Inner Circle Read Free

patch they could watch and lie in, one at a time, wriggling in remembered pain, resting or just gaping at the shadows of the skymen’s traffic.

    I created the circle and the circle was beginning to create relationships. Leeds could have disrupted my work, I knew the migrants of chaos, I had seen panic and stampede more than once. But Leeds was gone and receding, adrift on his own sea of troubles. And the island had safety zones along the shores, against which no tempest was tall and strong enough to raise its foaming fists.

    Joker had a story to tell. I was glad for Rain’s sake that a cat came into it, or rather couldn’t come out of it, as soon became obvious.

    ‘Once upon the other side of time,’ Joker began, ‘there was a real cat sitting in a blue plastic saucer, and the saucer was floating in a pond, and the pond was filled with milk to the brim. Now the cat couldn’t swim and he couldn’t get at the milk because each time he bent his big head the saucer tilted and the cat was afraid of falling into all that white milk. So he sat and sat in his blue saucer, and licked those few little drops of milk which he had caught on to his whiskers while bending. And then his wet whiskers dried in the sun and became so stiff, long and straight that the cat couldn’t pass through the reeds near the edge of the pond.’

    ‘How do you know that he had whiskers!’ said Sailor.

    ‘Because we both know it from that picture.’ This satisfied Sailor. They must have seen something like this on a micro-screen in the box.

    Rain looked now at Joker now at me with glittering blue smiles in her enormous eyes. She didn’t, of course, understand what the pond, milk or the reeds meant, she had only a hazy idea about swimming and drowning, but the cat sounded familiar and warm which she liked as much as my constant repetition of her name. Blue, too, was the colour which belonged to her. She didn’t care what happened to Joker’s cat in the end. The word cat was all she wanted to hear, and each repetition titillated her smiles. But I was curious to catch the end of the story by its whiskers.

    ‘How did the cat manage to get out, Joked’

    ‘Out of what!’ said Sailor and tugged at my belt.

    ‘Out of the milk pond.’ He was satisfied.

    ‘The cat churned and churned his blue saucer,’ said Joker beaming all over his moon face, ‘until he made a pondful of butter. Then he walked out, leaving a trail of paw-marks on the butter, so we caught him not far from those reeds.’

    ‘Who caught him, Joked?’ Sailor looked worried and Rain’s blue eyes switched off the last smile. September sighed.

    ‘You and me, Sailor, us both.’

    ‘That’s good,’ said Sailor, ‘there is no more cat.’ And he set the circle in slow motion on his own initiative which astonished me.

    ‘We have a big saucer in the middle,’ Joker pointed at our free space, enclosed by our trotting feet. This was his first attempt at discovery and he looked puzzled and much amused.

    ‘This is called saucer. Saucer.’ Repeating the word, September grasped the analogy.

    ‘But it isn’t blue,’ said Rain. I marvelled at her display of intelligence, even though it was achieved at the expense of the cat whom I knew she had suddenly forgotten. My coincidental family was making progress. It seemed to matter less that we were only a minute inner circle surrounded by loops, zigzagging streaks and millions of dithering dots.

    Stationary for a while, with my back to the crowds, I felt a new commotion like the first murmur of a tide. Then followed a splash, voices breaking against a loud voice, riding high against a communal sound barrier.

    ‘Can you see anything, Sailor’ He was the tallest in the circle but he had neither Leeds’s neck nor its agility. With his right hand above his eyes he was endangering the continuity of the circle, then he made a funny face to please Joker, dropped his hand and muttered in his usual drowsy way:

    ‘It’s not