Lost in a Good Book

16. Interview with the Cat

‘A visitor!’ exclaimed a voice behind me. ‘What a delightful surprise!’

I turned and was astonished to see a large and luxuriant cat sitting precariously on the uppermost bookshelf. He was staring at me with a curious mixture of lunacy and benevolence, and remained quite still except for the tip of his tail, which twitched occasionally from side to side. I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Cat.’

The cat’s eyes opened wide and the grin fell from his face. He looked up and down the corridor for a few moments and then enquired:

‘Me?’

I stifled a laugh.

‘I don’t see any others.’

‘Ah!’ replied the cat, grinning more than ever. ‘That’s because you have a temporary form of cat blindness.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve heard of that.’

‘It’s quite common,’ he replied airily. ‘I suppose you have heard of knight blindness, when you can’t see any knights?’

‘It’s night, not knight,’ I corrected him.

‘It all sounds the same to me.’

‘Suppose I do have cat blindness,’ I ventured. ‘Then how is it I can see you?’

‘Suppose we change the subject?’ retorted the cat. ‘What do you think of the library?’

‘It’s pretty big,’ I murmured, looking all around me.

‘Two hundred miles in every direction,’ said the cat offhandedly, beginning to purr, ‘twenty-six floors above ground, twenty-six below.’

‘You must have a copy of every book that’s been written,’ I observed.

‘Every book that will ever be written,’ corrected the cat, ‘and a few others besides.’

‘How many?’

‘Well, I’ve never counted them myself but certainly more than twelve.’

‘You’re the Cheshire cat, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘I was the Cheshire cat,’ he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. ‘But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the “Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat”, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh, and welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is quite mad.’

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ I replied indignantly.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

I snapped my fingers.

‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is the conversation you had in Alice in Wonderland, just after the baby turned into a pig!’

‘Ah!’ returned the cat with an annoyed flick of his tail. ‘Fancy you can write your own dialogue, do you? I’ve seen people try; it’s never a pretty sight. But have it your own way. And what’s more, the baby turned into a fig, not a pig.’

‘It was a pig, actually.’

‘Fig,’ said the cat stubbornly. ‘Who was in the book, me or you?’

‘It was a pig,’ I insisted.

‘Well!’ exclaimed the cat. ‘I’ll go and check. Then you’ll look pretty stupid, I can tell you!’

And so saying, he vanished.

I stood there for a moment or two, and pretty soon the cat’s tail started to appear, then his body and finally his head and mouth.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘All right,’ grumbled the cat. ‘So it was a pig. My hearing is not so good; I think it’s all that pepper. By the by, I almost forgot. You’re apprenticed to Miss Havisham.’

‘Miss Havisham? Great Expectations Miss Havisham?’

‘Is there any other? You’ll be fine—just don’t mention the wedding.’

‘I’ll try not to. Wait a moment—apprenticed?’

‘Of course. Getting here is only half the adventure. If you want to join us you’ll have to learn the ropes. Right now all you can do is journey. With a bit of practice on your own you might learn to be page accurate when you jump. But if you want to delve deep into the back-story or take an excursion beyond the sleeve notes, you’re going to have to take instruction. Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.’

‘You mean the spine?’ I asked, not quite up to speed yet.

The cat lashed its tail.

‘No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the spark. Once you’ve laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you’ve ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: you are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer’s evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?’

‘I think so.’

‘Okay, now imagine a simply vast saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it really slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.’

The Cheshire cat shivered deliriously.

‘If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just perhaps, you will have some idea of what I’m talking about.’

‘Can I pass on the cream?’

‘Whatever you want. It’s your daydream, after all.’

And with a flick of his tail, the cat vanished again. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.

‘You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,’ continued the cat, folding its paws and staring at me so intensely I felt unnerved. ‘We’ve been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?’

‘I… I… didn’t know I could do this.’

‘What you mean is that you did know that you couldn’t—it’s quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I replied, truthfully enough, adding ‘What do you do?’ as I didn’t see why he should be asking all the questions.

