In the days before even my mother was a girl, there lived a lord of these lands who was so protective of his daughter, Isobel, that he kept her locked in a room at the very top of the tallest tower in his castle, and he forbade everyone from seeing her. And so she grew up all alone.
One day, a travelling prince came to town and a huge ball was held in his honour at the lord’s castle. Noblemen and gentlewomen from across the shire came dressed for the occasion, and from her window Isobel marvelled at the extravagant beauty of the gowns the ladies wore.
“I wish, just once, that I could wear a dress of such beauty,” Isobel said, looking down in despair at the drab rags that her father insisted she wore.
Unbeknownst to Isobel, it was her 18th birthday that very night, and a passing fairy heard her plea.
“Lonely Isobel,” the fairy said as she appeared out of the thin night air. “Here is your dress.”
And in an instant Isobel was dressed in a gown more opulent than any she had seen below. Pale blue silks were adorned with exotic white furs, and all was overlain with sparkling gems of every form and colour.
“It’s beautiful,” Isobel said, and for a while she danced joyfully around the room in giddy excitement. But eventually she returned to the window and looked down at the still arriving guests.
“I wish I could go to the ball to dance with them all,” Isobel said. “Rather than be here all alone on my own.”
“Of course,” said the fairy. And as quick as that, Isobel found herself at the heart of the ball.
Even there, amongst the richest and most refined people of the land, Isobel stood out. Her radiant jewels shone brighter than the stars. The elegance of her dress made the other guests look as if their gowns were ill-fitted rags borrowed from their servants. And her joy… O, her joy!
The great prince could not fail to notice her, and soon he asked her to dance. Isobel agreed, and for the rest of the evening they could not be parted. She was the centre of all attention, and it was to her like a dream. People talked to her, listened to her, complimented her, laughed with her and danced with her. She had never before realised how silent her room was, and how still. How complete her isolation had been.
Nor how constricted she had been. She swirled around the hugeness of the hall, dancing in every corner, sweeping her dress round every pillar, sashaying past every doorway, lingering only at the windows to see each new view across the courtyards and the gardens.
And to see her tower anew, from the outside. To see it how others saw it, if they saw it at all.
The next day, the prince and all his guests left. In the dull morning light her outfit was transformed – the jewels now looked like lumps of milky quartz; the furs resembled clumps of wool; and the dress itself looked enormous and absurd as she walked awkwardly on her heels across the cobbles of the market square. The looks she received now were not of admiration but of prurient disdain.
“I wish I was back home,” Isobel said, and she found herself returned to her home, back in her rags, locked in her room at the top of her father’s tallest tower. But she could not be returned to her earlier state of solitude, unhappy as it was, for it was only now, having experienced friendship and company no matter how briefly, that Isobel would forever be cursed with true and unending loneliness.
And she finally grasped the fullness of her father’s cruelty.
__________
1. Originally written in October 2013, but heavily rewritten since.
2. A Cinderella variant (obviously)
3. The title comes from the Bjork song Isobel, which I always remember as saying “Lonely Isobel / Married to myself” rather than what it actually says
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One of our cats was stolen once, by the old woman who lived across the street.
It was a slow crime, committed by kindness day by day for months, maybe even years. Leaving food out in her garden, calling him over, petting him, letting him into her home and out again when he wanted, his body squeezing itself through the gap as her front door opened a crack, his tail flicking back and forth as he paused half in, half out, deciding whether to go forward or retreat. Curiosity always compelled him forward, and only on its satisfaction would he leave.
But then, eventually, curiosity claimed him completely, and he didn’t want to come out again. Or was it satisfaction that stole him? Was it kidnapping, or a divorce? Who can tell.
When I told the police she’d taken him they thought I was mad, or an idiot, needlessly wasting their time, pointlessly, hysterically. They never called me back. Never, as far as I know, even spoke to the old woman.
Even if they had she would have denied it. She did whenever I asked her, and when I shouted, when I pled.
And yet of course I could see him, sometimes, sat at her window, the net curtains rucked up awkwardly around him, looking out. Looking at me.
What did he think when he saw me. What did he think about everything he looked at out of that window, not just me or my mum but the street, the gardens and the green, the cars, the kids on bikes, the birds in the trees. All the world he used to love. That he used to rule, in his way.
