Whispers: An anthology of Fantasy and Horror

THE INGLORIOUS RISE OF THE CATSMEAT MAN by Robin Smyth

Back in nineteen thirty-five it was. Year of the Silver Jubilee. That’s when it all started. Thirty-five was a year of ups and downs for most people. It was a year of ups for dear old King George the Five because he’d lived it up for twenty-five years as Fid. Def. Ind. Imp. and it was a year of downs for my old man, downs and outs you might as well say, as this was the year he fell in the giant mixer at Bleeson’s Cement Works, which annoyed the Bleeson board of directors no end because dad’s blood and bones messed up a ten-ton consignment of cement and cost the Bleeson mob somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety quid gross profit. Not that I missed me old man much mind you (well, old I call him, he was only just forty when he toppled overboard) even though I was only a boy of fourteen at the time of the mishap. Fourteen being the start of crucial times in a boy’s life, or so all the head-shrinkers say. Well, he was a violent, drunken old pig, see, used to thump Huckleberry out of my dear, beautiful mother and she used to cry real tears and sometimes the salt tears were red-running with blood from cuts he inflicted on her pale face. And I hated him.

I love my dear mother, see. Really, I do. Some blokes think you’re a bit mad when you say things like that. Girls do too. Especially girls. Girls get jealous, see. Why, when I tell girls I can actually remember my moment of birth, they look at me all peculiar, like . . . but, it’s true. I do remember! Beautiful it was. Like plunging out of a dark, silent tunnel into the light of life. Love my mother, I do. Yes.

That’s why I was a bit choked when dear mother married again. So quick, too. Only just three months and a day after father’s messy passing. Not that I was worried about the old rats memory, it was just . . . well . . . I liked being alone in the house with dear mother. Liked her just being with me. Near me. Close. Didn’t really want anybody else sort of intruding.

Actually, though, the bloke she married, he wasn’t too bad when I really recollect it. Used to call me “mister” instead of “sonny” or “boy” and during the first months of the marriage he bought me a cricket bat and a Hornby clockwork train set and often he would take me to see a circus or the latest Marx Brothers picture. Mind you, he had bundles of money. Hundreds! So he could afford these luxuries, really. He was in the catsmeat business, see. That’s what he was called: Hollins the Catsmeat Man. Big bloke he was, all red-faced and black, brilliantined hair and he used to wear a brown warehouse overall down to his ankles and a great pair of brown, polished boots and a brown bowler hat with a dent in the middle and round the town he would go with his great tray of meat on his head and a big bell, swinging and clanging at his side and all the time he’d holler: “Ceeeee . . . aaaaaaaaaats meat for seeeee . . . aaaaaale! Beeeeee . . . eeeeeeest ceeeeee . . . aaaaaaaaaats meat!” And people would come from all over to buy his stringy red meat at sixpence a pound for their pet moggies if they was well-off clients and for their own consumption if they weren’t.

I used to work in the shop. Well, it wasn’t a shop really . . . it was the front room of Hollins’s little terraced down Mafeking Avenue, which was where me and dear mother moved soon after she was wed. The house was one of them two up-two down efforts with a lavatory out back and a yard the size of a fourpenny postage stamp. This front room was my bedroom too. I mean, I had to sleep somewhere. Hollins put the tin hat on me sharing with dear mother and him. First of all it was a bit uncomfortable having your bed set up amongst a stack of horseflesh and mutton . . . especially during the summer months when the old bluebottles used to come sucking and buzzing about, crawling all over your face and hands, bloated with butcher’s blood and, cor! The stink was enough to putrefy a graveyard. But I got used to it and I even started a lucrative sideline . . . breeding maggots . . . which I used to sell, a farthing a pokey bag to all the fishing kids around. Always had a cunning business brain, I did . . . suppose it’s that what took me where I am today. Any old rate, to cut the boasting and get back to the originals, Hollins the Catsmeat Man, also being a shrewd nut where business was concerned, told my mum that I would keep the front room rent free, plus grub and six bob a week pin money if she and me would run the “shop.” Dear mother, being as dumb as she was beautiful, agreed, not realizing that foxy old Hollins had a bounden duty to succor and provide for his stepson during his formative, early-work years and, indeed, should not have been seeking profit from the sweat and labor of one so young. Still! That’s life! And every morning come the dawn, I’d thrust up me window and slap a few trays of catsmeat on the sill and by eight, darling mum’d come and join me and whilst Hollins was out on his rounds, swinging his bell and bawling his head off, mum and me’d sit chopping up great chunks of meat into slices and slabs, all friendly and cosy together, like a couple of surgeons in the window, and folks would come from ours and the neighboring streets and buy from us and the men would say that it was a treat to be served their catsmeat by such a lovely gal as my mum . . . and they’d wink and crack little jokes and that . . . and as the months went by, Hollins’s trade perked up no end, but Hollins, instead of getting grateful and being pleased with dear mother and me, grew sullen and churlish and started calling my mum horrible names like: slut! and, tramp! and, Jezebel! . . . and I just couldn’t understand the change in the man. Sort of just like my old feller used to be.

