The following story, which is absolutely true, was brought to my attention when I was holidaying recently on the coast of North Norfolk. The month was January. I was in search of silence and tranquillity. I had rented a cottage which provided a fine view of the deserted nearby sea-shore, on which my small brown dog could run in safety. Having recently suffered the loss of my dear wife, I chose the location with care – isolation was precisely what I required, for I was liable to sudden bouts of uncontrollable emotion, and wished not to be the cause of distress or discomfort in others. For a week or two, I was glad to be alone here: to make the fire, cook simple meals, watch the dog running in happy circles at the far-off water’s edge, and weep freely in private whenever the need inexorably overcame me.
But I forgot that I would need mental stimulus. At the end of Michaelmas term I had bade farewell to my position at the library in Cambridge with few real regrets; the work had been mechanical for quite some time, and I had assumed I would not miss it. I remember debating whether to pack my laptop. This is strange to think of now. Had I not brought it with me, perhaps the following story would never have been told. But pack it I did. And one stormy evening, when the wind was moaning in the chimney, and I was craving intellectual occupation, I suddenly remembered that, around the close of the year, a library member of small acquaintance had sent to me by email the following folder of documents and other files, under the general title “Roger.” I opened it gratefully, and for several hours afterwards, I was transported by its contents. By turns I was confused, suspicious, impatient and even cynical. The story therein conveyed was outlandish, not to say preposterous. And yet, as I continued to study the material over the ensuing days, I felt increasingly inclined to believe it. Sad to say, I think what finally convinced me of the files’ veracity was the staggering stupidity of the man named throughout as “Wiggy,” through whose pitifully inadequate understanding these events are mainly delivered to us. As my wife would have said (I can hear her now), you couldn’t make him up.
Naturally, I wondered on occasion what lay behind Dr Winterton’s decision to send this material to me. But being unable to make contact with him (no wi-fi here), I was bound to accept the most likely explanation. I had rented a lonely cottage on the seaside; Winterton had somehow heard tell of it; he knew that this story unfolded in a similarly lonely cottage beside the sea. Though I often tried to picture Dr Winterton, I found that I could capture only, in my mind’s eye, a fleeting impression of a snaggle tooth and a hollow, unshaven cheek, and possibly (oddly) the smell of cloves. In former times, I would have asked Mary, of course. She had been my colleague at the library for the past twenty years; even though her position was part-time, she had paid lively attention to the members in a way that I would sometimes find bewildering. I remember how she would, on occasion, attempt to discuss the members with me at dinner, and grow incredulous (but amused) when I was able to call to mind not one of the persons concerned. I believe she did once mention Winterton to me in particular, but she would be unsurprised to learn that I could now recollect nothing of the circumstances of her dealings with him. For several years she was in charge of allocating the carrels in the great reading room, so perhaps it was related to that. She was the most wonderful, practical, and rational woman, my dear Mary. She would never have taken this simple cottage! She would have been instantly alive to all its frustrating inconveniences. But she would have laughed with sheer pleasure to see our dog running so happily on the deserted shore. Every time he does it, I feel her loss most dreadfully.
After long consideration, I have decided to present this material exactly in the order I encountered it myself. Who is Roger? Wait and see. I hope this is not confusing, but at the same time, I have come to believe that I should editorialise as little as possible. I will merely make clear, to begin with, that the “written” files – including the rather pointless and silly dramatic efforts – are by the man calling himself Wiggy. Descriptions of photographs and transcripts of the audio files are by me.
Contents of ROGER folder
WORD files:
ROGER NOTES (119KB)
ROGER THOUGHTS (66KB)
MORE STUFF (33KB)
ROGER DREAM (40KB)
JPEGs:
DSC00546 (2MB)
DSC00021 (1.6MB)
DSC00768 (3.8MB)
AUDIO files:
ONE (48.7MB)
TWO (64MB)
The kitchen of a coastal cottage on a gusty night. Scary stuff! Windows rattle. A kettle steams, having just been boiled. There is a sense of awkwardness, reflected in the MUSIC. Under a pool of yellow light at the kitchen table, a digital audio recorder is glinting. Facing each other at the table, their backs in shadow, are WIGGY and ROGER.
Close-up on the recorder: it is recording.
Close-up on wall clock. It is 11:45. Close-up on window: it’s VERY DARK.
WIGGY shudders. He is a handsome man in his mid-thirties; attractive and serious. ROGER stares, breathes. Music now suggestive of heartbeats. WIGGY speaks first.
WIGGY
Shall we start?
ROGER
Whenever you like.
WIGGY
Can I get you anything?
Such as?
WIGGY
Water.
ROGER
No.
WIGGY
Tasty tit-bit?
ROGER
(affronted)
No.
WIGGY
(trying to lighten the tone)
Saucer of milk?
(laughs)
Ball of string?
ROGER gives him a pained look. He is a cat, of course. In fact, I probably should have mentioned this at the top of the scene – NB: remember to go back and do that. ROGER is a cat. Otherwise, if not clear ROGER is a talking cat, the scene might be somewhat less interesting.
WIGGY
(abashed)
Sorry.
WIGGY attempts an encouraging smile, but ROGER is stone-faced. As well as being a cat, he is a bit of a bastard, to say the least. NB: Is this the right place to start the story? Yes, surely. Or possibly no. Oh God, I have no idea.
ROGER
Can I just check? You’re not going to write this up like a screenplay?
I mean, in a screenplay format?
WIGGY
(lying)
No, I’m not. Why?
ROGER
I’ve read your other screenplays, don’t forget.
You used to send them to Jo. We laughed like drains.
You go in for very self-indulgent stage directions.
WIGGY rises above this, superhumanly. But what a nerve.
WIGGY
So, Roger. Here you are.
ROGER
(not really paying attention, bored)
Yes.
WIGGY
A talking cat!
Note to self: Remember to make this clear at the top.
Yes.
WIGGY
Would you like to tell me –
(he falters, understandably)
– something about that?
ROGER has been thinking about something else. Close-up on ROGER.
ROGER
(thoughtfully)
What do you say to Daniel Craig?
No one will believe this. But it did really happen.
WIGGY
(confused)
What do you mean: what do I say to him?
I’ve never met him.
ROGER
If this becomes a film.
WIGGY
I’m sorry?
ROGER
You can be very dense sometimes, Wiggy.
What do you say to getting Daniel Craig to do my voice in the film, if there’s a film?
Well, I hadn’t really thought –
ROGER
(interrupting)
He’s very understated.
WIGGY
Yes. Yes, he is. Famously.
ROGER
He’s classless. I like that.
WIGGY
Yes.
This is exactly how the conversation went.
ROGER
Masculine.
WIGGY
Absolutely.
ROGER
Emotionally reticent.
WIGGY
Yes, but –
ROGER
He’d be perfect.
(laughs)
Except that you sound nothing like Daniel Craig, Roger.
You sound like Vincent Price!
ROGER jumps off the table, landing softly on the stone-flag floor, tail raised high. What a prima donna. He just can’t stand it when WIGGY gets the last word on anything.
WIGGY
(calling)
Roger! Oh, come on.
ROGER looks round and makes a loud – and very pointed – miaow.
WIGGY
You’ve got a great voice, Roger!
ROGER pushes through the cat-flap and leaves. Music climax. WIGGY, sighing, switches off the recorder. Windows rattle.
Outside, the garden gate creaks and bangs in the wind. Beyond is the cry of the sea.
Note to self: do this again; still not working. Remember it’s quite unusual that a cat is talking. Difficult to get the proper distance on this when you’ve got so used to it. Formatting quite professional-looking, though. So that’s encouraging, at least.
The picture shows an unremarkable moggy-type cat – tabby and white. White face and bib. White paws. Tabby back, tail and ears. Quite hefty. Harmless-looking. He is lying in the arms of a tall, striking woman in a grubby artist’s smock, her long brown hair lifted by a sea-breeze. She is smiling. At her feet is a small brown terrier dog of attractive appearance whose tongue is hanging out. Behind is a flint and brick cottage – the name LIGHTHOUSE COTTAGE visible on the lintel.
