Unexpected Magic (33 page)

I
am lucky enough to own a wizard who talks to me. Henry knows that we cats do not like being taken by surprise. This is how I know all about my early life, when I was much too young to remember.

Henry lives in an old farm in the hills above Ettmoor and he works three days a week for the Science Institute down in the valley. It is very secret work, he says, because the Government does not want it generally known that they do magical research, but they pay him quite well. Henry is an excellent wizard. But he is far too kindhearted for his own good.

At the time Henry came into my possession, a young lady—who, even Henry admits, was taking advantage of him horribly—had just moved out of the farm, taking with her all four of her brothers, her mother, and Henry's prize pigs. The only person left was Henry's great-aunt Harriet, who lives by herself in the cottage in the yard. Henry was lonely.

He tried keeping hens for company. He still has these, but all they give him is eggs. (Hens, if you are an innocent town cat, have sharp claws like we do and a very sharp bit on the front of their heads. A cat has to be careful around hens).

Henry tried to console himself for the sudden quiet emptiness in the farm by buying a CD player and twenty operas, but he was still lonely. He went for long walks. He tells me that the hills are excellent for walking in, and this may be true, but I have never tried it. It always seems to rain when Henry goes walking.

That particular day it was raining relentlessly, the kind of rain that is mixed up with mist and gets into all your crannies. Henry says he enjoyed it! He tramped along with his beard dripping on his chest, listening to the pattering of drops in the bracken and the gurgling of all the mountain streams, until he came to the place where the path goes over a rocky shoulder and a storm drain goes under the path. Henry says he could hear the drain rushing from a long way off. He thought this was the reason he couldn't properly hear what the black lady was saying. The water was thundering under the path when he got near. He wondered what an old West Indian woman was doing so far up in the hills, particularly as she seemed quite dry, but she loomed out of the mist so suddenly and she was beckoning him so urgently that he didn't have time to wonder much.

He thought she said, “Hurry
up
, man!” and pointed downward to where the storm drain came off the hill, but he was not sure.

But he galloped to where she was pointing, where he was just in time to see a tiny sodden slip of fur go sluicing down the drain and vanish under the road. He rushed to the other side of the path and went crashing down the bank, expecting me to come swirling out of the drain any second. In fact, I had caught on a stone about a foot inside the drain. I was buried in yellow frothy bubbles and practically camouflaged. Henry says he would never have found me if I hadn't had four white feet and one white ear. He plunged to his knees in the water and groped up the pipe until he had hold of me. He says I was frozen. Then he stood up, raining water from knees, elbows, and beard, and shouted up at the black lady, “Here's the kitten you dropped, madam!”

There was no sign of the lady. Henry floundered back to the path—with great difficulty, because he had me cupped in both hands and didn't want to hurt me—and stared into the mist both ways along the path and then up and down the hills, but there was no West Indian woman anywhere. He couldn't understand it. But he said he couldn't let that bother him for long, because it was obviously urgent to get me somewhere warm and dry. He ran all the way back to the farm with me.

There he put me on a towel in front of the kitchen fire and knelt beside me with a saucer of milk. I was old enough to lap, he says, and I had drunk about half the saucerful, when Great-aunt Harriet came in to borrow some sugar. Great-aunt Harriet always opens Henry's kitchen door by crashing at it with her stick. Henry says this was when I first showed my chief talent. I vanished.

Henry was most upset. He crawled about, looking under chairs and the hearthrug, and couldn't think where I'd got to.

Great-aunt Harriet said, “What
are
you doing, Henry?”

“Looking for the kitten,” Henry said—or rather shouted. Great-aunt Harriet is not good at human voices unless they are very loud. Henry went on to shout how he had found me. “And I can't think,” he bellowed, “how someone can drop a kitten in a drain and then just go away!”

“Because she wasn't human probably, and there's no need to shout,” Great-aunt Harriet replied. “Have you looked in the coal scuttle?”

Henry looked, and there I was, crouched up and trembling and black all over from the coal. Great-aunt Harriet sank into a chair and watched while Henry wiped the black off me and onto the towel. “What a rag-bag marked little thing!” she said. “You'll call her Dot, I suppose.”

