The man has a gecko on his back.  It stays quiet and complicit in his small while he shuffles through checkpoints.  In his grey shapeless suit he is just another young man, though he still called himself a boy, in the queue.  The gecko hid in his heat signature, fed, still, and urging him on, giving him confidence as the last ghosts of the high danced home across his skin.  When the line has shuffled him through the door, between one part of the city and another, he will disperse, like everyone else, and go about his business.  He gains whispered access to a sleeping flat and borrows the key.  At the outlet he squints into the bright, white light and orders a small flat pack of anaesthetic tablets.  As he climbed back up the stairs to Archie’s flat he fought a little guilt. 

He was wrong to come around here first thing in the morning and not do his lizard properly.
He reached around his flank and unbuttoned a pocket into which he slipped his hand to pet the gecko.  It still sat helpful and quiet, gripping his shin lightly.  He thought he would think better upside down and that was his mind made up, he would make it up to the gecko with a good meal before half day.  In the hush of Archie’s flat he snuggled into a scratchy, soft sofa.  The gecko was in his hand, its night eyes peering intently into every corner of the curtained galley. Boy cooed and apologised to the lizard, gave it a kiss, pushed his warm face against it.  He swallowed two thin octagonal pastilles and laid his head on the arm of the couch.  He laid his lizard just in front of his eyes in a depression in the worn black material that had once been green.  Free of him, the little reptile fussed over itself, spreading toes, licking its eyes in the way that had made the man, called boy, fall in love and take the risk. A new lizard after so long a break.  There was a moment of anxiety before contact was established, the man worrying that he was falling under sedation too quickly, but the lizard soon had its aura visible.  The gecko looked like a salamander in the midst of its self created conflagration that filled the man’s eyes.  All his could see was the animal he adored spreading along the beam of his sight and into his slowly fading mind.  There was a moment of mirror staring at mirror and then he could see his dreamy, smiling face, just girths away along the arm of the couch.  He stretched his heavy bulbous fingers and hefted his easily forgotten tail.  His heart leapt with his first jump, onto the face of his body and off again, not stopping, up the wall.  He trilled to the power in the tiny frame of his companion and climbed up the plaster to the centre of his pleasure.  His first steps onto the ceiling made his toothless mouth grin so hard he could feel the tension all the way to the tip of his tail.  He rasped his toes more intimately into the paint and dropped his gaze, laughing with joy, up into the room. 

On the ceiling he thrilled constantly.  It made him smarter, larger, but also it made him a total bitch.  In torrents of delight he passed insulting mental comment on the cheap galley fitments, the thirty year old couch, the scrawny eighteen year old smacked out on it, the lumps of crap that the humans can’t see adorning the tops or backs of all the furniture, the rubbish décor, the damp stains, the state of the plaster, the bulge on the ceiling.  In this cold country, a little lizard could only go for so long without a cuddle of something hot, a few stolen minutes on a sunbed, lots of food.  He, the lizard was also male, had grown fat and sluggish since his import, but he was happy with his new human protector, happy enough not to mind ill health, that would soon change. The boy played close attention to its needs, he had had many geckos before.  The attention paid to him by the child compensated for the environment and the occasional nightmares that it had been through. 

