Severus found it hardest to stay feline at night.
In the daytime, he began exploring the island on his own. He had tried accompanying Konstantine to the gym where he had now returned to working part-time, or Anakin to Hephaestus's forge, but both places were too noisy, especially for a cat's ears. Besides, his housemates had friends of their own there.
Severus wondered whether it was time he made friends of his own, too. As a cat, that is, not as a human wizard. Did cats even have friends? He remembered, again, the stories his first teacher in primary school had read the class, when they all sat on the floor in a circle at the end of the school day. Apart from the one about the tiger-cub whose adoptive family were kangaroos and who climbed up a tree to try to impress his joey friend and then couldn't get down, there had been the one about how the first witch tamed the man and all the animals except the cat, because the cat is neither a friend nor a servant, but bargains with humans to be useful on his own terms. 'I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.' And there had also been one about a kitten who belonged to an over-protective old lady who was always fussing over him, until one day he decided to disobey her warnings and climb up the apple tree and refuse to come down, until, after a day of the whole neighbourhood coaxing him, when everyone had given up and gone home he climbed down all by himself. 'I'm a cat by himself, by himself in a tree, and the only way that I come down is by myself, you see.'
So, Severus the cat explored by himself. Except that, on the Rock, he couldn't be by himself for long. There were plenty of other creatures around, animals as well as humans. The first time he encountered a rat, he found his muscles tensing ready to pounce. It wasn't that the smallish, mild-mannered albino rat particularly reminded him of Pettigrew, who had bullied him throughout their schooldays and then betrayed Lily and her husband to Voldemort. It was just that his instincts shouted, Prey! Kill!
'Can we talk about this?' the rat said, and a rough-looking ginger tomcat said, 'Don't hassle him – he's with me.' And so the three of them sat down and introduced themselves. The rat was called Dangerous Beans, and he and the rest of his pack had become Educated Rodents – intelligent, talking rats – from eating some of the rubbish from a wizards' school, while Maurice had become a talking cat by – well, probably by accidentally eating one of Dangerous Beans' relatives without realising he wasn't just an ordinary rat.
Even though Maurice and Dangerous Beans were talking animals who could speak human language, and Severus couldn't, any more than an Animagus in beast form or a person Transfigured into an animal could speak, somehow he could talk to them. And the same applied when he met animals who came from worlds where all animals, not just magically uplifted animals, simply were people, and in some cases even walked on their hind paws and wore clothes. And it seemed that most of the animals who came to the Rock were people, to some extent, whether they dressed like humans or not. Many of them had unlikely cross-species friendships. Arthur and Humphrey, the leaders of a colony of church mice, were friends with Sampson the exceptionally long-suffering church cat. Lola Greytail, the rat who flew a tiny model aeroplane, was a scout for an organisation working to protect fantastic beasts ranging in size from dragons to tiny mushroom-folk, and her best friends included a homunculus and a troll. Hermux Tantamoq, the mouse clockmaker and amateur detective, lived in a town where a range of rodents, mustelids and birds seemed to live together relatively amicably, and were near enough to each other in size that one of the mice who shared Hermux's block of flats could invite her otter friend inside – though admittedly, Hermux had been betrayed by a trusted friend who turned out to be a mole.
Clearly, it wasn't right to eat Dangerous Beans or Lola Greytail or Hermux Tantamoq, or Olga da Polga the guinea-pig who liked telling tall tales of her adventures to her friends Noel the cat, Graham the tortoise and Fangio the hedgehog. But on the other hand, the colony of guinea-pigs in the forest on the mainland did seem to be genuinely just animals, the descendants of a pregnant female sent there by a wizard's experiment in inter-world travel long ago. But – Cheiron wanted them to be left in peace. And while a real cat wouldn't have cared about this, Severus was too much a human inside not to care. Meat, on the Rock, came from spells to multiply a tiny sample of tissue, no different from the hairs you might use in a Poyjuice potion, into a fair-sized meal. After all, anyone here, whether rabbit or human, potentially tasted good to someone else, and so not eating anyone had to be a rule.
