The Glaring Read online

  His route took him along the northern edge of the expanse of common land. It was cut now – a fortnight’s labour, at least, of very long days and weekends included – but the grass had grown back sufficiently for livestock (cows and calves) to be brought in to graze upon it; another sure sign of the onset of autumn. But being shorn now it was virtually featureless, except for the mostly unseen river ringing two-thirds of it, the tree-line on the opposite bank of the river showing its course, a solitary church steeple rising above those trees at one point and the herd of cows a-grazing on it. It was all very peaceful and picturesque, but not half as beautiful as in the spring when the water-meadow was an absolute riot of waist-high grasses picked out with masses of colourful wild flowers.

  Lionel and Ailish had been occasional visitors to this delightful spot, but only occasionally – as is often the case when living almost on top of a feature such as this, one tends to take it for granted and generally ignore it. But since starting to walk it regularly, he wished they’d made more of it in their time together for each season had its own splendours and marvels.

  Even in the comparatively short time since he’d renewed his acquaintance with the Holme Lionel had seen herons, several, an egret, once, a kingfisher, fleetingly, and a cormorant. But he knew from memory, from those rare past occasions with Ailish, that the regular winter flooding would bring several species of waders, ducks and gulls, and Bewick’s swans and grey lag geese and golden plovers would appear in numbers to over-winter there. Whilst in the spring… well, then it was incredibly rich in fauna, birds in particular, and flora especially. And Lionel was looking forward to that; he’d already determined to try and note and identify all the different species of meadow plant and catalogue them, and even draw them perhaps. And he already knew, from reading up about it, that there would be fritillaries out there somewhere as well as rare butterflies like the clouded yellow and corn bunting, hopefully, dotted along the only blot on the landscape, a line of poles and wires that transected the site.

  He left the perimeter path around the common land via a kissing-gate and set-off up a long tree-lined lane towards this morning’s goal: the country park. He whistled, tunelessly, as he went, but under some impressive and echoing brick-built railway tunnels he sang some nonsense at the top of his voice, for the sheer pleasure of being alive and on a day like this.

  *

  Lionel completed his circumnavigation of the country park, stopping only to use the conveniences in the café there and to pocket a ‘stray’ (unattended) copy of a local newspaper, and then he returned, by stages, to the minor, unpaved road leading him back to the water meadow. For some inexplicable reason the old rhyming riddle about meeting a man on the way to St. Ives kept popping into his head, and because no-one was around – after he’d passed a modest camp-site and some boats moored on a backwater – the words popped out of his mouth as well…

  “As I was going to St. Ives

  I met a man with seven wives

  The seven wives had seven sacks

  And in these sacks were seven cats

  The seven cats had seven kits

  Kits, cats, sacks and wives

  How many were going to St. Ives?”

  And he smiled at the recollection of being told this for the first time – by Ailish, of course – and how he had struggled to work it out, maths never having been his particular strong point. And then, to cap it all, his toe-curling embarrassment at being told the simple answer – and him a varsity man too!

  He was in a good mood, a preoccupied mood, a mood preoccupied with the life-affirming nature all around him, so he did not see what followed him out of the campsite as he passed-by, and proceeded to keep up with him thereafter.

  Lionel stopped, so his shadows stopped and hid, and – after looking fore and aft and seeing no-one – he stepped into some welcoming and enveloping undergrowth in order to relieve himself. Having completed his countryman’s, as his father rather coyly used to call it, Lionel stepped out onto the path again and cut himself a fine stave, with his Swiss army knife. Fully prepared, he set off again, as did his couple of shadows – keeping the same distance all the time.

  Lionel was about to break into the opening verse of O, Shenandoah when he thought he heard a cat’s cry somewhere behind him. It brought him to a stop.

  He peered back into the tree-lined, tree-arched and un-metalled lane he’d just come down, but saw nothing. There was a private fishing lake off to one side, which came complete with some bespoke ramshackle huts – so he guessed it might have come from there. He shrugged his shoulders and broke lustily into song: -

  “Oh, Shenandoah,

  I long to see you,

  Aa’way you rolling river.”

  And then he heard it again: a cat’s cry, but an altogether unfamiliar one; not one requiring attention or food, but a deep-throated and somewhat menacing cry. This time, it was followed by another animal close by, and – then - what sounded like another reply from another cat somewhere else altogether. Lionel experienced one of those slightly unpleasant tingles down the spine – known as ‘someone steeping on your grave’ – and for a moment he experienced a genuine frisson of fear, which was absolutely ridiculous, as he immediately told himself. He shrugged his shoulders and set off again, keen to reach the open skies and the broad acres of the water meadow once again, and as soon as possible. The double railway bridges hove into view and he felt encouraged. He would shout out or sing fortissimo some nonsense when he got there. He’d got to ‘Cross the wide Missouri’ by the time he arrived under them and belted it out for all he was worth, just as an intercity train thundered overhead and drowned him out completely.

  Lionel smiled ruefully and instinctively turned to look back up the lane. He thought he saw something black slink quickly into the thick undergrowth a hundred yards to his right, but he couldn’t be sure. Besides, what did it matter for goodness sake?

