Cat Flap Read online

  Cats are accused of endless indolence. But bipeds have produced their own pretexts to while away the hours on a much grander scale, invoking time-saving technology to fritter time itself. With my own eyes I have witnessed the birth of their inventions, arriving in huge coverings, mounted vertically on walls—portals into a captured world of colors and shapes, spheroids and ovals pursued by humans in standardized clothing. Sometimes in this parallel world that can be summoned and extinguished at will, there are quadrupeds whose cycles of death and procreation are explained by a wrinkled form of biped known as National Treasure. Look, X, I hear them say—snakes in packs, urban leopards, fellow felines far away. I track these apparitions at close quarters, stirred somehow by the quiver of a wing or whisker whose function is a mystery to me but whose observation makes my claws curl in anticipation.

  With the junior daughter at her side, the midrange biped is stroking one of her toys, laid flat on the floor. It is of little immediate interest. It does not bounce, sparkle, offer a hint of taste, movement. It cannot be sniffed or consumed or chased or tortured. It is an inert object that does not cross my radar of the familiar.

  She touches part of the toy and a sound emerges.

  She takes my paw and lays it on the same part of the surface and the same sound emerges. Then she strokes another part and a different sound. I allow her to take my front paw again.

  I do not at first attempt to scratch the shining surface. I follow her signals. I prod my stubby stump of a fist at different spaces on the shiny surface and chime-like sounds follow one another. The junior and midrange bipeds slap their large, clawless, furless, bony paws together and utter gurgly sounds that suggest contentment.

  I have made them happy. Mission accomplished: humans do not know what they are seeking until they are placed clearly and unequivocally in front of it. And yet they consider themselves infinitely superior.

  The junior and midrange bipeds touch the shiny surface in a different way and the monochrome bars disappear and other shapes emerge. They are the shapes of mice, which cats despise and wish to taunt into unpleasant, messy deaths. But how is this knowledge accessible to a tame creature such as I? I have never seen a mouse. I do not know what a mouse is for. But if I smelled one I would chase it. Is this something locked in me that I can never escape? Am I doomed to pursue animals I have never seen because my forebears, presumably, at some point did? And if so, is my whole life determined in advance, programmed as surely as these tablets—a series of stimuli and responses dictated by a past that can never be modified or altered or erased, no matter how hard I try to shake off history by molding and breeding a new persona?

  Is it, in other words, because I is a cat?

  And if I is a cat, what place do these human musings have in my lexicon?

  My claws tap against the shiny surface. And the shapes keep coming so that I can attack them. But, no matter how much I spear and wound them, the shapes do not bleed. They offer no prospect of nourishment and show no sign of mortality. They make no sound. They do not squeal with that tiny, tinny agony expected of rodents in extremis, which I know to exist without ever having heard it. They are not real. I have been duped into responding, reflexively, to chimera.

  I walk away, my tail high and mighty. I was never really interested in this frippery, this tedious interface masquerading as a real game played with feathers on sticks, golden balls.

  Because I is a cat I is able to display insouciance in the face of indignity, going about my business as if I had never even thought of doing anything else. But they know I will be back.

  seven

  Have they done this on purpose, her clever, beloved daughters? Have they signaled through this game that she has a chance of communication?

  They got X to play cat games on their tablet computer and, of course, as could be expected, X was brilliant, playing songs, chasing mice, responding to signals with appropriate zeal and intelligence. But Dolores glimpsed or sensed something else: the gaudy palette known as the desktop, the whole array of things that she used to know as apps but which are now just a jumble of shapes and patterns.

  One of those patterns, those building bricks of biped cleverness, must permit communication. One of them must allow her to tell herself to come back before the home fires consume that which they are supposed to nurture. But which shape will unlock the door?

  And when will her daughters leave their precious tablets lying around so that she can experiment, prise open the codes?

  And how will she write a message?