Now he had come to the boy, there would be only slight abuses, the same as he would suffer today.  His local spirit was trapped under the surface of the boy, stuck under the weight of the medication.  Heroin coloured boy, grey and dead, heavily pressing down through the body into the couch.  The last two girths of everything had just faded into the opiate mist.  Movement couldn’t quite connect, sight didn’t break through to the clouds, the gecko could not feel the scratchy sofa, could not move the pinhole eyes to see its own body, on the ceiling as it was sure to be, could not rise, could not escape if needed.  The one consolation was the warm.  To the cold blooded gecko that body of a human was like the radiation on The Riviera, the heroin was like the beer that British tourists drink to quell their childish excitement in the sun.  The gecko sunbathed on the body of the youth, stifled but surviving, possibly digging it.  Soon the girl who came out of Archie’s room and the man who was a boy who was a gecko on the ceiling stared at her as she stared at the boy who was a gecko on the ceiling.  She got the measure of him and he licked his eye, enjoying it because he could not do it normally, she looked away and made the hot drink that she had wanted while she had lain in the cold bed next to Archie as he slept.  Archie slept for many hours and the anaesthetic began to wear off, the man hung in bliss as his body started to twitch, the final mile began to link up.  The lizard pushed energetically in its warm cocoon, it willed through to its limbs, stretched its slender fingers.  Its eyes were clear it hands and its feet.  It made a concerted effort and heaved the heavy fizzing nothing of its drug fuddled middle up bump and down the back of the couch. 
So preoccupied was the man, who had discovered a little of what it meant to be a man and so called himself boy, with being a gecko upside down on a ceiling that he missed his body coming alive and hiding itself.  When Archie awoke his girl told him about the wee mashed guy on the sofa and he came to investigate.  He found Tau-pi, gone into his gecko and just starting to get horny, behind his, Archie’s, couch.  The child-man on the ceiling, Tau-pi, noticed the clamour and snicked along into a crack in the dodgy plaster. Archie yelled at the boy and shook him, tried to make him sit down on the couch, be still.  Tau-pi didn’t feel like a normal human boy, the lizard was sending very different commands from the ones a human driver would use.  The experience of having Archie’s hard grasp around its arm was alarming although it had been experimenting with its own opposable thumb and precise grip.  The boy who was a gecko ran out of his hiding place, and down the wall, towards Archie, wanting to be seen.  Although Archie, like almost everybody else, had never used an animal correspondent he did know from his experience of Tau-pi that the animal must be present to bring him out of the disturbing sexual idiocy that he seemed to enjoy so much.  He spotted the gecko, the man moved.  Archie slung the boy down, not cruelly, to where the wall met the floor and glanced, with humour in his eye, to where his girl stood, anxiously, at the door.  For a moment the man and the gecko were one and the man felt the gecko’s confusion and pain over having been lifted up in human hands in its human body. 

The billion mirrors passed and once again the gecko drew back its aura of many colours to hide it within.
“Goddamn I hate it that kids have to come to my house to spaz out.”
Archie went back to bed slamming the door on his girl’s curious stare.

 

Changing body chemistry has become the number one fashion activity in Britain.  Yoga for yoga’s sake, MDMA overload, detox, toxify.  The weekend alcohol hike, bungee, go karts, speeding, sex, coke, cocaine.  Who you are is not enough.  Change it if you can’t grow, any life is fun and fulfilling with enough meditation, hypnosis, kickboxing or smack.  There is no need to live in the real world, you can exit on a squash court or in a playstation or in the geometry of chess, on the floor of the stock exchange or the artificial theatre of war.  Distraction has almost occluded life.  It isn’t money that is wanted, or power, it is that feeling, that effortless pleasure, personal and insatiable

Earlier people had the almost constant stars to give their lives an illusion of permanence; a child of the modern conurbation has only the glaring human lamps of street lights which obscure the heavens.   These motes in the city nebular are under the control of humans, the vandalism of communal illumination is one of the first acts of boyhood.

 

The wind compacts our heads. Our child-faces are hard and small. The wind scours the tarmacadam, our young hair streams from our heads like the grass that survives in the cracks.
Small clever eyes; seeing an effort, the thing seen must be important; our society values cleverness. We as children can be respected if we are clever. Clever wee boys and clever wee lassies. Serious faces, quick silver laughter. We frown when we consider the fate of younger

