For the next few days, I stalked around the cottage and the gardens, tail lashing, a permanent half-growl rumbling quietly at the base of my throat. I felt at odds with myself and everyone else. I had gained access to another world, a place where all I had ever wanted would deliver itself up to me with a purr and a wave of musky scent; and had stupidly turned my back on it and run away. I knew I could never find my way back.
For this reason, I avoided even thinking about Lydia. I avoided the canal. I avoided Hawkweed and the highways.
Dellifer and Vita avoided me.
*
‘You live your own funny little lives,’ Anna said to Dellifer, ‘don’t you? You cats?’
Dellifer purred contentedly.
‘What do you think about, all day long?’
It was Saturday night: comfort night. Orlando was out. These days, in fact, he was rarely in. His whole demeanour was that of a cat with important business. He rushed about. He rushed his meals. ‘But we don’t care about him,’ Anna said. ‘Do we, girls? Because we’ve got comfort night.’ She had fetched fish and chips for an early supper, and now, while Vita dozed contentedly in the kitchen, waking occasionally to lick the ghost of grease off her paws, Anna and Dellifer were sitting on the sofa in Anna’s tiny front room, watching Casualty on the television. Anna sighed happily. She had beside her a cup of mocha which she had made half-and-half with drinking chocolate; and a moment ago one of the more competitive of the young doctors had been rushed into his own emergency room with a suspected rupture of the spleen after an ill-considered rock-climbing weekend. What more could you ask? Dellifer yawned, and rearranged her long, scrawny body on the sofa so that her head rested on Anna’s forearm.
Suddenly she raised her head.
A moment later, Anna did too.
‘What’s that awful smell?’ she said: ‘Orlando!’
She phoned Stella Herringe.
‘He’s done it everywhere,’ Anna said, ‘and I’ve got no idea how to clean it off.’
Stella laughed. ‘My dear, he is a tom,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want a smelly house, you’ll have to have him snipped. How old is he?’ and when Anna told her, ‘Well, he’s a little early, but there it is. You can get it done in Drychester,’ – here, she gave a strange laugh – ‘but it’s so straightforward you could probably do it yourself.’
Anna discounted this bizarre possibility. ‘I suppose I’ll have to have them both done,’ she said.
There was a silence, then the click of a cigarette lighter. Stella inhaled and said in the same breath: ‘Oh no, dear.’
‘But—’
‘Has she come on yet?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what to look for.’
‘You’d know,’ said Stella. Another laugh. ‘Well, look, think about it. It would be such a waste. She’ll just make the most wonderful kittens.’ Then, before Anna could object that she had enough kittens in the cottage already: ‘And I’ll take them all off your hands at six weeks. Earlier if you like. How’s that for an offer?’ She blew smoke into the receiver at her end. Anna could almost smell it. ‘Or you can bring her up here and I’ll organise the whole thing. But do have the little boy done, because we don’t want him as the father.’
Anna barely considered this. ‘It would be hard to split them up now,’ she said. ‘They’re so used to each other.’ To soften her refusal, she added: ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘You do that, dear,’ said Stella. ‘But let’s not have an accident.’ She left rather a long silence, and then to Anna’s surprise said in a more hesitant tone, ‘Have you seen that awful cousin of mine this week? Or is he off at some symposium on the spirituality of Eskimo Nell?’
‘Do you know,’ lied Anna, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Not sure if you’ve seen him, or not sure where he is?’
Anna laughed uncomfortably.
‘Never mind,’ said Stella. ‘Look, I thought I’d have a supper party a week on Friday, and of course you’re invited if you want to come. Hello? Now’s the time to say. How nice, I’d love to, dear.’
‘Sorry?’ said Anna. ‘Oh, of course I’ll come. Thank you.’
‘Good. Eight for eight-thirty. And, dear? If you talk to John before I do, tell him I’d love it if he could be there too. Will you tell him?’
‘I will. Of course I will.’