Where to start? The crazy thing, or Jo? Well, Jo. Obviously, Jo. I mean, where the hell is she? You can’t just disappear! There I was, Coventry, Belgrade Theatre. God. Four o’clock-ish. Thursday afternoon. Just going on in the second half of matinee of See How They Run! “Call for you,” they said. Alice, the ASM. I didn’t have to take it, but I did. Thank God I did. It’s Jo, sounding weird. “Wiggy,” she says. “Wiggy, please come. It’s Roger. You’ve got to help me take care of him.” Or something like that, but I can’t be exactly sure. Well, I was a bit distracted! We’re building up to the bit where Jeff says, “Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!” and it’s important to concentrate. And my big sister is calling me at work to talk about looking after a cat? “Jo, I’ll have to call you back,” I said. I handed the phone back to Alice, and made my entrance through the French doors – just in time, I might add.
Anyway, after the curtain, I called the cottage, like the decent chap I am, but no luck. It kept going to voicemail. Ditto the mobile. I left a couple of messages. “Orfling Two calling Orfling One” – that’s our code to each other – well, that’s been our code since Ma died and left us on our own when I was still at school. Jo’s Orfling One, of course. And I’m Orfling Two. But she didn’t call back. Alice said afterwards that she’d tried to ask Jo what the problem was – they met when Jo loyally visited the show when we came in to Worthing (the cottage isn’t far from there) – but she said it was hard to make out anything distinct from the phone because of all the laughter in the theatre – some of which, I’m pleased to say, was generated by yours truly. What did Coventry Bugle say? Well, thank you for asking. I believe it was, “Will Caton-Pines manages to make the thankless part of Clive, the husband, almost believable.”
Anyway, back with Jo, I kept trying to call her for the next couple of days. At the end of the week, I just drove down here. Orflings must stick together, and anyway it was the end of the run. And of course there’s no sign of her – or even of mad dog Jeremy, who’s normally so glad to see me. I say “of course” there’s no sign of Jo – but why do I say that? There’s no “of course” about it! Where is she? Even as I drove up the muddy lane from that bloody village it felt all wrong. Her car sitting on the soggy grass across from the house. Big gate open. Back door unlocked. Handbag in the hall. Jeremy’s collar and lead hanging from the usual peg, next to the one where she usually keeps the spare keys for the next-door neighbour. Mobile phone plugged into the charger in the kitchen. Heating on. “To do” list on a chalk board – Do this, get that, take care of whatever. It felt like she’d just popped out. It still feels like she’s just popped out – and I’ve been here four days. Don’t know what to do, apart from write this.
I did ring the police yesterday, and a detective called Sergeant Duggan came round and took a statement. I showed him all round the house, the shed, studio, little cellar with historical smuggling connections and what not. Took him down to see the beach. Pointed out the fine view along the coast to Littlehampton. We knocked next door, but that chap’s always away – lives mainly in France. Jo’s only met him once since she’s been here. I explained how the two cottages used to be one house, built around 1750, and how Ivor Novello used to visit the one next door in the 1930s, when it belonged to a star of the musical theatre. I suppose I got a bit carried away telling him about next door – all the parties and what not. I shouldn’t have bothered! You can always tell with police when you’re giving them “too much information,” because they stop writing it down. My big mistake was asking him in a jocular way whether anyone had ever said to him, “Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!” He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
I explained that Jo had called me at the theatre to say “Look after the cat” – and he was quite cross with me then, because what she said suggested she was intending to go away. But she hasn’t gone away. What it feels like – I didn’t say this to Sergeant Duggan – but what it feels like is that she’s been taken by aliens. And it also feels like the abduction happened within the last half hour. I keep expecting the J-Dog to come trotting past, asking for a pat. I keep expecting chairs to be still warm when I sit down – and sometimes I get a real start when they are warm – Roger having just hopped down when he heard me coming. A really perverse cat, Roger. Since I first got here, there’s been this sort-of scratching noise from the wall with the fireplace in it, and you’d think – as a cat – he’d be desperate to investigate. But he’s lain there calmly in Jo’s high-backed armchair, just a couple of feet away from the source of this suspicious scratching noise, swinging his tail and ignoring it absolutely.
The policeman asked if he could look at Jo’s mobile – and of course, that was clever of him, so I said yes. But although it was still plugged into the charger, it turned out to have sort-of died. And when he picked it up, he said “Agh!” and dropped it (it was all sticky, he said). Anyway, he reckoned I should take it in to Worthing to see what could be retrieved from the “Sim card” (God, I hate all that kind of stuff), and he helped me use rubber gloves to put it in a plastic bag.
I have to admit it: he was much more observant than me; I suppose it’s the training. In Jo’s studio upstairs, he found a half-finished watercolour of Roger, and heaps of sketches for it all over the floor. I hadn’t noticed. He also asked about a pair of binoculars and a note book, with times noted down in it, right by the window next to an old, cold mug of tea. “Tuesday, 10:05. Next door garden. Partial.” That kind of thing. Jo being a birdwatcher was news to me. But the big window in the studio would have been a good place to do it. Lovely view across to the English Channel and the horizon. He asked if anything significant had changed in Jo’s life recently, and I said, “Well, yes. Roger” and he seemed quite annoyed with me again for not saying anything about Roger earlier. He made a note of the name and drew a circle round it and asked for a surname – which was when I realised he thought Roger was a lover or murder suspect, so I quickly explained that Roger was a cat, and he crossed it out. So I didn’t explain she’d only had Roger a few months – took him on when her old Chelsea Arts Club chum Michael died in Lincolnshire, falling downstairs. Likewise, I didn’t draw attention to the way Roger had definitely made himself at home here. He was sitting in the lane as I approached in the car; when he saw me coming, he just stood up, stretched, and trotted indoors.
Now this is the crazy bit. Woo hoo. Right. I mean it, this is absolutely crazy. Maybe I shouldn’t even write it down. But all right, I was sitting at the kitchen table last night, drinking some of Jo’s impressive stock of cheap pink plonk – which is disgusting, a bit like drinking melted lollies, but I was bloody desperate – and Roger was clawing at the back door, wanting me to open it for him. And I suppose I was in a bit of a trance. I mean, it’s very unsettling not knowing where Jo is! I keep testing the phone line; I’ve been in touch with everyone I can think of; I’ve checked her computer and her diary, which felt really awful, really wrong. But I have to do these things, don’t I? I don’t know where she is! I didn’t say this to the plod, for obvious reasons, but I’ve also checked all the grass in the area for tell-tale scorch marks, because in my opinion alien abduction is emerging as by far the most likely explanation. So anyway, I’m ignoring Roger, like I said, and he’s saying “Miaow, miaow, miaow” at the door.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I did. But what happens is this. He suddenly jumps up on the table, sits down in front of me, puts a paw over my glass and says, distinctly, “Let me out.” I look at him. I feel a tingling in my head. I look at the paw. He doesn’t move it. We look into each other’s eyes for about ten seconds. And then he jumps back down on the floor and claws at the door again, saying “Miaow, let miaow, miaow, miaow, LET ME OUT.”
“In your own time,” says Wiggy. He sounds quite upper-class. I can’t imagine why this is a surprise, but it is. I picture Wiggy as a feckless type, of course. An actor, in silly farces, in provincial theatres. He went to a good school. Floppy hair, I shouldn’t wonder. Mustard-coloured corduroys at weekends. From internal evidence, this recording must date from at least a week after Wiggy’s first so-called “thoughts” about Roger – but there is no dating whatever on these documents; as files, they were all saved on the same date in December when Dr Winterton sent them to me, which is quite unhelpful. As soon as I can, I will check when See How They Run! was last playing at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. Thus far, it is my only clue.
The quality of this recording is not of the best. Background noises sometimes obtrude. And when there is any sudden sound, such as Wiggy coughing (of course, he smokes!), the recorder reacts, and Roger’s words are rendered temporarily less audible. Also, Roger sometimes swallows his words in a miaow – possibly deliberately. As King George VI says in that highly successful film The King’s Speech, a couple of stammers “thrown in” serves to remind the British people – to whom he broadcasts – that it’s really him. I have no doubt Roger operates on the same intelligent and witty principle with his occasional miaows. As you will see, Roger is an astonishing individual. But I said I would refrain from editorialising. I genuinely intend to do my best.
