OUR TEAM MEMBER AND AUTHOR, DAWN TREACHER, SHARES CHAPTER ONE FROM HER NOVEL, 'THE NINTH LIFE OF NORRIS'
- Eva Bielby
- May 29
- 3 min read
THE NINTH LIFE OF NORRIS
Chapter 1
October 2000
Norris' ninth life came as rather a shock. Instead of two legs he had four. Having previously suffered a distinct lack of hair, now he was covered in orange fur. It seemed only minutes earlier he had drawn his last breath, lying in his bed in a terrace just off Dagenham High Street. Now beside him sat two kittens, their heads almost as big as their bodies, their bewilderment as great as his own. If it weren't for the smell of cat pee and sour milk Norris could have believed he was dreaming. No such luck.
The kitchenette was cluttered with the remnants of Elsie's supper, burnt baked beans in the milk pan, bread and butter on a plate and a stack of mugs harbouring what claimed to be tea. An exhausted tortoise shell cat lounged beside the cupboard as Elsie snored in a chair, grey hairs escaping the plait that trailed over her shoulder and down her back. As his siblings guzzled from their mother's teat, Norris sighed.
Life as a cat was going to take some getting used to. Confined to a shabby bungalow and frequently assaulted by his energetic siblings, Norris took to sitting on the window sill. It looked out over a garden in which dandelions and thistles thrived. His mother, if you could call her that, soon tired of her responsibilities, leaving Elsie to feed them, the rattle in her chest growing louder by the day. Milk Norris could tolerate, though it reminded him of school days he would rather forget. The packets of slimy cat food were quite another thing, especially for a vegetarian, or at least that was what Norris had been, back in Dagenham before old age got the better of him. There his garden was filled with regimental rows of carrots and onions, where the birds knew better than to linger and weeds had no place.
Norris wondered what he had done in his previous life to deserve this. What he didn't realise was that this life was a reward for the eight that had come before it, lives in which Norris endured and at times conquered, the hurdles of human life. But even if Norris had realised this, it is doubtful he would have considered what was to come as a reward of any kind at all.
Elsie raised the kittens, haphazardly it may be argued, but with a love as tender as any mother could give her child. Norris loved the warmth of her lap as she slept in her chair, her bony fingers stroking his fur. He snuggled closer as her dreams turned to nightmares, so vivid they made her cry out for the husband who had never come home. Norris rubbed his head against her hand until her cries were once again smothered by sleep. For Norris too had seen terrors, smelt death as he held a gun, fighting in a war that robbed men, like Elsie's husband, of a future. But of course, Norris couldn't tell her.
It was the morning Elsie didn't wake that the new terror began with the unanswered banging at the door and the faces that peered at him through the window as his siblings searched for food. When at last the door burst open, Norris didn't get a chance to say goodbye to Elsie as he was snatched by the scruff of the neck and dropped into a cat carrier that smelt of pee and plastic. He barely saw the flash of lights from the ambulance before being bundled into the back of a van. Unlike his siblings, Norris crouched in the darkness, silent in the knowledge he would never see Elsie again.
Unloaded at the rescue centre, Norris soon saw his siblings disappear one by one. He couldn't say he was sorry, he had never liked them. If they had memories of what had come before, they never shared them. If anything they shunned him as if he didn't quite belong there. Now he sat alone in a concrete cell with white washed walls, a litter tray in one corner and a heap of unappetising goo in a bowl. Of those people that walked past his pen, few lingered to pet him or take any interest at all. What put them off he never did understand, though it might have been the scowl that had taken root on his face. If the rescue centre offered new beginnings, Norris could not see them. All he saw was the hut that had become his home for more months than he cared to remember and the fellow prisoners who sat waiting out the end of the war.
COMING SOON: On Sunday 1st June, yoga teacher and author Maria Oliver, shares some of her work from her yoga books 'Blue Penguins, Bells and Open Skies' and 'Red Kites, Apples and Blood Cells'.
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