We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

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Authors: James Meek
Tags: Fiction, Literary
plastic moustache six inches wide. The band played till two and Katerina danced with a guest dressed as a cactus. Only his face showed, the costume was entirely rigid, and halfway through the Gay Gordons, he fell over and rolled around the floor, kicking his feet like an overturned beetle.
    By four a.m. the sun was well above the horizon and Kellas, Katerina, M’Gurgan, Sophie, Hephzibah, Rab and Leslie were drinking on the floor in the front room of Leslie’s house. Somebody had asked M’Gurgan what Kellas’s parents’ place was like andM’Gurgan had asked whether they’d heard about the cat. He had the storyteller’s beckoning smile on him as he said it and when he said to Kellas ‘You tell the story’, Kellas said ‘No, you do it.’
    ‘We’ve come back from the pub,’ said M’Gurgan, ‘and we’re sitting in the kitchen. All the women have already gone upstairs and Adam’s dad comes in all ready for bed, which is quite an operation. He spends an hour patrolling the house making sure everything’s switched off, the doors are double locked, the heating’s turned up to tropical. The lasers are primed. You know, stakes coming out of the walls to impale intruders. So he’s done his rounds, and he’s standing there in an Albanian dressing gown and a tasselled cap from Uzbekistan, which he only wears when Adam’s there ’cause that’s what Adam gives him for presents when he comes back from one of his assignments to shitholes. And Adam’s dad says to us: “Can you make sure, if the cat comes in, you don’t let it out again?” And he shows us how to lock the cat door, and off he goes to bed. The allotted task seems simple enough, and we go on talking. Couple of whiskies. After a while there’s this sound from the back door. Now I’ve heard cats come through cat doors before. I have experience, and I know, they’re very lithe creatures. It doesn’t matter how big they look; they slip through that little opening with just a wee clatter, and they’re in. But this sound is different. It isn’t a clatter. We hear the “clat”, and we’re waiting…and there’s no “ter”. So we go and take a look. The cat is gigantic! It’s the size of a sheep. And it’s stuck halfway through the cat door, with its head and front legs through, and its hind legs and arse hanging out the back. It looks like a lion that’s tried to jump through a quoit. So I ask Adam what the hell this Gargantua is and he says his parents have only just got the animal, this is the first time he’s seen it. So we open the door, and the cat just moves with it, like this. Then Adam goes outside, and we close the door, and he puts his hands on the cat’s arse and pushes, and I take the cat’s front legs in my hands and start to pull. And Adam keeps saying “Don’t hurt him!” and I’m trying to pull delicately, and thecat looks at me very calmly and sinks its claws into my hands. Deep. I jump back and bang my head and start cursing the cat and Adam says “Not so loud, my dad’s a light sleeper.” I’m trying to staunch the blood from my wounds and then I see it’s looking bad with the cat. It’s making these little panting sounds, like two voles fucking. I imagine. Meanwhile Adam’s getting really agitated and I have an idea: we’ll use some butter to grease the cat. Adam starts rooting around and all he can find is a bottle of extra virgin olive oil. And this is when I know the kind of lifestyle he has because he starts drizzling the olive oil over the cat. You know – like it’s a rocket salad. I’m waiting for him to start shaving the Parmesan. So I massage the oil into the cat’s skin and we take our positions again, he pushes, I pull, the cat screams blue murder and it just shoots out of the cat door and into the kitchen. The next thing is Adam’s father comes storming in, in his Lebanese night attire, shouting at us for all the noise we’re making. We explain that the cat got stuck in the cat door. Adam’s

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