Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (6 page)

“Black,” said Jenny.

“Oh, dear,” said Ma Scad, “that's bad. That's very bad. This party eats nothing but the soup of black cats. Look for cat bones in a certain midden as you go home. I'm mentioning no names.”

“That's impossible, surely!” cried Jenny.

“Then there are folk that hate cats,” said Ma Scad. “There are. A certain other party hunts cats with his shotgun. He hunts them over the hill and along the shore. No cat has ever harmed him or his. He shoots cats to please his evil heart. Black cats, that's the ones he likes best of all to shoot.”

“Who is he?” asked Jenny.

“No names,” said Ma Scad. “I don't want to get into trouble, lawyer's letters and all that kind of thing. I saw him with his blunderbuss no later than yesterday. Fankle is lying full of shotgun pellets in a ditch.”

Jenny began to cry softly. The dozen cats of Ma Scad looked as if it was all the same to them whether she laughed or cried or sang
Three Blind Mice
.

“Tears'll not get Fankle back,” said Ma Scad. “You'll just have to learn to carry on without Fankle. Life is very hard. You must be brave. I'll make you a cup of tea.”

“No, thank you,” wept Jenny.

“Let me see,” said Ma Scad, adopting once more her meditative stance. “Let me see now. Who was it told me? I believe it was Walter the fisherman. No, it wasn't. It was Scroggie the beachcomber. Why didn't I think of that first of all? I'm getting old. Scroggie told me, none other. Alas!”

“What did Scroggie say?” asked Jenny in a little damp whisper.

“Scroggie found a sack with the neck tied with string. Scroggie took his knife to it. What do you think Scroggie found in the sack?”

“I couldn't say,” said Jenny.

“I'll tell you what Scroggie found,” said Ma Scad. “A black cat. Dead and salt and stiff. So Scroggie told me. And Scroggie tells the truth more often than not.”

“Will Scroggie still have the body?” said Jenny. “I would know Fankle if I saw him, dead or alive.”

“What Scroggie would have done is this,” said Ma Scad. “He would have made a fire and he would have burned the cat on the shore. If you were to go down to the beach –”

But Jenny could take no more of this kind of talk. She ran out of Troddale without so much as a thanks or a goodbye. By good luck, half way down to the shore she met Scroggie himself. Scroggie regarded her with a kind eye. “Please, Scroggie,” she said, “is it true that you found a black cat dead on the shore, in a sack, and burned him?”

“No, dear,” said Scroggie. “I never found any black cat. Is it Ma Scad that told you? According to Ma Scad, I find a hundred drowned cats a week down at the shore. I think I've maybe found one in my time, years ago. Is it Fankle you're worried about? He'll turn up, never fear. That Fankle of yours is not the vanishing kind.”

***

Jenny knocked at the door of the merchant's house in the village. The store was locked for the night. Tom Strynd listened to Jenny's story with a long face. Had Fankle maybe got tired of her and Inquoy? Jenny wondered aloud. Had he maybe missed the fine smells of brown sugar, coffee, and apples in the yard where he had first appeared? “No,” said Tom Strynd. “Fankle hasn't come back here to live. I'm sorry, Jenny. I'll send you word if he does.”

Jenny thanked the merchant and turned away. It was getting dark. There was a star over the chimney. How would she ever find Fankle in the darkness?

“If you should ever want another kitten,” Tom Strynd called after her, “I'll keep you in mind, supposing Silas Ingison ever dumps another one in the back of my van.”

Jenny shook her head and moved on.

***

Mrs Martin, in the manse sitting-room, was very concerned to begin with. Had Fankle ever been gone so long before? Had Fankle been quite well recently, and lapped his milk and licked the fishbones clean? (She poured Jenny a tall glass of lemonade that she had made herself. Jenny sipped the lemonade gratefully; her throat was dry with grief and over-much speaking.) Mrs Martin smiled when Jenny told her about Ma Scad and her elegies. (Jenny took a big gulp of lemonade and felt more cheerful at once. She didn't know whether it was the lemonade or the kind old lady that made her feel better.) Mrs Martin declared that Fankle was the cleverest cat on the island – no, in Orkney – no, in the whole world. Wasn't it Fankle who had cured her of her trouble, with his antics in the garden that fine day? Fankle had unlocked in her the little spring that had lain hidden and dark for so long. (“Drink up, Jenny, there's plenty more lemonade ...”) That cat was so wise he seemed to have known what ailed Mrs Martin. Did Jenny think for one moment that an extraordinarily intelligent cat like Fankle could vanish into thin air? Fankle was unique. Fankle would be home in the morning. (Jenny drained the lemonade glass to the last drop. She did like this wise old lady who had suffered so much.) They exchanged goodnight kisses. The sky was thick with stars. Somewhere through the night, Jenny knew now, Fankle was moving, the essence of night and secrecy and wisdom.

