Cat Flap Read online

  I take it between my sharp little teeth. Its texture is difficult to place in my catalogue of sensations: hard, metallic on the outside, but something softer seems hidden within, bouncy, like one of those toys with which the humans try to distract me. My incisor easily penetrates the outer casing but the interior is glutinous, repellent. I bite a little deeper.

  An unpleasant taste. Slimy. A voice inside me is telling me what it is but I cannot quite decipher it. And whose voice would it be anyhow?

  The sound of the great white barrier opening and closing alarms us.

  Redrum most foul may be afoot. For all we know or care.

  * * *

  We flatten ourselves—X and I—and turn, surveying options. Unusually, the access gates to the warm storage zones are open, welcoming. Dolores tries to say something, but she has no voice and no one is listening anyhow.

  They traverse the sleep-pad. Leopard crawl, she thinks; but how would a cat know to attach that label to its reflexive, hunter’s advance, however appropriate to the action it described?

  They leap down from the sleep-pad, bound across open space, accelerate, gather strength in powerful rear legs, and without thinking launch vertically into the place where bipeds store spare skins and coverings; past the lower part with the shiny knobs; carried upward with enormous, thrusting power; scrambling for a toe-hold, claw-hold, paw-hold, bringing up the rear legs to grapple for vertical progression, shooting improbably past what Dolores recognizes as shelves of agnès b. blouses, folded Armani jeans, cashmere from Brora, Ralph Lauren polos.

  I am in among the warm, comforting things that smell somehow familiar, associated with a person who has left my life—her work fatigues, her camouflage. I turn in this dark, narrow space. I settle on my haunches, my left front paw folded under me, the right paw jutting out like a stump.

  My acute aural capabilities signal approaching human voices, one on a higher register, the other lower, more familiar, the one that makes my name a threat: “X, X, X! What have you done now?”

  My vibrissae that humans call whiskers have established my ability to fit in the space between yielding, warm piles. Framed by the limits of my adopted environment, I feel safe, although from another perspective I am trapped because there is no rear exit. I cannot leave my hiding place without forfeiting my invisibility.

  The barriers close but not completely. There is a splinter, a shard of vision. I want to flee but something holds me back. I look around, sensing that somehow I am not alone, but there is no one here with me that I can see. Unlike the events I—we—can see unfolding through the crack between the doors.

  four

  With unblinking cat’s eyes, Dolores Tremayne is watching her all-too-human husband and her all-too-human neighbor outside whose front door X once defecated. She wishes to turn away but X does not. She does not wish to see them removing their clothes in haste, but X is indifferent to her sentiments. The sight of the female nakedness is oddly familiar. It recalls some hazardous event that reduced her stock of lives to eight. A jumble of ghostly memories. Upstairs, downstairs. In short order. In panic.

  There is some giggling. Her husband, the novelist Gerald Tremayne, is popping a rolled-up banknote and a small, folded package into a drawer in the nightstand on his side of the guest bed and retrieving a small, silver, square wrapper from the carpet where X or I flipped it. He places it in the drawer.

  At least it is the guest bedroom. Is there some comfort in that? Probably not. Dolores has more powerful systems of recall than X. She knows what she is watching. She can identify the players. She wants to cry out, cry foul, but cannot. It is as if a rusting dagger, plucked from some slimy mire, dripping with rot and infection, has been plunged into her heart. Every twist and turn of the blade chokes her, compounds her anguish, introduces fresh toxins into those rapid-fire questions. Why? How long? Who else?

  Her husband is displaying a degree of tumescence. His companion expresses approval, fiddles with her nose, emitting a not-very-ladylike snorting noise. And he swore he was clean! Goddammit, I paid for that fancy nose-candy because his publisher’s advance reached the end of its very brief financially viable life months ago.

  So that’s where his allowance is going—financing the gradual erosion of his septum. She must have been mad not to see it. Mad in the sense of craziness, defined as repeating the same error over and over again in the expectation of a different outcome. He had been into drugs when they met—albeit as a purveyor to her college cohort—and now he was back to his old ways. She felt a stirring of liberal guilt—obviously not the same stirring as consumed the entangled bipeds in her line of vision. Could you typecast people like that? Profile them? She did not approve of racial profiling in her own doings. So why stigmatize lying, cheating, northern, sleazebag cokeheads? Unless there were circumstances to confirm the stereotypes, the incontrovertible evidence of genetic determinism. Like the scene before her.