Did he still mewl at the birds as he watched them through the window, imitating their cries and imitating his own, his cries of victory and pleasure at his imagined captures and conquests? Did he still purr so loudly – too loudly – in the mornings, just to let you know he was there, that he was happy to be there with you? Did he miss the summer and the sunlight, lying out in it in the dirt until he was hotter than the sun itself?
Did he miss me?
***
I tried to break in to her house once, when I saw that she’d gone out.
I edged my way up the side of her house, climbed over the fence into her back garden, tried the back door and found it locked. I looked around for something to smash a window with – a brick, a branch, anything really – and found a stone tortoise half-forgotten under a bush. I stood there, holding this absurd thing in my hand for an age, gripped with inaction and indecision. And sorrow, the sadness of rejection, of a baffling terrible jealousy I couldn’t quite understand or control.
I put the tortoise down and went home and cried and left him there in her lair.
***
We all know how it would have ended, anyway, if I had broken in. I saw it clearly through my tears. She’d have returned, found me searching in vain through her immaculate, eerily empty house. I would have stood there awkwardly before her, making my excuses and my apologies and my threats and she would have said nothing, perhaps even smiled.
And then she would have opened up her handbag and out he would have come. Him and a thousand others, a wave of cats, a torrent, raging over me and onto me, claws and teeth, fur and fury, ripping away at me, at everything I ever was, until there was nothing left of me but bones.
She picks them up one by one and puts them in her bag and no trace of me is ever found by anyone and I am as forgotten as my cat and as unmourned.
***
This was over five years ago now. I never saw my cat again, although I saw others, at her windows, in her garden, peering out from behind her legs as she answered the door to the postman or whoever.
And in my mind he slowly ceased being whole, became this memory in two parts: his tail disappearing through her front door into the darkness beyond, the door slamming shut behind him; his head staring down at me from a window as I pass by on the street below, his mouth opening in an unheard cry.
Did I ever actually see either of those things? I don’t know. It seems doubtful, in hindsight.
But they are as real in my mind as any memory of the truth.
***
Last week, the old woman died. I asked some of our neighbours about her cats, about what had happened to them, or what would happen to them, whether they needed homes or anything, but nobody knew a thing. Nobody even knew for sure if she even had any cats, if she’d ever had any.
Her house was still a council house, and she had no next of kin, or at least none that cared enough to come and take away her things. So the council have been sending people round to clear it all away, putting everything into black bags and flinging them into skips, day after day, skip after skip. A lifetime’s accumulation of things that nobody wants, nobody needs, nobody remembers.
I wonder what I would have found if I ever had gone inside. I wonder what I would have learnt if I had ever really spoken to her, ever listened, ever cared.
I wonder where my cat went and I wonder if he was happy.
***
I used to dream about him at least once a week, then, slowly, less and less.
In the dreams all those nameless, imagined cats surge forth from her handbag and overwhelm me, strip the flesh from my bones and leave me lying there on the carpet. I’m nothing more than a skeleton with a chest full of organs, a skull with eyes, a tongue, somewhere, and, somehow, still, a brain. Then they retreat and he climbs up onto me, lays down on my ribcage, looks me in the eye, purrs.
Purrs.
I try to lift my arms to stroke him but I can’t move, my muscles all torn away, these bones useless by themselves. My cat just sits there, a king on his throne, a dragon on his gold.
And he lazily dangles a paw down between my ribs and hooks his claws into my heart.
***
Last night some foxes got into the skip and ripped everything apart and now the wind has picked it up and blown it all around. Letters, old newspaper clippings, clothes, flannels, teabags, yoghurt pots, tissues, medicine packets, shampoo bottles, christmas decorations, chicken bones, photos. A single slash across the swollen belly of one black bag reveals it was filled entirely with scrunched up supermarket carrier bags, and now they blossom forth from the wound like roses, caught by the wind one by one and blown tumbling down the gutters towards my front door.
__________
Notes:
1. Written (mostly) in March 2016
2. Probably the origination of the name of this website, although it’s possible I’d used it before somewhere, too.
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A priest was eating lunch one day in the seminary cloisters when a cat sauntered past his bench and made its way across the empty square without a care in the world. Curious as to where cats go when they travel around on their own, he decided to follow it on its perambulations. He hurried from his bench as it exited the churchyard and pursued it out into the town.
