The book club

"We have a question submitted to us!" Millicent Pede waved the slip of paper in the air like a flag.  She was standing on one of the small plastic chairs that the library put out for the children, and it was slowly deforming under her weight.  She wobbled gently.
"A question?" Suzie Fort adjusted her glasses, which were perched on the tip of her nose.  They barely clung now to the very tip, which was turned up very slightly and both lumpy and decidedly not straight higher up, a legacy of two decades playing rugby.  "Why would anyone ask questions of a book club?  We're meeting in a library, for pity's sake.  What moron didn't just ask the librarian?"
"Be nice!"  Millicent glared at Suzie, and Suzie tried to glare back, but realised that she'd adjusted her glasses to the point where she was seeing double.  To try and save face she took them off and started polishing the lenses on her lace cuff.  "Now ladies, I'm sure you're all dying to hear what the question is –"
"Harrumph," said Dr. Philbert, carefully pronouncing each letter in what he fondly imagined was a real word instead of an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of someone clearing a clogged throat.
"You don't count," said Millicent.  The chair beneath her sighed and deformed until she was effectively stood on the floor again.  She tutted and stepped off the chair, which very slowly tried to pull itself back together.
"Ten quid says it's dead," whispered Dr. Philbert to Martia, the group's newest member.  She was a single mum of three and considered the book club to be her one opportunity to meet real people and have adult conversations every week.
"Fucking shagged," she whispered back, a touch of relish in her tone from using words she forbade around her children.  Dr. Philbert looked a little startled.
"The question, ladies," she said, pausing for effect.  The mangled chair farted a little as it tried to right itself, and Martia giggled.  "The question is: In which book can one find the character Arbutternot, and what is its species?"
"Do you mean Arbuthnot?" said Suzie, drawing her words out.  Her eyes were unfocused, and not just because of her glasses this time, and her fingers were twitching slightly as she thought.  "I seem to recall that there was a Duke Arbuthnot in Tis pity she's so poor."
"Was that a Selena Nightwich book?" asked Dr. Philbert. "I don't recall the character, but I'm sure I remember the book.  Was that the one with the bed of roses and the thirty-page seduction scene?"
"Yes," said Suzie, reddening slightly.
"Oh yes, I remember that.  That took all evening to get through, very tedious.  And just wrong, really.  Nightwich has no clue how to write a seduction scene, if I'd ever tried that one my wife when she was still aliv–"
"Well why didn't you?" Martia said.  They'd all heard all of Dr. Philbert's story about his dead wife, who had apparantly been the British answer to Mother Theresa when she wasn't confined to her sick-bed with gangrene.
"Because she's have been mortified!" said Dr. Philbert, his eyes opening wide and his eyebrows beetling around his brow in his excitement.  "My god, the very notion of buying a rabbit for her – and that's without letting the pet shop know what the intention is–"
"Not that kind of rabbit," said Suzie quickly, looking down at the floor.
"What?"
"Look," said Millicent, her voice cutting over a discussion that seemed destined to embarrass somebody.  "We have a question, and it doesn't sound like we've answered it yet."
"What's the question again?" asked Martia.  "I mean, what's the fucking question again?"
Millicent eyed her with a beady eye, but said nothing about her choice of vocabulary.  "The question," she said, brandishing the paper in front of her, is... is...."
"Is what?" asked Martia, just as Suzie said, "Stop messing about Mill!"
"The paper's changed," said Millicent, peering at it.  "I can't read this."
"Look at the cat," said Dr. Philbert, pointing at a sleek white cat that was standing in front of the nearby wall.  "Where did that come from?"
"Oh let me see," said Suzie, holding her hand out for the paper.
"It's a cat," said Martia, sounding unimpressed.  "I had one for Christmas once."
The cat attempted to walk forward, and head-butted the wall.
"Cats are for life, not just Christmas," said Dr. Philbert.
"These aren't words, Mill," said Suzie peering at the paper.  "Where's the one you read out the first time?"
The cat bumped its head against the wall again.
"It died on Boxing Day," said Martia.  "Cancer, the vet said."
"Oh," said Dr. Philbert, a little taken aback.
"They've changed all the signs too," said Millicent looking around.  "I can't read anything in here today!"
As the book club looked around, and slowly realised that they'd all forgotten how to read, the cat walked into the wall again, this time passing straight through and disappearing.

