LABORATORIESAnimal X stood blinking in the sunshine.
At first, he couldn’t make much of what he saw. The ruined laboratory, and the small tidy new road that ran away from it in a straight line, were held in a quiet fold of land from which broad, gently sloping pastures rolled in every direction to skylines crowned with thickets and oak-hangers. The sun was hot. The sky was very blue and tranquil, except where, above one of the distant coppices, a lot of tiny black specks were wheeling and diving, calling out to one another in a kind of raucous cheerful creak.
Animal X watched them for some time. ‘That would be bedlam if you were close to it,’ he thought. For some reason the idea made him shiver.
The word ‘crows’ came unbidden into his mind. He examined it, then, nothing occurring to him, let it slip away. Immediately, it became available to him as a description. He looked up at the crows in the sky. ‘I’ve seen them somewhere before,’ he told himself. ‘But I can’t think where.’ That was the next step with everything, he supposed: to remember it. ‘You can call a thing a crow,’ he reflected, ‘but it’s no comfort if you can’t recall the last time you saw one.’ Over the next few days, many little pieces of his past would come into focus like this; while, however hard he tried to recover it, the past itself remained resolutely locked away from him.
A faint, pleasant breeze moved in his fur.
He had no idea where to go.
‘I suppose I’d better just start walking,’ he thought, and that was what he did. The first thing he passed was a signboard which said, if you could read:
LABORATORIES
Winfield Farm Site
After that, the little tarmac road gave way to a lane heavily shaded by trees. The lane wasn’t so neat. There was a narrow verge of vetches and couch grass; dog rose and nightshade, threaded through with old man’s beard, made tangled screens through which the glitter of water could sometimes be seen where it ran shallow and clear in the sandy bottom of a ditch. Insects launched themselves clumsily out of the flowers and blundered past, scattering pollen from their feet and wings. The thick, drugged scent of meadowsweet came and went. ‘I like this,’ thought Animal X. A minute or two later, he remembered Stilton and the kitten. He turned round and found they were walking a few yards behind him. Stilton looked frail and tired already, but he was talking excitedly to the kitten. The kitten seemed puzzled. It was less distraught, though; and there seemed to be less anger in its silence. When he listened. Animal X could hear Stilton say, ‘What you can get, you see, from the factory shop—’
They walked like this for some time. New sights waited round every corner. They saw human beings off in the distance across the fields. They saw a lake, green water that looked solid enough to stand on, with lily-pads and a heron on a post. They saw how the heat shimmered and danced above the land in the middle distance.
Towards midday the lane led them up to a broad black road down which huge energetic shapes roared and rushed. Waste paper blew up into the air, settled, blew up again. It was a very human place. There was a smell. Animal X and Stilton stood for a minute or two at the junction, wrinkling their noses, rocked dangerously by the passing airstream. Then they averted their faces in embarrassment – because they had forgotten, if they had ever known, what all this meant – and turned away. The kitten confronted things more stoically, as if it was determined to understand only the worst about the human world. It blinked its single eye.
‘Come on,’ said Animal X. ‘This is no good. We’ll find some other way to go.’
‘I’m hungry,’ Stilton said to the kitten. ‘Aren’t you?’
The kitten didn’t answer, only stood up straighter in the rushing dirty air: so they left without it. A moment later it shook itself violently and ran after them. Thereafter they kept to the lanes, where the world seemed safer and less dirty. They were thirsty as well as hungry, but still pleased to be out on their own. Dusk brought them to the outskirts of a village: chestnut trees; a grey church; a handful of red brick cottages between which the lane dipped gently until it encountered a stream. For a few yards the shallowest of water flowed over the road, glittering busily in the fading light. Two or three quarrelsome mallards were splashing about in it, saying things like:
‘My water.’
‘No. All this water’s mine.’
‘Well it’s never the same water anyway.’
‘So what?’
‘I’m just saying, that’s all. How can it be yours if it’s not the same water?’
Warmth hung in the air in the soft grey shadows beneath the chestnut trees.
