The Glaring Page 4

  A few weeks went by in this new and happy quotidian round, each week busy now with one or other of these several classes. Furthermore, he’d joined a relatively informal group of people out on weekly walks in the local countryside (with a guide sponsored by the local authority); walks that ended invariably in a delightful country pub on a bus route to somewhere or other, but – usually – not very far away from town. They were billed as ‘health walks’ in a leaflet he’d picked up from the town library, though most of the participants looked to be in the rudest of health as far as Lionel could tell.

  He was actually more at peace with himself, more constructively occupied, than at any other time since Ailish passed away. He enjoyed his various classes and the walking group, the tuition and the company of his fellow students, though he did find the unsought-after attentions of a widow in the walking group, a woman who’d quite blatantly ‘set her cap at him’, rather unsettling, it has to be said. And then it happened! His newly established normality was simply blown away, in an instant.

  Sat in his dentist’s waiting room one day, he picked up a magazine that was unfamiliar to him. As a rule, these periodicals – women’s magazines, countryside publications and the odd fishing journal – were months if not years out of date, but someone had evidently bequeathed a whole batch of more contemporaneous journals on current affairs to the practice, and one article in particular caught his eye: an article that simultaneously depressed and alarmed him, rousing his ire and his curiosity once again.

  Researchers in the west African state of Gabon, he read, had deliberately infected thirty captive chimpanzees with the parasite t. gondii and found that they were three times more likely than non-infected chimps to investigate the urine of their only serious predator – the leopard! That was it, there was little more than that in the entire article, but it was enough; it was the trigger to start him off again.

  *

  Poring over his computer late into the night, his recently acquired (and age related) blepharitis notwithstanding (hypoallergenic eye-lid wipes well to the fore), Lionel soon espied another tantalisingly brief report about an article originating, this time, in the journal Schizophrenia Research. This article claimed that cat ownership was significantly more common in families where a child is later diagnosed with schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses. He shook his head and, grimly, filed it away on his computer in what was fast becoming an impressive series of folders containing references, articles, monographs and scientific extracts.

  He then learned of Swedish studies that actually showed how t. gondii enters the brain of its host. In several experiments the researchers found a most unexpected and amazing thing: the t. gondii parasite was found to be living inside the host animal’s immune cells – that is, inside the very cells that were designed to kill them! This was a survival stratagem that absolutely astonished the Swedish researchers, leading one of them - a Dr. Barragan - to admit, almost in awe it seemed to Lionel, that this was very clever of the parasite! The parasite was then found to be using these dendritic cells of the immune system to travel through the host’s body and into its brain. The Swedish team concluded that this evidence seemed to suggest that the dormant phase of toxoplasmosis in humans, previously thought to be totally symptom-free, may need to be re-examined; especially as there was an already well-established connection between t. gondii and severe mood swings and significantly increased risk-taking behaviour in certain individuals.

  After the Swedish work, Lionel came across that of the Czech scientist Jaroslav Flegr and his associates at Charles University of Prague. Flegr acknowledged that it was a growing awareness of his own altered behaviour – increased risk-taking, especially when driving – that made him, a cat owner, take a test for t. gondii – for which he tested positive! Flegr and his associates found that people with the parasite t. gondii have ‘significantly delayed reaction times’. Based on two studies in the Czech Republic, his team found that infected people were 2 ½ times more likely to have a car accident than non-infected drivers (a finding subsequently borne out by two similar Turkish studies), and that infected men rate the scent of cat urine more favourably than uninfected men!

  There was even a suggestion from Flegr – a hypothesis so far, no more than that – that t. gondii could be sexually transmitted because t. gondii tachyzoites had been found in the seminal fluid and testes of various animals, including humans. In addition, because two-thirds of t. gondii infections in pregnant women could not be explained by any existing known risk factors and because the prevalence of t. gondii infections in women of child-bearing years reportedly covaries with the incidence of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Flegr argued that epidemiological data like this seemed to lend further credence to his (hypothetical) view. Lionel duly noted all this even if he did not understand it fully; it sounded quite compelling, and worthy of further investigation at the very least.

  All of this convinced Lionel that there was a major public health issue here that was somehow being kept to the margins of public awareness or sanitised in some way, played down and marginalised with very little serious research going into it, as far as he could discern. In his more paranoid moments he could not suppress a growing belief that there was a conspiracy of silence among the governments of the world, the pet-food industry and veterinary surgeons, and even among scientists too, many of whom, he had absolutely no doubt, possessed their own cats. He therefore decided, in the small hours of one particular insomniac night, that although he knew very little about computers – hitherto a glorified typewriter and electronic library as far as he was concerned – he would find out how to set up a website and devote one entirely to t. gondii in all its ramifications. The public had a right to know!

  So, as soon as was convenient, he got in touch with Bob. And, in no time at all, Bob - who knew a vast array of people - put Lionel in touch with a young man who designed these things for a living; a young man who was prepared to help Lionel establish such a site, as a favour to Bob. In imitation of other sites that he knew of or had come across, Lionel called his website Felidwatch: a site devoted to bringing together as much information on cats and their (ill)health as he could find, especially t. gondii – and to have it regularly updated, of course. He wanted to make it the main reference point for all those concerned about the issue; a campaigning website no less, trying to raise money to fund more scientific research into the phenomenon, and to support any proposed legislation on the monitoring of the UK’s cat population.

