Sawdust, Secrets and Symmetry
Chapter Four
…..
"Okay," the big silver cat sighed. "Start with...who told you about us?"
Mungojerrie was talking alone (again) and it was uncomfortable as always. He wished they'd waited until Rumpleteazer woke up, but that chubby spotted queen had given her some sort of medicine that knocked her out. They hadn't given the same draught to Jerrie, swollen as his front paws were they didn't really hurt anymore and just needed to be wrapped in bandages, but the black sludge Teazer had been coughing up worried them considerably more.
"A queen," he mumbled, still numb with exhaustion. "Name of Prunella."
…..
As far as Jerrie was concerned, he was still at least a few weeks away from adulthood when Macavity insisted that he spend a night with his favourite queen as a 'reward' for pulling off a tricky heist. Jerrie, frankly, was terrified.
"You don't have to do anything," Teazer assured him, watching him pace around the den.
It was easy for her to say. Macavity had rewarded her with a gold-plated figurine of a horse. Why couldn't he get something like that?
"Yeah, and if I do nothing she'll snitch and then what do I do?" he groaned.
"She probably won't snitch," Teazer shrugged. "She seems nice. Nice for here anyway..."
In any other circumstances, Prunella would never have been called nice. She had a scornful look and her mouth drooped unhappily on the rare occasions she was seen around the headquarters, and there were rumours she had attacked and seriously injured other queens. That was probably why she was Macavity's favourite, because although she had once been very beautiful much of that beauty had been leeched away.
She looked him up and down when he was brought to her den (and the door locked behind them) and sighed.
"He sends me a kitten," she sighed. "Of course he does...Sweet Everlasting..."
"Sorry," Jerrie mumbled.
That got a laugh from her, dry and small as it was.
"Not your doing, I suppose," she said. "Let's get this over with."
She made an approach, but Jerrie backed away almost automatically. His hackles raised before he could stop himself.
"Don't worry, I don't bite. Unless you'd prefer that," she said with a mocking grin.
He must have made some sort of face, because she rolled her eyes and lay back on her hammock.
"Fine then, how would you prefer to do this?" she asked.
"I wouldn't," he blurted out.
The words hung in the air, she stared hard at him.
She's going to snitch. I'm in so much trouble.
But Prunella's expression softened, she seemed to relax and sink into her hammock.
"Just how did you get involved in all this?" she asked. "You seem a bit younger than Macavity's usual cronies."
"Just sort of happened, really," Jerrie sighed, relief making his knees weak.
"He got you hooked. That's what he does," she told him. "Until you're in so deep you can't get out. I didn't think he'd started targeting kittens, but what do I know?"
"We weren't in London long, we'd never even heard of him..."
"We? Who's we?" Prunella asked.
"Me and my partner," Jerrie replied. "We came to London together."
"Is your partner a queen?" she asked, with a new note of tension in her voice.
"Yes..."
Prunella swore under her breath and rubbed her temple. She beckoned him closer, so she could hiss into his ear.
"I'm only going to say this once," she hissed. "And you didn't hear it from me. There is a place on the other side of the city that has taken in Macavity's refugees in the past...they have some sort of protection over the place, I don't know...it's a junkyard. You need to get out, and soon."
Just the idea of running filled Jerrie with terror. He'd seen what happened to other cats who tried to run, even those just suspected of trying to run. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.
But Prunella understood.
"Any cat that cares about a queen would never let her stay here," she hissed, an edge of anger creeping into her voice. "You get her out. Get both of you out, however you can."
…..
"I knew Prunella," a timid queen who'd been hovering near the entrance of the den said, when Mungojerrie stopped talking. "She wouldn't have given out that information without good reason."
The silver tom nodded, deep in thought. Faintly, Jerrie could hear Rumpleteazer coughing in her sleep from the next den chamber. Under his bandages, the bones in his forepaws gently ached.
"So then, what made you take the risk of leaving, if it was so dangerous?" the silver tom asked.
…..
"This isn't up to your usual standard," Macavity said, holding up the bottles to the light.
He sounded bored, but that was just as dangerous as his anger. If he got bored with a cat he was more likely to send them on the most risky jobs or injure them for the pettiest of reasons. Jerrie shrank in on himself.
"I assume you have a good reason for this? I asked for ten bottles, did you suddenly forget how to count?" Macavity probed.
"I could only carry five," Jerrie stammered.
"And what happened to the ones Rumpleteazer was carrying?"
"Well, you sent Coriolanus to supervise us..."
"And?"
"...he was hassling her, he wouldn't leave her alone..."
There. He said it.