By this time, Stilton was very tired. The bottoms of his feet had developed blisters, and the blisters had burst. He limped, and his head nodded up and down in time with his limp. He had been sick twice because he kept trying to eat things he found in the road. Every so often his back legs would fail him; he would sit down suddenly and say, ‘I think I’ve got heat stroke.’ Now he added, ‘I’ve got to stop. I really have.’
Animal X was staring at the stream. For some reason, despite the tranquil look of it, he was reluctant to cross. He had no idea why. Insects bobbed and hovered above the surface. He watched the mallards stamp off to deeper water, sit down, fold their ruffled dignity, and float off with the current, still arguing drowsily with one another.
He said, ‘We’ll stop here then, Stilton. We’ll sleep if we can’t eat.’
Lupins filled the garden like candles. There was a scent of roses; of lavender. Everything was drowsy with summer air: the pony dreamed in its paddock, the dogs in their kennels dozed, the human beings murmured contentedly from their kitchens. The golden kitten stared into the twilight after the vanished ducks with a kind of absent-minded irritability, then followed Animal X and Stilton back up the hill, every so often shaking its head. Eventually they stood, the three of them, in front of a small weatherboard outhouse. White paint blistered, tarred roof entangled in honeysuckle, less a home improvement than an afterthought, this construction leaned amiably up against one of the cottages. From its partly open door – like beckoning human fingers, like tendrils of weed waving in deep water – issued smells both inviting and dangerous. Stilton raised his nose in the air. He drooled a little.
‘Who’s going first?’ he said.
‘We should think before we do anything,’ said Animal X.
Stilton sat down.
‘I’m afraid anyway,’ he said.
The kitten shouldered past them both.
‘Wait,’ recommended Animal X. ‘We—’
Too late.
There was a scuffling sound inside, followed almost immediately by an outbreak of fierce yowling from the kitten. Behind that could be heard a deeper, more guttural complaint – the angry speech of some large unidentified animal. Stilton ran away down the garden. Animal X ran after him. When they stopped to look back, Stilton was still ahead but not by very much. Animal X felt ashamed of himself.
‘We shouldn’t let the kitten face whatever’s in there on his own,’ he said.
‘No,’ agreed Stilton.
‘At least one of us should help.’
‘You,’ said Stilton. ‘You go.’
The noise continued unabated, then rose to a crescendo. Animal X had crept halfway back down the garden path, and was crouching in a border of overgrown mint, when the door of the outhouse creaked and shifted and something black forced its way out into the gathering dusk. He couldn’t tell what it was. It smelled strongly, even from that distance, and its white-rimmed eyes were the colour of liquid chocolate. It might have been a dog. If its outline had been less fluid – if it had been more clearly formed – Animal X would definitely have described it as a dog. It paused momentarily, half-turned, as if it might return to the argument, then, hearing the bubbling yowl of the golden kitten inside, clearly had second thoughts. It shook itself and limped out into the lane. If it was a dog, it only had three legs.
A minute or two later Animal X poked his nose cautiously round the outhouse door. It was almost dark inside. Strong smells rose from the litter of human stuff spilling out of the corners and across the floor – sawdust, straw, empty sacks, garden tools, a smear of burnt oil from some machine – but they could not disguise the pervasive odour of its previous occupant. The kitten stood awkwardly in the middle of everything, lips peeled back off white teeth, fur still bristling along its spine, the arch of its body still presented to a vanished enemy.
‘It’s me,’ Animal X said placatingly. For good measure he added, ‘I don’t want to fight.’
The kitten stared at him.
‘You don’t know what to do next, do you?’ said Animal X gently. ‘Look,’ he went on. ‘There are two dishes in that corner. We should taste what’s in them. In case it’s food.’
The kitten growled faintly.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
Nothing.
‘Well, I’m going to try,’ said Animal X.
Very carefully, footstep by footstep, his head turned aside so that he represented no threat, he picked his way through the junk towards the corner. There was a moment of anxiety as he brushed the kitten’s flank. But at his touch he felt its taut muscles quiver and relax suddenly. ‘There, you see?’ he said, more loudly than he had intended. ‘We’re all right now, you and me.’ He ran the last few steps out of sheer relief, pushed his face into the nearest of the bowls, and began eating. He had no idea what the stuff was, but his mouth didn’t care. After a moment or two he became aware of the kitten standing next to him. He moved over.
