Mad Cat, Franz and the Bomb

By Tony McAndrew

Cat is peculiar, she always has been. She grew up talking to the evil three that no one could see, which forced her into years of therapy. Maybe it’s because she’s a creative genius, tapped into the frequency where concept takes form and manifests, either way things got better when she met art gallery owners Teddy and Perry.

Seven years later it feels like all of that is the distant past, but the past is never forgotten, the ghosts of it walk among us and watch us, even as we sleep. He looks so real, is her mind playing tricks on her? He looks as three dimensional as you, as me, except he’s bound to here. Cat can see him, she can’t help but see him, and now she’s witnessed walking through the streets arguing with a new invisible friend.

Are any of these beings truly friends? The past should be forgotten, right? But what if forgetting the past puts us in danger? What Cat is about to do is explosive, it’s dangerous, and she no longer cares who calls her Mad Cat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wild Wolf Publishing
• Release date: May 25, 2018

Book preview

Chapter 1

1941

For God’s sake, Franz, save yourself! I’m finished.

Shut up!

Use a chute! … Go! coughed Max, a bolt of pink froth oozed from his mouth, bubbling down his chin.

We’re too low! Franz yelled at his co-pilot, over the rushing night air and sting of cold rain tracering in through the smashed cockpit. Just shut up and do as I say. Try and hold us level! He ripped off his scarf, folded and pushed it under his friend’s jacket, to try and halt the blood leaking from the hole in his chest.

The drone of the starboard Daimler-Benz turned to a hacking, stuttering hiss, grunting and snorting like a bull dying in the ring the way the port had twenty minutes earlier when the flak hit. Franz’s head snapped around at it.

Shit! Hold on. I’m going back to loose the bomb. It’ll blow us to bits if we splash. If I can free it we can try for the shallows. A chance, Max! A chance! He shook his shoulder. You got it? Max? You hear me? Wake up! Come on! Stay with me!

Max nodded weakly. Franz threw his cap away and ape-swung down through the bulkhead to the bomb bay, avoiding the swaying body of Marty the dorsal gunner dangling upside down in his harness like a broken puppet, the white hot lumps of shrapnel slicing through the fuselage killing him and Hal the radio operator. Franz skidded in the blood and slime, and tried to ignore the gaping hole in the port side and the suck of the black void beyond.

The bomb had defied them from the cockpit. Somewhere in the belly of the aircraft among the wires, hydraulic links, and catches a shard of English steel the size of a mouse had burrowed through. He lifted a flap in the centre of the floor and pulled the manual release.

Nothing. No gift from gravity, no rise in engine noise, no sudden upward surge. He hand cranked the buckled bay doors until they jammed half open, swore, held onto a cargo strap and kicked them the last few inches open, dropped on his belly and looked out. A flash of lightning lit up the furious, seething mass of black and silver nearly three thousand feet below, and the nose of the massive bloated bomb clinging to the belly of the plane.

The hole splattered wings and rudder, enraged by the storm fought back, yanking at the controls. The strength seeped out of Max, his lungs collapsing; filling with blood. His head wobbled at the altimeter and saw the earth reeling them down, the hands turning backwards. He wished it were time.

The dizziness made it hard to concentrate but he could think of home. The cramped, book-cluttered little flat in Hamburg overlooking the canal and his blue-eyed wife, lashes tear-clumped, her smell, the brush of her hair and the beautiful, wet, soft, ozone kisses as he said goodbye at the station; her pushing through the crowd to stand at the end of the platform on tip-toe, waving as the train slid away. Even after it was out of sight.

He gulped for air, his breaths coming in short, stertorous gasps. A cold numbness spread steadily up his legs till he could feel them no more. His arms flopped to his lap. He thought of home again.

Franz, one hand wrapped in a cargo strap, the other braced against the floor, hung between the bomb doors and swung a boot at the bomb suspension assembly. And again. And again. The pendulum sway of the aircraft rattled him in the jaws of the bay and made aim impossible. The engine spluttered and whined, metal screeching as the engine seized and was struck dumb.

He swore at the top of his voice. In desperation he put his feet on the nose of the bomb and pressed. It wouldn’t shift. He bounced on it, frenziedly stamping down with both heels. Without warning it gave and was gone.

The plane lurched upwards and wallowed to starboard, leaving Franz dangling one handed from the strap. He swung on the rain greased fabric, his free hand scrabbling around the floor of the bomb bay for any kind of hold, the wind pulling at his legs. His fingers found the manual release lever still upright, curled around it and hauled him back in. Getting to his feet he almost fell through the hole in the side of the fuselage as the plane lolled back towards port and pitched down.