It was bad enough when the toms harassed her at HQ, but once Macavity started sending his most trusted hench-cats to supervise their riskier missions it was a whole new level of awful. Coriolanus in particular seemed to think his position gave him some sort of claim over Rumpleteazer once she came of age, and he had a filthy mouth that he couldn't keep shut. He'd badly compromised the mission, alerting the guard dogs in the building with the amount of noise he made which lead to Teazer having to get them chasing her before Jerrie could get through to the broken window.
Macavity said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.
"...he got the dogs on us because he wouldn't stop talking at her," Mungojerrie continued. "If he'd been quiet we could've both gone in."
"I see," Macavity said, quietly. He didn't seem angry... "I'll have a word with him. A harsh one, I should think."
Heady relief loosened the grip Jerrie had on his tongue.
"Actually, it's all of 'em," he blurted out. "They keep grabbing her and trying to pull her away, they even come into our den looking for her..."
"Well, I'm sure you've noticed that we're not exactly swimming in queens here, Mungojerrie," Macavity drawled, sounding bored with the whole conversation. "They find their fun where they can."
"Yeah, I understand," Jerrie said, though even the thought of this kind of 'fun' made him sick to his stomach. "But it's...putting her off her work."
Appealing to Macavity's good nature would never work, he understood that much, but if his plans and profits were messed with he was almost guaranteed to put his foot down. Macavity hummed thoughtfully to himself. Jerrie fidgeted, desperate to be out of there.
"All right," he said at last. "I'll see what I can do."
Mungojerrie thanked him with more enthusiasm than he'd managed since the day they were brought there, and ran back to the den to share the good news. As usual, Rumpleteazer was in the pipe behind the fan. Instead of calling her down, he hopped in beside her.
"How'd it go?" she asked, idly playing with the pearls around her neck.
"Great," he sighed happily. "Better than expected, actually. He's going to do something about Coriolanus."
"What did you tell him?" she asked, her eyes narrowed in the dark of the pipe.
"Told him the truth, he's a dirty ol' perv who can't keep his trap shut," Jerrie shrugged.
"You shouldn't have said nothin'," she groaned, sinking lower. "That fat bastard's one of his best cats. He's gonna blame me."
"No, he won't," Jerrie assured her. "I think things'll be better now."
He was wrong, but he had no idea just how badly wrong he was.
…..
The old chubby queen bustled into the den, carrying a pile of rags and clucking gently in Jerrie's direction.
"Oh Munkustrap, couldn't this wait? Poor love needs to rest," she said, addressing the silver tom.
"I won't keep him long, Jenny," the silver tom replied with an affectionate smile, before his face flickered back to its stern countenance in front of Jerrie. "So what happened? Did he do anything about the toms?"
"Yeah," Jerrie mumbled. "He put her in lockdown with the other queens."
The timid queen that had been listening in suddenly rose to her feet and hurried out, making a little noise of distress as she did. The silver tom watched her, and for a moment Jerrie thought he would go after her, but he clearly thought the better of it and turned back to Jerrie.
"Lockdown?" he asked.
"He put all his favourite queens in lockdown, to keep the other toms from getting to them," Jerrie explained as that awful sick feeling rose again in his stomach. "Which meant pretty much all the queens. He only let Teazer stay out for as long as he did because she wasn't old enough to mate with, but he had her picked out as a favourite from the first day. I just hadn't realized until then."
The chubby queen quietly excused herself, and Jerrie noted the look of uncomfortable shock on her face. Even the silver tom looked taken aback.
"Macavity said I could handle my missions alone from then on," Jerrie continued. "'Cept I wasn't much good without Teazer. We always worked best together..."
"Did he threaten you?" the silver tom asked.
"Not to my face, no," Jerrie answered. "I did the best I could, 'cos if I didn't he might take it out on Teazer. But like I said, I wasn't much good without her..."
He trailed off, the distinctive sounds of a fit of coughing followed by retching in the next den grabbing his attention. Maybe it was a mistake to have done what he did...The silver tom cleared his throat.
"So, if she was in lockdown, how did you two escape?" he asked.
…..
The plan depended heavily on two things; his brain and her guts.
Mungojerrie would have to plot out the logistics carefully, because he would never get a chance to do this again. There was a hundred different ways it could go wrong, and a hundred more ways he could get caught before he'd put anything in place. Although time was against him, he had to work slowly, meticulously.
Rumpleteazer, for her part, would have to realize that there was a plan in place without ever having spoken to Jerrie about it. He was confident she would figure it out, and moreover be able to carry it out despite the danger.
His wit and her courage. It was a winning combination that had never failed them before.
Jerrie gathered the supplies and hid them all over the headquarters. Petrol canisters stolen from the local mechanics and gelignite taken from farm supplies, wrapped in newspaper, pushed through floorboards and crawlspaces. He positioned as many as he could away from the third floor, where the queens were held in lockdown. Well aware that some cats would die, he hoped to give the queens at least a chance to escape.