‘I don’t know what cats eat when they’re out on their own,’ he said. ‘But we can eat this. Go on, try some.’
The kitten tried. It ate slowly, and then faster. It raised its head and purred suddenly.
‘You’ve got it all over your mouth,’ said Animal X.
A little later, they both made room for Stilton.
‘I like this,’ Stilton said. ‘It’s almost as good as—’
‘Shut up, Stilton.’
*
Outside, the dog – if indeed it was a dog, or had ever been one – stood completely still in the middle of the village. It was as large and as shapeless as it had ever been. It stood there, and it was the Dog. Its shapeless smell filled the summer air, overpowering for a moment the odours of honeysuckle and night-scented stock; and, to anyone walking past, its outline would have seemed to waver a little in the dusk.
It was thinking, ‘I was comfortable in there.’
After a moment it thought, ‘I would have eaten that stuff in the bowls.’ It thought, ‘Now those cats will eat it instead.’ Finally it thought, ‘The New Majicou – who is not the Old Majicou – asked for news of two golden kittens. There is one in that outhouse now. I know that. But one golden kitten is not two.’ The dog mulled this over. ‘There is no reward,’ it concluded, ‘for one golden kitten.’
But it decided to sleep the night quite near, so that it could follow them in the morning.
‘A dog follows,’ it thought comfortably.
It thought, ‘That’s what a dog does.’
*
The outhouse was filled with a curious rhythmic clanking sound. Every shred of food was gone: undeterred, the golden kitten had continued licking one of the empty metal dishes until it fetched up in the corner, where each powerful stroke of his tongue now banged it against the wall. Animal X, meanwhile, gave himself a thorough wash, remarking contentedly how the sound of his tongue in the fur on his chest sounded much like the rasp of the kitten’s in the empty bowl. ‘Tongues are useful to have,’ meditated Animal X, ‘when you’re a cat.’ Stilton was almost asleep. He had tucked his paws up under him and let his head fall forward until his nose was almost resting on the floor. But each time he dropped off, the same thought woke him with a start, compelling him to ask anxiously, ‘Will it come back, that thing?’
‘I think the kitten was too much for it,’ said Animal X. He added, more to himself than Stilton, ‘I think the kitten would be too much for anyone.’
‘We took its food,’ Stilton’ said guiltily.
Eating had worked on him the magic it always works on a cat: but there was still a trembling in all his limbs, and the milky third lid had drawn itself almost halfway across both eyes. ‘You don’t look good,’ Animal X thought. ‘Of course it’s hard to know how you looked when you were well.’ Out loud, confident in his answer, he said, ‘I don’t believe it had any more right to be here than we do. If it had, it would have fought harder.’
‘What was it?’
This question left him on less dependable ground.
‘It was a traveller like us,’ he said in the end.
‘Sit near me,’ invited Stilton. ‘Just in case.’
Then he said, ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be out?’
Animal X curled round him, licked his ears once or twice, and settled down.
‘Sleep now,’ he said.
Observing their preparations from the other side of the outhouse, the golden kitten abandoned its pursuit of the dish, licked its chops massively, yawned even more massively, then came over. It stood near them for a moment or two as if awaiting instructions or trying to decide how to lie down, then with a sigh fell heavily on its side on Animal X’s tail and began to purr.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ invited Animal X.
*
His sleep was deep, with long, sensible dreams: next morning he woke as early as ever. Stilton lay beside him in a bar of pearly light. The kitten had already gone out. Animal X went to the door and looked into the garden, which was full of white mist and pale yellow sunshine.
‘I always liked the dawn,’ he decided quietly to himself. ‘But today I like it more.’
The kitten had left a trail in the dewy grass to the bottom of the garden, then ploughed through the hedge into the pasture beyond, where it had sat grooming itself for a few minutes before making its way down to the little stream, to sniff around among the duck-droppings then wander off in the same direction as the current.