The phone went down at Stella’s end.
Anna stood with the handset to her ear for some seconds. She thought: I’m not sitting in night after night watching TV with my cats. I’m not. For the first time since their disagreement in the churchyard, she dialled John Dawe’s number.
‘Can we be friends again?’
‘My God, I thought you’d never ask.’
Emptying out with relief, her heart pounding, Anna said carefully, ‘I’m working quite hard at the moment, but if you like, we could meet at Stella’s dinner party next Friday,’ and waited to see how he would answer.
*
Anna seemed to be upset that I had sprayed inside the cottage. She chased me out of the kitchen door, flapping her hands and shouting at me, by which I understood my presence was not welcome inside the house. I went and sulked, holed up on the dark, dry earth under the bay tree. I dozed. I slept. Every time I felt a dream brush soft as feathers against my mind, I woke and shook it away. Later, with the moon shining through the fragrant leaves above me, Anna came out and called my name. She stood there on the step, the golden light behind her making a halo of her hair, and stared uncertainly into the darkness. In one hand she held a dish which she rang repeatedly with a spoon – clearly, I noted with suppressed fury, to signal my suppertime. This went on for some minutes, while I wrestled with greed and an inchoate desire for revenge, until eventually with a sigh she turned and went back inside.
Unseen, in the depths of my refuge, I glared with ferocious satisfaction at her retreating form. It felt like a victory of sorts, until I heard the unmistakable sound of the cat-flap being locked.
Shortly after that I realised I was starving.
*
Later, at the Green Man, Anna told Alice: ‘He didn’t know.’
‘So?’
‘It means he really hasn’t been there. He hasn’t seen her since I shouted at him.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so happy.’
Anna emptied her glass. ‘Yes you do,’ she said. She went over to the jukebox, put coins in, and pored over the menu. She knew what she was looking for.
‘You’re jealous of her,’ called Alice from the bar. ‘I know that.’
Anna thought of John Dawe the first time she had seen him, in his grey Levi’s and black cotton sweater, insisting, ‘No one ever owns a cat;’ then on the Magpie, grimly searing tuna, shaking oil and vinegar for salad dressing; finally in the graveyard, admitting his dependence on the Herringe money. She thought of Stella, whose voice had been edged with such an unaccustomed anxiety when she said, ‘If you talk to John before I do—’ She thought of herself on the phone, lying to Stella, lying to John. The not-so-small dishonesties of love. She grinned at Alice over her shoulder.
‘That too,’ she admitted.
A group of regulars, pushing open the door of the Green Man a few minutes later, found her dancing dreamily away in the middle of the floor, to the old Rolling Stones track John Dawe had selected that strange rainy night with Stella in the bar. As she danced, Anna was thinking, he ignored her easily enough then. She was thinking, why should the Herringes have him, them and their money? I can make money, too. She was thinking, he’ll clean up very nicely if I can just get his self-confidence back.
*
‘You made the house smell!’ Vita declared gleefully when Anna finally let me in for my breakfast. ‘I ate your supper.’
Of course, it was not long before I was drawn back to the canal. How could I have thought I could keep away? My love – my lust – for Lydia called me.
The narrowboat cats regarded me warily. I recognised most of them as the opponents I had tangled with on that fateful night; indeed, some of them still looked a bit the worse for wear. One or two hissed their hostility and danced sideways on their toes to demonstrate that they were ready for a second bout, should it so please me. But when I failed to rise to the challenge, staring back at them blankly with the sun shining off my slitted eyes, they soon cheerfully ignored me, and sloped off to sit around in tight little huddles licking their fur and laughing quietly, I suspected, at my expense. Any threat I might have posed to the social order had obviously dissipated; I wondered, even, whether the delightful Liddy had shared with them the shameful circumstances of my precipitous departure.
Of that little queen, however, there was no sign.