Clambering into the cockpit he saw Max was dead. In the whistling, whooshing glide, the controls demanded a life of their own, struggling as if he had an enraged ram by the horns. He heaved back and the nose reluctantly came up. A shattering crash of lightning struck the sea, lighting up a town, the long finger of a pier poking the furious waves, a clock tower and the shock in the faces of seafront houses, nervously crimping the long curve of a beach half a mile off the port wing. Dazzled, Franz screwed his eyes and shook his head.

Gently he pushed the yoke forward, aiming to feather it back at the last moment and belly flop in the darkness where he remembered the waves lashing at the sand. It jammed. The bomber started to tip forward into a dive. He braced against it, frantically pulling back with all his strength, but it wouldn’t budge or turn.

The whistle of wind rose to a howl, the plane gained speed, shaking and shuddering, rolling lazily into a dizzying downward spiral towards the cracking black marble of the North Sea. Franz relaxed, leant his head back sadly, closed his eyes, and thought of his wife and children.

Chapter 2

2014

It was past high summer, but it would be another month before red bibbed swallows notated the wires and dreamt of Africa. Cat sauntered through the unending bungalows between school and seafront, closing her eyes now and again to enjoy the soothing putter and drone of lawnmowers and the smell of fresh cut grass sweetening the warm breeze.

Wherever she looked sunburnt big-bellied bald men in vests seemed to be everywhere. Thick, hairy wrists, and massive hands long retired from moling coal from the ground, hauling nets from northern waters, or sweating at some earth thudding furnace press. Equally big bellied wives, in overhang tee shirts and spindly leggings, chatted and walked tiny dogs, dainty as a snack.

More big men whistled softly through their teeth, shuffling carefully in the damp peat aroma of small, tidy glasshouses; a vivarium in every back garden, their specimens absorbed in the art of growing tomato plants as tenderly as grandchildren.

She’d just come from listening to another man, Mr Wells, the headmaster, and his end of term speech. Thin, with the apologetic stoop of the very tall and too, a disproportionately large head, it seemed he would need to keep shuffling his feet to stop himself falling over. Not only was it large but unusually square, with a jutting forehead and chin, like a three drawer chest with the top and bottom drawers a little way out, known to generations in the town as Old Brickhead.

Gripping the wooden lectern, from a distance as small as an open shooting stick in his hands, the invisible heckler of his stammer tried to interrupt a few times but it didn’t matter, she couldn’t recall a word but always loved listening to his voice; mellow, with a low background hum, much as Dylan Thomas reciting verse, turning words on the lathe of his tongue.

Sun-spilled doubloons shone in the bottom of shadow pools moating the pavement trees, sparrows fluttered and bathed in the dust at their feet as she floated by, not so much walking as treading water and being swept along by the tide of late afternoon heat. Joining the avenue, coming up behind the gardens and garages of the tall seafront buildings, she could feel the benevolent edge of the world pull of the sea beyond, of something moving, alive, quite unlike the awful dragging dead allure towards the edge of high places.

Passing the railway station, close to the street, a yellow faced two carriage diesel rested against the buffers at the end of the platform, engine mumbling to itself, having shaken off its passengers like so many fleas. The journey, a rattling single track sway from the city, stopping at Norman-churched villages marooned in the flat, endless, dyke-slashed fields awaiting the silver half-hearts of the plough.

In a small courtyard off Drummond Road, Cat homed in on the garish red and white embroidered shop window with Figaro’s written in a swirling gold curve across the glass. She walked up to the man with a shiny, precipitous Elvis quiff and an unfortunate smell of parmesan about him, leaning in the doorway with a dead roll-up at the corner of his mouth and wearing those under-belly fat men’s jeans that somehow defy gravity, hung incredulously from unknown anatomical pegs.

The pink nylon smock, open over the grubby white bib of a tee-shirt, exhibited tea and poorly rubbed off egg stains from the morning’s butty. He scowled at her over the folded pages of the Sporting Life, a faint whistle from the short breaths passing through the witch brooms poking from each nostril.

Hi. She looked past him into the empty shop.

’Lo, he gruffed eventually, realising she wasn’t going away.

Mr Figaro?

You taking the piss? The roll-up jiggled.

No, but it says Figa....

It’s Alf.

Ok then, Alf, I’ve come for a haircut. She glanced at the metal cutlery of comb and scissors peeping from the breast pocket of his smock.

This is a barbers, duck, you need a women’s…. whatever it is these days.

Been to them all and they won’t do it. She took sketches from her bag and showed him. This is what I want.

He examined them and then her, unable to hold back his eyes from flicking over her electric blue hair, cutting and layering as they went, the snips near audible. He rasped his fingernails slowly, crackling, surfing over his stubble, and sniffed.