***

Old Sam Swann the tailor was sitting beside his kitchen fire listening to the wireless when Jenny arrived. Old Mrs Swann sat at the other side of the fire, in a rocking chair, knitting a jersey.

“Have you seen my cat Fankle?” asked Jenny shyly. She had never been in this house before.

Behind the curtains was the tailor's bench, with its mingled smells of cloth, chalk, and resin.

Jenny had come here, on an impulse. Going home, she had suddenly remembered her father saying that Sam Swann the tailor was the greatest expert on cats in the island. There was nothing he didn't know about cats. People came from all over with their sick cats to the tailor shop, and more often than not Sam Swann knew the cure.

“Isn't the wireless a fine thing?” he said in his small sweet voice to Jenny. “It tells you things. It educates you.”

He was a very eccentric man, Sam Swann. Though he knew everything about cats, he didn't keep a cat himself. If somebody whose cat he had cured asked him to name a fee, he would say something like, “Oh yes, I think it will be a fine day tomorrow, indeed,” or “General Amin seems to be stirring things up in Africa.”

“It's about my cat Fankle I've come,” said Jenny. “He's been missing three days.”

“I don't know what I would do without the wireless now. I don't know what in the world Annabella would do ...” Annabella Swann, who was as deaf as a doornail, knitted away steadily.

“Is it usual,” said Jenny, “for cats to go away for three days at a time?”

“I'll tell you what I heard on the wireless tonight,” said Sam Swann. “A talk about the planet Mars. I learned a few things. There's volcanoes and icecaps on Mars. Fancy that.”

“I don't think Fankle's sick,” said Jenny. “At least, he didn't look sick last time I saw him. But he might have suddenly got sick. Is this true, Mr Swann, that cats when they get sick go away and eat grass and get better that way?”

“Another talk last night,” said the old man, “was about the American War of Independence. That was in George the Third's day, a long time ago. It all started with a gang of ruffians dumping chests of tea into the harbour at Boston, Massachusetts. There's never a day I live that I don't learn something from that wireless.”

“Goodnight, Mr Swann and Mrs Swann,” said Jenny.

Sam Swann followed Jenny to the door. “All that music too on the wireless. High-class stuff, Scottish dance music. Tell me now, Jenny, do you
really
like that pop music?”

Outside, the night was as black as coal, or tar, or treacle.

Jenny didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The old man said in her ear, in the doorway, and winked, “Cats sometimes fall in love, you know.”

***

Jenny was just going to bed when there was a loud double knock at the door. “Who can it be,” said her father, “at this time of night?”

It turned out to be Ma Scad. “Is that girl, what's-her-name, Jenny, in?” she demanded. “She was at my door earlier, asking about a black cat. Well, I have a message for her. A certain farmer in this island – I'm mentioning no names, I've been in trouble that way before – if you go, Jan Thomson, to a field of a certain farmer on this same island, you'll find a post in the middle of the field, and hanging down from the top of the post is a black cat. So I heard, not half-an-hour ago. I came here at once. A dead black cat, to scare the birds. Tell your girl that. I thought she might want to know.”

***

The very next morning Fankle turned up. He was tired and thin and hungry, but he had roses and moonlight in his eyes.

The largest trout ever caught in the island was a twelve-pounder. That trout had been caught on the little island loch by a ne'er-do-well called Steve Smith, in the year 1924. Steve, who lived in a hovel on the loch shore, thought nothing about it at the time; only how he was to have little to eat but trout – fried trout, grilled trout, boiled trout, trout soup, trout and apples – for a whole week and more. The prospect depressed him, for he didn't like trout to eat all that much. He was very relieved when Mr Twamm, who owned the little hotel in the village, gave him a pound for the fish. Mr Twamm got the trout stuffed; had a suitable case made; and the largest trout ever caught in the island hung thereafter in the hall of the hotel, a proclamation and a challenge.

