Pudding
I have been a cat for three hundred years, and I should like it understood, before anybody strokes me, that it was a sentence.
On the Monday evening after my witch died, I sat on her front wall at the end of Low Drove, in the last of the light, and let the town feed me. The wall is low and brick and faces the drove, and in this parish you leave a fish on the witch's wall for luck. Nobody living remembers why. I remember why. It was my idea, in 1726, and it is the only treaty I have ever made that held.
I sat in the middle of the wall, where I could be seen from the bend, upright and black, keeping vigil, and I felt magnificent. I also wished to be fed. I saw no conflict.
I will tell you about Sunday plainly, because there is not much of it. On Sunday I ate, and I slept. On Monday morning I woke on Mo Tebbutt's cushion under a crocheted thing, and she was crying, and my witch was at the bottom of the steps.
She had gone out of her back door in the dark, on her way to the sea bank, and she had gone down her own eleven garden steps, and she had not got up. She walked the bank every night at the turn. I do not walk the bank. It is wet on one side and wetter on the other. She would come in at some terrible hour smelling of salt and sheep and say, "You missed a good one, you lump," and I would tell her that I had seen the sea in 1725 and had not been asked back.
It was my firm belief, and I have had three hundred years to form beliefs, that somebody did this. In this parish somebody always has.
The town did not share my belief. The town came to the wall with food.
The first offering arrived at a quarter to six, from next door. Mo Tebbutt came down her path in her slippers with a saucer held out in front of her in both hands, the way you carry a candle into a cold church, and she smelled, as she always smells, of the chemist's: hand cream, cough linctus, the inside of a paper bag. Under that she smelled of salt, and not from the sea.
"There you are, love," Mo said. "There you are, my pet. I've done you a tomato one. I know you like the tomato."
"Madam," I said, "I have never liked the tomato. I have eaten the tomato. They are not the same thing, and I have been trying to explain the difference to you for eleven years."
Mo got a cat, as she always does.
"I know, love," she said. "I know. You come in by the fire when you're ready. I've got the cushion warm, and there's the blanket she did, and you can't sit out here all night, it's turning, you can smell it turning, can't you, I can always tell. Come on. Come in and keep me company. I'll not sleep. I know I won't."
"I am keeping vigil," I said.
"I know, love," Mo said, and put the saucer down, and stroked me twice from the head to the tail, which I permitted because it was a day of mourning, and then she put the back of her wrist against her mouth and went back up her path rather fast, and shut her door, and I heard her crying behind it.
I will give you my review.
The tomato sardine. Served at a quarter to six on Mo Tebbutt's second-best saucer, the one with the chip. A tomato sardine is a sardine that has been interfered with. Beneath the sauce lies a decent working fish of no particular character, and over it lies a substance the colour of a pillar box, which I believe to have been made by boiling pillar boxes. It was cold. It was sweet where no fish should be sweet. I ate all of it, and I want that recorded against my name, because I shall be blamed for something before this is over and I should like it known that I suffered first. And it tasted, as everything on this drove tastes, of pear drops.
The sardines in this parish taste of pear drops. I have always put it down to the vicar. He walks past and the whole drove tastes of hymnals. He had walked past twice already that evening, pushing his bicycle along the far side of the dyke, crunching, not stopping, his lips moving and his eyes on me, and I gave him my full regard both times until he went faster.
The second offering arrived at six, in a paper bag gone clear with grease, left by a woman from the bakery who said, "Poor old lamb," and was gone. A sausage roll, warm from the end of the day's tray. I ate it all. One does not leave pastry on a wall in March. It only encourages the gulls.
By now the light had gone the colour of weak tea, and the drove ran out in front of me, straight as a ruler, with a dyke on each side and the reeds ticking in the wind off the marsh, a mile and more to the bend and the church on its little hill. Under everything, low, the pumps at the mouth of the drove were humming, as they hum all night and have hummed every night since they put them in. The town does not hear them. Neither do I, as a rule. I have slept like the righteous dead on certain Sundays since the new year, which a cat of my years is owed, and the pumps have never once kept me up.
The third offering arrived at twenty past six. A man in a bowls club blazer, with a face I did not look at and trousers that smelled of a wet Labrador, came down the drove on foot, stood at the wall with his hat in his hands, said, "There you go, Pudding, old son. She'd have wanted you fed," and put down a tin. He had opened it already, with a key, and peeled the lid back into a curl. On the side of the tin there was a picture of a spaniel.
I do not know what was in that tin. I know what was on it.
In my day a dog's dinner was what a dog got, and the dog was glad of it, and nobody brought it to a mourner. This was brown. It had the shape of the tin it came out of, with rings round it, and a jelly on it that trembled when the wind came across the dyke, and it smelled of gravy that had been told about meat, once, by somebody who had seen some. I put my nose to it. I took my nose away. I put it back, out of respect for the dead, and ate a third, and turned my head toward the kitchen window to tell her.
I have told her about every dinner for three hundred years. She would be at the sink, and I would be on the sill, and I would give her my opinion of the mutton or the herring or the bishop, and she would say, "Eat it or don't, you lump, I'm not the Savoy," and I would eat it. The window was dark. The kettle wasn't on. I felt a great indigestion come up under my ribs, a hard round thing, like a swallowed stone, and I sat with it and looked at the dyke.
