Cat Kin (17 page)

Tiffany wrenched the phone away, half-deafened.

‘Sorry, Tiffany, that was my mother calling me to do silly chores. Anyway, Wales sounds awful, doesn’t it? Do your family drag you on daft holidays too? Listen, great talking but got
to dash, mother’s going to pop.’

‘Bye,’ said Tiffany. She stood dazed for a moment. She had forgotten how some people went temporarily insane when they had a phone to their ear. She reflected, and decided not to
ring Cecile. It wasn’t fair to drag friends into this. There was only one sensible thing to do. Call the police.

The station’s operator put her on hold for ten nerve-wracking minutes. Her breath was loud in her ear. What if Ben was right? No, that couldn’t be.

‘Stoke Newington police.’

‘Um. I want to report a crime.’

‘Go ahead, love.’

‘There’s this old factory off Albion Road,’ she said. ‘They’re keeping tigers and leopards in there. In tiny cages. They’ve all got tubes stuck in them and
this scientist is using them to make medicines. He takes the bile from their livers—’ She bit her tongue. It sounded ludicrous even to her.

‘Say again, love. I’m listening.’

‘It’s true,’ she protested. ‘Look, I’m not sure what’s going on. But it’s something very bad, and it’s inside that derelict factory. Can you check
it, please?’

‘Something bad,’ echoed the officer, slowly, as if he were writing those very words on his pad. ‘Can you fill me in on some details? What did you say your name was?’

The phone fell from her hand and lay on the carpet, burbling faintly, before going dumb. Tiffany ground her teeth. She would not pick it up again until she had a story they would believe. A hour
later, it was still lying there.

Ben wondered about calling her back. He wanted to explain. Tell her what had happened with his mother. Tiffany should know. She needed to know.

‘Benny!’ Dad called from the living room. ‘I’ve made a pot of tea. You want to come through and watch the boxing with me? I’ll tell you by round two who’s
going to win.’

‘Just a second,’ Ben mumbled. His father had been unbearably merry ever since Ben had shown up on Wednesday morning, dazed after a night walking the streets. Not that Dad knew the
real reason. He thought Mum was letting him have more ‘access’ at last.

Alone in the tiny spare room of his father’s flat, Ben hugged his knees and watched the pigeons scratch on the windowsill. His memory was stuck in one groove, as if by replaying it over
and over he could erase it, make it not have happened. His hand had struck at Mum quicker than thought, as electric current leaps from a wire. The force of it had thrown her across the kitchen.
Invisible claws had scored her face. It was no enemy, no hired thug who had done this to his mother. It was him.

He clutched his right hand by the wrist, as if it were a snake he had to strangle.

‘How could you?’ he whispered. ‘How could you do that?’

‘Ben?’ Dad knocked on the door. ‘They’re coming into the ring.’

‘In a minute!’ he snapped.

All those hours of practising pashki and he’d never thought what it was doing to him.

I don’t know what got into me.

The cat-self he had awakened, his Mau body, had reflexes too fast for him to control. If he was hit, he would hit back, no matter who got hurt. And this thing was strong too, strong enough to
knock a grown woman off her feet. He shrank inside, just as he had when he was five and had accidentally set the waste paper basket on fire, thinking the whole flat, the whole world, would burn
down. This was the same feeling. He hadn’t meant this to happen. What had he done?

‘Tiffany! Check this out.’

She glanced up from her magazine in time to see Stuart popping two large pills in his mouth and swallowing them in one gulp. His eyes bulged like a frog’s.

‘Cool, eh? Bet you can’t do that.’

‘Stuart!’ Mum scolded. ‘One at a time, love. You’ll choke.’

‘No chance,’ he grinned. ‘I’m the world’s greatest pill-swallower now. I could do four if I wanted.’

‘They’re not toys, you idiot!’

‘Tiffany! None of that,’ said Dad. He rolled up a couple of towels and stuffed them into a kit bag. ‘Cathy, where are my swimming goggles?’

‘Unless you gave them to me to be ironed, dry-cleaned or baked, Peter, I can only assume they’re where you last put them,’ said Mum.

‘A simple I-don’t-know would have done.’ Dad went whistling up the stairs.

‘I’m sorry, Stuart,’ said Tiffany. ‘But you know it’s bad to take too much of any medicine. Especially,’ she made sure she caught Mum’s eye, ‘one
we don’t know much about.’

‘I take two at lunchtime. It says so on the label.’

‘Mum, don’t you think so?’ Tiffany pleaded. ‘He’s practically well now. Shouldn’t he come off that stuff soon?’

‘Why?’ smiled Mum, filling a watering can at the sink. ‘Anyhow, I don’t know what you mean by
well
. You’re going to get a lot better still, aren’t
you, Stu?’

‘Yeah!’ said Stuart. He poked Tiffany, teasing. ‘You’re just jealous ’cos you know I’ll be stronger than you when we’re both grown up.’

