Only the Animals E-Book

Ceridwen Dovey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be human. The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century tell their astonishing stories of life and death. In a trench on the Western Front a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. In Nazi Germany a dog seeks enlightenment. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. In the siege of Sarajevo a bear starving to death tells a fairytale. And a dolphin sent to Iraq by the US Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath. Exquisitely written, playful and poignant, Only the Animals is a remarkable literary achievement by this bright young writer. An animal's-eye view of humans at our brutal, violent worst and our creative, imaginative best, it asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals, but for other people, and to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.

Leseprobe

Only the Animals

ALSO BY CERIDWEN DOVEY

Blood Kin

Published in E-book and paperback in Great Britain in 2015by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

First published in Australia in 2014 by Penguin Group.

Text copyright © Ceridwen Dovey, 2014

Illustrations copyright © Teresa Dovey, 2014

The moral right of Ceridwen Dovey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 717 5E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 718 2

Typeset in 11.5/17.5 Adobe CaslonPrinted in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

On one side there is luminosity, trust, faith, the beauty of the earth; on the other side, darkness, doubt, unbelief, the cruelty of the earth, the capacity of people to do evil. When I write, the first side is true; when I do not the second is.

Czesław Miłosz, ROAD-SIDE DOG

Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation.

J.M. Coetzee, ELIZABETH COSTELLO

CONTENTS

The Bones

Soul of Camel

Died 1892, Australia

Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I

Soul of Cat

Died 1915, France

Red Peter’s Little Lady

Soul of Chimpanzee

Died 1917, Germany

Hundstage

Soul of Dog

Died 1941, Poland

Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would be Handed to Me

Soul of Mussel

Died 1941, United States of America

Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space

Soul of Tortoise

Died 1968, Space

I, the Elephant, Wrote This

Soul of Elephant

Died 1987, Mozambique

Telling Fairytales

Soul of Bear

Died 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina

A Letter to Sylvia Plath

Soul of Dolphin

Died 2003, Iraq

Psittacophile

Soul of Parrot

Died 2006, Lebanon

Acknowledgements

THE BONES

Soul of Camel

Died 1892, Australia

The three of us were nodding off around the campfire, the queen’s yellow bones in a sack beside my owner, when I saw the goanna watching us again, the same one that had stalked us through the bush for days.

Mister Mitchell was already asleep on his swag, wrapped in an expensive blanket he had brought with him from Sydney for the expedition. But the poet drifter we’d picked up in Hungerford, Henry Lawson, was still awake. He lifted the square of calico he’d put over his eyes to block out the light of the moon and listened. The goanna was moving through the dry leaves, making them scrape against one another like cartilage.

It was summer in the back country, the night of Christmas. The men had eaten too much dinner – doughboys fried over the fire, boggabri to pass as greens, salted mutton that Henry Lawson had cadged from one of the sheep stations we’d passed along the track. And we had all had too much rum.

‘I told Mitchell to put the bones back,’ Henry Lawson said. ‘I warned him. Since we were boys together, he’s been stubborn. He was born on the Grenfell goldfields, like me, you know. Hadn’t seen him in years ’til he walked into the pub in Hungerford. His father got lucky, got rich. Mine didn’t. They moved out, disappeared to Sydney.’

I waited. In the short time we had spent together, I’d learned that when Henry Lawson was dehydrated or drunk – and he was usually one or the other – he talked to himself out loud.

‘He’ll go to hell for it, he will,’ Henry Lawson said. ‘The goanna’s come to take him there. The ghost of Christmas past.’ He gave a laugh, but his eyes, almost as big and liquid as my own, were watchful. The goanna had spooked him. It certainly spooked me. It was huge, more like a crocodile than a lizard, with frightening claws.

‘My mother used to read me Dickens as a boy, if you can believe it,’ he said. ‘We lived in a tent with a bark room out front, lined with newspapers, a door made of glass left behind in the last goldrush, a whitewashed floor. But still she read me Dickens, and Poe. I can hardly believe it myself.’

