Night of the Animals(66)
“Oh, brother seeker—and ‘brother-seeker’—surely you know that I would also take you, of all creatures, to the sacred path. I am here to tell you that the path leads eventually to the Shayk of Night. Don’t be afraid. I know your purpose. The Shayk has been waiting for you. But I get ahead of myself.”
“That so,” Cuthbert said. He wondered what to make of the cat’s strange ideas. They struck him as no less inscrutable than the penguins’, but this animal had at least alluded to a plan, as well as a quid pro quo arrangement of genuine promise. Given the fact that he’d made a sort of promise to the penguins, he felt inclined to work with this creature.
“Can you help me free the otters into the cut? This is my most important task.”
“Yes, I can help. All things are possible,” said the cat.
“Really?”
“Oh, so much,” said the cat.
Cuthbert thought for a moment. There was no little red emergency box here; there was merely glass. How dangerous could a little cat be? He tried to weigh pros and cons, and it did not take him long to reach a decision.
“Mind now,” said Cuthbert.
There was a heavy garden hose and squirter looped around its portable, wheeled spool a few feet away, propped against the back wall of the lion terraces. The apparatus was made of a heavy, galvanized alloy. He heaved up the entire assemblage, took a few steps back, and ran forward, ramming it into the glass. As he ran, he began to think of his brother, as if Drystan himself were helping him to push forward. There was a loud knock, oddly attenuated and resonant, as if the blow had come from beneath the sea. The force of the impact threw Cuthbert back. He toppled over. He was in great pain.
He screamed, “Drystaaaaaaaaan!” What he would give to see him tonight, even under these embarrassing circumstances. How he missed Dryst!
He sat on his arse for a few seconds, catching his breath.
“Drystan,” he groaned. “Jesus, help me. Jesus Drystan. Jesus Drystan. Help me, help me, help me, help me. Don’t I have a mucker somewhere? St. Cuthbert? Christ of Otters? Someone?”
The air had grown colder and he was shivering, his teeth chattering occasionally. He lurched up onto his knees and steadied himself. He felt dizzy and self-conscious. “I’m really doing it,” he whispered to himself. Kneeling made him think of prayer, but he felt unsure of what to do about it just then. “Bloody help me, someone,” he said. Here he was, a first-class social disaster on one hand, and on the other a supplicant to Family Felidae of Order Carnivora—all he needed was a rosary of fangs.
A huge triangle of the glass pane, half the size of a newspaper page, had broken off and tilted into the tank. Cuthbert got up and approached the opening—there were the three cats, lumped into a little cave made of artificial, flat rocks; their ears were pulled back in terror. After a little while, seeing Cuthbert and hearing a few soothing words he remembered his granny using (“Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”), their giant ears pricked up. The one named Muezza stepped forward first. Felis margarita are known for their gentleness, their sweetness of temper—provided you aren’t a snake, chicken, or rodent. Cuthbert simply pulled them out, like free kittens, and dropped them onto the pavement.
the green line to allah
THE SAND CATS STARTED TO KEEN AWAY, STRETCHING their legs into grand, picky steps, then pushing themselves into low, predatory crawls. This, evidently, is what a little imprisoned meat-eater does when it suddenly takes its place at the top of the local food chain. The killing of natural prey, which the zoo hadn’t allowed for decades, had to be eased into; it was like crawling beneath a tender belly—the animal looks for teats, and failing that, goes for the heart.
Watching them, Cuthbert was rapt. He felt that cats were healing, almost magical, and in a funny way, a force stronger than Flōtism.
His grandmother Winefride, among other things, was one of those great cat-loving women one encounters in the world, from Alabama to Zanzibar, the sort who, if given the opportunity, would keep a dozen in the house and feed a dozen more strays under the back porch. Removed from her Clee and Wyre environs to West Bromwich, she had turned to cats and birds as signs of wildness.
In her later years, Cuthbert’s father forbade all pets, but Winefride always talked as though cats were, apart from otters, the most perfect of God’s creatures. If otters brought miracles to the dying and to saints, cats helped the living. She often employed the word useful to describe them, though Cuthbert never understood just what that implied. She was always putting out saucers of milk and the occasional kipper for the moggies in the neighborhood.
“They deserve it,” she would say.
In his mind, he could still hear her calling “Kitty-kyloe! Kitty-kyloe!”
Cuthbert watched the sand cats begin to relax and stand taller. In London, a cat could command a certain respect. He remembered the prancing cat logo one saw when visiting the A&E at the Whittington Hospital, up the Holloway Road, where he had regularly shown up in recent years for neulibrium and a hot meal and Flōt detox.
You again, Cuthbert? his favorite nurses would say. After your jabs again? Going to hospital used to be a relief for Cuthbert; he had been welcomed at Whittington for a long time, and the staff never minced words: Keep it up, Cuthbert, and you’ll be dead before you’re a hundred. He had been placed in the hospital’s large psychiatric unit seven times for chronic Flōtism, with stays from three days to nine weeks, typically signed off by Dr. Bajwa. He never stayed away from Flōt more than a few hours after his discharges, but he felt a temporary relief—he saw that, in theory at least, it was possible to stop drinking.