‘Give me a break.’ Tiffany felt like smashing the Panthacea jar on the floor. That would get their attention. ‘All I’m saying is, he can’t just keep taking
pills.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘I dunno, Mum, you tell me. You’re the one who always goes on about nature being the best doctor.’

‘But Panthacea
is
natural, darling,’ said Mum. ‘Look here, it says on the label. Where are you going?’

Tiffany was going upstairs in a hurry. Probably to be sick. She stared down the loo until the nausea passed. Someone knocked at the door.

‘Tiffany?’ It was Dad. ‘Did you want to come swimming with me and Stuart? We’re off in a minute.’

She had to drink from the tap before answering, her mouth was so dry.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d just get in the way again, wouldn’t I?’

‘Not a chance,’ said Dad. ‘Go on, it’ll be fun.’

‘I don’t feel like it today. I might help Mum in the garden.’

‘Okey-dokey. Don’t let her get too muddy or the restaurant won’t let us in.’

‘Right.’

When she was ready to go back downstairs, Stuart and Dad were on their way out.

‘Peter, my burgundy silk blouse,’ said Mum, catching them on the doorstep.

‘What about it?’

‘Have you seen it? I want to wear it for the meal tonight.’

‘Well, unless you gave it to me to wash the car with,’ said Dad, giving Mum a kiss on the cheek, ‘I expect it’s where you last put it. See you girls later!’

The blouse never showed up, so Mum compromised with a black evening dress and sparkly jewelry. She still looked pretty stunning and all the waiters fussed round her. Cathy
Maine hadn’t dressed up like that for months, perhaps years, and it was, Tiffany supposed, a great evening. But only one detail of it stayed with her: watching Stuart wash down yet another of
those tablets.

She lay in bed next morning, listening to the blackbirds imitate car alarms, noticing the extra notes they made, too high for ordinary human ears to hear. It was absurd: she had these new
abilities, yet she couldn’t stop her little brother taking a drug that was brewed from unimaginable suffering.

And should she? For the fact remained that, evil or not, Panthacea was helping him get better. Stuart would have a childhood at last. He would run, swim without floats, hold a book without
getting exhausted. He could catch a cold and they need not live in fear that it might be his last.

Her brother, on one side. On the other, a room full of wild animals. Surely it was no contest? Tiffany dug her nails into her palms. No, she would not accept that. Stuart, she felt sure, would
not accept it. He was the only young boy she knew who would rescue spiders from the bath rather than drown them. He even pitied the fleas she occasionally combed from Rufus’s coat, crushing
their armoured bodies between her fingernails. Stuart cared. No matter how magical Cobb’s potion might be, the mere thought of the pain it had caused would be enough to bring him crashing
down to earth.

And that wasn’t all. Her brother might even be in danger. Those pills seemed to be doing him good at the moment, but she would never trust anything that had been touched by that dreadful
skeletal scientist. Cobb did
not
care. Awful side-effects might kick in any day.

A thought struck her. It was Monday. Dad was in the City crunching numbers, and although Mum would be working from home she rarely surfaced from the study. Stuart, by the sound of it, had the
telly on.

In the bathroom Tiffany found the current batch of Panthacea, a package of three jars. She found the fourth jar, half-full, in the kitchen. She went back upstairs and stared at the hatch in the
landing ceiling. It was so high that Dad was the only one in the family who could reach it and lower the heavy wooden ladder.

Tiffany closed her eyes and let the catras boil through her like bubbles of light. She leaped. Her right hand found the lip of the hatch, the Mau claws letting her hang for one instant while she
flicked the latch and pushed the trapdoor open. She dropped back onto the landing with the lightest thump. From the study came the tap-tap of Mum sending emails. Breathing deeply yet silently,
Tiffany gathered up the pill jars and crouched under the open hatch. She focused on two catras, blue and indigo, and launched herself upwards.

Felasticon
. Her whole body stretched as it threaded through the hatchway, and she had to duck to avoid banging her head on the roof’s rafters. She landed on the balls of her feet
at the very edge of the trapdoor, heels jutting out into space. Not bad for the class PE wimp.

All their junk had been stowed up here in the attic: boxes of old-fashioned vinyl records, winter clothes, her once-cherished doll’s house. She prowled across the rafters, taking care not
to let any creak. At the very edge of the eaves she found a box crammed with a spaghetti of wires and dusty bulbs. She buried the pill jars deep inside.

Mum was still typing away in the study. Biting her lip with the strain, Tiffany managed to close the trapdoor softly behind her as she lowered herself down, dropping the last few feet.
She’d done it. The Panthacea was hidden where they’d never dream of looking, a place Tiffany could never have gone by herself. And if they ordered some more, expensive as it was, she
would hide that batch too.

She returned to her room and picked up a magazine. It was done. She leafed through the pages without reading them. For some reason she didn’t feel any better.