“I wish ’e was dead, Boysie,” she said to me one hot August morning as we sat slicing up a horse steak.

“Dead, mother? Who?”

“Hollins!”

“Why, mother?”

“Cos ’e’s cruel, Boysie!” She lifted one fragile white hand and pushed back the hair which framed her face. “Look! He did that to me last night with a fag.”

I felt a sudden hatred for Hollins as I looked at the four neatly placed burn marks on my mother’s cheek. “Why’d he do that, mother?”

“Cos I wouldn’t kiss him. Well ’e stunk someink terrible, he did. Bin on the rum half the day, he had.” She shivered. “I hate ’im more than I ever hated your father, I’ll tell yer.”

“I’ll kill ’im if you like, mother.” I slashed at the meat. “I’ll slit his throat and chop his head off if you want me to.”

She let the hair flop about her face. She looked at me with a tenderness I’d never before witnessed. “I couldn’t let yer do that, Boysie. That’d be murder. Young as you are, they’d ’ang you for it.”

“Not if they never find out.” I selected a cube of meat and sliced it neatly. “And I know a way that I could get rid of him for sure. No one’d never discover what happened to ’im, and we could have a business and everything. Just me and you, mother. We’d be laughing. We’d be rich.”

There was a silence. I chopped more meat. Slowly. “But if I done him, mother, you’d have to make me a very special promise.”

“And what’s that, darling Boysie?” she cooed.

“You’ve got to promise never no more to go with other blokes. No kissin’ and cuddlin’, like. No more getting married.”

She smiled, leaned forward and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Of course, I promise. There’s only one man I need and that’s you . . . my darling little Boysie.”

I loved it.

Well, mother and me we worked it together. I done Hollins with a specially sharpened carver when he was totaling up his week’s takings in the upstairs back bedroom, then between us mother and me chopped him up into little lumps and mixed best part of him with the catsmeat on the window trays. Went down a treat with the clients, he did and old Mrs. Sollicutts from the buildings, a regular catsmeat eater, came back a-drooling, begging for more of that “real, lovely liver, what was the best she’d ever tasted!”

In fact, before Mr. Hollins was exhausted, mother and me were showered with flattering compliments.

“Delicious, braised!” said Beattie Flower, the barmaid from the Sailors’ Haven.

“Sure and I wouldn’t be after wasting choice cuts like that on my moggie,” enthused Old Man Murphy the Irish street fiddler.

“Nicest meat pie me mummy ever made,” commented little Timmy Brown, the postman’s son.

Course, it didn’t take long for mother and me to realize the potential. If we could get a regular supply of Hollinsmeat . . . well . . . we could bump our prices and make a fortune. Naturally, even though he was a big bloke, Hollins didn’t go far once he was diced up . . . and, I mean, there was a hell of a lot of wastage, like bones, teeth, hair . . . things like that (which we just buried in the yard) and it began to look, by the end of the week, that mother and me were going to be stuck with the regular line in catsmeat.

Any old rate, one night, mother and me were sitting in the cosy little parlor, downstairs back, she combing and brushing her long, golden hair and me just sitting back in this old rocker, gaping at her and marveling at her beauty when all of a sudden she looks at me with those green-gray gorgeous eyes of hers and says:

“Y’know, Boysie, mother’s been thinking.”

“Yes, mother. And what have you been thinking about?”

“Our future, darling.”

She tossed back her head and her soft hair seemed to float about that china-doll face.

“We could make a lot of money, y’know, if we . . . well, darling Boysie . . . if we could obtain another consignment of meat same as Mister Hollins.”

“But Mister Hollins has all run out, mother . . . ’cept for that pound of rump we’ve been saving for ourselves.”

She gave me a very fond smile and my heart went boomp, boomp, boomp! She said: “There are other gentlemen like Mister Hollins.”

I frowned: “You’re not thinking of goin’ a-courting again, are you, mother?”

She pouted her luscious lips: “Mmmmm . . . well . . . sort of!”

A sudden sort of evil-hate feeling came over me. “But you promised, mother,” I said. “No more chaps. No more kissing and cuddling. No more . . .”

“There’ll be no kissing, darling. No cuddling. I’ll just go parading around the bars and backstreets where the big men gather . . . and I’ll entice them with me looks.”

“Entice?” I felt this dark rage welling up. “Sounds dirty. What’s it mean, mother?”

