Warlight(7)

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes.”

I was silent, out of politeness. I never had a cat. I don’t like cats.

“I avoid them,” I said.

“I know,” The Moth said. “Why is that, do you think? That you avoid them?”

The gas fire sputtered and The Moth got on his knees and put a coin in the meter to revive it. The flames lit the left side of his face. He stayed as he was, as if he knew when he leaned back he would be in darkness again, as if he wanted me to see him, keep the contact intimate.

“You had a cat,” he said again. “You loved it. It was the only pet you had when you were a child. It was small. It would wait for you to come home. One doesn’t remember everything. Do you remember your very first school? Before you moved to Ruvigny Gardens?” I shook my head, watching his eyes. “You loved the cat. At night, when you fell asleep, it seemed to sing to itself. But it was really a howl, not a beautiful sound, but it liked to do this. It irritated your father. He was a light sleeper. In the last war he took on a fear of sudden noises. Your cat’s howling drove him mad. You were all living in the outskirts of London then. Tulse Hill, I think. Around there.”

“How do you know this?”

He seemed not to hear me.

“Yes, Tulse Hill. What does that mean? Tulse? Your father used to warn you. Do you remember? He would come into your room that was next to his and your mother’s and take the cat and put it outside for the rest of the night. But this made it worse. It would only sing louder. Your father did not think it was singing, of course. Only you did. That is what you told him. The thing was, the cat would not start its howling until you were asleep, as if it did not want to disturb you while you were beginning to fall asleep. So your father killed it one night.”

I did not avert my eyes from the fire. The Moth leaned even closer into the light so I had to see his face, that it was human, even though it looked as though it was burning.

“In the morning you couldn’t find your cat, and so he told you. He said he was sorry but he could not stand the noise.”

“What did I do?”

“You ran away from home.”

“Where? Where did I go?”

“You went to a friend of your parents’. You told that friend that you wanted to live there instead.”

A silence.

“He was brilliant, your father, but he was not stable. You must understand that the war damaged him badly. And it was not only his fear of sudden noise. There was a secrecy about him, and he needed to be alone. Your mother was aware of that. Perhaps she should have told you. Wars are not glorious.”

“How do you know all this? How do you know?”

“I was told,” he said.

“Who told you? Who…” And then I stopped.

“It was me you came to stay with. You told me.”

We were both quiet then. The Moth stood up and moved back from the fire until I could barely see his face in the darkness. So it felt easier to talk.

“How long did I stay with you?”

“Not very long. Eventually I had to take you home. Remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“You did not speak for some time. You felt safer that way.”

—

My sister didn’t return until late that night, long past midnight. She appeared unconcerned, barely spoke to us. The Moth did not argue with her about her absence, only asked if she had been drinking. She shrugged. She looked exhausted, her arms and her legs were filthy. After this night The Moth would intentionally grow close to her. But it felt to me that she had crossed a river and was now further from me, elsewhere. She had after all been the one to discover the trunk, which our mother had simply “forgotten” when she’d boarded the plane for the two-and-a-half-day journey to Singapore. No shawl, no cannister, no calf-length dress she could swirl in on some dance floor during a tea dance with our father, or whoever she was with, wherever she was. But Rachel refused to talk about it.

Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “?‘Schwer,’?” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”



There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil. These feel like moments without context. Picasso as a youth, I’m told, painted only in candlelight, to admit the altering movement of shadows. But as a boy, I sat at my desk and drew detailed maps radiating out to the rest of the world. All children do this. But I did this as precisely as I could: our U-shaped street, the shops on Lower Richmond Road, the footpaths beside the Thames, the exact length of Putney Bridge (seven hundred feet), the height of the brick wall at the Brompton Cemetery (twenty feet), ending with the Gaumont cinema at a corner of Fulham Road. I did this each week, making sure of any new alteration as if what was not recorded might be in danger. I needed a safe zone. I knew if I put two of those homemade maps beside each other they would look like a newspaper quiz where you had to find ten things that were different between two seemingly identical panels—the time on a clock, a jacket unbuttoned, this time a cat, this time no cat.