Cat Kin (10 page)

‘This way.’ Tiffany darted down an alley of headstones. Ben strove to keep up, trying to recapture the cat grace that had deserted him.

‘I didn’t think that cow would actually dial nine-nine-nine,’ he panted. ‘She must have a really boring life.’

‘Urk.’ Tiffany stopped so suddenly that Ben thumped into her. ‘Up ahead.’

Alerted by his colleague, the fat policeman was running from the other direction.

‘Split up!’

‘Wait. I’ve got an idea,’ said Tiffany. She veered off into a thicket of tall graves.

‘That’s a dead end,’ hissed Ben. ‘Not that I’m trying to be funny or anyth—’

‘You don’t remember! Last lesson she showed us how to Freeze.’

Ben shook his head. He wasn’t trusting in that mumbo-jumbo now.

‘We’ve got to try!’ said Tiffany. ‘Stand still. Focus on your Kelotaukhon catra. In your throat. It’s copper.’

‘I’m more worried about the coppers over there.’

‘Oh, be quiet. We spread out. I’ll stand here. Now Freeze.’

Ben stood near a statue and tried to be one himself. He heard his heart beat slower. Through half-closed eyes he saw the young officer run past. Moments ticked by. The two policemen slowly
returned to the field of graves, looking confused. Ben saw the thin one stare straight at him, and he held his breath.

Kelotaukhon, copper maw, my mystery…

The gaze slipped off.

‘They were right here,’ the officer grumbled.

Eyes swept over him again.

‘Maybe it’s the vampires,’ chuckled the elder. ‘This place is meant to be full of them. Did you bring your silver handcuffs?’

‘Hysterical.’ His partner scowled. ‘I’m not seeing things, Trev. They can’t have gone anywhere else. I was right on their—’ He pointed straight at Ben.
‘Hey! There’s one.’

Ben bit his tongue. Now he was cornered. Tombs reared on all sides and behind him was the sheer wall of the cemetery. Grinning, the constables advanced through the headstones. Ben glanced
skywards in despair. Branches cut the clouds. A cherry tree grew near the wall.

He jumped for the lowest bough but it was too broad to give a proper grip. His feet scraped at the trunk while the feeling drained from his hands. All that time he’d spent in arcades when
he should have been learning to climb trees. One policeman chuckled. They were almost on him.

Then his fingers found a knot or something in the branch. With a jerk of his elbows he was up in the leaves. Climbing as if hounds were after him, he saw the top of the boundary wall, leapt onto
it and lowered himself over the other side, hanging from his fingers. Mossy brick pressed cold against his cheek. The policemen’s voices drifted over the wall.

‘Come out of the tree!’

‘He’s not in it, Trevor.’

‘What? Where’d he go?’

‘Search me. I’m not following him. People aren’t meant to move like that.’

The older man let out his breath. ‘Who’d work in Hackney? You answer a call and you find yourself chasing Spring-heeled Jack.’

The policemen went quiet.

‘Trev?’

‘What?’

‘Does this place give you the heeby-jeebies?’

Another pause.

‘Yeah,’ said Trevor. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

When the silence told him they were far away, Ben lifted himself back onto the wall. He found Tiffany there, sitting on her heels.

‘Hey, Ben! That was really good.’

Ben looked down and his stomach turned a somersault. That rickety cherry was the last tree any kid would try to climb. And you’d have to be stupid to jump from its branches across to this
towering wall. Nevertheless, he appeared to have done both.

‘Look there.’ Tiffany spoke softly, pointing at the cherry tree’s bough. Pale lines, like knifestrokes, marked the crusty bark. ‘Do you think…?’

‘Let’s go. I don’t want to wait for them to come back.’

‘But don’t you see? You did it! You must have got your Mau claws to work.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Ben turned on her, suddenly angry without knowing why. ‘Those scratches are where the bark flaked off. You don’t believe everything Mrs Powell
says, do you?’

‘So what are you doing here on a fifteen foot wall?’

Ben found that he had folded his arms, both hands stuffed protectively into his armpits. Not that he was scared to look at them or anything.

