But then all became strange. The tortoiseshell flinched, suddenly, and became wide-eyed. A certain awkwardness stole through the air. The two cats surveyed each other silently for a moment. Library Cat didn’t know what to do. A weird heat started to rise inside of him from the sheer embarrassment. What had gone wrong? Do something, do something, Library Cat. The awkwardness was terrible. This couldn’t go on. Finally, with a de-clawed paw, Library Cat gently biffed her on the side of her back while uttering the only icebreaker line he knew: “Prrrrrrrrp?”
Almost instantaneously, the tortoiseshell quadrupled in size. Her fur extended out into the air, and her cavernous mouth opened brutishly to reveal a long track of fangs through which she spoke a deep, spitting, sibilant hiss, swiping her paw against his side, before darting down the close and into the gloom.
Well, that went well, thought Library Cat, as certain other members of the cat fraternity turned to eye him, standing alone, his paw still outstretched. Two amorous white cats looked up from their canoodling. A ginger, eating a mouse, paused mid-chew and gazed over. A clutch of tiny mewing shorthairs, suspiciously young and probably still within kittenhood, played boisterously over the silence. Finally, breaking the stasis, a green-eyed alley began walking towards Library Cat poised-of-claw, but thought better of it as Library Cat rose sharply to his feet and growled him down.
“Grrrrrrrooaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrooooooooooooooooow wwwwww…”
And then it happened. Suddenly the scene became a throbbing ball of fur, fangs and noise. Hisses, scratches, swipes and bites all tumbled over each other as Saaf Landan Tom – originally enjoying the company of an amorous she-cat near a litterbin – bounded into the middle of the scene like a lion, thrashing this way and that.
And then nothing. Library Cat was alone. The alley was empty, with the cats seeming to have evaporated into thin air. He had no idea where they had all gone, and was loath to cry for Tom, lest the baying throng stampeded back for some reason. A dog barked nearby. He shivered. Looking down at his paw, he noticed a few red beads of blood beginning to plush up on its white tip like tiny berries. He dunked it down in a nearby puddle to wash it.
And then he saw her again. PUDDLE CAT! Her whites ripped and silver; her blacks velvety and ethereal; her eyes flickering like emeralds and her whiskers like white lace; and her expression seeming to speak the secrets of a thousand interminable years of knowledge and wisdom.
Library Cat was speechless and, more to the point, thought-less. Gently with the sweet-terror of a Petrarchan prince, he moved his mouth closer to the image. (She moved in too! Oh the joy!) He wanted to contain the moment forever but couldn’t think how. Could he kiss her? He must kiss her. I have to kiss her! And with that, he lowered his head down to hers, and was just about to rub his cheek against her soft head when…
“Eow!”
Saaf Landan Tom jocularly sat down in the puddle sending a raft of muddy ripples fleeing in all directions from the sheer bulk of his enormous fluffy backside. He had something in his mouth. It was a note:
Sorry about that mate. Not what I planned. Home?
As the two cats wended their way back along Lauriston Place, their breath pluming little clouds of condensation in front of them, Library Cat began to feel a little… how might we put it… unusual. He had only had a few snickets of catnip, and was initially feeling a little woozy and lightheaded – a perfectly normal response. But now things were turning strange. Objects began to take on the shape and fluidity of a Salvador Dalí painting, with melting colours and sounds. Fireflies seemed to buzz above his head, and he found himself bounding up joyfully to snap at them only for them to disappear into the black. Traffic lights and dustbins suddenly seemed to gain an alarming and inexplicable sentience. All of a sudden, shimmering in front of his eye line, he could see himself linking with Puddle Cat in an ensouled room, red with light and ablaze with bitter sublimation. Her black fur was interminably deep like jet, while her white fur was glowing moon-silver like platinum. Now she emerged purring through the gloom to Library Cat on the street, nuzzling him gently. And then they were eating mice after it had happened, and then… nothing… All images vanished as a diorama of blackness passed across his vision.
Recommended Reading
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Food consumed
Watery lumps of jellied chicken, a mouse, half a lamb kebab, and some grade-one catnip.
Mood
Heady excitement, to delirious, to a crushing nihilistic disappointment.
Discovery about Humans
Their abuse of chemicals at night isn’t as incomprehensible as previously thought.
Shame
Shame. That’s what Library Cat felt right now. Pure, unadulterated cat shame.
He had been sick. On his turquoise chair in the library. The vomit clearly contained the dark brown threads of the previous night’s catnip. His memory of the night was a blur. There had been Puddle Cat, and a beautiful tortoiseshell, he remembered that much, but that was all. Now his lamentable loss of dignity in the sober surroundings of the library led to him being shooed out into the cold square.
My head feels like a lead ball, thought Library Cat, the effects of last night’s debauchery forcing him into the heady heights of metaphor.
But there was more. An hour of so earlier, Library Cat had headed home only to discover Saaf Landan Tom drinking from his water bowl once again, contaminating it with large chunks of chicken jelly. And then something terrible happened. Library Cat lashed out. For the first time in his life, the red mist had descended. Incensed by his cousin’s boorish impertinence, and still fat-tailed with jealousy over Tom’s evidently more successful time On The Prowl the night before, Library Cat had dealt his cousin a smart blow to the neck, with all five claws fully deployed. It was over in an instant. Saaf Landan Tom had fled the house and Edinburgh hissing curtly, his great ginger tail swishing through the air like a medieval torch.
This was worse than the vomit in the library. This was worse than ostracism to the square. This was a slight of character. Up until this point, Library Cat had fought all his wars with two deeply coveted weapons – weapons of infinite virtue, that brought their bearers certain victory against cats and Humans alike, and which were brandished by thoroughbred thinking cats all over the world. The two weapons were: thoughts and expressions. They’d never failed Library Cat before and, he assumed, they never would. But he’d swiped, there was no escaping the matter. And it was his own flesh and blood at the receiving end – his dear, well-meaning half-thinking cat cousin, Saaf Landan Tom. For a thinking cat to engage in warfare at all is a slight of character; but for a thinking cat to lash out rather than stare down or outsmart brings even greater embarrassment to the thinking cat community. And yet the only thought Library Cat had had at the time was, to put it succinctly, Take that you slobbering, ginger, nip-addled, toilet-brush-tailed b*****d!