After a few hundred yards the stream entered a spacious water-meadow – low-lying, greyed with dewy spiderwebs, buttered with kingcups and dotted here and there by single tall thistles – on which the mist seemed to linger despite the growing warmth of the day. There it joined a broader, deeper stream, green, thick with weeds and apparently unmoving except where it plunged over a weir with a kind of mumbling roar. Above and beside the weir the air brightened in an arc of colour, as if the falling water had laundered the mist out of it. Everything was in sharp focus. Blue dragonflies hung and darted above the water. On the bank beside this theatre of light, its head cocked attentively to one side, sat the golden kitten, captivated by the fall and rush of the water, the broad silver weight of it as it poured over the weir, the creamy white standing wave from which broke suds of foam that were tossed up into the shiny air. Animal X went and sat companionably in the close-cropped turf nearby.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
The kitten turned its face towards him. In its remaining eye gleamed a joy so quiet and pure it made him feel shy. An adult cat could only wince away from a look like that. When he was able to face it again, the kitten had forgotten he was there. It was too busy following the roar and plunge of the water across the weir, pausing to wonder how it folded itself over and danced into foam, then tilting its head a fraction to watch the process through again – unable, indeed uninclined, to release itself from that perpetual event. After a moment, Animal X asked, ‘What do you see?’
Silence.
‘I’m not so keen on water myself. I don’t know why.’
The kitten watched the weir.
‘It really is beautiful,’ said Animal X.
The kitten hunched its shoulders.
Animal X tried another tack. ‘Do you remember something like this then?’ he said. The water collapsed in thunder, the spray refreshed the air, the light split apart in delight and shimmered prismatically above it all. ‘I mean, from before they caught you?’
The kitten turned its head and hissed at him. Its ears went back, and a low, ululating yowl proceeded from its throat. Its good eye burned.
‘No!’ said Animal X. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I only—’
He gave way. He gave way again. Step by slow, threatening step, the golden kitten drove him away from the water. ‘This is ridiculous,’ thought Animal X. ‘What have I done?’ He put his haunches to the ground. He felt his own ears go back. He felt the angry yowl build in his own throat. Then the kitten lifted its head as if it had heard the weir for the first time. With a single despairing glance towards the dancing foam, as if it were giving something up for ever, it rushed off across the meadows.
‘No!’ called Animal X, too late. He had remembered the ducks, bickering in the shallows the night before. ‘It’s your water,’ he whispered. ‘It’s your water.’
He was about to run after the kitten and talk to it when he heard a voice call, ‘Wait! What’s going on?’
Stilton, waking up alone in the outhouse, had run his heart out to catch up with his friends.
‘Why were you fighting? Don’t leave me!’
Animal X sighed.
He waited.
He thought, ‘The kitten will calm down soon. And we might as well go in this direction as any.’
So, once Stilton had caught up, and Animal X had assured him that they would stay together, the two of them waded off into the dew in the kitten’s footsteps, unaware of the shadow that followed them across the meadows like a small cloud crossing the sun.
*
The kitten did calm down – though it took all day, and the day after that, and even then it seemed to keep a wary eye on Animal X and Stilton, and to walk a little apart from them. ‘I don’t know what I did,’ thought Animal X, ‘but I’d better be careful in future.’ To Stilton, he said, ‘That kitten wants friends, but it is too angry to let anyone near.’
‘I would be angry too,’ said Stilton.
Animal X stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
But Stilton couldn’t explain.
*
They walked for some days without anything happening, their course bounded by the water Animal X was reluctant to cross. The stream thickened and flexed its muscles. It wound through pastureland, or along the bases of gentle chalk hills, sometimes sharing the valley with a road. The three cats were never far from human beings – there was hardly a point in their journey when they were out of sight of the grey spire of a village church – but they kept to themselves. At midday they slept beneath a hedge; as dusk gathered, they found they were wading through chilly layers of mist as high as themselves, dammed into small fields like millponds. They froze at the call of an owl, the bark of a dog from a house in the moonlight; they caught the stark reek of a vixen and heard her cry later from the ridge for a mate. They ate what they could find, which was never enough, and they were glad of the hot afternoons.