You doin’ it for a bet?

No. She shrugged. Would it matter?

No. The whistling increased along with the jowly, heavy lidded stare. Hmm.

She took her sketches back. Well, never mind. I can see you’re busy and it’s obviously out of your league. They confronted each other. A tingle of creativity long buried beneath the years of short back and sides, just a trim please and square neck or round, bubbled to the surface. She smirked. He bit.

Get in the chair. He nodded at the worn red leather and chrome edifice, with its whiff of execution equipment squatting before the mirror and sink.

The heaps of grey and white hair on the floor told her his customers were mostly those who probably still closed their curtains when someone died, ate tapioca, could remember the voice of Vera Lynn and a time when there was a king on the throne. Either that, she thought sliding into the wide chair, or he’d just finished shaving a badger. There was a warm, sweet tang of Brylcreem in the air. She looked around the gloomy pine panelled walls adorned with yellowing photos of sly-eyed, handsomely chiselled men driving highly polished wooden speedboats across Lake Como, about to drawl a lazy "Hiiii" from the corners of their mouths.

On the adjacent wall above a row of unrelated arthritic wooden chairs, splashed a tacky red matador’s cape peppered in sequins and dust, itself below a fake set of lopsided bull horns bought from an auction at the drill hall when the town still had one. Lurking on a corner shelf a cardboard advert for Durex Featherlite made room for a cutthroat razor, the dull bored tongue of its sharpening strap dangled from a hook beneath. Alf took a black sheet and with a bullfighters flourish covered the chair and Cat up to her neck, his warm, meaty fingers folding it into her collar.

Right then, he grunted, and set about the task with a finesse and gentleness she hadn’t expected.

Chapter 3

All the way from Figaro’s to the seafront summer stampede and the Theodore Jayne Gallery of Fine Art, she ignored the looks from passers-by but couldn’t resist the shop window reflections. She hadn’t seen Alf’s rare satisfied smile watching her walk away up the street before returning to his paper in the doorway.

It was just as she wanted. A straight, high fringe, and feathered and shaved to the scalp an inch over the ears to fan out over her shoulders, and come to a point below her shoulder blades, the shape of a magpie’s tail. She couldn’t wait to hear what Teddy and his partner Perry thought of it.

On the seafront, just south of the over-ornate Diamond Jubilee clock tower built for Queen Victoria who never heard its chimes, Theodore Kyte and Peregrine Jayne had exhibited and sold art for twenty years in spite of the occasional brick through the window and piss through the letterbox.

Double fronted, three stories and a balconied bay window bulging on each, tucked at the border where shops ended and the jostle of small hotels and B and B’s began. They’d bought it when they retired from the stage, wearied by the travel, the treadmill rep and endless strange beds, the best parts being soaked up by fierce-bright younger lights and the pitiless taunt of the unringing phone.

The whole ground floor was the gallery. Rooms knocked through and opened out, with soft ponds of light cast from recessed spots onto the walls and the pale, polished cedar wood floor Perry had insisted upon. It was Cat’s second home. She discovered it at the age of eight, days passing with hours at the beautifully ever clean window, before she plucked up the courage to tag along with a couple of customers and go inside, to her epiphany. The day her invisible friends left and never came back.

From the days of the highchair, her hands were never empty of pencil or crayon, and a twisting inescapable need to put images on any surface she could. In the same way some people found beauty in words, the simple truth of one word being described perfectly by a combination of others, or in the fluency of numbers, the emotion of music, the euphony of verse; she found the same in colour and form. Moving in awestruck slow motion along the walls, mouth flopped open like a suitcase with broken latches, she suddenly understood what she wanted to do with her life. Found the key to the barrels of her lock.

Perry, kind as always, introduced himself, and seeing her gleeful interest gave her a tour, explaining who the artists were, what they were trying to do and some of the technical aspects of each work he thought she might grasp. He asked if she drew or painted, and when she replied how much she loved it, said he would be delighted to see some of her work sometime, never thinking she would be back in twenty minutes with a bulging carrier bag of pads and individual sheets. But how he was glad she did. He was amazed at the proficiency, the sheer raw talent, and called Theodore downstairs.

The measured, slow thuds came back to her ears. Descending gracefully but with an air of foreboding, step by step, heeling down until the figure appeared in the doorway, the grey mane of shoulder length hair brushing the top of the frame. The tweed jacket and its yellow flounce of pocket handkerchief, the cobalt cravat and white, thin check shirt, brown corduroy trousers and oxford shoes were not clothes but a better skin. She thought his face and features so sharp as to have been designed solely for speed, to cut through the air with the least resistance, the swept hair blown back in the forward rush. And he had the fiercest eyes she’d ever seen, the gaze a palpable heat washing over her, past and around, over the room, returning finally to rest on her and the bundle of art.

