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Authors: Nick Green

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BOOK: Cat's Paw
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Curiosity plus catnip – talk about a fatal combination. He made sure he was alone in the alley and bent his knees, just a little. Then his hands were clinging to the top of a wall that was
tall enough to keep burglars out. With a scrape of rubber soles he scrambled to the summit. The trouble with being able to jump ten feet straight up was that there were so many excuses to do
it.

Aha, what was this? On the far side wasn’t a garden but a yard. He could see the back of a pub, probably the White Lion. No plants, no flowerpots, only a gleaming Harley motorbike parked
by a row of wheely-bins. He sniffed again. The aroma of catnip was dizzying. He moved his knee and saw a splash of white paint on the top of the wall. No, not a splash – a paw print. A white
cat’s paw. The smell was rising off the bricks.

He suddenly felt very exposed up here.

‘Oi!’

Ben wobbled. A stocky man barged out through the pub’s kitchen door.

‘What you up to?’

‘Er,’ said Ben. ‘Have you seen a cat?’

The man glared with bright blue eyes. Ben guessed he was the landlord. His messy, grey-flecked hair and stubble gave him the air of a faded rock star. ‘Have I seen a cat? Is that a trick
question?’

‘No. I heard it –’

‘How did you get on my wall?’

‘Forget it,’ sighed Ben. ‘I’m going.’

‘Don’t tell me to forget it.’ The man drew himself up to his full disappointing height. ‘I know your sort. Don’t let me catch you again or there’ll be hell to
pay.’

‘Yeah, get a haircut,’ said Ben. He dropped back into the alley, in a pashki stance that cushioned the fall. There was no chance of the guy chasing after him, but he hurried out of
Moll Walk all the same. The encounter had left him uneasy. The magic-mint smell lingered on his clothes and the sense of being watched was slow to lift. Giving Tiffany’s road a miss, Ben
walked quickly, glancing behind him, all the way home.

Home. That word was causing him problems. For three months, the place where he slept, ate and got ready for school had been Dad’s flat on the Hillcourt Estate. Ben tended to call it
the
flat
rather than
home
. It was odd waking up each morning knowing Mum wasn’t in the next room.

She was no longer in London. Various little things, such as watching her home being smashed by a crane, had ended her love of the city. Compensation, when it came, had let her move into a
bungalow in a nearby town, where she’d found a new job managing a café. Hertford felt like the countryside after Hackney. Lucy Gallagher had been so thrilled that she assumed Ben would
be too.

‘But it’s miles from my school,’ he had protested.

‘This may surprise you, Benjamin, but they have schools out there too. Along with electricity and flushing toilets.’ She laughed. Ben shifted farther up the sofa. They were in the
cramped bed-sit that she had rented rather than stay at Dad’s place.

‘Change schools, you mean?’

‘Wait till you see your new one. No spray-paint on the gates. Playing fields with grass!’

Ben listened glumly. His school might never top any league tables, but it was his. Some of his friends he had known since nursery. Yet, if it made Mum happy, he’d move schools tomorrow.
That wasn’t the issue. The Cat Kin was the issue. He couldn’t risk losing touch with the only people who shared his secret. Least of all Tiffany.

He tried to forget the weeks of arguments that followed. He told himself he had no choice. In the end, he’d won. His prize was a bed in Dad’s spare room, whole milk at breakfast
instead of horrid skimmed, permission to play CDs at volume 10. Watching horror films, jousting with Dad on the home-made pinball machine. Home. And though it was arranged that he would go and stay
with Mum for most of each long holiday, Ben was already missing her more than he would have dreamed possible.

Things looked better on a Friday, though. Fridays ended with double art. Even if he didn’t have Mum’s gift for craft, the smell of paints or the squish of modrock between his fingers
made it feel like she was standing nearby. Then, after school, he would meet up with the lads at Highbury arcade to eat kebabs and thrash everyone at pinball – just as Dad might have done. On
Fridays his parents didn’t feel so far apart.