It was dusk before the priest returned. He went to bed without saying a word, and soon the priest went mad and died.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on July 15th, 2015
2. The phrase “soon the priest went mad and died” is taken from Japanese folk tale “The Emperor’s Finger”, translated by Royall Tyler, and found in the book “Japanese Tales”, which he edited and translated.
3. I’m pretty much convinced that every story ever written could be improved by using “Soon [the protagonist] went mad and died” as its final line.
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!
Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I‘m fucking terrified. I was terrified before, for weeks, and I was terrified earlier, out the back, waiting, trying to relax. And I’m terrified now, standing here on stage behind this mike. Holding on to this lectern as tightly as I can for courage and trying not to look any of you in the eye. In case I see your disgust, your anger. Your boredom. Or possibly worse, your delight and amusement. So I’m going to concentrate as intently on my notes as I can, pick them up, and start to read.
“Yeah, I’ve never done this before,” I read out loud, word for word from the page. “So, um, sorry. If it’s, you know…” I give you an amiable shrug — at least I hope it’s amiable — and then finish my sentence… “if it’s a bit shit.”
A couple of you laugh. Not many, and not for long. The audience equivalent of a polite smile.
“So anyway,” I say, “I hope this is okay.” A slight pause before the next line. “I’ve been dreading this all week.” And I try to say that, I mean to say that, with a laugh, but at best I manage a sort of forced unnatural looking smile.
Do I tell you, I’m wondering, when I’m practicing this at home, how at first, even in an empty room, I can’t speak. That I’m so self-conscious I can’t even overcome the horror of public speaking in private, to no-one. And not just on the first day of practicing this performance, but every day. Every time.
But I decide it’s probably best not to say a word of that to you. It’d sound needy, pleading. So I go back instead to hoped-for charm of admitted first-time incompetence instead.
“This is…” I start, looking down at my script, flicking through the pages nervously before putting it back down. I start again: “Sorry, I should have said thank you all for coming. And I hope the book’s not a disappointment. Well, I hope tonight’s not a disappointment either, as you’ve all made the effort to come down here and everything. But especially the book…”
Is this silence that follows as uncomfortable for you as it is for me? Is my voice as inflectionless, as emotionless, as I always fear? Does it sound as awful to you as it always sounds to me when I hear a snippet of it on tape, in the background of some video I’ve recorded on my phone? Or in my dreams.
I read some advice somewhere about how it’s best to never, ever, think about the sound of your voice, not when you’re speaking, when you’re giving a speech, but I’ve started now and how to stop? It’s like being told at the dentist or wherever not to swallow — you’re told not to swallow and you think okay, I won’t swallow, and then, only then, do you realise how desperate you are to swallow, how you’ll choke if you don’t, and you can feel your tongue absolutely huge in your month and if you don’t swallow you’ll fucking choke you’ll choke on your own tongue you’ll forget how to breathe you’ll fucking die.
I’m trying not to think of the true sound of my own voice and yet I have to speak. I have to just close my mind to it and carry on and read.
So I go back to my notes. I read. I speak.
“This first story — it’s not the first one in the book but it’s the first one tonight — it’s called The Reading, or Performance Anxiety.”
I’ve printed these stories out quite big, so the letters are nice and distinct and the lines are all clearly separated and everything’s nice and easy to read, but now this massive font I’ve used gives all my words the appearance of a children’s story, some sort of Ladybird learn to read book. Or the eyesight test lettering in the opticians.
Actually I think they probably most closely resemble the look of a note in a film, with everything printed in big sparse letters and held in shot long enough so even the slowest readers in the audience can read them. Now I’ve seen this similarity I can’t stop seeing it, and it gives my words a weird and unwanted sense of unreality and artifice, undermining everything I’ve written.
And without belief in what you’ve written your words are nothing.
But finally now I’m on to the story, past all my introductory messages and the title and onto what you’ve come for. Onto what you’ve paid for. I discard the first page, place it neatly to the left, and find my place at the top of the second page. And finally now move onto the first story.
“The Reading, Or Performance Anxiety,” I read out, word for word from the page. “Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I’m fucking terrified.”
It all sounds so hollow, limp and dead on my tongue, disconnected from any real feeling. Not just from feeling but disconnected from each other as well, as if they weren’t even sentences, but instead a collection of unconnected words in a line, and now, as I say them, everything begins to fall apart.