The fourth offering arrived at five past seven, and it walked.
It was a child, of about six, from the bungalows at the top of the drove, in a coat over her pyjamas and school shoes with the buckles undone, and she had come the whole mile of Low Drove on her own, holding something in front of her in a paper napkin with a cartoon rabbit on it. She stopped at the wall. She looked at me, and I looked at her. She had a gap at the front of her teeth you could have posted a letter through. Then she unfolded the napkin with enormous care, one corner at a time, and laid it on the bricks in front of me, and stood back with her hands behind her.
"It's for luck," she said. "Mummy says you're sad."
On the napkin was a fish finger.
I do not eat fish fingers. A fish finger is a lie told to children about the sea. It is a fish that has been to a bad school. I have watched this parish go from herring to cod to the fish finger in two generations, and I had never once let one pass my lips, and I had no intention of beginning on the worst Monday of my life.
But she had walked the length of Low Drove in the dark in her school shoes to bring it. And she was watching.
I rose. I let her see me rise. I stepped forward along the wall, as a duke steps forward at a banquet when they bring in the swan, and I lowered my head over the fish finger and regarded it, and I let her see me regard it. Then I ate it, in five bites, slowly, with my eyes half closed, pausing between bites as one pauses between courses, and when it was gone I washed my whole face, both paws, behind both ears, with the greatest thoroughness. She knew what that meant.
"Good boy," she said, which I forgave.
Her mother's voice came down the drove from the bend, a voice that could have stopped a tractor, and she ran.
The fish finger. Served at five past seven on a paper napkin with a rabbit on it, by the youngest cook in the parish. Breadcrumb, frozen cod, a thumbprint. I shall not hear a word against it.
At eight Mo opened her back door and called me in to the cushion, twice, and I went into the cottage instead, through my flap, and heard her say, "Oh, love," to her own back step, and shut her door again.
The range had gone out. Nobody had thought to keep it in. The kitchen smelled of cold soot and her liniment and her hat on the peg, and I went through it quickly, as one goes through a room where something is asleep, and out of the scullery door at the back and down onto the steps. The third step down the garden runs over the boiler flue and is always warm, and it has been mine since they put the boiler in, and the boiler, being a boiler, had not been told about any of this. I sat on it. Below me the garden fell away to the back gate and the dyke, and the dark lay along the dyke like a dog along a hearth, and the pumps hummed.
At nine the church clock struck, four minutes late, as it is always four minutes late, and something went.
It went out toward the high street, a mile and more away. I felt it in my teeth, at the back, on the left. It was like a tooth deciding to leave without consulting the rest of the mouth: a small cold crack, deep in the bone, and then a looseness, and then a taste of old pennies all along my gums.
I was up the steps before I knew I had moved. I went in through the scullery door with my fur standing, and I was halfway across the scullery tiles when the floor went soft.
Not all of it. The square of tiles in front of the drain, which have been there since the old queen was a girl, gave under my feet like the skin on a custard, and under them it was hot. Not warm. Hot, with a smell like an iron left face down on a wet shirt.
I knew that smell.
The floor did not drop. It considered me. It was a mouth deciding. And I went, an inch, toward the drain, with my whole body flat and my back legs running on nothing, and I put my claws into the glaze, and the glaze did not care. Another inch. I have had three hundred years to prepare remarks for occasions, and I had one ready for this, in Latin, with a joke in the second clause. I did not say it. I said, "No." I said it several times, quite high.
Then it stopped. One breath, and it stopped, and the tiles were tiles again, cold and square and stupid, smelling of bleach and old washing and mice, and I was flat on them like a dropped glove.
I lay there until my legs would have me. I shall not tell you what that was. I shall tell you that it was unpleasant. It likes the dark.
I went out through the front by my flap and sat on the wall, because the wall is brick, and has held still under me for three hundred years.
The drove had changed. At dusk the dyke along it had lain a good two feet below the edge, flat and black and minding its business. Now it was a hand's width from the top, and it was talking. Not loudly. A low, busy chuckle, all along the reeds, the length of the drove, as if it had heard news and was passing it on. The water on the other side of the drove was talking too.
Out at the end, over the high street, the sky had gone orange. Not fire. A light that turned and turned against the low cloud: somebody's emergency lights, going round on a roof. And under the hum of the pumps, which had risen half a note, there was a new sound coming down the drove on the wind from the town. It was the sound of a bath running in the next room.
I sat on the wall. I kept my vigil. I did not go to Mo's.
At about ten, when the clock had struck and the dyke had come up another inch to listen, a pair of headlights turned in at the far end of Low Drove, by the bend.
I did not know them. I know every engine on this drove: the chip van, the bin lorry, the doctor's bicycle, which is not an engine but has opinions. This was none of them. It came slowly, very slowly, as people drive Low Drove when they have read the sign, its lights bouncing on the ruts and swinging out over the water on one side and then the other, and as it came nearer I could see that it had a small lit box on its roof, sitting up there like a hat, and I could smell, even from the wall, through the exhaust and the mud, a little cardboard pine tree.
It came the whole mile. It stopped at her gate.
The engine kept running. The little light on the roof stayed on. And nobody got out.