There’s a nagging chill around Tom’s neck and in the soles of his feet. He keeps close to the towering walls of the main building, partly to shelter from the wind, which blows down from the great sycamores beyond the old outbuildings, down into the massive body of the workhouse, and also so that when his feet begin to take him towards those outbuildings he’ll know it and will try to resist. For three weeks he has tried, without any success at all, to stay away from that disused stable with the wooden platform in it. He goes there every day, sometimes two or three times in a single morning, slipping in through the half-opened doors, buckled on their hinges and lodged fast in the ground, where dandelions and thick, bushy grass seems to have glued them for ever to the earth. Each time he creeps back into the place his chest deflates with a fizz of released nerves, and in those first few moments he wears a big, stupid smile, his breath heavy and irregular with the panting of silent laughter. When he moves further inside, towards the wooden stairs, he begins to blubber, suddenly and with no chance of stopping himself, until even if he makes it over to the stairs all he can do is collapse down on to them and weep.
He has been at the workhouse three weeks. After the day at the fairground he had found himself penniless, homeless and jobless. It was Markham who had taken charge of him, offering him a job, explaining that he would come to the workhouse and earn his keep there. Only, Markham had put it in a peculiarly compelling way. ‘Whatever happens,’ he had told Tom, who was by this time frightened half to death at the thought of his sudden destitution, ‘you’re coming to the workhouse. One way or another,’ Markham announced, seeming to relish the nice inference which one could but draw from what he said, ‘one way or another you’re coming to us!’
Tom for his part did not need reminding of this. Though, for him, the shadow of that place cast an extra and more penetrating darkness across his soul, and in his desperation he almost fancied that being an inmate there might be preferable; only in this way, he thought, by being locked up, would he ever manage to tear himself away from his most powerful memories; and even as he nodded in agreement with Markham’s take-it-or-take-it offer of work, Tom felt himself being drawn back to that vermin-pit of a stable, and to the wide-eyed, screaming face of Alice, her limbs in spasm, as she lay trapped, delirious with fear, beneath his panting body.
In the three weeks since his arrival Tom had struggled to discover exactly what his new job was. There had been no mention of wages, but neither had there been much in the way of work, and he began to skulk about the place on his own and do his best to keep out of the way. Markham had all but disappeared, spending whole afternoons in his office drafting legal submissions, or in conference with his solicitor. The rest of the workhouse staff distrusted the boy, and he felt the cold absence of Alice in the kitchens and in the expressions of all those who had known her.
He was sent on one or two errands, but quickly got the impression that these jobs had been devised for him, and would otherwise not have existed: since when did the workhouse send a boy all the way to town to buy furniture polish? Or to a bakery three miles off just to return a couple of old pie dishes (which puzzled rather than pleased the baker on receiving them so unexpectedly)?
For the last three weeks Tom has not slept more than an hour without the return of those two scenes which have come to replace all other images in his young, shattered mind. One of these is of himself, nearly naked, on top of Alice, high up in the old stable. In the other he is in the tent at the fairground, and watches the canvas collapse onto his own exhausted body. Sometimes the two images come together and vie for prominence in his weak, jittery reality. The cat wanders nonchalantly centre stage, cool and proud, looking calmly on at the chaos around it; the winged cat that has now become a factotum of evil, fulfilling every office of malice in his imagination, coming to represent the totality of horror and madness and cruelty in the poor boy’s head until in the end the thought of it never leaves him, and he carries its fearsome presence with him constantly, both when he sleeps and when he wakes, and all those times in between; finally he yearns to see it, to replenish and strengthen its memory, until slowly it begins to supplant Alice in his thoughts.
Now, after three weeks, he creeps around the outer walls of the workhouse, and there’s nothing for him to do but steer himself away from his hopeless addiction. He feels himself turning towards the old stables again, and he falls forward like a drunkard, stumbling ahead of himself, trying to decide where he’s going, confused at the ground in front of him as if it’s foreign, or has just then appeared.