‘That’s different,’ he mumbled. ‘Balancing and jumping you can practise. Those are
possible
things.’

‘Really? I’ve done some pretty impossible jumps lately. So have you. We could probably enter the Olympics and—’

‘Look, pashki’s just a weird martial art. There are karate experts who can smash bricks, right?’

‘I was reading my book with the lights off last night. Can they do that?’

Ben hesitated. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been doing the same.

‘Tiffany, humans aren’t made to do these things. It’s…freakish.’

‘It’s fantastic.’ Tiffany lay down on the wall, watching the sky blow by.

‘Okay then. About Mrs Prowl.’

‘Our teacher’s name is—’

‘What does she want with us?’

Tiffany laughed.

‘No, listen, just for once.’ Ben was warming up. ‘Why does she take the class? Not for the money. What we pay wouldn’t even cover her rent.’

‘So? She’s keen for us to learn. She doesn’t want pashki to be forgotten.’

‘But don’t you remember? She tricked us. We met at the leisure centre, but we haven’t been back there since. She’s nothing to do with that place. I’d bet you that
no-one there has even heard of Felicity Powell.’

He thought he’d got her with that one. Tiffany continued to stare at clouds.

‘I don’t think that’s suspicious,’ she said at last. ‘You have to understand how cats are. She could never be an instructor in a busy leisure centre. Cats are their
own bosses. They need their space.’

‘She is
not a cat
. And she lied to us!’

‘Don’t be paranoid.’ Tiffany backward-rolled and stood, ignoring the steep drop either side. ‘Anyway, you like pashki. You’re streets ahead of everyone else. Except
me.’

‘I knew you were going to say that.’

Tiffany dropped her eyes, as if she hadn’t meant to.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘what’s suddenly made you upset.’

‘Who’s upset? I’m not upset.’

‘Something is really bothering you.’ Tiffany met his gaze again. ‘It doesn’t take cat senses to see it.’

She had a point. The idea that he had invisible claws was weird, but why should it make him angry? Maybe he was anxious more than angry. Maybe the word was
afraid
. It wasn’t just
pashki. Everything he trusted in, his parents, his home, was shifting like quicksand around him. And now he was doing these inexplicable things. He felt the terror of losing himself, like a figure
in a fog.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Tiffany asked.

He wavered. He could tell her. It hardly mattered if she avoided him ever after. But tell her what? That he and Mum might be thrown out of their home before the end of the month? That he broke
into a sweat whenever the phone rang? Or that he suffered nightmares in which rats seethed out of the toilet and changed into John Stanford, gnawing away the carpets, walls and floor before turning
his grinning yellow teeth in Ben’s direction?

He imagined telling her what it was like now that Mum never smiled. Now that she had given up her craftwork and only spoke to snap at him. How she’d punished him with two weeks of
near-silence for getting Dad involved. Could he tell Tiffany about his last Sunday lunch with Dad, where he’d tried to ignore the bruises and missing teeth that were the work of Toby’s
fists, so that they hardly said a word to each other all day? The more he thought about it, the more impossible it seemed. He couldn’t tell her any single thing. They were all tangled
together in a lump. To answer her would mean spilling his guts.

‘Of course, I’m not a qualified therapist.’ She gave a little smile.

That grin. At once he understood. She was after juicy gossip to feed her posh friends at ballet. To make them giggle with the story of a boy who broke down in tears. That was the only reason she
was interested.

‘Hey, just forget it,’ he snapped. ‘Go and find some other cripple to help.’

She drew in her breath sharply. It was as if he’d struck her. What had he said? Suddenly unable to meet her gaze, he picked moss off the wall for something to do. When he looked up a
minute later, Tiffany had gone.

Tiffany sniffed the breeze. The nutty woodland air was spiced with hot spaniel and the usual London fume. She could hear barking, a ball game and the splash of swimmers in the
mixed bathing pond nearby. Both footpaths were deserted. She crept under the trees. She had been looking forward to this day for more than a week.

‘All clear, Mrs Powell.’

