Pudding
At half past eleven on the Friday night I was sitting on the third step down my witch's garden in the dark, and the blood was standing on the second with a torch, and I was telling her about the great frost of 1740.
Mo had said it in the church, in her nightdress, in front of the parish: the third step, above her, dead to the world. The blood had driven us home without a word, walked me through the cottage and out of the back door and down, and stopped, and said, "Show me."
So I had shown her the step. And then I had begun on the frost.
"It came in the January," I said. "It came in a night. One evening the dyke was a dyke, and the next morning you could have danced a minuet on it, and the vicar of that day did, madam, with the curate, and broke his wrist. I slept, that winter, in the bread oven of the Lamb, after the last loaf was out and before the first was in, and on the Thursday the landlord's wife lit it early, and I woke—"
"Steps," said the blood.
"I am coming to the steps. One does not arrive at the steps without the journey. I woke, I say, mildly baked, and went out over the Lamb's back wall onto the ice with my coat smoking, and I walked the frozen Nene from the sluice to Wisbech on my own four feet, and at the far end of it there was a man selling hot chestnuts off a sledge, with one eye. Now. The chestnuts."
"Steps."
"I have not finished with the chestnuts."
"Steps," said the blood.
I looked at the dark. Below me the garden went down into it, eight more steps and a gate and a dyke, and I could not see any of it, and I did not need to. I have known those steps by the soles of my feet since before anybody now in this parish was born. They were wet. They are always wet. The third step under me was warm, as it is always warm, with the flue under it ticking like a clock in another room, and the heat came up into my belly from the brick, and for the first time since they put the boiler in, I did not want it.
I tried once more. I tried hell. I began to tell her about the catering, which is a subject on which I can go for an hour, and I got as far as "The soup, madam, in the place I came from," and she did not even say "Steps." She put the torch on me.
It came down on me white and flat, and I sat in it.
"Were you on the steps?" said the blood. "That night. When she came down."
"Yes."
It was out before I could make it anything else. It is my step. I have never been able to say a thing that is not so, and I had never, until then, wished so much that I could.
The torch did not move.
"Did she fall over you?"
I could have gone long. I could have given her the frost again, and the chestnuts, and the soup. I could have answered the question she had not asked. I have done it to bishops and curates and a magistrate, and I am very good at it, and I sat on the warm brick in the white of her torch and found that I did not have a single thing to say that was not the answer.
"I don't know," I said.
I had been on the step. She had come down the steps. She had got to the bottom of them and not got up. And between the one and the other there was nothing in me at all. Not a sound, not a smell, not a boot. A hole the shape of a night.
The blood did not say anything for a long time. Then she moved the torch.
She moved it off me and down, onto the edge of the step I was sitting on, the front lip of it, where the brick turns over. There was moss on it, as there is moss on all of them, green and soft and wet. Except in one place. In one place, the width of a hand, on the very edge of the third step, the moss was gone, scraped clean off in one long pale stroke down to the brick, as a heel takes it when it goes.
She held the torch on that for a while. I looked at it, because she did.
"You sleep here," said the blood.
"On cold nights. And on most of the others."
"It's warm."
"There is a flue under it. From the boiler. It has been my step since they put the boiler in."
"And Sunday."
"On Sunday," I said, "I ate. And then I slept. And then I woke on Mo Tebbutt's cushion, under a crocheted thing, with her crying on me. I have told you that. Every word of it is true."
"You slept through it."
"I sleep well, madam. I am a cat of some years. On certain Sundays since the new year I have slept like the righteous dead, and I have not been sorry for it until now."
"Did you hear her?"
"No."
The torch came back to my face. I shut my eyes in it.
"What's the last thing you remember?" said the blood. "Sunday. Before Mo's cushion. The last thing."
That one I could answer, and I answered it, and I gave it everything I had, because it was the last good thing and I was not going to be given another.
"A sardine," I said. "On the wall. In oil. Perfect. It was the first decent sardine in a decade, madam, after eleven years of tomato. It was fat and it was cold and it was silver all through, and it had been laid on the saucer as one lays a thing that is meant, and it tasted of nothing but itself and of pear drops, which I have always put down to the vicar, because everything on this drove does. I ate it on the wall in the dark, before the Lamb rang for last orders. I ate it slowly. I felt like a king. And then I felt heavy, and grand, and very warm, and that is the end of it. That is all there is. There is a sardine, and then there is Mo."
The blood stood on the second step with the torch in her hand and her face swollen up like a pumpkin, and her breath going in and out of her with a whistle in it. She did not say anything about the sardine.
"They found black hairs in her hand," she said.
I had nothing true to say to that which would have helped her. So I said nothing.
"And Mo found you here. On this. In the morning. And she screamed, and you didn't wake up. And she picked you up off it and carried you home, and you didn't wake up. And you woke up on her cushion."
"I woke on her cushion."
"She trod on you." The blood said it quite flat. It was the voice she uses for the meter. "She came out of that door in the dark, the way she did every night, without a light, and she came down two steps, and she put her foot on you. On this. And she went over. And you were asleep."
I did not say it a second time.
Get off that step, you lump. I'll go over you one of these nights.
She said it to me most nights since they put the boiler in. She said it going down to the bank at the turn of the tide, at one in the morning or two or whenever it was, with her stick in one hand and her boots unlaced and her coat smelling of sheep. And on those nights I heard the back door go, and her boot come down on the first step, and the second, and then a gap, a long one, the length of a woman of three hundred and some lifting her leg very high over a cat; and then her boot on the fourth, and the stick, and the hem of her coat going past my ear with the salt on it, and her voice going on down the garden in the dark: "One of these nights, you lump." And I would put my chin back on my paws and go to sleep with the warm coming up through me, and she would come in at some terrible hour with the sea on her and say I had missed a good one.
Most nights. "I know where my feet are," she used to say.
The blood sat down.
She sat on the second step, behind me and above me, with her knees up and the torch on the step beside her, pointing out at nothing, at the dyke. She did not touch me. She did not sneeze, which I had not known she could stop herself doing. She sat with her arms round her knees and her chin on them, and looked down the dark garden at the gate, and the dyke, and the bank beyond it, and the sea beyond that, which we could hear, the long hiss of it on the mud, coming in.
I did not look round at her. I looked where she looked.
I do not know how long. The church clock struck midnight, four minutes late, and then nothing for a long time, and she did not move, and I did not move, and the flue ticked under me. Once she breathed in as if she was going to say a thing, and I waited for it with every hair I had, and she let the breath out again without it.
At about a quarter to one she got up.
She took the torch. She did not go back up to the house. She went down. She went past me on the far side of the step, close to the wall, and down the rest of them, the fourth and the fifth and all the way, slowly, with the light on her feet, counting. I heard her counting under her breath, as she counts change. Nine. Ten. Eleven. At the bottom she stood still on the flags by the gate, where my witch had been found, with the light on the ground there, and she stood a long time.
Then she came back up.
She came up the eleven steps with the torch on them, and when she came to the third, I was on it, because I had not moved. I could not have told you why I had not moved. And she stopped one step below me, and looked at me, with the one eye that would still open. And then she lifted her foot, high, and put it down on the second step, on the far side of me, and brought the other after it, and stepped over me.
She did it carefully. She had the light on me the whole time, so as to know where her feet were.
She went up the last two steps and in at the back door and through the kitchen, and I heard the front door go, and the gate, and the door of Mo's little car, and the engine, which coughed twice and caught. The headlights went across the front of the house. I heard the car turn in the gateway, back and forward, back and forward, three goes at it. Then it went off up the drove, slowly, in the dark, with its lights bouncing on the ruts, toward the bend. I listened to it until I could not tell it from the pumps.
Tomorrow was the thirteenth night. Neither of us had said so.
I came in off the step.
I do not know why I came in. The step was warm and the kitchen was not. I went in through the back door, which she had left open, and across the kitchen in the dark to the table, and I got under it, between the legs of her chair, where I used to wait for the bacon rind, and I lay down.
It came up through the tiles almost at once, and this time it held me, stretched flat between the table leg and the open scullery with my cheek against the cold leg of her chair. There was a name to say, and I did not feel that I was owed it. I counted for myself, as she does, and on the far side of sixty it let me go, as a mouth lets go of a thing it means to come back for.
I was not under the table any longer. I was a hand's breadth beyond it, toward the scullery, out in the open floor. Behind me, in a line, in the glaze, there were ten small grooves where my claws had been, and in some of them, black, a few of my own hairs.