Cat Out of Hell (5 page)

“Why did we have to see that car park?”

“Just a theory.”

Wiggy thinks for a moment. He is evidently making a connection to the car park suicide from the papers! Each time I listen to this recording, I pray again:
Don’t mention the cuttings from the newspaper, Wiggy. Knowing the contents of those three stories torn out by Roger from the
Telegraph
is your single advantage, right now
.

You will be pleased to hear that, for once, he makes an intelligent decision.

“Will you live for ever, Roger?” he asks.

“That was what I asked the Captain,” says Roger. “When my ordeal was over, all those years ago.”

There is something quite mechanical in the way Roger picks up the tale where he left off. It makes you wonder: how many times has he told it before? What is his purpose in telling it to someone like Wiggy?

“
Does this mean I will live for ever?
The very question I asked the Captain.
Does this mean I can never be killed again?
”

He’s off again. “After all, would anyone choose to have eternal life? One needn’t read very deeply in the great myths and stories of the world to know the general verdict on eternal life – immortality is always discovered to be far more of a burden than a blessing. Living for ever deprives the spirit of hope and purpose. It also separates you from mortals in mainly tragic ways. Think of the Sibyl at Cumae – or, if you like, Wiggy, given your more limited range of cultural reference, think of Doctor Who. Of course, I didn’t think like this in those far-off days of my youth. I hadn’t read anything. I didn’t know anything. I was a rough-edged street cat familiar with just a couple of square miles of East London. But I knew enough to be afraid of what the Captain had done to me. After all, as a Nine Lifer himself, he was clearly not a happy cat. He did not rejoice in his own immortality, if that was what he had. It was clear that the only thing that gave him happiness was me. He was wonderfully proud of me. He had created a companion for himself. For the first week or so, all he wanted to do was congratulate me, marvel at me, tell me the story of my triumphant nine lives again and again and again.

“We moved from the warehouse after a week or so. Why should the East End contain us? For the next ten years, in fact, we travelled. In the first instance, it was easy enough to get to the docks at Tilbury, to hop aboard a ship and leave London far behind. We both adored the idea of life at sea, and we had all the requisite skills for stowing away on board. When you think about it, any ordinary cat is good at making himself invisible, scavenging, defending his territory – and we were not remotely a pair of ordinary cats! I recall that we always encountered trouble at first from the pre-existing cat population, but the Captain was more than a match for them. On the first
ship, which was bound for Cape Town, we were no sooner out of the Thames Estuary than we were cornered in the engine room by four big heavy cats. In my mind’s eye, these cats had tattoos and heavy accents, but I’ve always been a big reader, so my imagination might be embellishing things a little. Anyway, I remember how I took several deep breaths, readying myself for a fight with these tough mariner felines. But the moment I started to yowl and spit, the Captain struck me in the chest to silence me, and hissed, “I’ll take care of this.”

“What happened next was simply amazing to watch, and requires no embellishment whatsoever. Soundlessly, he walked towards the four big cats, and sat down in the middle of their circle. They were confused (as was I!), but at the same time couldn’t believe their luck. The Captain looked at the biggest of the four – the cat looked back. And then something phenomenal happened. The other cat started to edge backwards, and he also shook – as if he had lost control of every muscle – and I’m not lying, for a moment or so, he sort-of lifted off the ground. The Captain looked into the eyes of the next cat, which immediately edged back as well. I had my paws over my eyes – he was going to slash all their throats, wasn’t he? He would kill them the way he had killed all those others! But he wasn’t interested in killing them, it seemed. He just overwhelmed them, vanquished them, terrorised them, and they retreated, and we never saw them again – because (as I later realised) they threw themselves overboard. In my innocence, I thought they hid from us for the remainder of the voyage. I would sometimes remark to the Captain that we hadn’t seen them since the encounter in the engine room, and he would say, “You’re right!” – as if he couldn’t explain it either.

“It was the grandest of grand tours. We saw art. We saw architecture. We read books, and learned languages. All this time, the Captain was teaching me to talk, to read, to reason,
to memorise. Long sea voyages are excellent for all such projects of self-improvement, as long as there’s a fairly stupid person (there usually is) in charge of the human stores. Oh, the reading! How we loved to read. The Captain with his Conrad, me with my Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. From Cape Town, we made for India. After India, we saw Egypt, Italy, Greece. The Pyramids by moonlight. The Forum by moonlight. The Parthenon by moonlight. My best memory of all is of lying on a rocking wooden deck on a starlit night, in the Aegean, with the Captain reciting Tennyson’s
Ulysses
faultlessly beside me.

