Jess
Monday night, and the hen party wants five addresses.
They tell me at the pub, all at once, all of them shouting, with the bride in the middle wearing a sash and a plastic crown. Werrington, then Dogsthorpe, then the flats behind the hospital, then Orton, then the one in Hampton with the gnome. I don't write it down. I go Werrington, Dogsthorpe, hospital, Orton, Hampton, and at every stop the right one gets out, and the last one, the one with the gnome, leans back in through the window and says, "Did you see her face when he took his shirt off? Did you see it?"
I didn't. Faces I don't do. Voices I don't do. I do roads. I look at the road and the meter.
"Forty-two eighty," I say, and she pays me in coins out of a cocktail glass she's stolen from the pub, and I watch her get to her door, because you do, and then I turn the light off on the roof and sit in the car in Hampton with the engine running.
The solicitor rang at three this afternoon. A woman in Wisbech with a voice like a radiator. Agatha Crowle, of Crowle Cottage, Low Drove, Thornbury Fen, has died, and I am her heir. I said I didn't know an Agatha Crowle. She said Agatha Crowle was my great-great-aunt, or thereabouts, on my mother's side, and that the property was mine, subject to probate. She said the neighbour would leave the key on the front wall. She said, "I'm sorry for your loss." I said, "Right," because I didn't know what else you say to that about somebody you've never met.
I have fourteen thousand two hundred pounds of debt. A cottage is a cottage.
I put the light back on, so the police know I'm working if they stop me, and I go out on the A forty-seven.
It's an hour. The A forty-seven to Wisbech, then a B road, then a road with no number at all, and then the land goes flat and black on both sides and stays like that. No hedges. No lights. Ditches full to the top, shining when the headlights catch them. Every so often a farm, with one light on, a long way off. The wind pushes the car about. I've got bald tyres on the front, and I know it, and the road knows it.
There's an orange light going round somewhere off to the right, over a few roofs and a church. I don't go toward it. The satnav takes me left, down a track between two ditches. There's a sign at the end of it. Low Drove. Unsuitable For Motors.
I'm a motor, so.
The track is straight and long and full of holes, and there's water each side of it, high, almost level with the road, black and moving. I go at ten miles an hour. The reeds tick on the doors. It's a mile. I count it on the clock. One mile exactly and then there's a house.
It's small and brick and it leans to the left. There's a wall at the front, low, and a gate, and on the wall there's a saucer with nothing on it but red sauce, and next to the saucer there's a cat.
It's black. It's fat. It's sitting up very straight, like it's waiting for a cab.
I stop at the gate and leave the engine running and look at it. It looks at me. Behind it there's a house next door with a light on upstairs. Behind me there's a mile of track I don't want to reverse down in the dark.
Whatever a cottage is worth, it's a start.
I get out.
The key's under an empty sardine tin on the wall, next to the saucer. The cat watches me pick it up. It doesn't move. It's got one ear with a bit missing and eyes like two coins, and it doesn't blink. I go through the gate and up the path, and it gets down off the wall and comes after me, slowly, with its tail up. I put the key in the door. It's stiff. I shove it with my shoulder and it goes, and the air comes out of the house at me.
It's warm and thick and it smells of smoke and cat and some kind of ointment, and my eyes shut on their own, and I sneeze so hard I hit my head on the frame.
I sneeze again. Then three more times. I find the light switch with my hand. It's a kitchen, with a range and a big table and a dresser full of plates, and every surface has got black hair on it. The cat walks in past my legs and jumps up onto the table and sits in the middle of it.
My eyes are streaming. My nose is going. I can feel my throat starting to close up, the way it does, at the back.
"Well," says the cat. "You took your time."
I sneeze.
"I have been sitting on that wall, on and off, since dusk," the cat says. "I have eaten a tomato sardine, a sausage roll, a third of a tin of something meant for a spaniel, and a fish finger. I am Azzariel Thorncrown, the Unquenched, Duke of the Ninth Furnace, familiar to the late Agatha Crowle of this parish for three hundred years, and I bid you welcome to her house, which is now, I gather, your house, and which you have just walked into without knocking."
"What?"
"Azzariel," says the cat. "Thorncrown."
I sneeze on it. It shuts its eyes until I've finished.
"What?" I say.
"The Unquenched. Duke of the Ninth Furnace. I'll not do the whole of it again, madam, you're getting it all over the table."
"You're talking."
"I am."
"Are you a talking cat?"
"I am a great deal more than a talking cat."
I go to the kettle. It's on the range, a big old steel one, shiny. I look at my face in the side of it. It's swelling up already round the eyes, but both sides of my mouth go up when I try to smile. My mum used to say if you thought you were having a stroke you should say "British Constitution" and see if it came out right. I say "British Constitution" to the kettle. It comes out fine.
The cat watches me do all of this with its front feet together, like a little magistrate.
"Are you finished?" it says.
"No," I say. "I'm having a stroke."
"You are not having a stroke. You are having an audience."
I sit down on a chair, because my legs want me to. I put my sleeve over my nose. The cat looks at me across the table.
"You're the blood," the cat says. "The heir. The last of the line. The great-niece, with a number of greats missing."
"She was my great-great-aunt. The solicitor said."
