The Amethyst was a place like no other I had ever encountered. Admittedly, in my short life, I had not encountered much, but here was somewhere – and something – that was completely unlike anywhere I’d ever been. Though its exterior held no surprises – I’d watched so many ships coming and going that the sight of a ship was very familiar – the inside of my new home was a mystery.
Like so many human structures, the ship was a box, but unlike the cavernous warehouses into which I’d sometimes sneak in search of sleeping lizards, it was divided into lots of smaller boxes. The junction between each box was also very clear. Where I was used to squeezing myself into slim gaps between things, here it was all about ups and downs. To get from one space to another, as I found out almost immediately, it was necessary to first leap over a small metal wall. It was complicated to understand, being so full of things that made no sense to me; within each new place that my tentative travels took me I saw the same lacework of piping over all the walls and ceilings, the same inexplicable lumps of wood and metal, all rising up from the same, highly polished red floor. It couldn’t have been more different from the green softness I was used to seeing, or even the giant scale of all the human-made structures of the docks. It was so much to take in, in such a small, confusing space. I could only trust that I would begin to make sense of it eventually, and in the meantime not get hopelessly lost.
I saw no one. It was true that I hadn’t travelled far yet, but this surprised me almost as much as it relieved me. Then I realised that the humans here must all have been ‘mustered’ – the whole lot of them; a thing I would doubtless also learn about in due course. For now I was content just to explore my immediate surroundings, and to try to make sense of my strange new abode. Though finding my way outside, back to where I would be able to see the sea again, took some time and some doing, and some retracing of my steps, because there seemed little logic in the way the ship was laid out.
Back on the island, with its many meandering pathways and alleyways, it was simply a case of following my nose and eyes, and padding along, taking heed of the information from my whiskers. Up a slope, down a hill, through a space between railings; there wasn’t much in the way of obstacles that could effectively bar my way. In this strange place, however, quite apart from the multitude of strange little barriers I must hop over, there were also step-ladders everywhere, which looked fine to scale, but far less appealing to descend. It was clear that, though to look at they were quite different, these had all the same qualities as trees.
Trees, as any cat would tell you, were never to be trusted. Trees were bewitching, confounding and ultimately deceptive, as I’d found out as a kitten of maybe not quite five months, when in bold pursuit of a large gecko. So easy to climb (a determined kitten could shimmy up one in no time) but, once there, it was almost impossible to get down. And my mother – this being a while before everything went wrong for us – seemed to find my plight very funny.
There is a reason you’ll never see a cat up a tree, kitten, she’d observed, as I’d trembled and mewled and miaowed high above her. It’s because every cat recalls the day they did just as you have. Now, don’t panic. Be brave. Trust you’ll land the right way up. Land hard, yes, but the right way. You’ll see. Come on, try it. She’d been right. It had taken half a morning, but she’d been right about both things. That I would land the right way up – even if only after a terrifying, uncontrollable, claw-shredding downward scramble. And that I wouldn’t forget it. I vowed I would never scale a tree trunk again.
I elected to avoid the ladders too, at least till I’d worked out how I might negotiate them. So it was via a rather circuitous route that I finally found the outside, and when I stepped out there at last, treading lightly and cautiously, I realised I must have arrived at what George called ‘on-deck’. Though there was no sign of anyone – which ‘on-deck’ had he been mustered to? – I knew because for the first time in many, many hours now, I could smell salt and feel a familiar breeze caress my fur.
Being apparently alone – the shiny ground stretched into the far distance in both directions – I drank it all in, noticing how much the air differed from that in George’s space in the fo’c’sle, which was air like no air I’d experienced before, being so thick with dense, alien, often startling odours.
It was also fully light – a glorious morning, in fact – and I felt in no rush to explore further yet. It was enough just to look around me, take it in, letting my nose and whiskers reassure me, then cast my gaze upwards towards a sky so bright and butterfly-blue that I had to narrow my eyes in order to properly see it.
But it seemed I wasn’t the only one ‘on-deck’ after all. ‘What the very devil do we have here?’ boomed a voice from behind me. ‘A cat? How’s a ruddy cat found his way aboard my ship?’
Every cat’s life is precious, so instinct prevailed. I dug my claws in – though into nothing, so that wasn’t much use to me – and made myself as big and threatening as I could. Which I fully realised wasn’t very big, much less very threatening, but I was too frightened to think rationally.
Except perhaps the dark part of my brain was being perfectly rational, because the other option, of running away, felt foolish in the extreme. Where exactly would I hope to run to? For what struck me most forcibly as I trembled beneath the human – tail fluffed, back a half-moon, teeth bared, teetering on tippytoes – was the sight, in the gaps between the deck edge and rail, of sea, and more sea, and not a great deal else but sea. The time for escape was clearly long gone.
And, just as George had, this human – this huge, thunder-voiced male human – seemed to find my predicament very funny. He also wasted no time in reaching down and scooping me up, though he grabbed me not by my belly, but by the scruff of my neck, just as my mother used to do. He brought me close to his face then and dangled me in front of it, breathing his man-scent (another assault on my nostrils as well as my dignity) and eyeing me just as I might have done a shrew.
For a moment, it was all I could do not to panic. One thing cats don’t do for pleasure is swim, particularly in waves bigger than they are. Given the way he’d just spoken, overboard was where I must surely be headed. I’d have wriggled, even knowing the futility of it, but the scruff of a neck is a singular location – by some clever trickery, which I’d thought was known only to mother cats, I was entirely unable to move.
‘Hmm,’ said the captain. (I knew he must be the captain, because only the captain would call it ‘my ship’.) ‘A stowaway, eh? Or did someone smuggle you on board, eh?’ He studied me intently for a number of seconds, as if seriously expecting me to answer.
I sniffed him. He smelled markedly different from George, which seemed appropriate, because George, I now knew, was still only a man-boy. I knew because of his ‘bum-fluff’, as he called it, and his sharp observation that we were both of us teenage ‘waifs and strays’, give or take, causing me to wonder if we weren’t both in the same situation – both without our mothers, and neither of us feeling quite ready.
This captain was clearly no man-boy. He was a man and I could smell it, in the same way as I was always alert to the scent of the big cats on Stonecutters Island, in whose territories I never dared tread. His scent was earthy, and salty, and strong in my nostrils, though also strangely reminiscent of the shady spaces on the island where the jacarandas dripped their purple petals. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘since you are here, you may as well come meet my number one.’ Upon which, I was relocated to the crook of his other hand, and carried up and down the step-ladders I’d slunk beneath before, my heart beating out a tattoo against his palm.