  *

  But the sun came up every day and went down again at night; the Earth continued to spin on its axis and describe its path about the sun, and there was no discernible change of behaviour among the generality of cats, or their prey for that matter (other than the very rarely observed one of rats and mice offering themselves for dinner). There was no sense of an impending crisis, not even in Lionel’s feverish mind: a problem, yes, but one that had been around for ages and just needed to be properly addressed, that’s all.

  And then came the astounding and deeply shocking news that a cat in Croydon had killed a new born baby in its cot, not by smothering it (a perennial fear among some new mothers with pet cats) but by savaging the baby’s throat. It was all over the news, especially the tabloids, for several days and conjecture was immediately rife as to what had caused it.

  An animal psychologist put it down to psychological impairment on the part of the previously pampered pet and it was instantly dubbed, in the ‘red tops’, as the Siamese Syndrome: a reference to the highly pampered, badly behaved and jealous cats in Lady & the Tramp. The cat, described by the distraught mother as a truly lovely family pet, raised from a kitten, was adjudged to have been made insanely jealous by the new baby’s presence in the family. But it was clearly an aberration, all the experts agreed upon that.

  The baby’s father destroyed the animal before it could be dealt with humanely, and its body was thrown onto a garden fire – so there was no chance of an autopsy after that. But Lio
nel made a mental note of it, nevertheless, and wrote the case up on his website. He was very circumspect and careful in his language, but – privately – he was absolutely sure, whatever the so-called experts had said, that he knew exactly what was behind it. That in some way, some way as yet unknown, the ‘clever’ parasite, t. gondii, had altered the behaviour of this particular cat and made it more aggressive – though for the time being he could see no evolutionary advantage for the parasite in doing so. And it was a ‘one-off’ after all.

  The report of the Croydon incident also came during a spell of exceptionally hot, late summer weather. A transition so sudden and so extreme that it caused a spike in dog attacks and fights among youths and, thus, was seen as part and parcel of a raft of heat-induced, summer-maddened behaviour. But it was followed by a couple of other cat attacks shortly afterwards – one in an old people’s home and another on a sleeping patient in a hospital – though these were still few and far between and isolated, seemingly random, incidents. It was nothing to get alarmed about, and nobody was – though Lionel took note of each and all and, for the time being at any rate, kept his own thoughts (his more worrying thoughts) more or less to himself.

  **

  (viii)

  He sat bolt upright in bed. They were at it again!

  For the last week or so a small number of cats had gathered at night on the patio below the bedroom window and, in the small hours of the morning, they’d set up a horrible chorus of yowling and wailing.

  The first time they did it so alarmed Lionel that he suffered an involuntary micturition in his pyjamas. He got his own back though. Returning from the bathroom with a couple of glasses of water, he stealthily opened the sash window a little further and let them have it, smiling to himself as he heard their scampering retreat – knocking into one of the patio chairs in their haste and jumping up onto a garden shed before exiting in disorder over the party fence. He made a mental note to go to bed, henceforth, with a full bucket of water ready just below the bedroom window – until such time as they gave it up and left him alone. He even considered adding his own urine to this strategy, but reasoned (eventually) that the patio might begin to stink before too long if he did, and there were the neighbours to consider, of course.

  But they were at it again, tonight. And they were in greater numbers, too, by the sound of it. He got out of bed and tentatively tweaked the curtain. It was a moonlit night and what he saw chilled him to the bone. The patio seemed to be positively alive with cats, cats of all types all looking back up at him. He darted back to his bed, oddly frightened.

  Why were they gathered here in such numbers? Why him? Was this a remembrance of the occasional stone-throwing, the facial grimaces, his several (failed, but seriously intended) attempts at discouragement? If so, that had only involved the few cats from his immediate neighbourhood, but there were many more down on the patio than that.

  The awful caterwauling continued. It was almost human-like, too: like a chorus of highly disturbed babies all crying at once. That made it even worse somehow, its similarity to something so innocent and endearing as a baby – especially as Ailish wasn’t able… He shook his head to rid himself of such sad thoughts.

  ‘There’s some intelligence behind all this,’ he told himself. ‘There’s something calculating, something almost human about all this, this… intimidation. For that is what it is.’

  “They have singled me out,” he told his favourite photograph of Ailish, just beside his bed.

  “Somehow certain memories have been shared in some way… or they’ve been ordered here. But how, for goodness sake?”

  It was a good job that Norman and Jean, his elderly neighbours on his left-hand side, slept in the front and were both very hard of hearing.

  Lionel went to the bathroom for some cotton wool to stuff up his ears.

  ‘If they keep this up much longer, I’ll copy Norman and Jean and sleep in the front bedroom,’ he decided.

  But, eventually, exhaustion got the better of him and he fell, fitfully, asleep – abandoning any more thoughts of the douche as an ineffective counter-measure.

