Animal Alchemy

By Mark Roland Langdale

Jag, short for Jaguar, was orphaned when her environmentalist parents died in the jungle saving animals’ lives. Although she was put into a care home, she ran away two years to live on the streets where she was adopted into a street gang who have now become her family. Danny, the trickster and street magician and Tiger, whose animal instincts run close to the surface, and a few others are all animal activists at heart. Although they go one night to an animal sanctuary in the country to tag the walls with graffiti, Jag gets caught in an enclosure. However, it ends up for the best as the keeper takes a shine to her and offers a part time job when she hears Jag’s affinity with the Jaguar spirit.

With Jag working at the sanctuary, her gang start spending more time there to see the great Cat Man Do perform his animal magic – until one day when a tiger is let out its cage. And that is only the beginning as a villainous Cat Man begins to stalk the streets with two pet panthers out for blood, seemingly appearing and disappearing at will. With newspapers reporting maulings and deaths and Sergeant Dickins not sure what’s going on, the kids are intrigued by the reports. After witnessing an attack, the kids get sucked into this mysterious Cat Man’s idea of a theatrical villain performance – but even if they have animal instincts and spirits with them and even if the big cats are swaying to their side, should they run before they too turn prey?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803139265

Mark Roland Langdale

Mark Roland Langdale has had a varied life and career. He has worked with children and teenagers, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in an effort to fundraise, travelled down the Amazon and is a longtime member of Greenpeace. Mark likes to write modern day fairytales with an undercurrent of real life issues such as mental health, environment, dyslexia which he suffers from himself, and autism.

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Contents

Prologue

The Architects of Alchemy

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Epilogue

Epilogue 2

Epilogue 3

A World Away…

Other Titles by Mark Roland Langdale

Prologue

The Animal Alchemists

When the animal alchemists created the bigs cats – the tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard, cheetah, panther and puma – they were at the very height of their powers. Unfortunately, the power of the Animal Alchemists waned like an old moon watching high up in the gods as their beautiful creations also dwindled to the very edge of extinction. Perhaps the only way to find a true sanctuary for these maginificent creatures would be to trek through a corridor in time to an animal kingdom, an alternate reality, one not ruled by lion and tiger kings and queens, a reality where they could spread their wings and fly – literally fly, as the big cats sprouted wings, a nice twist in the DNA strand, one the Animal Alchemists wished they had imagined. Alas, for these magnificent and fantastical beasts there is no flight of fancy as they are stuck in the reality of this world, with declining numbers and declining habitats as the jungle is replaced by a vast, urban, concrete jungle in which such creatures are not able to survive.

The Architects of Alchemy

Besides Animal Alchemy, there is another form of alchemy – an architectural one. This alchemy began in earnest in the Victorian era with a collective of architects known as the Order of the Architects of Alchemy. The greatest exponent of this form of alchemy was a man by the name of Joseph Paxton, later to become Sir Joseph Paxton. Paxton’s vision was as clear as crystal: to give London a new glass makeover. The Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853 and Kew Gardens were seen as his best works. At the time, these fantastical glass structures defied belief; some predicted a strong wind would blow them over like a house of cards. Kew Gardens was a miniature rainforest housed in a giant glass hothouse, and the Crystal Palace was a giant glass treasure chest containing the weirdest and most wonderful objects one could ever imagine.

The only Victorian structure to rival the Crystal Palace was James Wyld’s Monster Globe. Considered to be too big to be housed within the Crystal Palace, it found a home in Leicester Square. There were elevated viewing platforms, staircases and walkways so the public could see the giant map of the Earth painted upon the concave walls of the giant globe. It was first thought that the structure, like Kew Gardens and the Crystal Palace, would be made of glass, but in the end it was made of bricks and mortar. The press and the critics called it a monstrosity but the public loved the building and flocked in vast numbers to see a world inside a world. Sir Joseph Paxton had wanted to build a vast glass cathedral-like tunnel ten miles long that would encircle the centre of London, but the money to build this glass wonder was not forthcoming. It seemed that Paxton, like a lot of other big dreamers, had found to his cost that in reality there really was such a thing as a glass ceiling!

If this magnificent towering glass structure had been built in London, one could easily imagine it as a giant magic circle made entirely of glass, and inside that circle a smaller circle, the famed Magic Circle. What could possibly be more imaginative than that? A giant glass pyramid, perhaps one conjured up by a modern-day alchemist, the Italian Renzo Piano. And Renzo Piano wasn’t the only architect who dabbled in alchemy either, for if one gazes across The Glass-scape – that is, the city of London – architectural alchemy will pop up as if out of a giant 3D dot magic book; a giant glass gerkhin and London’s new town hall, which to some people’s eyes resembles a giant glass urn, presumably in which the ashes of Victorian London are kept for future architectural alchemists to use to sprinkle their magic over the city of London. Others reimagine the town hall as Pandora’s Giant Glass Jar, and some even reimagine the building as a jinn’s giant bottle, one that houses a giant jinn who, like all jinns, when commanded would grant the city of London three wishes, three being the magic number.

