Cat Kin (9 page)

Her heart leaped. If major companies wanted to buy up Panthacea, perhaps there really was something in it. You could fool a few desperate people, Tiffany knew, but not hard-headed businessmen.
It looked like Stuart might get better. Really better. Maybe this time next year he’d be running round the school fields playing football. No, not football, he hated that…so maybe
he’d be charging about with his friends, pretending to be superheroes. Maybe he would
have
some friends.

Mum had left a jar of Panthacea on the computer desk. Tiffany unscrewed the lid and peered inside at the pills. Chunky ovals, the colour of dark moss, they looked nothing special. The jar had a
funny aroma. Knowing she shouldn’t, she picked out a pill and touched her tongue to it. As Stuart had said, it was bitter, like aspirin, only thicker. Greener. On an impulse she popped the
pill in her mouth.

‘What are you doing, Tiffany?’ she mumbled aloud, the tablet snuggling awkwardly in one cheek. The bitter taste spread through her mouth as the pill softened with saliva. She hurried
to the bathroom and spat it out in the toilet. The lump floated in circles on the water, disintegrating. She watched it, queasy. What had possessed her to do that?

Screwing the lid back on she returned the jar to its exact same place. But, as she surfed onto a chat room to kill another hour, she found herself wishing she had swallowed that pill after all.
She wasn’t exactly Miss Universe herself. With the last PE lesson of the year approaching, and Miss Fuller ominously promising the class ‘a surprise’, she needed all the help she
could get.

‘Ah, Rufus,’ she crooned. ‘Where’s
my
medicine, eh?’

The ginger cat purred on her lap.

‘If this is Miss Fuller’s idea of a nice surprise,’ Avril whispered, ‘I pity her kids.’

‘If she ever has any,’ Tiffany whispered back. ‘She’ll have to catch a man first.’

‘And shut him in the cellar,’ sniggered Avril.

‘Locked in a cage.’

Miss Fuller had set up the gym horse and springboard. Her treat was a vaulting contest. Whoever sprang highest or furthest without suffering serious injury got to take home a live tarantula. Or
something. Tiffany hadn’t really been listening.

‘No way are we surviving that.’ Avril watched grimly as the first boy, Jason Wilks, rocketed over the horse.

‘And that’s just the lowest notch,’ Tiffany muttered. ‘Look, she’s putting it up. Typical.’

Avril went paler. ‘How high is it going to be when it’s our turn?’

‘She knew we’d go to the back of the line, didn’t she?’ said Tiffany. ‘Evil, muppet-haired witch.’

‘I’m going to be sick.’

‘Should’ve thought of that earlier.’

Tiffany closed her eyes and reminded herself that, in forty minutes, Miss Fuller would be nothing but a bad memory. But the ignominy of being the class lump wouldn’t pass so easily. Week
after week she’d come here to be humiliated. How could she be good at pashki and so useless in school sports? Yusuf, she had discovered, was one of the year’s top footballers, yet at
Cat Kin she could run rings around him. Last lesson she had wowed everyone at by Eth-walking the long, winding course Mrs Powell had set for them in Clissold Park. Tiffany had done it in under a
minute, beating Ben’s time by one second and everyone else by a mile. But in PE she was like a different person. A different species.

‘Emma! Go,’ shouted Miss Fuller. Tiffany heard bare feet run to the springboard, judder off it and land with a wettish smack on the mat. Emma grunted, as if she had fallen badly.
Tiffany’s knees almost buckled under the weight of the butterflies in her stomach. She heard Miss Fuller raise the gym horse still higher.

Then, in the blackness of her own eyelids, she saw cats’ eyes. Mrs Powell had encouraged them to practise their catras until they appeared at will. An indigo eye swam into view (that was
Ailur, Tiffany recalled), merging with a golden one, Parda. Why these should appear to her now, and what they meant when combined, she couldn’t think. But their presence was comforting and
she felt strength in her again.

‘Excuse me? Tiffany? Thank you for coming, pet, but can you wake up now?’

Tiffany started at the sound of Miss Fuller’s voice. She opened her eyes to find herself at the front of the line. Everyone was staring at her, grinning like a pack of wolves. In her
confusion she had lost sight of the gym horse. She looked left, right, turned round and finally saw it. With no time left to be nervous, she ran at it and prayed.

The vault turned out to be easier than it looked. She bounced up and skimmed over the frayed green padding on the crown of the horse. There was the tiniest jolt as she touched down on the wooden
floor, and that was that. She raised her hands above her head for good measure, the way gymnasts did on television, and walked to the back of the line, heart thudding with relief. She’d done
it as well as any of them.

It took her a moment to notice how silent the gym had become.

‘Tiffany…’ Miss Fuller’s voice sounded different. Almost human.

‘What did she just do?’ one of the boys whispered.

‘That was the wrong way round,’ said someone else.

‘Tiffany…’ Miss Fuller was peering at her like a mole faced with an exam paper. ‘Why did you do it that way?’

‘Miss?’ Tiffany had no idea what they were on about. She wondered if she’d cut herself and glanced at her arms and legs.

‘The springboard’s on
this
side,’ said Jason, frowning in confusion.

‘Did you
see
that?’ cried Avril.

Tiffany stood bewildered as the gym dissolved into uproar. She looked back at the apparatus and understood. Somehow, being muddled, she had run at it from the wrong end, jumping with no
springboard to launch her and no mats to cushion her landing. Yet the horse now towered on its highest notch, as tall as she was.

‘Can you, er, do it properly next time, please?’ Miss Fuller stammered at last.