Was he in fact talking to me? It was unclear. Not since my handler, Zeriph, passed away years before in Bourke had a human spoken to me casually, for the sake of conversation. Mostly all I got was ‘Hoosh!’ and ‘Itna!’ Down. Up. Up. Down. I lowed quietly in response, as encouragement, and settled more comfortably onto my thick kneepads on the sand. The rum had made me thirsty, but I knew the waterbags Mister Mitchell had filled with tank water in Hungerford were almost empty and it was no use begging for more.

Hungerford. Of all the strange, half-formed places I’d seen since I was brought here, it was one of the strangest, straddling the border between Queensland and New South Wales, a rabbit-proof fence down the main street, a couple of houses on one side, five on the other. After sampling a few glasses of sour yeast at one of the two pubs (both on the Queensland side), Henry Lawson joked the town should instead have been called Hungerthirst. Then he pointed out with a twinkle in his eye that there were rabbits on either side of the fence.

‘That was back in Pipeclay, where our fathers were fossicking on the goldfields,’ Henry Lawson said, laying the calico square over his eyes again. ‘Most of the other diggers had left by then. Their holes had collapsed, their huts were haunted. The first ghost I ever saw came at me from one of those huts, the ghost of a Chinese digger murdered for bottoming on too much payable gold. He used to sit up in the forked trunk of the blue gum above our tent, making the branches sway even on nights when there was no wind.’

I too have ghosts in my past, I wanted to tell Henry Lawson. The ghosts of the other camels who were shipped with me from our birthplace on the island of Tenerife, sold along with our handlers – who had come from somewhere else far away – to an Englishman on his way to Australia. I was the only one of my caravan to survive that dreadful sea journey. The women died around me in the hold, one by one.

And the ghost of the bachelor camel I killed near Alice Springs, who challenged me by grinding his teeth together. I suffocated him, squashed his head between my leg and body, though there were no females around to compete over and we should instead have become friends. Zeriph never let me forget my stupidity, killing that bull. He felt sorry for the other handler, who grieved over his dead camel as if for a child.

‘Our schoolhouse – the one Mitchell and I went to as boys – was haunted,’ Henry Lawson said, sitting up to suck the last drops from his black bottle of rum. ‘By the bushranger Ben Hall’s ghost. The troopers had murdered him in his sleep out on the Lachlan Plain. We thought he was a hero of the people. Mother said he was a common thief. Funny thing was, my little brother couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a bushranger or a trooper when he grew up. That was the choice for us boys from the bush – outlaw or agent of the law! Ha!’

He lay back down on his swag, leaving his face uncovered. Slowly he raised one arm and pointed a long accusatory finger at the moon. ‘At Sunday School we were told it was wicked to point at the moon.’ The rum had stopped his shakes. ‘And we were told our blacks are the lowest race on earth. There was a painting of some Aborigines hung on the schoolroom wall, but they looked more like you, like camels, peculiar creatures that shouldn’t exist, than like the black men we knew.’

But I do exist, I thought. I may have oval red blood cells, three stomach compartments, and urine as thick as syrup, but I exist. I watched him, still pointing at the moon. I felt sick, not just from the rum. Homesick.

‘A black man’s ghost turned up at one of my mother’s séances,’ he went on. ‘She had joined the local Spiritualist Society – it was the thing to do in the bush for a while – and she let me come along to one of the meetings. A lot of teamsters had joined, and the first hour of the séance was taken up by them asking the medium to check whether any of the spirits might know the location of their missing bullocks.’

He chuckled, and shook his head hard as if to clear it. ‘Mitchell’s father was at that meeting. His wife didn’t know he was there. He had come to ask the spirits for help finding gold, but the medium couldn’t answer those questions. Then a different spirit came knocking. It wanted to speak to Mitchell’s father through the medium. “Who are you?” she kept asking, but it wouldn’t say. “Have you met in spirit land many you knew on earth?” the medium asked. “Yes,” was the reply.’

