Cat Out of Hell Read online

  “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:

  “Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed

  As of a person separate to God,

  Designed for great exploits, if I must die

  Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out,

  Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze;

  To grind in brazen fetters under task

  With this heaven-gifted strength?

  “Gosh,” says Wiggy, impressed.

  “Well, I admit, not everything in that passage fitted my exact predicament.”

  “But the gist – ?”

  “Exactly!” Roger is pleased, for once, with Wiggy’s grasp of essentials. “Yes, what I’ve found so often in life is that recollecting poetry at key moments is all about the gist. Why, I asked myself. Basically, why was I made so special if I was going to end up in a cat basket?”

  Wiggy makes a sympathetic noise.

  “So there I was. Not eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, but defeated by the tiny buckle that kept the door of a simple wicker basket closed! I had no way of telling the Captain what had happened. I just had to hope he would return to the Acropolis and that somehow he would work out where I’d gone.

  “Poor Captain.”

  “Yes.”

  “And poor you, of course.”

  “Thank you, Wiggy. I’m afraid I do think ‘Poor me,’ even though, on the voyage, I suppose I was treated well enough. The boy’s parents were academics who had the best literary conversations I’d ever heard, although they were far too soft on Robert Browning for my taste. The boy was not neglectful of me – he just made me very anxious. I could hardly forget that he had read about cats like me. But here’s the point. When we arrived back in England, we came straight to London, and I escaped – and came straight to Bloomsbury.”

  “How did you manage it? The escape?”

  “Oldest trick in the book, I’m afraid. Laundry basket.”

  “And why Bloomsbury?”

  “I suppose I only had one idea. Where would the Captain think to look for me? I’d worked it out on the voyage – he’d last seen me at the Parthenon, so the obvious place was the London home of the Parthenon marbles!”

  “Oh, that’s clever.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are they anything like the Elgin Marbles?”

  “The Parthenon Marbles and the Elgin Marbles are the same thing, Wiggy.”

  Wiggy says nothing.

  “So that was my thinking, for right or wrong, and the British Museum was my actual home both during the war and for a long time after. Even when all the objects were evacuated, I stayed put. I still visit as often as I can. I am proud to say that I know the lay-out of the Enlightenment Gallery better than I know the back of my own paw.

  “The boy became an academic himself, in time. I followed his progress. He specialised in pre-Christian attitudes to animals – in particular, their relationship to the afterlife – as companions, and so on. He co-wrote a masterly work on the subject with a quite famous historian, and he also once wrote an affectionate piece in the Times Higher Education Supplement about the cat he had found at the Acropolis which later (or so he’d been told) lived wild in the British Museum, even throughout the Blitz. This cat had inspired him, he said. Well, as if I gave a damn about that! All I knew was that he grew up, he got older; in the fullness of time, he grew old. I, by contrast, have remained exactly the same, aside from becoming (if I may say so) much, much cleverer than he could ever be. But what he did, when he abducted me from Greece, was ultimately to draw to him the wrath of the Captain. He lives still, but it’s a miracle, and I have reason to believe that he doesn’t have long.”

  MORE STUFF

  (by Wiggy)

  Sergeant Duggan brought the phone back with pretty extraordinary news. It had been urinated on, by a cat, while it was charging! Whoa. The effect was basically to electrocute the insides of the phone. Duggan said he’d never heard of anything like it. I said, truthfully, I bloody well hadn’t either.

  “Imagine!” he said. “Why would a cat want to wee on a phone?”

  I was just asking myself the same question when Roger happened to saunter into the kitchen, as if by coincidence, and the policeman (knowing not who he was dealing with) reached down and picked him up. It was, I have to say, a brilliant moment.

  “Who’s been a naughty cat, then? Who’s been a naughty ickle cat?”

  Roger looked at me over the policeman’s shoulder. I waggled my eyebrows at him. He glowered. It was hilarious.

  “Can’t have animals at home. Daughter’s allergic,” Duggan said, bending to put Roger down. I fleetingly wondered whether any of the great poets ever wrote anything that covered the ignominy of that particular situation. I’d be very surprised if they had.

  “Er, did they retrieve anything from the Sim thing?” I asked, trying to show a polite interest. I think the policeman realised quite a while back that I had no idea what a ‘Sim thing’ was.

  “Ah, now,” he said. And he gave Roger a last pat on the head as he straightened up. “Now, because it’s an iPhone, there’s nothing stored on the Sim card apart from account data.”

  Roger curled up on a nearby chair, as if unconcerned.

  “All the interesting and useful stuff – things like messages, photos, voice memos, map references – they would have been stored on the phone itself, which, as we know, was destroyed, burned out –”

  “By the peeing?”

  “Yes, the inside of the phone was sort-of electrocuted when it was unfortunate enough to come into contact with electricity and cat urine at the same time.”

  I looked at Roger. He was doing a bit of grooming, but with his ears pricked up for every word. What a cool customer. However, he wasn’t prepared for what the bloke revealed next.

  “But fortunately, all is not lost!” he announced. And God, it was funny to see Roger’s reaction. He fell off the chair.

  “What? Oh fuck!” he said, aloud.

  I suppose it slipped out. I gasped. Duggan looked at me, and said, “What did you say?”

  So I had to impersonate Roger, with his Vincent Price voice and everything. I laughed. “Sorry, officer. I just said, ‘What? Oh fuck!’ It’s a funny family catch-phrase, that’s all.”

  I could see he was confused, but he let it pass.

  “You were saying all is not lost,” I prompted.

  He frowned at me. “Yes, well. Mo
st people ‘sync’ their phones with their computers. In many cases nowadays, it happens automatically when the phone is in range of the computer in the house. And if your sister did that, we can ‘sync’ this replacement phone.” He held one up. “And then we can find out at least what was on her other phone the last time she plugged it in. Do you see?”

  “Blimey,” I said. “So whoever peed on the phone – they didn’t think of that?” I couldn’t help rubbing it in a bit. I was enjoying seeing how this news was affecting Roger. His tail was thrashing about like nobody’s business.

  The policeman was surprised. “I don’t suppose he did it on purpose, did you, ickle puss, ickle puss, ickle puss?” He reached for Roger again, but Roger backed off.

  “Can we do it now?” I asked. “The syncing thing?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Shall I – ?”

  I said absolutely, and he was just going upstairs when his own phone beeped with a text message. He stopped to read it. And I’ll remember the moment for ever, I think. Up to that point, I was still enjoying Roger’s discomfort. It was great being in on it, if you know what I mean. He had hopped up on the table, and I was stroking his head like a normal cat-owner, saying to Roger in a normal talking-to-animals kind of way, “The nice policeman’s going to ‘sync’ Jo’s phone upstairs, Roger. This might clear up the mystery of where she’s gone.” And he was pretending he didn’t understand a word anyone was saying.

  “Any news?” I said, when the policeman had finished reading his text.

  “Not relevant to this, no. Sorry,” he said. “Silly, really. We thought we’d just check whether this cat-peeing-on-a-charging-phone thing had ever been recorded before as part of, you know, ‘suspicious circumstances.’ ”

  I felt Roger’s body go tense under my hands.

  “And?”

  “It turns out, it has. Oh well. There’s nothing original in this world, I suppose.”