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Lister found the Cat exactly where he expected to find him.
Well, okay, maybe not exactly where he’d expected to. It had taken him a few searches through several different rooms lined with coat-racks brimming with suits and jackets of every colour and design before he’d found the one that was currently in active use and not just one of many, many archival wardrobes but he had been right in thinking he’d find him somewhere around there.
Presently, the Cat was hunched over his latest project, neatening up the final details on the lapels of what looked to be a magenta suit, the silvery reflective gilet he had been wearing earlier that day – the one he had fashioned from one of Starbug’s emergency parachutes – already hanging up on display beside him, along with the accompanying suit jacket. It would likely soon join the rest of Cat’s extensive collection of clothes, archived after one use.
If he could at all help it, the Cat would never be seen dead wearing the same thing twice and if he had to be forced to you could bet he’d find some way to make sure there was still something subtly different about it to distinguish it from its previous use.
That kind of mindset was directly antithetical to Lister’s, who had largely been cycling through the same grotty handful of gradually deteriorating clothes for the last 30 years.
Clearing his throat quietly and tapping lightly on the doorframe to get his attention, Lister invited himself in and plopped himself down unceremoniously on a vacant chair, palms resting on his knees, digits tapping out a restless little rhythm. Cat glanced at him quickly out of the corner of his eye, flashed him a toothy grin and said, “Hi, bud, what’s up?”
He didn’t seem too worse for the wear after the wild couple of days that they had all just endured. In actual fact he seemed as pleasantly content as ever, completely unaffected by any of the revelations and discoveries that had taken place. If the Cat was nothing else, he was at least consistent.
Lister shrugged at the greeting and watched on as Cat snipped the end of the finished thread and removed some of the pins that had been holding the fabric in place. He wondered with amusement what poor unsuspecting part of the ship he’d sourced his latest materials from.
“Just stoppin’ by,” he said eventually before indicating with his thumb towards the upper floors. “The Almighty Smeghead up there is still floating on his high of being declared God so I’m waiting for him to come down from that a bit.”
He laughed, a little incredulous at the ridiculousness of the situation, and Cat visibly grimaced beside him, rolling his eyes. “Bad, bad idea,” he muttered, shaking his head and reaching for another section of material. “He’s never gonna come down from this one, bud.”
“Nah, he will,” Lister said assuredly. “Rimmer’s an expert at ruining his own mood.”
“Well, if you’re sure…” The Cat didn’t sound convinced, both eyebrows raised dubiously as he busied himself pinning fabric in place again.
Lister watched him again, trying to wrap his head around everything that had happened. It had been a lot to take in, stumbling upon other members of the Cat’s species – the relatives of those who had once lived on board Red Dwarf, the place of their origin – and immediately being treated as a deity, worshipped and respected, looked to for salvation.
It had been strange enough for him the first time he had ever found out about it from Cat himself, discovering that he was the unintentional, completely accidental creator of an entire newly evolved species of humanoid, the Felis Sapiens, all because he’d impulsively smuggled a pregnant cat on board some 3 million and a bit years ago, but that had been bearable because Cat himself had largely seen him as little more than a slob who provided him food. He’d never actually looked at him as a saviour, not even once.
This time around, however, the other cats had been utterly entranced in awe of him, chanting and bowing and pleading to him to perform miracles to help the rest of their people and Lister had felt well and truly out of his depth, desperate to help them but unwilling to lead them on, to continue to let them believe he was anything more than a bloke from Liverpool who’d made several extremely significant mistakes in his life.
As strange as it had been for him, though, he wondered just how odd it had been for the Cat, who had spent so long away from the rest of his kind but had never seemed particularly bothered by it. He’d been reunited with someone who had turned out to be his brother Rodon, leader of the feral cats, but it hadn’t exactly been a warm and fuzzy sort of family reunion.
Cats were generally believed to be fickle creatures, quick to jump ship to suit their own needs, and it wouldn’t have been above Cat to have done exactly that – he had certainly pretended to more than once in the past – but for some reason when he had been offered a last minute chance to flee the doomed Red Dwarf and join his brother, to ‘come home’ to his people, he had refused and insisted that he was already home.
It warmed Lister to hear him say that, to suggest that he was already with his people, but he wondered whether Cat really felt that way, or whether it had been specifically Rodon he had been turning down, not the cat people in general.
