Tik Tok sensation and author Alex Howard has turned his attention from The Library Cat to The Ghost Cat in his latest novel. Over the course of a century in his nine lives in one Edinburgh tenement the ghost cat oversees two world wars, a coronation and one giant step for mankind. In the extract below, we are introduced to Grimalkin at the end of his first life.

The Ghost Cat
By Alex Howard
Published by Black and White Publishing

Back then, during the reign of Queen Victoria, Eilidh had found Grimalkin as a stray kitten on nearby Thirlestane Lane. Mewling for milk and nearing death in the corner of a stable, a mist, or ‘haar’ as it is known locally, had swept across Edinburgh, causing Grimalkin’s mother to abandon the site with the rest of her kittens. As he shivered in the urine-soaked straw, the haar sank its teeth into his minuscule bones, hour by hour. Another thirty minutes and the little cat would have been no more. The master of 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, Mr Calvert, a cartographer by profession, who was forever dressed in brown stockings and accompanied by a forbidding oak cane, had reluctantly agreed to keep the cat. In the early days of kittenhood, Grimalkin would often chase his tail on one of Mr Calvert’s great maps that had been unfurled onto the study floor. Lost in the ecstasy of papery rustles, he would suddenly detect Mr Calvert’s narrow head (bald apart from a few white wisps of hair on the side) looming over him. A moment of stillness would ensue, as Mr Calvert slowly placed his quizzing glasses over his eyes before releasing a sudden ‘humph!’, which would send Grimalkin charging off down the hall.

But Eilidh’s face told a different story: big rosy cheeks flushed vivid red like a clutch of Scottish loganberries on her otherwise perfectly white skin. Her eyes permanently sparkled, as if she was always on the point of telling a joke, and their turquoise irises were so deep and kind one could tell, just by looking at them, that their bearer could be trusted with your secrets. She wore her black hair rolled up in a handsome pompadour, but despite her best eff orts, it would often explode out of its frilly headdress in little corkscrew curls, making her look comic, and yet somehow charming. She was one of those people that always looked youthful, and to Grimalkin she looked no different to the day in 1887 when she cupped him in her warm hand from the icy sodden straw of the nearby stable.

As Grimalkin padded over to the fire grate, which was just starting to lick with flame, he caught sight of his own reflection in Eilidh’s brass firebox. A hunched tabby cat stared back at him, crooked of tail and jagged of whisker. His eyes, once lizard-green and flashing with alertness were now, at fifteen years old, cloudy and drawn ever so slightly down at the corners, so that his pupils looked unnaturally large. To the unassuming passer-by, this might have given them a melancholy air, but, to the more perceptive among cats and humans, it in fact spoke of a profound and restless wisdom. His fur, at one time the envy of the neighbourhood for its dazzling mix of browns, marmalades and creams, was now flecked with white and constantly matted with bits of grit that he could never completely lick off . His forelegs were stout, with big paws, the likes of which would not seem out of place on one of his wildcat cousins excepting his neatly rounded toes; and his ginger hind leg, once his proudest attribute when prowling the communal gardens, had now turned a deep fox-red and was bent in a half-curve that he couldn’t straighten out. There was a majesty about him, as there is with all handsome cats grown old, and a robustness to his form that suggested a prodigious Victorian diet of lark pie, pork suet and dripping. He was a thinking cat and, as such, enjoyed a life of quiet intellectual contemplation.

But on this morning in September 1902, his whole frame, from the ends of his ear peaks right down to his tail, was lashing with pain. His leg joints throbbed, taking his mind plain off any thoughts of stalking for mice; and even now, as Eilidh placed his morning bowl of fish-ends down on the pantry tiles with a familiar clatter, Grimalkin’s ear did not twitch. Instead, he sat staring into the grate deeper and deeper, as the orange flames licked in between the knuckles of coal, his senses dulling and his mind becoming ever more silent. No, this will not do! he thought, in a sudden rallying of mental strength. A dreary soul doth guddle nay mice. I must still wash myself. A good ablute always puts me to rights.

You see, even at fifteen, Grimalkin believed, as did many Victorian cats, that a clean pelt led to a pure soul. Rising, he padded closer to the fi re, coming to rest on a little rug beside Mr Calvert’s gramophone, which stretched up its huge brass trumpet like an oversized daffodil. But no sooner had he dampened his paw with his tongue and hooked it up towards his left ear than his muscles seized, and his tummy cramped with a pain so strong that it almost made him cry out loud.

No, I cannot. I simply cannot.

It is an alarming day when a cat can no longer wash himself. It signals the last of dignity and the end of choice. Feeling quite alone, Grimalkin squatted on the rug and decided to watch the skirl and twist of the flames again. As they flexed and grew, he thought back across his life. Being born in 1887, he had seen a lot . . . The opening of the Great Forth Rail Bridge, the first motion picture camera, the proliferation of works of literature by Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr Dickens . . . The continual irrevocable rise of the steam train. I have had much fortune . . . he thought as various memories panned up in his mind. I have been well-kept, well-fed and well-groomed. Why if a cat has nine lives, reserved for misadventure and poor luck, I dare say I am still on my first . . .

*

In the silence, Grimalkin’s eyes closed. And under the strengthening morning light coming in through the part-opened shutters, the crackle of the fire and the warming smell of coaldust, his head fell silent, and the worries and travails that inflict all cats during their short time on this earth receded as if carried downwards on a tumbling vortex of sand. The ache of his back eased; the arduous pull and heave of his lungs subsided, and as the rising flames beat their warmth upon his fur, the twist of his thoughts fell silent for the last time ever in this life.

The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £12.99.