Henry Lawson lowered his voice. ‘Then the medium said, out of nowhere, “Hospital Creek. Do you know of it?” Mitchell’s father’s sunburned face went pale. “Yes,” he said. “I worked at the stockyard there.” The medium was silent for a long time. “I’m getting – a fire. A fire of some kind.” Mitchell’s father said nothing. “Bodies in a fire,” she said. “A lot of them.” And at this, Mitchell’s father began to shake, a grown man trembling, but not with fear. With rage. “You bitch,” he spat, “don’t you know how to keep your mouth shut like the rest of us?”’

Henry Lawson threw the empty bottle of rum out into the bush, in the direction of the goanna. The goanna didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. ‘So the séance ended, and soon afterwards Mitchell’s father struck gold,’ he said.

I thought of the place Mister Mitchell had taken me, where he dug in the earth for the queen’s bones. Had it been near a creek? Perhaps, though it was hard to tell; it was the time of year when most of the creek beds were dry. I had been distracted by the goanna from the beginning. It had appeared as Mitchell brushed soil from the bones, clinging with its claws to the carved tree to which I was tethered beside the grave.

My mouth felt dry, and I was gripped by the urge to spit up some of my regurgitated cud, something that Zeriph had almost managed to train out of me, except when I was very angry or upset. Or drunk, I thought with shame. The green fluid landed heavily in the fire, and sizzled a bit as it burned.

Henry Lawson found this amusing. ‘Now that will go very well with the last spittle I encountered, in Hungerford.’ He dug around under his swag for his notebook, paged through, and began to read aloud. ‘After tea had a yarn with an old man who was minding a mixed flock of goats and sheep; and we asked him whether he thought Queensland was better than New South Wales, or the other way about. He scratched the back of his head, and thought awhile . . . at last, with the bored air of a man who has gone through the same performance too often before, he stepped deliberately up to the fence and spat over it into New South Wales. After which he got leisurely through and spat back on Queensland. “That’s what I think of the blanky colonies!” he said.’

Henry Lawson laughed. He looked cross-eyed and vulnerable from the rum. His gaze slipped onto the goanna at the outer rim of firelight, its loose, scaled throat illuminated.

It wasn’t a childhood bond or the rum keeping Henry Lawson by our campfire night after night. He’d told Mister Mitchell that if it were shearing season he would have stopped off to work on the stations and let us be on our way back to Bourke with the bones without him. But he was lying. We were the perfect quarry for a writer sent out to dig around in the bush for copy, almost too good to be true: a madman collector on a camel, son of a man who’d made the family fortune on the goldfields, carrying the stolen bones of an Aboriginal queen from long ago, all while being stalked by a giant goanna. I’d heard him say he liked to put animals in his stories because it made the humans look worse.

‘They didn’t really have queens,’ was the first thing Henry Lawson said after listening to Mister Mitchell’s explanation for what he was doing riding a camel along the stock route in midsummer. It wasn’t unusual to see an entire caravan of camels lugging supplies across the vast desert, especially further north (we had been brought to this country for that purpose; a railroad was being built on our backs), but as a lone camel, used by Mister Mitchell rather like a fancy horse, I became part of his oddity. ‘Not in the way we think of a queen.’

‘The queen’s bones,’ Mister Mitchell had repeated in his dreamy way, and Henry Lawson had let it go.

The first day of our journey, the day after Mister Mitchell had bought me in Bourke, he decided it was too hot to wear his boots, and burned his feet to blistering in the noon sun while murmuring to himself the instructions he’d been given on how to ride a camel. ‘Keep your hands by your sides, relax, and sway with the creature as best you can.’

I became afraid then that he would get us lost, and bit a hole in one of the bags of flour hanging against my flanks, to leave a trail. That only worked as long as we had flour, and soon we didn’t, and the white trail on the red sand ended abruptly. I cursed myself then for not taking the chance to run away after Zeriph died, off into the redder centre to join the ranks of wild camels whose numbers were rumoured to be swelling, desert outlaws who spent their days destroying the very same things they had lugged to the interior in the first place: stock fences, well casings, railroad tracks, water pumps.