Roger is evidently so moved by the recollection that for a moment he almost turns conversational.

“It was Greece that captured my heart. Have you been?”

Wiggy starts to draw breath, but Roger changes his mind.

“It doesn’t matter. It will have changed so much since the 1930s in any case. Have you read the Durrells?”

“Um –”

“We knew them in Corfu – well, they didn’t know
us
, because we kept ourselves to ourselves, but we lived very happily for a while at all three of their villas. We borrowed Larry’s books; we read some of his manuscripts. We even helped ourselves to some of Gerald’s smaller zoological specimens. In the end, the Captain and I spent three whole years in the Greek islands, and it was the very best of times. I was coming of age, I suppose. I was finally beginning to understand – and enjoy – my freedom from normal mortal constraints. I’d been reading some fabulous travel writing. Mixing with top-notch people. And meanwhile everything inspired me. I loved the light in Greece. I loved the air. I loved the fish! And Greek cats were no match for us, those skinny things, so we never had a bit of trouble (the cats in the Forum are another story!). I was so very happy on the isle of Symi in the Dodecanese – which were
under Italian rule at the time, of course, as you’ll remember from your hellenic history at school – that I hoped we would settle there for ever. I pictured us living in a cave and becoming a bit famous, maybe even the focus of a cult – something like St John the Evangelist on Patmos. But it was foolish to dream of such things. Because it was on Symi that the Captain started to reveal an unfortunate trait – a kind of psychotic possessiveness – which in the end made me anxious to move on, and meant we were never safe for long in any one place.

“At Symi, you see, something rather horrible occurred. The first of a series of horrible things. And I blame myself: I had ignored the signs. I had assumed the Captain was as happy as I was. A kindly waiter at a harbour-side taverna would sometimes tickle me under the chin and fling me a piece of octopus. I thought it was nice of him, and I played up to it – scoffing the tit-bit and miaowing for more. His name was Galandis, and I stupidly mentioned him to the Captain. I even made the excited suggestion that we might want to settle down at Galandis’s taverna, and be looked after for a while.

“The Captain pretended to be interested in my suggestion. He made me point out Galandis when we were sitting on the harbour wall one evening. The next day, when Galandis was feeding me, I noticed the Captain was watching. It all seems so clear to me now, but at the time I thought he was weighing up the idea of making our home here, so I was (what a fool!) quite pleased that he saw me purring and nudging at Galandis’s ankles. Two days later, I arrived at the taverna, and there was no Galandis. His wife was sobbing, people were shouting (they’re always shouting in Greece, but this was different), and the church bells were tolling. The focus of attention was a black hand-cart dripping sea-water onto the ground. I hopped up on the harbour wall to see what was in it; what was causing the dripping water; what was causing all this unseemly human
grief. It was Galandis’s body, of course. My sweet Galandis! He had drowned himself.

“The Captain joined me on the wall. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘That was your nice human friend, wasn’t it? They’re saying he jumped into the sea from his little fishing boat last night, and he had rocks in his pockets.’

“ ‘But why?’ I said.

“ ‘Who knows?’ shrugged the Captain. ‘Sometimes humans just lose the will to live.’

“Three more blameless Greek people, on three different islands, had to set the church bells tolling before it dawned on me that it wasn’t a coincidence. The fat man from the Post Office on Samos; the hairy-faced woman on Hydra who sold honey; the fisherman’s idiot son on Cephalonia with the public-nuisance shoe fetish – how peculiar, that every time I got to know a human being, he or she immediately
lost the will to live
! I thought for a while that it might be
me
– that I somehow infected these people with despair. But it must have been the Captain. He was possessive; he was a classic psychopath (obviously); and he had nothing but contempt for the average human. However, I never had evidence that he tampered with any of them – not Galandis, not the cuddly postman, not the honey-lady or the fisher-boy. The only time I saw him interfere directly with a human was in 1933, when we were strolling through the temple at Luxor on a fine afternoon and an American woman decided to take a photograph of us. ‘What enormous cats!’ she exclaimed and snapped the shutter. Well, the Captain wasn’t standing for that. And it was as if we had rehearsed it. He ran to her. She bent to stroke him. He slashed her leg. She screamed and dropped her camera, which he knocked away, in my direction. Then he streaked off and I quickly lay across the camera, as if asleep, while the woman was helped away, hobbling and bleeding, by the native guide.”