‘I repeat,’ Mrs Powell was saying, ‘do
not
stray off the routes I have marked unless you want to end up in hospital. All of you must look for the cats’ eyes
painted on the boughs. These show the safe trees and the safest routes between them.’

‘Phew,’ said Olly. ‘Roots I can manage. I thought you were going to make us walk along the branches.’

Susie folded the newspaper that she seemed to be always carrying.

‘Olly, if ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest person on earth.’

Olly stared up into the tangled attics of the wood, his adam’s apple bobbing in fright. Tiffany didn’t blame him. Even she felt edgy. It was probably like this for people taking
their first parachute jump.

‘Follow me.’

Mrs Powell stepped onto the bole of an oak trunk, which grew at a slant out of the soil like a lazy wooden arm reaching for an alarm clock. As easily as if she were mounting stairs, she walked
up the gentle slope to a fork in the branches that drooped across the dell. Tiffany was at her side in four springy steps.

‘Come on,’ Mrs Powell hissed to the others, when they hesitated. ‘A dog could climb this.’

Yusuf came first, arms spread for balance. Kitted out in the close-fitting black sportswear that seemed to have become their unofficial uniform, he looked more feline than ever. Susie went next,
humming a tune through the newspaper she now carried in her teeth rather than leave behind. Tiffany followed Mrs Powell along the left-hand bough to make room for them. It felt as safe as flat
ground. She could have put her hands in her pockets, except that she didn’t have any.

Perched over the dell she parted the leaves. The city of London looked near enough to touch. Office blocks floated in the exhaust haze like fairytale towers, the wheel of the London Eye no more
than a charm bracelet dropped among them. With birdsong in her ears, it was easier to think she was studying a painting.

‘It’s like being out in the countryside,’ breathed Cecile.

‘You can still see the town, though,’ said Susie, sounding oddly relieved.

Cecile’s eyes shone. She sat astride the right-hand bough. ‘How did you find this place?’

‘How would you
lose
it?’ Mrs Powell replied. ‘Hampstead heath takes up half a page of the map.’

Sadness crept over Cecile’s tortoiseshell face. ‘Never been here before.’

‘Woah!’ Halfway up the sloping trunk, Olly swayed and waved an arm. Daniel grabbed it, steadying him.

‘Stop looking down,’ said Daniel. ‘Look where you want to go.’

‘That
is
where I want to go.’

‘Headfirst?’ Daniel took his hand away. ‘Come on, it’s a cinch. Climbing scaffolding’s a lot harder and my dad does that every day. Carrying bricks.’

‘You have strange hobbies in your family.’

‘That’s his job!’

‘So pay me what he’s getting and I’ll climb this tree.’

‘Oh, move it.’ Daniel pinched the back of his calf. Olly yelped and scrambled up the rest of the trunk like an acrobat. Daniel pursued, laughing. Last came Ben.

Tiffany watched him walk up the tree. Like her, he might have been out for a stroll. Pulling on a pair of leather gloves with the fingers cut away, he stared distractedly down into the hollow
where a fallen tree lay, its soil-caked roots like a warrior’s round shield. With the smallest turn of his head he could have looked at her, but he didn’t. Since that afternoon in the
graveyard, when he’d acted so strangely, they hadn’t exchanged a single word.

What had she done to annoy him? As far as she could tell, nothing. She was no longer so angry about what he’d said (since he couldn’t have known about Stuart), but if he was
determined to ignore her, she was happy to ignore him back.

Once, over a Friday fish and chips in the school canteen, Avril had claimed that, if a boy starts being nasty to you for no reason, it means he secretly likes you. ‘Not that any
boy’s ever been nasty to me,’ Avril had sighed. It had never happened to Tiffany either.

Her ears pricked up.

‘This lesson,’ Mrs Powell was saying, ‘will be your last for a few weeks. You’ll be relieved to hear that I’m off on holiday tomorrow.’

Olly mimed a cheer.

‘Where’s that?’ asked Yusuf.

‘Around and about,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘Kerala, mainly.’

‘South India,’ Susie put in.

‘Yes. I’m patron of a wildlife sanctuary there. I pop in from time to time. See how the inmates are getting on.’