Ben left the arcade and took the northbound Tube. The train was strewn with wasted free newspapers, their headlines shouting about the recent robberies that had been plaguing the Underground.
Ben ate Pringles. Muggers were nothing compared to what he had to worry about. The pashki class was meeting in an hour and he still hadn’t made peace with Tiffany. When he thought about what
he’d said to her, he wanted to shut his head in a door.

He strolled out into the ticket hall at Finsbury Park station. All he had to do was say sorry, he decided, and they would make it up. That was what friends did. In relief he flicked his last
crisp at his mouth. He missed. A shove knocked him hard against a photo booth and he heard a shout.

‘Hey! What the– Stop!’

Rubbing his shoulder, Ben saw a tall woman with bobbed hair, her hands raised helplessly. Three boys were sprinting down the passage towards the platforms. Swinging from the arm of the middle
boy was a brown handbag.

No-one else in the packed ticket hall paid any attention. Ben went to the woman, who made a fist.

‘I’m warning you. . .’

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. She seemed to twig that this hoodie was harmless.

‘Heck. That was a Christmas present.’ The tall woman bit her lip. She looked pale. Then she turned paler. ‘My pen! My pen was in that bag!’

‘Oh,’ said Ben. ‘Was it expensive?’

She shook her head, exasperated. ‘No, no, my
insulin
pen!’

‘Insulin?’

‘It’s a needle.’ Her eyes were wide and scared.

‘I’m diabetic. And I need it, I need it now. . .’

Now he understood – his geography teacher carried a similar syringe round his neck and had to use it after every meal. The bag-snatchers were already out of sight, racing for the trains.
Luckily his inner cat never stopped to think. While he was still wondering what to do, he found himself halfway down the passage and still accelerating. At the northbound staircase a lightning
hunch made him shoot out a hand to grab the banister, slinging his weight into the turn. He flew down twelve steps without touching one, skipped round a bunch of dawdling young men, and in one more
leap cleared the second stair-block, plunging eight feet to the concrete.

He had not set his Mau body loose like this for a while, and it felt good. The travellers he passed had scarcely time to gasp before he landed on the concourse between platforms. A Victoria line
train stood waiting, the perfect escape route for any pickpocket. He sprang on board. Then a glimpse out of the window pulled him up short. Those three boys were running off down the platform. They
hadn’t got on this train at all.

He jumped out just as the doors closed. Following the bag-snatchers at a distance, he watched them chase alongside the departing train, slowing when they neared the end of the platform. Now
what? They’d passed every exit and had nowhere to go except back past him. Warily he sized them up. The one with the stolen handbag was the smallest. The boy on his right was built well for
basketball, all shins and elbows. The third was the sort of kid that Ben used to steer clear of. He moved with a dangerous swagger and his raw, muscled arms were heavily tatooed. As different as
they were, they had one curious thing in common. All three wore black bandanas tied around their heads.

The tunnel swallowed the train’s tail lights. The youths jumped down onto the tracks and ran into the darkness in its wake. They merged with the gloom and disappeared.

Ben stopped dead. He rubbed his eyes. Those crazy kids had fled down a Tube tunnel. They might as well have climbed into a loaded cannon. The thought of going after them was blasted from his
mind.

But what about that sick woman?

But nothing. Her bag was in a tunnel and that was that. The end. Someone else would have to help her. It was a busy enough station.

There was nothing for it but to turn and walk away. He stayed where he was. Black headbands. They’d all worn black headbands and the same style of clothes. Hadn’t there been warnings
about some gang raiding the Tube? He wished he had looked at those newspapers instead of just wiping his feet on them.

A mouse pattered through the crawlspace below the rails. A line of verse pattered through his head.
I heed no words nor walls
. Why, exactly, couldn’t he follow them? What actually
stood in his way? He looked back. The platform was mostly deserted. An indicator board announced the next train in four minutes. Call it five. Time enough to have a peek inside.

