Every Living Thing Read online

I’d heard that description of Calum a thousand times from the farmers around Darrowby and now it seemed to be more strikingly proven than ever. I looked up Papua New Guinea in the public library and read that it wasn’t till 1930 that the first white man had made contact with the million inhabitants of the unexplored highlands where Calum had gone. It was a whole intact civilisation that had had no contact with the outside world.

  I looked at pictures of fierce-looking, almost naked men with slivers of bone transfixing their nostrils and brandishing bows and arrows as they glared into the camera. These frightening people would be his neighbours and there was nothing surer than he would love them all and especially those wide-eyed little black children.

  The letters started to arrive from Mendi in the southern highlands. Calum, as expected, was utterly entranced by it all. The agriculture was Stone Age in character with pigs the only livestock, most of the settlements unchanged from when the first whites discovered them, and the primitive farmers, though a bit careless about keeping appointments when he tried to teach them animal husbandry, were charming chaps. Dierdre and he were already firm friends with all of them.

  As the months and years passed he was clearly absorbed in the development and improvement of the country. I learned how he introduced cattle, sheep and poultry into the local agriculture, educated the farmers and immersed himself with all his energy in the life there.

  In 1988 one of his daughters, Sarah, wrote to me. She said, “Dad still amazes me with his knowledge of the local vegetation and wildlife and on his station farm he has 11 Border collies, 2 pig dogs (Labrador crosses), 2 water buffalo, 5 horses, many cattle, sheep, goats, an assortment of chickens, ducks, guinea fowl and a huge flock of homing pigeons.”

  As I put down her letter I thought of Calum’s little menagerie at Skeldale House. It had been only a rehearsal for this. The vet wi’ t’badger would be happy now.

  Chapter 52

  MONTHS PASSED WITHOUT ANY thawing of relations between me and the cats and I noticed with growing apprehension that Olly’s long coat was reverting to its previous disreputable state. The familiar knots and tangles were reappearing and within a year it was as bad as ever. It became more obvious every day that I had to do something about it. But could I trick him again? I had to try.

  I made the same preparations, with Helen placing the Nembutal-laden food on the wall, but this time Olly sniffed, licked, then walked away. We tried at his next mealtime but he examined the food with deep suspicion and turned away from it. It was very clear that he sensed there was something afoot.

  Hovering in my usual position at the kitchen window, I turned to my wife. “Helen, I’m going to have to try to catch him.”

  “Catch him? With your net, do you mean?”

  “No, no. That was all right when he was a kitten. I’d never get near him now.”

  “How, then?”

  I looked out at the scruffy black creature on the wall. “Well, maybe I can hide behind you when you feed him and grab him and bung him into the cage. I could take him down to the surgery then, give him a general anaesthetic and make a proper job of him.”

  “Grab him? And then fasten him in the cage?” Helen said incredulously. “It sounds impossible to me.”

  “Yes, I know, but I’ve grabbed a few cats in my time and I can move fast. If only I can keep hidden. We’ll try tomorrow.”

  My wife looked at me, wide-eyed. I could see that she had little faith.

  Next morning she placed some delicious fresh chopped raw haddock on the wall. It was the cats’ favourite. They were not particularly partial to cooked fish but this was irresistible. The open cage lay beneath the wall, hidden from sight. The cats stalked along the wall, Ginny sleek and shining, Olly a pathetic sight with his ravelled hair and ugly appendages dangling from his neck and body. Helen made her usual fuss of the two of them, then, as they descended happily on the food, she returned to the kitchen where I was lurking.

  “Right, now,” I said. “I want you to walk out very slowly again and I am going to be tucked in behind you. When you go up to Olly he’ll be concentrating on the fish and maybe won’t notice me.”

  Helen made no reply as I pressed myself into her back in close contact from head to toe.

  “Okay, off we go.” I nudged her left leg with mine and we shuffled off through the door, moving as one.

  “This is ridiculous,” Helen wailed. “It’s like a music hall act.”

  Nuzzling the back of her neck, I hissed into her ear, “Quiet, just keep going.”

  As we advanced on the wall, double-bodied, Helen reached out and stroked Olly’s head, but he was too busy with the haddock to look up. He was there, chest high, within a couple of feet of me. I’d never have a better chance. Shooting my hand round Helen, I seized him by the scruff of his neck, held him, a flurry of flailing black limbs, for a couple of seconds, then pushed him into the cage. As I crashed the lid down, a desperate paw appeared at one end but I thrust it back and slotted home the steel rod. There was no escape now.

  I lifted the cage onto the wall with Olly and me at eye level and I flinched as I met his accusing stare through the bars. “Oh, no, not again! I don’t believe this!” it said. “Is there no end to your treachery?”

  In truth, I felt pretty bad. The poor cat, terrified as he was by my assault, had not tried to scratch or bite. It was like the other times—his only thought was to get away. I couldn’t blame him for thinking the worst of me.

  However, I told myself, the end result was going to be a fine handsome animal again. “You won’t know yourself, old chap,” I said to the petrified little creature, crouched in his cage in the car seat by my side as we drove to the surgery. “I’m going to fix you up properly, this time. You’re going to look great and feel great.”

  Siegfried had offered to help me, and when we got him on the table, a trembling Olly submitted to being handled and to the intravenous anaesthetic. As he lay sleeping peacefully I started on the awful tangled fur with a fierce pleasure, snipping and trimming and then going over him with the electric clippers followed by a long combing till the last tiny knot was removed. I had given him only a makeshift hair-do before, but this was the full treatment.

  Siegfried laughed when I held him up after I had finished. “Looks ready to win any cat show,” he said.

  I thought of his words next morning when the cats came on the wall for their breakfast. Ginny was always beautiful, but she hardly outshone her brother as he strutted along, his smooth, lustrous fur gleaming in the sunshine.

  Helen was enchanted at his appearance and kept running her hand along his back as though she couldn’t believe the transformation. I, of course, was in my usual position, peeking furtively from the window. It was going to be a long time before I even dared to show myself to Olly.

  It very soon became clear that my stock had fallen to new depths, because I had only to step out of the back-door to send him scurrying away into the fields. The situation became so bad that I began to brood about it.

  “Helen,” I said one morning. “This thing with Olly is getting on my nerves. I wish there was something I could do about it.”

  “There is, Jim,” she said. “You’ll really have to get to know him. And he’ll have to get to know you.”

  I gave her a glum look. “I’m afraid if you asked him, he’d tell you that he knows me only too well.”

  “Oh, I know, but when you think about it, over all the years that we’ve had these cats, they’ve hardly seen anything of you, except in an emergency. I’ve been the one to feed them, talk to them, pet them day in, day out. They know me and trust me.”

  “That’s right, but I haven’t had the time.”

  “Of course you haven’t. Your life is one long rush. You’re no sooner in the house than you’re out again.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. She was so right. Over the years I had been attached to those cats, enjoyed the sight of them trotting down the slope for their food, playing in the long grass in the field,