“I was terrified before. For weeks. And I — sorry — I was terrified… I was terrified earlier. Out the back. Waiting. To relax. Wait — I was waiting, I was trying to relax. I…”
I turn the page and during this tiny pause someone shouts ou-
—GET ON WITH IT!
Er, yeah, thanks, like that. Exactly like that.
So I say, “Yes,” back to them. I say, “Sorry.”
But now when I look back at the page I can’t even read the words. My heart’s pounding like I’m afraid I’m about to get hit. I can feel the tears at the edges of my eyes. Not quite tears actually, not yet, but that hot feeling across my face and that… that pricking sensation you get when you can tell that they’re just about to form, when you know that you might still be able to hold them back but once they start they’ll just flow and flow.
That shout, that one single shout.
It feels like being told off at school, never wanting to admit it hurts but it hurts. Being shouted at, being mocked, bullied, abused. And the years of hardening yourself to it, hardening your face so it’s a case of studied blankness even though inside you’re in fucking turmoil.
Please let me still have that control.
“I’m. I’m…” I stammer. “And I’m terrified now, standing here on this stage — ”
— WELL GET THE FUCK OFF IT THEN!
You all laugh. I can hear it and I can see it and you don’t even stop even though I’m looking at you, pleading with you with my eyes, my face, my slumped shoulders, to just
not
laugh
— YOU’RE FUCKING SHIT AT THIS YOU KNOW!
“I’m sorry you think that,” is my, well, my rather lame reply. I’m defeated and I know it, but I try to hold it off, if only for a second. “Sorry, the lights — I can’t see anything — who am I talking to here?”
— EVERYONE!
You laugh and you laugh. The whole room full of you laughing, at him, at his words. And at me, and mine.
“Can you just… Look, can’t you just let me finish. Look, I’m sorry, sorry everyone, maybe it’ll be better if I start again.”
I turn the page back.
“The Reading,” I repeat. “Or, Performance Anxiety.”
I see him getting up, the heckler, out of the corner of my eye. Hopefully he’s leaving and we can all get on with this.
Get through this.
“Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I’m fucking terrified. I was terrified before, for weeks, and I was terrified earlier — ”
— Give that here.
A hand – that hand, there, this hand, his hand – reaches over the lectern and grabs at my papers.
— I bet I can do this better than you anyway. I could hardly be worse, could I?
He laughs. You all laugh.
I look up. There’s a spotlight — that one there — that’s shining directly into my eyes and I can only see this person, this heckler, this intruder, I can only see him as a shadow. The audience, I can’t see the audience anymore, I can’t see them at all. It’s only you now, whoever you are, you. A silhouette, a suggestion — you’re everyone and no-one, you’re looming aggression and dominance and contempt and
I shove him out of the way, two-handed in the chest and he stumbles backwards and, in his surprise, trips. People behind me cheer and I take his place on the stage, turn my back on him and turn round to the room and look at all of you here in the audience. I can see the relief on your faces. The anticipation, the strange vicarious joy.
I begin to flick through the pages of his story, discarding them one by one, passing through the words you’ve already heard and the things you’ve already seen, until on the fourth page I find my place, find the here and now.
I begin to read.
“He sits there at the back of the stage for a moment, too dazed to stand, and listens to me speak. I read his words, shout them out confidently as if they were my own. And I speak them with a clarity, with a conviction, that he could never match. As if the words are mine, now. As if they have always been mine, always will be mine.
“He can’t bear to watch, can’t bear to watch me, my performance, my… usurpation, and he crawls behind the curtains, gets up and stumbles his way down the passages to try and escape. To get away. Away from the stage. Away from all of us. Away from his embarrassment. His failures.
“He opens the fire escape and there’s a sudden rush of silence as the freezing cold air hits his face and he imagines me stopping, triumphant, as I reach the end of his story. He pictures me bowing slightly, taking his applause, the pages of his words littering the stage around my feet. I step around the podium and I hold my arms wide and I bow again and smile and wave and your ovation grows and grows and then finally begins to subside.
“And now his tears flow.”
