The evidence was clear. The husks of grains, the crumbs of bread and swede and carrot. The foul-smelling pellets that rats, being entirely without hygiene, drop thoughtlessly, randomly, disgustingly, in their wake. Then that odour – that once smelled was never forgotten odour – which was now making such an assault on my nostrils that it was almost like a magnet, reeling me in…
And then the prize, as I slipped round the edge of a metal bin. The rat itself, with its back to me, front paws up to whiskers; those whiskers twitching in a way that a cat’s whiskers never would, rhythmically, quiverishly, furiously – marking the movement of jaws that were munching on food it had no business munching, that it had absolutely no right to steal. The captain had been right, I decided, as I watched it – it was the very curse of His Majesty’s Navy.
I sank down slowly, feeling my belly fur almost melt into the floor beneath me, adjusted my position, and counted out heartbeats in my head. There was time, there was space, there was no way of escape for it. Two more heartbeats. Luck and courage.
I pounced.
The rat spun around, a blur of pale pink, black eyes and frantic whiskers, the spoils forgotten as it tried to scrabble claws at my face. But it was too shocked to do any more than slightly unbalance me, which – being a cat and not a rat – I quickly corrected, making firm, decisive contact with the side of its neck till its thrashing began to ebb and finally ended.
I waited, crouched and motionless, a full half-minute more till my heart slowed, my fur settled and the moment seemed right finally to relax my jaws and drop my prey between my paws. And it was only then that I began to appreciate just how heavy it had been. How one fat-bottomed rat had so much more bulk about it than a vole or a mouse or a shrew. How my mother had had a point when she’d cautioned against kittens taking them on. But I’d done it. I couldn’t believe it, yet I’d really done it. I’d killed it. I’d dispatched it for my captain and could not have felt more proud. I’d become big enough and strong enough and would soon be experienced enough. I couldn’t wait to take it to his cabin.
And I would have done so, except that fate intervened, and it seemed that someone else was destined to see it first. It was while I was on my way up top, moments later, that I bumped into him.
I was hurrying, keen that I should present it to the captain warm, and (I don’t doubt, since I was feeling particularly full of myself) trotting along with something of a swagger. It was perhaps that which caused the sailor (who appeared round a corner out of nowhere, a massive man-shaped silhouette) to place his hands on his hips and make such a noise about it.
‘Well, looky here!’ he boomed, his voice echoing off the walls and the ceiling (I mentally corrected myself; the bulkhead and the overhead, of course). ‘Look. At. You!’ he went on, seeming almost as proud of my kill as I was. ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Blackie? Is it what I think it is?’
He stepped nimbly over the small metal wall beneath the door between us, moving into the pool of what little light was left burning at that time of day. He had a piece of paper in his hand and a pencil behind his ear. The light gleamed on his teeth as he grinned down at me.
He squatted in front of me to make a closer inspection. ‘Good Lord, it is!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a clever little Blackie. Earning your keep already, I see!’ Before I could take any action to evade it, I was then ‘treated’ to a scratch of the space between my ears, which, with some effort, I just about tolerated.
It wasn’t that I had anything against him – as with everyone I’d so far befriended on the Amethyst, he looked nothing but overjoyed to have had the chance to meet and stroke me. But it’s no treat for a cat bearing prey to be touched. (Not even, might I add, by their mother.) It’s quite the opposite. And try as I might to believe that he didn’t mean to take the rat from me, certain feline instincts are way stronger than logic. Though I managed not to growl at him. Just.
But he seemed to understand anyway, because he stepped aside and made a dramatic sweeping motion with his arm. ‘On your way, sailor,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me hold you up. And if it’s the boss you’re after, you’ll find him on the bridge if you hurry. Blow me,’ he finished, now scratching his own head, using the pencil. ‘And you such a titch, and all, Blackie! Fancy!’ Then he laughed. ‘Peggy’ll be looking to her laurels!’
Even then, I didn’t pay it a great deal of attention – either to the business of who Peggy was, or what ‘her laurels’ might be. I was much too focused on the business in hand. Well, more accurately, the business at that moment in mouth – a dead weight between my jaws that was getting heavier by the moment, and that I had still to present to the captain.
As it was, I failed to find him, because he wasn’t on the bridge and, fearing the man up there – Lieutenant Berger, who was apparently not a ‘cat fan’ – I slipped away again, carefully, holding my head up as I went, so the rat’s scaly tail didn’t drag on the floor.
To the captain’s cabin, then, I decided, but he wasn’t there either, and it occurred to me that he might by now be back out on deck, doing the dawn ‘mustering’ that seemed to bring him such joy. Since it seemed a bit presumptuous to waltz up with it while he was busy giving orders, I decided that the cabin was the best place for my trophy. I sprang up to his bunk and left the body where I knew he’d appreciate it – on the pillow.
It was only when I jumped down and headed back to the rat runs that it occurred to me. I still had no answer to my question. Who or what was this Peggy, anyway?
Chapter 6
When you live on board a ship, as I very quickly came to understand once I’d joined the Amethyst, life is all about order and routine. This obviously holds true for every drama a ship might encounter, but it’s equally important on those days when there is none; those long days of ploughing steadily through the water, the sky above, the ocean below, the view calm and unchanging. That’s where routine apparently makes for ‘good order’, which was something the captain seemed to mention a lot, along with ‘shipshape’, which seemed relevant, even if not entirely obvious, and ‘Bristol fashion’, which meant not a jot to me.
But whatever the reason Mr Bristol had decreed it, his way of fashioning things created routine and structure, which made it quite unlike any day in my previous life. Back then, every dawn could bring entirely new challenges, many of them challenges I felt ill-equipped to face. Here, every new day was a copy of the one that came before it, and also a blueprint for the one coming after – each one so like the other that they soon began to blur; it would be only the ship’s log that would enable any distinction to be made, and some specific memory be pinned to it.
With one exception. The day I met Peggy.
News of my first kill seemed to blow through the Amethyst like a hurricane, and I made even more friends as a result. It seemed the captain hadn’t been joking when he’d told me what a scourge the ship’s rats were, because the first thing he did was congratulate me fulsomely. ‘Well, thanks VERY much for my gift!’ he said, chuckling as he did so. ‘What a TREAT it was to find it just before I had my breakfast! Absolutely DELIGHTFUL,’ and lots of other jolly things like that.