The wind picks up, and now the smallest finger of it, if it gets down into your clothes, is painful. He is buffeted by a sudden gust, stinging his eyes and sending him sideways. To steady himself he puts a hand against the wall. The bricks, red but baked darker with soot, are warm, the temperature of a comfortable body, and they are as smooth as unblemished skin as he runs his palm across them and feels with the tips of his fingers that the thin lines of gritty mortar between the bricks are warmer still. He walks on, following his hand until it reaches a set of doors wide enough for a carriage, but which he knows lead to the furnace room. He has passed them every day since he came, and has sometimes heard the faint clanking of water pipes, or the just audible hum of the furnace. Today, though, the wall itself is warm, as if the fire has been stoked up twice, like a heart which one day begins to pump faster and more intently. He pulls open one of the doors and steps inside.
By this time John Longstaff is on his way to jail, where he will do six months’ hard labour for larceny. Even before he leaves the court buildings, having kissed his wife and daughters goodbye, Joseph Markham is on his way home, the wicker cage by his side, Thomas-Bessie the famous flying cat now his legal possession.
When he arrives at the workhouse, an ebullient Markham springs down, abandoning his horse there in the yard for someone else to deal with, and skips like a child all the way round to the back of the building, the cage bouncing against his leg in the wind. Even before he takes his coat off, he has decided, he will take a look at the brand new trap.
Tom is already inside the furnace room. The temperature there is almost unbearable and the hot air rubs against his wind-pricked cheeks like sandpaper. His throat and lungs feel as if they are crammed full of old, dry carpet, and he has to strain to draw breath. The furnace door is fractionally ajar, and through the inch-wide gap tiny licks of flame curl out against the dull iron door, providing what little light there is in the place. He moves around, pushing his feet forward slowly in the semi-darkness across the stone floor, sensing the crunch of coal fragments underfoot, imagining how the dark expanse in front of him looks, as he waits for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark. He moves off, away from the source of the heat, the insistent glow of the furnace following him, pushing through his clothes on to the backs of his legs and arms, and sees in a corner a fleck of something vaguely familiar. The dim, yellow light from the flames is intermittent, yet it catches something golden in the corner of the room. It flickers in and out of vision, winking at him, insinuating its presence, a distant curve of gold, half a ring, a neat semicircle twinkling in the dark. He edges forwards and makes out a little more, more gold, a bit at a time, first an outline, then more curves, and a series of neat, regular uprights. He cannot quite believe what he sees, so familiar and so mesmerising that he goes on, forwards, even when his eyes first make out the words, painted in large gold script: The Cat-Icarus.
Behind him the doors are dragged wide open, and the room is suddenly filled with light. A shriek of wind rushes in, exciting the furnace, and flames belch from it in a sustained burst. There at the door, against the cold light, is Markham and the cat.
For a long second Tom looks at the cat, whose white-and-ginger face and ears can be seen through the wire mesh at the front of the wicker cage. And in that second his body turns to liquid from the inside: acid wells up in his stomach, burning through the walls and dripping down onto his kidneys and his bowels; adrenalin comes from nowhere, a fast-travelling goo that saturates his flesh, pumping it full and juicy, until it comes away from bone and he collapses, first to his knees, then toppling over onto his face. From his lips a thick, bubbling saliva flows, soaking into the coal dust on the stone floor.
Markham watches the boy for a while, but then seems to make a snap decision, for he tosses the cage to the ground and walks from the room in disgust, closing the great doors behind him. Deaf to the harrowing, pre-pubertal screams which can be heard from within, he takes his keys from a coat pocket and locks the doors, then marches off with a very heavy and disconsolate step to his office.
Tom’s filthy, devilish cries of anguish are muffled by the wind, which by now has risen to a gale and pummels the brick walls of the workhouse with such force that no one dares venture outside; even if they did they would hear nothing of Tom.
