Caroline Cronjäger
What the Cat Dragged Out
It is almost noon and I long to be outside. The sky is a hazy blue with just a few wispy clouds to the West. A blanket of bogs and marshes covers the smooth hills, their reds and golds radiant in the morning sun. To the innocent eye it seems perfectly harmless, but as the wind picks up and stirs the grasses, I am forced to lock the door, double-check all windows, and move around cautiously, trying not to draw attention to myself. The sound of its gusts sends shivers down my spine, and like prey sensing the predator’s approach, my sensitivity to sound and movement is heightened.
There is no mistaking this for a natural phenomenon, simply a movement of air masses. This wind is not only shaking the foundation of the trailer, but unhinges the very laws of physics. It bends straight lines into circles, tugs the tiny salt crystals back into the shaker and has you burn your tongue on the very cup of tea that was lukewarm just a moment earlier. No, these blasts cannot be mistaken for something harmless, not if every hair on your neck stands up at each gust and crack.
On mornings like these, my mind is heavy with dark and grey thoughts. The malicious skies press down on my conscience, squashing what feebly solace is left to me. Though locked out by boards and bolts, its presence imposes itself on my mind, drains my energy, and dampens the few positive thoughts, residues of times past.
As I watch the scene outside, a pair of eyes appears hovering above the horizon. Eyes of an animal, much more than of a human. A primaeval fire burns within their brown depths, speaking of a determination that can only be born out of hardship, survival. As I blink, the floating eyes blink back. It seems impossible to reunite the creature reflected in the smudged window pane with the woman I was before. I feel like the kernel of a fruit that only emerged after every layer of comfort, hope, and solace has been peeled away. As each layer withered and died, the flame emerged from within. It is all that is left. Burning out of hollow eyes, bringing to life the taut, dry skin, the dirty brows, the chapped lips. Today, all that remains of me is a survivor.
A movement at my feet retrieves my mind from its depths, pulling it back into my physical body. Margaret rubs her nose against my leg and points her tail to the ceiling in a gesture of greeting. “Good morning, my love,” I say with the cheerful inflection that is reserved only for her and pick her up. The cat sniffs my cheek and then rubs her soft black head against my neck. After feeding, she saunters off in the direction of the bedroom. In her absence, my thoughts regain their dull tinge, and the faint rattling of brittle roof boards in the blows fuels my unease.
The morning hours are spent picking up one book after another, putting each down after reading just a handful of lines. Restlessness is plaguing my mind, and the occasional creaking of different parts of this ramshackle home grating against each other gives me goosebumps. With each passing moment, the gales seem to grow stronger, more threatening. Discarding my current book, I get up to make a round of the locks and latches that keep the windows closed, and bolts and screws that attach their frames to the wall boards. They fortify the physical barrier that separates the inside of the trailer from the fierce, unforgiving wrath raging outside.
From my vantage point in here, it is impossible to tell that the grasses covering the mountain flanks are moving, but the walls are shuddering in the strong gusts. Rushing and gushing around my small abode, the wind is ripping violently at every crease, edge and tear it can find, ravenous for exploitable vulnerabilities in the foreign matter, the human-made materials. Though all windows are shut and latched, the wind pries its long, razor-thin talons into the narrowest gaps, hungrily feeling around for a living thing, tirelessly seeking vengeance.
On my round, I encounter Margaret who is nestled up in her usual nook behind the bedroom door. As I bend to scratch her head, a warm purr emanates from her body. At least I have a companion in this desolation. Mildly reassured, I return to the couch and open my book on the page I left off. Luckily, the wind did not move my bookmark—it has played this trick before. I curl up and pull a blanket around me. Hopefully, this will all have blown over by tomorrow. Huddled like this on the sofa, I eventually fall into a sleep haunted by eerie dreams, distorted flickers from the past.
A stuffy Hackney flat. Thick, hot air. Hands lifting Margaret into a pet carrier.
Motorway signs flying by. Capital letters. The NORTH. Endless motorways.
Brown eyes in the rear-view mirror. A spec of silver blinking in the left earlobe.
When I awake from my slumber, I absentmindedly reach up to twist my earlobe between my fingers, but find it naked. Trying to shake off the strange residues of my dreams, I drag myself to the kitchen. While the kettle is boiling, I rub sleep from my eyes and peer outside. The sun has moved past its zenith and the wind has risen to a raging storm. I shudder as an unusual cold creeps into my bones. Returning to the couch with a steaming mug of ginger tea, I pick up the booklet that has slipped from my lap. As I mindlessly leaf through the tattered copy of Leaves of Grass, my unease at the wind’s noise is mounting. I hear it stalking around the trailer, encircling me, drawing closer to its prey. It is trying to pry open the twisted latches of the bedroom window, pulling, pushing, wrestling itself into the tiniest cracks, causing the structure to bend and creak. It taunts me, it threatens, it seeks to inspire fear, panic; prompts me to do something stupid in despair.