Now, three Londons running parallel with one another would be a nice wish; the old Victorian London, the modern-day London – an urban jungle, a glass zoo, as some who lived in the metropolis reimagine London – and a tropical London with a steaming rainforest full of exotic creatures, possibly housed under a vast glass dome, one with a sliding roof. But surely God, the architect of everything, wouldn’t allow for one of the greatest natural wonders of the world to have a glass ceiling put upon it. It would be like putting a glass ceiling on all our hopes and dreams. If this ever came to pass, then it really could be said that man was the architect of his own downfall. If the runaway greenhouse effect ever becomes a reality and not just a model on a computer, as the planet becomes a giant hothouse, perhaps the unimaginable will happen.

But for now, the future of London looked bright. In fact, it looked like a giant hall of glass mirrors. And one day in that future, London, the Glass City, would disappear as if by magic. This would not be by dark magic – which would very much be the case if the rainforests of the world disappeared off the face of the planet – for this magical disappearing act would simply be an optical illusion. From a distance, the Glass City would vanish from view.

One day, Architects will have stepped so far through the Looking Glass that they will be building cities of glass on other worlds, possibly even on parallel Earths in the Goldilocks Zone. However, that’s for the future. For the Greenwich Mean Time, we must come back down to earth, and if planet Earth is not the highest form of alchemy imaginable other than the universe itself, then I don’t know what is.

1

Animal Instincts

‘What are you waiting for?’ growled a young man named Danny with an air of menace in his voice. Danny was holding a pair of wire cutters in his hand and looked as if he was thinking of cutting more than the wire fence in front of him.

‘Waiting for you to open the fence so I can climb through, Sir Galahad,’ snarled a girl with a rather unusual name. It was that of a big cat, Jaguar, although she preferred to be called Jag for short.

Tonight Jag’s animal instincts were as close to the surface as they had been for quite some time. She normally kept her animal instincts well hidden, unlike her friend and usual partner-in-crime, Tiger, who let them loose on anyone who got under her skin. Jag found herself wishing her friend had come with her tonight instead of the great ape Danny Chump of the Underworld, or was that Chimp of the Underworld, a poor man’s version of Planet of the Apes? This imaginary film, very much a B-movie, was full of Z-list actors and the real chimps in the film were easily the better actors! But Tiger had a death wish and Jag had no desire to die just yet like some teenager rebel without a clue; she had always considered herself to be a rebel with a cause and she needed to be alive and kicking if she wanted to fight that cause. The cause was animal rights. At times it felt to Jag as if she loved animals more than people, and she knew Tiger felt the same way.

If someone had been witness to this scrap they may have imagined the two feral street kids were not human, but animals fighting over the carcass of a gazelle.

‘You’ll be waiting a long time then, till hell freezes over,’ Danny replied coolly, not moving a muscle as the two teenagers stood in front of a high wire fence outside an animal sanctuary. Danny was thinking that if Jag had not had her long sleek black hair recently cropped at the barbers, he could have used the wire cutters to do the job and saved her some money. The Barber of Seville did not enter the young man’s head for, unlike Jag, Danny was not well read. In fact, he could barely write his own name, or so Tiger and Jag had always imagined.

It turned out that this time the girls had imagined wrongly, for although Danny wasn’t a big reader like Jag, he did read on the subject of magic, illusions and conjuring tricks. Danny was the trickster of the street gang and a street magician of some note, at least in his own mind. He even had his own street magic act, The Great Dandinni, an act he performed on Abracadabra Street. To Danny, this street was like a magic carpet, one he rolled out and then rolled up after every performance. And Danny often had to disappear as if by magic when the police came into sight with a view to moving him on for practising his street magic without a licence.

‘You should probably follow me in,’ Jag hissed, dismissing the comment she knew was coming.

‘Scaredy-cat,’ smirked Danny like the cat that got the cream.

‘No, I just thought you’d like a nice warm place to stay overnight with your brothers and sisters. I hear there are a few monkeys kept in cages in the animal sanctuary,’ Jag shot back, baring both her teeth and claws.

‘You’re the one who believes you were a jaguar in a previous life,’ Danny retorted, not letting it go without a fight.

A bright light shining in their direction suddenly caused Danny and Jag to freeze like rabbits caught in a car’s headlights. The security sensors lit up the dark like space-like laser beams in an art gallery.