Markham, when he reaches his office, has already begun to regret the effort of winning back the cat from Longstaff. He regrets it because though his victory in court has been resounding, it has come almost to nothing. He had no desire for the animal, just as he had no desire to take Tom in and give him work. The cat is merely a way to offset the cost of giving the boy a job, although it promises much more than this. For Markham, after long consultation with the workhouse solicitor, who claimed again and again that the law in this area was on many points unclear – prevaricating, or so Markham thought, until it seemed that even the word cat had no secure basis in law – had decided that if the workhouse (that is to say, he) must provide for Tom, then Tom must turn a good profit. So, a travelling sideshow had been constructed for the cat, designed to fit on the back of a pony and trap, to be taken to fairs and feasts and any other place where paying customers might be found, there to exhibit the famous Cat-Icarus. By now every person who read a newspaper or indeed had spoken to a person who could read a newspaper, from Nottingham to Newcastle, knew of the winged cat, though few had seen so much as a photograph, although it seemed that almost everyone knew someone who had actually seen the thing fly, or at least who knew someone else who had seen it. The cat, in fact, had been seen by practically no one since the now infamous day at Dewsbury Feast, when its presence had caused so much trouble. Since then it had become a living gold mine, although at the moment the gold itself lay unmined. It was, of course, Tom who would extract the lucre on Markham’s behalf.
However, he now realised that Tom was mad. And if the boy was going to flop to the ground in a gurgling heap every time he laid eyes on the animal, then someone else would have to take charge of the Cat-Icarus sideshow, with its new, shining cage and bold gilt sign (which included a few grand references to antiquity, but nothing like the original). Markham contented himself somewhat with the thought that he still had his potential gold mine, and only the thought of how best to dispose of mad Tom remained.
But at this point something occurred to him: mad Tom and the cat were now locked in the furnace room together, and the furnace mouth was just the right size for the wicker cat cage.
Meanwhile, Tom had at last regained enough consciousness to crawl across the black, stone floor to the doors, still gurgling from fear, moving ponderously like an injured animal. He hauled himself to his feet, his body slumped against the heavy wooden doors, which shook so violently on their hinges in the wind that he believed they were trembling out of fear for him. Before his eyes a series of jumbled images danced in a wild kaleidoscope: the cat, Alice, the furnace, the gold lettering, filling his soul with a hatred so intense that even John Longstaff would have withered under its power. For a moment Tom flayed out his arms, as if the raw loathing inside his body could no longer be contained, his head rolling loose on his shoulders as he entered a new and deeper delirium. Then, as he turned and stumbled forwards, he caught sight of the wicker cage again, and even before his lips had hardened into a cruel grin he grabbed the cage and ran with it the three or four strides over to the furnace. In one great twist of the body he yanked open the heavy iron door, and with the other arm swung the cage back ready to hurl it into the flames, which now spat into his face with such fury that he felt his eyelids begin to peel away and the hairs in his nostrils sizzle and disappear. Then, as he prepared to throw the thing into the fire, he realised that the cage was empty, its wire door hanging open: the cat was loose in the room with him.
The cage fell from his hand and hit the floor. At that exact moment he felt the brush of a furry wing against his neck and, spinning around so quickly that he lost balance and crashed down on top of the cage, he saw the cat hovering above him in the fiery red light, its wings as huge and meaty as an eagle’s, and claws that could take a baby’s head clean off. He may have fainted, or simply curled up there, but sooner or later he was staggering to his feet again, running and clattering from one side of the place to the other in bursts of lunatic energy, his arms spinning like rotors, trying to beat off the cat, which he could sense right above him, hot and rampant, its feet tangled in his hair, its crackling breath cold and steely in his ears. He ran into walls and scrambled halfway up them, his hands beating into the crumbling brick, his fingernails ripped clean off, his voice shrill and hoarse, pleading to be saved.
Markham was sprinting down from his office to save the cat, two of his men behind him. When they arrived and unlocked the doors, Tom already had his arm inside the furnace, right up to the shoulder, and was quite clearly trying to climb in. The flames nibbled at his skin and turned it a blotchy maroon, and the hair on one side of his head had disappeared, leaving the scalp grey-black, welted and wrinkly.
They dragged him out on to the floor. His arm was so charred that it was impossible to tell whether there had been a sleeve on it. His hand was like charcoal, puffed up and scored with lines of blood, the flesh laid open, glistening. He trembled, and from his eyes ran a thick glaze, oozing from him and turning his face crusty. Next to him on the ground, not more than three or four feet away, was the wicker cage, and on top of it sat Thomas-Bessie, looking on, its head cocked slightly to one side. Watching.