Your job, as a kitten, is to learn about the world as fast as you can. For me, it started with a small, warm cupboard at the top of the stairs. You would not have thought there was much to be learned in such a place, but I was to discover otherwise. In the depths of that cupboard was a whole living world.
High up against the ceiling, tiny creatures spun shining threads across dusty corners. Against the peeling paint of the old woodwork their babies lay in clusters, asleep. If you were a cat, even as tiny a cat as I was then, a cat who lay very still amongst the woman’s clean bed-things, you could hear them breathe.
Down in the bottom of that cupboard was a colony of life. Hordes of tiny, armoured grey beasts raised families there; and great, spiky many-legged creatures hunted them amid the dust and fluff, and the softening wood of the old house.
I could hear feet scurrying. I could hear the shriek of the captured and the dying. And all the time, tiny flies, bored with their journeys across the lazy green pond I had seen outside, would come in through the slatted doors, wings iridescent in the late afternoon light. The flies made hardly any sound at all. To me, then, they were magical beings, barely visible to the naked eye, tiny, sparkling shards of life.
But I could hear their cries as they got caught in the shining webs; and when the many-legs despatched them with glee, the whispery paper-sound of jaws breaking through their crispy skins.
I watched them, too.
My whiskers twitched. My paws itched. Something about the pattern of hunter and hunted excited me; but I didn’t know why.
My ears flexed to follow the progress of the flies, noted their flight-paths and their sudden ends; marked the frantic speed of escapees, the hunting-paths of the spiky ones, the intricately hidden nests. I was fascinated by it all. So much life: so much death. It seemed like a marvellous dance; a game, even. To me, then, everything was a game.
I played and fought with my sister and thought nothing of the scratches and bites we inflicted on one another. I wandered into the back garden, and from there into other gardens, where I sat and watched with interest how insects ate the plants, and birds ate the insects, and how, from time to time, a cat might catch and eat a bird. And I yearned for the day when I would be big and nimble enough to become a hunter too, and take my place in the game.
I cannot be proud of the fact that it would take me so very many lessons to learn the truth of the matter. That nothing, really, is a game.
My lessons were soon to start in earnest: and not just how to clean my paws, or behind my ears; or that biting my sister would get me cuffed about the head by Dellifer. I thought that I had tumbled through the dark spaces of my falling dream, only to land foursquare on to soft carpets, and that tuna fish, garden sunlight and gentle hands would be my lot.
But I had reckoned without the old cat.
Of all the things in my young life, he fascinated me most; his random appearances, his uncertain temper: ‘mercurial’, Dellifer called him. ‘Your grandfather has a changeable nature, Orlando,’ she would warn me. ‘You watch yourself around him.’ Which only beguiled me more.
‘How did you get your name, Granfer?’ I asked him one day as we sat in the garden. He had taken to chivvying me outside, no matter the weather, to teach me the names of the things that I saw there, the birds and insects, the plants and the trees, and I went willingly, flattered by his attentions, and the fact that he took no such interest in my sister.
The old cat blinked lazily and the sun struck off his yellow eyes, so that a flash of gold abruptly lit their opaque depths. I had a sudden vivid picture in my head of the tiny pond two gardens away, where ornamental fish swam through water hazy with sediment: a glimpse of gold disappearing tantalisingly into the dark and tangled weeds below.
If I was entirely truthful, I would admit to being a little afraid of my grandfather, afraid of the dark and tangled depths I sensed lurking all too close to the surface. Afraid too, of his sharp teeth and fast paws.
‘When you get to my advanced age, laddie,’ he said, ‘you’ll have had so many names you’ll never be able to recall them all. Nor wish to, neither.’
I had no idea, then, what it was he meant by this. How could anyone have too many names? And what did a name matter anyway? It was just what everyone called you by, and not necessarily how you thought of yourself.
The old tortoiseshell rolled over so that the sun could warm the other side of his face, the side with the permanent snarl where the muscles had shortened and thickened. Two teeth, still sharp and white despite his years, snaggled out over the tight pinky-black lip. I was curious about the reason for my grandfather’s alarming expression, but had been warned most explicitly by Dellifer not to raise such a personal subject. Left to ourselves Vita and I had devised many ingenious explanations of our own, and in truth, I did not want to know exactly how he had come by his spectacular injuries, for the truth would only spoil the glamour we saw in him.