  Dolores finds herself thinking: I must teach myself to read and write. It cannot be so difficult. I taught the rudiments to Astra and Portia before the urge to return to the world of work and advancement recaptured my soul and I sent them off to professionals to finish my handiwork. It occurs to her that Gerald showed little inclination to introduce his first daughter to the wonderful universe of verbs and adjectives and nouns and subjunctive clauses that he supposedly inhabits as a citizen of that wordy world. Another failure to list in the annals of his shoddiness and treachery.

  So now she must teach X. She must somehow force this tiny, illiterate, innumerate creature with her limited horizon to look at things in a new light that is comprehensible to her resident human, her live-in partner, her other half. She must learn to see things in a way that a captive mind or soul can interpret.

  X must learn what two legs know to be good.

  Portia is tapping something.

  A message has arrived and if Dolores could read it she would scream, grab the tablet, call the police.

  “I wait at Kentish Town tube station but you dint come, you naughty girl! I was looking for a girl just like you and me but you weren’t there. It makes me a bit sad. Don’t you trust me? I have had such a difficult time and I know that we could be such good friends. Aren’t you sometimes lonely, too? But remember. This is our secret. I will wait every…”

  Portia has tapped something but then makes the worm of incomprehensible gray-on-white jumble retreat on itself, devour its own tail. As X sometimes pretends to do during her spinning, performance-art show-offs, hurtling in tight, furry circles until she is breathless.

  Portia switches off the tablet.

  Voiceless, Dolores cries out: leave it on, leave it on! But Portia looks at her quizzically.

  “It’s not suppertime yet, X, you greedy cat. What are you yowling for?”

  * * *

  For long, dark hours I am able to avoid the large, male biped and I know that is the wisest course of action. But it will not be possible forever.

  In her human configuration, Dolores Tremayne has reserves of rage that enable her to sustain anger and distance over long, icy periods of dispute. On the occasions when her man has overstepped some modest bound, she has succeeded in bringing him back into line with pursed lips and clipped responses that coax forth the ever-present latent guilt of the male who knows, deep down, that he has sinned in some way or another for that is the human condition.

  X, by comparison, is a pussy. What else would she be?

  “Treats, X,” the novelist is purring. It is, she believes, the day after some incident that caused alarm. There has been the long slumber, the murmurs and squeaks of the night hours. X has prowled and patrolled the nocturnal home, stopping by her bowl to nibble at some pellets, check on her teenage and preteen charges, curling close to their sleeping forms to chase away the nightmares and the boogeymen.

  Now, she detects the rattling of the cylindrical container associated with smells of sea and mollusk that her DNA deems to be irresistible.

  Dolores is screaming: no, no, no.

  But X is purring, indifferent to the trap.

  The treats draw X closer.

  One, a sampler, is from her husband’s hand. The next is laid in her transportation cage.

  X does not like the cage, because it has taken her to unpleasant encounters with bipeds in white jackets who cause pain and discomfort in return for money. But she likes the treat mo
re. She snuffles and snoots, undone, like so many humans, by her nostrils.

  The cage clicks shut behind her at exactly the moment she locates her fix of prawn and ocean.

  “Walkies, X,” Gerald Tremayne is saying in a voice that humans would call a snarl.

  “Time to meet some wuff-wuffs.”

  eight

  The world through the grille. Life chopped and quartered into squares. Sliced and diced. I am reminded of an ancient portcullis from the point of view of a besieged defender, looking out at a hostile horde readying towers and trebuchets, battering rams and ballistae. But how can X know that? Where did that idea, those soldierly words, come from?

  X has been lured into the transportation box and me with her. We fit cozily, haunches to the rear, head facing forward, tail curled around like a huge traveling rug. I peer through the latticework of the door that has snapped shut on us, its catches firmly in place to forestall escape. I sense no panic from X. Not at first. She is used to this view, which usually precedes being placed on the big, pale seats of the car that covers distance without the expenditure of animal energy beyond the working of the controls—throttle, brake, brake, throttle; stop, usually at the place where the sado-biped prods and snips and probes with his sharp little devices and knuckled paws.

  Makes me sick, in every sense.

  Once, X had somehow contrived to devour the elasticated string used to hog-tie a rotisserie chicken as it turned on the spit. The cord had been cut and in the human rush to devour the hot, dead bird, the binding had fallen to the kitchen floor where X, smelling a delicious, rich, forbidden odor, proceeded to gobble it up, not even suspecting that its stretchy, nonorganic nature made it more or less indigestible.