The island was visited every summer by a number of trout fishers, all of whom stayed in the hotel. They looked with envy and longing at the twelve-pound trout in the hallway of the hotel. If only they could catch one half that size! One of them was heard to declare, over his malt whisky, that he would give his left hand to land a trout as large! But of course they were only joking. They knew they would go to their graves with nothing larger than a four-pounder to their credit. Indeed they were quite content, on a summer evening, to catch a couple of half-pounders, which they would hand in at the hotel kitchen, to be fried for breakfast next morning.

But there was one man in deadly earnest about breaking the record. Lieutenant-Colonel Stick came every summer to the island, with his large fat wheezing wife, Mrs Stick, and his pretty, plump, earnest daughter Constantine. The colonel himself was as thin as a twig, which caused the islanders to say that he had been very aptly named. His neck was like a rope with a skin-clad skull on top of it. His knickerbockers cracked in the wind about his thin shanks, as he stood in the dinghy and fished, fished, fished from June to September. “I'll catch a thirteen-pounder before I die,” he whined through his nose. “I will. I will. I will.”

But all he caught were little tiddlers, or half-pounders, or pounders. One marvellous day he caught a six-and-a-half-pounder. His thin face split with delight as he weighed that trout on the hotel scales. Mrs Stick and Constantine were pleased that day, too – it meant that the vinegar of him would be changed to honey, for one evening at least. But then the colonel's eye caught the fish in the display case, and he scowled. Why should a tramp like Steve Smith have all the glory, while he, a gallant and honourable soldier, was condemned to fish, fish, fish, for little bits of tarnish? It was an unfair world.

***

Every evening that summer, as the colonel turned his back on the loch, he observed a black cat sitting on the grassy verge above. This black cat knew a thing or two, that much was obvious. As soon as a trout fisher waded ashore, there was this black cat waiting for him. As often as not the trout fisher would throw him a little fish, and then Fankle – for of course it was Fankle – would begin to devour it with the utmost greed and delicacy. The trout fishers all grew to be fond of Fankle. They seemed to think that Fankle, and his blackness, brought them luck. (Fishermen are very superstitious.) Often they would turn round, where they stood thigh-deep in the loch, to see if that black cat was anywhere on the bank above. If Fankle was there, washing his face or chasing a butterfly, sure enough they would catch a decent fish within the next half-hour. They all had the greatest regard for Fankle, except Colonel Stick.

Colonel Stick waded ashore one day, tall and thin as a heron, and all he had in his bag was a quarter-pounder and a six-ouncer. The black cat approached, he coiled himself sinuously, and with deep affection, around the rubber ankles of Colonel Stick. The next thing Fankle knew, he was struggling in cold brackish loch water! The colonel had hurled him there, with one violent kick! There was not a more wretched cat than Fankle when finally he struggled ashore. He looked as if he had been dipped in a tub of slime. He shivered. He sneezed. The three swans on the loch looked at him with disdain.

Fankle dragged himself home, to be comforted and dried and warmed and fed by his dear friend Jenny.

***

Sometimes Fankle would walk all the way to the hotel. He was very popular in the hotel kitchen, where Annabel the cook and Alfie the kitchen boy would treat him to all the scraps from the plates of the rich over-fed trout fishers.

The first coolness of autumn was in the air – the island oatfields were full of ripe secret golden whispers – when a wonderful thing happened to Colonel Stick; he hooked the largest trout he had ever seen! It happened in the middle of the loch. On that particular afternoon Steve Smith, now an old man with a brown wrinkled face, was acting as the colonel's ghillie – that is, he was rowing the gallant gentleman here and there about the loch, and seeing to the gear, and advising on this and that matter. “You could do worse,” Steve had said, “than have a try over beside that little islet with the ox-eye daisies growing on it. I saw two or three big ones jumping there ...” “Very well, my man,” the colonel had deigned to reply, “row in that direction.” After a couple of casts, a huge underwater obstacle disrupted the splendid rhythm of the colonel's fishing. “Damn it!” he cried. “Blast and damn! It's stuck in weed.” But then the obstacle made a powerful swerve and lunge. “Hold on to it,” said Steve Smith. “You've caught a big one.”