Cat Lover

CAT LOVER

BY

JOHN MCCONNOCHIE

Can you hear me out there? Can you hear me now that I am unhusked emptiness, now that I am merely a flicker of light at the back of an eye?

It was her eyes that captivated me from the first, those fathomless black wells of sin floating in the liquid amber of her irises. I had seen the advertisement - `Pedigree Kittens For Sale’ - in a local paper and, because I had always liked cats, and because I craved companionship - a release from my loneliness - I gathered up my small courage in my hands and phoned. She had my heart from the first; there was something about her - some indefinable grace and delicacy, and of course those eyes - which set her apart from her brothers and sisters, and looking at her I was reminded of the time when I had found a tiny black kitten wandering lost and pathetic and, ignoring my mother’s warnings of disease and the ruin wrought by claws on furniture, had installed it in my room and tended to it for a whole weekend. How eagerly - for once - I had returned home from work the following Monday to be greeted by my mother’s tearful tale of the kitten’s escape and its demise beneath the wheels of a passing car. Coward that I am, I had not faced her with my discovery of the broken and bloodied broom-handle hidden beneath the sacking in a dark corner of the cellar but had continued to hug my long hatred of her to myself in self-recriminating silence.

Sabrina - for so I named her - was expensive but I was not poor, for when my mother’s suffocating lungs had finally ended her suffocation of my life she had left me well-provided. I remember the pride - even then the fierce possessiveness - with which I clutched the cardboard box in which I carried Sabrina home.

During the weeks which followed we both grew, my beautiful Sabrina and I, she physically and I emotionally, for after all the empty, nagging years there was finally something in my life which I could love unreservedly. I grew to know her ways, to recognise her moods: to know when she wished to be alone, when she wished to be caressed; I came to know her tenderness, her sudden passions, and I grew to love her.

Often, in the evenings, when she would sit upon my lap and suffer my strokings and the little musics I would make with my mouth to soothe her, I would gaze into her eyes and, transfixed by love, I would be carried away in transports of adoration; I felt then, in the depths of my exaltation, that she was a kind of goddess and I wished I could worship her in all ways, and forever.

I met him - he who would in the end murder my happiness, my simple uncomplicated joy in Sabrina - at a Cat Show, for my pride in her beauty was such that I had to share it with others, to hear their words of praise, to see the envy in their eyes. I don’t know what made him pause as he walked by- perhaps he sensed something in the way I brushed her fur as I burnished her perfection for the judges - but at any rate stop he did.

He was carrying a small wicker cage, from within which green eyes set in a face of almost supernatural whiteness peered disdainfully out at the world.

"She has beautiful eyes", he said admiringly as he looked at Sabrina and I was instantly disarmed, for no other approach could have penetrated my habitual reserve. So, eager to hear further words of acclamation of my beloved, I permitted him to engage me in conversation, and for the first time in my life I found myself liking another human being. And so it was that later, after the judging, when he suggested that I might care to accompany him to his home to share a drink in celebration of our triumphs, I agreed.

The house to which he drove me was not quite a mansion, but it was a large, three-storied affair several miles out of town, set back from the road along a long and winding drive and hidden from view by a screen of tall trees. Inside it was all oak-panelling and oil-paintings: the house of a rich man, and a far remove from my own small flat.

We sat in what he referred to as 'my study’, a cosy room in which, to judge by its atmosphere of lazy comfort, I swear no serious studying had ever been done - and, while our cats warily surveyed each other and then settled comfortably before the fire, we sat and drank and talked. Our discussion began with the prosaic - small talk of shows and grooming and feeding - but as the evening wore on so our philosophical scope broadened and he held forth on the mysterious soul of cats; of their sensuality, their cruelty and tenderness; of how they have been sometimes worshipped and sometimes reviled and gradually, as the drink loosened my tongue, I confessed how at times I felt an almost-religious adoration of my Sabrina. And he understood; he understood! His talk then grew more impassioned, more confessional, and he told me of things which at first seemed strange to me, even a little horrifying, but at which something within me exulted. How I wish I had shut my ears, gathered up Sabrina, and fled.

After that came the Brotherhood and my initiation; the gift of the keys to his house, which were also to unlock the door to his secret. God knows in what arid desert hole of forgotten Egypt, in what mouldering papyrus he found that secret!