I sat there, quite still, for several hours. The sun sailed overhead, bright and impassive, slipped once or twice behind high clouds, and began to drop towards the horizon. Chilly shadows chased one another across the surface of the canal, and still nothing stirred. Eventually, I settled down with my head on my paws, and waited for night to fall.
I may have dozed: for when a voice disturbed my rest, it was full night. It was a female voice, yet it seemed to be coming from behind me. I was disorientated. The narrowboat, and its occupants, lay dark and quiet in front of my nose. I started up and looked around.
Only to find a long-legged tabby-and-white cat regarding me with her head on one side and a strange half-smile on her face. She had a small silver hoop in one ear, and a spiky crest of fur on her head, rather like that of a jay.
‘I said, you should give it up.’
I stared at her. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said you should give it up. Call it a day. It’s stupid, waiting around for hours and hours for Miss Lydia just to have her wrinkle up her little pink nose at you. She is,’ – the tabby-and-white paused, searching for the right expression – ‘a prize coquette.’
Then she winked at me. The white patch that looped across the left-hand side of her face became a perfect snowy disc. She was without doubt the oddest-looking cat I had ever seen.
‘A what?’
‘A coquette, a vamp, a philandress.’
I was none the wiser.
The tabby-and-white sighed. ‘Honey, she’s a tart.’
I demurred, but the odd-looking cat carried on, impervious.
‘She is – how can I put this? – anybody’s.’
I have to admit I was shocked.
‘Whereas some of us,’ she considered, ‘are extremely choosy.’
‘You don’t seem like the other cats around here,’ I said at last.
‘I know. I’m not from round here.’ A broad grin spread across the patched face. She rolled her eyes, ‘Thank the stars.’
I regarded her with a frown. ‘You’re not very polite.’
The tabby-and-white cat threw back her head and laughed, a generous sound that echoed off the moored boats. The silver ring jounced merrily in her ear. ‘Polite? What’s polite? It’s just something for those with nothing better to do. Polite is for cats who care what others think. Me, I don’t give a damn.’ She cocked her head. ‘You know, for a dreamcatcher, you are a bit of a fool.’
For a moment, I was deeply affronted. Then I said, ‘If I am a fool, then you are a freak.’
Her eyes gleamed dangerously. ‘A freak? What do you mean?’
I nodded towards her earring. ‘To mutilate yourself like that.’
She laughed, rather bitterly. ‘You think I have done this to myself? Then you really are a fool. A man thought he owned me once and he did this to me to prove it to himself. I left, of course. No human can own a cat. My mother taught me that: no one ever owned her.’
An edgy silence developed between us as I thought about this. Then something else occurred to me: ‘How do you know I’m a dreamcatcher?’
The long-legged cat shrugged. ‘My dear, if anyone knows anything round here, everyone knows it. To be a dreamcatcher, well—’
‘I know.’ I hung my head. ‘It’s not my fault, though,’ I rushed on. ‘It was my granfer made me eat that stuff, and now I seem to be stuck with it. Look at my paws...’
She bent to sniff at the yellow-stained fur around my toes, and a strange look came into her eye. She had very shiny eyes, I noticed suddenly; shiny and rather wicked.
‘Ah. Hawkweed.’
I stared at her. Did she mean my grandfather or the little yellow flower? ‘What?’
She laughed at me. ‘You act as if you’re ashamed of it. Where I come from dreamcatchers are like royalty: all the girls want them. A dreamcatcher’s family always know when trouble’s coming, that’s what my mother said. And she should know: she mated with one.’
‘Your father’s a dreamcatcher?’
‘Sure. One of the best. Or he was.’
‘What happened to him?’
She avoided my gaze, bending her head round to tease goosegrass out of her haunch. The movement of her tongue made the spiky crest rise and fall like some kind of warning signal. When she raised her head again, her eyes were distant.
‘He disappeared one day: out the door one night on his usual rounds, and never came back. There’s more to it than that, but it’s not something I talk about, especially with someone whose name I don’t know.’
