The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (3 page)

“Well … friend, I’d like to have a whole tongue, please.”

The piglet man danced his head side to side like his neck had popped out of place as he picked up a metal grabbing device, lifted the tongue from its well-lit resting place, and slid it into a paper bag. He flicked the bag over itself, tying the end of it. He then repeated the process for the sirloins and asked JoEl for £19.91.

“£19.91?” JoEl repeated.
 

The piglet nodded his head and blinked his eyes and said, “Yes, please.”

JoEl opened his long dark overcoat, revealing, for a second, his overalls — slim and form-fitted to his skin for efficient travel and adorned with the tools for whatever the job demanded. He reached into a pocket for his per diems. He’d given himself just enough human money to get by comfortably on his work trip. He handed the piglet a crisp £20 note — printed the month before on Gamma Nebulous. The piglet held the note up to the light coming in from the window. Once satisfied he handed the bags of meat to JoEl and said something about a good day.

Without leaving the butchers, JoEl reached his hand into the bag, pulled out one of the sirloins and held it in front of his face. The slab of flesh felt wet and firm in his hand. The animal that the flesh had been ripped from was a strong animal. Strong indeed. He saw the red run down to his fingers before biting down on the raw meat, ripping a chunk out of it.
 

The piglet man watched with a loose jaw as JoEl gorged on the juicy raw flesh. He swallowed down the bite and smiled at the piglet man.

“Thanks again,” JoEl said, showing his teeth in their reddened glory, the juices all around his mouth and down his chin. “You have a good day now.”
 

Before he left he took another bite of the meat and stepped out onto the street.
 

His tablet computer beeped and sent a shock of nervous excitement through his body. It was a notification, a signal, that only meant one thing. It was time to go to work.
 

Luna Gajos

“Tomorrow, when you’re in, can you make sure you give the floor a good mop?” Blaise said. “When I unlocked this morning I could see so many lines of dirt in on the floor I thought I was in a helicopter, looking down at a freshly ploughed field.”
 

“What?” Luna said. “My mopping is fantastic. You’re lying.”

Blaise looked at her with the big wide eyes of shame, his caramel skin already showing some wear and tear. His eyes had lost some of their vim and vigour. It was only six months ago that he was showing off about his Twitter followers and spouting nonsense about middle-management. And now look at him. The restaurant manager of CrunchyBites in the King’s Cross station. Doing the job that he heckled Luna for doing only a few months prior.

“Well, I don’t bloody know, do I Luna?” he said. “Maybe you were having an off day.”

Blaise twisted a key in the wall and the steel shutters of the café screeched from the ceiling to the floor. She waited her turn to reply, to remind Blaise that it wasn’t
that
long ago she was teaching
him
how to clean the coffee machine, ring staff discount through the register, deal with a customer complaint. And now here he—

The metal crashed as the shutters rooted themselves into a groove in the floor. Blaise removed the key and looked back to Luna.

“You do realise that I was the one who showed you how to use the mop in the first place,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He spun the ring of keys around his finger. The ring of responsibility that Luna used to look after. “All that was so long ago now … how long was it?”

“Six months,” Luna said.

“Oh yeah. So, you tell me then, what happened?”

Luna thought about the alien, the cat, the parasite, the fact that she’d played an integral part in saving the world. She thought about the brother who was pulled apart by the beast. She thought about his lifeless face, similar to the butchered pig-heads you see on dinner platters, apples in their gobs. She hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Even now, looking into the café through the shutters, she could see the table where Moomamu was attacked. She could see the spot where Gary laid, bleeding out, missing his paw after jumping to protect his companion.
 

“Nothing, I guess,” she said. “I don’t know what happened.”
 

Blaise wished her a good night and scootered past her towards the entrance to the underground.
 

As Luna stood there, looking into the café at the spot where Moomamu had fought the killer, her eyes drifted to the floor she’d just mopped. Crap, she thought as she saw a dirty footprint smack bang in the middle of the floor.

***

The car grunted as Luna yanked the handbrake on. She placed the steering lock over the wheel, piled an empty crisp packet and bottle of orange juice into a plastic shopping bag and braced herself for what she was about to walk into. Her new flatmate — Gary.