  The defense rests, m’lud. A crime of passion. Redrum. A marriage redrummed by heinous betrayal. For innocence read foolishness, blindness, self-deception.

  She feels X wriggle uncomfortably. X was physically spayed after her first heat when she alarmed the girls by shedding her cuddly kitten persona to become a sex-driven demon, desperate and available. She has gotten a little chunkier since her operation but is still essentially playful. She is available to chase feathers on sticks, leap at Christmas wrappings, climb into small cardboard boxes as if they were her private bunkers, but not to mate or procreate. Yet, some vestigial trace of feline passion seems to be rekindled by what she can see through the not-quite-closed doors, this not-quite-cliché: husband and neighbor, rumbled by a voyeuristic cat providing much the same services as a private eye employed by a suspicious spouse.

  A private cat’s eye, stirred by an ancient longing. A sleuth denied the ability to report her findings. X and Dolores: investigator and client. All in one. Vaguely, X recognizes the naked female foot that had once swung at her with lethal intent. Specifically, Dolores recognizes the upstairs neighbor.

  You can cut out the anatomy of estrus, Dolores is thinking, but you can never quite quell the urge. It is a lesson that age will bring to us all. But not yet. Not in her household. Not for her husband.

  It is like watching a dream trainwreck of the carriage in which you are traveling: horrifying and fascinating. Tables lurch and crash. Suitcases fly from the racks as if on a spacecraft. Drinks bottles, cups, saucers assume ballistic qualities. You watch your own destruction. The familiar planes—vertical, horizontal—warp and bulge and turn topsy-turvy. You watch your life to date, and the assumptions that hold it in place, simply disintegrating. There is nothing beyond the gross breach of trust, of faith.

  Reluctantly, wishing she hadn’t, Dolores remembers the day her upstairs neighbor telephoned down to them after one of X’s occasional forays onto the staircase.

  The neighbor—Jenny Steinem—is angry. Since her flatmate left, she lives alone, right above them. Sometimes, usually on rainy evenings when jogging is not an option, she skips on a rope for exercise. She is a mere wisp of a person—as Dolores can see all too clearly from her vantage point in her wardrobe: the androgynous bottom, the pubic fluff and prison-camp hip bones. But when she skips, the thump resonates through the bedroom ceiling as if she is having percussive sex with a very energetic lover, as she did before her partner left.

  That, evidently, is where Dolores miscalculated in the never-ending assessment of threat and opportunity that governs so many interpersonal apartment house relationships—staircase alliances, balcony feuds, campaigns fought over parked bicycles and incontinent pets, screeching parrots, over-loud infatuation with Led Zeppelin or Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Jenny’s partner was called Waltraud and came from Baden-Württemberg. They had seemed an item that could only be replaced by reference to identical gender. The apparent monosexuality of the neighbor’s inclinations had, Dolores now thinks, lulled her into a false sense of security. Vis-à-vis Gerald, that is. The upstairs neig
hbor had never put a move on her. Or the girls. And was unlikely to see her desires fulfilled by one so male as her husband. She had assumed.

  But Jenny seems, indubitably, to swing both ways and silly, naïve, deceived Dolores had not included that possibility in her calculations.

  After X’s indiscretion on the mat outside Jenny’s door, Dolores had answered the phone. A Californian-accented voice screeched at her.

  “Your cat has shat on my doorstep! SHAT!”

  Dolores is full of apology. She is on neighborly, first-name terms with the woman upstairs but they are not close. Personally, she believes that a little cat poop is a fair reward for hours of skipping and thumping and obsessive attention to burning off calories and exploring the aural frontiers of the libido. But she hears herself saying: “Jenny, I’m terribly sorry. Really. I’ll ask Gerry to pop up and clean.”

  “Please do,” says Jenny and hangs up abruptly.

  Dolores remembers how Gerald Tremayne left the family apartment armed with a dustpan, rubber gloves, carpet shampoo and two Tesco plastic bags for the evidence.