I know what Great-aunt Harriet meant. I am all over dots. Somewhere on me I have a dot of every color a cat can have. I have looked in mirrors and Henry has checked. I have silver and gray and tabby, two kinds of ginger and almost-pink, tortoiseshell, Burmese brown, cream, as well as white and black. I have one blue eye in a black patch and one green inside ginger. I am special. But at that time, Henry said, “Dot is a trivial sort of a name, Auntie. A cat should always have a special, impressive name. I shall have to think.”

“Please yourself,” said Great-aunt Harriet, and began to complain that the hens kept her awake roosting in the coach house on the other side of her bedroom wall.

Henry hates people complaining. He put one of his operas on to drown Great-aunt Harriet out. This part I dimly remember. There was a lot of singing that I slept through quite happily on Henry's knee, and then, suddenly, there was this huge human woman's voice screaming, “Len Iggmy son of Trey, la moor Tay Una!”

I vanished again like a shot.

It took Henry and Great-aunt Harriet half an hour to find me. I was behind the big blue-and-white meat dish halfway up the Welsh dresser. We still don't know how I got there.

“That settles it,” Henry said. “Her name is Turandot, out of this opera.” He sat me on his left leg and stroked me with one finger while he explained that the screaming woman was a princess called Turandot, singing a song to warn her prince that he would die if he didn't answer her three riddles. “The words mean:
There are three riddles but only one death,
” he said.

So my name is Turandot and I am a princess, but somehow I am nearly always called Little Dot. Some of my chief memories of growing up—apart from chasing wisps of straw and galloping over the shed roofs and tearing up Henry's work papers and playing with the stuffed mouse Henry bought me—are of sitting on Henry's knee while he explained how I got my name. He played that screaming woman a lot. And I always vanished. Henry would fish me out from behind the meat dish—and later from under the Welsh dresser and then from inside its cupboard—and sit me on his left knee, and then on both knees when I grew big enough, and explain how I got my name. At night, I slept in his beard, until after about six months he complained that I was throttling him and asked me to sleep on his head instead.

A few weeks after I started sleeping on Henry's head, Henry came home with two more cats, one under each arm. They were a dark tabby and a rippled ginger and they were both bigger than me. I was horrified. I was truly hurt. I went bounding up the coach house roof, where I drove the cockerel down and sat in his place with my back to everything, staring down at the moor. Henry came and called to me, but I was too angry and offended to listen. I sat there for hours.

In the end, Henry climbed on the roof too and sat panting astride it. “Little Dot,” he said, “it's not my fault. I was in town and I met the black lady again. She was in the garden of an empty house and she called me over. Someone had moved house and left the two cats behind. They were both starving. I
had
to help them, Little Dot! Do forgive me.”

It soothed me just a little, that he had come up on the roof to explain, but I couldn't let him see that. I kept my back to him and twitched my tail.

“
Please
, Little Dot!” Henry said. “You'll always be my first and only cat!”

“Prove it,” I said. “Send them away again.”

“I can't do that,” he said. “They've nowhere to live and you can count their ribs, Little Dot. Let me look after them and I'll do anything you want.”

“All right,” I said, and I turned around and nosed his hand. But I didn't purr.

Henry said, “Thank God!” and more or less fell off the roof. The noise brought Great-aunt Harriet out of her cottage.

“I thought you were that dratted rooster again!” she said. “What a fuss about one little spotted cat! When are you going to build a proper henhouse?”

“Soon, soon,” Henry said, rolling in the weeds.

He called those cats Orlando and Cleopatra, would you believe! But they generally answered to Orange and Claws. Claws was a tomcat anyway and Claws suited him better. I made it very clear to them right from the start that it was
me
who slept on Henry's head, and I made it equally clear to Henry that I was having my food up on the Welsh dresser in future, not down on the flagstones like an ordinary cat. I wanted him to put two more catflaps in the kitchen door too, so that they wouldn't sully mine, but he said that one would have to do. He was too busy planning the hen coop Great-aunt Harriet kept asking for to cut holes in doors.