Every time she’d been home she’d found new claw marks in her curtains and sofa. Puddles of yellow around the litter tray. No, not in the litter tray. Next to it. She’d find him lying in the sun — his face as sour as an old grape. He’d been lying in the window, watching birds fly by, licking his lips.

The only words leaving his rough tongue came in twos — “Gary’s hungry” or “Gary’s tired”. It was like he’d devolved from the sentient ginger wonder to something else. A stray moggy, depressed, lonely. It didn’t matter what Luna did for him, he wasn’t the ball of stoic calm he’d been when she met him. He was an old knife, ruined by what he’d had to cut down, blunted, flattened, in need of sharpening.

She dragged the bags of shopping — milk, bread, cat-food and so on — to the building, holding the bags outwards so as to not catch her feet. She’d have to do the same again the next week. The Sisyphean task of the weekly food-shop.

With the aching muscles of a mountain goat she walked past whatever was happening in the flat, dropped the bags down in the kitchen, and collapsed on the living room sofa, burying her face in the faux-fur cushion.

It smelled like piss.

She’d washed the cushion so many times its deep red colour was now pink, but still, Gary’s piss had permeated the cushion thoroughly and completely. His urine was now
one
with the stitching.

She lifted her head just enough to move the pillow away when she saw him staring at her.
 

His pink nose, scribbled with scars. His knife-sliced pupils. The fur around his neck standing on edge in wet peaks — he’d cleaned himself. And behind him, swaying side to side, his chunky tail slapping the floor on each side of his butt.
 

“Hello Gary,” she said.

“Gary has news,” he said.
 

She sat up, placing her legs to his side. She looked around, but there were no fresh claw marks in the sides of the furniture or in the wallpaper. She looked over by his litter tray. Mostly dry on the sides and all around, and in the tray she could see the darker patches, where the litter had broken down, clumped together. He’d been using it. She wasn’t sure she knew what a cat looked like when it smiled, but this was the closest thing to it.

When she’d first brought him back to the flat, after the parasite had gone, the plan was to wait for the next mission. She’d let him stay until he had to move on to the next project — adventure, quest, whatever — but here he was, still chewing and scratching and pissing everywhere.

“Gary has new mission,” he said as he purred for the first time since coming to Luna’s flat. She didn’t think he could even do it. Physically. She thought it was more of a non-intelligent cat thing to do, but here he was, his little heart shaking in his ribcage with excitement. “Luna must come with Gary.”

“Me?” she said, realising she’d not put the milk in the fridge yet. “What do you mean? I thought you were going to get on with your life when the new mission came along? Wasn’t that the idea?”

Gary jumped onto the sofa and placed his front paw on her leg. She could feel his purr working its way through his paw and into her knee. She realised he was doing it on purpose. He was soothing her.
 

“It’s too important for Gary to do alone. Gary needs quick-fire smarts of Tall One, like last time.”
 

She brushed his paw off, stood up, and went to put away the shopping. It was a studio flat. Kitchen, living room, bedroom. All in one. Not enough for one person. Never mind a person and a cat. A couple of steps to the kitchenette and she opened the fridge. The smell of the old cat food was rank. It was stinking up her human food.

Gary trotted along after her and pushed his body against her leg. As he glided past, his tail clung to the outside of her calf.
 

“Well,” she said, and threw the old tin into the bin. It crashed at the bottom with a damp thud. “Tell me more about the mission. Where is it?”

“Down from here. Kingston,” he said.
 

“Oh, I see. You need my car now right? First it was the bed, food, shelter, and now it’s the car.” Images of her father flashed into her mind. Oh, how he hated cats.

“They don’t really love you,” he’d always said. “They use you for your resources, like parasites.”

Back then she’d defended them. They did love you. They just showed it in different ways.

“Give me a dog any day of the week,” her father would say, and that would be the end of all arguments on the subject. Nothing could top that.

“Tall One is Gary’s friend?” Gary asked as he walked over to his bowl, bent down and scooped up a bit of dried kibble into his mouth.
 