__________
Notes:
1. Written on March 19, 2016
2. This was performed at a liars league event in London on November 8th, 2016.
3. Where it was performed by the wonderful Peter Kenny, as can be seen below:
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A nobleman had three sons, but had yet to choose an heir. When a cat began to attack the people of the town, he said to his children, “Whosoever saves our town from this beast of the woods shall inherit my castle and all of my lands”, and each in turn set out to defeat the creature.
The eldest son, a soldier, picked up his sword and marched out into the forest where the cat was presumed to live. He quickly became lost and as the day headed towards night he sat down and, although only intending to rest for a short while, fell asleep against the trunk of an old oak tree.
When he awoke it was completely dark, and he could feel the weight of something heavy on his chest. He tried to move but the cat – for that was what it was – pushed its claws into his skin, opened its eyes (which were just in front of his own) and said, “What is that you hold in your hand? Is it for me?”
The eldest son said, “Yes, it is for you. If you let me up I will give you a good close look of it.”
The cat leapt from his chest and sat down in front of him, and the soldier stood up, raised his sword, and swung it as hard and as fast as he could at where the cat now sat. But the cat’s eyes saw so well in the dark that she dodged easily out of the way of the blade and then leapt forward and sliced the man’s head clean off his shoulders with a single swipe of her claws.
The next day the nobleman woke to find the head of his eldest son left on their front doorstep. So now the middle son, a farmer, strode out into the woods to try his luck against the cat, and he carried with him a bag of the finest meat from his farm.
He quickly became lost as he searched through the unfamiliar woods, and as the day headed towards night he sat down to quickly rest his weary legs. Yet he ended up falling into a deep sleep, and when he awoke the moon was high in the night sky above him and bathed in its light he could see the cat asleep on his own chest.
When he tried to move, the cat awoke and said, “What is that you have in your bag? Is it for me?”
And the farmer said, “Yes, it is for you. If you let me up I’ll open up my bag and give you a good look at what’s inside.”
The cat leapt from his chest and sat down in front of him, and the farmer stood up and opened his sack, and took from within the meat he had brought with him and threw it onto the ground. The cat sniffed at it, and satisfied that it was not poisoned, began greedily to eat, and while she was distracted the farmer held out the sack and approached the cat as quietly as he could. But before he could lower the sack over her head, she heard the heavy beat of his heart as he approached and leapt out of his way. And then, with a single swipe of her claws, sliced his head clean from his shoulders just as she had his brother’s.
The next morning, the nobleman awoke to find the head of his second son left on their back doorstep. The youngest son, who was considered useless by his father for he had no job nor a wife, was still in bed when his father burst into his room. His father dragged him from his room and insisted that now he must make his way to the forest and avenge the deaths of his brothers.
To this the young son said, “I do not want to, father. This cat has never harmed me. And anyway, surely now you’ve sent my brothers to their deaths, I’m your only son and your only heir.”
In response to this insolence the nobleman beat his son so fiercely that the boy agreed tearfully to go to the forest, even if only to escape his father’s wrath, and he set out before lunch. In the woods, the young man did not become lost, for he cared not where he was, and gave no thought to returning home.
He came soon to a stream, where he stripped naked and bathed his battered body in the babbling brook. When he returned to the riverbank, he found the cat sat on top of his blood-soaked clothes, busily tearing the cloth of his shirt to ribbons with her long and deadly claws.
She looked up at him while her claws continued their game and said, “Your first brother brought me a sword, and with it tried to kill me. Your second brother brought me a sack of food, and with it tried to capture me. What have you brought me, and what will you try to do to me with it?”
The youngest son said, “I have brought you nothing, for I came here only to escape my father. I cannot give you my clothes, for you have already destroyed them. I cannot give you money, for I have no job and therefore nothing to spend. I cannot give you food, for I forgot to bring any even for myself. All I have left are my hands and my heart, which for all my trying I have never been able to give away, for no-one has ever wanted to employ me, and nor have any ever wanted to love me.”
“Then give me your hands,” said the cat. “To stroke me whenever I desire. And give me your heart, to love me forever and without regret, and in return I shall become your wife, and cease my attacks upon on the town.”
So they returned to his home and were married that very afternoon. For saving the town, the young man and his cat wife inherited the nobleman’s castle and all of his lands, and lived there benevolently until the end of their days. As for where the noblemen went, none would say.
__________
Notes:
1. The earliest version of this I can find is from August 2013.
2. Illustrated again by Holly English
3. I like cats
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