St Paul's Cathedral (a fragment; a shaggy cat story)

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL (a fragment; a shaggy cat story)

In his youth Chris fronted a bar blues band. He was tall and blond and charismatic. Phil was the lead guitarist, more intense, kept his head down as he played. Mike, Chris’s brother, played bass and like the rest of the band favoured black and brown pullovers. Mike hated summer when you were supposed to wear bright colours. Russ was the drummer, and kept himself a little apart from the others. Of course there was another bar blues band starting up in those days. In fact they were myriad but that one, the Rolling Stones, had a particularly long shelf life.

Chris and Phil loved the blues, all that Chicago stuff that British boys were learning about in the early 60s, and some from Louisiana as well like Slim Harpo. Those cats could make your skin tingle and shrivel like a chicken’s as Ry Cooder, slide guitarist supreme, The Stones’ favourite, so elegantly put it. Guitars and harps (that’s what we called harmonicas back then) screaming through the night like the Devil on a Friday. Mike never quite took to the twelve-bar blues, preferring the rolling style of nascent country rock to its more staccato delivery.

Cats they were called back then, these cool dudes who stood on tiny stages playing “CC Rider” and “Trouble In Mind”; the guitarist never moved and the ash on his ciggie was longer than the ciggie. They looked up to the men who had brought this stuff to the shires of old England- Alexis Korner from somewhere deep in Europe, a man carrying the night on his shoulders through smoky coffee bars, and Cyril Davies whose moaning harmonica shriek that opened “Country Line Special” could evoke Beelzebub, and bring Robert Johnson along for company.

In the darkening days of October and November these boys played on, dirty overcoats thrown over their pullovers. Phil’s was borrowed from his old man who had put it over his car bonnet every night for several winters in the days before they could afford a garage. They sipped pints of Guinness on half-lit stages.

But nothing lasts forever- “it can’t” the Beach Boys sang. Phil went briefly to university, Chris and Mike to art school. They were both talented painters. “Mick and Uncle Charlie” honouring the Dartford boys was one of his first. Russ disappeared into the increasing abyss of hippie drug taking. The others stayed truer to their past. Mike shuddered at the thought of tie-dye shirts.

They all had an eye for the girls, and over the years girls would come between them. Phil liked them aged 22, and there was not much latitude there. He had at 15, at 22 itself, and he showed no signs of changing his tastes as he hit 40. Chris attracted the daughters of famous men, the first a foreign Communist, the next a very British atheist. Mike liked them quirky and they liked him.

Cats they were called, but until Chris settled down with his second wife he had never had a real cat. Or rather the cat had him. There was something clearly feral about the beast and it followed Chris around until he and Eleri took him in. Cat (as he was called for want of something better) stopped his wandering but never forgot his litany of screeches and moans and hisses. He could arch his back as if for the Devil to tuck him under his arm, or was he reaching back to when he was familiar to Hecate as she sacrificed black lambs at desolate and windy crossroads.

Cat in those days, before it lost its primal energy, was a scraggy little bundle of bone and sinew, slipping through its own loose skin as you tried to take hold of it. One day it freaked, cascading up and down the living room in search of some chimera. Chris shifted in his chair and Cat set off again, weaving its way through arch and furniture, avoiding Waterford and Wedgwood. Agility given to neither man nor dog, its floppy, seemingly sloppy body could insinuate itself around every obstacle and into every gap. Damage there was none. It was Eleri who found the answer. As Chris relaxed in his armchair his wristwatch emitted a slightly flattened circular light that danced before him on the magnolia wall of the arch. Cat was a mess and melange of atavistic impulse, and as a kitten waif could never resist chasing that light, hunting for it round every chair leg and cushion.

Chris never forsook his music though he became a listener only. He cottoned on to a new generation of bluesman more his age than the Wolf or Buddy Guy or Harpo. Taj Mahal particularly fascinated him. He’d found him through Cooder.

Woke up this morning, baby, felt round for my shoes

Ah Honey you know about that baby

I got them old, got them old walkin’ blues.

Oh the way Taj Mahal sang that. Down and dirty, strutting and pleading at the same time. Nothing had ever affected Cat like Taj Mahal. It became a banshee itself, as if it had known this music all its life and was now reunited in some dark blood rite. Chris watched transfixed.

“Come on darling”, said Eleri, “You gotta get ready for the fancy dress party”

“I am ready”.

“You can’t just wear your old black pullover”.

Chris looked at himself in the mirror. He couldn’t see Cat. But himself he still cast an image, his shock of blond hair and his black pullover.

“I’m a pint of Guinness”, he said.

He replaced Taj on top of the Garrard deck he still used for his music and let him drop again into the bowels of the deep red Ultra box.

Woke up this morning.

He looked at Cat. Tense as ever, though Chris preferred to see him as exultant.

Looked round for my shoes

I got them celebrated… walkin’ blues.

“Why did he call himself after a building?” No answer came.

“Cat” he said “From now on I’m going to call you St Paul’s Cathedral”.