at arm’s length like the empty pelt of a cat, out of Animal X’s sight.
There was a shocked and empty pause in the cabinets.
Then someone whispered, ‘Did you see the eyes on him? Weird!’ And someone added, ‘He was something to catch, that one.’ And someone else said, ‘It’s a shame.’
Suddenly, full of excitement, they all began to talk at once, shouting from cabinet to cabinet across the white room of their captivity, brought together in a way they had never been before. Animal X said nothing. He was saddened by this proof that life is, indeed, only capture, silence and the cage: only pain.
*
For some days afterwards the laboratory was quiet. Things went back to normal. The sunshine moved across the white wall, beginning a little earlier every day, lasting a fraction longer. No-one seemed to know which cabinet the gallant kitten had ended up in, if it had ended up in a cabinet at all. There were those that whispered it had not; they hinted at worse. As this rumour spread, conversation between the cabinets died out. Their occupants shrugged to themselves and went back to the long haul. Wall of Death – who had said nothing more anyway – became again the Silent Cat and stared ahead of himself all day. The human beings, perhaps, had received a reminder. They were a little more wary of their charges; but there was no more or less dried food in the stainless steel feeders than usual. The cats were fed last thing, just before the staff left, so that every evening the room was full of a sound like stones being sorted in a tin. Animal X regarded listlessly this manufactured stuff, with its strong but somehow unappetizing smell of fish products, and then, as usual, ate half of it.
‘Sometimes,’ Stilton told him as they ate, ‘we’d have a nice bit of blue. That’s a mould of course, they get the cheese like that by encouraging a mould to grow in it.’
‘I think they’ve encouraged a mould to grow in this,’ said Animal X.
‘A bit of blue can make a nice change.’
*
Animal X often woke up before the other cats in the laboratory. Despite himself he loved the dawn. He loved the deepened silence around the first chirp of a bird, the edge of silver on things. He liked to be awake then, and know that everyone else was asleep. It made him feel warm towards them. Sometimes dawn dressed the room with pinks and golds; sometimes it stole in feathery grey, and a faint prickle of rain could be heard falling on the vegetation outside the unseen window; but, good weather or bad, it was filled with promise. No matter how ill he was, he couldn’t stop himself from feeling optimistic. He thought he had probably loved dawns in his previous life, too.
Four or five days after the arrival of the kitten, he opened his eyes and looked around puzzledly. The room was too warm. There was a kind of hush. He shook his head. Things felt wrenched: barely awake, he already knew the day was out of shape. It had broken the wrong colour, yellow on the edge of gold, increasingly tinged with a strange, hot, transparent green, like light falling through thick foliage.
‘Well now,’ he asked himself, ‘what’s this?’
The light intensified as he watched. It fizzed and crackled silently, like a burning fuse. The laboratory warmed under its touch. It was like high summer, ‘Like the light,’ he found himself thinking, though he had no idea where the thought came from, ‘in some foreign land.’
It was hot now. It was very hot. All around him, the sleeping cats were bathed in light. It thawed their strained, uncomfortable attitudes. They sighed without knowing it, and relaxed, and did not wake, but for the first time in many months rested as if they had forgotten where they were. The light flickered about them, full of the power and humour of itself. Here and there it seemed to gather and spark. It glittered and crackled. It drew itself away for a heartbeat, during which Animal X held his breath. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ he told himself. ‘Never. I know I would have remembered anything like this.’ Outside, every bird in the world began to sing suddenly. The fuse of the dawn burned and burned, then ignited in a great soft roar. A green flame exploded beneath the ceiling, spread rapidly, roiled down and across the laboratory floor. Everything in its path caught fire. Everything it touched was engulfed. Everything in the room began to fly apart, in complete silence. The cabinets were pulled to pieces and thrown about; equipment toppled through the burning air; the very walls tumbled outwards and away, pulled and twisted, as they went, into dust and detritus and falling bricks.
Animal X heard a voice say, ‘Even this.’ All the air was sucked out of him and he too was whirled away. He went end over end through the sky – forelegs splayed in front of him, feet spread, claws out as if they could find purchase on the air to slow him down – and landed in a vague, unending dream of kittenhood. He was very young. His mother was close. His brothers and sisters tottered and fought around her. They bounced and sprang. They were so safe! surrounded by something that stretched away in all directions and yet cupped them like a hand. He could feel it. Was it love? What was it? It cupped Animal X too tight, and everything he knew was taken away.
*
When he woke again, he was chilled right through. His fur was wet. The light was grey. He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the laboratory door. Something was wrong with it. It was hanging off one hinge, leaning into the room like a drunken man into an alley. He stared for a moment, then, not yet able to understand quite what he was seeing, let his gaze be drawn away. The laboratory had been opened up in a dozen other places. The windows had blown out, the ceiling had sagged and split. Loops of cable hung down. The floor was thick with splinters of wood and shards of glass, the air with plaster-dust through which fell a fine cold rain. The examination table, site of so many indignities and so much pain, lay buckled and barely recognizable at the foot of a wall. It looked as if it had been thrown there by some enormous angry hand, which had gone on without a pause to dissect every cabinet into its component panels. Barely damaged, these lay distributed across the floor in curious, eddying patterns, like hundreds of playing-cards scattered on a table-top.