‘It’s a wound he sustained fighting for the honour of a queen,’ Vita had decided. ‘He took on ten brutish tomcats intent on rape and fought them all off, one by one. They wounded him so terribly that the queen could not look upon him, and banished him from her sight for ever after, so the greatest wound he cannot show; for it is his broken heart.’
At this, I had merely snorted with derision. ‘A romantic champion? Old Hawkweed? He hasn’t got a heart.’
I preferred my own theory: that somewhere out in the wilds, patrolling in the bleak of night, my grandfather had encountered a monster, and had to fight for his life.
The wound was the clincher for me: it was a badge of honour; a visible manifestation of the old cat’s soul: sort of twisted and hard, and at the same time deeply mysterious. I wanted to have a wound just like it. But somehow his name didn’t seem to fit well with his exotic appearance.
‘I mean,’ I continued with foolish persistence: ‘Hawkweed. It’s well, proud, and at the same time...’ I hesitated, as well I might, ‘...common.’
My grandfather fixed me with an unfathomable, unblinking stare so that I felt as uncomfortable as a fly in resin.
Then he heaved himself to his feet.
I got ready to run.
Hawkweed laughed, a brief and creaky sound, but a laugh, nonetheless. I had spent just enough time with my grandfather to recognise it as such. It didn’t always augur well.
‘Come with me, laddie,’ he said.
*
He trotted briskly out of the meadow, up the dusty path that skirted the cottages, and I followed, at once curious and a little afraid. Then we were out in the open on the village’s main road, the sun beating down on us with an almost physical force.
Out on the road! Dellifer had expressly forbidden such a thing, fencing it about with dire warnings of great, stinking beasts that roared along, looking for cats to maim and kill. Hawkweed’s ears twitched and flexed as if checking for such dangers, then he ducked into a wide, open space between houses. Here, though, upon the pebbly ground, a dozen great gleaming monsters sat silent in the sun, some of them ticking quietly to themselves, giving off an ominous, stinking heat, as if they were only resting and might spring out at us at any moment. Hawkweed skirted them swiftly and I followed in terror, running beneath tables of old silvered wood, emerging breathless beside a trellis wreathed with a dusty vine, and stone planters colonised by straggling forget-me-nots and ragged robin. In the wide brick building beyond, I could hear the dull hum of human voices and the clink of glass upon glass. We passed quickly by, slipping with relief into the shady peace of the footpath. Here, wild briar and elder looped overhead, shutting out the bright sky and muffling the birdsong of chaffinch and thrush. Halfway down this cool tunnel, Hawkweed stopped and leapt up the bank, pushing his nose through the rampant ivy that swarmed up to meet the hedgerow plants, and disappeared.
For a moment I stood there, confused.
Was this another game? Would he perhaps reappear silently behind me to teach me a cat’s proper stealth? I waited; but he did not show. Determinedly, I scrabbled up the bank, digging my toes into the shifting surface and dragging myself up painstakingly by root and stalk; but when I reached the top and pushed my face through the gap where I thought my grandfather had exited, all I could see was a wide, flat pasture, with some black-and-white cows grazing in the distance.
I jumped down into the grass on the other side of the bank and stared around.
No sign of Hawkweed at all.
I was mystified. I stared back at the hedge. Perhaps I had come out at the wrong place after all. The hedgerow was a chaos of plants: hawthorn and brambles, ivy and nettles, great, towering, sticklike plants bearing huge bracts of white flowers, docks and ferns and dog rose, and none of it appeared to offer any clue as to my grandfather’s whereabouts.
I have to admit then that I experienced a moment of fear. What if my grandfather had deliberately abandoned me? What if I could never find my way home?
Then a bright red butterfly skimmed past my nose and all my anxiety was at once forgotten in the sheer joy of being a brand-new little animal who could leap and run and chase a butterfly across open pasture in bright sunlight, my muscles bunching and springing with the magical fuels of youth. It danced and teased, and I danced after it, not even really wanting to catch it, for then the game would be over. (And, besides, it might taste strange – all those legs and feelers waving around in your mouth.) I chased it some hundred yards across the cropped grass before it finally gave up the dance and fluttered up and away into the blue.
I watched it flicker over the fields, over the heads of the cows and into the trees on the far side, and wished I could follow it, just to see where it was going. It might be nice to fly, skimming through the air, gazing unconcernedly down upon the world, far, far below...
‘Didn’t catch it, then.’
A cold shadow fell across me.
I whirled around out of my reverie.
The old tortoiseshell had materialised beside me without the whisper of a single blade of trodden grass betraying his presence.
