“No go, Rat. Auk, hawk, fork!”
In fact, Basil did Sirius a favour, because he taught him to listen to the beginnings of words. By the end of a week, Sirius was watching for the noise humans made by pouting their mouth into a small pucker. It looked a difficult noise. He was not sure he would ever learn to make it himself. But he knew that when ork began with this sound, it was real, and not otherwise. He did not respond to fork or talk and Basil grew quite peevish about it.
“This Rat’s no fun any more,” he grumbled.
Kathleen was relieved that Leo had almost stopped chewing things. Sirius was too busy learning and observing to do more than munch absently on his rubber bone. He ached for knowledge now. He kept perceiving a vast green something in himself, which was always escaping from the corner of his eye. He could never capture it properly, but he saw enough of it to know that he was now something stupid and ignorant, slung on four clumsy legs, with a mind like an amiable sieve. He had to learn why this was, or he would never be able to understand about a Zoi.
So Sirius listened and listened, and watched till his head ached. He watched cats as well as humans. And slowly, slowly, things began to make sense to him. He learnt that animals were held to be inferior to humans, because they were less clever, and smaller and clumsier. Humans used their hands in all sorts of devious, delicate ways. If there was something their hands could not do, they were clever enough to think of some tool to use instead. This perception was a great help to Sirius. He had odd, dim memories of himself using a Zoi rather as humans used tools. But animals could not do this. That was how humans had power of life and death over them.
Nevertheless, Sirius watched, fascinated, the way the cats, and Tibbles in particular, used their paws almost as cleverly as humans. Tibbles could push the cover off a meat dish, so that Romulus and Remus could make their claws into hooks and drag out the meat inside. She could pull down the catch of the kitchen window and let herself in at night if it was raining. And she could open any door that did not have a round handle. Sirius would look along his nose to his own great stumpy paws and sigh deeply. They were as useless as Duffie’s feet. He might be stronger than all three cats put together, but he could not use his paws as they did. He saw that this put him further under the power of humans than the cats. Because of their skill, the cats lived a busy and private life outside and inside the house, whereas he had to wait for a human to lead him about. He grew very depressed.
Then he discovered he could be clever too.
It was over the smart red jingly collar. Kathleen left it buckled round his neck after the first walk. Sirius hated it. It itched, and its noise annoyed him. But he very soon saw that it was more than an annoyance – it was the sign and tool of the power humans had over him. One of them – Basil for instance – had only to take hold of it to make him a helpless prisoner. If Basil then flipped his nose or took his bone away, it was a sign of the power he felt he had.
So Sirius set to work to make sure he could be free of that collar when he wanted. He scratched. And he scratched. And scratched. Jingle, jingle, jingle went the collar.
“Make that filthy creature stop scratching,” said Duffie.
“I think his collar may be on too tight,” said Robin. He and Kathleen examined it and decided to let it out two holes.
This was a considerable relief to Sirius. The collar no longer itched, though in its looser state it jingled more annoyingly than before. That night, after a little manoeuvring under Kathleen’s bed, he managed to hook it to one of Kathleen’s bedsprings and tried to pull it off by walking away backwards. The collar stuck behind his ears. It hurt. It would not move. He could not get it off and he could not get it on again. He could not even get it off the bedspring. His ears were killing him. He panicked, yelping and jumping till the bed heaved.
Kathleen sat up with a shriek. “Leo! Help! There’s a ghost under my bed!” Then she added, much more reasonably, “What on earth are you doing, Leo?” After that, she switched on the light and came and looked. “You silly little dog! How did you get into that pickle? Hold still now.” She unhooked Sirius and dragged him out from under the bed. He was extremely grateful and licked her face hugely. “Give over,” said Kathleen. “And let’s get some sleep.”
Sirius obediently curled up on her bed until she was asleep again. Then he got down and started scratching once more. Whenever no one was near, he scratched diligently, always in the same place, on the loops of the loose skin under his chin. It did not hurt much there and yet, shortly, he had made himself a very satisfactory raw spot.
“Your horse has his collar on too tight,” the thunderous voice told Kathleen. “Look.”
Kathleen looked, and felt terrible. “Oh, my poor Leo!” She let the collar out three more holes.
That night, to his great satisfaction, Sirius found he could leave the collar hanging on the bedspring, while he ambled round the house with only the quiet ticker-tack of his claws to mark his progress. It was not quite such an easy matter to get the collar on again. Kathleen woke twice more thinking there was a ghost under her bed, before Sirius thought of pushing his head into the collar from the other side. Then it came off the bedspring and on to his neck in one neat movement. He curled up on Kathleen’s bed feeling very pleased with himself.
This piece of cunning made Sirius much more confident. He began to suspect that he could settle most difficulties if he thought about them. His body might be clumsy, but his mind was quite as good as any cat’s. It was fortunate he realised this because, one afternoon when Kathleen, Robin and Basil were all out, long before Sirius had learnt more than a few words of human speech, Tibbles did her best to get rid of him for good.
Sirius, bored and lonely, drew himself quietly up on to the sofa and fell gingerly asleep there. He liked that sofa. He considered it unfair of the humans that they insisted on keeping all the most comfortable places for themselves. But he did not dare do more than doze. Duffie was moving about upstairs. It seemed to be one of the afternoons when she did not shut herself away in the shop and, Sirius had learnt by painful experience, you had to be extra wary on those days.
He had been dozing there for nearly an hour, when Romulus jumped on him. He hit Sirius like a bomb, every claw out and spitting abuse. Sirius sprang up with a yelp. He was more surprised than anything at first. But Romulus was fat and determined. He dug his claws in and stuck to Sirius’s back and Sirius, for a second or so, could not shake him off. In those seconds, Sirius became furiously angry. It was like a sheet of green flame in his head. How dared Romulus! He hurled the cat off and went for him, snarling and showing every pointed white tooth he had. Romulus took one look. Then he flashed over the sofa arm and vanished. Sirius’s teeth snapped on empty air. By the time he reached the carpet, Romulus was nowhere to be seen.
A bubbling hiss drew Sirius’s attention to Remus, crouched in the open doorway to the shop. Remus bared his teeth and spat. At that, Sirius’s rage flared vaster and greener still. He responded with a deep rumbling growl that surprised him nearly as much as it surprised Remus. A great ridge of fur came up over his back and shoulders and his eyes blazed green. Remus stared at this nightmare of eyes, teeth and bristle, and his own fur stood and stood and stood, until he was nearly twice his normal size. He spat. Sirius throbbed like a motor cycle and crept forward, slow and stiff-legged, to tear Remus to pieces. He was angry, angry, angry.
Remus only waited to make sure Sirius was indeed coming his way. Then he bolted without courage or dignity. He had done what his mother wanted, but not even for Tibbles was he going to face this nightmare a second longer than he had to. When Sirius reached the door of the shop there was no sign of Remus. There was only Tibbles, alone in the middle of a dusty floor.