‘Orlando,’ I said quickly and immediately pressed on: ‘Did he disappear on the wild roads?’
The strange cat surveyed me coolly. Then she shrugged. ‘Who knows? To be sure, it is none of your concern. You are a very determined cat: really, quite pushy.’ Then, seeing my uncertainty, her eyes lost their topaz glint and she grinned. ‘My name is Millie. Short for Millefleur, which means yarrow, or something in French. My mother liked to give the impression that she travelled a bit, you see. She didn’t, of course, but you can’t catch a dreamcatcher by being dull. It is nice to meet you.’
She extended a paw in mock-elegant manner, then changed her mind and affectionately headbutted me instead.
‘Do you want to come dreamcatching with me?’ I asked suddenly. It was the first thing that came into my head; I still don’t know why I asked her, or why I should have forgotten my mission so easily.
Millie smiled delightedly. ‘I can’t see the dreams, even if I eat the weed,’ she admitted. ‘They say it skips a generation, you know, the gift.’ A roguish light came into her eye. ‘But I love to hear about the dreams. Humans, they’re so bizarre!’
Being on the highways on my own had been a tense adventure, one that made my heart hammer in my ears. Being on the wild roads with Hawkweed was more like being on trial, as if the old cat were in league with the highways and had brought me there as to some ancient testing ground, where the compass winds would probe with icy fingers beneath my new wild fur to root out the essence of my character, to examine the tenacity of every moral fibre.
Being on the highways with Millie was a whole other experience.
As we entered my favourite wild road, the one that led off the old footpath running past the Green Man, I watched her caper in delight as her wild form came upon her. Silver and black bars wrapped themselves around her fur; from her ears great tufts sprouted like shoots of spring barley; her paws grew to the size of lily pads; and her body was one great smooth coiled muscle. On the highways, Millie was quite a different proposition to the odd little cat I had met upon the towpath. She saw me watching her and a huge fanged smile split the grizzled mask. Reflections of golden dreams danced in her eyes, so strange that none but I could see them.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she rumbled. ‘Catch me some dreams.’
So I leapt and pounced and leapt again. Up I soared, into the roof of the highway, paws splayed and talons spread. A dream fled past to my left, and at once I was upon it, worrying it like a mouse before flipping it up into the air again. The golden globe wobbled and fell, straight back into my waiting maw. I landed on my hind legs and at once sprang back into the air. I landed on all fours, two dreams pinioned beneath my front paws. I pirouetted; I spun like a dervish. On and on I hunted: a twisting leap here; a killing blow there.
Dream after shining dream succumbed to my lethal jaws and spilled their sticky juices down my ruff. The air was rank with the smell of them, hot with the energy generated by a dreamcatcher’s dance of life.
One by one their golden lights failed and died, until at last the road was dark and empty once more. Empty except for an apprentice dreamcatcher and the rumbling purr of my new friend, the lynx.
‘Now we will go back into the tame world and you can tell me about the dreams of the people of Ashmore,’ it said. ‘And when you have done that, I will reward you.’
The purr of the lynx reverberated through the highway like a force of nature. And then, quite abruptly, it stopped, and where there had been the most powerfully companionable noise in the world, now there was a complete absence of sound, as if I had been sucked into a vacuum.
I looked around. I was alone. Confused, my head full of other people’s imagery, I gazed into the darkness, just in time to see the flick of a bob-tail disappearing through the wall of the wild road.
*
Outside, the stars were scattered all over the sky as if someone had thrown them down in haste. There was a distinct chill in the air.
Millie, her wild self now only a memory, a shimmer echoing down the length of the highways, was stretched out in a patch of wild poppies, paying meticulous attention to a long, slim, extended leg. Where her barbed tongue tracked through the fur, it gave back a silvery sheen to the stars, and with each stroke the silken flowerheads nodded their approval. There is a little in life so reassuring as grooming. For a cat who has just slipped out of the adrenalised haze of the wild roads back into the cold, still exposure of the mundane world, where the vast, remote dark sky wheels overhead and perspectives are surreal and untrustworthy, the warm, rhythmic rasp of tongue over fur and muscle is a gentle reaffirmation of self: the persistent recreation of identity.
