Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (17 page)

Feeling as if I was walking through a minefield, I pussyfooted my way down the fictitious path until I was under the eaves, without setting any sirens off or seeing the floodlights turn the place into a set for a movie about the world's most impregnable maximum security jail. Relieved and still rather weak at the knees, I took a quick glance at my immediate surroundings. The neat, tidy look of the front of the house was not kept up at the back. There was any amount of old junk assembled under the eaves - or perhaps it was stuff that someone didn't quite like to throw away. Towers of file binders, indefinable electronic odds and ends, and in particular plastic tubs for medicinal preparations were all stacked there like bankrupt stock. My knowledge of pharmacology was limited, but I thought that a hurried sideways look at the printed directions suggested these tubs had contained medicaments to treat some kind of epidemic. However, much of the rubbish consisted of various utensils and other items which didn't fit into the picture of a business that had folded. There were flattened tubes of paint, frames containing ragged, half-painted canvases, and paintbrushes hopelessly gummed up, all suggesting that whoever lived here wasn't an entrepreneur gone bust but a creative artist seeking inspiration in nature.

All these impressions, which somehow refused to harmonise into a whole, heightened my curiosity, and against my better judgement I decided on a detailed investigation. Still keeping close to the wall, I moved round to the front of the house and then clambered silently up to the wooden veranda. Once there, I got up on my hind legs and pulled myself up to the window-sill next to the front door by my forepaws.

The scene I saw through the open window was far from sensational, but like my first impressions it didn't seem quite consistent with itself. A very thin woman, almost six feet tall, was working frantically away at a huge landscape painting on an easel. Unfortunately I could only see her from behind. She was wearing a black cape like a caftan, and her greying, wavy, carefully combed hair streamed down her back to her hips. Now and then she nervously snatched up her cigarette - not a filter-tipped brand - from the overflowing ashtray standing on a small table and dragged on it with desperate intensity.

Two things, however, pointed up that sense of inconsistency I mentioned. The wall behind the easel was occupied by an enormous set of shelves, every last centimetre of them holding carefully numbered video cassettes. However, the small television set in the room, which itself was only dimly lit by an old-fashioned reading lamp, wasn't at all what you'd expect a video freak to use, although it stood on top of a video recorder which looked particularly luxurious by comparison. All this concentrated audiovisual equipment was like a foreign body in a room which otherwise featured the gear of an artist with a Spartan lifestyle. The other oddity was the picture on the easel. This painting, a woodland scene, had been daubed on the canvas without the faintest spark of talent. It was absolutely terrible. Pairs of eyes glowed between gloomy trees; the artist's models seemed to have been feline orbs. They stared out at the real world almost demonically, like the sick products of a paranoid imagination. Not a trace of artistic quality, but obviously that didn't bother the painter. Dragging on her cigarette as if under some dreadful compulsion, working manically away, she sloshed colours - most of them sombre in hue - on the threatening forest scene she'd already painted as if to drive some kind of evil spirits out of it. You couldn't help seeing that this was some kind of self-therapy.

My spying activities, which were getting to be rather tedious, were suddenly interrupted when my claws inadvertently scratched the wood of the window-sill and gave me away. The painter's head shot round towards me with the lightning speed of a lizard. The face I saw for the fraction of a second scared the living daylights out of me. It was ageless, yet like an old woman's. It reminded me of the faces of children suffering from that mysterious ailment the Methuselah syndrome. Although she was probably in her late forties there was a childlike curiosity in her eyes, yet that curiosity went hand in hand with a vague fear. However, any gleam in those eyes seemed to have been extinguished, and the woman's features were frozen like the face of an ice queen.

Belonging as I do to a species which has made a fine art of developing the niceties of invisibility, I slipped soundlessly down from the window-sill and got underneath it. I heard footsteps above me. They had to mean that the woman was now hurrying over to the window to find out what had caused the sound. After an anxious interval the steps retreated again; obviously her glance outside had borne no fruit.