“I thought so,” she said. “But maybe not.”

“Tall One won’t help?”

Gary’s eyes widened, moistened. The whiskers dropped. Luna sighed.

“I never said that,” she said.

Luna unscrewed the green plastic lid from a bottle of semi-skimmed milk and took a swig from it. A fine line of white rested on the hairs on her top lip. “Promise me we’ll be back in time for me to get a few hours’ sleep before work tomorrow,” she said as she took another swig of watered-down milk. “Tell me how we’re going to do to save the world this time.”

“We’re not saving the world,” Gary said. “We’re saving a child.”

Moomamu The Thinker

It smelled sticky. This new room of his.

It wasn’t so long ago that Moomamu The Thinker had awoken in a small box of a room with all the fresh eyes and senses of a newly-born human larva, crying about going back to where he came from, snivelling like fresh spawn.

Some time had passed since then. He couldn’t tell how long, but his beard had grown down to the top of his chest and the muscles and fat that made up his human body had diminished somewhat.

For all of time he’d lived in the stars. He was a floating ball of consciousness watching the universe unfold around him, but after a parasite had latched itself onto a neighbouring planet, he was pulled from his place in the stars, and shoved into this human vessel. He’d awoken in the fleshy body, surrounded by the smell of urine and cat fur. And now, further on in time, he’d awoken in an even smaller room. The only light source was a fine slice along the bottom of the cell door. It was the sort of non-existent light that had him regularly touching his face and arms to remind himself that they were still there.

How did he get here?

This was a thought that often bounced around his mind.

He’d saved the Earth from the parasite. The beastly thing with blood-stained teeth that tried to eat him. They burned it alive. Him, Luna, Gary, and the broken human. They set the beast alight and sent it back into the portal, killing it, saving Earth. And what reward does a being get for saving an entire race?

Locked within a box.
 

His belly wobbled with hunger. It hadn’t stopped wobbling since he’d first arrived on this little planet of cats — wherever it was. It wasn’t a planet of his domain. Some other Thinker must be sitting in space watching this unfold. If there were any Thinkers left, that is.
 

Moomamu had many questions. Mostly about getting home.

The cats on this planet were unlike the ones of Earth. They were similar in furriness and colour, and they were full of claws and teeth, but these ones were more brutish. Some of them walked on all fours as expected, but most stood upright on their hind legs, wore clothing made from weathered skin, and carried all sorts of nonsense within their claws — weapons, tools, satchels. They were still an analogue species, yet to discover any digital technology … or cappuccino.

He’d been taken to a keep where he currently resided. A giant stone monstrosity with peaks that reached the skies and rooms buried deep into the ground.
 

He sighed and touched his cold cheek. It felt tacky to his fingertips. He placed his hand on the wall to his side.

He knew every inch of the cell. He could walk around the place with his eyes closed and only stub his toe or bang his face occasionally. The cold stone of the floor was damp, and the bed, if it could be called a bed, was a rolled-up collection of rags in the corner. He still had his human clothes — the fabric leg cover-uppers, the white body fabric and the black neck adornment— but he imagined they weren’t much to look at now.
 

The longer he was in the human body, the more he picked up from his human brain. The human names of the clothing were always on the tip of his tongue.

The length of fabric tied around his neck had become frayed where one of the cats had slashed at him, and the bottoms of his leg cover-uppers, no wait, the trousers, were sodden with dirt and wet.
 

He never thought he’d say it but he missed the excretion machines of Earth. He didn’t like the idea of excreting at all, but if he was going to do it, he’d prefer the feel of the cold porcelain throne against his buttocks. In this cell he’d been left with a tray full of pebbles, similar to the one Gary had used in his old room.
 

At least they changed the pebbles on a daily basis when they brought him the food — cooked animal flesh of a sort skewered on wooden sticks. He had no way to tell what animal gave its flesh, but he was sure a bit of Mexican/Indian spice mix wouldn’t go amiss. He tried to suggest such a thing to one of the guards but was met with a bashing of the end of the guard’s wooden thump-stick to his stomach.