I found it hard to sleep that night. I lay irritably tossing and turning against my sister’s flank. Vita, in turn, lay against Dellifer, every so often showing her awareness of my movements by jabbing a sharp elbow at me. Old Delly was fast asleep – I could tell by the rasp of her snoring. There was never another cat like her for snoring. Quite how such an awful noise could come out of such a frail cat, I couldn’t understand. I imagined Dellifer’s insides to be as empty and hollow as an old tin bucket, and her snores a vast bluebottle trapped inside it.
I listened to that inescapable noise for what felt like hours, but was likely only minutes, and tried to fall into rhythm with it, but whatever I did it rumbled on and on, oblivious to anyone else in the universe who might be trying to sleep.
Instead, after a while, I found myself listening to the sound of the wind in the trees outside the window. The world was full of air, it seemed; air that billowed softly in and out of every living creature: even the trees seemed to be breathing. I relaxed into this idea and in a short time became aware of how the currents of air stirred my whiskers and eyebrows, felt them move against the hairs of my ears and the exposed skin of my nose. If I tried hard enough, I thought, I might be able to feel the way the tides of the air moved outside, too.
So much life everywhere, breathing in and out, sharing the world! How strange it seemed then that the air that had sighed through the long grass in the meadow and the rushes round the pond, through the clouds and the cows and the bright yellow patches of hawkweed, should now be flowing through Vita and Dellifer’s lungs, and through my own.
Everything was connected to everything else.
Thinking this, I began to feel rather odd, as if I was somehow outside myself, a little way above the sofa, gazing down on three sleeping cats: a long, thin white one, whose skin shone pink in the moonlight where the fur grew sparsely above her eyes; a small, barred tabby with white socks; and one of flaming orange and cream, who even now was yawning so widely I could see every sharp, white tooth.
My mouth snapped shut and suddenly I was staring out of my own eyes again. I shook myself and sat up in the darkness, my head spinning, and waited for the world to right itself.
Alerted by the movement. Vita stirred briefly and opened one pale eye, which glowed in the dark as mysteriously green and inaccessible as the display on the buzzing white box downstairs in the kitchen. She blinked once, then stared at me as if she had never seen me before in her life.
Disconcerted, I dropped my head and started to groom feverishly; and when I looked up again. Vita was fast asleep once more. I gave my paw a last considering lick, and found that the fur there now tasted somewhat bitter.
I sniffed at it.
The smell was horribly recognisable. That vile hawkweed! I blamed my grandfather. What a trick to play.
Complex little cross-currents of anger and recrimination chased each other through my head. One day things will be different, I promised myself, and settled back down against Vita. One day I’ll show him. I worked on this idea for a bit longer until, wrapped around in a haze of fur and muscles not yet my own, I fell asleep. And as I slept I dreamed—
I dreamed, oddly enough, that I was awake. I was still in the back sitting room, amid a tumble of cushions, and beside me my sister slept on. Then I became aware that I could see very clearly indeed, although there was hardly any moon; indeed, everything I focused on appeared to be limned with a faint golden light, as if a sun had secretly risen behind the curtain of dark sky.
I rolled over on to my stomach, and then sat up. Beside me, Vita curled closer to Dellifer, as if to make up for the sudden loss of heat.
I leapt lightly down from the sofa, padded across the room and jumped up on to the windowsill to stare out between the curtains. The garden in darkness looked very different to how it looked during the day, somehow bigger, as if the moon-shadows that layered each object added further substance, another dimension that might be explored. I had not been outside in the night before. Dellifer’s advice was always to stay inside, ‘out of harm’s way’. When I’d asked, in all innocence, who Harm was, she had laughed. ‘Harm’s all around, baby cat,’ she’d said softly. ‘All around us, all the time,’ and I had stared fearfully over my shoulder. For a very long time I had pictured Harm as a huge orange tomcat, with mangled ears and a mocking smile. Untrustworthy and prone to lashing out with an angry paw at any small creature in its way. A bit like my grandfather, in fact. Even though I now knew this was a fiction born of a kitten’s fear, I still peered hard through the window in case such a silhouette should suddenly shift among the shadows.