Of course I could have turned my back on this odd house and its even odder inhabitant at this point and gone on my way. But I was still tempted by the other dimly lit window, up on the first floor. Who knew, I might meet some delightful human there who skinned my kind alive and then roasted their tender flesh over a romantic camp fire while playing
For We Will A-Hunting Go
on the mouth organ. I couldn't let a chance like that slip, now could I? I spotted a tree growing near the veranda; its largest branch bent down towards the eaves of the roof. It didn't look difficult to climb the tree, do a balancing act well within my powers along the branch to the slope of the roof, and then nip in through the window.

No sooner said than done. Once I was up on the tiles after a ridiculously easy manoeuvre, my paws led me straight to the open window, which showed a softly flickering light. Having reached it, I cautiously put my nose into the room. I'd already noticed that this was an odd house, but by comparison with what my astonished glance now beheld, everything I'd seen so far was the flattest normality. To be honest, at first I doubted my own reason, because the sight that met my eyes strongly reminded me of humorous depictions of my species. Believe it or not, but in this room, which was lit by several candles burning in antique branched candlesticks, magic and fairy-tale had really come true, along with a touch of the facetiousness human beings like to project into my kind.

Another member of my species was seated at a solid desk in the old English style. He was obviously male, and of the Somali breed. He was sitting up on his hindquarters in the middle of a chaotic arrangement of open books, untidy papers and inkwells whose contents had been sprinkled all over the desk in large blots. As a long-haired variant of the Abyssinian breed, he had fur of a lustrous apricot colour, thick and slightly shaggy without being at all woolly in appearance. Rather oddly, there was a fine film of moisture on his coat, as if he'd just taken it out of the washing-machine, and a damp patch had also formed around the spot where he was sitting. Although he came of very good pedigree, as you could see from his bushy tail and full ruff, there was something scholarly about his appearance, or perhaps I should say something of the dotty professor. Apart from the shelves lining the walls, full of very old-looking books, he was surrounded by various peculiar objects: wooden totems and primitive masks representing animal gods from Africa, Australian spear throwers and other exotic hunting gear, even genuine shrunken heads. The place felt like an ethnologist's lumber room.

However, what really rocked me back on my heels wasn't this old colonial junk, reminiscent of vanished worlds in the muted candlelight. No, it was the sight of the Somali himself that made my jaw drop in amazement. In spite of his wild origins he appeared to be a confirmed ink-slinger in the most literal sense of the term. What do I mean? Well, it was fascinating to watch! With all the skill of a poet of the Romantic era, he dipped the middle claw of his right paw in the inkwell and then used it to scribble on the sheets of paper in front of him. The velvety fur of his paw acted as a blotter to sop up the ink, and I assumed that he'd sharpened the claw to give it a fibrous texture so that he could use it like a quill pen. Every now and then the writer stopped to think, raised his writing paw in imitation of a great mind meditating, until the Muse seemed to descend again, whereupon he nodded and eagerly resumed work. What on earth was he writing? His memoirs? His doctoral thesis? Or the definitive book on our species and its ways?

My head was whirling, and I felt positively dizzy as I stared open-mouthed at this king of wise guys. But His Majesty was good for yet another surprise. Although I'd taken a lot of trouble to exercise the utmost caution as I prowled around in secret-agent mode, it soon transpired that he could outdo me in even the most primitive matters of instinct. As if his skull had a built-in monitor of its own, he suddenly started, turned swiftly in my direction, and I found him staring right into my astonished face.

We screeched at one and the same time. Don't ask me why, but both the Somali and yours truly were so alarmed by our abrupt eye contact that caterwauling seemed the only thing to do. However, the ink-slinger was clearly in the grip of some much worse anxiety, something which made his whole body vibrate as if caught in an earthquake.

'Please do-do-don't kill me, brother! It was only a jo-jo-joke!' he begged after he'd stopped yowling. As he spoke he put both forepaws up in the air as if I were holding a pistol to his nose.

'Then don't you write anything about my reactions just now, brother! It wouldn't look good in my biography,' I begged him in return.

'Y-y-you mean you won't punish me?'

His face, its apricot glow distorted with alarm, began to brighten and took on the expression of a crotchety old owl again.

