The Knot Garden by Gabriel King
At last, Dellifer let her charge go and tutted again. ‘Shall I pull it out for you, my dear?’ she offered suddenly, with a glint in her eye. She flexed her toes and an array of surprisingly well-kept claws sprang into view.
Vita looked horrified. ‘No!’ She backed up against the fridge. ‘Besides, I want to show Orlando: he never takes me seriously; thinks I’m just a baby.’ She wagged her head from side to side to feel the jewellery brush her ear.
Dellifer’s eyes became misty. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ She brushed a paw across her face, and when she looked back at her charge again her eyes were hard and clear. ‘Vita, listen to me, and listen well. You’ll never gain true beauty by suffering or inflicting hurt, missy: the world holds pain enough, and to add to it wilfully and for such small reason, is both reckless and wicked. Beauty comes from the inside, that’s what my mother always told me; and I have learned by hard lessons that she is right. What does it matter if your fur is as silky as a mouse’s ear, or your eyes as bright as a star; if your whiskers are as long as summer grass or your paws as neat as daisies, so long as your essence is spoiled and tainted? Such outward things are just empty fancy that fade and fall as the years sail by. It’s only those whose souls please the Great Cat who can ever be considered truly lovely: the ones with a light inside themselves, a light that blazes out clear and true as a beacon to those in need. Wisdom is what makes you grown. Vita my dear; and wisdom’s hard to come by. Earning it takes years of experiencing the world and judging which actions to take based on that experience. It’s not age makes you grown; and it’s certainly not some silly gewgaw a-bobbling in your ear. Don’t you go bothering your brother with your self-indulgence. There’s a cat who’s out there learning those hard lessons, my dear: he’s got more on his mind than such fripperies. A lot more.’
But Vita had given up listening to this tedious moral lecture almost immediately. The idea of being considered reckless and wicked just for the sake of a tiny little earring was so plainly ridiculous that she thought Dellifer must be quite mad. She sat there with her face composed in a rigid expression that was supposed to convey concentration; and as soon as her guardian finished speaking, she trotted out of the kitchen, through the cat-door and into the garden, where she had just remembered there was a waterlogged plant pot in which she might be able to see her reflection.
*
I stared at the tooth for a long time. Then, with a shudder, I picked it up and carried it the few paces to the base of the oak and carefully buried it in the soft mulch there.
When it was safely hidden from view, I lay down on top of it, as if the weight of my body would somehow keep at bay the implications of its violent and unusual appearance.
After a while, I dozed; then finally fell into a disturbed and fitful sleep. And as I slept, I dreamed:
I dreamed I had entered a wild road that somehow ran above the ground, where I found myself hovering like a silent kestrel searching for prey. When I looked about I could see the village, though I was looking at it through a mist: everything was slightly hazy, but if I blinked and concentrated I found that the object I was looking at would come into better focus, leaving my peripheral vision as misty as ever. It was an odd sensation, but after a few moments I forgot about it and began to enjoy my unusual vantage point. From here (wherever I was) I could see all the way down the road to the cottages on the corner, to the stand of ash trees that obscured the bend there, and beyond that across the wide green fields that stretched to Glory Farm. In the opposite direction I could make out the spire of the church emerging from the dark yews of the churchyard, and, much further away, and with hardly any cottage in between, the gates of the old manor house. Between the church and the common, where Anna’s cottage and its two neighbours should have stood, set back a few feet from the road behind their chintzy little gardens of herringbone brick and aromatic herbs, there was nothing but open ground, grazed by a number of scruffy-looking sheep.
I squinted.
The façade of the cottage opposite the pond looked curiously new and unstained; and the roof-windows where the children sometimes leaned out and catapulted nuts at passers-by were missing. Then I noticed that the illuminated box that stood on the corner, into which people went and talked, had also vanished, leaving nothing in its wake but a bank of hazels, newly budded catkins hanging like lambs’ tails.
The road, too, was different: somehow unfinished-looking and dusty, full of small stones and deep ruts. And not a single car to be seen anywhere: not parked along the side of the road, nor gathered outside the school, nor even emerging from garages or driveways. There was no sign of the big black car next door, nor the gleaming blue vehicle of the family up the road; and in the area I recognised as the pub car park there was only a large wooden cart and a broken-down old horse chewing in a resigned fashion on a patch of thistles.
The familiarities of the scene jarred painfully. It was my home; and yet, somehow, it was entirely strange to me. But how could it be my home, if there was no home to go to? I pondered this for a while before the consequences of such a situation sank in. If this was not my home, and I could see no way back to that place I regarded as my home, I would never see Vita again; nor Dellifer, nor Anna, nor my grandfather; nor the lads by the garages; nor Liddy; nor even the little long-legged cat with the interesting smell.
At this realisation I felt a moment of pure panic, followed by a wave of terrible loneliness.
