The Wildings (14 page)

“Do you remember the smell from that dog’s food bowl?” Hulo said suddenly.

Southpaw couldn’t stop his stomach from letting out a gargantuan rumble. The small whisker twitch that meant “yes” was entirely superfluous.

“What did it smell like to you?” the tom asked. His matted fur hung over his eyes, and he had picked up what looked like a tree’s worth of dead leaves and filth as they came back through the storm, but he radiated alertness to Southpaw. If Hulo was as hungry as the kitten, he hadn’t let it show.

Southpaw moistened his pink mouth and his whiskers began quivering on their own. “It smelled like marrowbones and rich meat stew,” he said. “It smelled even better than fresh rat, and it smelled warm and good.”

Hulo’s green eyes were almost opaque; Southpaw couldn’t tell what the tom was thinking.

“Every meal that pup eats is like that,” he said. “Rich and warm, and savoury. Filling, on a day like this, when you can feel the first cold fingers of winter running through your fur and bones. He doesn’t have to do anything for his meals. No hunting, no digging through the garbage and fighting the rats for
every scrap. No going out in the heat of summer to find food that isn’t spoiled, no expeditions in the rain when your fur soaks right through to your skin.”

The tom stared out across the park. They were comfortable enough, but drifts of rain blew into their corner every so often, and Southpaw shivered from time to time from the cold.

“Some Bigfeet will do that for cats as well,” he said. “Feed you milk and fish—you’ve tasted fish, haven’t you, Southpaw?—three times a day, give you a warm bed. Wouldn’t you like that?”

The kitten’s eyes were huge, considering the lovely pictures that had begun dancing in his mind as Hulo shared his thoughts.

“Yes,” he said, but his whiskers were uncertain. The tom said nothing. “Would the Bigfeet tie me up?” the kitten asked after a while. “No,” said the tomcat. “They never tie up cats, perhaps because we would bite through any leashes. But they might lock you up, in their hutches.”

“Would the Bigfeet beat me?” the kitten asked.

The tip of Hulo’s tail moved back and forth as he considered the question.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Would they let me stay in the park and climb the roofs?” the kitten asked after considering the matter. He could still almost smell and taste that bowl of meat stew, and imagine how good it would feel to clean what little remained off his whiskers. His belly would be warm and bulging, instead of empty and slack.

“Probably not,” said the tom. “Some cats around the dargah visit Bigfeet houses for the food and come away, but it’s an uncertain life. If you want your meals three times a day, then
you have to become an inside cat. And as I’ve said earlier, it isn’t a bad life at all, if you don’t end up in a place like the Shuttered House.”

Southpaw washed his paws several times over to try and sort out his thoughts.

“Is the house the Sender lives in nice?” he said.

“Yes,” said Hulo.

“But she never comes out of the house?” the kitten asked, unable to imagine what that would be like. His thoughts went back briefly to the gloom and stench of the Shuttered House. He blinked the nightmarish image away and thought that even if he were to live in a comfortable Bigfeet house, the idea of being unable to see the sky would be unbearable. In summer, a few days after his eyes had opened, he had wandered into a cardboard crate and been unable to find his way out. His heart began to hammer as he remembered how closed in and suffocated he’d felt, before Katar heard his mews and clawed a path through the cardboard.

Hulo said, “Only up to the stairs.”

“How horrible it would be to live in a box!” Southpaw said. “Why does anyone want to be an inside cat?”

The tomcat said, “How does your belly feel?”

“Empty and sad,” said the kitten.

“If you found the right Bigfeet family,” said Hulo, “you would never have to be hungry again.”

Southpaw lay back, confused again, and tried to grab his tail with his paws to get his mind out of the dilemma. He could see what Hulo meant, and with his stomach reminding him that it didn’t like being empty, he began to understand why the life of
an inside cat might have some appeal. But his mind refused to go beyond the sense of claustrophobia. He played with his tail, fluffing it up with his claws, smoothing it back down, and then he thought of the pup and the way it had whined, wanting more food, dependent on its Bigfoot. “I’d rather be an outside cat,” he said at last. And he felt Hulo’s smile radiating through the other cat’s fur and whiskers as clearly as if it had been light and he’d been able to see the tom’s face.

“It’s a choice every cat has to make at some point,” said Hulo.