Behind me, something in the room stirred.
My back prickled. A line of fur all the way from the space between my ears to the tip of my tail started to rise, apparently of its own accord.
I whipped around. At first I could see nothing out of the ordinary. Dellifer slept with her back to me, her flanks moving slowly in and out in time with her snores. Vita, too, was still asleep, but above her head, something glowed.
Something at once bright and cloudy.
Fascinated, I found that I was holding my breath. I slipped down from the windowsill and approached the sofa cautiously. I sat on the floor and stared upward. My sister’s eyelids were flickering, backwards and forwards, very fast. Her paws twitched as if she was running. As her paws moved, so the cloud above her head moved, too, vague shapes and colours swirling in the air. I was transfixed. It reminded me of how a couple of weeks ago, I had watched some children walking down the road, clutching little plastic bags in which several golden-orange fish had switched back and forth, distorted by the substance in which they were immersed.
I stared harder and saw something move inside the globe. It was— my catnip mouse! But what was it doing in this strange bubble? Straining towards the cloudy mass, I could make out a blur of paws and the bright red toy flew up and disappeared. A second later a cat’s muzzle quested after it, pressing against the limits of the globe, stretching it outward like a membrane. Another cat – with my toy! And the colouring around its muzzle was rather similar to Vita’s tabby markings...
It was Vita, I realised with a sudden rush of recognition and fury; and at the same time, somehow it wasn’t: for here she was, my sister, fast asleep in front of me, her breath misting the tiny mirrors on the bright cushions.
But I had no time to wonder about this peculiarity, for now the cloud was moving, up and away from me. Rather sadly, I watched it travel across the top of the room, skimming the ceiling, and finally passing through the wall.
I blinked. Then I raced through the door into the hallway, just in time to see the globe slip through the open fanlight and out into the night.
I knew from bitter and embarrassing experience that I could not follow it out of that fanlight, so instead, I rushed down the stairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. In there, the yellow light was stronger. The cat-door beckoned me. I stood by the flap for some time, staring through its scratched and misty transparence into the unreadable world outside.
Then I screwed my eyes tight shut and pressed my head through the cat-door, shivering as the hard plastic brushed my back and tail.
I was outside, at night, alone!
I opened my eyes.
The garden I knew so well by day was at night transformed into a shifting sea of shadow, and the darkness was punctuated by unfamiliar rustlings and distant cries. At once, I was strongly tempted to forget I’d seen anything odd at all and retreat to my warm sofa to sleep the night away, snores and all. At the same time, I was a cat, and curiosity soon got the better of me. I gritted my teeth and determinedly made my way out on to the road, feeling immensely brave, and at the same time immensely vulnerable in the face of so much dark space. In front of me, the village pond glimmered in the moonlight.
I looked very carefully right and then left and then crossed the road in a swift scatter of paws, until I was on the other side, panting among the bull-rushes.
The surface of the pond shone like oil. Beneath the surface, in the roots of the pondweed, I could make out tantalising yellow shapes, just out of reach. I pushed my way out through a stand of rushes on to a floating island of sweet peppermint and for a moment was so overcome by its extraordinary scent that I had to sit down and close my eyes. When I opened them again, one of the yellow things had sailed close enough to the edge that I knew that if I dipped a quick paw into the water I might catch it. I wriggled down through the vegetation, keeping my profile low: something I’d learned, on those few occasions when I’d been able to sneak off for an hour or two, from a young cat called Ginge, who was an ace at early-season craneflies.
At the edge of the water I hesitated, sighting the yellow glow. Was it a fish? Perhaps even a golden fish? My mouth watered suddenly, and a tiny growl of desire started in the back of my throat. I swallowed it down for fear it would betray my presence to the fish, and then swiped a paw into the water. At once, the yellow glow dissipated into a thousand shimmering wavelets.