  X was nowhere to be seen, of course. Being a cat she had divined the moment to disappear.

  When he returned—after spending longer, in retrospect, than anyone needed to be absent on such a simple mission—he had a smile on his face. And Dolores remembers his words.

  “Well, I think I calmed her down.”

  That is not what he is doing now.

  Watching her husband, part of her feels detached. It is her feline part, switched off to human antics: so lacking in animal grace compared to a cat’s suppleness, its sense of cool.

  Another part is appalled.

  Please, she is thinking, do not do our special things. Do not do those things with mouth and tongue and protuberance and bodily cavity which I had never previously experienced. Please do not show that I was merely a foil for your skillful repertoire, like the magician’s stage sidekick, present merely to be bisected and then to stand aside, deflecting applause to the supremo of spells and wizardry.

  She wants to shout, or somehow say something, anything to stop it. Like those TV viewers who do not wish to see the result of a sporting fixture, she wants X to look away NOW. And failing that, she wants action. Kinetic action. The disruption of infidelity by any means.

  A loud miaow to distract them, for instance. She wants X to leap forth, claws bared, and dig them into that scrawny rump athwart her husband, riding him like a demented jockey in the final furlong. She wants the cat that contains her mind or soul to intrude, break cover, run amok among the mementoes stored in the guest room—a royal wedding mug showing Charles and Diana, a framed photograph of his parents long ago before their separation, a winner’s cup from a children’s contest at a forgotten ski resort. She wants their combined being to hurtle along the shelves, sending porcelain and silverware flying and crashing.

  But X may have other calculations.

  Gerald has never really liked X. When they met, he called himself a dog person—ever since his father walked the whippet to the pigeon loft above the slag-heaps, if only in the cinematic self-image he had chosen to express his quintessential alienation as a northerner in the perfidious south. Who knows if there was ever a dog, a bird, an industrial landscape borrowed from L. S. Lowry? Why would the great novelist invent lives only on his laptop?

  Besides, X knows from her previous experience with the flying female foot, retribution might be swift and terminal. And anyhow, X seems content to let the nightmare unfold, like some perverse reversal of one of those lewd shows Dolores had heard about in the red light districts of Hamburg or Amsterdam where humans watch animals entwine bestially.

  After some preliminaries, during which the neighborly Jenny offers some oral encouragement to the husbandly arousal, they grapple themselves under the covers so that all a cat can see is a billowing mound of sheet and duvet, an occasional foot—that foot—protruding temptingly as if a game of nibble-the-toe, invented during her kitten-hood, is being offered.

  Dolores can decipher the way things are going, like one of those choreographed encounters in televised wrestling bouts where the mandatory procession of headlocks and forearm smashes must unfold before the declaration of victory. The woman is rocking back and forth, buttocks clenched. Then the protagonists regroup and she is on her back, legs akimbo to judge from the shape of the expensive bedding. (Selected and paid for by—yes—Dolores. From—yes—John Lewis. Again. Saturdays at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. With the mad hordes, the locust swarms of shoppers consuming iPhones and handbags and shirts and trousers and dresses and blue jeans and crystal glasses and curtains. And stuff from Boots the chemist: shampoo. Condoms. She buys them, too. French ones in their shiny silver packaging. Prophylaxis now destined for a familiar function in a different, dark environment from the one intended—a very small mercy, indeed.)

  A hand reaches out from the mountains of percale cotton and goose down. It fumbles around in the bedside drawer.

  Another line? Already?

  Gerald reaches for the square silver wrapper. Dolores cannot see, with X’s somewhat unfocused feline vision, if it is the same square silver wrapper that she—or X—chose to puncture.

  Her acute hearing detects noises suggesting that the upstairs neighbor is in some kind of dire pain that lingers and rises and falls. Gerald does not inspect the wrapper. He tears it. His hand withdraws under the bespoke covers, holding the slippery, lubricated contents, as if transferring an oyster from its glistening shell. There is some new wriggling.

  Not long now, Dolores figures from experience. The noise switches from female tones of submission and need and fulfilment to male grunts; breath heaving like in the last hundred yards of the half-marathon that time she trained and ran for charity and advancement in the firm and her daughters praised her and thought she was crazy, wonderfully so.