  “Where is the string?” Dolores asked in panic as X peered at her, licking her greasy chops.

  “Oh, fuck. She’s eaten the string!”

  X was rushed in the Range Rover—by Dolores, not Gerald—to the rooms that smelled of alien quadrupeds, and injected with something that induced her to vomit. And up came the string! In human terms, it would be like swallowing a length of mountaineer’s rope from the flanks of Mount Everest and then being forced to regurgitate it.

  Bipeds rarely grasp the magnitude of such brushes with the unimaginable.

  This time there is no Range Rover, no comforting hum of engine and automatic seven-speed gearbox, no gentle rhythm of tire on tarmac. X is bombarded with unfamiliar impressions from ear and eye and nostril. The world sways to Gerald Tremayne’s gait as he leaves the apartment, walks along the narrow path leading to what I know to be eight hundred acres of North London heathland, but which X does not know at all.

  Gerald walks with a degree of urgency, passing by all my memories which I can no longer articulate—the huge magnolia tree, heavy with blazing white blossoms in its brief season, the frail-looking bench in the little spinney where I have often retreated from family tensions to smoke a clandestine cigarette, the array of blooms, the towering semi-blighted ash trees that form the frontier between public land and our private communal gardens.

  Azaleas, roses, shrubs tended by an army of noisy gardeners with leaf blowers and lawn mowers; sacks for fallen leaves and cropped grass; chain saws that howl with malice. Past the rhododendron, the fir tree, the Escallonia, the Buddleia, the Ceratostigma—names I know because I once served as secretary on the gardening committee of our residents’ association, before my business success gnawed away at my availability for unpaid labor, banished any thought of “giving back” while there was still the prospect of taking salaries and bonuses and stock options in quasi-industrial proportions. And what else got consumed in this pell-mell rush for power and fame and riches? What other bonds and ties and nurtured interplays of texture and color became unraveled? Where else did my time disappear?

  Don’t go there, Dolores, not now; not while your children are being drawn into a webbed world and your husband seems to have expanded his sphere of influence among the neighbors.

  Really. Do NOT go there because the possibilities are endless.

  Who else? The maid from Manila? Your friends with their broken marriages and singleton yearnings for a head on the shared pillow and a hand to clasp the neglected buttock? Old school memory-laners? Ex-partners on exploratory missions? Chance encounters? Pub pickups?

  Gerald swings the cage and we, X and I, are treated to a dizzying view of sky and cloud above other apartments in our complex. It is like being at a mid-twentieth-century funfair, the kind you see in old black-and-white films (though not if you are a cat) where people sit in swing boats and pull on ropes to send themselves to giddy heights, craving the thrill of life beyond the horizontal where only some frail semblance of G-force prevents them from tumbling earthward. He reaches the small, metal gate. A new vista: narrow bars perceptible through the caged doors, as if the cell is opening and the prisoner is filled with inchoate terror at what lies beyond.

  Free Nelson Mandela! The crowds await, heaving and bursting and pushing and shoving in anticipation of the first glimpse. Free Dolores Tremayne!

  Gerald punches in the numeric code. Inside my furry new persona, I cannot recall it. Numbers have slipped from my data banks, although the human me, on the road in Munich or Detroit or Shanghai, virtually lives in an arithmetical, algorithmic world of computations. Excel spreadsheets, profit, loss, projections; the universe reduced to the math of money. EBITDA, gross, net, amortization, letters that open computer programs, numbers that open gates, just as his patter once unlocked my heart.

  The human me knows the answer to the riddle of the gate’s opening but X, confronted with such routines, is mystified, defeated before the battle has even begun.

  Gerald pushes through the gate, swinging the transportation box dangerously close to a clump of nettles.

  Gate fever.

