Cat Out of Hell (22 page)

A NOTE FROM
THE AUTHOR

About twenty years ago, some bookseller friends gave me a gift of a small wooden box with a tiny handmade book inside. The box was modern; the book had been made in 1934. It was handwritten, and the pages had been sewn together with strong cotton twine. On the front page were the words
The Adaptable Cat. 2nd edition. Feb: 1934. By A.M.B.T
. Inside it said,
COPYRIGHT ORIGINAL
and
Printed by the author A.M.B.T
. The dedication was:
To my friend Gatley I dedicate this little book. The genuine doings of my adaptable cat
. The book contained a poem about the cat (whose name was “Huffy”) and also seventeen black-and-white photographs that had been carefully tipped in. And what they showed was a handsome substantial tabby-and-white cat who lived a seemingly glorious and innocent life in a 1930s sunny garden, posing in wicker baskets and dollie outfits, and so on. Obviously I had no idea who “A.M.B.T.” was, except that he once had a friend called Gatley. But his affection for his cat – and his appreciation for its adaptability (a quite unusual quality in cats, after all) – made a big impression on me.

I lost track of this little book quite a while ago. It turned
up when I was moving house, just a few months after I’d finished writing
Cat Out of Hell
, and I was thrilled to see it again. It’s only after finishing a novel that you can sit back and think (sometimes with alarm), “Well, where did
that
come from?” Some of the influences on
Cat Out of Hell
were direct enough: I have long been a fan of M. R. James, for example. I have pastiched him before, and I hope I shall do so again. I placed M. R. James’s
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
on the desk alongside Desmond Morris’s
Catwatching
, Anne Rice’s
Interview with a Vampire
, and also Patricia Highsmith’s horrible
Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
(which was much too dark for me). Thinking about horror in general, I consciously focused on recalling a book from my teenage years: a particular schlocky paperback collection of horror stories that always scared me, but attracted me as well. I could remember how it smelled, but what was it called? Finally, I remembered enough to track it down and re-buy it (
Great Stories of Mystery and Imagination
, edited by Bryan Douglas) – and I still shiver when I look at the clichéd cover: a ghoulish and cobwebby clergyman with blackened eye sockets, his bony fingers splayed on the top of a dusty dark-wood table (or is it a coffin?).

So there were some influences that were obvious. The “Adaptable Cat” got into my narrative because of the photographs – even without being able to refresh my memory, I could draw on the intense way an old photograph of a long-ago cat could engage one’s curiosity. Meanwhile,
Catwatching
was a really rich source of ideas, because it asked questions such as “Why do cats purr?,” which I thought I could perhaps answer (fictionally) in new and convincing ways. “Why do cats knead your lap before settling down?” Morris had asked, for example, and then explained that when a cat performs the motion on us, it is thinking of its kittenhood, when it needed to stimulate milk from the mother. Such an explanation was a revelation at
the end of the 1980s, but I like to think we’ve moved on a bit now. Oh, how little they know of zoology, who only zoology know.

To be honest, the evil cat was top of my list when I was asked to write a horror novella. I had done evil cats before, and I’d loved it. Jeanette Winterson had asked me to contribute to a book of stories inspired by operas, and initially I expended quite a lot of effort just coming up with excuses, but finally I said that if I could think of a funny twist on the story of
The Turn of the Screw
, I’d do one. Of course, Benjamin Britten’s
The Turn of the Screw
is based on the Henry James story in which an imaginative governess grows convinced that the two children in her care (Miles and Flora) are possessed by evil spirits. At the heart of the story, it’s ambiguous: is she right about what is happening, or is she mad? However, having volunteered
The Turn of the Screw
, I then couldn’t think of any sort of comic twist, and so I just started making excuses again.