“Did you ever want to be an inside cat?” Southpaw asked, thinking that he couldn’t imagine Hulo anywhere near the Bigfeet.

The tom was licking his tangled fur clean, but at this he stopped, and his fur rippled with laughter. He turned his battered fighter’s face with the scars and the broad ugly features to Southpaw.

“What kind of Bigfoot would invite me with a face like this?” he said. “They usually greet me with their brooms!”

Southpaw wriggled, enjoying the joke, and was about to curl into Hulo’s bulk for warmth when the tomcat stiffened, cocking his ragged ears. “Rats!” he said. “Look at them, swarming out into the street! The drainpipe must have flooded their homes out—all right, Southpaw, I’m off to hunt. Stay here!”

The kitten scrambled to his feet, his nose twitching in excitement. “I’m coming too, Hulo!”

The tom cuffed him gently, rolling the kitten over and back into safety.

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You haven’t been on your first hunt yet and there’s too many of them—you might get bitten.”
The black creatures were disappearing down the alley on the left, and the tom was already at the edge of the roof as he talked. “Don’t leave the park, Southpaw, stay right here. I’ll be back with fresh kill for you.” His bristly bottlebrush of a tail stayed waggling in the air for a second as he braced his paws on the broken drainpipe, and then Hulo was gone, his teeth already chattering in anticipation of the hunt.

Southpaw’s tail dropped all the way down as he watched Hulo go. It’s not fair, the kitten thought. Hadn’t he watched Katar, Miao, Beraal and Hulo hunt from the time the blue had left his own eyes and he could see? But Hulo had been very clear: he was not to leave. Southpaw often got in trouble, but he never disobeyed the older cats when they gave him a direct order. He scratched at a discarded paper bag, feeling better when he’d torn it up into small, grease-stained shreds. “That’s what I’d do to a rat!” he said to himself. “Right paw! Left paw! Teeth at the ready for the killing bite! I’m a great ferocious hunter, look at me!”

The storm seemed to be blowing itself out, and the rain dropped from its clatter to a low, steady, pleasant thrumming. Southpaw killed the paper bag again, but the second time around wasn’t as much fun. He chased his tail. He cleaned his whiskers. He stropped his tiny, emerging claws on a piece of cardboard.

Across the park, the lights went on in the house Hulo had said the Sender lived in. Southpaw wondered what it was like, living in a house. Would it be exactly like living in a box, dark and stifling? Or would it be different? Idly, he skewered some strands of tinsel that were flapping in the breeze and killed
them until he was sure they were dead. It must be different, because otherwise there would be no inside cats at all, even if Hulo and everyone else was right and inside cats were crazy.

The rain had died down to the lightest patter. Southpaw looked across at the Sender’s house, at the well-lit staircase, the open kitchen door. Perhaps he could go and take a look, just a quick peek, he thought. There was no sign of Hulo, perhaps he had met another cat, or decided to do his night rounds.

The kitten sat up on his hind paws and sniffed the air carefully, his whiskers taut and listening for any sign of the tomcat. He stared at the Sender’s house again—it was such a short distance away, just a hop, skip and climb really. What Hulo had actually said was, “Don’t leave the park.” The kitten’s paws padded off more or less of their own volition, and Southpaw bounced down the roof and bounded across the wet grass. He would be inside the park, he told himself. Inside a house inside a park, but that was the merest quibble.

Southpaw crept up the steps, flattening his belly the way he’d seen Beraal go up the stairs, keeping his nose alert for the scent of any passing Bigfeet. But the rain must have corralled them indoors, for he saw and smelled none. “Just a peek,” he told himself as he approached the kitchen door, which had been left ajar for the Sender’s convenience, he assumed.

And then the smell hit him. The kitten let out a mew as he stuck his head cautiously over the sill, before he could tell himself to shut up. If the aroma from the pup’s bowl of food had been rich, meaty and filled with doggy wonders, this was an elixir carefully blended to perfection for cats. It smelled of fish-heads and fish broth, and fresh, caught-this-minute fish, better
than the freshest of fresh rats, and Southpaw’s nose quivered with such intensity he thought it was going to fall off. The kitten stuck his whiskers out to check for Bigfeet: it was a hasty check, but they seemed to be elsewhere. Then he was across the floor and his head was in the bowl. As he gobbled he purred like a steam engine.