The following is a faithful transcription of what can be clearly heard in the file marked “Audio One.” If it is helpful to know this, Roger does sound a bit like Vincent Price. Essentially, it is Roger’s life story, told in his own words. I have long since ceased to care that every aspect of this monologue – the teller; the telling; and above all, what is told – is technically utterly impossible.
“This is like Interview with the Vampire,” says Roger.
“Really? I never saw it,” says Wiggy.
“Shame,” says Roger. (He says “Sha-a-a-me” in a beautiful feline singsong.) “The parallels are so amusing.” (“A-mewwsing,” ditto.)
Wiggy says (without thinking): “Oh God. You’re not a vampire, are you?”
A long sigh from Roger. One sympathises with his problem here. “No, not a vampire,” he says, quietly. And then he begins.
“I was born in 1927 in the East End of London, and before you tell me that’s impossible, Wiggy –” (You can almost hear the tiny mechanism in Wiggy’s brain doing the mental arithmetic) “– may I remind you that a cat talking into this recording device is impossible enough, but I think you will agree that it is nevertheless definitely occurring.
“So. I repeat, I was born in 1927 in the East End of London, close to the Roman Road market. My mother was very beautiful, and very young. I never knew my father, but that’s pretty standard for cats, so please don’t bother trying to read much into it, although I have to admit that a sort of father-fixation – with its associated rejection issues – has arguably been a theme of my whole life. Have you read much Freud, Wiggy?”
“Er, no,” Wiggy says. He sounds a bit startled by the question, and you can’t really blame him. In any case, Roger clearly isn’t interested in discussion.
“My brothers and I learned to scavenge and hunt,” he goes on. “We played at fighting, as all kittens do; we made adequate progress. There were four of us all born together – Alf, Arthur, me and little Bill – but we were reduced to three when my brother Bill was killed by a cart-horse when we were six months old.”
There is a pause. Wiggy starts to ask, “Are you all right?” But Roger resumes.
“I must say,” he says reflectively, “I thought Mother would be more affected by the loss of little Bill.”
You can hear how shocked he was by this; how hurt by extension, of course, at how little his mother would have grieved for any of her offspring, including him.
“I was just a year old when I met the Captain. In the intervening six months I had often visited the spot where little Bill had met his end, and I had sometimes been aware of a large black cat watching me there. I assumed that one day this cat would expect me to fight, and although I wasn’t looking forward to it, I was big enough, so it was bound to happen. In the cat world you don’t really choose who you fight, you see. But although we met each other in the conventional way – backs arched, tails erect, teeth bared, circling with our claws digging into the dust – he disarmed me by saying, “You miss him, don’t you?” In my surprise, my back dropped down, my tail flopped. No one had ever said anything like this to me before. I was confused. “Your little brother,” he said. “It was a senseless way to go.”
“And then he walked off, and I followed him. It was the turning-point of my life. If I hadn’t followed the Captain, what a different story would be mine. A straightforward cat’s life around the Roman Road, circa 1930. I’d have survived (if I was lucky) to about the age of six. I’d have fathered dozens of kittens. I’d have used up all my so-called “nine lives” in mundane ways, such as recovering from drunken blows, losing my tail in some old housewife’s wringer, getting stuck for weeks in a garden shed. Such was the everyday fate of the other members of my family, certainly. Although I never saw them again, I found out later that Alf was run over by a number 30 bus when he was two, and I heard that Arthur made it to five years old but was rounded up and taken to Battersea Dog’s Home, where the story goes that he was gassed. I don’t know how anyone can be sure of that. But it’s sad to think your last sibling was lost to you in 1932, the year the Mars Bar was first produced, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. I very much doubt you can imagine it.”
Wiggy, realising something is required, makes some sort of hopeless mumble. Perhaps he’s making a mental note of the interesting fact about the Mars Bar.
“What I do know,” resumes Roger, “is that Mother had two more litters and then collapsed and died in Victoria Park in 1932, under a favourite tree. I suppose every animal from a fatherless background thinks the same as me, but in all my years I’ve honestly never seen a more beautiful cat than Mother.”
Wiggy takes advantage of a natural pause. “I expect I’m being thick,” he says. He clears his throat. “But when this other cat – this captain – spoke to you, do you mean the way you’re speaking to me now? Or was it some sort of cat language?”
Roger is incensed at his stupidity.
“Of course it was cat language! I just told you, I was only a year old! I’d spent my kittenhood in the slums!”
Wiggy is clearly mortified. But I must admit I’m rather glad to hear him on the back foot like this. He really is out of his intellectual depth with Roger.
“Don’t be like that,” Wiggy says. “It’s just that you seem to take it for granted that you can talk.”
“I don’t take it for granted at all. You’re the one with the problem.”
“No, I’m not. Look, how do you explain – ?”
Roger interrupts. “Wiggy, if you can’t get past the fact that I can talk, perhaps I should stop.”
“No, please. I’m sorry. You’re really touchy.” Wiggy laughs, and attempts a joke. “I mean, you know. Keep your fur on. You were following the Captain.”
“I know I was following the Captain! You don’t have to tell me I was following the Captain!”
There is no sound in reply from Wiggy. In fact, you will be pleased to hear that Wiggy does his best not to provoke Roger again for the rest of this recording. The incendiary expression “Keep your fur on” is thankfully never reprised.
“So, yes. I followed the Captain. I made my choice. I expect I was inwardly proud that he seemed to have sensed something special in me. I had no idea what was in store. He led me into an old warehouse, all the way silent. There were so many things I wanted to ask him, but I knew he would only speak when we were safely alone together. ‘Here we are,’ he said, when we were finally inside. He spoke in a weary way. I didn’t know then how old he was. I didn’t know how many times he had gone through this process before. ‘You’re wondering why I picked you out,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say I had a hunch about you.’ I looked round. From the darkness, I was sure I could hear the far-off groaning of an injured cat.
“ ‘Is there someone else here?’ I said. I hoped I didn’t give away how anxious I was.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain to you later. If there is a later.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘Well, here we are.’ He sat down right in front of me, his huge green eyes looking right into mine. Being captured by his gaze filled me with a strange mixture of terror and blissful joy. He leaned forward and said, very quietly, ‘Has anyone ever talked to you about cats having nine lives?’
“And then, before I could say anything, he lashed at me with massive ferocity, slashing my throat. My blood gushed out, fell like heavy rain to the ground; I stumbled and fell, weakly, feeling the pulse of my heart pumping my tiny young life out of me as I lay there, helpless. I remember that I felt surprise – utter surprise – but no resentment, no anger. In some ways, I didn’t really mind that I was going. I thought briefly of Mother, but then remembered – without rancour – that she probably wouldn’t miss me very much. A happy memory of little Bill came back, which made me smile. And then my Mother’s special smell filled me up – filled me with almost unbearable comfort – and I succumbed to death.
“When I woke, I was desperately thirsty and my eyes hurt. They were like rocks in my head. Obviously, my main feeling was confusion – but these physical sensations were powerful too. My paws felt as if someone else’s had been tied on top of my own. My tail was so heavy, I could hardly lift it. The captain was watching me as if he had never moved. How long had I been dead? He pushed a water bowl towards me, and I drank every drop from it. He didn’t speak, and I was too frightened to break the silence. Yet I had no urge to escape. I trusted him. He had just killed me – hadn’t he? I had felt myself die. And yet I trusted him. After all, here I was, alive! My throat appeared to have healed itself. The blood on the floor had dried. Whatever had happened, somehow the Captain had it under his control.