If this was a magical space it was a dark one, and some unseen hand was practising black magic of the close-up variety, or so Jag imagined. Danny, a street magician and animal activist, did not believe this space was in any way, shape or form a magical space, for there was very little space for the animals that were kept here to move around. Or at least, this was the information they had received from an unknown source on the dark net. Wild animals should remain in the wild – it was that cut and dried as far as Danny was concerned, no matter what wildlife parks or zoos said to the contrary about breeding or protecting endangered species, or about zoos being a place of learning to educate and inspire the public to become involved in animal welfare themselves.

Jag, on the other hand, did not think things were quite so black and white. There were many grey areas in life, in the urban jungles and the tropical jungles on Planet Earth. A black and white jungle, that’s hard to imagine. But not for Jag, it wasn’t; she could easily imagine a ghost jungle, the negative of a colour photograph of a tropical jungle. Which, due to deforestation sometime in the not-too-distant future, would be all that was left of the world’s rainforests.

Jag wondered if in fact she was doing the right thing by breaking into the animal sanctuary with the intention of spray painting a message on the walls of the building: ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! ALL CREATURES SHOULD BE FREE! Under this scrawl Jag would create her tag, a giant jaguar – or at least, the outline of a jaguar, as if she had replicated a chalk drawing around a dead body at a crime scene. Except this was a crime scene, with a twist. The twist was that the body was a dead jaguar killed by hunters for its elaborately patterned fur coat. The crime scene was Planet Earth as more and more wild cats were being hunted to the brink of extinction, hunted by man. Perhaps one day the roles would be reversed, but by this time Jag imagined she would have passed on to the spirit world. Later still she would be reborn, reincarnated, and in her next life she would return to Earth as a jaguar. The Jaguar Spirit would see to that, so Jag believed.

‘Run!’ growled Danny. He dropped the wire cutters as if they had suddenly become red hot as he ran towards the woods as fast as his legs would carry him, not looking back.

For a moment that was anything but magical, Jag really was like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights before her animal instincts also kicked in. But instead of running away she scampered into the pound as if she felt this was where she belonged. A few minutes later, the security lights were switched off. It appeared Jag hadn’t been seen. In truth, the night watchman had fallen asleep while watching a nature documentary on big cats. It had also helped Jag’s cause that the full moon had gone behind a cloud as she stole into the compound. A nice trick by the Moon Magician, transforming a full moon into a black new moon in the blinking of an eye, exactly like magic, natural magic.

‘Synchronicity, you gotta love it!’ Jag purred under her breath, feeling she may have been a small part of this trick, for the big only worked in conjunction with the small. That was how life, the universe and everything in between worked: quantum magic.

It seemed Jag’s luck Lady Luck was changing. She looked up to a star named Jaguar, or Jag for short. To Jag, the star looked like a giant cat’s eye in the sky, one she felt that would – as long as she didn’t lose sight of it – keep her safe from harm. Jag’s grandmother had bought the star for her seventh birthday. She still had the certificate to prove the star belonged to her and nobody else. The Jaguar Spirit may have something to say about that, given that it was said by the ancients that this spirit was able to move between worlds, being of the Earth and the stars. It appeared Jag had the same ability as the Jaguar Spirit as she pictured herself flying over the animal sanctuary as if she had wings, an out-of-body experience with a twist – the twist being that her body was that of a jaguar.

Jag’s grandmother Hester died a week after her seventh birthday. Every time she looked up at the star, her thoughts turned to her grandmother. Jag had been brought up by her grandparents after her parents were killed in the jungle when their Jeep overturned in a mudslide. Her parents were environmentalists and died while trying to save the rainforest and the jaguars that lived there – or at least, that was the story Jag told the children in the care home she lived in after her grandparents passed.

Was the story true? Well, if Jag believed it was true then it was true. As they say in quantum circles where dark magic is often practised, ‘We make our own reality’. Fooling the mind – the darkest and most dangerous trick in the book!

Jag had run away from the children’s home two years ago and had lived on the streets ever since, joining a street gang, which had become her adopted family.

Jag winked at her star, the Jaguar Star. It seemed to her that tonight all her stars were aligned. The Jaguar Star winked back three times. Well, after all, three was the magic number, and despite the danger she knew she was in, tonight seemed a most magical night and one she knew that, no matter how old she got, she would never forget. Jag had a strong feeling. Her animal instinct was that something truly magical was about to happen. What, how and why, she had no earthly clue. But then again, it wasn’t the Earth that controlled life; it was the universe. The very fabric of the universe was working overtime as usual. Call it serendipity, synchronicity or simply the guiding hand of the creator. Jag felt this with every fibre of her being. The feeling was so strong that she wondered if she was about to go through some kind of metamorphosis from human to wild animal. The full moon had reappeared once more but Jag did not imagine she was a werewolf or a she-wolf. Her spirit was one hundred per cent jaguar. Jag had wondered if in fact Danny was a vampire, for he had a vampiric streak as long as the black streaks in his bleached orange hair. This bad hair day had been Danny’s idea of a joke, his attempt to look like a human tiger. According to Tiger, he looked more like a baby orangutan who’d climbed up a chimney full of soot.

