Cat's Crossing - Couverture rigide

Cameron, Bill

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0679311688 ISBN 13 : 9780679311683

Editeur : Random House Canada, 2003

Synopsis

A dark and uproarious satire about media, the modern city and a missing cat, from journalist and award-winning broadcaster Bill Cameron

When Jones, an ordinary house cat, pops through a loose window screen and abandons his wealthy owner’s country home for the sweltering city by the lake, he does not think of the trouble he’ll cause. Ethical-sausage magnate François Will tries to impress his heartbroken wife by announcing a two-million-dollar reward for Jones’s return and throws the city into chaos.

In 17 Division, home to downtown’s seediest neighbourhoods, the promise of millions drives its residents into alleys, trash heaps and garages, searching for the little black cat that can make all their dreams come true. Sergeant Judd, a hard-boiled but deeply troubled cop, sees an escape from his own problems; his favourite stripper-turned-informant is courting disaster with an obsessive dentistry professor and a very large snake, while his senile aunt wastes his children’s badly needed inheritance on a house full of stray cats, driving Judd to desperate measures.

Add to Jones’s pursuers a murderous and ingenious television reporter, and Cat’s Crossing boils over into a rich satire of media manipulation, mass hysteria and the maddening things we do for love.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Bill Cameron is no stranger to media or the city. A former news anchor for Citytv and CBC in Toronto, he has also written and produced numerous documentaries from such places as Rwanda, the West Bank and Nicaragua for CBC-TV’s The Journal. A Gemini Award-winner and playwright, Bill Cameron is now an independent broadcaster and writer living in Toronto. Cat’s Crossing is his first novel.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

One

The black cat woke in the late afternoon and felt something wrong with his right hind leg. There was a new presence, a strange thin layer between the flesh and the muscle. He stretched. This film in his body tightened and loosened and followed him as he moved.

He jumped down onto the big room’s carpet and felt pain in his leg when he landed. It set him slightly off balance. The leg didn’t hurt, but it felt numb and only half connected, as though the muscles had pulled and then gone slack and weak.

The sun had begun to move toward the horizon, and the light in the room was beginning to fade. He had a few minutes before the person came. She’d arrive in a billow of sweet scent, and he’d arch his back and bump against her, waiting for the rattle of dry food into his bowl. She always fed him and stroked him at this time of day, but now he felt an impulse to avoid her, even if that meant missing his food. He wasn’t hungry.

There was a loose screen in the window at the top of the landing. He had noticed it a few weeks ago and marked it with the scent from the side of his mouth. He moved into the hall and up the stairs. The presence in his haunch was constant. He sat on the smooth wood floor of the hallway and stared at the glowing window and then gathered himself and jumped up onto the sill, nudged the screen aside and squeezed onto the ledge.

The outside world was endless. He was used to the bounce of sound off the hard walls and the slur of voices from the floor below, but here in the open air the noises came clearly: below a sweep of water on grass, voices and the hammering of metal, the scrape of claws against bark and a rubbing of leaves, and smudges of noise from above, a faint pulse of wings. He felt dizzy. He knew contained life, the spaces inside the house. The longest distance he remembered was the hallway that ran along the second floor. Now he was in an enormous nothing-filled quarter-dome, the wall at his back, the ground running far underneath him away to the distant trees. He was frightened by the size of the empty air. From inside the house he could sometimes hear bird calls through the glass, and he’d sit and listen and growl, but those sounds were tiny and this place was rumpled and alive with wind, with thin shifting smells, and with the faint sounds of creatures breathing and moving on and below the surface. The air swept over him and against him.

His bad leg pulsed. He sensed something far away, even farther than the forest, something so distant he couldn’t settle on its exact direction, but he knew what it was. There was a tree limb that ended about three feet from the window and the healing would be somewhere beyond that, in the direction the wind was coming from, far off beside some water. It would be a plant, maybe some kind of grass. He would know it when he reached it. He felt a moment of weariness. It was very far away, but the signal was very clear, unmistakable, reliable.

The black cat jumped, slipped, clung, swayed and worked his way along the limb to the trunk of the tree. He saw the ground far below and stopped, feeling the distance and the possibility of falling, landing hard, hurting himself, damaging his body further. He thought of turning to back down the shaft of the tree, digging with his claws into its seams and skin, but that would mean moving into an unseen space, ending up maybe in the mouth of some undetected hunter. He shuffled, mewed, hunched and finally half jumped and half ran down the tree head first, his claws shifting and scrabbling on the bark, his eyes narrowing, and as the earth came closer he pushed off from the rough surface and landed on the gravel of the driveway.

Straight-edged shadows from the house fell across the failing light. He heard human sounds, footsteps and words. He was hungry and his hip was annoying. The crushed stone pushed against the pads of his feet. He moved along the line of the outer buildings, flowing like oil away from the big house.

* * * * *

The cat was beginning a journey into a city built on a lake at the convergence of two rivers. The city had grown inland along the rivers, climbed a line of hills and descended into a bowl of pasture and plain, scraping them flat, cutting them with sewers and paving them over. The rutted, piled-up, shoved-aside land smelled of nails, dust and new sod.

There were three million people in the city now. Along the lakefront the concrete, glass, metal and flesh were crowded so closely together that they seemed to press the air between them into dense blocks filled with soot and fumes. The birds that flew in from the lake found their wings labouring, and at night when they knocked into the towers that reared into their airways they fell straight down to the street. The paths through the air were stitched with power lines and saturated with the phantom crosstalk of wireless telephones, broadcast signals and magnetic fields that blossomed out from the pylons. The birds flew above the malls, their bodies glowing with signals from the earth.

A mile north of the lake, the city rolled up a long line of bluffs and onto a fertile plain. The earth here was sealed under a jumble of concrete, tar, lawn, gravel, oil and steel, plaited below the surface with plastic tubes for sewage, water, power and communication lines. There was a constant moving weight of trucks and vans carrying meat, bread and processed vegetables for the doughnut shops, burger palaces, falafel stands, sausage vendors, chip wagons, curry, roti, Chinese, Korean and Thai outlets that sustained the suburbanites and the office workers. The buildings in this outer arc of the city were smaller than the ones downtown and were filled with local branches of the big downtown banks, the offices of lawyers who had not been asked to join the noted firms by the water, and suites of accountants who processed the unremarkable tax returns of middle-income salary workers who lived in the housing developments nearby.

Beyond this band of medium-level life was a wide highway that funnelled traffic through and past the city, a chute of moving lights and drifting fumes, streaks of rubber pasted on concrete and peels of tire tread on the shoulder, and then abruptly just beyond the roar of the road a sudden flush of trees and a sweetening of the air, and then large estates laid out beside new lakes. Some streets had houses that were built to resemble columned Southern manors with white statues beside neat vineyards; they belonged to grocery and wine kings, recent money, immigrants. People with old English money lived on other streets, nearby but separate, in houses with timbered stables, mud rooms and leaded windows.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Canada
• Date d'édition: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0679311688
• ISBN 13: 9780679311683
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible