Cat Out of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

. WIGGY keels over, dead . ROGER jumps down on to the floor. He stops, raises a paw and admires his bloodied claws with a secret smile. He looks back at the lifeless body of WIGGY and the fridge door swinging open .
ROGER
( with classless, masculine understatement, over the shoulder )
Nice, Smeg.
    AUDIO TWO
    The second recording has a different ambient sound. As we discover, Wiggy and Roger are in a borrowed flat near to Russell Square in London. Cars and lorries pass outside. The pavements are evidently very busy, too: young people in groups can be heard. Dogs bark. Sirens pass. It’s a winter afternoon. As will become apparent, Roger has persuaded Wiggy to take himon a trip down memory lane, and they have gone together to London.
    “Ready?” says Wiggy. He sounds a bit tired and tetchy. Perhaps it’s been a long day. “Might we get as far as Jo today, Roger? Where did we leave your life story last time? Around 1928? How fast can you do the next eighty-some years?”
    There is a pause. Wiggy tries another tack.
    “Had it changed a lot?” Wiggy asks. “I could tell you were shocked when it turned out they’d built the Olympic Velodrome directly on the site of the Captain’s special place.”
    Again, Roger doesn’t speak.
    “Do you miss the Captain?”
    Roger laughs. “No,” he says. He laughs again. And I apologise for saying this, but anyone else but Wiggy would realise that this is an intriguing answer, and would follow it up. Wiggy, frustratingly, does not.
    “Why did we have to see that car park?”
    “Just a theory.”
    Wiggy thinks for a moment. He is evidently making a connection to the car park suicide from the papers! Each time I listen to this recording, I pray again: Don’t mention the cuttings from the newspaper, Wiggy. Knowing the contents of those three stories torn out by Roger from the Telegraph is your single advantage, right now .
    You will be pleased to hear that, for once, he makes an intelligent decision.
    “Will you live for ever, Roger?” he asks.
    “That was what I asked the Captain,” says Roger. “When my ordeal was over, all those years ago.”
    There is something quite mechanical in the way Roger picks up the tale where he left off. It makes you wonder: how many times has he told it before? What is his purpose in telling it to someone like Wiggy?
    “ Does this mean I will live for ever? The very question I asked the Captain. Does this mean I can never be killed again? ”
    He’s off again. “After all, would anyone choose to have eternal life? One needn’t read very deeply in the great myths and stories of the world to know the general verdict on eternal life – immortality is always discovered to be far more of a burden than a blessing. Living for ever deprives the spirit of hope and purpose. It also separates you from mortals in mainly tragic ways. Think of the Sibyl at Cumae – or, if you like, Wiggy, given your more limited range of cultural reference, think of Doctor Who. Of course, I didn’t think like this in those far-off days of my youth. I hadn’t read anything. I didn’t know anything. I was a rough-edged street cat familiar with just a couple of square miles of East London. But I knew enough to be afraid of what the Captain had done to me. After all, as a Nine Lifer himself, he was clearly not a happy cat. He did not rejoice in his own immortality, if that was what he had. It was clear that the only thing that gave him happiness was me. He was wonderfully proud of me. He had created a companion for himself. For the first week or so, all he wanted to do was congratulate me, marvel at me, tell me the story of my triumphant nine lives again and again and again.
    “We moved from the warehouse after a week or so. Why should the East End contain us? For the next ten years, in fact, we travelled. In the first instance, it was easy enough to get to the docks at Tilbury, to hop aboard a ship and leave London far behind. We both adored the idea of life at sea, and