Ten Tales Tall and True by Alasdair Gray Page A

the years when I rummaged in cupboards I found other evidence of a cat: a plastic feeding dish with FLUFFY printed on the sloping sides, and behind containers of Marmite Yeast Extract and Granny’s Tomato Soup a tin of Whiskas Supermeat, Chicken and Rabbit Variety. Most sinister of all, behind the long-lost matching sofa I once saw a cardboard box more than two feet square with an arched hole like a door cut into one side, and crayoned over the sides and top a pattern suggesting brickwork, with the words CAT-PALACE, MOG-A-DEN and FLUFFY HOUSE. This writing was not in Zoë’s hand. It suggested that before she helped me up from the pavement and brought me home here she loved another human being as well as a cat, somebody who enjoyed fishing. There was a wicker creel under the bed, an angling rod in thewardrobe, waders in the lobby press. I said nothing about these articles and one day I came home and they had gone. I said nothing, because out of sight is out of mind if I want it to be, nor did I mind Fluffy ripping at the chair. Cats invented themselves by clawing their way up and down tree trunks and scratching soil or grass over their excrement. Forbidding cats to scratch is like forbidding humans to cut their nails and hair. Also, the chair was not responding to Fluffy in the year I found the pellet. It was brightening and darkening. The dim russet fabric glowed and flickered, then leapt into dazzling vividness like when new, but with a moving pattern of leaves dancing over it in a very irregular way. This pattern (dull red on bright russet) was dove grey on creamy ivory over the exposed timber. For half a minute the chair persisted in this way then suddenly, like an exhausted dancer, slumped in two or three seconds back to its ordinary dull old colours. Had the chair been remembering leaves it had seen in earlier days?
    Glancing through the window I noticed a remarkable coincidence. The leaves of the ash tree had the shapes and dancing movements of the pattern which had recently faded from the chair. And I saw another coincidence! Leaves, branches and trunks were flickering, lashing, swaying in the same direction and with the same turbulence as ragged whiteish-grey clouds in the sky beyond,clouds with shifting patches of blue and gleams of unpredictable sunlight between them. Without its underground roots every part of that tree would have flown off with the clouds, which shows the infectious force of a strong example. Had the air between the tree and clouds been visible I might have seen it rushing along too. For a moment I considered working out how the movements within the chair had been caused. People will pay a lot of money for objects that blaze and flicker, as television sets and games machines in public houses show. But I am too old to venture into show business. It is enough for me to passively enjoy the play of natural coincidences and actively enjoy the play of inward speculation. These two plays led to my famous discovery. Of course they did.
    Einstein had died without establishing the unified field hypothesis, all the physicists had agreed the thing was impossible when I – a botanist – proved that every part and particle of the universe reflects every other part and particle and every past and eventual possibility inherent in each part and particle. My dissertation proving the identity of sense and motion in water lilies also proved the identity of sense and motion everywhere! And it cleared away all the paradoxes in Newtonian gravitation by showing that Kepler as well as Einstein had been right all along. Look at a star. Astronomers will say it is a distant sun or nebula, but even a moth can see it is a body oflight. We know it gives light because we live inside the radiance of the gift – live inside the star. That twinkling little item is the core or central pip of a radiant fruit containing every other star and galaxy. My discovery angered many clever people, for by proving that