Danny’s nickname was The Dodger, after the Artful Dodger in the musical Oliver, and if anybody made a good Victorian street urchin it was Danny. The vampiric bit came when Danny was outed as a meat-eater, a carnivore, when Tiger and Jag caught him in McDonald’s eating a burger, a quarter pounder. The others who made up this street gang, Troy, Isaac, Tiger and Jag, were vegetarians or vegans – not an easy thing to be when you’re living on the street, when some days you’re just happy to eat. So far, none of the gang had turned to cannibalism to survive like some tribes in the Amazon were said to have done. As the urban jungle was getting greener, thanks to the greener members on the London Borough Council and the Mayor of London, soon the street kids, like the dinosaurs and many other creatures on the planet, could become herbivores, able to live on leaves, shrubs and plants. If you were hungry, you could visit Kew Gardens and help yourself to whatever was on the menu, to exotic plants that tasted even better than fried insects.

Jag imagined her guardian angel, her grandmother, was watching over her right now, as was the Jaguar Spirit. Leo the Lion was King of the Night Jungle, the one Jag imagined lay in the mazy star fields of the Milky Way. Now Leo had competition. The two big cats glared at one another from a safe distance, reaching out their giant paws as if in a fight that would never take place, for the distance between these two star cats was immense. Jag had often imagined herself riding across the bejewelled, black velvet night on the back of the jaguar in a race with Leo the Lion, Pegasus the Winged Horse and Monoceros the Unicorn. Everybody needs to escape the real world from time to time, and what better escape than the starscape in the heavens above? For it really was a different world; many different worlds, in fact.

Jag lowered her eyes from the heavens to concentrate on earthly matters, for all she had to do was spray the walls of the animal sanctuary with spray paint and leave. The plan had never been to let the wild cats loose. That would be highly irresponsible, although if Danny had his way that would be the plan.

Jag wasn’t her real name, it was one she had chosen for herself like Tiger, another member of the street gang. They were all into animal rights and saving the planet and generally using the walls of London as a giant gallery for their graffiti art. If the teenage rebel tribe were not creating art or creating trouble for the authorities, they were free climbing and free running in the concrete jungle that was the city of London. Often the kids would record their stunts and upload it to their website, all using stolen mobile phones. So the police didn’t hunt them down and throw them in the clink, they wore hoodies or masks, the sort seen during the coronavirus pandemic of a few years earlier. It was almost as if they were modern day superheroes, although the street kids saw themselves more as anti-heroes than heroes. They were freedom fighters and as such, loved the freedom being on the streets gave them. They hated being caged in, whatever form that cage came in. Glass cages were all the rage in London; high-rise, high-priced flats, glass towers where the citizens of London could prowl around like caged tigers.

Jag unzipped her small backpack, took out a can of black spray paint, switched on the headlamp on her hat and went to work. Ten minutes later her work was done. She felt satisfied. It was one of her best pieces to date. She stood back to admire her work, a miniature work of art. ‘Purrrrfect,’ Jag purred as she took out her mobile and took a quick snap for posterity, one she intended to upload to Instagram later. Due to the faster-than-the-speed-of-light lifestyle and the nature of the web, no message, however important, was viewed for more than a microsecond. Posterity wasn’t what it used to be. News was yesterday’s news the same day it was made; people’s attention spans were as short as that of a mayfly. If only people had the ability of a dragonfly, Mothers Nature’s Time Warper, for that minature work of living art, with its 3D magical eyes, has the ability to slow time down, even stop it, as it puts its prey under the microscope.

Jag’s ears began to twitch, although the night was as still as the objects in a monochrome photograph. It appeared her cat senses were working overtime. A split second later, she heard a noise. ‘Cool for cats, no drama. Just a wild animal, probably an owl or a badger or, more likely, the wild boy Danny scrambling out of a bush, spooked by a fox,’ hissed Jag under her breath. That was, until the noise came again, this time louder than the first time. Her blood ran cold, for she realised it was the sound of boots on gravel and, worse still, the sound was getting louder and louder to the point that whoever was wearing the boots must come within sight at any moment. Of course, the sound could be a wild animal, a big cat in an even bigger cat tray. Black humour, it was what had kept Jag sane in an insane world.