  He strode on, the iron gate-way with its associated kissing-gate to one side was only yards ahead now and then the vast expanse of the Holme. Approaching the gate, he had a momentary desire to vault over it, but instantly reflected on his age and what he would do out here, on his own, if he sprained his ankle, or worse.

  And just then he heard probably the weirdest and the most spine-chilling noise of his entire life. He spun around to see six cats, all stationery under the last railway arch – line abreast – yowling together in the most blood-curdling way, the echoes playing to their maximum effect.

  Lionel’s jaw dropped, it literally dropped open in amazement. Here in an innocuous and leafy English lane on one of the sunniest and most pleasant of mornings was behaviour scary enough to chill you to the bone: so unexpected, so untypical, so threatening. The cats… well, they were roaring, he realised with a shock!

  The six cats were doing their level best – with amplification – to roar together in a deep-throated and terrifying way. How had they got like this? Why were they behaving like this? And, more to the point, what were they going to do next? He decided, instantly, that he knew and he didn’t want to stay to find out. All thoughts of Shenandoah’s daughter were instantly abandoned to the needs of self-preservation.

  They began to move forward, slowly.

  Lionel fled.

  He managed to get over the large gate somehow, stave hastily abandoned, and then instinct took him, as fast as he could go, towards the river – in the blind belief that getting into the water would be his best means of self-preservation. Even as he fled in terror he was thinking; there was something about those cats that suggested a pride of lions at work. Looking over his shoulder as he ran he saw them fan out, with the out-riders being the fleetest and clearly aiming to get ahead of him.

  He ran like he’d never run before. He developed a stitch, and the river seemed so far away from him still. Yet the cats were clearly not going all-out to get him; instead, they were herding him, exhausting him, being economical with their own energy as they dissipated his; going in for the ‘kil
l’ perhaps only when they were good and ready and not before.

  Yards to go now. The sweat was blinding and stinging him with its saltiness; he wiped away as much as he could, he faltered in his step and nearly fell. He looked frantically to left and to right, but there was no escape either way; two cats on either side hemmed him in. And on the faces of two of them as they loped alongside he caught, fleetingly, even in his panic, expressions of such malice and hatred that shook him to the core even so. And, then, two cats were on him from behind, he could feel their weight and their claws make contact with him and he panicked. Waving his hands behind him in a futile attempt to be rid of them, he finally threw himself full-length into the river, unaware that his attackers had already let go.

  Surfacing, his legs frantically trying to find the bottom of the river, his arms thrashing about, he found all six felines sat on their haunches on the river bank staring at him.

  A little calmer now - after all, they had not followed him into the water – Lionel tried to assess his situation, and his chances of getting out of his predicament. It did not look good. They could sit there indefinitely, by the look of them. He was a poor swimmer and the river was wide, but he could try and get to the other side, if need be.

  But the affair resolved itself quite soon and quite effectively when a dog-walker and her three charges, large dogs all of them – boisterous rather than vicious – appeared on the scene. The cats simply slunk away, but not without two or three producing a final snarl at Lionel.

  The dog-walker was obviously very wary of Lionel at first and clearly sceptical about his story, but when he got to the bank and pointed out, in the far distance, a posse of cats (an unusual enough a sight in itself) she began to reappraise her early estimation of him. His torn and bloody shirt lent even greater credence to his story.

  *

  Decidedly shaken, Lionel resolved on the way home to report it to the police as soon as possible. He had been hunted, there was no other explanation for it, stalked and hunted, and the wider public needed to be warned. Cat behaviour was definitely getting odder and odder.

  When he got home and relieved himself of his wet clothes he found in his windcheater the local weekly newspaper he’d acquired. He set that out to dry in the sun along with his socks and trousers (the shirt he kept for evidence) and afterwards he made himself a cup of tea. He was in a state of shock, and he knew it; he needed to calm down and collect his thoughts before he rang the police, otherwise he was likely to sound very garbled and not at all convincing.

  Sat in his back garden in the sun, a restorative pot of green tea with lemon beside him, his eyes suddenly alighted on the front page of the local paper as it dried out. ‘Cat savages dog’ declared the arresting headline, He bent down, picked it up and began to read: -

  Earlier this week, in broad daylight, a domestic cat – subsequently identified from its torn collar as ‘Bustopher’ – attacked a pit-bull type dog in the town’s High Street. The dog’s owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, described his utter shock at the cat’s behaviour – leaping on the dog’s back out of nowhere, and biting the enraged animal in the neck.

  “There was blood everywhere,” the owner explained, “and my dog was in real danger… It got the [expletive deleted] in the end though, killed it good and proper it did… Got its head in its jaws and crunched it to death.”

  When asked if there was anything else, anything out of the ordinary that he could remember about the event, the owner remarked that the cat, which had every opportunity to run away from the scene simply chose not to…

  “It seemed to want my dog to kill it, straight up. It was like a suicide, honest.”

  Police were reportedly still trying to trace the cat’s owner whilst the pit-bull was impounded under the Dangerous Dogs Act – and charges for having an unleashed dangerous dog in a public place might very well follow, the dog’s owner was informed.