The goanna scuttled closer to the fire, jerking its flat head, then it froze and was once more unsettlingly still. I felt my long spine tingle.

‘They eat meat,’ Henry Lawson said. ‘All kinds of meat. Fresh or rotting. I’ve heard they’ll eat the eyes out of a sleeping man’s face, or drag a whole sheep off in their jaws. I saw one kill a kangaroo and take chunks of flesh out of it like a dingo. One bite, they say, and you never stop bleeding.’

I looked at Mister Mitchell’s padded, sleeping form. He had the bag of bones beside him, clutching it to him like a lover. The way he was lying – on his side, his knees pulled up and head tucked in – reminded me of the way the queen’s bones had been arranged in her mounded grave. She had not been laid out on her back when she was buried, arms straight, legs out straight. She had been laid into the earth carefully curled up on her side.

‘His father was fixated on those bones,’ Henry Lawson muttered. ‘Like father, like son. They’ve both always been a bit touched.’ He snapped his head around to look at me, as if I had said something. ‘Oh no, it’s not what you think. These aren’t those bones. Not from the killings at Hospital Creek. They made sure to burn those ones up, get rid of the evidence. The queen – he does insist on calling her that, doesn’t he? – is from a time before we were here, before old Captain Cook even. Someone at the stockyard told his father about the queen’s grave. Now he thinks if he has her bones, the Hospital Creek ghosts will let him alone.’

The goanna hissed, inflating flaps of skin around its throat into a menacing neckpiece.

Henry Lawson ignored it and began to sing softly. ‘We three kings of Orient are/bearing gifts we traverse afar . . . My god, I’m thirsty. Imagine dying of thirst. You hear about Ebenezer Davis, who was taking a mob of Kerribree sheep along the stock route and got lost? They found his body last week beside an empty waterbag and a note. The sheep had buggered off and left him. Hold on,’ he said, and turned the pages of his notebook again. ‘Ah, yes. Good man. I did write it down. “My Tung is stkig to my mouth and I see what I have wrote I know it is this is the last time I may have of expressing feeling alive and the feeling exu is lost for want of water My ey Dassels. My tong burn. I can see no More God Help.”’ Henry Lawson sighed. ‘I must find a way to use this. Great theme, death in the bush. Death in general. My ey Dassels. My tong burn.’

I decided then and there that in the morning, once I’d slept off the rum, I was going to run away from Mister Mitchell and Henry Lawson, and gallop on my spindly legs until I was deep enough into the desert to forget what I could not understand. None of it made any sense: Hospital Creek, the ghosts on the goldfields, the bonfire, the queen’s bones, the goanna. I wasn’t blameless, but I was innocent of this, of whatever Henry Lawson and Mister Mitchell and their kind had done. I had only arrived a few years ago, how could I have done anything wrong?

‘God, Bourke. Of all places to ring in the New Year,’ Henry Lawson was saying, picking his teeth. ‘We’ll be back by then, I suppose. Let’s see. There’s still Youngerina Bore, Fords Bridge, Sutherlands Lake, Walkdens Bore. Then Bourke. It’ll be too hot to think or write. Too hot to do anything but drink until you feel about life as you ought to feel before you start. You know what they say about people who die in Bourke? They get to hell and find it chilly, and send back for their blankets.’ He laughed. ‘Many’s the night I’ve lain in the dust outside the Carriers Arms, listening to the drunks making jokes about the Salvation Army woman who sings hymns outside the hotel, all day, all night. It doesn’t matter if a woman’s cracked, they say, s’long as the crack’s in the right place.’

Mister Mitchell suddenly rolled onto his back, threw off the blanket and jumped to his feet, facing the goanna where it stood watching, still as quartz, a few feet away from him. He was sweating. ‘Father warned me about you,’ Mister Mitchell said, swaying, pointing at the goanna. ‘He said to kill you, drain off your oil, eat your flesh, and burn your bones to ashes. It’s you he dreams about, you who comes to haunt him. It’s you who saw him light the bonfire.’