The third floor had a fireplace and a small chimney. Climbing it would be easy for Rumpleteazer, and the cats that guarded her in lockdown would hopefully be distracted by the fire long enough for her to get up there. From there, the roof was close to a telegraph wire that she could, in theory, walk across. That's if everything went perfectly.
The night he set the fire, he wished he'd had time to warn her about what he was going to do. He watched from across the street as the flames licked the building and cats flooded out, scattering in all directions. His eyes were rooted to the chimney, smoke billowing from it in a neverending flood.
Briefly, he heard Macavity ordering cats back inside to save some of his important things. His voice thundered with bitter rage, he asked if anyone had thought to let the queens out. He screamed at Coriolanus to get back in to unlock the door. Mungojerrie kept his eyes on the chimney.
After what felt like hours, a small black figure did emerge from the flue. Covered in soot and gasping for breath, she flopped across the roof tiles sucking in air. She rubbed at her eyes, and a horrified Mungojerrie realized that he had overlooked something; the effect the smoke would have on her sight. She couldn't see the telegraph pole.
"Teazer!" he yelled, dashing to the base of the telegraph pole. "This way, follow my voice!"
She followed without hesitation, though the roof was starting to cave in and Macavity was just a few yards away. Jerrie didn't care if he heard them, all he cared about was getting her to the ground in one piece. He called to her, instructing her carefully on where to put her feet, until she was halfway across the telegraph wire.
The pole holding the wire had managed to remain untouched by the fire until that point, but the flames that had been threatening to jump from building to pole finally made it. The fire climbed the pole quickly, and the wire quivered in the air. Rumpleteazer froze, hanging on for dear life.
There was only one thing to do.
"Jump!" Mungojerrie called to her. "I'll catch you!"
…..
"You caught her?" the silver tom gasped.
For the first time, he actually looked impressed. Mungojerrie shrugged.
"It's not exactly 'catching'," he explained. "If you catch someone falling from that height you'd break your arms, and maybe your spine. It just looks like you're catching them...it was a trick we used to do in the circus."
The trick was to swipe out your arms to interrupt the fall, throwing the falling person out to the side to reduce the impact. They'd only ever done it from a height of ten feet or less.
…..
She jumped off the wire as soon as the words left his mouth. A little part of him that wasn't taken over with panic was touched that she trusted him enough to blindly leap from a great height on his say-so, while the rest of him watched her plummet in a state of rigid readiness.
Don't reach out 'til you see the whites of her eyes.
Her eyes were closed.
Don't let her land directly on top of you.
The wind was pushing her off trajectory.
He grabbed her just as she was about to smash into him, flinging her out of the way to where she crashed, winded but otherwise unhurt, into some rubbish bins. The impact shuddered through his body, sharp pain radiated all along his outstretched paws and forelimbs, but it barely registered with him. She staggered to her feet and he crawled over to her.
"We need to get out of here," he said.
She nodded, but then doubled over with coughing that sounded like she was trying to dislodge something large and sharp. He figured he would have to carry her, like he had before, but as soon as he put his front paws on the ground he realized he was in no state to carry anything.
Behind them, the fire brigade was just arriving as the building was finally collapsing. There were only a handful of cats still around, some of them queens, but no sign of Macavity. Humans were bustling around nearby, which always made Macavity jumpy. They could afford to wait, for a little while.
It was approaching dawn by the time they had collected themselves enough to get out of there. Mungojerrie had to lean heavily on Rumpleteazer to keep the weight off of his forelimbs, and they stopped frequently to let Teazer cough and catch her breath. She could open her eyes now, but they were red and streaming and she could barely see what was in front of her.
"Did you know it was me?" he asked, when they took a break beside a canal.
"Of course," she said, mid-cough. "You used dynamite, didn't you?"
"Gelignite," he corrected.
"Thank you," she said. "That place...the queens..."
"S'alright," he cut across her.
They wouldn't speak of it again, for the longest time.
…..
When they arrived at the junkyard, nearly two days after the fire, most of the cats had gone to their dens to sleep bar the big silver tom, who was standing guard from an old wrecked car. He took one look at them and called for the chubby queen, and without even being asked who they were and what had happened to them they were hustled into the queen's den, cleaned and bandaged and soothed as though they were kittens. She set Jerrie's twisted paws with makeshift splints and rubbed Teazer's back as she brought up seemingly every speck of smoke she'd inhaled.
"Poor dears," the chubby queen kept saying, shaking her head all the while. "What a state, poor things!"