With her animal instincts working overtime, Jag darted across the compound towards a large building that looked like a stable. She unbolted the door, snuck inside and closed the door as quietly as she was able to. She lay down upon the floor in the foetus position, too frightened to move, too frightened to leave. Jag settled down and waited for the man to go away. She yawned. She was tired. It had been a long day travelling down from London in a beat-up old van that Danny had stolen. The van was so old it could have entered the London to Brighton Automobile Race. None of the gang thought it would be missed. In truth, Danny probably did the owners a favour by saving them from driving it to the nearest scrapyard.

‘Come on, Jag, wake your ideas up.’ Jag heard a whining voice in her head. It was Danny.

She replied caustically to the voice. ‘At least I have ideas to wake up big ideas, whereas your ideas normally lead us to the nearest police cell. Don’t pass go, don’t collect £200… unless it’s a £200 fine! Who rattled your cage?’ Jag growled, trying to delete the image of Danny from her mind’s eye.

‘Tiger,’ came back the disembodied voice. In her mind, Jag pictured Tiger biting Danny’s head off, literally!

‘A tiger rattling a human in a cage… Shouldn’t that be the other way around?’ Jag replied, sounding more than a little confused.

‘Animal magic, my dear Jag, animal magic,’ spat Danny as Jag’s subconscious finally woke her up to the fact that she was no longer in the waking world but in the dream world, having fallen asleep in the animal sanctuary. Jag’s subconscious should have then turned the dream on its head, turning it into a nightmare. Wake up to yourself, Jag. You’ve fallen asleep in a place where there are wild animals and some of them might want a midnight snack!

The next thing Jag knew, the dream took another twist. Thankfully it wasn’t Danny twisting the knife in. She found she was riding a giant tiger, a flying tiger that took her over the city of London. The dream turned into a nightmare not the first time as sleeping on the street was often a nightmare a waking nightmare as either a car horn or a police officer woke you up and moved you on. It seemed the warning voice in Jag’s head, her subconscious, had finally made it through to her conscious mind. Jag started to turn over in her sleep as if trying to wake herself up.

As Jag rolled over, she felt something underneath her, something sharp. Then she heard the tiny cry of what sounded like a cat – no, it was a kitten, definitely a kitten. Jag switched the lamp on her hat on and was amazed to see, staring back at her, a jaguar – thankfully not fully grown, just a cub. Jag knew enough about wild cats, and jaguars in particular, to know a jaguar when she saw one. This shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did, for the animal sanctuary kept wild cats, but seeing the cub up so close really was an amazing experience. Jag started to panic. Where was the cub’s mother? The cub was so tiny, no bigger than a soft toy, and still wobbly on its legs, like Bambi on ice. She was sure the mother had just given birth to it. All mothers were protective and if the mother was close by, Jag’s life was in danger. The mother would not see she was a friend, only a foe.

The torch on the top of her helmet afforded her very little light, only a narrow beam, so the rest of the room was dark. The cub’s mother could be right behind her or right in front of her. Every shadowy object in the room, from a cardboard box to a litter trap, became a wild cat ready to pounce on her and eat her alive.

Her own fear took her even more by surprise. There must be a light switch somewhere in the stable. She fumbled around, trying to be as quiet as she could. Normally she was comfortable in her own skin, but now she felt she may jump out of her skin at any moment. Leopard skin was often seen on the catwalks of London, New York and Paris, and on the catwalks of urban jungles – or at least, the leopard pattern was. Tiger once quipped that if the leopard had patterned the design of its own skin it would be rolling in money, for leopard print tights, trousers and tops never went out of style. Personally, Tiger thought it looked cheap. She preferred her own natural skin tone, and at night often went skinny-dipping in Hyde Park or in the lidos in London.

Although Jag was alone, she wasn’t. She had spent so much time with her friends on the street over the last few years, they were always with her inside her head. Sometimes she wished they weren’t; or rather, sometimes she wished Danny wasn’t in her head. That was dark magic Danny, the mind reader, the mind invader.

Thankfully Jag’s prayers were answered. It seemed she was right: the Jaguar Spirit from the rainforest in South America was looking down upon her, making sure she came to no harm – at least, from any wild cat. ‘Oh my god,’ Jag exclaimed, for in the corner of the room she saw a large cat, a jaguar that she presumed was the mother of the cub, and it was clear that she had died giving birth to the cub. Jag couldn’t see any other cubs, unless the mother was resting her body on top of them. Jag’s immediate response was to move the mother over in case she was suffocating her own cubs. Jag held back for a moment, wondering if perhaps she was wrong and the mother wasn’t dead after all but simply tired from the exertion of giving birth. The jaguar may simply be sleeping. If so, it would be official that this was a nightmare, a waking nightmare.