‘You’ve nothing but the jim-jams, Mitchell, you’ve drunk too much rum,’ Henry Lawson said. ‘Lie down, go back to sleep. It’s Christmas night, for God’s sake. Ignore the animals. They’re our only and most loyal spectators.’

Mister Mitchell ignored him instead. He dug around in his supplies for his shot belt, and began to load slugs in one barrel of his muzzle-loader and ball in another. Henry Lawson didn’t stop his old friend. His eyes had glazed over – the rum, yes, but I could tell something else had gripped him. He had to see how it all ended.

Mister Mitchell tamped down the wadding with the ramrod and lifted his gun, aiming at the goanna. ‘The bones are mine!’

The goanna bolted in my direction. I lunged to my feet. There was an excruciating silence.

The goanna was dead, I saw that first. I felt my cheek against the cold midnight sand, and found myself thinking of a moment years before, when Zeriph had loosened the ropes and I was finally relieved of the terrible weight of the upright piano I’d carried on my back, all the way from the railhead at Oodnadatta to Alice Springs, counterbalanced by a drum of water.

Zeriph had been proud of me, carrying the first piano into the core of our new country. Not copper from the mines, not wool wagons to the mills, not reckless explorers, not railroad tracks nor overland telegraph supplies, not one of the mounted Oodnadatta policemen on patrol. A piano. A thing of beauty.

But for what? I carried that thing of beauty all that way on my back, with the ropes cutting into my bones, so that somebody could tinkle on the keys for the midday drunks at the pub in Alice. That’s what broke Zeriph’s heart, that the piano’s music could mean nothing without the false prophetry of drink.

I tried to move my head so that I was facing Mecca, but I became confused. I thought I saw a figure in the bush. For a moment I believed the goanna had transformed itself into a woman, into the queen herself. Then I realised the figure was Henry Lawson, half hidden behind a tree, laughing hysterically at the scene before him: a dead goanna, a dying camel, a white man clutching a bag of old bones.

‘I’ve got it!’ he said, between gasps. ‘I’ve got the last line . . . And the sun rose again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird. I’ve got it!’

My ey Dassels. My tong burn. Oh, Mister Lawson, be careful. You’re not the only one who can tell a good story about death in the wastelands.

PIGEONS, A PONY, THE TOMCAT AND I

Soul of Cat

Died 1915, France

O crossing of looks! Bond that the animal tries to tighten and that man always undoes!

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette,LOOKING BACKWARDS: RECOLLECTIONS

Waiting for the tomcat

It is long after midnight and still the tomcat has not returned to his parapet above the trench adjacent to mine. I have been waiting for him, primed by the soldiers’ talk of his legendary night-hunting skills out in no man’s land and the way he fearlessly cleans himself while exposed in the sun on the parapet, even in the heaviest bombardments. The soldiers welcomed me when I arrived but seemed a little disappointed that I wasn’t also a tom – they like to bet on anything and everything, these boys, and I think they would have liked a wager on who would win the scrap of the tomcats.

What they don’t know is that I’ve always felt I was meant to be a tom and not a she-cat. Colette understands this, my beloved Colette who inadvertently left me behind here at the front after a brave secret visit to her new husband, the awful Henri, who was made sergeant at the outbreak of war and fully believes he deserves the title. She didn’t know that I’d stowed away in her vehicle in Paris, overcoming my detestation of blur and movement. But while I was outside the car, distracted by a blackbird, she was discovered and sent back to Paris, before I’d been able to surprise her with the warmth of my body at her shins. Now I’m trapped here until she realises what has happened – she will, I’m sure of it, with her catlike instincts – and returns to collect me.