siblings, we have courts not laws. Time is fickle, sometimes a definite 'Tea Time', sometimes we don't know what year it is. Holding hands is a matter of not falling over, falling in, falling behind.
I can't say how many children were there, childhood was my time institutionalised and institutions bring many hangers on that we call friends, people we go through much together with but whose personal bond to us is never tested as with true friends, they simply must live beside us and us beside them. So I can say that I remember fewer than ten serious windblown kids standing, some holding onto or holding back their younger sibling, under the pedestrian bridge that crossed a grass choked railway siding, little used in our lifetimes. The focus of our group,
something that I can remember far more clearly than my fellow humans, was a mummy cat. She was dirty and cross and too bloated to move from her wind shelter as we ringed her around. We had see cats before, cleverness has many advantages, but never one having babies in the street. I could see that she wasn't dying but I supposed her pretty sick, I'd never known a cat so sluggish. I knew the mechanism by which mammals reproduce, as I knew the mechanism by which they feed their young, but I no more identified this swollen lethargy with childbirth than I identified the six angry dots on the cat's white belly with nipples. I was concerned with the hygiene of the situation.
"Nobody touch it."
All the kids I knew were quick on the uptake or impenetrably thick and the thick ones seemed to sense the importance of doing what other people did. We kept our distance, no one went to get a pokey stick, I remember the children I knew as smart and compassionate, I don't remember
anyone hurting animals intentionally. Kids in stories are always so violent, I wonder if I was simply lucky not to know any. Sure there were kids who hit other kids but that inter-human stuff is not important. Hurting animals makes you a cunt, pure and simple, and I didn't know anyone like that. I think people who write with children as characters when the are grown up are trying to make up some kind of myth for themselves about their own childhood. It might be that I am doing
the same. Perhaps childhood is mostly boring when looked at by chilly old adults, maybe being a kid was what made it all worthwhile. My childhood was boring, in a small city that wasn't even a big town, just a place that didn't have enough fields to be the countryside. I had not the
excitement of a city or its need to be cool and poised and I didn't have a rural community to knock my corners off and screw me up. This story does not contain several chapters about how my dad beat me or my aunt raped me or my entire family colluded in telling me a lie so big that it
pulled me apart, it didn't happen. I grew up, it was cold and windy, nearly always dark and often Christmas. Children talked seriously about their favourite cartoons and frowned at smokers, in a cold, dark place like this who wanted to cough more than they already were. If someone fell in a
river then they had to run home, it was a dangerous thing and you knew that without being told.
But the cat was pregnant and more than that it was giving birth. Someone might have thought about it at the time but I never did, as to why such a beautiful white cat was giving birth in such a bleak environment. I supposed that she wanted some peace and the great outdoors, I could certainly understand that. I didn't know how expensive a cat she was, I didn't know that she had escaped, I didn't know that her babies were the products of anything more than a daddy cat and a mummy cat. I didn't know shit about the future, cleverness isn't for that. Mostly it's about remembering the past.

Later when I was more twelve than eight it seemed cleverness had disappeared. Sex had reared its head and appeared to make everyone crazy and dumb. As a boy, of course, I thought at first that it was just girls who were acting weird, as if there was something secret going on and you couldn't know about it unless the secret rules were satisfied. At the time I didn't know that people who don't know what is going on pretend to know what is going on, it’s just a thing they do. I was wrong though, it was boys as well, I just didn't notice them become weird because I didn't grow breasts.
So I started hanging out with older people, people who had calmed down a little about sex because they were having it sometimes. People who were too laid back to notice that I was a child inside my baggy clothing, my head was big enough, my chat was good enough. These people still did cleverness but they did it in a box. A work box or a university box. When they came home they didn'y want to be clever anymore, they drank instead. Sometimes they enjoyed listening to me being clever and I had time because secondary school doesn't want any clever. It wants attendance.

We stayed until all the cat cubs were born, only then, watching them tumbleover, did we remember that they were called kittens.

The older kids were jumping happily along the steppingstones left out before them by who knows what. Underage drinking makes that first pact between sex, fun, irresponsibility and breaking the law. Faced with increasingly joyless lives and only sex and anaesthesia to see them through they make the only choice they can and run around all chase-me chase-me. That is all fine and inescapable, cavemen had a piss-up and a bunk-up to see them through the daily grind, we can proudly do the same. The problem is that the teenager is also forced to associate these basic survival techniques with being thrown out of the house, arrested by the polis and pushed into crap sex by people they don't like, outdoors, too drunk to remember whether you could have talked your way out of it or even whether you talked your way into it.
So the next step is drugs because they are not allowed and because they generally make sex last longer so even though you are old enough to drink you can still get arrested and have to spend your time hiding in the freezing streets not having the perfectly normal sex that you are designed to be having. Drugs are a stepping stone, the authorities are right about that, but they are not the first stepping stone and you wouldn't be able to reach them at all if the other stone wasn't there. A healthy sex life overshadows drugs to the degree where they cannot direct the individuals behaviour. I know half a dozen heroin addicts, junkies as the delightful public brands them, cured by regular sex from someone they esteem. Even to the degree of becoming a love evangelist and getting other people off drugs by encouraging them to have proper sex lives. Which shows that these were passionate people who threw themselves into drugs with a passion because it was the best thing that they had.
I didn't have sex, of course, or drugs, I had my cat.