Jag looked and listened for any sign of life. The cat’s chest was still. She was sure the poor animal had passed, probably on to the great cat jungle in the sky. Jag knelt down and gently stroked the dead animal as a mark of respect. She’d read somewhere that Indigenous Amazonian tribe members did this when big cats passed away. Jag kissed the jaguar on the crown of its head before carefully lifting its stomach to see if there were any more cubs underneath its belly. There were not.

The cub staggered towards where Jag was kneeling, and it was then that she realised the cub thought she was her mother. Jag had heard many stories where animals had lost or been taken away from their mothers. They seemed lost until they latched onto either another animal, not always of its own species, or a human being. If the mother had died giving birth to the animal and the first thing it saw was a teenage girl, then in their eyes they were their natural mother, and not their surrogate mother as seen through human eyes. If this teenage girl was a cat person and one named after a wild cat, then even better!

Jag carefully picked up the cub and cradled it in her arms, singing to it as if trying to get it back to sleep, like a real mother would do naturally if her baby couldn’t sleep. Jag could not believe she had any motherly instinct in her. Perhaps this was her animal instinct. She believed that in another lifetime past lives she was a jaguar in the rainforest of South America.

Another noise startled Jag. The door of the enclosure swung wide open and she was confronted with two angry faces, one of a middle-aged woman and the other of the night watchman.

This time Jag did not run. She was frozen to the spot, not so much in fear but more in shock. She had been caught red-handed. It must have looked as if she was stealing the cub and, worse still, perhaps as if she was responsible for death of the jaguar.

2

Spirit of the Jaguar

‘What on earth are you doing in here? No, don’t tell me, I think I know by the graffiti tag on the wall. Another animal rights campaigner trying to right a wrong, except in this case the only person in the wrong is you, young lady!’ exclaimed the middle-aged woman named Sam. In the half light, her straggly grey hair tied back in a ponytail made her look as if she was a Native American. ‘Teenage rebels without a clue!’

Jag wanted to reply that she was not a rebel without a clue, she was a rebel with a cause, the cause being to stand up for animal rights – and her rights as well, as she believed that one day, her transformation would lead to her becoming an animal, a wild cat, a jaguar. By the angry look upon the woman’s face, she felt she was facing a wild cat, and as such could not be sure how this particular wild cat would react. All animals had personalities of their own; they were not carbon copies any more than humans were. Perhaps this wild cat would show her claws or, worse, attack and leave her fighting for her life? When cornered, wild animals are always at their most dangerous and often come out fighting, especially wild cats.

Jag was about to go into her Oliver Twist routine, ‘Please, missus, I ain’t done nobody no harm, I’m just a poor street urchin looking for a warm place to stay the night to get out of the cold.’ But she thought better of it as she was pretty sure this would cut no ice with this she-wolf who clearly wanted to protect her cubs from anybody who tried to endanger them.

‘Shall I call the police?’ the night watchman growled, taking a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket as he too now turned into a wild animal, a grizzly bear in his case. Grizzly bears in this neck of the woods, what next? Bigfoot Sasquatch in the urban jungle St John’s Wood in London Town?

‘No Steve, that won’t be necessary. Go back in the warm and make us all a nice cup of herbal tea. I think we all need to cool down,’ Sam replied, trying to calm herself down, the girl, the grizzly bear with a sore head, and the situation before it got out of control.

‘I— I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause any harm. I heard a noise and snuck in here. The next moment I knew I was asleep and the next, awake. I rolled over to find this little creature by my side and her mother dead,’ Jag said, fearing the worst – that she might find herself locked in a cage of another kind, a police cell, if the woman decided to change her mind and later press charges.

‘I knew I should have slept close by in case the mother gave birth during the night, but I was so tired and I had to finish some paperwork. I meant to check but like you, fell asleep,’ Sam said with a tone of regret in her voice. She sighed as she walked over to the dead jaguar and knelt down by its side. She then proceeded to stroke the jaguar before kissing it on the crown of the head as Jag had done a few moments earlier.

‘I’ve already sent her on her way,’ Jag blurted out, not thinking.

‘I’m sorry,’ snapped Sam, turning back into a she-wolf right before Jag’s eyes.

‘She’s resting in the lap of the Jaguar Spirit now,’ Jag added softly as she too started to well up.

‘You know about the Jaguar Spirit and the ritual performed when a jaguar dies in the wild?’ said Sam, sounding surprised.

‘There is nothing I don’t know about the jaguar. My name’s Jag. Some even call me Jaguar, but I prefer Jag,’ Jag said, as if that explained everything, and in a way it did. Or at least, to Sam it appeared to.

‘It seems she’s taken a shine to you. Would you like to give her a name?’

‘Can I?’ cried Jag as if she had not heard the question properly or couldn’t believe either her human or her animal senses.