I’ve kept a low profile, and done my surveillance work discreetly. The officers’ quarters, far from the fire trenches, appealed due to their trimmings and comforts, but I know the sergeant has always been jealous of Colette’s love for me, and would be delighted to see me harmed. Alone with him one evening in their apartment in Paris, I sensed his malevolence so strongly that my usually dry paws became wet with sweat, and I disappeared the way only a cat can and did not re-emerge from my hiding place until she was home.

I moved away from the base reserve camp, past the support line, and arrived at this mud-churned front, though I would dearly have loved to stay close to the pigeon loft to catch one of those earnest little birds ferrying messages in aluminium capsules attached to their legs. Can it be true they are motivated to fly the distances they do for the meagre promise of being reunited with their mate on the other side of the partition on their return? They look delicious to me even when they come back ragged and bloody, almost torn apart by German bullets or German hawks, about to drop dead from fatigue. I enjoyed the jokes their human handlers told too. A male pigeon falls in love with a female pigeon and sets up a rendezvous at the top of the Eiffel Tower. He arrives on time. Two hours later, when he is about to give up and leave, she arrives and says casually, ‘So sorry I’m late. It’s such a lovely day, I thought I’d walk.’

The fire trench is not my ideal environment, but at least I know the sergeant will rarely set foot here, and the young men who fill these trenches are so miserably bothered by rats which have developed a taste for human flesh that they are glad to claim me as their own trench cat to rival the tomcat next door. It shocked Colette to see what has become of this swathe of the countryside. So many times I have accompanied her on visits to her mother in the small village in Burgundy where she grew up in pastoral paradise. She can summon vignettes of a way of life that most Parisians have long lost: resting her feet on a metal foot warmer filled with embers in a cold schoolroom; feasting on sloes from the hedges and on haws; the chestnut skins she’d throw in the fire, to her mother’s chagrin, for they’d later spoil the ash lye spread over the bucking cloth on the laundry tub, and stain the linen. Autumn was always her favourite season, and it became mine too once I had seen Burgundy. It was just as she’d promised: the last peaches, the triangular beechnuts, and the red leaves of the cherry trees quivering in the November dawn.

But this late autumn at the front is unlike any I have witnessed. Without the changing palette of the trees to signal the shift towards winter (the leaves have been exploded off), and the songbirds mostly gone quiet, it becomes difficult to know where I am, in what season, in which century. Between my trench and the foremost trenches of the Germans, there is no living thing except rats anymore. Instead there is an ocean of mud, liquid enough that when the wind blows it forms ripples on the surface of the largest shell craters; pools deep enough to drown a man. Paris and its millennial amusements must have been a mirage, for how could that have led to this?

Neighbours

The tom returned when the sun was eking out a cold light. The soldiers had just stood down from their dawn stand-to-arms on the firestep, shooting off their ‘morning hate’, as the ritual of firing into the early mists – the Germans do the same – is called. Worn out from anticipating the tom’s return in the night, I was no longer prepared, half dozing on my own parapet. The soldiers were wrapping and rewrapping their rotting feet before gingerly fitting on their boots. They had cleaned their rifles, and the senior officers had inspected them, and it was time for the breakfast truce, during which each side (on good days) let the other eat in peace.

One of the soldiers – very thin, very young – offered me some of his condensed-milk ration, and I stuck my nose up at it in worst pussycat fashion because I couldn’t bear to take from him his small chance at nourishment. But he looked so dismayed that I climbed down, lapped it up, and thanked him with a guttural purr and a nudge of my head against his legs.

It was then that the tomcat’s outline appeared against the grey sky and I knew I’d lost my chance to surprise him in a show of dominance. I would have to change tactics.

‘Careful, little one,’ the soldier whispered, looking up. ‘You’ve got company.’

As nonchalantly as I could, I climbed back up the side of the trench and out onto the parapet. Some of the other soldiers stopped their morning task of repairing duckboards to watch, whistling and joking about a love match between two cats equally dimwitted enough to expose themselves to German snipers in daylight.

