In a house there was a very dirty rug, it was dirty because all kinds of filth were constantly being trailed into the house from the garden and the street, and no one, none of the people living in the house, took care to wipe their feet or take off their muddy boots. It was a filthy off-yellow pelt of a rug, and on it, when all the men were in the house of an evening, sat a cat.
Yes, the cat sat on the rug, which makes me laugh, to say it, for there was no way this rug, yellow as the penumbra of an old bruise, could be called a mat, one could certainly not stretch or shrink the definition of “mat” to fit this rug, for a rug it was, and god knows where it came from, probably a skip, and the cat sitting there as if in defiance of the stock phrase, the stock rhyming phrase, as if to say fuck you I’m here on the rug,yes therug is what I’m sat on , not any other similar thing, despite the availability of several mats elsewhere in the house, such as the bottom of the bare staircase, or the top of the bare staircase, for example, and god knows why also there was a fibrous hessian sort of mat at the top of the bare stairs, but never mind, and never mind why the stairs had always been bare wood and without varnish and spotted with carmine paint when no walls are painted carmine.
It was a hammer head cat, the cat, a squat evil cat, although of course an animal cannot be evil, except that I am inclined to name it evil because of its presumptuousness, which is to say it was not supposed to be there. It did not belong to any of the men who lived there, and had started entering the house shortly after the house cat - the ‘official’ cat, shall we say, a svelte cobalt Abyssinian cat, the kind of creature precisely the Egyptians would have worshiped as the earthly expression of a deity - was squashed flat by a lorry driven by Mr Rey who had fallen asleep at the wheel. It was not “pronounced dead”, for such a pronouncement would have been a cruel and needless mockery of the almost two-dimensional and variegated purple spatter on the ground.
And then in the wake of this horrific incident, and the sudden subtraction of the elegant godcat, came the truculent hammerhead cat.
To begin with, it was as if the house had somehow improvised a cat to fill the space left by the Abyssinian. In one sense its presence was no mystery: it had knocked open the cat flap, ostensibly rigged up to respond only to the other cat’s delicate round magnet, small as a burnished pearl around its neck. This is what happens in nature, perhaps – you leave a vacuum and a monster slips in; or, abhorring a vacuum, nature fills it with anything it can get its gummy green hands on, in this case a vicious hammerhead fucking cat.
I say vicious, but in fact it was quite serene. What was vicious and brutal was its sheer presence. Where we expected absence. And whereas the svelte and graceful cat had brought the soul of an Egyptian god into the house, this fat-headed fuck was just a pulsing body, purring with a bass purr in which one could hear heart and ligament, the indifferent soft interior of the animal, rising and falling even as the hammerlike head itself remained still; still, like a sentinel, or rather exactly like a car with its engine running, a car at night with the engine running, ticking over, getting hotter, a hot metallic smell, the whine of the fan belt; and just as you think, what are they waiting for these cnuts in the car, so it was with the cat. For me at least. It didn’t bother the others. At first.
Then it started with mice, bringing them into the house, petrified or dead. I saw it once in the half-light, with a mouse trapped under its paw and rigid with fear, its head obscenely erect, straining, so that the black beady eyes were popping out, round and glassy. The hammer head cat impassive.
Later the mouse was found dead on the rug.
That was one thing. Leaving the stiff mice dead on the rug for people to tread on as they left early in the morning. But then it started to bring them up as “gifts” or tokens to the men asleep in their beds.
Lenny for example.
Lenny was a huge man, his skin always coated with a talcum powder of building dust, lending him the appearance not so much of a ghost as a kind of knotted and knuckled machine, the fine light grey particles buffing the skin into unnatural rubbery smoothness. Plus the fact that his head was shaved and smooth as a mushroom. Lenny, who’s match-thin roll ups only emphasised. by contrast the thickness and scale of his hands and limbs, the great flat slate of white forehead beneath which his blue eyes oozed anger and grief. Well, this Lenny was “freaked out” by dead mice, it turned out. One night he’d rolled over and squashed one under his cheek. So tiny, the feeble floppy legs, the tiny delicate mouth agape, as if photographed by eternity at the very moment of its passing.. Fucking freaked me out has that fucking mouse, Lenny said. Can’t be having them fuckin dead mice in the house. You need to seal that fuckin cat flap.
So, somebody glued shut the cat flap. Mr Rey probably, Mr Rey who had confined himself to bed mostly, after killing the slim Abyssinian cat.
And that was the end of it. Except it wasn’t.
I found this absence uneasy. Where I expected to find relief I instead experienced unease. Unease usurped relief, just as the Hammerhead had unexpectedly usurped the place of the Abyssinian. For it was as if its absence from the rug in the hall lead not to closure but to speculation. Where was it now, what was it doing. Could it be on the roof, or in the eaves, the loft, what schemes, what scratchings, what terrible business is it up to now; and whereas before, when the cat flap was open, we at least knew where it was and what it was doing, it now was everywhere and nowhere, and immanent in every moment; and whereas before, its uncanny repose, its fat head half sunk in the folds of its body, was visible to us, its behaviour now, real or imagined, was invisible. And so we continued with our business, but always expecting to see it. But we never did.
What happened in fact is that there was a burglary. A plate of glass was broken and someone got in. They turned the kitchen upside down, although it was difficult to ascertain what was stolen, or if anything was. Lenny or someone sealed the pane with cardboard and masking tape. The next day, though, the cardboard had gone. We neglected to fix it, each man thinking the others would do it. That’s of course how it works in the world. Each of us thinking the other would fix it. But the other is always elsewhere.
Two mornings later, Lenny woke up with a mouse on his face. It was live but sluggish and Lenny quickly flicked it off him onto the floor. There it was punch drunk. Lenny got up an put his work boots on, not of course wanting any contact between the calloused skin on the underside of his foot and the dazed, once mercurial, mouse. He stamped on it. Over and over, as if wanting to cancel it, cancel the trauma and indignity of the experience he had just suffered. And then, from nowhere, the black hammerhead cat shot out from behind the door and bolted downstairs. Lenny chased after it but slipped on the wet remains of the mouse and cracked his head on the iron bed post.
Shitting fuck we heard in the dead of night. I got up and found him limp on the floor, mumbling and moaning. I wrapped his head in a pair of joggers lying next to the bed. We ordered an Uber and I took him to A and E. by the time we arrived, there was jam thick blood on his neck.
Each experience of A&E. joins hands with the last. Fluorescent light like luminous acid. Plastic chair. But this time no endless waiting. His hair was crispy with dried blood already. He was seen in no time:
Head strike?
Bedpost.
LOC?
Sorry what?
Did he black out?
Dunno, he shouted something.
What?
Shitting fuck.
Shitting fuck? Erm, Anything else?
Nothing
Pupils sluggish.
Torch entering his eye like a burglar casing a house form outside.
Thank you so much Mark for sharing this here, it's truly a privilege to read your writings. The way the tension builds, the hammerhead cat character, the story escalation... what a thriller! Thank you
Thank you so much Mark for sharing this here, it's truly a privilege to read your writings. The way the tension builds, the hammerhead cat character, the story escalation... what a thriller! Thank you