While the golden kitten seemed to thrive on these hardships, Stilton grew increasingly ill and tired. His fur fell off in patches to reveal, smelly, yellowish and unhealed, the burns he had come by in the explosion. The burns frightened him, and he stopped cleaning himself rather than admit they were there. He rarely complained, but crouched listlessly in the open at night, his head turned away from the other cats, talking to himself as if he was back in the cabinet. You woke, and you were immediately in the middle of his monologue, which flowed past like a stream – Oh, my owners ate some stuff, all right. They got through some stuff. But it was blue they liked the best. And none of that barely ripe supermarket stuff, either. ‘Plastic cheese wrapped in plastic!’ I often heard him say to her. ‘None of that supermarket stuff here!’ They were pretty choosy about their Stilton, those two – and then you slept again. It was comforting in a way. It went on for a night or two; then the sick cat seemed to grow so depressed he stopped talking at all. Trying to cheer him up one evening, Animal X said, ‘That’s a nice piece of Stilton you’ve got there.’
They were sitting at the base of the wire fence at the edge of a conifer plantation. Midges danced in ghostly pagoda shapes above their heads. It was almost dark, but the birds were still singing competitively from their pulpits high in the tops of the trees. Warmth seemed to spill out of the woods, where the trees had stored it up in secret all day; warmth and shadows and a smell of resin so strong it made the cats blink.
After a moment or two, Animal X prompted, ‘It’s rather a lot for one cat, though, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t got any Stilton.’
This came out with such quiet matter-of-factness Animal X was unable to think of a reply.
After more silence, Stilton added, ‘I’ve never had any.’ He looked across at Animal X. He seemed to be forcing his eyes to open so that his friend could see all the way into them to the pain inside. He said, ‘I never had owners or a family or a mate called Tabs. I’m just an old cat who lived in a pen. I never had any of those things.’ He let his eyes close and looked away again. ‘I don’t even know what Stilton is,’ he admitted. ‘Any more than you do.’
‘But to talk about it like that—’ said Animal X.
‘Oh, I learned it all from a cat in the cabinets,’ whispered Stilton. ‘He’d come from the outside, just like you, long before you, or Dancey, or any of the others arrived.’ He shuddered, then gave a frail laugh. ‘Maybe he made it up too.’
‘I don’t understand why.’
‘To give myself a life,’ said Stilton. ‘I was born in that place. I was bred to go in the cabinets, I had no other purpose, and I’ve had no life but that until now, but I don’t mind.’ He said, ‘I don’t even mind if I die now. Do you want to know why?’
‘Yes,’ said Animal X.
Stilton looked up at the dark wall of trees behind them, the midges dancing above his head.
‘Because I’ve been here and seen all this,’ he said. ‘And I’ve had a friend who took care of me.’ His head drooped and he stared at the floor. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to talk about cheese any more.’ Then he said, ‘Everyone minds dying. I don’t know why I said that.’
Throughout this exchange, the golden kitten sat upright, gazing with a kind of ancient impassiveness out across the thistly pasture, the tapetus lucidum of its single eye blank and reflectant in the last eggshell-green light above the river. Who knew what it was thinking, or if it was thinking at all? Silently, it rose to its feet, stretched, and looked down at the sick cat. In that light it seemed bigger than itself. It stood over Stilton and began to lick him gently. Stilton offered up his tired face to the long, slow, careful passes of its tongue. He closed his eyes, and the kitten licked the mucus from them before it passed on to his ears, across the top of his head, and down his withered little sides and the burns that hurt him so much. After a moment, he sighed, and began to relax. The kitten gave a single, grunting purr which seemed to echo away across the fields. The stars appeared, one by one. A car whirred along some nearby lane. Suddenly it was pitch dark and off in the woods a brock was coughing. Stilton, who had begun to doze, woke up and shivered anxiously. But he was soon asleep again, and all that could be heard was the quiet rasp of the golden kitten’s tongue.
‘You were listening, then,’ thought Animal X. ‘I knew you were.’