‘I think you should get down from there,’ Tiffany whispered for the second time. She was in the Hunter crouch, peeping through the bushes.

‘The guy won’t mind, will he?’ said Ben. ‘He’s dead.’

He shifted his position on the back of the marble lion and peered between its rain-bitten ears. The two policemen were in the open now, talking to a young couple who were taking a walk through
the graves.

‘I meant, they might see you,’ said Tiffany.

‘They might
hear
us, if you keep talking.’

That hiss was Tiffany blowing through her teeth. Ben ignored her and tried to pick up the policemen’s conversation. By concentrating on the green catra, Mandira, he could make their voices
seem louder. The older officer, a thickset man in a too-tight uniform, asked the couple if they had seen anyone lurking in the cemetery. They hadn’t.

‘If you do,’ said his partner, ‘we advise you not to approach them. It’s probably kids, but you never know.’

Tiffany glided from her hiding-spot like a draught. Once she was in her black pashki cat-suit and tabby face-print it was almost impossible to make her walk normally.

‘I warned you back there,’ she whispered. ‘That lady in her garden saw you.’

‘She saw both of us.’

‘
I
was careful.’

‘Please accept my humble apologies.’

Given the choice, Ben would rather have been paired with Yusuf, Daniel, or perhaps Attila the Hun. But over the weeks Yusuf had tended to hang out more with Olly, which was kind of inevitable
since they both went to the same school, and Daniel had surprisingly latched onto them. Ben had started to wonder what was wrong with him, only to realise, as the long holiday wore on, that he was
simply getting too good at pashki. The Cat Kin were spending more time outside, trying out new moves and routines in the parks and streets, and Mrs Powell had ordered Ben and Tiffany to practise
together. They were too far ahead of everyone else. Ben could see the logic of this. It was just a shame that Tiffany was an expert at rubbing him up the wrong way.

The policemen drew nearer. Ben slid off the lion monument and alighted on the grass, for the moment still hidden. The ivy-robed trees cast the ground in green shade, the sun dripping through
like rain into an old tent. Shadows of tree trunks wove among the graves, vaults and petrified angels. Ben Eth-walked after Tiffany to a denser patch of undergrowth. This must be how it felt to be
a burglar. A cat burglar, ho ho.

But they hadn’t been stealing. Or rather, they had only been stealing space. Territory, said Mrs Powell, was a vital part of a cat’s being. A cat built up a store of special places
where it owned (it believed) every breeze and grass blade. This was the fifth rudiment of pashki: Laying Claim. Mrs Powell sent them out to find unfamiliar territories and pass through them
unnoticed, while getting to know them and absorbing their essence. ‘And do
try
,’ she added, ‘not to get arrested.’

That was starting to look likely. The two officers had parted where the path forked and the thin policeman looked as if he might pass within arm’s reach of their hiding-place.

‘Keep still,’ whispered Tiffany.

‘It’s lucky I have you to tell me what to do,’ muttered Ben.

‘
Quiet
.’

The policeman’s radio crackled. He ignored it, but Tiffany, who was already tense, jumped. The leaves shook and the officer turned.

‘You! Stop there!’

‘Run?’ whispered Ben.

‘Yes.’

They scarpered. In his panic Ben forgot everything he’d learned. Robbed of the agility of pashki he blundered towards the nearest path, running as if through tar or a bad dream. He could
hear the younger officer jabbering into his radio as he chased.

Was he jinxed or something? To be caught by a copper would be the final straw. Over the past few days he and Tiffany had crept through people’s gardens, across walls and over garages,
travelling whole streets without setting foot on a pavement, and had hardly drawn a glance. Ben found that pashki let him move, if not invisibly, then unobtrusively. He could cross someone’s
field of vision and they would simply ignore him. Only rarely had they been spotted. Once a man had bellowed from his bathroom window and they’d had to hide behind his chimney-stack. And just
now a woman had yelled as they crossed her garden, forcing them to scramble over a lopsided wall and drop ten feet into the cemetery. That they did these things without thinking amazed and alarmed
them both.

Mrs Powell had organised extra lessons for the summer holidays, and Mum had remarked, grumpily, that Ben seemed to be doing little else nowadays (though as far as she knew, it was just an
ordinary self-defence class). His mum had a point. He’d stopped playing pinball altogether. But amongst the Cat Kin, Ben found he could relax. He could forget about John Stanford’s
threats, Mum’s ever-blackening moods, Dad’s disastrous attempt to help.

His favourite lessons were in Ten Hooks. One of the nine pashki rudiments, Ten Hooks was non-contact sparring, based on the way cats fought. Whenever he practised the dreamlike slashes, lunges
and kicks, usually with Tiffany, he could go as long as five minutes without dreading what was going to happen to his family.

It was when he thought of Mum, working extra hours in the organics shop or sitting alone in the flat that now felt like a prison, that the guilt came, clawing at his conscience. He should be at
home comforting her, not wasting his time being taught tricks by a half-mad old woman.

For Mrs Powell got stranger by the minute. For three lessons now she’d been talking up something called
Mau claws
. She said that, just as the Mau body could extend beyond your
head to create an effect like whiskers, it could also be forced out through your fingertips or toes, so you would actually seem to have claws for a second or two. This (she claimed) was extremely
difficult and needed energy from all the catras in sequence, blue, green, gold, copper, red and indigo, to feed the Mau body to the point where it became almost a physical presence. To Ben it all
sounded about as likely as bending spoons with telekinesis.

Running through the cemetery, he felt a tug on his arm.