“For the following few days, he brought me food and I got stronger. And then, on the seventh day, he said “Follow me,” and led me to another part of the building. This time, I didn’t care if he knew I was afraid. ‘Captain, please,’ I said. ‘I need you to explain what’s happening.’ But he shook his head and we made our way into the darkness, in the direction of the groaning I had heard when we first came in. He stopped on the edge of a pit about fifteen feet deep. It was too dark to see to the bottom, but I could detect movement down there, and smell an overpowering stench of animal decay. I could hear cracked and laboured breathing, and the unmistakeable squeak of rats – a sound that drives any cat crazy with loathing and bloodlust. ‘You’ll understand soon,’ he said – and knocked me in. I screamed as I fell; I also screamed as I landed. Lining the bottom of this pit were the decomposing bodies of at least a dozen cats – their loose fur horrible under my paws, their dying breaths still hanging vilely in the air. Rats swarmed round me, climbed over me. I struggled to breathe, lashing out in all directions. ‘Help me,’ said a voice close by, and then there was a dreadful, feeble wailing.
“I was down there for six whole days before I expired. My death was caused by a combination of dehydration, asphyxiation, and rat-induced dementia. This second demise had none of the emotional consolations of the first. In fact, it was the worst of all the deaths. It’s no wonder that the Captain always placed the pit second in the sequence. As he explained to me in the fullness of time, very few cats rose out of the pit and made it to their third life – let alone made it eventually (as I did, so amazingly) to their ninth.”
Roger stops. “You look confused, Wiggy,” he says.
Wiggy evidently shrugs his answer. “Nngh?” is all I can hear. He lights a cigarette and sighs. One can hardly blame him for his slowness to grasp what Roger is telling him. I must admit that, in his shoes, I would have struggled to come up with a meaningful response myself.
Finally, with a struggle, he takes a drag on the cigarette and says, “Nine lives, then?”
“It is quite a big idea to take in, I suppose,” says Roger.
“It is, yes.”
“Just cling on to that idea.”
“Of the nine lives?”
“Yes.”
“All right, but –”
“Just think about what a strange belief it is – every cat has nine lives. Why do humans say that? Where did you get such a bizarre idea? Why do you pass it on? The Captain used to say how typical it was that while all humans seemed to know the saying about cats having nine lives, not one of you had stopped to find out what it really meant – so you applied it, pathetically, to the famous luck of cats in surviving mundane accidents.”
He pauses. Wiggy swallows. He manages a feeble laugh. “Ridiculous,” he says.
“In fact,” says Roger, “as the Captain explained to me, every cat literally has the capacity within him to survive eight deaths.”
“Right.”
“Up until, say, two thousand years ago, all cats had powers unimaginable to the average cat today. The species has been vastly diminished by time and domestication. In the modern world only one cat in a million has the character, the spirit, the sheer indomitable life force to fulfil that universal feline destiny of nine lives as part of a conscious programme of self-completion. I am that one in a million. And if I seem quite pleased with myself – well, so would you if you’d survived the shit I had to go through. My initiation through the Captain was long and merciless, a symphony of pain and despair. And it got worse and worse. What one has to take into account is that the risk of failure – the risk that I would die for good the next time the Captain killed me – kept growing, exponentially.
“The Captain loathed all the killing, he said – and even from the point of view of the poor little street-cat on the receiving end, I believed him. But I grew quickly to understand, as he did, that there was no other way of finding out whether I was The One. If you’ll excuse the pun, this was the ultimate process of elimination. After cutting my throat and then leaving me to die in the pit, he went on to hang me, drown me, brain me –
There is a little whimper from Wiggy here.
“Gas me, burn me, and poison me – each time having to prepare himself for an even greater likelihood that I would not return. When I recovered from the final test, I found him bent over me, weeping. He thought I hadn’t made it.
“He thought you were dead?”
“Exactly.”
“Wow.”
There is a pause.
“But you weren’t dead?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
“Wiggy, look, I’ll explain it again.”
“Would you? Cheers.”
“He had killed me eight times.”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
“Meaning that I’m the cat that literally has had nine lives.”
“Right. Like every cat has nine lives, kind of thing?”
“Except that most cats nowadays die once and that’s it.”
“Got it. Got it. I think I’ve got it.”
Roger waits. Wiggy makes a “Huh!” noise of exhalation.
“I’m a very special cat, Wiggy,” says Roger. “That’s the bottom line here.”
“Well, I know that. You can talk.”
Roger sighs. “Yes, I can talk,” he says, flatly. This is clearly as far as he’s ever going to get, explaining things to Wiggy. He goes back to the story.
“I wish I could remember everything he told me. The trouble is, once someone has shown you a convincingly different way of looking at the world, it’s hard to remember how you saw it before. If it helps (but I suspect it might not in your case, Wiggy), the Captain was a classic Nietzschean. According to his world view, he and I were both Uberkatzen, and it’s true that once you are an Uberkatze, the feebly simple one-bang-and-you’re-out mortality of others – especially of the weakling human – is impossible not to be impatient with. In the process of finding a companion for himself, the Captain had sacrificed literally hundreds of cats, over the course of forty years. Scores and scores of them had not survived the initial slashing; a mere dozen or so had raised his hopes temporarily by coming out of the pit. But not a single one before me had got even as far as life number five! All this killing had made the Captain sad and weary and disgusted, he said – but it was the sense of perpetual let-down that had injured his spirit the most.
“ ‘With every cat I had hope,’ he explained. ‘I thought, perhaps this one will have what it takes! But they died. One after another, they died. And in the end, their pathetic weakness made me sick. Can you imagine it, Roger? Losing all compassion? Feeling only fury and dismay?’
“I felt that I could. But I said, carefully, ‘I don’t know.’
“ ‘Think of little Bill,’ he said. ‘I know you loved him. His death was senseless. But be honest. Having survived as you have done, over and over, eight deaths that were each of them far worse than his, what do you really think of him now?’
“I thought of Bill’s little broken body. Of the kitten who had been so sweet and beloved. Of my sense of loss; the shock of his sudden departure from this world. And then I said, with perfect candour, ‘You’re right. Little Bill? What a pussy!’ ”
There is a pause. Wiggy (thankfully) says nothing. And then Roger laughs. It is a shriek of a laugh, that raises all the hairs on the back of my neck each time I play it. “Your face!” he says. And then he laughs and laughs, and then, abruptly, the recording comes to an end.
This picture, in black and white, shows a man standing in a patch of bluebells in dappled light. He has a handsome face. Big ears. He holds a lit cigarette. Beside his leg sits a cat – the same cat as in the first picture, the one I assume is Roger. Roger is pressing his head against the man’s calf in what looks like an affectionate way. I wonder if the man is Michael, the one who died in Lincolnshire and bequeathed Roger to Wiggy’s sister Jo? No, it can’t be. It’s from much longer ago. The trousers of the man are post-war; he looks a bit familiar. The quality of the picture is fuzzy, as if it had been printed on soft paper.
Again, black and white. Again, the picture quality suggests a fairly ancient date. 1960s? Two cats together: one is the supposed Roger cat, the other a massive black tom with a handsome head. The black cat is lying down, stretched out on a patch of long grass in sunshine; the Roger cat lies on his back, his legs in the air, his head resting on the black cat’s abdomen. They are both relaxed. If they were young men instead of cats, you would assume they had been for a drink and a swim after their final examinations, and that there was an ancient teddy bear called Aloysius lying half-hidden in the grass. Behind them, little is in focus – a tree is casting shade across the bottom left-hand corner of the picture. Still, you can make out bushes, trees, and an Elizabethan chimney.
I looked at this picture several times before noticing, right in the foreground at the top of the picture, a hazy horizontal shape. It makes no sense – being presumably some distance off the ground, and too close to make out properly. I narrow my eyes, searching for detail. It looks like a pair of brogue shoes, heels together, toes pointed out.
Roger has been tearing stories out of the papers! I left the Telegraph on the kitchen table last Thursday, and then went out in the garden. When I came back in, there were holes in it, not to mention really deep scratch-marks in the table-top. I suppose it’s my own fault for cutting out the crossword for him every day. It started a precedent. But I thought it was pretty reasonable when he first made the suggestion. After all, it’s true what he said: I don’t do cryptics. I don’t have the right kind of brain.