“You sure about this?” he asked suddenly, looking around at the room, surrounded by works-in-progress and finished outfits, each one just as glamorous as the one before it. “Stayin’ here I mean?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Cat responded, not looking up from his work.
Lister shrugged. “I dunno, choosing us over being with other cats. I know your brother was kind of a smegpot but the others seemed nice enough? Sol and Luna and Peanut and that. You probably could’ve been happy with them.”
Cat straightened up suddenly and sat back, turning to regard Lister with a deathly serious expression on his face. “Trust me, bud,” he said. “I made the right call. Any group who decides to worship Goalpost Head as a god is not for me!”
Lister had to admit he had a point there. Cat definitely wouldn’t have yielded to any of that nonsense. Maybe before when it had been Lister but certainly not now that they had switched to Rimmer.
Relaxing again and returning his attention to his work, Cat inclined his head a little in something of a shrug. “Anyway it’s much easier here,” he went on. “Cats get competitive, always tryin’ to one-up each other. Here, I don’t even have to try to be the coolest guy on board.” He smiled cheekily, fangs glinting in the light. “But I do ‘cause a cat’s still gotta have standards.”
Lister’s face fell and his mouth hung open in wounded astonishment. “Hey, now, who said you were the coolest?” he said, and the note of offense in his tone was patently clear to hear.
Cat fixed him with an almost bored, dubious look, a single eyebrow raised, sceptically. “Who else is there?”
“Me for a start!” Lister cried, incredulous, holding out his arms and gesturing up and down at himself in all his scruffy, curry-stained glory. “Last human being alive, kickin’ it in deep space in me leather jacket and boots. I’m pretty cool, yeah?”
Cat’s face crumpled a little in a grimace, unimpressed and unconvinced, and then forced itself into a patronising, pitying smile. “If you say so, bud.”
He reached out, patted a hand dismissively, consolingly, on his shoulder and sat back. Lister rolled his eyes.
“Alright, alright,” he said, conceding to the fact that where Cat was concerned he was never going to convince him any other way. “But you’re okay stayin’ here with us, yeah? You don’t regret it?”
“Hell no, bud!” Cat all but yelled, slamming a hand dramatically down on the desk and shaking his head vehemently. “Where else am I gonna find so much space? I’ve got several museums’ worth of storage space all to myself and trust me, bud,” – he winked, brown eyes twinkling – “I am gonna make use of it all!”
That tracked. Red Dwarf was huge, a ship the size of a city run now only by the four of them plus the newly reinstated Holly, and the majority of its rooms were empty, free real estate for a Cat with more clothes than most folks could ever dream of owning and free reign of wherever he chooses to store them.
Lister had to admit that Cat would have had to be a fool to have given up on all that just to be crammed into a much smaller, much less spacious vessel with several other cats he didn’t know nearly half as well as Lister and the others. It really was no competition. He didn’t know why he’d even worried for a minute that Cat might have had second thoughts. Of course he didn’t. He never had.
“Well, good,” he said, hopping off the chair and making to head for the door. “Would get pretty dull around here if you left.”
Cat let out a low hoot of agreement. “Yeah, no kidding. You fools are lucky to have me around. I’m a luxury few can afford!”
A luxury few can stand, Lister imagined Rimmer would say bitterly in response to that and he smiled a little in mild amusement.
He turned to leave Cat to his work, ready to make his way back up to the living quarters to see if Rimmer had come back down to Earth yet but he paused in the doorway just short of exiting, an impish, wicked little smile pulling up the corners of his mouth. It was just too good to resist messing with the Cat just a little.
“I was only askin’, you know,” he began, angling his head just enough that he could see Cat out of the corner of his eye. “Because I thought you’d have leapt at the chance to woo all those cat ladies. I’m sure I saw a few of ‘em givin’ you the eye, too. Guess you missed out.”
Cat’s entire frame went rigid, his shoulders squared, and if he had resembled a classic cat a little more maybe his hair would have stood up on end too. Evidently, Lister had just dropped a bombshell, something he had overlooked, something he hadn’t considered and it had struck a particularly excruciating cord. If he hadn’t had any regrets before he certainly had them now.
“Aww, man!!” he yowled in anguished frustration and Lister couldn’t help the laugh that tumbled out of him nor the mischievous gerbil-like smile on his face as he left him to it.
Brutal.