In the aftermath of the explosion, it was clear, many of the captive cats had taken their chance and fled the laboratory; but many others, too far gone to move, had been released by death. Animal X stood shivering in the wreckage. He gazed out dully over the windrows of silent animals, cats of all colours, coats clotted with neglect, patchy with eczema, sodden with the falling rain. Damp air moved over them and brought Animal X the sour simple smell of mortality. He felt an awful cry of misery and rage well up inside him, then fade away unexpressed. What would be the point? Intervention had been welcome to all these animals made old and miserable before their time. They lay in relaxed postures among the tangled wires and detached implants of their captivity, happy to accept the embrace of the green fire. Many of them had stretched out their forelegs in welcome, the way cats sometimes do when they are rolling in the sunshine.
Without the cabinet around him. Animal X felt alone and exposed. He stood shivering dully in the wreckage – his spine a bony, uncomfortable curve, his tail tucked tightly into his hindquarters – trying to make sense of it. He had been there as long as any of them. He had seen it all come and go. Why was he alive? What was he to make of that secret dawn and jungle light?
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ he kept telling himself. ‘I don’t know what’s happened.’
Suddenly he said it out loud.
At that there was a stealthy movement in the remains of the cabinet. With considerable struggle and disconnected effort, the cat called Stilton hauled himself into view. He was coated in greyish dust. He looked down at himself in horror, made three staggering steps forward and fell over.
‘Are we dead?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ said Animal X. ‘All these others are.’
‘Come and sit here,’ said Stilton.
They curled themselves as tightly as they could around one another. Shaking fits passed through them. They tried to lick one another clean, but their bodies were so relieved to feel the touch of another cat again that they fell asleep immediately. They stayed that way for much of the morning, unwilling to leave the site of their old cabinet – though they kept a distance between themselves and the bodies of the cats they had shared it with. Animal X found himself remembering those three with more affection and less discomfort than he had expected. ‘The Silent Cat had given up speaking because he didn’t have anything left to say about life,’ he thought. ‘Death must have been a release for him.’ Then he reminded himself, ‘I never knew the others, though I heard them talk. They might have been interesting cats.’ He thought, ‘I would have known them better if they’d been next to me in the cabinet.’ His memory was already garbled and confused, so that some repeated phrase of theirs had become mixed up with the luminous dawns, the rattle of hard food in a tin tray, the flutter of paper on the cork board by the door. It all seemed one, and surprisingly like a life.
*
The rain stopped. The sun came out. Mid-afternoon saw the two survivors poking about independently in the ruins.
Cabinet life had so wasted them that they had to teach themselves to walk again. Animal X’s progress was punctuated by unexpected skips and jumps, sudden shies and spasms of his depleted nervous system as it readjusted to the proper life of a cat. At first he felt rather excited by these sensations; but it was a vigour that proved illusory. He hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. Despite his excitement, despite the optimism the watery sunshine had brought with it, he had no stamina, no condition, no muscles worth speaking of. Stilton was worse. He limped. His fur, draggled into hard, crusted little curls, tasted of blood when you tried to groom him. There was something pushed-in about his ribs. Sometimes he forgot where he was and stood swaying and blinking and repeating quietly, ‘Now, my owners, you see—’
Once he called over to Animal X, ‘Aren’t we a pair, eh? What a pair!’
Whenever they met, they backed off and stared at one another, surprised all over again, trembling with fear of the future.
‘You’re a tabby then,’ said Animal X.
‘I’m starving.’
‘There isn’t any food left. I’ve looked and looked.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘It can’t hurt to try again.’
They were wobbling stiff-leggedly about in the dust when the golden kitten appeared. It walked up quietly out of nowhere and stood patiently in front of Animal X. Though it was clearly distressed, it couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. Oh, it was still all beauty and thuggishness, a kind of glowing, raging overstatement of itself. A week in the laboratory had done nothing to change that. The muscle still bunched and shifted beneath its sandy, luminous coat. It still moved with the kind of fluid absent-mindedness common to young animals. One eye still flickered with lights like specks of gold in jade. It had lost the other in the explosion.
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Animal X.
He couldn’t think of anything better to say. Despite a sticky discharge at the inner corner, he thought the wound looked clean. ‘What do I know?’ he asked himself. ‘You’ll be all right with us,’ he tried to reassure the kitten. It stared silently ahead. The lids were already drawing closed across the insulted eye-socket to seal it off. When Animal X looked closer, he saw that they had been sewn together some days before. Humans had taken the eye. The explosion wasn’t to blame at all.
‘Can you remember who you are?’
The kitten looked away from him. It trembled a little, then stood closer and, still looking away, began to purr loudly.
‘Come on,’ Animal X said tiredly. ‘We’d better get you out of here.’