Of course, he’s giving me the silent treatment still. Not a single coherent word for a week. The bastard. All miaowing. Miaow, miaow, miaow. God, it sounds so sarcastic when it comes from him. It’s like it’s in inverted commas. What sort of cat is he, anyway? He never dealt with that scratching noise, did he? In the end, it just stopped. Anyway, back with the cuttings, the big Silent Act meant it was pointless asking him what these stories were that he was so bloody interested in. He’s done it again every day since, as well, as if he’s looking for something in particular. So today I had one of my Wiggy Brainwaves. I secretly bought two copies of the paper from the village shop – and hid the second in the fridge. Which might sound a bit odd, so I should explain it’s not me; it’s Roger. The thing is, Roger, for all his mental brilliance, hasn’t been able to work out a way to open the fridge! I’ve started keeping my wallet in there, just to be on the safe side. I put Jo’s phone in there too (still in the bag), after I realised Roger had been playing with it in the garden, and had nearly lost it under a bush. I really must take that phone to a phone shop soon and see what can be done.
Anyway, back with my cunning plan, I left the first Telegraph on the table as usual, and went out for half an hour for a pensive smoke beside the sea. Then I came back in, to find the paper on the table in the usual tatters, and quickly took both papers into the downstairs loo. It took a while to work out exactly what had gone, but in the end, it turned out he had torn out three stories. Which were:
1) A light-hearted news item about the statistics concerning various bizarre fatal domestic accidents last year in the UK (caused by tea-pots, dressing-gowns, place-mats, trousers).
2) A story about an East End gangster who had apparently taken his own life by jumping off the roof of a car park near the 2012 Olympic Stadium.
3) The obituary of some obscure academic from Cambridge.
No idea what to make of any of this, and as I said, I can’t even ask at the moment. Miaow, miaow; miaow, miaow, miaow. He really is a bastard, Roger. He won’t tell me what has happened to Jo – or he has to tell me his whole so-called life story first, which will take several bloody years at the rate he’s going. And then he clams up for a week and just does cryptic crosswords in his head, making contented purring noises to let me know how clever he’s being. Sorry to get worked up, but how the hell do you talk to a cat like Roger? Whichever approach you take, you feel like a total idiot. On the one hand, you can’t say normal cat things like, “Ooh, what’s for your dinner tonight? Is it a bit of lovely fishy-wishy?” He’s the feline equivalent of Stephen Fry, for God’s sake! On the other hand, what if someone came in and I was saying to the cat, “Oh, Roger, I forgot to say. I bought you that copy of Shaw’s Man and Superman you asked for. Where would you like me to put it?”
If Roger never spoke again, would I mind? It’s a toss-up. It’s certainly a lot more peaceful round here when he’s in “proper cat” (or what I call PC) mode. But when he’s not talking, I feel I’m making no progress, and might as well be dead. I don’t know what to do with myself. I did have a look through Jo’s binoculars yesterday, and saw hardly any birds at all, so what a waste of time. Puzzling, though. Whatever Jo was watching for, she saw it virtually every day – in fact, this is quite interesting, on the day she called me, she made a note of seeing it at about 3:30 in the afternoon – which would be just before she called me at the theatre! The handwriting is quite shaky, so she must have been excited. Also, thinking about it, wouldn’t it have been almost dark by then? Well, that means it can’t be birds! To be honest, this makes me even more keen on the aliens theory. Maybe that’s what she kept seeing … a flying saucer! Maybe she just had time to pick up the J-Dog and “Whoosh!” – up they both went, off across the dramatic coastline of Littlehampton and beyond to the Isle of Wight. (Although she did have time to call me first, which slightly ruins that scenario.)
Talking of scenarios, I had another go at a bit of proper writing at the weekend, but it’s hard to get a grip on it somehow. Ever since Roger suggested Daniel Craig to play him “in the film,” I can’t help picturing him dressed in a shiny designer suit, running along the top of a train as it goes round really tight corners coming out of Istanbul. He’s got quite an idea of himself, hasn’t he? I play along with that Nine Lives story of his, but I don’t care about any of this stuff – why should I? He could be making the whole thing up. And meanwhile, I learn nothing about what’s happened to Jo – nothing. That policeman came back today and asked whether I’d had the mobile looked at yet. I think he was quite surprised when I got it out of the fridge to give it to him, but he didn’t say.
A cottage by the sea. Peaceful. WIGGY strolls into kitchen, lights cigarette, fills kettle, casually opens fridge. BOND-TYPE ACTION MUSIC as ROGER explodes out of fridge, lands on WIGGY’s shoulder, and delivers a devastating range of blows on WIGGY, who drops to his knees.
(yells)
No! Roger!
More blows. NB: ROGER makes no cliché squalling cat-fight noises. He is silent, focused, methodical, assassin-like. (This makes it more scary.) WIGGY’s arterial blood spurts and pours onto kitchen floor.
WIGGY
(naturalistically)
But how did you open the – ?
I thought you didn’t know how to open the – !
Get off!
A final coup-de-grace swipe to the throat. WIGGY keels over, dead. ROGER jumps down on to the floor. He stops, raises a paw and admires his bloodied claws with a secret smile. He looks back at the lifeless body of WIGGY and the fridge door swinging open.
ROGER
(with classless, masculine understatement, over the shoulder)
Nice, Smeg.
The second recording has a different ambient sound. As we discover, Wiggy and Roger are in a borrowed flat near to Russell Square in London. Cars and lorries pass outside. The pavements are evidently very busy, too: young people in groups can be heard. Dogs bark. Sirens pass. It’s a winter afternoon. As will become apparent, Roger has persuaded Wiggy to take him on a trip down memory lane, and they have gone together to London.
“Ready?” says Wiggy. He sounds a bit tired and tetchy. Perhaps it’s been a long day. “Might we get as far as Jo today, Roger? Where did we leave your life story last time? Around 1928? How fast can you do the next eighty-some years?”
There is a pause. Wiggy tries another tack.
“Had it changed a lot?” Wiggy asks. “I could tell you were shocked when it turned out they’d built the Olympic Velodrome directly on the site of the Captain’s special place.”
Again, Roger doesn’t speak.
“Do you miss the Captain?”
Roger laughs. “No,” he says. He laughs again. And I apologise for saying this, but anyone else but Wiggy would realise that this is an intriguing answer, and would follow it up. Wiggy, frustratingly, does not.
“Why did we have to see that car park?”
“Just a theory.”
Wiggy thinks for a moment. He is evidently making a connection to the car park suicide from the papers! Each time I listen to this recording, I pray again: Don’t mention the cuttings from the newspaper, Wiggy. Knowing the contents of those three stories torn out by Roger from the Telegraph is your single advantage, right now.
You will be pleased to hear that, for once, he makes an intelligent decision.
“Will you live for ever, Roger?” he asks.
“That was what I asked the Captain,” says Roger. “When my ordeal was over, all those years ago.”
There is something quite mechanical in the way Roger picks up the tale where he left off. It makes you wonder: how many times has he told it before? What is his purpose in telling it to someone like Wiggy?
“Does this mean I will live for ever? The very question I asked the Captain. Does this mean I can never be killed again?”
He’s off again. “After all, would anyone choose to have eternal life? One needn’t read very deeply in the great myths and stories of the world to know the general verdict on eternal life – immortality is always discovered to be far more of a burden than a blessing. Living for ever deprives the spirit of hope and purpose. It also separates you from mortals in mainly tragic ways. Think of the Sibyl at Cumae – or, if you like, Wiggy, given your more limited range of cultural reference, think of Doctor Who. Of course, I didn’t think like this in those far-off days of my youth. I hadn’t read anything. I didn’t know anything. I was a rough-edged street cat familiar with just a couple of square miles of East London. But I knew enough to be afraid of what the Captain had done to me. After all, as a Nine Lifer himself, he was clearly not a happy cat. He did not rejoice in his own immortality, if that was what he had. It was clear that the only thing that gave him happiness was me. He was wonderfully proud of me. He had created a companion for himself. For the first week or so, all he wanted to do was congratulate me, marvel at me, tell me the story of my triumphant nine lives again and again and again.