‘I,’ said the cat proudly, ‘am the librarian.’

‘You look after all these books?’

‘Certainly,’ replied the cat proudly. ‘Ask me any question you want.’

‘Jane Eyre,’ I said, intending only to ask its location but realising when the cat answered that a librarian here was far removed from the sort I knew at home.

‘Ranked the 728th favourite fictional book ever written,’ the cat replied parrot-fashion. ‘Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure 829,321—1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It’s a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.’

‘So what’s the most read book?’

‘Up until now or for ever and all time?’

‘For all time.’

The cat thought for a moment.

‘In fiction, the most read book ever is To Kill a Mocking Bird. Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but of all the vertebrate überclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the lobster market—if you’ll pardon the pun—a billion years from now, you’re really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is: tlkîltlîlkîxlkilkïxlklï or, literally translated, The past non-existent state of the angel fish. Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tklîkï, and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikïflik.’

‘How does it compare?’

‘Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It’s the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.’

‘Daphne Farquitt?’ I echoed with some surprise. ‘But her books are frightfull!’

‘Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I’m no fan of Farquitt’s but her bodice-ripping pot-boiler The Squire of High Potternews sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.’

I was getting off the point.

‘So all these books are your responsibility?’

‘Indeed,’ replied the cat ainly.

‘If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?’

‘It’s not quite that easy,’ replied the cat. ‘You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It’s quite easy, really—you’re not colour blind, are you?’

‘No. So if I wanted to go into—oh, I don’t know, let’s pull a title out of the air—The Raven, then—’

But the cat flinched as I said the title.

‘There are some places you should not go!’ he muttered in an aggrieved tone. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain oddness that goes with them. Most macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that—Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out—they have a way of weaving you into the story and before you know it you’re stuck there. Let me show you something.’

And all of a sudden we were in a large and hollow-sounding vestibule where huge Doric columns rose to support a vast vaulted ceiling. The floor and walls were all dark red marble and reminded me of the entrance lobby of an old hotel—only about forty times as big. You could have parked an airship in here and still had room to hold an air race. There was a red carpet leading up from the tall front doors, and all the brasswork shone like gold.

‘This is where we honour the boojummed,’ said the cat in a quiet voice. He waved a paw in the direction of a large granite memorial about the size of two upended cars. The edifice was shaped like a large book, open in the centre and splayed wide, with a depiction of a person walking into the left-hand page, his form covered by text as he entered. On the opposite page was row upon row of names. A mason was delicately working on a new name with a mallet and chisel. He tipped his hat respectfully and resumed his work.

‘Prose Resource Operatives deleted or lost in the line of duty,’ explained the cat from where he was perched on top of the statue. ‘We call it the Boojumorial.’

I pointed to a name on the memorial.

‘Ambrose Bierce was a Jurisfiction agent?’

‘One of the best. Dear, sweet Ambrose! A master of prose but quite impetuous. He went—alone—into The Literary Life of Thingum Bob—a Poe short story that one would’ve thought held no terrors.’

The cat sighed before continuing.

‘He was trying to find a back door into Poe’s poems. We know you can get from Thingum Bob into The Black Cat by way of an unstable verb in the third paragraph, and from Black Cat into The Fall of the House of Usher by the simple expedient of hiring a horse from the Nicaean stables, from there he was hoping to use the poem within Usher, The Haunted Palace, to springboard him into the rest of the Poe poetical canon.’

‘What happened?’

‘Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him—one lost his breath and the other… well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers—thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of amontillado or burried alive or some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.’

‘So Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he disappeared on assignment too?’

‘Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.’

‘It was tragic.’

‘It certainly was,’ replied the cat. ‘He owed me forty francs and promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.’

‘Oranges?’

‘Oranges. Well, I’m off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right and the books are about a hundred yards on your left. Great Expectations is green bound so you should have no trouble.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said the cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavoured Moggilicious for him the next time I was home—before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason’s hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.

I took the marble stairs into the library, ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, and walked down the corridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of Great Expectations from early drafts to the last of Dickens’s own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I nipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself, willing the words to live. And live they did.