  *

  When he awoke and pulled his curtains, the first thing he saw was a cat staring in at him; a large multi-coloured cat with a very unpleasant face; a cat who’d climbed all the way up the steeply sloping roof over Lionel’s kitchen to stare in at him. He shuddered, involuntarily, and instinctively looked around to see whether his window was safe.

  The top of the kitchen roof, where it met the main wall of the house, was almost level with the top of the back bedroom window and Lionel wondered – as he stood there exchanging stare for stare – whether this was how that ginger cat had got in, launching itself through space to land either on the bedroom window sill or coming in through the opening at the top. But it would take a very resourceful and emboldened (maddened?) cat to do such a thing, he reasoned. If it dropped down to the window sill, nearly six feet below, it would have to do so near-vertically and with very little space to secure a footing. Equally, if it launched itself toward the top of an open window (nearer, much nearer, it is true) wouldn’t it find it very hard – even harder – to get a firm footing, especially atop a wobbly sash window? It seemed incredible and highly unlikely, but Lionel was fast coming to the opinion that cats were capable of a great deal more than was commonly thought.

  And with that thought, a frisson of fear shivered through Lionel’s body as he realised that his bedroom redoubt might be breeched even as he slept, and that he wasn’t as safe as he’d previously imagined. And he never had discovered how the ginger cat got in in the first place, nor how it had left the bedroom either come to that, since the room was deserted (and in no bad way, contrary to his expectations) when he’d finally got up the courage – and the suitable clothes and equipment – to affect an entry and regain his territory.

  He’d have to add the amount he left his windows open – top and bottom – to the check-list of things he had to think about now, precautions he had to take care of now that cats were beginning to behave so oddly, or some of them at least.

  The ugly sentinel cat (the leader of the cats?) turned its back on him disdainfully and slunk away. But what was it that made it seem so malevolent? And then, in a flash, Lionel realised. Just below its nose it had a black patch of fur that looked for all the world like a moustache. Hitler, it was bloody Hitler! And, henceforth, Lionel called it Schicklgruber in order to diminish it somehow, and to make it less fearsome in aspect – hopefully.

  The very next night though the numbers seemed to have swelled again and the caterwauling was worse than ever. It was other-worldly, it was horrible. And it was particularly horrible because the baby-like cries had a knowingness about them that had no equivalent in humans. It was ghastly.

  When it had all started, the caterwauling that is, it was always about the same time of night and (though it seemed like an age) it was always of roughly the same duration: ten minutes or so. Latterly, however, they had come a second time to disturb him and now, this particular night, they were below his window for a third time: either the same bunch of cats or an altogether different shift (Lionel was absolutely convinced now that they were quite capable of such coordinated and pre-planned action).

  The caterwauling went on for many more nights and, soon, Lionel was feeling utterly wretched both through his lack of sleep and the poor quality sleep he eventually did manage, and he looked exceedingly haggard – as a friendly shop assistant in the High Street had the temerity to tell him. They were winning, they were wearing him down, there was no doubt about that. But it was that solitary Hitler cat on sentinel duty, always the same one, always there in the morning to stare him down with an imperturbable half-sneer (or so it seemed), completely unmoved and unfazed by whatever faces Lionel pulled back at him. It was that cat that particularly unnerved him. It was always the first sight to greet him in the morning and, recently, the last thing he saw before closing the curtains at night.

  One morning, h
aving forgotten the previous night to close the curtains, Lionel had his most surreal experience ever with cats. From his particular vantage point – prone in bed looking upwards – he rubbed his bleary eyes and saw what appeared to be a headless cat peering in at him over the net curtains, looking for all the world like the Cheshire cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And, in a flash, the ex-librarian remembered a favourite quote of his, one he would mutter mutinously (under his breath) to a trusted colleague during a particularly tedious and interminable staff meeting at the library…

  “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  And, with that, Lionel resolved to get an air gun. That Hitleresque watcher-cat would have to go, and as many others as were likely to come within his range as well.

  *

  “So, am I being singled out and targeted by cats, Bob? It certainly feels like it, I can tell you! And, seriously now, what do you make of all that then?”

  Lionel was on the phone to Bob; he had to tell someone about the caterwauling. And Bob was listening to him in polite silence, though grinning to himself all the while at his hapless friend and the issues he had with cats. Lionel had come to the end of his story finishing it on a challenging interrogative.

  Bob allowed himself an audible chuckle.

  “I think you are letting your imagination run away with you, Lionel. Look, I know you’ve been plagued by cats, preoccupied by cats – especially since Ailish… but, look, it’s a coincidence. The cats have simply massed on your patio – and only recently you say – because, to them, it obviously has certain advantages for a cat love-in, or whatever they get up to. Sex is bound to be behind it, it usually is behind most things, and not just in the animal kingdom either… So, a lone cat got into your house not long ago as well… again, pure coincidence, I say, and not uncommon. I’ve had to chase my neighbour’s car out of our bedroom a couple of times over the last few years… Just keep things in proportion Lionel; ever since you found out about that parasite you see its influence everywhere, you know.”