‘Well, as you appear to be her mother – or at least, in the jaguar’s eyes – then it seems only appropriate,’ Sam said, smiling warmly as the scowl disappeared as if by magic. Animal magic, perhaps. ‘Oh, and my name’s Samantha, Sam to my friends, and my dear, I have a strong feeling – call it animal instinct – that you and I are going to be the best of friends,’ Sam added as her smile widened further, a smile that changed her appearance entirely in Jag’s eyes. Whereas before she had looked as cold and grey as a statue, now she looked warm. It was as if Sam really was a she-wolf and Jag was her cub, and one she was about to welcome into her woman cave with open arms.

‘I will call her Cleopatra, Cleo for short. No, no, she’s definitely not a Cleo. What about Catherine after Catherine the Great, Cat for short?’ said Jag, thinking out loud.

‘Both good choices, although Cleopatra was well-known for her love of cats. According to historical records, Cleopatra thought she was reincarnated from a cat. Then there’s the story of the sphinx who no longer has a nose. I hope, my dear, you are not going to cut off your nose to spite your face as some teenagers seem to love doing on a regular basis. I am going to offer you the chance of a lifetime. Come and work for me with the big cats. It seems to me you were born to work with them, whether in the wild or within a wild cat sanctuary like the one I run here in the country,’ Samantha said, hoping Jag didn’t mind her straight-talking approach.

Jag was finding all of this hard to take in and wondered if in fact she was still asleep and dreaming. The dream had got even more surreal when the owner of the animal sanctuary, upon seeing how much Jag loved animals and wild cats in particular, offered her a job. Jag had broken into the sanctuary and scrawled graffiti over one of the walls with her tag and a slogan clearly from an animal rights group. She had imagined she had been taking a walk on the wild side and was at risk of putting one of her nine cat lives in danger. In truth, like her friend Tiger, Jag had already lost several of her nine lives, both in this life and in other past lives in another incarnation as a jaguar, as she and Tiger both believed.

‘Of course, if you don’t want to be tamed and want to continue to roam wild and free, I completely understand,’ Sam said, trying not to sound too pushy as she offered Jag a cup of herbal tea.

‘I’d love to come and work here, although with my nose, I wouldn’t mind cutting it off to save my face,’ purred Jag like the cat that got the cream. Jag touched her nose – which was nowhere near as bad as she made out – a little self-consciously. It was Jag’s small, squashed nose and her emerald green eyes that made her appear so cat-like, and the way she moved was so feline that one could easily imagine Jag as a cat in a previous existence.

‘I really don’t have any qualifications. I think society have me filed under the heading of Problem Child,’ Jag growled, trying not to let the wild cat imprisoned in her mind’s cage escape. Jag had left school without any qualifications, for she did not complete her final year, having run away from the children’s home she was living in at the time.

‘Qualifications are highly overrated in my book. Life experience and having a natural aptitude and passion for something, on the other hand, are very important. Besides, you have all the right qualifications for the position – after all, you are a jaguar, are you not? And as for a problem child, you’re looking at one as well. I was a wild child and I can assure you, it never stopped me finding creative solutions to the problems we all face in the modern world. Problem children often see the world differently to others and are remarkably good problem solvers. If everybody thought the same the world would stay the same, and it needs to change more now than it has ever needed to change if we are going to save Earth and all the creatures that live on it,’ said Sam. Her smile returned so she too looked like the cat that got the cream. Sam didn’t see why one couldn’t smile simply because they were an animal activist or a member of an environmental group. Everybody responded better to a smiling face and a person with a positive mental attitude. It opened doors that otherwise would be closed or slammed in your face.

Wildlife corridors connect habitats from one place to another. Khata corridor connects Bardia National Park in Nepal with Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary in India. Tigers use the corridor to move between the two protected areas, Tiger had once told Jag. Jag had replied that it was a pity there weren’t protected corridors in the backstreets of London where street people could walk from one place to the other in safety.

Sam hoped the cream she imagined Jag licking from a saucer did not now turn sour. She also hoped Jag didn’t disappear like the Cheshire Cat, taking her smile with it, for it was clear that Sam was looking for a chance to connect with a woman, a younger woman. Sam had never had children but had always wanted a daughter, one who shared her passion for animals.

Jag sensed this connection between her and the woman named Sam. It was as if they had known each other in a previous incarnation, as wild cats whose spirits had returned to this earth in human form. The animalistic fear that had risen up in her when she was first confronted by Sam had dissipated like a cloud over the urban jungle on a hot summer’s day. Jag sensed Sam had experienced the exact same emotion. It gave Jag a warm feeling inside to have found someone who spoke her language, a lost language in some quarters of the urban jungle. The language known as ‘Animal’.