I glared into the water, mystified.
The ripples moved out across the pond, disturbing all the other yellow things, and it was only then that I realised that what I had tried to catch was nothing more than a reflection.
Slowly, I stared upwards into the night sky.
It was full of golden lights.
*
I nearly toppled headfirst into the pond in surprise. Goldfish in the sky? It seemed unlikely, even from what cursory knowledge of the world I had so far gleaned. Birds flew in the air: fish swam in water. The world was that simple, or so I thought then.
Then I remembered that I was dreaming, and therefore did not have to make sense of every strange thing I saw. After all, had I not experienced flying dreams myself? And everyone knows cats are not natural travellers of the sky. At once I relaxed, and as I did so, the golden shapes started to converge, slowly at first; then they began to stream towards me with heart-stopping speed.
I flattened myself on the mint and weeds, and the golden lights skimmed overhead, missing me by a whisker. It was if they were taunting me to follow them: but how could I, when they fled across the road, gained enough height to clear the hedge by the pub, and disappeared from sight?
Undaunted, I was off and running and the stream of gold seemed almost as though it hovered, waiting for me to catch up, then it drew itself up like a swarm of bees poised for entry into the hive, and barrelled through the gap between the houses and into the path down which I had that very morning followed Hawkweed.
In the gloom under the canopy they began to spiral and change direction. There appeared to be fewer of them now, I noticed, moving more slowly; while in the air above the path, little sparkles suggested that some of the golden lights had winked out of existence, as if lacking the will or the energy to continue their journey.
In contrast, I felt full of vigour. I bounded down the cobbles, water splashing where my feet slipped, leaping the bramble runners, the nettles and the thorny dog rose, and lunged up the bank after the lights. This time, I noted with satisfaction, I had no trouble reaching the top. I emerged at exactly the point at which my grandfather had vanished from sight. But the golden lights, too, had disappeared. Instead, at the top of the bank, I was confronted by a disturbance of the air and a strange scent: slightly bitter, rather acidic. I inched forward and suddenly the air pressure tightened against my whiskers. I pushed a little harder, and with a barely audible ‘pop’ the world seemed to release itself to me, and suddenly I found my head occupying a completely different category of space to the rest of my body.
‘Outside’ – if I can put it like that – the air brushed past me softly, with barely any resistance; but ‘inside’ the air hurtled past my head with brutal force. I felt my ears buffeted, my fur flattened against my skull. And it was cold, too: icy cold.
This was all very odd.
Oddest of all was the sight of the golden lights. They occupied the same icy tunnel as my head did: but they appeared to have greater resistance to the wind. They bobbled about in the darkness a foot or so above me, like soap bubbles constrained by some invisible surface. Seeing them up there, trapped yet still in some way still free, I felt an irresistible urge to chase them, to leap up into that night-coloured space and bat them with my paws.
At once, I felt myself moving. I watched my foreleg enter the windy place with some surprise: for as it did so, it appeared to grow. I waved the paw under my nose. It was huge, but it was definitely my paw, for it did what I told it to do. I thought about flexing my toes, to inspect my claws – as pinkly translucent as the shells in Anna’s bedroom – and the enormous new paw spread toes each the dimension of a good-sized mouse, and from the end of each toe sprang talons like black stone. Curious to see if the rest of me would grow so large, I stepped the other foreleg inside.
The wind howled at me.
I wavered there for a few seconds, neither fully a kitten nor yet entirely the creature demanded by this harsh new environment; then suddenly the rest of my body followed of its own accord and I found myself standing in another world, in the midst of a shrieking gale.
My body felt very different in there: larger, more powerful. I looked down at myself, and saw that I was indeed a different beast: tawny and massively muscled. The blood pounded in my head. It was marvellously intoxicating to feel like this: but even so, I felt dwarfed by ferocious elements, as if, even in my brave new guise, I was still too small a cat to enter here.
I shivered, then braced my new shoulders and strode decisively into the jaws of the wind.