"She was three hundred and seventy-one," the cat says. "She looked well on it. The forms have said seventy-one since before anyone's time, and nobody here asks."
"Three hundred and seventy-one."
"And a bit."
"Nope," I say.
"One of you per generation," the cat says. "There is always one. You're this one."
I sneeze, four times, and when I've finished the cat is still there.
"Are you going to tell me you're lying," I say. "That this is a wind-up. That there's somebody in the next room with a microphone."
"I can't lie," the cat says. "I can be extremely selective."
"So there's nobody in the next room."
"There is nobody in the next room. There is nobody in this house but you and me." It stops. It looks at the window for a second, which is black. Then it looks back at me. "You walked straight in, you know. Through her gate, up her path, in at her door. Not so much as a knock. You walked straight in like a Methodist."
"I've got a key."
"So has the Methodist."
Somebody knocks on the back door.
The cat doesn't move. I get up and open it, and there's a woman on the step in a pink dressing gown and slippers, seventy-odd, small and round, with her hair in a net. She looks at me and starts crying straight off, and says, "Oh, you're her, you're Jess, you've got her chin, you've got her chin exactly, come here, come here, love," and she puts her arms round me.
She's soft and she smells of hand cream and she's covered in cat hair. I sneeze into her net.
"Bless you, love," she says, into my shoulder.
"Don't," I say.
"I'm Mo. Mo Tebbutt. Next door. I left you the key. I've been watching for your lights, I said to myself, she'll come tonight, she'll come straight out, she's a Crowle, and here you are, and you look like a wet week, love, you do, have you eaten, you haven't, I can always tell."
She lets go of me and looks past me at the table, at the cat, and starts again.
"There he is," she says. "There's my boy."
"Tell her I'm in mourning," the cat says.
I look at Mo. Mo hears a miaow.
"I know, love," Mo says to it. "I know you are."
"Did you hear that?" I say.
"He's been crying for her all day," Mo says. "He's not stopped."
"I have not been crying," the cat says. "I have been reviewing."
"I know, love," Mo says.
The cat looks at me.
"The blood hears me," it says, "and anyone a witch has taught. She taught two that I know of. One died in 1802 and the other went to Canada. To everyone else I say miaow. I say it with contempt."
"You'll have a cup of tea," Mo says. "You'll come round mine and have a cup of tea, you can't stop in here, not with your face, look at your face, love, it's going up like a balloon. Come on. He'll be all right. Come round."
I go round, because she's got me by the arm.
Her house is the same as the cottage but the other way round, and full of things. Crocheted things. On the back of the settee, on the arms, on the telly. She doesn't let me past the doorstep at first, she stands on it in her dressing gown with the hall light behind her and holds my hand in both of hers and talks.
"She went down the steps," she says. "Her own back steps, in the dark, Sunday night, going out to that bank like she always did, every night God sent, she'd never have a light, I said to her a hundred times, Agatha, have a light on them steps, and she said I know where my feet are, Maureen. That's what she said. And I found her. In the morning. I went round and I found her."
"I'm sorry," I say.
"She always said she'd go over that cat one day," Mo says. "And she did, love, she went over that bloody cat. They found black hairs in her hand."
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say to that.
"I took him in, poor lamb," Mo says. "He was," and she stops. She looks at me, and she looks at the cottage, and she lets go of my hand. "You'll have a cup of tea," she says.
I don't ask. It's not my cat.
"No," I say. "Thanks. I'm going to sleep in the car."
"In the car? You can't sleep in the car. You can have my settee, you can have the settee and welcome."
"I'm all right in the car."
"You've got a house."
"It's got a cat in it."
She looks at me a long time. Then she says, "Your mum was the same," and goes in, and shuts the door, and I hear her start to cry on the other side of it.
I go back to the cottage. The cat's still on the table. I turn the light off on it and pull the door shut and lock it and go out through the gate, and it's out on the wall before I get there. I didn't see it pass me.
"There is a bed," it says. "In the box room. A good bed. She aired it on Saturdays."
"There's a cat," I say.
"There is a cat everywhere. That is the nature of cats."
"Not in my car there isn't."
I get in the car and shut the door. I put the seat back as far as it goes, the windows up, all four, the doors locked, my coat over me. My face is hot and tight. My breathing whistles.
Through the windscreen, the cat on the wall is looking at me. Its eyes catch the light from the house next door.
I count the money in my head. Forty-two eighty from the hens. Thirty-one before that. Sixty for the airport. Fourteen thousand two hundred. It doesn't go down. I count it anyway.
I'm almost asleep when the horn goes.
It's a long one, and then another, coming down the drove from the high street end, and a pair of headlights bouncing on the holes, too fast for this track. It's a van. A white van with a rattle in its exhaust you could hear in Peterborough. It doesn't stop. It slows by the cottage and the next house, and the driver's window is down, and the driver is shouting out of it over the noise of his own engine.
"High street's going! High street's going! Anybody with a car, get up the high street!"
Then it's turning, in the gateway of a field, three goes at it, and it's off back up the drove the way it came, still on the horn.
I sit up. Next door the lights are coming on, one after the other, downstairs, hall, porch.
Something lands on my roof. I hear it. Four feet and a lot of weight. Then the cat's face comes down over the top of the windscreen, upside down, with its torn ear hanging.
"That will be the first one's water," it says.