When all the kittens were born and licked clean we decided to keep them. We couldn't take them off their mum, that would be ridiculous, but we improved her shelter in some small ways that we thought would go unnoticed, and therefore undisturbed, by adults. Packer went home and got some milk and there was a tiny purple tin of kitten food from somewhere.
All the kittens were the same. Even after a month not one of us could really tell them apart. Two girls called Stephanie and Allegra said that they could. But we tested them and they couldn't. Nobody was surprised; it seemed natural for all the cats born at once to be the same.
Anyone with a fighting chance worked on their parents. Success followed effort.
The mummy cat was taken in, given a box and visited with treats after school by as many children as she had kittens. We were waiting to be able to tell them apart so that we could claim them. The day never came but we divided them up anyway. The young cats didn't mind a bit. Sometimes your kitten would be playing with someone else’s and you couldn't be sure that you had got your own one back but being identical you really didn't worry about it.

Then the cats showed how different they were.
I was just stroking her. She sat up tall in my lap. Such a royal thing, the Egyptians saw them right. A big white thing. And a face, we see a lot in a face.
She was so still and so alive.
She dug her claws into my legs, right in. To keep me still.
I stroked and stroked, terrified at my sudden responsibility.
It felt so nice.
That stroking.
So perfect.
On my neck.
And on the necks of my sisters and brothers.
All the children happily stroking their pets.
All the cats were one big happy mog.

It didn’t stop. Part of us was always falling, rolling, jumping, biting, fluff. Kittens and kittens and cats and cats. It was obvious at school. By the end of the first day you couldn’t talk to anyone else. I’m not going to tell you who they were because of what happened shortly afterward.
I would prefer to leave them there. Friends on a new level. One based on common experience, sure. But unforgettable common experience.
Jumping and pouncing and rolling over. Boring possibly to the jaded human, but the cats really loved that stuff.

The world is a dream when you stand in it beside friends. The years passed in bliss, bliss we will never recapture.
High school opened its gates to us and swallowed us. We stuck together, we had a reason, but it was clear that if we kept wrapped too tight then one little split would kill us.
Then, as I have already lamented, tick-tock, sex arrived.
My sexual cynicism kept me out of kitten to kitten sex. I just wanted it back the way it had been before, all wrestling together, everyone had claws and a tail, why split into groups and try to fuck each other.
Then our women folk were skimmed off us by more determined suitors. Rather than be discovered, our little group died.
We stopped stroking the cats all at the same time, just falling back to a background level of claws and teeth and fluff and jumping, oh yeah, and sometimes eating a bird or torturing to death a mouse.

Someone reported ‘our little group’ for acting outrageously, why does everybody know this story? Reported us after we had stopped even hanging around together. “Some of the kids who went to Hogtie Primary act funny, nyah.” “We think they do drugs and worship the Devil, yeah.”

It didn’t take long for an adult to find out about the cats. It wasn’t an official secret. The way the mother cat died was a secret but the existence of the litter could not be denied. They sent us all to the child psychologist but that was only a feint. Our parents were called and the cats were taken away.
I honestly cannot think why it was handled in this way. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that you should do to a bunch of kids in a new school. We couldn’t shake each other fast enough.
I started hanging out exclusively with my older set.
And I bought a gecko. Cheap even on pocket money.

The removal of the cats left us with only one piece of information, spurious conjectures aside. The mother cat had died due to a weird gross lump on her head and it had been so sudden that a vet had never been called, indeed a vet had never seen the animal. The cat had been found without any collar. However this was past the date of invention for embedded microchip technology and, after I exhumed her and carefully searched her, I had the mother’s identity chip. I kept it as a memento. As a talisman against trust. As a reminder that the adults had drowned my kittens the moment they found out about them. A tiny, metal slug, my only reminder of a whole litter of cats.

So I did the abusive gecko trick, hell, I do it, solitary, contemplative, smacked out of my mind when I come round. It’s no fluffy cat hit I tell you. Before we were children falling into a new world: I am directly swapping my mind with that of a reptile, that is the difference. The street animals are nothing next to those pure white cats, they are chosen because they are easy to smuggle and produce lurid and undeniable effects. Buying those cats would be like visiting an expensive prostitute, cheaper to fall in love than to buy into something that gaudy. When a gecko inevitably dies, it can be replaced and you have favourites but people have favourites amongst their families but you’d still rescue them all from a burning train. I don’t really want to say it but I won’t be afraid to; if the geckos are like family, as a good pet should be, then those cats were like god. More personal than genetics or location or society. Something bigger than the self but still central to existence. I wonder where they are and if they ever have people stoke them all at once anymore. If I try to feel out for them I only get cold.

We all eventually meet people who have ‘made it’. We are forced to see them prosper, just like us but sorted. People seem to have two settings, irritatingly humble and unassuming and overbearing and licentious. Shy people are generally that way because they know from childhood that they are over the top, generally nuttier than the average squirrel. We respect people who exploit a small amount of security to act as if they own the place. The cleaner or doorman who assumes responsibility for the whole show.
People love familiar, insulting behaviour. Insulting people and slapping them around is something that we reserve for our nearest and closest. The folk-hero is someone who can get away with being familiar with the alien; the judge, the king, the godhead. To chum around with reality, with matter and spirit, to assume personal responsibility for all things, this is the apex. Tiny guests of creation it is our appointed place, it seems, to gorge ourselves of the banquet, to drop in unannounced, put our muddy boots on the hostess and drink the special wine. We are encouraged to talk to god, and plants and animals, lightly manhandling them for encouragement. And ask for extra things as well. Do you have any more? Can I get some to take away? We always used to have dodos on these long voyages, have you got any of their eggs for a quick fry-up? What strange armlock prevents the world from speaking up? Politeness? And why are we such rubbish guests?
Without slinking around creation like a frightened marsh hopper can we be moderate? Is moderation not the very thing which god makes impossible. You can defy probability and death and soar beyond imagination with savage passion and you can lie in the shit and do fuck all but not any kind of compromise. Our emotions, from a Monday to a Sunday, are all things but even and balanced.
I had become interested in the state between the gecko mind and my own. Instead of being the gecko, as I had done as a child, I would flit back and forth between myself and the gecko, trying to push off again as soon as I was solidly one or the other. This mid-state allowed me great freedom of mind but little to bring back to myself.
At first however, I was worried by the geckos I was using. When I flit for a long time with one gecko, it would become eerily calm, and this noticeable in a reptile. I assumed it was some kind of brain death and became cautious, fearing for my own mind. I entered the gecko and could find nothing wrong with its reactions or senses. I left the little guy alone and turned my possibly lethal attentions upon another of his kind that I kept. Geckos are great, better than almost anything else. So portable, so durable and so discrete. Born to live in a crack on a ceiling, perfection. Plus of all the animals the insect is the least under man’s domination and so food for my critters was still plentiful. I dread the time when I must link with cockroaches but I try not to.
Time passed and I found time to convince myself to burn up another gecko for my enlightenment. That last sentence gave me an image of a salamander, deluging light from within a cage. But I could tell myself that ‘things do die anyway and what can I do about that?’ the gecko that I had done it with before was still alive and doing ok so I didn’t know that it was dangerous. I jumped to one of the troop and jumped back out. In, out, shake it all about, you do the hokey cokey and you turn around, that’s what it’s all about. Hah!
So I did the hokey cokey and everything turned out alright. The lizards became calm. I became calm. The depth and resonant majesty of all things came to me. I could feel for the first time the importance of shutting up first, before you start listening. The midstate was not a moment, it was not a place, but, insanely, you could go there. As Einstein said, ‘the strangest thing about the universe is that it can be explained at all.’ The person that I was, with none of my facets ignored, could go to that place of infinity whole and undamaged; able to think even in that extremity. There was not a lot that it was useful to think about, but the ability was not denied. I sailed above the world with the dislocated clarity of the tortured.
With the calm, and the rest and the easing of burdens came inevitable improvement in what people think of as the standard of living. I could do the things that I wanted to do more easily. I went places and I spoke to interesting people. Somewhere always, however, was a white cat. Not just any cat, but mine. There is only one and it is mine. It can only exist when I am there. And I am not there. People were great but they had taken something from me and all the reptile calm in the world couldn’t make that better.
So, back to the party full of interesting, successful people. I have known some of them for a long time, which is why I am allowed to be here, even though I don’t exist, even though I am a man who talks to lizards. I am in a room with a man and a woman. The room is horrible and just in case you missed that fact there are half a dozen mirrors crammed into it at various angles to catch you on the rebound. The girl was talking to me, I have no idea why, and the man knew that I am into animals. He wanted into the girl so he asked me if I wanted to see a special animal. I was fine with that, as with everything, three geckos pinned to me under my clothes, I was bouncing between the three of them, hardly in myself at all.
We went into the horrible bedroom and the girl sat on the white doily of bed. I stood and the man opened a mirrored wardrobe, reaching inside to get The Animal. I’ve been openly using geckos around these people for nearly ten years, that means that they think I know about the shady world of animal dealing. I’ve been breeding my own geckos for six years, ok, three years solidly but on and off for six. But it means that when people take the plunge from drugs to animals I get to watch them boast about it. These are people who got on the stepping stones with drinking behind their intolerant parent’s backs, then they do the drugs and the serious drinking, then they move to animals because they haven’t been stopped and nobody really cares if they pass out every day anyway. So I was expecting a toad or a gecko or perhaps a small snake. But I think you are all way ahead of me when I say that it was a perfect white cat.
Girl goes crazy for it, calls it to her, onto the lap, stroking the neck, like she’d done it before.
I don’t think she had, though, and when she cried, so did I.
“Guess what it is man, see if you can guess.”
“It’s one cat split into several different bodies, if more than one cat’s neck is stroked at a time then the stokers and the cats become as they truly are. One.”
His face fell and the girl still cried on the bed as I left.

 

This was a world of weird, don’t get me wrong.
You might go up a small hill to breathe and rest and think in solitude and there might be thirty-five guys staggering about carrying a freak priest with a massive head in a litter. Not noisy but disturbing. I have long thought. But I have never come up with any good ideas concerning the fixing of broken humans. What level of fixed are we trying to raise people to? When do we say, ‘you are ok now.’? I can’t hold a job, I have visions, I’m one of the healthiest people I know. I can run a mile or two pretty good, I can live outdoors at night if I have to, I get a cough sometimes. Am I broken? Do I need help, intervention?
Fuck yeah, says some of me. Kidnap me, train me as a ninja in the cause of justice and release me into the world confident that wherever I go I have the skills to make that place better.
Society doesn’t want me as I am but it has never done one thing likely to change me. If I was a bit younger then they might have got to me in primary school with some Ritalin and then I’d be a junky instead of some dirty animal handler. The phrase, “but life is just too good to risk it all by taking medication I might not need,” got me out of the firing line of overzealous prozac prescription.
My skillset is heavy on the lizard breeding and checkpoint jumping but lacking in the kissing ass and wearing a tie areas. I am not employable in the modern world, nor do I want to be. They haven’t got anything to offer me. I know that because I had what I wanted and they took it away from me. Now if someone offered me my cat back if I was a good boy and bred their worthless little drug-lizards for them. I’d take it. Like a shot. Accept me. Accept the last ten years, treat me like the person that I am and give me a function with my cat beside me? I would fall at your feet. Some people would call me weak. Morally judgemental people. Because humans invented morals in shock when they read about what they do every day. Why would they take something like that off some kids? Are their own lives so good that they want to shield children from the possibility of another?
They took my cat and now a bit of it is being sold to hedonists all around the world to link up and feel furry. And that’s great except that when I had the cat it was free. It was equals all in together and it was natural. I bet one of the kittens is in a constant stroke room somewhere so that no paying users stroke a dud cat. Because the stroking didn’t work when it was only one cat and one stroker. There was something about the litter as a whole and it worked best when all the cats had played together recently and when all the cats were stroked. They took our cats and sold them into stroke slavery. With us they were just normal cats.
It is like taking a local herb, making it a product, having the native peoples work in its production and then making it illegal and burning it all. It just didn’t need to be done. It was a natural thing. It may have started for us on a piece of smashed concrete in the cold but it was natural. What were we being prepared for that was better? Even not thinking of the fate of the cats, trying not to think about the fate of the kids, which I don’t know because we didn’t keep in touch. The best friends in the world smashed by an interventionist boot. I hope they are ok but even not thinking of them. What lives do the poor drudges who confiscate and confine and medicate and suture lead? What no cat? Ever? Not even the idea that it might be worthwhile? I can understand not pissing about in your bedroom with geckos but if it was in your power to let the kids have their own cats then you would do it. No?
It was the best thing which ever happened to me, better than the unformed joys of childhood. To join with openhearted new friends in play without the possibility of language and then to be able to talk to them face to face about it afterwards. To be inside the senses of many creatures at once. To be small and wild and different and new. I would have paid a great personal price to have it but instead it was taken from me and then I had to pay a terrible price. Their attitude is stupid and they break their own laws more than anybody else. My cat is a slave to these morons.
What can I do?

