Chapter 05. The Yellow Thread

The yellow thread did not come at once.

For several days more the room went on living quietly. Beyond the door there was grey Lira now — with her woolly smell, her short hiss, and her habit of keeping her distance. Inside I still had the blanket, the water, the tray, and the strip of light under the door. Morning lay down on the floor; evening darkened in the gap. The creak of the board by the wall gave warning of footsteps a little before the people themselves appeared. And so, bit by bit, the room stopped being temporary and became mine.

The boy came in more often than the rest. He would sit down on the floor, lean back against the wall, and talk to me in his level, warm voice. Sometimes he told me something long; sometimes he simply sat there. He had already got himself a small set of words of his own:

‘All right, little one? How’s it going?’ ‘We’ll sit a bit longer.’ ‘Don’t get lonely.’

Then one day a familiar rumble came up from below. First the whole house seemed to straighten itself. Then the staircase answered under heavy steps. Then the door opened.

The man was back.

He had brought the cold in on his coat, and the smell of iron, and of something faintly bitter, and that big, far-off thing that always comes in with anyone who has been outside the house. A yellow thread dangled from his hand. At the end of it — a small blue thing. A scrap of paper trailed after it.

He crouched down. The thread swung.

The blue thing drew a small arc in the air. The paper rustled. Again. And again. The world gathered itself at once into a single point — there, where that little yellow tail was trembling. I lifted my head. My ears went up. My paws drew themselves in under my belly.

‘Go on, little one. Catch it.’

I did not come straight over. I sniffed. The paper brushed my whiskers. The blue thing swung towards my nose, then went off sideways. So I struck at it with a paw. It bounced away.

That was where it all began.

The thread went to and fro. The paper crackled. The blue thing would vanish at the very instant I had all but got it. I jumped once. Then again. The jump was not wasted. It was noticed. His hand did not dart about; it seemed to be listening to me and answering in kind.

At some point a small flat shiny thing appeared in his hand — one of those the people are forever looking into. He held it so that it was looking at me, and it gave a short click. I had time to decide that it was playing as well, only with its eyes. But then it rang thinly, right there in his hand. A woman’s voice came up from below:

‘Sasha, your phone’s ringing!’

He was already looking into the shiny thing.

‘Yeah. Hello,’ he said, not downstairs but into it. Phone. So this thing is called a phone. It takes people’s eyes away from them, clicks quietly, and then suddenly starts speaking to them in their own voices. I remembered that.

Then the thread went along the floor again. I got up on my hind legs, reached, hung a second in the air with the whole kitten of me, and flopped down on the blanket with the feeling of an honest piece of luck.

‘There. Not bad.’

I sat down, breathing hard, and looked straight at him. He was looking at me too. Then he stroked me, briefly, as though setting a warm seal on me. I answered with a paw. The yellow thread lay between us on the blanket — no longer prey, but something we shared.

He got up and left the thread hanging in the room — so that I could come to it later on my own, whenever I liked. The scrap of paper went on swaying a long while, rustling without his hand now, quieter, in a way of its own.

I still had no name. But sometimes the paper would stir of itself in a draught and rustle in the dark — and I would lift my head at the sound, as though I were being called.