Only the Animals Read online

  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 cat-like 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.’

  He slunk off in the direction of the trenches and I felt briefly sorry for him, abandoned by his owner, until I caught sight of a red-breasted robin stunned into silence by the bombardment. The bird was perched on a branch of a leafless apple tree that should have been glowing in full autumn glory, and I decided to terrorise the beautiful creature for a while.

  Dumb Animals

  Colette and I have always been interested in mules, perhaps because we consider ourselves hybrids of a sort, never quite able to fit within the boundaries of our sex or species, always feeling we’ve a smudgy, mongrel character. It’s this very quality in mules that makes them so appealing. They get their vigour from being half horse, half donkey; they are courageous and full of stamina. And of course she and I identify with the refusal of mules to be anything they don’t truly feel themselves to be. Humans tend to call this bad manners or lack of respect for authority, but I call it the highest form of authenticity.

  So I was gladdened by the sight of a pack of mules bringing around fresh rations for the soldiers in the trenches after sunset, the food loaded into panniers on their backs. Until I tried to talk to one of them and he couldn’t answer me except with an awful whispering noise.

  The tomcat materialised beside me, obeying the rules of what Colette calls Cat Law, the ability to appear in a place where, a moment before, we have not been.

  ‘They give away our position with their braying if their vocal cords aren’t cut,’ he said. ‘These mules will have travelled a long way carrying supplies to the base camp. And tomorrow they’ll probably be put to work carrying munitions.’

  I looked more closely at the man driving the mules. He was far too old to fight. The mules showed none of their usual inclination to misbehave and were following him peaceably. ‘They love him,’ I said.