The tomcat looked at me. ‘Kiki?’ he said. ‘Kiki-la-Doucette?’

I didn’t recognise him. I said nothing, licking my paws.

‘It’s really you, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I don’t believe this. I’m sharing a trench with the famous Kiki-la-Doucette!’

‘I’m giving you fifteen seconds to clear out,’ I said. ‘Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen —’

‘You don’t remember me? I live down the road from you in Paris. My owner started walking me on a leash after she saw Colette walking you, to my great embarrassment. We came once to your apartment for a salon of sorts, and I’ll never forget my first sight of Missy, wearing that tuxedo adjusted to fit her womanly shape. There was a strange musician playing otherworldly notes on the piano, someone called Ravel. Colette’s bulldog took an instant dislike to me, so we didn’t stay long, but you and I shared a bowl of milk and I was so awed by being in your presence that I couldn’t say a word.’

‘Twelve, eleven, ten —’ I kept up my count rather brutally, for I did remember, suddenly, that shared bowl of milk.

‘My owner was in love with Colette, you see. She always watched for her at the window, and read her newspaper columns out loud to me, or the nasty reviews of her latest music-hall performance – there was one where she took on the persona of a cat, I remember, with whiskers and a black nose.’

I was overwhelmed with such longing that I forgot to keep my countdown going. She’d developed her mime for the title role in The Loved-up Cat at Le Bataclan by observing me even more closely than usual, crawling around on the floor after me, copying my every move and twitch and affectation. She didn’t have to try very hard to be catty; her young friend Jean Cocteau has the knack of seeing through her niceties and he likes to warn new acquaintances, whoever is her friend du jour: ‘Her velvet paw shows its claws very fast. And when she scratches, she leaves a gash.’ They usually don’t believe him until it’s too late, until they are bleeding.

Toby-Chien the bulldog didn’t mind all the attention Colette paid me. He was used to playing second fiddle; it was always clear that in her hierarchy of loves, cats came above dogs, and any four-legged creature came above those of the two-legged variety, even dear Missy. You wouldn’t think it, but I could always count on Toby-Chien for a good chat when I felt like one. Colette would observe us wryly from the kitchen table with her cigarette poised, and that’s where she got the idea for her Animals in Dialogue columns which she published in La Vie Parisienne, imagining what Toby-Chien and I were talking about, though in that she was often wrong. We didn’t care much about the scandal of her open-mouthed kiss with Missy – whose stage name was Yssim – on the stage at the Moulin Rouge, and we’d never liked her ex-husband Willy, and once he was gone from our lives we didn’t talk much about him. But these were the things she knew that Paris was preoccupied with, and Colette, just finding her feet as a stage presence and an author, never missed an opportunity to give Paris what it desired.

‘My owner hated Missy with a passion,’ the tomcat was saying. ‘Called her mutton dressed up as lamb, though it wasn’t her age that Missy was trying to disguise. She thought Missy looked ridiculous in those baggy men’s clothes with that thin moustache pencilled above her top lip. My owner believed she could give Colette what she really wanted, a woman’s gentle love, unsullied by any pretence at masculinity; a mother and lover all in one. Isn’t that what Colette is searching for, somebody to love her as consumingly as her mother?’

I thought of our apartment on the rue de Villejust, where she and Toby-Chien and I lived after her divorce from Willy, until she got married again, to the despicable Henri. Missy lived half a block away in an apartment where she turned out bathroom fixtures on a lathe and held Sapphic salons for ladies who came dressed as men and stood around drinking expensive wine and smoking cigars. Missy made a pair of moustaches from hair plucked from her poodle’s tail for herself and Colette, and sometimes they wore matching pince-nez, white trousers, black jackets made from alpaca wool, and several pairs of socks to fill up men’s shoes. A regular game for members of the salon, initiated by Colette, was to think up imaginary titles of books that one of the women who worked at the Bibliothèque nationale would make sure afterwards to insert surreptitiously into the official catalogue. The ones Colette came up with usually had me in mind; my favourite was Diary of a Pussy in Mourning: Kiki-la-Doucette on Breaking Her Long Animal Silence.

