Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Evan was out with a well-driller, and Sally was with the vet about some of the sheep, so Tony and Julian took Meena around the Manor, with me wandering along behind. Tony showed her the ground-floor room in the east wing that he’d been turning into a dance studio—he even had a bar on one wall, and he was putting up every piece of mirror glass he could find, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He was sanding the floor, too, on weekends, over and over, till it was practically transparent. So then, of course, Julian had to show Meena his rock collection, and his pressed-leaf collection, and his sugar-packet collection. And the stuffed gorilla in my room, but he never once mentioned that it was really his. Julian. I still can’t get him to take it back.

At dinner the boys were both talking to Meena at the same time, and Evan and Sally were asking her the same school questions Mr. and Mrs. Chari had been asking me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her in peace until we went to bed in my room. And then it took me half an hour to talk Meena into taking my bed and letting me get into Evan’s old sleeping bag on the floor. Indians keep wanting to treat you like their guest, even when they’re yours. They can wear you out .

But then, finally , we got down to business. We lay there and talked about our families, and people at school, and I told Meena about Jake and Marta, and she told me about Lalitha, who was her best friend in Madras, and we compared books and movies and songs, and who had worse periods, and who hated Mr. Winship more—he taught Organic Chemistry—and why the monsoons are so important, and why I was going to take her to meet an old man they call Poet O in Central Park. Today it’s just a few years later, and already I can’t remember why, when you’re thirteen, all that stuff absolutely has to be talked about in the dark, when you’re supposed to be asleep. But it does.

Meena told me about Karthik, her white mouse, and I talked about Mister Cat—or I did until my throat started to tighten up again. So Meena changed the subject without seeming to change the subject, which is something she’s very good at. She said, “But what a palace he’ll be coming home to, your Mister Cat. So much space, so many shadowy corners to investigate, so many interesting new sounds… I’d love to be a cat in this house.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Other people have cockroaches—we’ve got gnomes, or boggarts, or something.” I told her about the voices in my bathroom, which I hadn’t told anyone, and about the rooms Julian wouldn’t go into, and the things the carpenters and electricians had said. The longer I went on, the crazier it sounded, but Meena listened without laughing or interrupting once.

When I got through, she said, “Well, Julian was right—you definitely do have a haunted house. Dollars to doughnuts.” (Meena’s crazy about American slang, and sticks it in every chance she gets.) “In India we’ve got haunted houses all over the place—we’ve got haunted apartments, haunted gardens, even haunted garages. Our old house in Madras had a poltergeist, one of those spirits that breaks things, throws everything around. I saw her a few times as I was growing up.”

I’m glad it was dark, so maybe she didn’t see my mouth hanging open. “You saw it? Her? The poltergeist?”

“Oh, yes,” Meena said. “Not very often, though. A little girl, about Julian’s age, with a scar down one side of her poor face. Like a burn scar. Maybe that’s why she was a poltergeist, who knows? We felt so sorry for her.”

“What did you do? Do Indians have, like—I don’t know—like with a priest? An exorcism?”

“Yes. In a way.” Meena half laughed, but there was a little catch in it, too. “But Jenny, she lived there, she’d lived in our house longer than we’d done. What could we do?” Then she giggled outright and said, “Besides, she scared away a lot of relatives I couldn’t stand. And she left my room alone, except once or twice. I think sometimes she almost liked me.”

I thought about that for a while, and finally I said, “Well, whatever’s in our house, it doesn’t like us all that much. Not the way those nasty little voices sounded. I’d rather have a real flat-out ghost, if we’re going to have anything. I’d rather even have a pooka.”

Meena wanted to know what a pooka was, so I told her what Evan had told us, and about boggarts and the Wild Hunt. She said, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have both—boggarts and ghosts. I bet you do. It’s just the sort of house that would.”

I said thanks, I really needed to hear that, and Meena laughed a real laugh this time. “When you grow up with old houses, the way I did, you grow up with ghosts, too. They’re people, they’re always drawn to places where people have been living for a long time. You don’t get ghosts in shopping malls.”

“Great,” I said. “I hope the ghosts at least run off the boggarts, that’d be something.”

We didn’t say anything for a while, and I was starting to think Meena was asleep. Then I felt her hand reaching down from the bed, bumping around to find mine and taking hold of it. She said, “When you go to get him. Your Mister Cat. I could come with you, if you like.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just squeezed her hand and mumbled, “Sure, I guess, okay.” I think we fell asleep holding hands like that, but I don’t remember.

It was a beautiful day when we drove to Goshawk Farm Cattery for the last time. You have to be careful with English springs—you can’t ever turn your back on them, because they’ll drop thirty degrees and start thundering and lightning while you’re taking your shirt off. I know for a fact that the poet who wrote “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there” was living in Italy at the time.

But this one early April day stayed warm and clear all the way to Dorchester. There were pink and white blossoms on the trees, and daffodils everywhere, and new lambs in the fields with big red numbers painted on their sides. People were out on tractors, plowing and harrowing, and the car’s front windows were partway open, so in the backseat I kept smelling raw turned earth from every direction. Not that I was paying any attention to it, or the lambs, or to Sally asking Meena more school questions in the front. I just hunched up around the pain in my stomach and tried not to think about how I used to imagine the way it would be, bringing Mister Cat home at last.

When we got to Dorchester, I was wishing Meena wasn’t with us, because then I could have just waited while Sally went in and picked up Mister Cat. But they were all happy and excited, so there wasn’t any choice. I still remember how heavy my legs felt, and how long it seemed to take to climb out of the car.

We went in, and Sally told us, “I’ll handle the paperwork, you two go get the big guy.” I was going to argue about it—he’s my cat, I’ve handled every damn miserable bit of this all the way, I’ll be the one who finishes it—but Meena grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the cat runs. So I couldn’t stall even a minute longer.

Okay. This is hard, this is what I mean about trying to write how another person felt at one particular moment, six years ago. I may not be that same person anymore, but I’ll never forget how it was for her, having to run with her new friend to find her best friend and bring him home, even though she already knew he wasn’t going to speak to her or even look at her again. And she had to go through with it, there wasn’t any way out, and the cat runs kept getting closer. And there was Martin, the nice guy from the airport, unlocking Mister Cat’s run, and smiling at her, saying, “This is my favorite part of the job.” And throwing the gate wide.