Creak.
But I have known it for years. Though an enemy, it is as intimate as my beloved Margaret. It cannot outsmart me. I force my thoughts to return to ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’
Creak.
My thoughts wander to the jams on the windows. How they were manufactured from cheap metals in some godforsaken steel plant on another continent.
Creak.
How they have been shipped to this island to be screwed onto the frames at crooked angles by some stoned carpenter’s apprentice.
Creak.
How they have been sitting in this desolation for decades.
Creak.
Time eating away at the substance.
Creak.
Erosion.
Creak.
Rot.
Creak.
I start up and fly through the door to the bedroom, slamming it open with the full momentum of my body. It doesn’t bang against the wall. In the middle of the room, I freeze and stare. My chest is heaving up and down in uncontrollable spasms, my heart pounding violently against its bony cage.
The window is closed. Latches securely in place. Jams sitting perfectly aligned on their frame. Only a delicate draft squeezes through narrow gaps in the brittle insulation and lightly tugs at the blinds. They swing back and forth lazily.
My head is spinning, and I stumble backwards, blindly groping for a corner of reality to hold onto. Instead, I step onto something soft, eliciting a weak whimper. As I turn, I see a small mount of bristling fur, visible quivering. Margaret. The force of my entrance must have pinned her body between wall and door, and now she is lying there in a trembling heap. As I bend down to inspect the cat, I realise that her head is angled in an unusual way. She seems unable to get to her paws, and instead gives off a quiet but steady whine. What have I done?
An hour later, Margaret rests on a pillow beside me on the couch. As I gently arrange her tail around her, in the way she usually does herself when curling up for sleep, she hisses at me in anger, but her body is too weak to fight the intrusion. Her spine is not the straight line it used to be, and she seems to have lost control over most of her movement. Still shell-shocked, I regard the battered creature. I reach out to gently stroke her fur the way I always do, for my own comfort just as much as for hers, but this time I am met with a claw, instead of her purr. My breath hitches in my chest. Of course I knew that she would leave me at some point, but in my fantasy, that point always lay in some faraway future. And I never imagined myself to be the cause. We have been companions for many years, both finding solace in each other’s company. Moreover, she reminds me of a time before.
Before dams collapsed, seemingly without any physical explanation, before the grid broke down, before cyclones appeared out of nowhere, laying waste to whole countries at a time. Before Westminster was reduced to rubble, I had been an aspiring journalist, eager to right the wrongs of the world through my unfaltering belief in democracy and the power of the written word. The fires and floods and epidemics and conflicts flaring up around the globe must surely be a momentary disturbance in the grand scheme of things, and we would, ultimately, converge back to an equilibrium, to peace. But in our single-mindedness, our pursuit of expansion, economic growth and development, we laid the cornerstone of our annihilation. We liked to think ourselves smart in the way we exploited natural resources and farmed every last bit of land and ocean to exhaustion, but just like a kid pushed around in the school yard, there was only so much that the water, air and soil could take. Once they were fed up, they started fighting back.
As natural disasters mounted, my friends fled London one by one, dispersing into whatever part of the world each deemed safest. Meanwhile, I was holding on to the hope that things would eventually turn around, and shaved Margaret’s black fur to a stubble to keep her from overheating.
When London summers grew so scorching that bikes left in the midday sun were reduced to aluminium puddles, I finally caved, packed up my Prius and drove up to Scotland, Margaret by my side. The plain between Edinburgh and Glasgow had already been largely reconquered by the turbulent seas, leaving no safe land routes to travel by. Hence, a ferry carried us over the Forth, the very same boat that would capsize only months later in a flash flood, its wreckage and the bodies of its unlucky passengers washed out to the North Sea, never to be seen again.
High above the malicious waters and entrenched in the rocky Cairngorms, I started mapping out our survival plans. Hunting proved to be impractical. Instead, I bought up as many preserves as would fit the boot on periodical trips to the nearest settlements. When the locals stopped selling because they, too, were starving, I turned to cultivating my own crops. My final drive to Aviemore also marked the last time I spoke to another human being. Radio transmission broke down a few years later, and since then, no human voice apart from my own has reached my ear. For a while, the quiet brought relief. Relief from the horrors occurring around the globe. The last broadcast before the signal died had reported a swarm of locusts, each the size of a motorcycle, obliterating most of France. For weeks after, the winged beasts haunted my dreams, and during waking hours their buzz filled my ears and I expected them to come and devour me at any moment. But the locusts never came. I grew accustomed to the silence, and worked away on my improvised farmland one monotonous day after the other. For a while, it seemed like Margaret and I had found something. Not quite happiness, but rather a distorted reflection of it in a dirty pond.