I remember that first meeting: the candlelit attic with its barred and shuttered windows into which I was ushered. It was already crowded with those who were to become my brothers and in it stood a vast statue: a golden-earringed cat which dominated the room and before which the treasured pets of the Brotherhood sat enraptured. I remember the incense, the chanting, the giddy ecstasy which took me and I remember, too, that terrible moment when he - my host - called for the `little mouse’ to be brought in and the sudden realisation of what that little mouse was, before the struggling, mewling bundle disappeared beneath the wave of surging fur, leaving for an instant one tiny hand helplessly waving in the air.

And then after - when the feasting was done - I remember how the Other Sabrina came to me. I remember the way she looked: her pale, flawless flesh; her breasts; her long, black hair; the drops of sweat which glistened on her belly and traced tiny rivers on her skin as they crept slowly down towards her pubic hair; I remember the way she moved beneath me as her nails tore my back. But most of all I remember her eyes.

I knew it was wrong, of course I knew it was wrong. Listen, my mother hammered her loveless, guilt-cored version of Christianity into me almost before I could think, she embedded it like an irremovable nail into my heart. I knew it was wrong, but you must understand the way I felt. My immersion in the Other Sabrina was not the trivial addiction of an alcoholic: long before I met her she had been a part of me, and the first encounter of our flesh was merely the confirmation of a relationship which was already so intimate that it was impossible to draw a line which divided our souls one from the other. But in time, away from her, the dreams - those dreams in which the squealing of all those days and weeks and months of little mice woke me screaming so loud that I thought my ear-drums must rupture - began to overwhelm me. I could not sleep, and the eternities I spent apart from that attic and the Other Sabrina were spent in a daze of horror.

And so, when the burden at last became intolerable, I made my plans. I should have gone to the police, I suppose, but I doubted that they would believe me. Or at least that’s what I told myself. In truth, I suspect, I knew what they would do to me if somehow I did make them believe me, and I could not bear the thought of being separated from Sabrina; it would pain me enough to lose the Other One -to lose both, to be plunged back into that awful well of loneliness, lost forever inside myself in some institution for the criminally insane - was too much for me.

So when the Brotherhood next met I phoned and made my excuses: I was ill, I would see them at the next meeting. And indeed I was ill, in the same way in which they were all ill - the only difference was that I suffered while they delighted in their sickness.

It was late when I left my car at the bottom of the drive. I walked so that no-one would hear, and be alerted by, the sound of tyres crunching over the gravel. I let myself in with the key that was the symbol of my membership of their foul ranks and of my degradation. After that it was easy: there were only two staircases to the upper levels of the house - the grand one leading from the main hall and a small enclosed one leading from the kitchen - and I soaked the lower steps of each with paraffin. The fire spread quickly up the stairs, and outwards into the house. I knew that they would be deep in their pleasures at this hour, that they would not smell the smoke or hear the flames until it was far too late.

On my way back to my car I paused, startled by some furtive sound within the bushes that lined the drive and, seeing nothing, I turned for a while to watch the fire claim the house.

The flat was empty when I returned to it. Sabrina had doubtless exited through the open bedroom window in my absence and was engaged in some feline pursuit or other out on the rooftops. Sitting in the threadbare armchair by the gas fire I opened a bottle of Scotch - one of countless which had kept me company over the past months - and drank until, at last, I felt I might sleep. Then I went to bed.

While I slept I dreamed that I lay, my hands and feet tethered to pegs, upon the goat-cropped grass of a village green while the villagers came one by one and laid heavy stones upon my chest, all the while crying "Witch!" and "Murderer!".

I awoke with all the guilt of the world crushing the breath from my lungs and my newly-opened, sleep-befuddled eyes were trapped in an amber stare - Sabrina! I tried to rise but her eyes held me where I lay, struggling feebly against her terrible weight while between her soul and mine there passed some unfathomable communication that filled me with fear even as I struggled to comprehend it.

Then a paw -dainty even then - its claws gleaming with gold-red fire from the rising sun, rose and fell and rose and fell, again and again!

Can you hear me out there? How can I be here, here in the grey light? How can that be my face, my blood upon the pillow seeping from the ragged wound in my throat? How can I be here, looking down at myself. And purring...?