The soldiers in the trench beneath had lost interest and turned back to their tasks. I felt I owed it to them to enliven their morning, and the tomcat’s knowledge of intimate details of Colette and Missy’s life together had made me angry. Without warning, I leapt forward and hissed at him, swiping at his face with one of my paws and grazing his nose. The soldiers looked up, and laughed.

The tomcat backed off and stared at me forlornly. ‘Why did you do that, Kiki?’

‘Because I felt like it,’ I said. ‘If you knew anything about her, you’d know that she and Missy are no longer together. She’s remarried now. Her mother is dead. And Colette has her very own baby daughter, Bel-Gazou. Now piss off.’

To my surprise, he did, disappearing into his trench, forgoing the weak sunlight.

I have been lying up here on the parapet and moping since then, trying, and mostly succeeding, to ignore the whine and thunder of the shells the Germans send occasionally across the mud towards us. I pine for Colette and, the truth is, I miss Missy. The tomcat is right. I always knew Colette would leave her eventually. Why she then picked the sergeant, who is drawn to the masculine space of politics and warmongering in an increasingly exclusionary manner, I don’t understand. But Colette is not always transparent to me emotionally, just as my needs are sometimes opaque to her.

Fufu and the egg

After a massive artillery barrage aimed at the enemy’s front line, the order was given late this afternoon for the men to go over the top in another futile attempt at inching forward our position. I couldn’t watch. The thin soldier who believes himself my adopted owner gave me a squeeze before he climbed out obediently and began to wade through the mud, his rifle lifted with the bayonet pointing ahead as if it might give him some sort of magic protection against bullets and shells.

I left the empty trench and staying hidden retreated to the base field hospital and division kitchen, set up in relative safety far behind the front line. The medical orderlies were waiting for the action to end so that they could retrieve bodies, but for now there was little they could do. To distract themselves, one had hidden an egg from an old pony they call Fufu, who drags stretchers piled with the wounded. I watched as Fufu wavered between two dominant preoccupations: finding the egg, and lying down with her forelegs outstretched and eyes closed every time she heard the wail of an incoming shell. As soon as it had exploded at a distance, up she’d get, ready to keep searching for the egg.

‘Fufu!’ The tomcat had followed me and was calling out to the pony. ‘Fufu, over here!’

I looked sideways at the tomcat, with a glance I tried to fill with disdain.

Fufu came towards us. ‘Did you see where they hid the egg?’ she said.

‘It’s under the side flap of the tent,’ the tomcat said.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This,’ the tomcat said proudly, ‘is Kiki-la-Doucette, who belongs to one of Paris’s most fascinating denizens, the theatre performer and author Colette. Many consider Kiki to be Colette’s true muse.’

Fufu looked at me with interest. ‘Welcome to the front,’ she said. ‘Did Colette put you out on the streets when war was declared, like this one’s owner did?’

The tomcat looked ashamed.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘She would never do that. I was left behind here accidentally when she made a secret visit to her husband. And you?’

‘Fufu’s owners fought hard to keep her,’ the tomcat said. ‘They even wrote a letter to the commander-in-chief asking for her to be spared being called up.’

‘Dear Sir,’ Fufu recited, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘We are writing for our pony, who we are very afraid may be taken for the army. Please spare her. She is seventeen years old. It would break our hearts to let her go. We have given two other ponies, and our three older brothers are now fighting for France. Maman says she will do anything for the war effort but please let us keep old Fufu, and send official word quickly before anyone comes to take her away. Your little patriots, Marie and Claude.’

Another distant shell announced its incoming trajectory and Fufu promptly lay down and closed her eyes. When it had exploded somewhere in the mudlands, she stood up again. ‘The letter didn’t work,’ she said. ‘They took me anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and eat my egg.’

The tomcat looked at me nervously. ‘Would you like to come hunting with me tonight?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to leave me alone.’