He lowered his toes over the platform edge and onto the railway sleepers. Before anyone could notice him he slipped into the tunnel. On a black screen in his mind he imagined a blue cat’s
eye: Ptep, the head catra, the source of a cat’s sense of balance. Ben stalked along the strip between the rails, placing each foot as a jeweller sets gems. Eth walking – the skill that
cats used to cross shelves of china ornaments and leave nearly all of them unbroken. He had never needed it more. Two of these four rails could zap him with hundreds of volts.

No, no, this was stupid, this was suicide, this was utterly crazy. His inner voice frantically protested and his inner cat pretended not to hear. He picked up speed, moving deeper in.

Ahead the gloom thickened, studded by weak lamps. Dealing with darkness was second nature by now. Green Mandira, the face catra, blinked into life, and Ben focused it until the cavern lengthened
in washed-out colours, its rounded walls ribbed like the gullet of a great snake. Wind sighed in his face and he nearly panicked, thinking a train was coming. No, wrong direction. It must have been
air overflow from the southbound line.

Where had those kids gone? The tunnel stretched into darkness. To get out of sight they’d have to be running, and even Ben couldn’t do that without risking electrocution. Were there
maintenance hatches, hidden side-passages? It struck him that, despite riding so often on the Tube, he had barely any notion of what was down here.

The fearful voice inside him wouldn’t shut up. Rather, it grew louder. A train would soon be bearing down on this very spot. How long had it been? Two minutes, three? Turn back, the voice
yelled, turn back
right now
. Still he hesitated. An odd shape lay on the track. It could almost be a person, slumped across the rails. He stepped closer and saw with a thumping heart that it
was.

The smallest of the boys lay on his front, one arm twisted under him. He looked younger than Ben, twelve at most. His bandana was pulled over his face like a bandit mask, the eye-holes showing
lifeless eyelids. He was no longer touching the electric rail that had, presumably, struck him down. It looked as if his friends had simply grabbed the handbag and left him here, where the coming
train would cut him in half. Ben knelt to listen at the boy’s mouth and caught a whisper of breath. He was still alive.

‘Can you hear me?’

Pain exploded in Ben’s head. Something had hit him so hard that he saw stars, stars that dazzled every catra. Ben himself was all but knocked out, but the Mau body inside him reacted like
a stung wildcat, planting both his hands on the ground and lashing out with both feet. Someone was pinned to the wall behind him, winded so instantly that they didn’t even grunt. Ben
staggered upright just as a bare, tattooed arm hooked round his neck.

Ben pulled at the arm in vain. As it tightened it squeezed the strength from his limbs. There had to be a pashki move to get him out of this. His head felt swollen with pressure and yet light,
floaty. A roar filled his ears. The noise of a train. Oh no,
the train. . .

Then it was strange. He fancied he was still in his seat on the Tube. The carriage was empty apart from him. He stared through the dark window. They were stuck in a tunnel. The lights had gone
out. He was delayed. It bothered him. By now he should be walking back to Dad’s flat, on his way h–

‘Home,’ croaked Ben. His voice sounded different. It was pitch dark. He felt as if he had woken from sleep. Time was missing. His head and neck ached and he was cold.

He was sitting on hard ground. Trying to get up he found his arms would not move. A light flared, hurting his head.

‘Told you he was alive.’ It was a deep voice, but a boy’s, not a man’s. ‘You’re a worry-weasel, Hannah.’

The light bobbed farther away, tracing the outline of a rangy boy holding a small torch. Beyond him crouched two smaller figures. Crouched where, though? This didn’t feel like the tunnel
anymore. More like a poky room. Again he tried to move.

‘Your arms are tied,’ said the tall boy.

Ben opened his mouth. The boy mockingly said it for him.


Where am I?
You’re in the Hermitage, and you’re trespassing. Next question.
What are you going to do to me?
Dunno. That’s up to him.’

‘Him?’ Ben strained at the cords that chafed his wrists. ‘Who’s
him?

BOOK: Cat's Paw
4.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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