Simon nods.
‘Are they here?’ he asks.
I say that I don’t think they’re coming.
‘Would you like to see something interesting?’ asks Simon.
‘Okay,’ I say, and Simon just turns and walks away up the path. Heading further onto the Heath. I consider letting him go but curiosity makes me follow.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask as I catch up.
‘To see the Cat Lady,’ says Simon.
1 Notes for Agent Reynolds by Harold Postmartin, MA, DPhil (Oxon), FRS, AFSW – Thomas has asked me to provide a few explanatory notes. In this case, Tikkabilla is the name of a children’s television programme, although the allusion to the presenter’s voice escapes me as well.
3
The Cat Lady
I hate it when people ask me stupid questions. You’re chatting about something and they say something like, ‘Photosynthesis? What’s that?’ with that stupid look on their face like they is proud of their ignorance or something. I’m thinking, you’ve got a phone, right? Look it up. But if you say that, they just tell you they can’t be bothered because, ‘Photosynthesis? If it was important, right, there’d be an app.’ So I don’t say that.
And I don’t tell them what chlorophyll does either, because that would be a waste of my time.
Hampstead Heath is a heath, from the old English hœ¯ th meaning wasteland, because it consists of a big sandy ridge that stretches across the top of Camden. The sand makes the soils acidic, which meant nobody ploughed it for crops and it was only good for sporadic grazing, sand extraction and large-scale landscape gardening.
Sir Thomas ‘Wasteman’ Maryon tried to build a big housing estate on it but there was a public protest and he was stopped. But not before he built a totally fake red brick ‘viaduct’ across a pond which now gives its name to the path that runs from the barrows to Whitestone Pond at the top of the hill.
Finding all that out took me five minutes on my phone while I was standing on the actual viaduct in the dark this March. And I was looking for ghosts, all right, but all I found were some olds looking for a quick hook-up after work before catching the bus home.
We’re running across the viaduct now because Simon seems to run everywhere. The slowest he goes is a quick trot, as if he’s missing his lower gears and only has two speeds. The creepy still one and the fast one.
I can keep up but I wouldn’t want to do this all day.
I see I’m going to have to teach him how to walk proper. What Peter, who is a Fed, calls proceeding.
If you run everywhere you miss stuff that you might have been better off noticing – just saying.
We run up the viaduct path until we’re up by the second fairground site.
Simon is pointing down into the valley between the path and Heath Street. It’s full of trees and bushes.
‘Down there,’ he says.
‘Down there what?’
‘Down there lives the Cat Lady,’ he says, and runs down the grass slope towards the trees.
Fortunately we’re not in the real countryside so there’s lots of paths and no chance of being eaten by yokels. Simon seems to know where he’s going and is leading me to a particular rhododendron bush. He crouches down and crawls inside and I follow.
We are inside a hollow inside the bush. The space is cramped and hot with both of us in there. I can smell the flowers and the earth and a sharp smell that I realise is coming from Simon. It’s not horrible or anything, but it seems strange to be close enough to smell him like this. His bare arm is right by my face and I’ve got this mad urge to lick the smooth pale skin of his biceps to see what he tastes like – which freaks me out, so I say something instead.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I whisper.
Simon shushes me and points.
I shuffle forward until I can see through the leaves. Ahead of me is a clearing under the spreading canopy of a mature oak tree. There is a short stretch of grass with a park bench at one end. On the bench sits an old white lady.
She dresses like she’s homeless, in a great big green army coat that is too big for her and too hot for summer. Her hair is grey and long, really long, hanging down over her face and shoulders. She has little round glasses and black fingerless gloves. On one side of her is a shopping trolley made of worn blue canvas, and with wheels that I’m sure are too big to be standard, with the kind of tyre tread you’re more likely to see on a mountain bike. On the other side is a cardboard box the size of a bread bin.
The old lady is smacking her lips together and making a growling cough noise in the back of her throat. I’m thinking that maybe she’s wandered off from a care home and that maybe we should be backing away slowly – for her sake if not for ours – when I sense something magical.
I know wizards, real wizards, who do real magic, and they’ve been teaching me to recognise magic when it happens in front of me. They call the sensations vestigia because they’re old-fashioned and put Latin on everything. You have to know what you’re looking for if you want to spot it.
So behind the lip smacking and coughing and growling, I can sense that off meat smell that tinned cat food has. Sense because it’s not a real smell, it’s just something that manifests itself in your mind as a smell.
The first cat arrives quickly, a battered black and white tom with a missing ear. It slinks up to the old lady and starts stroking itself against her foot. She ignores it and carries on making her noises. Two more cats arrive from different directions, a ginger