Roger laughs. Wiggy, rather uncertainly, joins in. He obviously feels he should say something.

“That was quick thinking on your part,” he says.

“Teamwork,” says Roger, with a sigh.

There is a sense that this is the end of the instalment. Wiggy scrapes his chair back (does he stand up?). But then Roger resumes.

“You’re right. Perhaps we should stop now. But you must be wondering why I wanted to visit Bloomsbury, and I suppose I ought to explain.”

“All right.” The chair is moved back.

“It’s about humans again. It began with – a boy.” Roger sounds different, suddenly. Less carefree; less in control. This is clearly not a happy story like the one about wantonly injuring a poor American tourist in Egypt. What if she got septicaemia? Roger doesn’t care, and Wiggy doesn’t think to ask. All Roger is concerned about is the “boy.”

“He was an English boy in glasses and long shorts,” he says. “And I spotted him at the Acropolis one day when I was on my own there. He was sitting on a piece of fallen masonry, in the midday sun, making an elaborate drawing of the Parthenon, working so hard on it that I was sure he was oblivious to everything else, certainly to me.”

“Why were you on your own? Where was the Captain?”

“On a bus to Piraeus. He’d gone to check the ferry times. We were leaving Athens the next day for Brindisi. The last words he said to me were –”

He stops. This is clearly emotional for him. “Sorry,” he says.

“Roger, if this is difficult for you –”

“I’m all right. But ten years with the Captain – well, I realise, now, they had made me … hubristic.”

Wiggy starts to say, “What?” but Roger carries on.

“And where better to suffer for your hubris than in one of
the greatest sites of Ancient Greece? This boy – I was really drawn to him, you see. And I’d got used to the insane idea that the only possible bad outcome from interacting with a human would be a bad outcome for
him
. With his glasses and sketchbook and grey socks, he reminded me of those nice intellectual Durrells on Corfu. I felt sorry for him because he was sitting in full sun without a hat! As it happened, the Captain and I had recently spotted an old panama hat left in the dust near to the site of the Chalkotheke, and in my concern for him I didn’t hesitate: I went and got it and dragged it over. It was possibly the nicest thing I’ve ever done for someone else. Well, how true it is that no good deed goes unpunished.

“The boy smiled, thanked me, and took the hat. Then he poured some cool water from a flask into a little bowl and gave it to me. I lapped it up, and he stroked my head. ‘You’re not a Greek cat, are you?’ he said. I purred, a bit uncertainly. And then he uttered the fateful words. ‘Ah-ha,’ he said. ‘I thought so.’ What did he mean? Why the ‘Ah-ha’? Did he think I’d replied to him? Up to this time, I’m sure I had never spoken human language to a human. I’m positive I didn’t speak to him! Yet somehow I did betray myself to that boy. It must have been clear that I understood what he said! Something I did gave me away!”

Roger’s voice, when it rises, is a yowl of anguish. Wiggy takes a deep breath. But he knows better than to interrupt Roger’s flow of thought.

“And then – oh it was vile,” Roger says, as steadily as he can. “He picked me up by the scruff of my neck and said, ‘I’ve read about cats like you.’ Then he produced some string from his pocket, and before I could do anything, he’d put a running slip-knot around my neck and was pulling me away.”

“No!” says Wiggy.

“Yes!” says Roger. “I yowled vehemently, and tried to fight
him, but he held me out at arm’s length; and that’s how I was marched away from the Acropolis, from the Captain, from all my happiness. No one lifted a finger to help me, despite my obvious distress. The Greek cats cheered. When we reached the bottom, the boy shoved me into a wicker basket; that same afternoon I was taken with a heap of other luggage to the port and put on a ship for England. In my panic, I kept repeating in my head those lines from Milton’s
Samson Agonistes
: