Best of all, however, was the news that if anyone considered throwing me overboard they would think twice, because throwing a cat overboard would cause a great storm to sink the ship and kill everyone and should any lucky ones survive they would have nine years of further bad luck to look forward to.
In any event, it was all rather good news, I decided, as was the captain’s announcement that he was giving me a ‘roving commission’ as an ordinary seacat, with my number-one duty – as well as the bringing of luck and magic – being to take control of all the vermin.
Quite apart from all that, the captain seemed to have taken a shine to me personally. He would tour the decks, whistling, and it soon became obvious that sometimes he was whistling specifically for me, as I’d often hear him calling out his name for me as well. This put me in mind of the old lady in the big house on Stonecutters Island, and the way she’d often whistle to call my mother. It also reminded me of the affection she’d always shown us, and how my mother had once told me it was a cat’s way to reciprocate, and to return such a compliment wherever possible. (Even if I knew full well that, in her book, such feline displays of affection definitely didn’t include allowing yourself to be picked up and hugged, much less slung over a naval captain’s shoulder.)
I would therefore always hurry to wherever he was and show myself, and he would express such delight at my having come ‘at his command’ that I made it my business to hurry to him any time I heard him calling ‘Simonnnn!’, or whistling for me to come to him. And it wasn’t just because of the ease with which he could find me sardines, either. I was equally delighted to have made a new human friend. I thought perhaps my mother would have been, too.
Making friends very soon became the order of the day because it seemed everyone on the Amethyst wanted to say hello to me. Wherever I went I was greeted with the same affection George had shown me back on Stonecutters Island, and I quickly got used to being picked up and cuddled.
It was a very different life from the one I’d been living in Hong Kong. But I was still my mother’s kitten and, for the most part, her words of advice still made sense to me. I would do as she’d always advised when it came to relations with other creatures; return the friendship my new human friends were extending to me by becoming the best ratter in the Navy. And so what that I lacked experience? I would make up for that easily – with enthusiasm, dedication and courage.
It felt good to have an ambition. To be given a role in life. To strive for something more fulfilling than just survival. And I couldn’t wait to get underway. There was just the one detail that was holding me up. In order to kill the ship’s vermin, first I had to track them down. And in this I still felt woefully lacking in skills or experience, bar half-remembered snatches of half-remembered information from my mother – that fresh rat’s urine was so revolting that it made your whiskers shiver, and that they scuttled around the most at dawn and dusk.
So it was that on the fourth or fifth night after getting my orders I was still prowling optimistically below the waterline at dawn, having had what was shaping up to be a very productive night – my first true lead in what had become a rather lengthy campaign.
Ever since I’d joined the crew, I’d been trying to work out where I might find the promised enclave of marauding rodents, but up to now I hadn’t had a great deal of success. I could often smell them (fusty and musty, like mice, only more so) but that had been as far as I’d got. Which didn’t surprise me. If they were one of the evils – indeed, the very curse – of His Majesty’s Navy, it seemed sensible to assume they were as crafty as any rodent, and knew their way around a ship a lot better than I did.
I also wondered if they’d got wind of my own presence. I’d only encountered rats very fleetingly, as one of the rules my mother had been at pains to have me heed was that I was forbidden from having anything to do with them. She had been clear in the utmost on how much danger a rat posed to a kitten; I was too small still, too weak, too inexperienced and too curious, and she assured me that when the day came when she deemed me no longer all those things, she would be the first to tell me.
Not that I’d even fully understood what she’d meant. That last bit, for instance. Shouldn’t cats be curious? Wasn’t that what cats were supposed to be? As a kitten, it had all been such a puzzle to me. In what way could being too curious about something as lowly as a rat pose a danger to a rat-hunting kitten? What could a rat – just a big mouse, really – actually do to me? They were grain-nibblers. Scurriers. Made for footling, not fighting. Whereas I had the tools for an altogether different kind of life. Speed and stealth. Grace and agility. A predator’s teeth and claws.
And then I’d met one for myself, back on the island, and though I was only little then, I was still not convinced. Because my memory was not so much of a terrifying adversary, as of being a bold, courageous kitten, cruelly thwarted. That what I’d spotted had been a rat had been without question. Fat, dung-coloured rump. Scaly tail, like an earthworm. Unquestionably a rat – just like a mouse, only bigger – and I couldn’t have been more excited. And having spied it scuttling away (another thing rats are good at), I simply did what a kitten is naturally compelled to do. I sank down almost to my belly, took aim, rehearsed my pounce in my head and then –
‘KITTEN, STOP!’ My mother’s hiss pierced the air with such force that the entire rat, already aquiver, completely left the ground. And once back in touch with it, streaked away as if propelled by a hurricane, to go on and live – and to steal – another day. And I’d been cross – just as any thwarted kitten had a right to be, in my book. Humphing and harrumphing and generally mewling my displeasure at what she’d done. Oh, how I sulked! Till I was finally chastened by my mother – by her explaining at great length that a rat was, in reality, not at all like a mouse. That the fat-bottomed rodent I had set my sights on killing could just as easily turn around and kill me.
I trusted my mother, so was still slightly nervous as I padded along the passageways in the bowels of the Amethyst, nose up, whiskers twitching, reading the air. For all that the captain had assured me that I’d make a very fine ratter (though how could he know that?), my mother’s stern warnings couldn’t help but nag at me and neither could the memory of that scar on her nose. So the business of whether I was yet big enough, strong enough, experienced enough to deal with one – all of those were the questions I had yet to resolve. Without her to tell me – because she’d died before that day she’d mentioned happened – I would just have to judge for myself.
I was in no doubt about one thing – that I must be curious. I knew I’d be ratting no rats otherwise. Without curiosity, I would fail to even find one. The Amethyst was a place of secrets, a place of nooks, crannies and corners. Many of them places, presumably, where my human friends couldn’t go – which was why rats, evil scavengers and skulkers in shadows, could set up home there and take things that weren’t theirs. And as the captain’s ratter – which responsibility I took extremely seriously – it was down to me to seek and find them, to get into all those places and (with luck as well as courage, both of which I knew I would need a lot of) take control, thin their numbers, make kills.
It was with that very much in mind that I stalked my first ship’s rodent, which I came upon, finally, in the space between the flour sacks and pipes, at the very back of the dark, silent stores. It was its route I noticed first. I knew all about routes. This route was a rat run if ever I saw one. And though I could hear my mother tutting as I thought it, I thought it anyway; that it was exactly like a mouse run only bigger.