But then I was saved. At the time, I was the owner of two brother-and-sister rescue cats – Bill and Daisy – who were a very depressing presence in my life. Basically, they rejected my love, scratched my face off if they got the chance, and were incapable of joy. They also made no noise whatsoever, which was very disconcerting. Customarily, they sat at the top of the stairs, together, in silence – two black, forbidding shapes, Bill quite big, and Daisy quite little. (I have a photograph of them assuming this terrifying silhouette, which makes people fall about laughing.) Anyway, one day I was climbing the stairs, approaching them, and I broke down. “Why won’t you let me love you?” I wailed. And then, like a switch being thrown, I saw that I resembled the governess in
The Turn of the Screw
! I wrote the story from the point of view of a male friend of a woman with a history of letting her imagination run away with her. Disregarding his advice, she daringly gives the names Miles
and Flora to some horrible brother-and-sister rescue cats. It proves to be a fatal mistake.

As for Roger being a talking cat, well, the idea seems quite commonplace to me. Of course, sometimes cat-owners do feel their cats
are
talking to them. A friend of mine says to his cat each evening, “Do you want dinner later, or do you want it now?” And the cat says, “
Niaow
.” But in fictional terms, well, there must have been scary old Czechoslovakian folk tales that I’d read as a child, and then there was also
Top Cat
on the TV, where the cat was a Manhattanite lord of misrule (in a jaunty necktie) and talked like Phil Silvers. People have asserted that the main influence on my
Cat Out of Hell
is self-evidently Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
, but since I’ve never read it, it can’t be. Much nearer to the mark would be the short story “Tobermory” by Saki (H. H. Munro). In this classic story, the cat at a country house is given the power of speech – and everyone is thrilled when he speaks his first words (on being offered milk), “I don’t mind if I do.” But then it starts to go wrong.

Tobermory fixed his gaze serenly on the middle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay outside his scheme of life.

“What do you think of human intelligence?” asked Mavis Pellington lamely.

“Of whose intelligence in particular?” asked Tobermory, coldly.

“Oh, well, mine for instance,” said Mavis, with a feeble laugh.

“You put me in an embarrassing position,” said Tobermory.

“When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested, Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the
most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call ‘The Envy of Sisyphus,’ because it goes quite nicely up-hill if you push it.”

So what a mish-mash of influences. The structure of the book comes from memories of the great Gothic novels such as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
– and there are conscious allusions to other historical narratives of the nineteenth century. But it’s fascinating, after the event, to pinpoint stuff that you didn’t know was in your mind at all. One of the darker inspirations for a key scene in the book, I now realise, was an installation I saw a few years back at the Hayward Gallery – and at the time I certainly didn’t think, “One day I will use this in a book.” Nor did I remember it until I was writing the scene, when all I could remember about it was the feeling it inculcated of icy apprehension. It turns out it was called “In Memory of H. P. Lovecraft,” and it was by Mike Nelson. A bleak space (of two rooms) painted plain white, it had been rendered utterly terrifying by wild gashes and claw-marks on the bottom half of the walls.

Of all these influences, I like to think it was
Top Cat
that made the biggest contribution in the end. My cat Roger is certainly effectual and intellectual. His story is drawn from zoological speculations, artistic installations, and also those inseparable James brothers, M. R. and Henry. But one really never knows what’s been stored away in one’s head. When I was finally reunited with
The Adaptable Cat
, I opened it and
reread it. And yes, it is a sunny tale of a sunny garden between the wars. The cat looks like Roger, being tabby and white. He poses in his dollie costume, and he sits in that basket. But there is more. He poses with a rabbit! (I had completely forgotten this when I wrote the rabbit scene of John Seeward’s cine film.) And then it turns out he has a friend – and what is it? A dog, maybe? A kitten? No, it is an enormous black cat, who in the photograph genuinely seems to have more the proportions of a bear. I look at this huge black cat, standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the edge of a goldfish bowl that has been placed on a stool in the garden. Roger is looking at the goldfish, too. I look at them – those long-deceased cats from 1934, beloved photographic subjects of the mysterious “A.M.B.T.” – I look at them over and over. Because there is no doubt in my mind. It is Roger, and it is the Captain! All this time I had actual photographs of Roger and the Captain, and I didn’t even know.

Lynne Truss

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynne Truss is the author of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
, which spent forty-five weeks on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list, three at #1 and was the
USA Today
Book of the Year in 2014; and
Talk to the Hand
, which was also a
New York Times
hardcover bestseller. She used to be a cat lover, but in light of new evidence, she has reconsidered her position.