She put them to bed and Mungojerrie slept more soundly than he'd ever slept in his life, more soundly than when circus performing left him worn out and aching, more soundly than the hours after long sessions of keeping watch for predators in the wilderness, considerably more soundly than any day or night in Macavity's clutches. When he woke, the silver tom told him he had some questions, and Rumpleteazer was still asleep.
"And...now we're here," he finished, looking down at his paws.
He heard the silver tom let out a long-held breath, and they lapsed into silence.
"That's...quite a story," the silver tom said at last.
Jerrie just nodded, because there was nothing more to say.
"I'm glad you managed to find your way here," the silver tom continued. "At least so Jenny could give you some proper care...and as far as we can see your account has been truthful..."
How would you know?
Up until that moment Jerrie had managed to miss the two cats sitting on a ledge above the door, unmoving and staring down at him. There had been an odd prickle at the back of his head the whole time he was telling his story, but he had dismissed it along with all his other aches and pains. Now, for some strange reason, he had a feeling it was connected to those two. Their eyes were fever-bright, unblinking.
"Under normal circumstances our leader would be the one to decide on whether to let you stay," the silver tom sighed. "But he's not here right now, and in any case we have only take cats in on rare occasions..."
Isn't this rare enough for you?
"Munkustrap," the timid queen suddenly spoke up, having come back inside without Jerrie noticing. "Where else are they supposed to go?"
"That's not for me to decide," he answered, staring pointedly at Mungojerrie. "Did any cats die in the fire?"
"I don't know," Jerrie said with a helpless, exhausted shrug. "I didn't set out to kill anyone, I just needed to get her out...it was the only way."
"Live by the sword, die by the sword," the queen said with an edge of venom. "That was one of his favourite phrases...Munkustrap, if there were any innocents in that building I think these two kittens were it."
"Be that as it may," Munkustrap cut in sternly. "They chose to endanger the lives of other cats. I don't think we can overlook that..."
"Just take her then."
It was enough to make them all stop and turn towards him, wide-eyed.
"Excuse me?" Munkustrap asked.
"Just take her," Jerrie repeated. "I was the one who set the fire, she didn't have no part of it. You can let her stay, can't you?"
It hurt to even say the words, but he knew it would hurt even more to drag both of them out of safety back into the unknown.
"What about you?" the queen asked.
"I'll manage," Jerrie shrugged.
He wouldn't manage. He'd be dead in a week. Either Macavity or one of his henchmen or all of his henchmen would catch up, or he'd starve in some gutter because he couldn't dare to take a few extra steps, or he'd try and leave London and get snatched up by the first fox that spotted him.
"And if I were to ask her, what do you think she'd say?"
Jerrie wanted to lie, but he didn't have the energy.
"She'd probably say the same," he answered.
…..
In the end, they were allowed to stay. It took weeks for them to feel truly safe, but they managed. The other cats were friendly, sometimes a little too friendly, but never in a bad way. They took their lookout duties without complaint and shared food with the rest of the colony, as required.
Even so, that perilous first year of life had left its mark.
Munkustrap, Jennyanydots and the other seniors of the colony didn't approve of their thieving, but it was impossible now to stop. They'd become so dependent on their 'game' that going too long without invading a human space to take something made them feel edgy, almost scared.
"Could you limit it to one place, then?" Munkustrap asked, with the air of the long-suffering. "Having a bunch of humans traipsing down here looking for their lost property is the last thing we need."
They agreed, and settled on Victoria Grove. Very few of the junkyard cats spent all of their time in the junkyard anyway, quite a few of them had human homes they regularly returned to, though none so well-heeled as the Grove (with the exception of Bustopher Jones, but he was so rarely in the junkyard he hardly counted.)
Victoria Grove was a place Macavity had always avoided. It was full of the supposed 'nouveau-riche' (always to be said with a sneer) who collected new things but had hardly anything worth stealing for Macavity's purposes. It suited Jerrie and Teazer nicely; there was always something interesting or strange or novel to be taken, and the furious shouting of the humans was always amusing.
They endeared themselves to many a clumsy housemaid or overworked cook; if anything was dropped or broken or spoiled they could blame it on the wandering cat. A young scullery maid names Gladys regularly saved them the best parts of the roasts to keep them coming back, as she was a particularly careless dropper of teacups.
Macavity would come looking for them, one day. He couldn't have gone so long without realizing that Mungojerrie was the one that had burned down his headquarters, and why he had done it. His other refugee, Demeter, had been allowed to live at the junkyard without his interference for a long time, but whatever power was keeping her, and by extension them, safe could only last so long.
They could run, that was always certain. At a moment's notice, if needed. They had enough food to last a week stashed away in jars along their den, and valuables they could trade for safe passage on trucks or trains. They modified the den to have seven separate exits.
They had no idea where they would end up, but as long as they were together, it didn't matter.