The cat that walked into walls (II)

"It just says Arbutternot," said Mrs. Coldwell.  She had picked the piece of paper up from the nice young man at the reception desk on the way in, and had been puzzling over it ever since.  The library allowed the knitting circle to use one of their reading rooms because they were a nice, quiet, tidy group who paid the small monthly subscription in advance and could be relied upon to quell rowdy teenagers if the noise became too loud.  "I mean, what does that even mean?"
"Is it a type of margarine?" asked Hettie, deliberately pronouncing margarine with a hard g.  Every ignored that, as they'd already each sat through a lecture on how the substance was derived from margaric acid and it hadn't changed their pronunciation of it at all.  "It sounds like an advertisement to me."
"I've not heard of it if it is," said Mrs. Coldwell.  There was doubt in her tone and, as she was the expert rescuer of dropped stitches able even to fix a fifty-row mistake, the other ladies all made deferential noises and avoided looking at Hettie.  "But I suppose it could be one of the new ones.  Made from strange oils."
"Oooh," said Duckie, her voice low and thrilled.  "Oooh, I've heard about those strange oils, you know!  Radio three talks about them when they're supposed to be airing Mahler.  They can do bad things to your contraception."
"Perhaps it's something intended to be used with butter," said Daphne, who was willowy, wore oversized glasses and severe pant-suits and only knitted with the largest size needles because her eyesight was bad with or without her glasses.  She tended to produce sweaters for zoo animals and underwear for charities specialising in the obese or grossly deformed.  "A new kind of biscuit, perhaps?"
"Who let the cat in?" said Hettie, pointing by the door.  "I think a margarine is more likely than a biscuit, dear."  She emphasized margarine a little, still hoping that there would be someone daft enough to pick it up.
"What cat?"  Duckie peered under her chair, brushing her gypsy skirt out of the way and exposing her cleavage because her blouse was shockingly low cut.  People averted their eyes, more out of sympathy than prudery.
"I didn't think Radio Three played Mahler any more," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "But wouldn't it be one of those indigestible oils?"
"What, like Castrol?"  Daphne's tone suggested that she felt her biscuit suggestion had deserved a better reception.  "I thought I saw a cat too, though."
"Don't you give Castrol to children?" said Hettie.  "It's a white one, it's gone under the table, I think."
"I hope it's castor oil you give to children," said Mrs. Coldwell, picking the edge of the lace tablecloth up and looking under the table.  The table held a few small plates of crisps and nuts and a large stack of napkins so that salt or grease didn't get on the knitting.  Some weeks they splashed out a little and might have a red velvet cake or some macaroons, but this week they'd been uncertain whether Dolly would return or not.
"Hettie doesn't have children," said Duckie, "do you dear?  You can give them anything you like.  Where's this cat then?"
"There!" Hettie pointed a triumphant finger at the far wall, where the cat was walking slowly.  All eyes in the room fell on it, and a moment of silence descended.  Then the cat walked into the wall and banged its head with an audible thump and sat down heavily.
"Should it do that?" asked Mrs. Coldwell who only liked birds and thus was quite suspicious of cats already.
"Poor thing," said Hettie, not getting up.  "I've got allergies, you know."
"Probably all that margarine," said Daphne with just a smear of malice.  The cat stood up again, and walked once more into the wall, banging its head and mewling in annoyance.
"That can't be right," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "He could the wall there."
"She," said Duckie.  "You can tell on account of...." She tailed off, suddenly aware that everyone was listening intently.  "On account of, anyway," she said, daring them to challenge her.
"No, definitely male," said Mrs. Coldwell.  "There was this ginger tom that kept coming into the garden that was definitely male, and this looks like the same kind of cat to me."
"Oh really!" Daphne was indignant.  "Does it even matter?  Shouldn't we be helping the poor thing?"
The cat stood up again and walked once more into the wall, banging its head a third time.  Somewhere outside the room something chimed, a pleasant silvery sound that made all the women look round.
"Fire alarm?" asked Mrs. Coldwell.
"It's stopped now," said Hettie, a few seconds later.  "Probably not important.  Where's the cat gone?"
Though they looked into and under everything, the cat remained vanished from the room, as easily as it had appeared there.  And when they all sat down again to knit, they discovered that none of them could remember how.