“We moved from the warehouse after a week or so. Why should the East End contain us? For the next ten years, in fact, we travelled. In the first instance, it was easy enough to get to the docks at Tilbury, to hop aboard a ship and leave London far behind. We both adored the idea of life at sea, and we had all the requisite skills for stowing away on board. When you think about it, any ordinary cat is good at making himself invisible, scavenging, defending his territory – and we were not remotely a pair of ordinary cats! I recall that we always encountered trouble at first from the pre-existing cat population, but the Captain was more than a match for them. On the first ship, which was bound for Cape Town, we were no sooner out of the Thames Estuary than we were cornered in the engine room by four big heavy cats. In my mind’s eye, these cats had tattoos and heavy accents, but I’ve always been a big reader, so my imagination might be embellishing things a little. Anyway, I remember how I took several deep breaths, readying myself for a fight with these tough mariner felines. But the moment I started to yowl and spit, the Captain struck me in the chest to silence me, and hissed, “I’ll take care of this.”
“What happened next was simply amazing to watch, and requires no embellishment whatsoever. Soundlessly, he walked towards the four big cats, and sat down in the middle of their circle. They were confused (as was I!), but at the same time couldn’t believe their luck. The Captain looked at the biggest of the four – the cat looked back. And then something phenomenal happened. The other cat started to edge backwards, and he also shook – as if he had lost control of every muscle – and I’m not lying, for a moment or so, he sort-of lifted off the ground. The Captain looked into the eyes of the next cat, which immediately edged back as well. I had my paws over my eyes – he was going to slash all their throats, wasn’t he? He would kill them the way he had killed all those others! But he wasn’t interested in killing them, it seemed. He just overwhelmed them, vanquished them, terrorised them, and they retreated, and we never saw them again – because (as I later realised) they threw themselves overboard. In my innocence, I thought they hid from us for the remainder of the voyage. I would sometimes remark to the Captain that we hadn’t seen them since the encounter in the engine room, and he would say, “You’re right!” – as if he couldn’t explain it either.
“It was the grandest of grand tours. We saw art. We saw architecture. We read books, and learned languages. All this time, the Captain was teaching me to talk, to read, to reason, to memorise. Long sea voyages are excellent for all such projects of self-improvement, as long as there’s a fairly stupid person (there usually is) in charge of the human stores. Oh, the reading! How we loved to read. The Captain with his Conrad, me with my Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. From Cape Town, we made for India. After India, we saw Egypt, Italy, Greece. The Pyramids by moonlight. The Forum by moonlight. The Parthenon by moonlight. My best memory of all is of lying on a rocking wooden deck on a starlit night, in the Aegean, with the Captain reciting Tennyson’s Ulysses faultlessly beside me.
Roger is evidently so moved by the recollection that for a moment he almost turns conversational.
“It was Greece that captured my heart. Have you been?”
Wiggy starts to draw breath, but Roger changes his mind.
“It doesn’t matter. It will have changed so much since the 1930s in any case. Have you read the Durrells?”
“Um –”
“We knew them in Corfu – well, they didn’t know us, because we kept ourselves to ourselves, but we lived very happily for a while at all three of their villas. We borrowed Larry’s books; we read some of his manuscripts. We even helped ourselves to some of Gerald’s smaller zoological specimens. In the end, the Captain and I spent three whole years in the Greek islands, and it was the very best of times. I was coming of age, I suppose. I was finally beginning to understand – and enjoy – my freedom from normal mortal constraints. I’d been reading some fabulous travel writing. Mixing with top-notch people. And meanwhile everything inspired me. I loved the light in Greece. I loved the air. I loved the fish! And Greek cats were no match for us, those skinny things, so we never had a bit of trouble (the cats in the Forum are another story!). I was so very happy on the isle of Symi in the Dodecanese – which were under Italian rule at the time, of course, as you’ll remember from your hellenic history at school – that I hoped we would settle there for ever. I pictured us living in a cave and becoming a bit famous, maybe even the focus of a cult – something like St John the Evangelist on Patmos. But it was foolish to dream of such things. Because it was on Symi that the Captain started to reveal an unfortunate trait – a kind of psychotic possessiveness – which in the end made me anxious to move on, and meant we were never safe for long in any one place.
“At Symi, you see, something rather horrible occurred. The first of a series of horrible things. And I blame myself: I had ignored the signs. I had assumed the Captain was as happy as I was. A kindly waiter at a harbour-side taverna would sometimes tickle me under the chin and fling me a piece of octopus. I thought it was nice of him, and I played up to it – scoffing the tit-bit and miaowing for more. His name was Galandis, and I stupidly mentioned him to the Captain. I even made the excited suggestion that we might want to settle down at Galandis’s taverna, and be looked after for a while.
“The Captain pretended to be interested in my suggestion. He made me point out Galandis when we were sitting on the harbour wall one evening. The next day, when Galandis was feeding me, I noticed the Captain was watching. It all seems so clear to me now, but at the time I thought he was weighing up the idea of making our home here, so I was (what a fool!) quite pleased that he saw me purring and nudging at Galandis’s ankles. Two days later, I arrived at the taverna, and there was no Galandis. His wife was sobbing, people were shouting (they’re always shouting in Greece, but this was different), and the church bells were tolling. The focus of attention was a black hand-cart dripping sea-water onto the ground. I hopped up on the harbour wall to see what was in it; what was causing the dripping water; what was causing all this unseemly human grief. It was Galandis’s body, of course. My sweet Galandis! He had drowned himself.
“The Captain joined me on the wall. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘That was your nice human friend, wasn’t it? They’re saying he jumped into the sea from his little fishing boat last night, and he had rocks in his pockets.’
“ ‘But why?’ I said.
“ ‘Who knows?’ shrugged the Captain. ‘Sometimes humans just lose the will to live.’
“Three more blameless Greek people, on three different islands, had to set the church bells tolling before it dawned on me that it wasn’t a coincidence. The fat man from the Post Office on Samos; the hairy-faced woman on Hydra who sold honey; the fisherman’s idiot son on Cephalonia with the public-nuisance shoe fetish – how peculiar, that every time I got to know a human being, he or she immediately lost the will to live! I thought for a while that it might be me – that I somehow infected these people with despair. But it must have been the Captain. He was possessive; he was a classic psychopath (obviously); and he had nothing but contempt for the average human. However, I never had evidence that he tampered with any of them – not Galandis, not the cuddly postman, not the honey-lady or the fisher-boy. The only time I saw him interfere directly with a human was in 1933, when we were strolling through the temple at Luxor on a fine afternoon and an American woman decided to take a photograph of us. ‘What enormous cats!’ she exclaimed and snapped the shutter. Well, the Captain wasn’t standing for that. And it was as if we had rehearsed it. He ran to her. She bent to stroke him. He slashed her leg. She screamed and dropped her camera, which he knocked away, in my direction. Then he streaked off and I quickly lay across the camera, as if asleep, while the woman was helped away, hobbling and bleeding, by the native guide.”
Roger laughs. Wiggy, rather uncertainly, joins in. He obviously feels he should say something.
“That was quick thinking on your part,” he says.
“Teamwork,” says Roger, with a sigh.
There is a sense that this is the end of the instalment. Wiggy scrapes his chair back (does he stand up?). But then Roger resumes.
“You’re right. Perhaps we should stop now. But you must be wondering why I wanted to visit Bloomsbury, and I suppose I ought to explain.”
“All right.” The chair is moved back.
“It’s about humans again. It began with – a boy.” Roger sounds different, suddenly. Less carefree; less in control. This is clearly not a happy story like the one about wantonly injuring a poor American tourist in Egypt. What if she got septicaemia? Roger doesn’t care, and Wiggy doesn’t think to ask. All Roger is concerned about is the “boy.”
“He was an English boy in glasses and long shorts,” he says. “And I spotted him at the Acropolis one day when I was on my own there. He was sitting on a piece of fallen masonry, in the midday sun, making an elaborate drawing of the Parthenon, working so hard on it that I was sure he was oblivious to everything else, certainly to me.”
“Why were you on your own? Where was the Captain?”