I was just giving in to this rush of self-pity when my eye was caught by a movement from a low stone wall on the opposite side of the road. A small white cat had leapt up there and had started to clean her face. She looked rather as Dellifer might have done in another life, I thought dreamily: more rounded where the old cat was thin and angular, but with the same tilt to her cheek, the same slightly upturned eyelids. As I watched, she licked a paw and rubbed it prettily down the side of her head, as if aware of being the centre of a male cat’s attention. She was young and neat and daintily proportioned: apart from a vast swell of belly which filled the entire width of the wall.
Kittens! I thought, and a maudlin sorrow flowed through me. My own mother had once looked like this cat, though she had not been white; she, too had once sat on sun-warmed stone and groomed herself in this careful fashion. Her tongue had probably run right over me and Vita, blind and tiny inside her. I felt a little moan escape me; and as I did so, the white cat looked up and stared straight at me.
She had eyes the colour of forget-me-nots, eyes the colour of the wide summer sky. Dellifer’s eyes.
She jumped down from the wall, and with her tail high in the air and her feet planted with neat precision, began to cross the wide dusty road towards me.
At that moment, something came hurtling around the corner past the ash trees, and the sound of its passage split the silence of the village like thunderclaps on a clear day. Great gouts of dust shot up into the air, obscuring its true shape; then, horrifyingly, it appeared right in front of me. Four huge galloping horses, their eye-whites showing stark against their dark faces as they strained against the cruel metal of their bits, came crashing into view; and behind them, attached to them, came a vast black coach, its sides so spattered with mud as to largely obscure the ornate family crest worked in colourful detail on its door.
‘Run!’ I cried, but the white cat paid me no heed.
She never stood a chance. It seemed she did not even hear the carriage as it bore down upon her, for in the middle of the road she stopped and mewed up at me, as if in greeting. Seeing the little cat in their path, the horses skittered wildly, determined not to crush her with their great hooves; but the sight of these vast creatures so suddenly upon her appeared to shock her so badly that she leapt sideways in panic. For a second I saw her – startlingly white amidst all the black – and thought she had escaped injury. Then the first of the enormous wheels went over her and I could see her no more.
At once the carriage came to a shrieking halt and one of i
I held my breath.
For a few seconds, maybe four or five, the pregnant cat struggled, her hind legs twitching as if she believed herself in another existence to be running out of harm’s way. Then all the life went out of her in a rush and she sagged, a limp ghost of a cat against the dark fabric of the cloak.
The woman’s hands were busy. Her fingers were prodding at the distended white belly as if she might somehow save a life; but when she realised that the little cat had indeed been carrying young her hands fell still, clutching the dead creature to her like some hideous trophy. Already, it had left a dusting of white hairs against the deep black velvet of her dolman.
All my breath hissed out of me. The little white cat had died and it was my fault. My fault! She had seen me – where I was – and come to speak to me; and now she was dead.
While I was thinking this, a sudden wind whipped up out of nowhere, shaking the catkins in the hazel hedge so that they danced and twirled, making the branches of the ash tree rattle; and then the woman’s wide hood fell back upon her shoulders, to reveal a long, pale face, with skin as translucent as porcelain, framed by hair as black as night.
It was a face I recognised.
And as if she felt my eyes upon her, the woman, as the little white cat had done before her, stared straight up at me, her gaze as cold and hard as emeralds. My body went chill from the inside out. Whether or not she was truly able to see me, I did not know; for as she looked up and searched the air above her, I awoke with a start, my heart hammering painfully against my ribcage. But the image I retained in the nightmares that came whenever I fell into any sleep deep enough to enable me to dream for the next week or so was not the horrifying sight of the little white cat being crushed to death beneath the wheels of the great black carriage, but the sight of that face, mouth open wide in some transcendent emotion – amazement, maybe; or triumph.
Despite her porcelain beauty and apparent youth, there was not a tooth left in her head.
20
It was rare that Dellifer made excursions into the outside world, but today she crossed the dandelioned and mossy lawn, past the untidy lavenders and the stark rose bushes, noting even in mid-stride how in the space of just a year the wood of the plants had extended another inch or so up the stem; another inch of dead wood in which the thorns would thicken and harden to great uncompromising claws; another inch which would, for all the care Anna lavished, never produce another shoot or bud. That was how she felt, she thought suddenly: an elderly cat, long past her best; sucked dry by litter after litter of motherless kittens, with her blood thinning and her joints stiffening, and less and less life left to run in her. Nine lives! What sort of nonsense was all that? She smiled to herself, and for an instant there was a glimpse of the young queen tomcats had fought over down the generations. Or maybe it was the memory of one tomcat in particular that brought that smile to her face.