She put her finger to her lips and thought for a moment. “Entice means . . . lure!”

“Lure?”

“Well . . . seduce!”

“Sounds dirty too,” I said. I frowned. “You promised.”

Like the tinkling of bells was her laughter. “Silly, darling Boysie,” she trilled. “Mother loves you. All mother’s suggesting is that she brings,” she wagged a finger, “just brings, mind you, these gentlemen home.”

I whined. “But why, mother?”

“So that you, my darling, can dispatch them, same way as you dispatched the late Mr. Hollins!”

The evil-hatred feeling flew away from me like a passing dark raven. I felt love now. Love for this mother of genius.

“Then we chops ’em up,” I enthused, “just like we chops up the late Mr. Hollins . . . and we sells ’em at twice the normal catsmeat price per pound and its all profit and within a year or so we’ll be livin’ in style . . . wahoooo!”

She came over and draped her arms about me, pulling my face to her springy bosom, till I almost sweetly stifled in that tender flesh. “Oh, my lovely Boysie,” she cooed. “Won’t it be wonderful?”

Illustration by Tim Kirk.

During the next year a brigade of gentlemen passed through our street door. Mr. Hargreaves, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Squires, Mr. McCauley, Mr. Hartwell, Mr. Smith, Mr. O’Grady, Mr. O’Toole, O’Hara and O’Dee. Mr. Wallington-Smith, and D’Arcy-Jones, Mr. Ivor D. Evans from somewhere in Wales . . . by the dozen they came and went. Mother enticing ’em, me dispatching ’em and all of ’em, rich and poor, holy and unholy, young and middle-aged ending up as slices and cubes on the catsmeat trays in the window. It was a marvelous arrangement and with our bank balance swelling like a fat man’s belly, mother and me were seriously considering bigger and classier premises . . . and all the while the fame of our tasty catsmeat spread wider abroad, people coming from as far afield as Hammersmith Broadway and Kings Cross to buy.

Yes, it was all very wonderful for that glorious year, then mother had to go and entice Graham Gunterstone from the lounge bar of a Chelsea pub and all our plans and hopes and dreams from that fateful moment were doomed to be as useless as an overcoat for a Teddy bear.

Graham Gunterstone was young and handsome with blond, wavy hair, blue-blue eyes, a tiny nose, even teeth, an Oxford accent and manners so perfect they made me heave. From the moment he swaggered into our cosy little house, I was itching to lay about me with the meat cleaver . . . to part that pansy hair with a neat, bloody channel across the scalp . . . to slice off that teeny nose, to hack out those sparkling blue eyes, to chop off the tongue and silence forever his irritating whine.

But dear mother had other plans for Graham and in a most devious way, she dissuaded me from slicing him up immediately, saying he needed fattening up. I fell for her lies, as well. Well, if a chap can’t trust his mother, who can he trust? I mean, I didn’t credit for a moment that she would retract her promise to me.

I didn’t know that she would be spending her evenings cuddling and kissing Graham Gunterstone: fondling his ears and stroking his face and telling him how much she loved him. I didn’t know . . . oh, and it makes me sick just thinking of it . . . my beautiful mother! I didn’t know she’d actually go to bed with Graham. But I caught them at it. Up in the back bedroom what she used to share with Mr. Hollins . . . this sacred room which I had never been allowed to enter. It was disgusting.

Here was me worrying me eyeballs out in the front room, running short of catsmeat while my trusted mother is upstairs back, gasping and puffing, giggling and kissing, playing the most unhealthy games with our immediate meat supply.

Well, I got the bang needle, I can tell you. I crept downstairs, picked up the cleaver and tiptoed again to the bedroom door. I could hear dear mother, talking and giggling and that pansy-boy Graham, tittering and breathing heavy and from the general gist of the overheard chatter, I realized that dear mother didn’t love me at all and had broken her faithful promise to me by kissing and cuddling with every bloke she’d enticed since we took over from Mister Hollins. Unable to contain myself longer, I burst into that darkened, filthy room and yelling blue murder I let the pair of ’em have it, fast as I could.

There was a lot of sensation when I gave myself up. You know what papers are. Things like: “Cannibals in S.W.6.” and “Frenzied Ghoul Axes Mother and Lover!” and “The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man!” But, as you will appreciate, that was all paper claptrap. Facts are, mother and me were in business and would have stayed in business if she had kept her word. I was faithful. She wasn’t. Simple as that.

Anyway, I wound up in Broadmoor where I’ve now resided for thirty-four years. There is some talk of letting me out on a short parole . . . sort of to prepare me for my eventual release. Trouble is, as I explained to Sir Georgie Ringle, our chief head-shrinker . . . where would I get employment?

There’s not much call for catsmeat men nowadays.

Is there?