But then, the winds picked up. In the early days, they came as whistling breezes, carrying with them an overwhelming sense that something was awfully off. Though no stronger than a sea breeze on a summer’s day, they prompted me to instinctively drop my rake and hurry inside, slamming the door shut and waiting till the gusts had subsided. Since then, we have been constantly on guard.
I shake myself out of the depressing memories and return to the no less dire present, as my eyes return to Margaret. Her tremble has subsided, replaced by a soft whimpering that is almost drowned out by the gale raging outside. Her hair has shed its velvety shine. Panic is rising in my chest, and I start to clench my fists around the pillows and cushion, restlessly kneading and punching the upholstery. Between the worn-out fabric, something pricks my palm. I hesitate, then retrieve the minute object. A silvery ear stud, blinking in the sun.
As I stare at it, I feel a knot tightening in my chest. It rises slowly and expands, painfully compressing my windpipe. For a moment, I think that I am throwing up, but instead, what breaks out of me is a gut-wrenching weep.
It hits me in gusts, each sending a violent jolt through my body. I sob uncontrollably, and eventually, I scream. I scream and scream, and the storm screams back at me. I scream at the world that dared to fall apart in my hands, at the cruelty of the winds that imprison me on this godforsaken mountain. Most of all, I scream at myself. I scream at myself for ruining the last shred of happiness I had left. I scream at myself for being so rash, so naive, so stupid. The distinction between my shaking body and the shuddering walls breaks down and the storm’s howling becomes my own. All sense of up and down, of motion and time, is lost in the tempest.
After what feels like an eternity, the storm subsides. Like the waters of a tsunami wave flowing back into the sea, uncovering the devastation they wreaked, my body goes limp and collapses on the couch. My face and shirt stained with tears, snot, and saliva, I spend my last iota of energy to crawl up to Margaret. Careful not to touch her, I gently lower myself down beside her, and gingerly bed my head as close to the motionless body as I dare. Closing my aching eyes, I draw in a long, shuddering breath and take in her warm, musky scent that has provided me with so much comfort over the years.
I think about the claw that reached out to scratch me, and the vengeful hissing. She loathes me, just like the storm outside does. My breathing eventually calms, and my heart slows as I contemplate. Things begin to shift, rearrange themselves, fall into place.
Hate and fear elicit the same reaction in an animal. The fight-or-flight reflex. Does my Margaret truly despise me, or is she acting out of fear, pain? The wind’s talons slashing at the sides of the trailer no longer seem those of a predator, but rather of a hurt animal, frightened and fighting for its life.
I open my eyes and blink, momentarily blinded by the orange light of the sun creeping towards the horizon. The hate and fear that was surging through my veins only moments earlier drains from my body like water from a broken barrel. What is left in its wake is tender, vulnerable. It is compassion. Gathering Margaret up in my arms, I pad to the door, pull back the latches one by one, and step through the opening.
The wet grass instantly seeps through my socks and strong gusts threaten to throw me off balance. The dying cat pressed to my chest, I stagger forward, past the ragged beds of potatoes, past the remains of my once silver Prius, past the bits and bobs that I have scattered across the land during the decade I have existed here. The ground becomes muddier and I slow down, one excruciatingly slow step after another submerging me further and further in the undergrowth. When the brambles grow too thick to allow further passage, I gently let myself fall backward. Bedded thus upon the grasses, half submerged in the mucky bog, the sky fills up my field of vision. Flickers of hilltops, the tip of my nose, and loose strands of hair adorn the periphery.
The wind is still raging overhead, and water from below is soaking my clothes, but I experience neither cold nor fear. Instead, my lungs draw in a deep breath, as if for the first time in their life, and I feel more alive than I have in decades.
Margaret begins to purr, and the vibration sends a soothing warmth through my chest. As I close my eyes, my head starts spinning. The wind is deceiving my senses into the sensation of movement. Out here, with just the ferns and rocks and winds as company, I feel like I might come apart bit by bit. Like the wind blowing through me might carry off a few atoms at a time, and my body will eventually dissolve, like a spoon of honey dipped into freshly brewed tea. I am made out of the same matter as the world around, and out here, away from the cities and buses, the books and radios, and all things man-made, nature will simply reclaim its particles. There is no boundary between me and her. Matter flows freely, and bit by bit I dissolve, I come apart.
I come to rest. AQ