'Of course not. Good heavens, they let even the most avant-garde writers live these days! I'm a law-abiding character.'

He frowned, as if baffled. 'Some th-th-things should be explained, stranger.'

I suspected that his stammer was not because of the shock of our meeting. Even at the risk of disturbing him yet more, I took a step into the room. The alarm system outside was making me a trifle nervous.

'Why would I want to hurt a relative? Anyway, I only ever kill on special occasions.'

He calmed down again, put his paws back on the desk and smiled broadly.

'I ge-ge-get the idea. Obviously all just a mis-mis-misunderstanding! My name is Ambrosius. I'm a seeker after knowledge in the field of ESP.'

Hang on a moment! A certain Alcina had introduced me to the bitter-sweet pangs of jungle fever. She had told me that her mother was called Aurelia, and now I met Ambrosius. What was all this - some kind of medieval Scrabble? Well, why not? After all, there seemed to be Black Knights lurking outside. I wouldn't have been surprised if that autumn crocus of a woman downstairs had suddenly come flying into the room on a broomstick.

'Well, pleased to meet you. My name's Francis, and I'm a seeker after knowledge in the field of CTF.'

'CTF?'

'Commercial Tinned Food.'

'I s-s-see. Come on in, Francis. I th-th-think I can help you there.'

Stepping back, he pointed to a corner of the room with his paw. I jumped from the window-sill to the desk and looked that way. The beautiful sight took my breath away. I saw a plastic bowl the size of a swimming pool containing a Mount Everest of chopped meat. There was also plenty of dried food and a bowl of water. It all went to prove no less than the existence of God. I put up a silent and joyful 'Halleluia!' and then, casting good manners aside, I fell upon the spread even before Ambrosius could invite me to tuck in. Only as I sank my teeth into these delicacies did I realise how close I'd been to perishing of hunger and thirst. The stressful activities of flight and mating had drained my body of strength, and my short sleep hadn't made up the deficiency. What I felt during that orgiastic banquet could be described in a single word, a word not much used these days: gratitude. I felt the deepest gratitude to the friend who had seen my need and was instantly ready to share what he had. Indeed, I loved this stammerer. The title of Your Oddity might seem too conventional for him, but he possessed an organ found in fewer and fewer of our contemporaries today: a heart. The only trouble was, I had my mouth too full to express this fervent gratitude.

When at last the bowls were empty, because I hadn't left even a scrap for Mr Manners, and I had delivered my culinary verdict in the form of a satisfied belch that seemed to go on for ever, I got it out. 'Thanks, Ambrosius! You saved my life. And that's not just a manner of speaking, friend.'

'It t-t-takes a bi-bi-bit more than that to save a life, Francis. Glad you enjoyed it. I li-li-live in luxury myself. My companion Diana ha-ha-has gone a bit funny in the head since burying herself in this forest. But the le-le-less normal she got, the more care she lavished on her little da-da-darling.'

It was on the tip of my tongue to remark that her little darling didn't exactly seem to represent the normal EG reading of mental health either, but I managed to swallow my words at the last moment.

'Listen, Ambrosius, I've already seen some odd things about here, even apart from your own amazing skills. For instance, I never heard of a great painter obsessively hoarding thousands of video cassettes before. I suppose she even watches the stupid things too.'

I jumped up on the desk again and took a quick squinny at the handwritten - sorry, paw-written - effusions of my generous host. The contents of those scattered sheets of paper might contain the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but calligraphy was not their author's strong point. They looked more like coded secret messages from the likes of Dr Mabuse. The writing itself was very thin, in accordance with the nature of the writing implement, but the author also seemed to have developed a preference for an ant-like, miniature script such as particularly unsympathetic human eggheads use. Arrows linked the separate entries, as if they were all in some kind of sequence. However, before I could examine the manuscripts more closely Ambrosius lay down sideways on them, obstructing my view, and began calmly licking the ink off his claw. Perhaps he was addicted to the stuff. I couldn't be sure if he had suddenly settled into this comfortable position spontaneously, or if he just wanted to keep me from poking my snotty nose into what was none of my business.