It appeared that Jag had completely forgotten why she was here and that her friend Danny was holed up in the woods nearby – or with his head down a rabbit hole, more likely, knowing Danny. Danny wasn’t her friend, he was just a street kid who thought he was tougher than he was. Like animals though, there was safety in numbers, so to be part of a street gang who looked after one another made sense. It also made sense to take this opportunity, one she imagined was gifted to her by the Jaguar Spirit. What the Jaguar Spirit was doing on the outskirts of London she had no idea, other than it had been sent to watch over her in her hour of need. Perhaps the Jaguar Spirit was as concerned as she was about how wild cats were being treated in captivity. No doubt the Jaguar Spirit had first visited London Zoo to see how the wild cats were being cared for before its flying visit to the wild cat sanctuary.

3

Spirit of the Tiger

‘Where’s Jag?’ growled Tiger, confronting Danny head-on as he opened the door of the van and clambered in looking as if he had been on an SAS training camp, his face and clothes covered in mud. For a second, Danny imagined Tiger as a real tiger, that he’d just put his head in the tiger’s mouth and the tiger was so wild it was about to bite it off, chew it up and spit it out. It seemed Danny had unwittingly been reading Jag’s mind and, in all honesty, for a poor reader to Danny’s mind it was a hard read.

In the wild, tigers greet one another with a soft ‘prusten’ sound, which sounds something like the snorting of a horse. Tigers speak their own kind of language, a language Tiger referred to as Tiger Talk. Later, as she grew older, she changed this to Tiger Speak, feeling Tiger Talk was somewhat childish. And she felt that Tiger Speak, the language of tigers, was more likely to be passed by the New Zoological Society as a real animal language when it came to the next annual meeting of this well-respected society.

The language of Tiger included growling, roaring, moaning, hissing, grunting, snarling, chuffing and gasping, each signifying different emotions. Tiger had taken the time to learn ‘Tiger’ and often communicated her feelings as if she were a tiger in its natural habitat, that of the wild. Tiger was certainly wild. Danny could clearly see the wild look in her eyes, which seemed to illuminate like cat’s eyes on a dark country road at night.

‘Where’s Jag? In the nick by now. We were rumbled by security. I told her to leg it but she didn’t, must have been frozen to the spot with fear. I told you she was a lightweight. She’s all talk, that one,’ grunted Danny, acting like a Neanderthal in Tiger’s eyes.

‘All talk? I think you’re talking about yourself, Danny, you’re good at that,’ roared Tiger, getting her claws out. ‘Why didn’t you go back and get Jag?’

‘The same reason you’re not running to Jag’s aid now, Tiger. You’re down to the last of your nine cat lives and I’m down to the last of my Get Out of Jail Free cards,’ Danny retorted irritably.

There was another young man in the van besides Danny, a clean-cut boy with a hero’s name, Troy. Troy didn’t say much. He was the strong, silent type, a hero to the others for he was a few years older. Tiger was expecting Troy to step in like he often did to break up any potential infighting, but this time he didn’t. He could see Tiger was more than capable of fighting her own battles. Through Troy’s eyes, it seemed that Danny was getting a bit of a mauling. He wondered if there would be anything left of him after Tiger ate him – not for breakfast, as the old expression went, for it was late, but for supper.

‘Please tell me you didn’t just leave Jag there out of spite. You’ve never liked Jag. She’s a good kid, her heart’s in the right place. I’m not sure you’ve even got a heart, unless it’s a black heart. You could give the Grinch and the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz a run for their collective money. She better not have come to any harm. Some of those security guards are thugs, ex-army bouncer types. No brain, all brawn!’ snarled Tiger.

‘Cool down, Tigger. You’re like a cat on a hot tin roof. Jag hasn’t got a record. She’ll be released by the morning at worst. She’ll get a small fine, a slap on the wrist; she won’t end up in juvie like the rest of us have at one time or another,’ Danny replied, slicking his greasy hair back with his hand as if he was imagining he was James Dean or the young Marlon Brando in the movie The Wild One. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best, one of those blessings in disguise. She was never one of us. We live in the real world, she lives in a fantasy, imagines London isn’t a concrete jungle but a tropical rainforest. Mind you, with the amount of trees they’ve planted in inner London, in summer it is like a tropical forest minus the wild animals. That’s if we exclude you and Jag, Tiger, naturally. And the buildings are like a modern Kew Gardens, full ofplants and trees with greenery draped over the outside of the buildings,’ spat Danny, running off at the mouth, leaving his brain in neutral.

‘I— I hope you’re right, Danny,’ stuttered a young man named Isaac, the last member of the street gang. ‘Gang’ wasn’t really the right description for these young street kids; ‘group’ was a much better description, even though at times they acted as if they were a part of a gang.

‘I— I hope— hope I’m wrong,’ Danny stuttered, mimicking Isaac, a boy who suffered from Asperger’s but was the brightest of the gang, and Danny