As if hunting instincts weren't confusing enough, there were sexual instincts. Before Lily had cut off contact with him in their fifth year, he had put a lot of thought into crafting magical gifts for her: nothing creepy like trying to feed her chocolates spiked with Amortentia the way some of his classmates did to people they fancied, but things like enchanting sheets of parchment to fold themselves into origami flowers and then unfold and speak out the poems he had written on them. It would never have occurred to him to express himself by spraying urine. Yet this was what he found himself doing the first time he met a queen-cat flattening the front half of her body on the ground and raising her rear end suggestively in the air, tail waving to one side. His feline instincts told him to mount her straight away (even though, at barely four months old, he probably wasn't actually capable of having sex yet). His human mind told him that at the very least, he should say 'Hello' first.
'Watch it, kid,' she said. 'I'm always a lady – an alley cat, granted, me what used to be Cleopatra, but still always a lady and toujours gai, but if you get me pregnant and abandon me to bring up the litter on my own the way the other toms did, you'd better decide which eye you can do without.'
'Can you get pregnant here?' Severus wasn't at all convinced that this was how the Rock worked. It was a timeless place, a place between times and stories, so there was no death (so what would actually happen if he tried to kill and eat one of the talking rats?); there was sex but, as far as he knew, no pregnancy and birth.
The Cleopatra-cat shrugged her tail. 'Maybe not. All I know is, when I'm not here, life is just one damned kitten after another. It's not a good way to live. I'm a dancer, really – and an author, though I have to dictate my works to a cockroach I know – and artists shouldn't really have children, should they? It gets in the way of the creative life.'
'You used to be Cleopatra? I hadn't heard that the great Pharaoh was Transfigured into a cat.' Hadn't Cleopatra killed herself to avoid being captured by Augustus Caesar?
'Transmigrated, you mean, silly! After I choked to death on a fishbone, I woke up to find myself a kitten in 1920s New York. My mother was a beautiful pedigree Persian…'
Severus was fairly sure that Cleopatra had killed herself by having a snake bite her, and this cat didn't look remotely Persian. Severus wasn't sure how far she was lying and how far she was genuinely delusional, but he knew that he didn't much like her. Unfortunately, his body was going through feline puberty and was insisting that it wanted her. He hurried home, and found a ball to bat around to distract himself from the thought of the Cleopatra-cat's gorgeous tail. I need catnip, he thought – but no, he had enough problems without developing a drug habit as well.
He could control his instincts while he was awake. But when he curled up on his bed to sleep, he found himself dreaming about inviting the Cleopatra-cat to a dinner of Olga avec Lola, followed by hot sex, the female screaming in a mixture of delight and pain from the barbs on his…
Severus himself woke screaming, to find that his claws had lacerated his bedspread.
Author's note: I am sure readers will pick up the references to The Just So Stories and Winnie-the-Pooh. The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents is by Terry Pratchett, Arthur and Humphrey and Sampson are heroes of the Church Mice series by Graham Oakley, and Lola Greytail is in the Dragon Rider series by Cornelia Funke. Archie and Mehitabel were created by Don Marquis, Hermux Tantamoq by Michael Hoeye, and Olga da Polga by Michael Bond who also wrote the Paddington Bear books. And, of course, the guinea-pigs are the descendants of the one that Polly and Diggory found in The Magician's Nephew.
However, I can't remember at all who wrote the story The Cat In The Apple Tree. I encountered it as a child in a collection of stories written to be read on the children's radio show Listen With Mother, which was broadcast on the BBC Light Programme, and later on BBC Radio 4, from 1950 to 1982. By my childhood, this had been replaced with Listening Corner, which did the same job of reading stories to young children and teaching them to listen, but without the sexist assumption that a child's caregiver would necessarily be their mother. But we had a book of the best Listen With Mother stories, including The Cat In The Apple Tree, which I loved both because it had a cat hero and for its message that sometimes, it's best not to heed grown-ups' warnings about being safe and never taking risks.