Erect and aloof with all, Teddy loathed children, ghastly swollen-headed creatures with little teeth, but, inexplicably, took to Cat with a passion. Spending more and more of her time at the gallery with the two men, Mrs McEvoy became concerned at their interest in her daughter. An afternoon invitation to tea in their beautifully decorated sitting room, on the first floor with its French windows and small balcony overlooking the promenade and sea, evaporated all her fears.

Teddy unleashed a torrent of thespian fireworks, his parrot’s ear for accents, impressions and stories, amusing and charming in equal measure while Perry gushed sincerely about her daughter’s talent and the brilliant future which lay in wait.

Some evenings the two men returned the compliment and visited the rest home for the elderly her mother owned, half a mile the other side of the clock tower, performing old show songs on the piano, a little tap and a lot of hamming. Cat marvelled at the reaction of the residents, suddenly bright eyed and becoming young again. The plonking jangle of the tatty upright beneath Teddy’s fingers sent notes back through the years, past the wrinkles and arthritis, the pains and sorrows, hacking through the taffle of dendrite befuddlement, calling into the synaptic fog to bring out the voices once again, reedy and warbling.

They supplied her with quality materials and advice, ladled encouragement, took her to other galleries and major exhibitions, and within a year allowed her a corner in their gallery during an exhibition of local artists. They entered her work in competitions and more often than not she won; her face familiar in the local paper beside the farmers’ market, dog show and In Memoriam, her work becoming collectable. The year before, the local TV even did a short ham-fisted piece on a lazy news day.

However odd, they became a family, Mrs McEvoy considering them better than any father she could hope for Cat, and certainly better than the rat who deserted them.

Hand resting on the smooth, brass swan neck handle of the gallery door, thumb on the worn wobbly latch, Cat stopped and smiled. Through the glass, at the far end she could see Perry alone, half turned away by the small counter, leafing through a pile of catalogues, pen raised, skirting over the pages as if it were reading for him.

She loved that chubby, dark haired little man with the red apple cheeks and chin dimple, giggling eyes as quick to tears at triumph as setback, impeccable as ever in white shirt and pale blue dicky bow, gun barrel elephant cords and grey moccasins. He was engrossed, free hand stroking his bow, but she knew where his mind never loitered far away from these days. Same as hers. Her smile withered. Teddy was dying.

The old man’s curse as he’d called it, of countless nocturnal trips to the toilet, ignored for months despite Perry’s urgings, was soon followed by weight loss, lethargy and a dull ache in his bones. The path through scans, biopsies, and endless bloods and corridors led inevitably to the charmless consultant, and worse room where the grim news was as mundanely delivered as the weather forecast. The cancer had spread from his prostate to his bones, liver and lungs.

There was nothing to be done. Only experimental drugs to prolong the inevitable, with dreadful side effects. Perry had broken down while Teddy remained stoical.

Thank you for your services thus far dear Sawbones, but my cancer and I must decline your kind offer. We bid you good day.

She pushed the door and a mellow upstroke of harp strings turned Perry. His eyebrows shot up in an m.

Oh sweetheart! his eyebrows stretched higher. "Will you look at you!" He dropped the pen and went towards her, arms out as if sleep walking. She was as tall as he was short and they could look each other comfortably in the eye.

You like it? she squealed. "Do you really like it?"

Like it?! No I don’t! I hate it! he laughed. Oh I adore it, I adore it! Spin! Spin!

It’s a mix of Amazonian Indian styles, cuts, you know, she twirled, those pictures of the Suruwaha tribe I showed you. It’s not quite finished yet, the colours I’m going to do North American. Dip dye the tips Navaho and Sioux colours all the way along the edges in pale blue, green and yellow…. maybe some pink.

It’s beautiful! Who cut it? He cupped her shoulders, swaying with his gaze.

The bloke at Figaro’s.

Figaro’s?! Figaro’s! Oh my god, listen at me I sound like an opera!!

Alf, he said.

Nooo! You’re joking! What? Alf Preston!!??

Yeah! No one else’d do it.

Well I never! Dear old Alf Preston. My word! Hidden depths there to be sure. He patted his hair with exaggerated camp. I must remember to pay him a call next time I need a trim. Maybe we have more in common than we realise. What’s your mum think?

Erm, she stalled guiltily, she hasn’t seen it. I’ve not been home yet. She knows I’m having it cut but…. er… just not... quite like this. She winced.

Oh.

Don’t worry. She’ll be fine, she paused, after a day or two, she’ll get over it. She did last time. You’ll see. Anyway, how’s Teddy?

"Not so