‘You have a great deal to learn, Orlando. You need to keep your wits about you. Blundering about like an idiot after some silly scrap of colour on wings.’
I stared at Hawkweed, feeling rebellious. Why shouldn’t I chase a butterfly? I was only a kitten. A cruel trick had been played on me, and by my own grandfather. I opened my mouth, ready to argue. But the old cat was smiling, the sort of hidden, fleeting smile that I was learning to distrust.
I narrowed my eyes. ‘How did you do that – that disappearing thing?’
Hawkweed’s smile widened for a second, then he tapped my nose with a conniving paw. ‘Can’t let you into all my trade secrets at once, can I, laddie? Or you’ll think you know more than the old master, and then where will the rightness in the world be?’ He cuffed me lightly around the head.
‘Still want to know how I came by this name?’
He trotted off across the field and I stared after him, feeling the fur bristle on the top of my head. When it became clear that he was not going to stop and wait for me, I ran after him.
Hawkweed loped through the pasture until he came to the uncut margins of the field. Patches of wildflowers grew there where the earth was churned and heaped. He bent his nose into a patch of yellow ones and inhaled. He lay down and rolled amongst them. Then he sneezed.
I stayed well back, watching this odd display with some bewilderment.
Hawkweed stared back at me, his expression inscrutable. ‘Come here.’
I approached cautiously. The plants he had rolled upon, though a little flattened, looked remarkably ordinary: a scatter of leaves and tatty little yellow flowerheads, scruffier than dandelions. I was not much impressed.
‘So what do you see?’
‘They’re just a load of old weeds.’
My grandfather cocked his head. ‘Look closer, laddie.’
I did as I was told.
The plants stood in little clumps, the flowerheads bobbing on their narrow stalks, stalks that rose out of a tightly packed rosette of hairy, undivided leaves. Both stalks and leaves were covered all over with little grey hairs.
‘They’re... furry.’
‘Ah,’ said my grandfather.
‘There are rather a lot of them,’ I added hopefully.
‘Would you say, perhaps,’ the old cat flicked a glance at me, ‘that they look a bit – common?’
I quailed.
‘Look closer, laddie... see here, where all the little runners creep out across the ground. Like little spiders they are, spreading their webs all over the field. Put down roots, they do, all along ’em, grow a whole new plant where they stop. Efficient, that is. A clever little beggar, this plant.’
The old cat bit off a flowerhead and pushed it towards me and as he did so, I noticed for the first time the strange tinge to the white fur on my grandfather’s paws: a sort of yellow staining, like the markings on the fingers of the old man who tended the garden a couple of doors down. ‘Chew that,’ he ordered.
I patted the broken flower with a paw-tip.
‘Don’t play with the damned thing – eat it!’
I bent my head to the weed and gingerly took it in my mouth. It smelled bad enough; but it tasted appalling. My eyes watered. I shook my head to get rid of the taste, but it was acrid on my tongue. I swallowed, and at once the taste diminished. Was my grandfather poisoning me? Was this the old cat’s revenge for my impudence?
Hawkweed watched me closely.
‘There’s a lot more to this little plant than might appear at first sight. Just as there is to everything in the world, Orlando. Perhaps you’ll remember that whenever you see this fine example of vegetable life.
‘This is Hieracium pilosella as a philosopher once termed it; but Auricula muris, Mouse-ear Hawkweed we call it today, and it is a noble and a useful plant. Rub it on a wound and the bleeding will stop, quicker than you can say “cat-spit”. And that’s not all.
“‘To him that hath a flux
of Shepherd’s Purse he gives.
And Coltsfoot unto him
whom some sharp rupture grieves.
To him that delirium seeks.
Henbane like drunkenness may seem;
But ’tis Hawkweed thou must take
if thou wouldst chase a dream.’”
I regarded my grandfather, and then the scruffy little plant, with confusion. Then I said: ‘You still haven’t told me why you share its name.’
Hawkweed smiled into his ruff and shook his head sadly. ‘You’ll learn soon enough.’ He winked at me and the scar tissue wrenched his face into a terrible grimace.
‘What colour is piss, laddie?’
I laughed. ‘It’s yellow.’
‘And what colour is hawkweed?’
I wrinkled my nose in confusion. ‘Yellow...’
‘Well, laddie—’ Hawkweed pushed his face close to mine. Then he opened his mouth wide and roared so that my ears rang for minutes afterwards: ‘We both have the ability to make you piss yourself!’