Cat Nation

Mrs Simpkins had stuck little A4 posters on every lamp post, bin and tree in a one-mile radius of her small garden flat in the quiet end of town at the bottom of the hill. The poster declared that Twiggy, her black and white cat who’d been with her these past twelve years had been missing since Tuesday and could everyone please check their sheds and outhouses, unlikely as it was that anyone in genteel Densbury had an outhouse but it seemed the thing to write; Mrs Simpkins was sure she’d seen as such, and took that as her template.

Cats rarely “go missing’. They fuck off to someone else's house or get run over. And, so it transpired, Twiggy had opted for the former. She’d been observed – by the ever-watchful Mrs Carstairs -entering the back door of number 24 The Cedars, where that strange Mr Renton (with the cast in his eye) lived in the ground floor flat.  

Mrs Simpkins was of course relieved at the news that Twiggy was still alive and kicking and apparently in fine fettle, but somewhat peeved that he hadn’t come home, where a fish supper and his little mouse toys, scratch post and bags of catnip awaited him.  

She felt spurned. And, in time, resentful. 

However, Twiggy wasn’t the only cat to enter the back door of number 24. And Mrs Simpkins wasn’t alone in her resentment. But cats tend towards an independent nature. Free spirited and wandering. One might go so far as to say mercenary, although it’s mostly dog owners who subscribe to that opinion.  

They’re fickle. Shrewd. Clever. And open to forces beyond our understanding; they weren’t lumped in with the witches for nothing. And Mr Renton at number 24 had something no-one in the Densbury environs could hope to offer. 

He had the ear of Bastet, the Egyptian cat god.  

She’d come to him in the form of a British Shorthair, the night after he’d painted the hieroglyphs on the toilet door, having copied them from the old book his grandad had left him. His grandad, an explorer, had discovered the book during his last ill-fated expedition, in a boot-sale in Croydon.  

The cat had come padding in through those French doors, dropped a broke-backed mouse onto the open text. Mr Renton had watched as the mouse crawled across relevant glyphs, breathed its last and died on the name of the goddess. The cat looked up at him. As if to say, 

“Don’t be bloody dense.” 

And he knew. 

Now Mr Renton sat with his back to the wall, facing the open French doors. All the other houses along the street were built along similar lines, with similar French doors opening out to the back garden, with lacy curtains, and blinds and curtains to pull across of an evening. And their rooms were painted pastel, or had William Morris-type wallpaper, geometric flower patterns stretching from skirting to ceiling. A nice warm rug, settees, TVs and coffee tables and pictures of the family.  

But Mr Renton’s bare feet were placed firmly on blackened floorboards, charred like the walls from fires, offerings, the burning of bones, the torching of the rubbish he’d snatched from neighbours’ bins.   

A little-known fact about cats: they like the smell of your stuff burning.  

Try this at home. 

If you have a cat – if you think you “own” a cat, get some of your belongings, the more treasured the better. That letter, those photos, the childhood teddy, the pregnancy test, the lock of hair.  

Make sure you're in feline company. Torch the lot in front of them.  Oh, they’ll be on their backs writhing in ecstasy. They like to watch your life burn down. It’s better than catnip. 

But a small bonfire in a barren front room is not enough to bring about the supramundane or anything influential, for all its oddity. Mr Renton spoke into the flames, words that he barely understood, and called up a Cat Lady.  

Every town has a Cat Lady. Some have one on every street, but that’s rarer nowadays. They’re often mildly scorned but not to the point of an old-fashioned witch hunt. And Mr Renton’s Cat Lady, like most of them, was a princess in mufti, a goddess, a conduit for and servant of Bast, and once she’d got her plimsolled feet over the threshold of Mr Renton's front door, on the pretext of giving him a carrier bag full of cat food from the posh supermarket (albeit out-of-date and liberated from the skips in the back alley) she revealed her true lithe, beautiful self, gained a couple of feet in height – some of which  she garnered from simply standing up  straight – and began speaking in a throaty language that just might have been ancient Egyptian. 

Or so it appeared to Mr Renton. But Mrs Simpkins, just dying to know what that Cat Lady was up to inside one of the nicer properties, and what that funny Mr Renton was thinking letting her in, (she was known to smell, and not just of cats), had talked the Pallisters next door into letting her peer over their garden fence, where she spied the Cat Lady staggering around Mr Renton’s parlour in a state of undress (a good few layers peeled off and strewn about the floor, but a good few layers still to go) at the exact same moment Mr Renton was witnessing the manifestation of the cat goddess. Perspective is everything. Notwithstanding hokey cat magic.  

The Cat Lady held a hand out over the book  Mr Denton’s grandfather had brought back from the Croydon expedition, whereupon it opened of its own accord, and the pages flipped over until  Mr Denton found himself staring at a text which, despite being written in hieroglyphs and stranger, older alphabets and sigils normally unintelligible to him, he could now read as clear as any Ladybird book of cat magic.  

It gave him a choice.  

Be hers. 

Or fuck the whole thing off, and she and the cats would be on their way.  

He had a good solid week out of it, of having the cats come to him, purring, rubbing themselves round his ankles. Doing his bidding, as he liked to think of it, although that was the extent of it: even conjuring up a cat god from the land of the Nile won’t get the bloody things to behave. There’s the rub – they had their own agenda. He wasn’t the boss of them. The Cat Lady was.  

And she did look unattainably beautiful. A beauty one would do anything for. A beauty one says yes to.  

He had another lovely week. Carnal. Sleepless. Noisy.  

And he rose on the Friday with a hankering for a bit of fish. He leapt out of bed and lost all co-ordination – his body felt all out of sorts - and yet, remarkably, miraculously even, managed to land on his feet. All four of them. 

Furry. 

Clawed.  

And Mrs Simpkins’s cat Twiggy returned the very next day, as if he’d never been away. 

And Mrs Simpkins saw no more of that Mr Denton, but she did spy that cat with a cast in its eye moping around the gardens, looking for something to eat maybe.