“On a bus to Piraeus. He’d gone to check the ferry times. We were leaving Athens the next day for Brindisi. The last words he said to me were –”
He stops. This is clearly emotional for him. “Sorry,” he says.
“Roger, if this is difficult for you –”
“I’m all right. But ten years with the Captain – well, I realise, now, they had made me … hubristic.”
Wiggy starts to say, “What?” but Roger carries on.
“And where better to suffer for your hubris than in one of the greatest sites of Ancient Greece? This boy – I was really drawn to him, you see. And I’d got used to the insane idea that the only possible bad outcome from interacting with a human would be a bad outcome for him. With his glasses and sketchbook and grey socks, he reminded me of those nice intellectual Durrells on Corfu. I felt sorry for him because he was sitting in full sun without a hat! As it happened, the Captain and I had recently spotted an old panama hat left in the dust near to the site of the Chalkotheke, and in my concern for him I didn’t hesitate: I went and got it and dragged it over. It was possibly the nicest thing I’ve ever done for someone else. Well, how true it is that no good deed goes unpunished.
“The boy smiled, thanked me, and took the hat. Then he poured some cool water from a flask into a little bowl and gave it to me. I lapped it up, and he stroked my head. ‘You’re not a Greek cat, are you?’ he said. I purred, a bit uncertainly. And then he uttered the fateful words. ‘Ah-ha,’ he said. ‘I thought so.’ What did he mean? Why the ‘Ah-ha’? Did he think I’d replied to him? Up to this time, I’m sure I had never spoken human language to a human. I’m positive I didn’t speak to him! Yet somehow I did betray myself to that boy. It must have been clear that I understood what he said! Something I did gave me away!”
Roger’s voice, when it rises, is a yowl of anguish. Wiggy takes a deep breath. But he knows better than to interrupt Roger’s flow of thought.
“And then – oh it was vile,” Roger says, as steadily as he can. “He picked me up by the scruff of my neck and said, ‘I’ve read about cats like you.’ Then he produced some string from his pocket, and before I could do anything, he’d put a running slip-knot around my neck and was pulling me away.”
“No!” says Wiggy.
“Yes!” says Roger. “I yowled vehemently, and tried to fight him, but he held me out at arm’s length; and that’s how I was marched away from the Acropolis, from the Captain, from all my happiness. No one lifted a finger to help me, despite my obvious distress. The Greek cats cheered. When we reached the bottom, the boy shoved me into a wicker basket; that same afternoon I was taken with a heap of other luggage to the port and put on a ship for England. In my panic, I kept repeating in my head those lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:
“Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed
As of a person separate to God,
Designed for great exploits, if I must die
Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out,
Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze;
To grind in brazen fetters under task
With this heaven-gifted strength?
“Gosh,” says Wiggy, impressed.
“Well, I admit, not everything in that passage fitted my exact predicament.”
“But the gist – ?”
“Exactly!” Roger is pleased, for once, with Wiggy’s grasp of essentials. “Yes, what I’ve found so often in life is that recollecting poetry at key moments is all about the gist. Why, I asked myself. Basically, why was I made so special if I was going to end up in a cat basket?”
Wiggy makes a sympathetic noise.
“So there I was. Not eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, but defeated by the tiny buckle that kept the door of a simple wicker basket closed! I had no way of telling the Captain what had happened. I just had to hope he would return to the Acropolis and that somehow he would work out where I’d gone.
“Yes.”
“And poor you, of course.”
“Thank you, Wiggy. I’m afraid I do think ‘Poor me,’ even though, on the voyage, I suppose I was treated well enough. The boy’s parents were academics who had the best literary conversations I’d ever heard, although they were far too soft on Robert Browning for my taste. The boy was not neglectful of me – he just made me very anxious. I could hardly forget that he had read about cats like me. But here’s the point. When we arrived back in England, we came straight to London, and I escaped – and came straight to Bloomsbury.”
“How did you manage it? The escape?”
“Oldest trick in the book, I’m afraid. Laundry basket.”
“And why Bloomsbury?”
“I suppose I only had one idea. Where would the Captain think to look for me? I’d worked it out on the voyage – he’d last seen me at the Parthenon, so the obvious place was the London home of the Parthenon marbles!”
“Oh, that’s clever.”
“Thank you.”
“Are they anything like the Elgin Marbles?”
“The Parthenon Marbles and the Elgin Marbles are the same thing, Wiggy.”
Wiggy says nothing.
“So that was my thinking, for right or wrong, and the British Museum was my actual home both during the war and for a long time after. Even when all the objects were evacuated, I stayed put. I still visit as often as I can. I am proud to say that I know the lay-out of the Enlightenment Gallery better than I know the back of my own paw.
“The boy became an academic himself, in time. I followed his progress. He specialised in pre-Christian attitudes to animals – in particular, their relationship to the afterlife – as companions, and so on. He co-wrote a masterly work on the subject with a quite famous historian, and he also once wrote an affectionate piece in the Times Higher Education Supplement about the cat he had found at the Acropolis which later (or so he’d been told) lived wild in the British Museum, even throughout the Blitz. This cat had inspired him, he said. Well, as if I gave a damn about that! All I knew was that he grew up, he got older; in the fullness of time, he grew old. I, by contrast, have remained exactly the same, aside from becoming (if I may say so) much, much cleverer than he could ever be. But what he did, when he abducted me from Greece, was ultimately to draw to him the wrath of the Captain. He lives still, but it’s a miracle, and I have reason to believe that he doesn’t have long.”
Sergeant Duggan brought the phone back with pretty extraordinary news. It had been urinated on, by a cat, while it was charging! Whoa. The effect was basically to electrocute the insides of the phone. Duggan said he’d never heard of anything like it. I said, truthfully, I bloody well hadn’t either.
“Imagine!” he said. “Why would a cat want to wee on a phone?”
I was just asking myself the same question when Roger happened to saunter into the kitchen, as if by coincidence, and the policeman (knowing not who he was dealing with) reached down and picked him up. It was, I have to say, a brilliant moment.
“Who’s been a naughty cat, then? Who’s been a naughty ickle cat?”
Roger looked at me over the policeman’s shoulder. I waggled my eyebrows at him. He glowered. It was hilarious.
“Can’t have animals at home. Daughter’s allergic,” Duggan said, bending to put Roger down. I fleetingly wondered whether any of the great poets ever wrote anything that covered the ignominy of that particular situation. I’d be very surprised if they had.
“Er, did they retrieve anything from the Sim thing?” I asked, trying to show a polite interest. I think the policeman realised quite a while back that I had no idea what a ‘Sim thing’ was.
“Ah, now,” he said. And he gave Roger a last pat on the head as he straightened up. “Now, because it’s an iPhone, there’s nothing stored on the Sim card apart from account data.”
Roger curled up on a nearby chair, as if unconcerned.
“All the interesting and useful stuff – things like messages, photos, voice memos, map references – they would have been stored on the phone itself, which, as we know, was destroyed, burned out –”
“By the peeing?”
“Yes, the inside of the phone was sort-of electrocuted when it was unfortunate enough to come into contact with electricity and cat urine at the same time.”
I looked at Roger. He was doing a bit of grooming, but with his ears pricked up for every word. What a cool customer. However, he wasn’t prepared for what the bloke revealed next.
“But fortunately, all is not lost!” he announced. And God, it was funny to see Roger’s reaction. He fell off the chair.
“What? Oh fuck!” he said, aloud.
I suppose it slipped out. I gasped. Duggan looked at me, and said, “What did you say?”
So I had to impersonate Roger, with his Vincent Price voice and everything. I laughed. “Sorry, officer. I just said, ‘What? Oh fuck!’ It’s a funny family catch-phrase, that’s all.”
I could see he was confused, but he let it pass.
“You were saying all is not lost,” I prompted.
He frowned at me. “Yes, well. Most people ‘sync’ their phones with their computers. In many cases nowadays, it happens automatically when the phone is in range of the computer in the house. And if your sister did that, we can ‘sync’ this replacement phone.” He held one up. “And then we can find out at least what was on her other phone the last time she plugged it in. Do you see?”