  Climax almost operatic. On both sides. The scrawny diva sings. Pavarotti-husband modulates an ascending crescendo.

  Think Puccini. Turandot. No one, certainly, is sleeping here.

  Vincerò!

  Though for every great victory, there is a bitter defeat.

  Of course the neighbor won’t hear through the ceiling because the neighbor is belowdecks, pinioned, audience and participant, stimulant and receptacle, repository of the vanities. Silence. That moment. The final curtain. The stunned auditorium. Murmurs of mutual congratulation, amazement.

  Bravo! Brava!

  The drooping ovation. The coital claque.

  Please don’t say it was better.

  “It was the best. Ever.”

  It is muffled but she hears it. The final betrayal.

  Now, she believes, there will be those few moments he is so good at, the warm descent from the golden uplands, the assurance, the verbal sugarcoating on the raw physicality of the act. Whispers. Strokes. Hugs. If her husband ever took a real job, it would be in a call center, soothing bruised and cheated egos; or in some airport control tower, talking down the stricken airliner. Assuring. Confident. Knowing.

  But her cat’s ears detect a shift in emphasis. Something has loosened in the coda of mutual congratulation.

  Complaint. Questioning. Strident tones like after the poop incident. The pink-purple face. The indignant rage.

  A single piercing wail that a cat would recognize as a signal of acute alarm, mortal hazard.

  X’s wide-angle eyes see the Californian woman leap from the snow fields of bedding and run to the “family” bathroom. Clutching at the damp tuft between her glistening upper thighs.

  Sounds now of running liquid. As in the biped water box.

  Furtively, Gerald reaches to the bedside where he had casually dropped the floppy, knotted tube of stretched, extended latex. Even with a cat’s eyes, at this range, you can see the great gash in the tip of it, the shredding, the evidence of catastrophic failure.

  There is not a trace of his usually abundant and perilously fecund deposit in this bank of love. There is no talking
down from this cataclysm. No flaps and air brakes and reverse thrust to coax the stricken jetliner to the runway’s haven, forestalling certain disaster. This is not a night at the movies. Or reality TV. This is the daytime of real reality. The howling descent. Gravity’s triumph. “Brace! Brace!” the flight crew bellows. But everyone knows it is ending in tears. Not Vincerò, after all. Think Richard III or Macbeth or Hamlet. Strewn bodies. Hubris leading to the fall, the plummet of destiny.

  Gerald is inspecting the bright silver square. You can see the mental gears grind, the cognitive cogs turn.

  Sabotage! His condom has been sabotaged. By a sharp, single, needlepoint incision, slender as a stiletto. Like a cat’s tooth.

  This is not the moment for X to break cover.

  So she does.

  five

  Scamper away from the guest room. A fast turn worthy of Lewis Hamilton at the cavernous litter box—a fecal Aladdin’s cave—into the central corridor.

  Reckless speed now. Claws finding purchase in the expensive sea-grass carpeting chosen for its durability from a specialist store in Belsize Park. Or was it Hampstead? Or Notting Hill?

  Breakneck maneuvers. A door opens. X propels herself between the spindly, dripping, towel-draped legs of the upstairs neighbor emerging from the bathroom.

  My bathroom. Our family bathroom.

  Almost tangling them. Fresh shrieks of alarm.

  “That fucking cat.”

  A swinging dainty foot that almost connects, like a World Cup soccer tackle provoking a dive and anguished, aggrieved appeal. The foot. That same lethal appendage to the biped leg. Discount the threat, the memory. Speed is all. No time now for theatrics. Survival is at stake.

  Her husband is calling, but X understands with instinctive clarity that this call must be ignored. It is full of rage. Madness.

  Carried along in pell-mell flight, Dolores cannot fault the feline logic. Because she is not herself. She cannot, as her instincts would like, stand up to him, fight her corner, condemn, assail, express her betrayal, denounce his treachery with tears and shouts and slaps and beating with bunched angry fists. She cannot call a lawyer or a counselor or a hit man. Or even expel the treacherous, scheming neighbor. For she is a cat carrying the spirit, the essence of a woman whose soul has been cut to the quick.