I was just waiting in line at a checkpoint. Tee-dee-ous. At least the morons in front and behind stay in their place with two armed men watching. Ordinary bitching and pushing and boorish threats fall away when a soldier scans the crowd looking for targets. We all feel close to the people with whom we are queuing and distanced from the officials checking our papers as we pass. You’d think, if you were a proto-fascist state, that you’d want to make the man in the street identify with the soldiers, not with each other. The soldiers are the human face of fascism, the only part that resembles a human being at all. But as we are processed like cattle we feel part of something and it is dead easy to think of yourself as a freedom fighter, a resister in the crowd, a democrat with a stone in their hand. Even I, a real subversive, someone who does not want the authorities looking his way, has time and space to indulge my fantasies of direct insubordination. I’m smuggling a cargo that could put me away for life and I’m not afraid. The soldiers are just soldiers, the cops are just cops, no one will stop me today because no one has ever stopped me. This is my neighbourhood, my papers are in order. My strand of queue marches through, the others are delayed by a group of four young men with beards. They are handsome and intelligent looking, not poor, but youth, masculinity and a refusal to shave make you a good target nowadays. Two looked used to the treatment, one confused and one clearly scared. They must be hardworking students who rarely go out, unused to this unfair world. Poor little rationalists in time of irrationality. I send them mental signals telling them to give up, think like a sheep, go limp, don’t stand out, sit down, become invisible. The frightened one pulls his identity back out of the fingers of the officials too quickly and one of the soldiers decides that that is his cue. I can see him walking towards his victim but the educated wee dude can’t see anything. The squaddie lifts the butt of his rifle and swings it into the little guy’s teeth. Two others drag him out of line by the scruff of his neck. The two beardies who know how to act don’t even look at him but his confused mate cannot take his eyes off him as he stumbles through the checkpoint. They leave their comrade in military custody and keep walking. It’s ages since I’ve seen violence of any kind at a checkpoint, damn these bookworms for not knowing how to avoid a beating. Things have been quiet for a long time; maybe the troops are bored, maybe their orders have changed. Nothing changes for me, they are incapable of finding me. I am too insignificant. However important they claim their laws are, their own freedom of action is paramount, chasing me would bore them to death. It makes me wonder why they picked me as a target at all. They can’t be bothered finding out enough about me to stop me doing what ever it is that I do. I suppose if you lean on the small local breeders you can combat the exciting international smuggling rings, which wouldn’t otherwise exist. I’m never going to carry a gun, I’m not a good threat to hold over the heads of the mortgage slaves. I hate to think what it must be like for them, people all throughout their own organisations, at every level, must be animal lovers. Judges, aristocrats, military officers, people who carry the world upon their shoulders. Are they going to knock away the crutch of exotic pets? They must make have to make compromises every day that would make me spit-up and split. Turn a blind eye and pretend that the crusade goes on. It must be heart-wrenching.
Humanity has been forced to admit rational defeat in the fight against vermin. To be free of the problem it must be embraced but people still have histrionic violence to get over. Policies which extend the gap, between humans and the animals which must co-exist with them, are everywhere employed. Bomb the bugs! is still thought of as tenable posture.
Loss is not so shameful. Especially to species that do not speak our language.
They do keep on though, fucking things up worse. What is all the daftness for?
I started this anonymous blog because I wanted to talk about my cat. I don’t want to find the kittens, it is too late for that. If anybody knows what I should do, I would be happy if they e-mailed me.
I have done a little digging, found out a little about the mummy cat that we found. Quietly I checked whose cat she had been before she ran outside to spill her children at our childs’ feet.
Nothing obvious, not registered to a laboratory or anything, but I got a name. I looked it up and it belongs to a civil servant and his family. Real enough, I walked past the house and saw the man, saw the kids. No mother, no cat, but a flap. Did they know? Was it a secret of the children, as it had been for me? Is it a plant from his work? He works in the Agriculture department, so close enough but not medical or military. They didn’t look dodgy and I can usually tell (takes one to know one as they say whilst they shake down Jews and homosexuals). Was their cat the same cat? The house was close enough to the waste ground as an animal walks. Could the microchip have been switched into another cat? Nothing would surprise me. I have been into the bodies of other creatures and I have been into the centre of more than one nothing, anything is possible. And any level of oppression is possible. I live in a police state, the most security cameras of any country in the world, I have no protection from the hands and guns of dangerous men but I break the law and I am not caught, I write of my life on the internet and I am not stopped. Oppression seems to be as random as death always was. Not that I wouldn’t like more freedom. Freedom of association and assembly would be best. I would love to see more people but we aren’t allowed outside in groups.
When the checkpoints started they were only for cars, just to check you weren’t drunk and had paid your taxes. I’m a diehard pedestrian and it’s only been recently that I’ve had to carry my passport most days. I carry it every day, of course, I don’t want a random search blowing the lid on my reptile fixation.
That’s what they want, everyone to carry their passport, it shows that you know that they exist and must be respected. It shows that you aren’t going to give them trouble. Same with shaving your face, if you are a man, and your armpits, if you are a woman. It shows that you are willing to make a daily sacrifice for the good opinion of your society. Society thinks that bearded men are liars and hair on women is dirt. It wouldn’t be worth doing something for society if it wasn’t pointing a gun in your general direction, but it is, so it’s worth it. If you look like everyone else when you walk down the street you are less likely to be picked out by the gunman. That is what safety in numbers means. Superheroes can’t hide in a crowd; they have to be able to survive being shot if they are going to be superheroes very long. I’m not a superhero. I’m not getting shot for fashion. I’m going to shave and some other guy is going to eat a soldier’s gun for him. You can break every law in the book behind closed doors but when you walk down the street pretend to be like all the other folk or you are going to get singled out. Practise thinking ‘oh good, they caught another one’ when you see them hauling away the next innocent schmuck that you see them hauling away. Respect policemen. The hells angels were saved from many beatings in the cells by quick thinking leaders who said ‘Sir’ to pigs. It’s all they want, respect and existence, same as you. Why should you listen to me? I never get arrested, not questioned, not looked at twice. I’m that guy who looks like every other guy. I’m doing well in a society that says that I’m evil.
In twenty years some of the people I know might even have a little power and then we can see about getting those laws changed.
But until then, keep your head down, your nose clean and your clean-shaven face out of the police files.