“Blimey,” I said. “So whoever peed on the phone – they didn’t think of that?” I couldn’t help rubbing it in a bit. I was enjoying seeing how this news was affecting Roger. His tail was thrashing about like nobody’s business.
The policeman was surprised. “I don’t suppose he did it on purpose, did you, ickle puss, ickle puss, ickle puss?” He reached for Roger again, but Roger backed off.
“Can we do it now?” I asked. “The syncing thing?”
“Of course,” he said. “Shall I – ?”
I said absolutely, and he was just going upstairs when his own phone beeped with a text message. He stopped to read it. And I’ll remember the moment for ever, I think. Up to that point, I was still enjoying Roger’s discomfort. It was great being in on it, if you know what I mean. He had hopped up on the table, and I was stroking his head like a normal cat-owner, saying to Roger in a normal talking-to-animals kind of way, “The nice policeman’s going to ‘sync’ Jo’s phone upstairs, Roger. This might clear up the mystery of where she’s gone.” And he was pretending he didn’t understand a word anyone was saying.
“Any news?” I said, when the policeman had finished reading his text.
“Not relevant to this, no. Sorry,” he said. “Silly, really. We thought we’d just check whether this cat-peeing-on-a-charging-phone thing had ever been recorded before as part of, you know, ‘suspicious circumstances.’ ”
I felt Roger’s body go tense under my hands.
“And?”
“It turns out, it has. Oh well. There’s nothing original in this world, I suppose.”
Roger pulled away, jumped off the table and strolled to the cat-flap – but waited to hear the end of the conversation before going outside.
“So you mean it has happened before?”
“About six months ago, apparently,” the policeman said. “In Lincolnshire. At the home of some sort of artist who fell downstairs.”
An hour later, we had flicked through nearly all the contents of Jo’s phone – and let’s just say we had different ideas about what we’d found. He thought we’d found nothing! “Oh well, it was worth a try,” were his exact words. What he’d been looking for, I suppose, was a name, a number, a secret lover, a villainous fancy man. So a series of pictures of the garden, taken from the upstairs window, with a large, unknown black cat in them – sometimes with that loyal dog Jeremy face to face with him – were of no interest whatsoever.
And then we looked properly at the last picture taken with the phone – a picture just of Jeremy on his own, the little J-Dog, Jo’s beloved little border terrier. At first glance, it had looked like a simple snap of Jeremy lying on his side on the gravel by the gate. But oh no, this was not a doggie having a lie-down in the sun on some nice winter’s day. This was taken on the day Jo disappeared; the day she called me in the theatre; the day something really bad happened at this house. Poor little J-Dog was lying right beside the big five-bar gate that leads to the lane, and his face – well, his whole head, really – was crushed. The poor little thing was obviously dead.
The policeman and I went straight out to the gate and when we got there, I felt such a fool for having noticed nothing earlier. I’ve been here three weeks! And there were still traces of blood and dog-hair in the hinge of the gate – about a foot off the ground, exactly Jeremy’s height. Oh God, poor Jo. How she loved that J-Dog. I noticed Roger watching us from the garden wall as we examined the scene. It was easy enough to see what had happened. In the gravel – Oh God. In the gravel, we even found some little doggie teeth.
“So the dog was sniffing here,” said the policeman. “And then someone lifted the latch. Is it a heavy gate?”
I could hardly speak. I just nodded. The thing is, it’s a very heavy gate, yes. And the way it swings open – Jo always said it was lethal. That’s why we tended to leave it open. It had been open ever since I arrived.
With some effort, I walked the gate shut, to demonstrate. Dumbly, I signalled to him to stand back. One flick of the latch, and it swung open so fast and so violently that we both gasped.
“Jesus!” he said, catching it. “She should have fixed this.”
“She was always meaning to,” I said.
So the poor dog must have been standing there, with his little nose right in the hinge of the gate, when someone lifted the latch. But why had he been standing there?
“Look at this,” said the policeman, bending down. “He was deliberately lured.” And there it was. A ham bone, now stripped of all flesh, was wedged between the gate post and the wall.
At this point, I’m sorry, I was sick.
“She wouldn’t have done this herself?” he said.
“Oh God, no. God, no.” I fumbled for a tissue, and couldn’t find one. I felt like crying: I kept thinking of the force of that gate swinging open, and the poor dog’s head just cracking like a nut. It was as if I’d personally heard the noise; been there myself when it happened. The J-Dog had been dead before I got here! And all this time I’d been imagining he was safe, even enjoying himself, in a jolly space ship, hovering over the Solent. Up on the wall, Roger was still watching, not moving.
The policeman made to leave. “I’ll find out if she took the dog’s body to a vet’s anywhere. This could explain why she left in such a hurry,” he said. “Although it doesn’t explain why she didn’t take the car.”
He turned to me and gave me a searching look. “It’s a shame you didn’t notice it before,” he said. “And it’s even more of a shame that you didn’t do anything useful with that phone.” It was the first hint of unfriendliness in his tone.
“I’m sorry.”
“Mr Caton-Pines, I have to say this. You haven’t done anything to find out what happened to your sister, have you?”
I thought of all the hours I’d spent since I got here, listening to Roger, thinking about Roger, writing about Roger, when I could have been focusing properly on finding Jo. In a way, what he said was true.
“I’m beginning to think you’re not telling my everything.”
I didn’t have to answer because I was throwing up again. But not telling him everything – oh God, he was definitely right about that.
I promised I would allow the Wiggy files to tell their own story without any unwelcome “editorialising,” but something has happened that has made me change my mind. Yesterday, having reached a natural break in this batch of transcriptions, I left the cottage for the first time and drove to Norwich. I imagined I would go shopping for food, possibly catch an improving matinee at the art cinema, and (if time allowed) spend a few moments at an internet café, checking on Wiggy’s appearance schedule at the theatre in Coventry. In fact, I spent four hours at the internet café, and was so upset I had to come back at once. I now shan’t bother with the file entitled “Roger Dream.” It doesn’t add much, except that in his dream Wiggy keeps being led to look at that peg in the hall – the peg that usually has the keys to next door but on which nothing was hanging when he arrived at the house. His subconscious mind has worked things out, even if he hasn’t. If the keys to next door are missing from the usual peg, his exasperated inner self is asking, what do you think that means?
But that’s enough of WIGGY’s slow mental processes. The bare facts of what I discovered are these:
1: Will Caton-Pines (Wiggy to his friends) did appear in See How They Run! The Coventry Bugle review is exactly as he gives it. The play ran at the Belgrade just two months ago.
2: He is now at the centre of a gruesome investigation into the death of his sister. The noted watercolourist Joanna Caton-Pines, who had been missing for three weeks from her cottage near Littlehampton, was found in the first week of December in the cellar of an adjoining house, with the corpse of a dog whose head had apparently been crushed. Both she and the dog had been partly devoured by rats. She was alive when she entered the cellar but the dog was not. She died, says the preliminary report, of “dehydration, asphyxiation and (possibly) rat-induced dementia.”
Her brother is the chief suspect, mainly because much of his behaviour is inexplicable. For example, he evidently showed signs of “inappropriate amusement” when the mobile phone belonging to his sister was found to have been disabled. He also withheld from the police the fact that he had heard scratching from beyond the party wall for several days after his sister “went missing.” Those scratchings were, of course, the sound of his sister clawing at the bottom of a heavy cellar trapdoor. After he eventually “found” his sister’s body, it is clear that he did not contact the police for at least three hours. In the interim, he evidently went on a bloody rampage, in which he bludgeoned a cat to death, beheaded it, and incinerated its body in the garden. He is now in custody.
3: The academic whose obituary Roger had removed from the Daily Telegraph was a Professor Peplow. He was eighty-two, and he appeared to have killed himself, using hemlock. In the 1960s he had co-authored a major work on the place of animals in ancient death cults with a Dr G. L. Winterton. Neighbours reported his agitation about repeatedly spotting a large black cat in the area. He left a note saying (these exact words) ‘I have lost the will to live.’
End of interpolation