Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (7 page)

The colonel was so excited he nearly dropped the rod. His Adam's apple wobbled in his throat. He did all the wrong things, such as reeling in when he should have given the fish more line. In fact he made such a mess of it that in the end Steve Smith had to take the rod out of his hand. When he felt the huge power on the hook, Steve whistled. His own frail body responded with a surge of joy. Man and fish fought with each other. After twenty minutes an immense trout lay thrashing itself to death on the bottom-boards of the dinghy. The colonel gaped at it in awe.

There was nothing to be done then but row ashore. The colonel gave Steve Smith an extra fifty pence, over and above his fee, for his help. He stuffed the speckled bronze-and-silver-and-rose splendour into his bag; it was so huge the head and the tail stuck out.

A certain black cat had observed the drama from the door of the boatshed.

The colonel's only concern now was that this treasure of a trout should tip the scales at over twelve pounds. What if it was eleven pounds eight ounces! The colonel thought of cheating – of stuffing a sizeable stone into the trout's maw. But immediately he regretted it. He was, after all, an honourable man.

A little lithe black shadow flowed after the colonel, twenty yards behind, as the colonel strode on towards the hotel.

The monstrous fish was placed on the scales. The needle swung and hung and quivered upon twelve pounds four-and-a-half ounces! The colonel wept with joy. He embraced his enormous lady. “If I die tomorrow,” he half sang, “I die a happy man!”

Guests and hotel workers gathered round this king of trout. They nodded. They smiled. They admired. (Privately, each was sorry it hadn't been caught by somebody else.)

Mr Twamm the hotelier came out of his office and congratulated the colonel.

“Take that down!” said the colonel, indicating the prize trout caught in 1924.

“Remove it. Let room be made for my champion!”

“What a fuss,” said his daughter, “about a fish that nobody is going to eat!” (It wasn't that Constantine Stick was unromantic; she was genuinely and actively concerned for the poor and undernourished of this earth.)

The colonel frowned at Constantine. But then, his eye again lighting on his treasure, he summoned all present, even the kitchen boy, into the bar for a celebratory drink. It cost him all of twenty pounds sterling, in ringing toasts and pledges. Alfie the kitchen boy drank too much beer and had to go out and be sick among the rhododendrons. When he returned to the bar he was still half-tiddly. He muttered something about “a black cat whooping it up in the hall ...” But nobody at any time paid any attention to Alfie. The colonel called for a last round – “make it doubles this time” – whatever they wanted.

***

When the colonel stole out from the circles of drinkers to enjoy a private view of his heart's desire, the fish was not exactly down to a skeleton. That would have been an impossibility, even for a cat of Fankle's voracity and bottomless stomach. But several large gashes had been trenched in the splendid flank. It was as if a knife had been taken to the
Laughing Cavalier
. Ravages of speckled skin, tatters of flesh.

It was Mrs Stick who heard the low moan from the hall, under the bar chatter and clink of glasses. She had heard it perhaps twice before in her life, when the colonel had been
in extremis
, once when his Rhodesian shares had crashed and another time when he got an abscess in his jaw.

She said to Constantine, “Wait here.” She went out into the hall. She saw, beyond her hunched and broken husband, a black cat groaning with excess trout on top of the reception desk. Then the black cat looked over at the colonel, and it seemed, in spite of its sufferings, to smile.

Fankle lay curled and seemingly asleep under Mr Tindall's desk, a thing which happened frequently, for as often as not he accompanied Jenny to school, like Mary's lamb.

“Now,” said Mr Tindall, “are your pencils sharp? Start at a clean page in your jotters. Composition this morning.”

Most of the children groaned inwardly. Composition was not the favourite subject in that school.

“Dear me,” said Mr Tindall, “we seem to have tackled about every subject on earth. I'm stuck for a subject. Any suggestions?”

Jimmy Riddack whispered, “Fankle,” holding out a crumb of bread from his playtime piece. Fankle stirred, but slept on.

“Well, now, James,” said Mr Tindall, “I think that's a good idea. You will write an essay on Fankle the cat, a hundred words long. Begin.”

***

At the end of half an hour the pupils stood up one after the other and read their essays on Fankle aloud.