  Similar reports of very odd cat behaviour were appearing all over the country, apparently, according to the article, and with increasing frequency too.

  **

  (xi)

  He had an occasion late one night to go to the outhouse just beside the back door to fetch something… it’s unimportant what he went for, it lends nothing to the story. The outhouse door was closed, of course, to keep out any vermin, but he noticed that a small window above the main window was slightly ajar. He thought nothing of it.

  The chest freezer hadn’t been put in there at that point or any electricity laid on so he’d taken a torch with him. He placed his right hand on the door knob and turned it, instantly opening the door and flashing his light inside.

  Immediately, four or five cats shot out between and around his legs, giving him the nastiest of shocks, and there in front of him, momentarily frozen in the act of copulation, were two cats, one of which – the female - he recognised straightaway as a near neighbour’s pie-bald cat. These two then broke away from each other with the tom following his male brethren in both the speed and route of his egress. The female cat, however, simply sauntered out close-by him with what can only be described as a withering and contemptuous look upon its face.

  He’d interrupted some feline group sex, evidently, though clearly not a rape. The female cat was in there voluntarily serving the local supply of toms each of whom was waiting patiently and silently for their turn – until, that is, his untimely intervention. He’d never seen anything like it in his life, nor read about such goings-on either. Normally, when female cats are in heat they attract lots of male cats, which then fight furiously over her (he knew that much). Furthermore, the female cat usually utters a loud yowl of pain when coitus is over.[4] Yet he had heard and seen nothing of the kind – absolutely nothing of the kind!

  He was highly bemused at the time, but soon forgot all about it. However, in light of more recent developments with respect to cats, and his growing awareness of these issues, he wondered – on reflection – if he’d chanced upon a rare instance of rapid evolutionary change in practice: of the parasite t. gondii furthering its reach and ensuring its success through encouraging, and compelling even - soundlessly and painlessly - the heightened promiscuity of cats!

  **

  (xii)

  Suddenly, the entire world – well, Britain at least for now – was awash with news stories about oddly behaved cats, and violently behaving cats at that. Lionel’s experiences were not as singular as he’d thought; he was not after all being sought out by cats for his previously ailurophobic actions. Through dint of circumstances, he’d had an above average number of contacts and run-ins with cats it was true, but listening to and watching the news, talking to neighbours – even his formerly sceptical friend, Bob, now – it was clear that something extraordinary was happening to the country’s feline population.

  People were now exceptionally wary of cats, took precautions against cats, dressed protectively against cat attacks and, increasingly, began to shun them. ‘The Great Shunning’ a popular red-top daily newspaper called it. For all over the country people began to abandon their cats and deter them – by refusing to let them back into their homes by nailing-up the cat-flap and shooing them away with sticks and stones whenever they came anywhere near their former habitats.

  Cats beyond number were dispossessed of a comfortable and easy living and forced onto the streets and parks and wasteland to fend for themselves, gleaning waste food where they could and hunting and fighting for it as well. In short, they soon became feral and, disturbingly, the rate of infectivity of the parasite t. gondii – according to government scientists – then soared as their consumption of rats and mice (the refugia of the disease, so to speak) increased significantly. There was little doubt now, in anyone’s mind, that this parasite was in some considerable measure responsible for it all, but in ways as yet unknown and which could only be guessed at. But even without the conclusive science as yet, something needed to be done – and urgently.

  *

  Meeting in a specially conven
ed session, just before Christmas, Parliament passed a hastily promulgated law. Local councils were empowered and required to recruit, train and send out teams of operatives to catch or kill the nation’s cats. They were almost immediately dubbed ‘cat-nappers’ in popular parlance (a play on the word kidnapper with the added inference that they were mostly ineffective, asleep on the job – at least to begin with). For many councils saw this as a further imposition upon them at a time of financial stringency and – lacking any extra funding from central government – they were generally lax or even derelict in their duty at first. In short, they were caught (cat) napping whilst the crisis grew all around them. Only a minority of local authorities took their new powers and duties seriously and began rounding-up cats in numbers, though with great difficulty (the old quip about the near impossibility of herding cats being upon every operatives’ lips). Cats were destroyed in their thousands but given the estimated 7.5 million in the country it was, to begin with, slow going and inadequate – too little and too late, some said.

  Cats evolved rapidly from highly individual creatures each jealous of their own back yard, yowling, spitting and scrapping with any interloper that needed to be put in their place, and –

  ejected from their homes and shunned by most owners – they soon began to congregate in larger social groupings of extended families, or prides, in effect. Sightings of these prides soon became common enough, but all over the country reports came into the news-desks and relevant local authority departments of cats running together in even greater numbers, sometimes upwards of a hundred animals, which was an awesome and worrying sight. Some observers noted what they thought was a definite pattern within these particular massings of the animals: of several groups of female-dominated families associated with one dominant tom, and with juvenile toms running on the periphery or separately in male-only clusters. They noticed something else as well. The toms, the dominant toms, were already looking bigger - or so it seemed to some!