Orange and Claws and I got on quite well actually. They knew I was the one who really owned Henry. And they had always lived in a town up to then, so they were quite fascinated when I showed them the farm and the hills and warned them to be careful of hens and Great-aunt Harriet's stick. Great-aunt Harriet always said she had no patience with cats and was liable to prove it by swatting you. Orange went out exploring a lot, while Claws taught me how to catch mice in the sheds. I mean, I
knew
mice before Claws came, but I hadn't known you could
eat
them.

But Henry just couldn't seem to stop himself adopting cats. “I seem to have got into the habit,” he said to me apologetically, the day he arrived home from the Scientific Institute with Millamant in a basket. “Don't mind her. She's a victim of a mad scientist at the Institute. I sneaked her out of a cage there, and I'm afraid she's a bit mad herself by now.”

Millamant was a skinny Burmese with a squint, and
mad
was understatement. I mean, she liked being
wet.
The first time Claws and I found Mill swimming in the water butt, we naturally assumed she was drowning and set up a scream for help. This brought Great-aunt Harriet out of her cottage, who assumed the same thing and tried to pull Millamant out. Millamant scratched her. Deeply. In reply, Great-aunt Harriet pushed Millamant right under water and stumped off, shouting to Henry that she couldn't
abide
cats and this one was
crazy.
Later, she found Mill in the bath with her and threw her out of the window, yelling to Henry that he was to stop owning cats at
once
, before everyone else went mad too. Mill didn't care. She had a wash in the water butt and then got in the shower with Henry.

Great-aunt Harriet didn't really dislike cats. She just needed the right cat to belong to. This became clear when one of her nephews arrived for a visit. He had brought his cat, Mr. Williams, in a sort of glass box pitched sideways into the back of his sports car. Mr. Williams was black and well-mannered and scared of almost everything. Well, so would
I
be scared of everything if I was forced to ride around sideways in a glass box. As soon as Henry saw Mr. Williams, he strode to the car and opened the box.

“That's no way to treat a cat!” Henry said. “Turn your car around and drive away. Now.”

“But I've come to stay with Aunt Harriet,” the nephew protested, “for a week.”

“Oh no, you haven't!” Great-aunt Harriet screamed from inside her cottage. “Go away at once!”

Henry looked very surprised at this. Great-aunt Harriet was supposed to be very fond of this nephew. She was leaving him her things in her Will. But as soon as Henry opened the glass box, Mr. Williams had done a vanishing act almost as good as mine and ended up clamped to Great-aunt Harriet's chest. Shortly, Great-aunt Harriet arrived in the doorway of her cottage with the trembling black cat in her arms. He had his claws into her everywhere he could hang on to. Every claw said, “This human is
mine
!” Great-aunt Harriet accepted this at once, the way humans do, and she told the nephew he was not to set foot in her cottage ever again. The nephew drove sulkily away and Mr. Williams stayed. He was as unbalanced as Mill in his way. He
liked
it when Great-aunt Harriet called him her cutchy-wootchy-darling-diddums and tickled his tummy—but we forgave him for that, considering what he had been through.

Great-aunt Harriet made Henry drive her into town to alter her Will, so that she could leave her things to Henry instead. Henry told me that the things were all hideous china ornaments and he hoped she would change her mind. Then he drove off to visit one of the farmers on the moor, who had asked to see him urgently, and came back with the sixth cat.

The sixth cat was called Madam Dalrymple and she was white and fluffy as a dandelion clock—or she was when Henry had washed the muck off her. Nobody knew where she had come from or who had belonged to her and Madam Dalrymple was far too stupid to explain. She certainly did not belong on the farm where Henry found her. He had discovered her struggling in the farmer's pigpen, in considerable danger from the sow who lived in the pen. Henry had to bathe her four times. Unlike Millamant, Madam Dalrymple hated water and actually scratched Henry, but this was practically the only touch of spirit she ever showed. She was
stupid.
She lay about in picturesque poses and sighed to anyone who would listen that what she really,
really
needed was a blue satin bow around her neck. I mostly ignored her, except for when she tried to sit on Henry's knee. I always made her sit on his feet instead. Henry's knees are
mine
—both of them.