He was almost through when he heard the loud clump-clump shuffle of a Bigfoot, and the kitten found himself painfully torn. “Quick, get out of here—you’ll reach the door in two shakes of your tail,” said part of his mind. “Please, just one more mouthful, there’s a bit here that tastes of shrimp,” begged the other part of his mind. Unfortunately, it was the louder part, and Southpaw stuck his nose back into the bowl, practically inhaling its contents.

The Bigfoot was at the entrance to the kitchen. Southpaw leaped back from the bowl and stared up at it—such a long way up. But it wasn’t looking at him, and the kitten, terrified, squeezed himself under the kitchen table, his paws propelling him to the nearest hiding place. Slam! The doors shut, and staring from under the table, Southpaw saw the dark, rain-spattered sky narrow and disappear. He could see the Bigfoot’s shoes, now, and he shook like a leaf under the table, expecting to be discovered at any moment.

The Bigfoot turned around and left, its shoes booming back along the corridor, the footsteps fading away into the house. “The thing to do,” the frightened kitten said to himself, “is to stay right here and wait until—until they open the door or something.”

But slowly, as the hand on the kitchen clock ticked over the minutes, Southpaw’s terror began to ebb. Inside the house, it
was warm and quiet. There was no sign of the Sender, and the Bigfeet seemed to be on the other side of the house, their voices echoing in the distance. The kitten crawled out from under the table. He padded up to the kitchen door and pushed it with his nose, but it stayed firmly shut. He eyed the open doorway that led back into the house with cautious interest. “I should stay right here,” he told himself. “They’ll open the door in the morning so that the Sender can sit on the stairs. It’s always open when we’re coming back from night prowls. I wonder how far away the morning is?”

Restless, Southpaw padded around the kitchen, investigating the many different smells, patting at a runaway potato, stropping his claws on the wooden leg of a stool. He stopped once more at the doorway that led to the rest of the house. From here, he could smell the Sender; the most recent scent trail was an exciting one, and indicated that she had tried to climb up to the curtain pelmets. It also indicated that there were points at which she’d been less than successful. He raised his whiskers gingerly, but there was no whiff of the Bigfeet.

“It wouldn’t do any harm to poke my nose in, just for a second,” he thought. “Would it?”

Southpaw padded in slowly, and kept going.

MARA
’
S DAY HAD BEGUN
wonderfully well, with the Great Pelmet Expedition occupying most of the morning. This had gone better than the most recent expedition, the Garbage Can Trawl, which had led to sharp words from both the Bigfeet and a smacking of her bottom. This was deeply injurious to her
dignity, and the kitten had heaved out of her Bigfeet’s hands, marching off with her tail, ears and whiskers up to let them know what she thought of the situation. Given that it was a First-class March, with a Flounce thrown in, it was unkind of them to laugh—and by now, she knew exactly when the Bigfeet were laughing at her.

She had scaled one pelmet after another, revelling in the discovery of dust bunnies and other unexpected surprises—half a bangle, a candle stub that was great fun to roll around on the carpet, a dead beetle that she had eaten and wished she hadn’t. It tickled her stomach and made everything from her morning bowl of milk onwards taste distinctly beetleish. By afternoon, she was curled up on the back-door staircase, purring and ready for Beraal’s company.

Then the skies opened up unexpectedly. She shot in off the stairs after sticking her paws cautiously out into the rain—Beraal tended to go on about the beauty of the monsoons, but the salient feature of rain was its wetness. Mara disapproved, strongly.

She sat for a long while at the kitchen door, waiting for the rain to stop and Beraal to come. Neither wish was fulfilled and gradually, Mara’s ears and whiskers began to droop. Her Bigfeet were out, as they often were in the afternoon, and as she padded restlessly around the house, its emptiness gnawed at her. The kitten pounced listlessly at the lizard who sat on the door-frame, but he ran up into the corner and said “Girgit!” to her accusingly.

She played with her ball, but her heart wasn’t in it. The Bigfeet came back to find the kitten slumped in a corner, and
she made no protest when they picked her up with exclamations, cuddled her and finally tucked her into her blankets, thinking that she must be ill.

Mara listened to the rain, wondering when Beraal would come and see her next. If the rains continued like this, would the cat stay away for days? She tucked herself deeper into her blankets, thinking of Beraal and the many cats her mentor had mentioned—Miao and Hulo, Katar and Southpaw.