The cat that walked into walls

Some speak of Macavity in hushed tones; others mutter the name Griddlebone and then cross themselves and look over their shoulders.  There are those who fear Mungojerrie, and those who worry intently about Grimalkin.  There are even, amidst the pasta-makers of Firenze, those who mutter the name Garfield and then lock their doors and shrive themselves in darkened rooms.  But no-one mentions Arbutternot, the cat who walked into walls
His name is not forgotten, and in the temples of Bast that survive to this day there are books in which the roll-call of famous and sacred cats is written, and Arbutternot is still listed there.  But no-one dares speak it, for though the others may be dreaded to be listening in, overhearing conversations that were better not discussed in front of cats, there is surety that speaking his name will summon him, pulling him from wherever he is beforehand to wherever the speaker is now.
For the problem with the cat who walked into walls is that the walls always gave way before him.

*

Dolly Hayfield was sixty-six and already fed up with retirement.  She had fourteen separate pensions from her various activities before she retired, and for the first three months she'd entertained herself by organising the various cheques and stipends that they provided and consolidating the various payments to happen on the same day and into the same account, followed by a myriad outflowing into other accounts, through shell companies and eventually into clandestine accounts where they accrued financial interest and sloughed off governmental interest.  Now that her money ticked like clockwork though, she was looking for something else to do

The local library had yielded two students who were unimpressed with her offer of help, possibly because she'd shaken her head at their homework problems and muttered 'Trivial!' not quietly enough under her breath.  When she'd started asking them if they could request harder homework and trying to show them how to solve polylogarithms in their heads they'd approached the head librarian and told him that she was attempting to touch them indecently.  Given that she felt that she'd been trying to reach through sloppily-cooked baked beans to find intelligence, she was inclined to agree and so had had to promise to leave them alone.  The hobbies and activities board only had three notices on it; an announcement for a weekly book-club meeting, a knitting circle, and a yellowed and smudged offer of tuition that she'd assessed as discrete prostitution.

The book-club let her attend two meetings and then asked her to leave.  She protested, and asked to know what the problem was, and was told that they liked their Mills & Boon romance novels and disliked her attempts to introduce foreign-language texts with over eight hundred pages.  The knitting circle had started off in a friendly manner as she'd not known how to knit, and the matrons and mothers had cooed over her, lending her needles and yarn (with a sharp look that she immediately recognised as meaning there will be payment for this) and teaching her the basic stitches.  When she returned the second week with a reasonable quality knit of the Bayeaux Tapestry they'd told her to get out and demanded money for the needles and yarn she'd been lent.

So when the book she'd proposed to the book club arrived and she opened it to learn that there were supposedly temples of Bast hidden around the world from where they migrated after the fall of the worship of her in the Egyptian empire, she decided that hunting down a lost temple might be just what she needed to keep her mind sharp and engaged.

She was still feeling put out about her rejection from the library's clubs though, and as a last act of vengeance she sent a couple of pieces of paper to both meetings, each containing the same word written in large, block capitals.

Arbutternot.