For all her years, though, she leapt up the fence and on to the top of the old shed, with its peeling white boards and air of neglect, with a grace born of long experience of judging height and distance. Something had called her out there; something that made her skin twitch and her nose alert; but now, gazing about her, she couldn’t imagine what it might be. She took in the cottage, with its warm red bricks and crumbling mortar; the leaded windows glinting in the chill sun; the curl of smoke from the fire in the snug, and sighed. Her job here was done: she had raised the two kittens to something approaching adulthood, and it had to be admitted that they no longer needed her. There seemed little reason to stay: sentiment, maybe; or a promise long given that might never be kept, and possibly a certain self-interest; for of all the places she had passed through on her journey, she would miss this cottage and its inhabitants most. The woman had been kind to her, despite difficult circumstances; and her charges had not been the most troublesome of her long career. Young Vita was turning into quite a handful, but it was only to be expected, at that awkward age. The fancies would soon pass, once she had kittens of her own. Having children made you more aware of the priorities in life, Dellifer thought. She’d never had any herself, not in this life, but she’d looked after enough of other cats’ litters to know the truth of the matter. And through it all, she kept producing milk. One of the Great Cat’s little miracles, she often said. Though it might have more to do with the strange-tasting food the woman at the big house had fed her during the long, strange stay. All those kittens...
Dellifer blinked away her thoughts.
She settled deeper on to her paws and sank into that restful state which cats achieve so easily and humans hardly at all, when the body relaxes itself into the flow of the world and the mind becomes a tranquil pool; and sat, as the sun went down and the first glow of the moon spread itself across the sky, as unblinking as a sphinx on a desert plain.
*
I, meanwhile, was approaching a place I had long avoided. I hadn’t a thought for my kindly foster mother in my head: no, I was intent upon other concerns entirely.
I made my way to the canal from the common, through mazes of highways and the thin, dank foliage of winter, following a scent-map as familiar to me as my own heart.
The dream of the death of the little white cat under the wheels of the black carriage, of the bizarrely young, yet toothless woman, had disturbed me in a way I could not define to myself. Even now, some days later, it nagged at me, buzzing at the edges of my mind like a great black and gold bee, freighted with information I could not decode.
Was Liddy beyond the reach of harm? I had to know.
I came out on to the towpath a little further up from my usual track, and emerged from the brambles and dead bracken into a place of silence and obscurity. It was the canal’s most elusive hour, when all things are undependable and it is hard, even for a cat, to tell what is shadow, what wave, or wood. Dark shapes sat at unexpected angles, in different configurations from my last memory of the place. Pale gleams between the blacker areas suggested empty moorings, abandoned berths. Nothing moved: not a breath of wind, not a rill of water. I sniffed the air.
A patchwork of scents came back to me: tar and oil; cats of all kinds; humans, too. Usually, I would have picked the golden thread of Liddy’s scent out from among the others in a second; but so many nights out on the highways catching and gulping down the horde of nightmares that had descended on Ashmore over the last week had left my senses slow and befuddled. I sniffed again.
There!
Her scent. Liddy’s. It was faint, but even so it was as clear as a crow in an empty sky to a cat obsessed.
Liddy’s houseboat lay in its usual place, though the neighbours on either side were gone. Lulled by inexplicable optimism and a sudden deep calm that wrapped my racing heart, I trotted to the edge of the towpath and called softly into the night.
‘Liddy! Liddy, come out...!’
Nothing stirred on board the narrowboat.
I walked from one end of it to the other, before I caught a new scent. New, but not unfamiliar. I dropped my nose to the ground and followed it, trying to pinpoint its origin. The scent was human: that much I could perceive at once; female, too. I opened my mouth and inhaled deeply. Anna! I could smell Anna. I felt a shiver run through me, a mixture of emotions and images: a gentle hand in my fur, a face looming close but unthreatening above me; food offered and accepted freely, a familiar voice calling in the dusk. But underlying the smell of Anna, another, older scent, fusty and indeterminate, like something that has been stored for too long. I sensed a faint recognition of this scent too: so
I was still brooding confusedly on this when there was a movement above me.
Liddy!
I looked up with a leap of the heart. Moonlight licked off a shiny eye. I found that I could not speak. I craned my neck for a better view of my beloved and from above there came a hiss.
I backed off a little way, stared along the darkened deck. The hissing stopped, and the narrowboat yielded only indistinct shadow to my scrutiny.
‘It’s all right, Liddy, it’s only me, Orlando. I came to see if you were all right, and to apologise. I let you down, and I’m sorry, truly I am. I shouldn’t have run off like that: I don’t know why I did it – I just couldn’t seem to help myself. Dreamcatching is a terrible burden, Liddy, and it has made me miserable thinking about that night. I know I don’t deserve another chance, but, oh, Liddy, if you only knew how terribly I’ve missed you. I’m sure you’d take pity on me and let me see you again...’
From the deck there came a sort of cackle.
I examined the shadows with indignation. ‘There’s no need to make it worse than it is,’ I said, feeling miffed. ‘I do have some pride, even if I’ve come crawling back here. You might have the grace to hear me out without making fun of me. I’ve tried not to think of you, but it’s no good. I even hurt a friend because of you, and I didn’t mean to do that, either.’ I hung my head. ‘The truth is, Liddy, I’m hopeless around females. I just don’t know what to do, or say, or even think. I feel confused all the time. All I need to know is that you like me, just a little; that you could try to forgive me.’