(All that Fred Kringle knew, after a hurried whispering session behind hands with Jenny, was that the cat's name began with “f.” He wrote down a large black F near the centre of the page. After a while he drew a sailing ship flying a jolly roger in one corner. In the opposite corner he drew what might pass for a pyramid. He drew, with deep concentration, a long spiky flame-breathing creature – a dragon, possibly. He drew, and rubbed out, a motor van. Finally Fred drew a full moon with smiling eyes above the hill ...

This essay could not be read out. Mr Tindall pinned it – Fankle's heraldry – to the blackboard.)

***

Fankle slept all through this recital, but from time to time

The snow came early that year. It came in the night, in great black whirls. It was still coming, at dawn, in great grey whirls. It was coming at noon, in great dazzling whirls.

When the children were let out of school at lunch time, their island was pure enchantment. Their island was all crystal and silver and swans-down. They ran into the snow, shrieking with joy ... They gathered snowballs; they pelted each other; they wept and laughed. Norman Fell got a snowball in his eye. Instead of scooping it out, like any other boy, he bawled as if he had been struck by an arrow, and he ran into the school to report Sammy Ingison for throwing the snowball at him.

Mr Tindall gave him a couple of sweets, and that silenced him. But when he came out to the ringing playground once more, the other children turned their backs on him. Norman, with a snivel or two, turned and began to trudge home through the great folds of whiteness.

Which was purer and colder that afternoon, the snow or the children's laughter, it would be difficult to say.

Every time the boys and girls laughed or shouted, their breath made little ghosts in the air.

At last they stopped the chaotic snow-fight. They were exhausted. Their hair and jerseys and trousers were covered with white crumbs. Their cheeks shone like apples.

“What we'll do now,” said Sammy Ingison, “is, we'll make a snowman!”

So, all twenty of them, aged between five and twelve, piled a snowman five feet high. They would have liked to make him ten feet high, or as high as the moon, but five feet was as high as they could manage. There he stood, a shapeless silver mass, only half-made, when Mr Tindall rang his bell for the resumption of classes.

***

“Norman, dear,” said his mother, “what are you doing out of school? Is something the matter?”

The little blue-faced wretch, that was all the encouragement he needed. He burst into tears. Between sobs, he told how he had been deliberately hit in the eye by a snowball flung by Sammy Ingison.

“That Sammy Ingison!” cried Mrs Fell. “A wicked boy he is, that's the truth! I'll have a word with his mother.”

“I was half-blind for a minute,” said Norman.

“No wonder, you poor dear,” said his mother. “You're too delicate for rough games like that. Just wait till I get my hands on Sammy Ingison. Winter's not a good time for your health. You'll stay at home beside the fire, dear, and read books and listen to the wireless, till the snow's all gone. Yes, you will. I'll write a note this very afternoon and send it along to Mr Tindall.”

***

The blackest shape on the island that day flowed silently down the hill in the direction of Inquoy. Fankle hated snow much more than Norman Fell did. He lifted his delicate feet through the white cold alien stuff. He thought with joy of the fire at Inquoy, and a saucer of warm milk. Fankle would not have been out at all, on such a dreamlike morning; but he was interested in certain young hares he had recently noted on the hill. As a matter of fact, his journey had been fruitless. The hares – he might have known it – were snug in their burrows.

Fankle's way home led past the school. Would he go in? No, he needed that warm milk. Fankle saw that the children had piled a great mass of snow in the centre of the playground. It could have been anything – a white monster, a ruined crystal castle on the moon, a frozen ghost. Fankle considered it for a while. He disliked it, even though Jenny must have had a hand in it. He gave the half-made snowman a baleful glare, then he flowed on, a black snow-hindered shape, in the direction of Inquoy.

Twenty blackbirds sang along the telegraph lines, “Look, we're the blackest things in the world, now the snow's here! There's no blackness in the world like ours! There isn't! We're intense blackness, thrilling blackness!”

Then they saw Fankle coursing home through the snow, and they stopped their boasting.

***

“I'll tell you what that boy is,” said Alistair Fell, “he's a coward! You pet him, you mollycuddle him, you give way to every whim that takes him. I'm ashamed of that boy. He'll go to the school tomorrow. What would do Norman the world of good is a fight – a fist fight, with black eyes and bloody noses. Hit by a snowball, was he? Hit in his precious eye? By Sammy Ingison. What the precious darling should have done was take a fistful of snow and ram it down Sammy Ingison's jersey. And then ram another fistful between his teeth. The coward!”