For me, watching Millie’s head bob and draw, bob and draw, it was like watching the Great Cat Herself steadily licking the world back into shape. With each stroke I felt my heart slow, my pulse gentle; I felt the dancing dream-images in my head coalesce to harlequin patterns of pastel light.
She looked up. ‘So, now, my little dreamcatcher,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you saw.’
And so I settled myself beside her and recounted what I could recall of the dreams I had eaten, without pause to make any sense or order of it all. I told her of curious figures and sequences; of running, and screams; how the light fell on the skin of an orange; how mould spread like a wave across a woman’s skin; how an empty boat rocked gently in a lake of pale liquid gold; I remembered bare brown skin and a shining dark eye, very close up. How, seen through a small window, a dove rose vertically into blue air by a church spire, the bright sun turning its feathers to brilliant white and, circling, how it disappeared from view, only to re-enter the windowframe on the other side, a bird black with shadow. Of corridors lined with hundreds of doors, all closed. Of glowing embers and a broken violin. And made her laugh when I told her of a woman I had seen in her dream, a woman whose eyes were the most extraordinary green, her hair as black as a crow. She was watching her reflection in a mirror as her head became the head of a cat.
‘She should be so lucky.’
‘In her dream, she felt she was.’
‘Transformation is magical,’ Millie said simply.
I stared at her, surprised by the sudden gravity of the conversation.
She smiled. ‘Everyone likes to be more than they are. That’s why I love to be on the highways. That sense of greatness, all that power and potential.’ She flexed her paws so that her claws popped, sharp and glinting, out into the moonlight. ‘On the highways, Orlando, you are a lion. Did you know?’
Now it was my turn to smile. ‘And you, Millie: you are a lynx.’
‘A lynx is good,’ she considered. ‘Did you know that hundreds of years ago humans believed that a lynx could see through walls?’
I snorted. ‘A cat on a highway can walk through walls. That’s no big trick.’
‘And they believed that its urine crystallised into precious stones!’
‘Now you’re making things up—’
Millie started to laugh. ‘People are mad, Orlando: quite mad! They used to think that squeezing the juice out of a civet cat’s arse made them smell good! Can you imagine?’
‘Never!’ I scoffed.
‘It’s true!’
She rolled on her back and wriggled in delight. The starlight glimmered on the silver ring in her ear and made crescent moons of her eyes. Then all of a sudden she became still and her bellyfur glowed submissively white against the dark ground.
‘You were a lion when you fought the narrowboat cats, too,’ she said, and her voice was as low as a bumblebee’s drone. ‘I watched you beat them all, one by one by one.’
The long, long legs parted minutely, in a gesture both vulnerable and lascivious. A warm pheromonal musk filled the air.
My mind went blank.
‘Don’t need to fight anyone for me, honey,’ she said softly, a light purr trilling at the back of her throat.
In the distance a cricket chirred and a night-bird sang, and my blood beat faster. It would be so easy to fall upon this willing female, to roll her roughly over and bite the thick skin at the back of that long unfamiliar neck and to lower myself into her receptive warmth. Too easy. And far too difficult.
All I could see in my mind’s eye was a tawny cat, gold to the bone, angular of face and slim of shoulder, beckoning me into the depths of her boat.
‘I can’t, Millie,’ I gasped. ‘I just can’t.’ I leapt to my feet as if scalded. I could not bring myself to look at her. ‘I’m sorry. Really, I am.’
And with that I turned and ran.
*
Millie rolled on to her side and watched the young marmalade cat go, and the jaunty piebald mask she wore to encounter the world fell away to reveal a face both bleak and inexpressibly forlorn.