  In truth, the status accorded to cats has always baffled Gerald. He does not get it. Cats are a waste of space. They do nothing, give nothing, give nothing away. They are creations of humans who project peculiar, attractive qualities onto the feline emptiness. Cats remind him of actors mouthing parts invented by others; superb performers; mirrors of our secret desires. Even the world’s greatest brains—Einstein, for example—have been fascinated by cats. Or rather by the idea, posited by some Austrian physicist, that a single cat could at once be alive and dead, according to theories of quantum mechanics which, frankly, Gerald could live without. What was he called, the Austrian, who had somehow argued that if you put a cat in a steel box with a radioactive source and some poison, the cat would, by the theory of quantum superposition, be simultaneously subject to two contrary interpretations: alive or dead. For a moment he toyed with the idea, imagining X as the quantum cat, dispensing with the complexities, locked in a steel box with polonium-laced treats that would allow only one interpretation of her state of being: former, an ex-cat, a dead parrot.

  Then there was that colleague of Dolores’s who had been posted to a new job as a lobbyist in Brussels and had been obliged to embark on the rituals of household removals—the surly packers, the clumsy unpackers, the chipped porcelain, the hanging around for enormous tips. All of that had been covered, of course, by the firm. But the one riddle—not the quantum riddle—lay in working out how to transport the family cat, a superior type of cat, a Russian Blue called Marley. Of course Marley has all the requisite vaccinations and certificates of rabies-free health to cross just about any frontier. But the simplest, most elegant solution that Dolores’s colleague could devise was to send him by cab. Not alone, of course. Marley would be escorted in the voluminous rear compartment of one of those new black cabs made by Mercedes, escorted across southern England, through the various controls for animals and humans at Folkestone, into the brief darkness of the Channel Tunnel and across the six-lane highways of northern Europe where gallant American GIs and British Tommys fought Fritz the German Hun with depressing regularity. Thus would Marley arrive in Brussels, peering from the smoked-glass windows at his new home city with much
the same sense of ineffable superiority as a visiting president in a motorcade contemplating the unfamiliar sights of a minor ally or defeated foe.

  But what was the Austrian called? Schirnding? Schopenhauer? Schiller? Schöneberg? Gerald halts for a quick séance with his cell phone’s search engine.

  Schrödinger!

  Erwin Schrödinger! (1887–1961)

  Unaware of her perilous superposition, neither one thing nor the other, yet both at the same time, X peers out of the cage with a combination of curiosity and abject terror. It is an environment she has yearned for instinctively without being able to know it objectively. Its surfaces are uneven, seething with smells of small life. Its upper limit is far higher, intangible. It is so much wider. It has no ceiling. There are none of the stages of the human cross—eating, sitting, sleeping, shitting, staring at moving pictures in a box. There is no box, in fact. If you were to be located out here, or left out here, you would not know which way to go. Which way to turn! You would have so many options. How would you navigate? What would you eat? Where are the bowls of pellets and the device that pumps potable liquid from a spout? Where are the soft surfaces for naps and the rough posts for scratching? The defecatory litter?

  She observes other quadrupeds which attach bipeds to their necks with slender leashes and tug them along. They come in many shapes and sizes, some not much bigger than X herself, small legs pumping in a blur of fur. Others are huge, towering, slow-moving, Jurassic beasts, ambling along as if the world was theirs, with their lolling tongues hanging like slices of raw veal. A barrage of odors. All hostile. Even the small ones. Atavistically inimical to feline interests. A cacophony of noises. Names, apparently. “Hugo,” “Algernon,” “Fenton,” “Milly.” All called out with a variety of biped anxiety or wrath or entreaty. “Barney,” “Bodger,” “Bentley,” “Bailey,” “Charlie,” “Buddy,” “Bella,” “Daisy,” “Princess,” “Rosie,” “Gonzo,” “Gizmo,” “Sadie,” “Seeley.” There has been talk in the biped world of cats using similar leashes to exercise their patrons, to distract them from the instinctive feline pursuit of lizards and rodents and flying things. As if! Just think for a moment of all those noises in addition to the bellows and wheedlings of the dog world. “Tigger,” “Tiddles,” “Marie,” “Berlioz,” “Mephisto,” “Eliot,” “Munkustrap,” “Quaxo,” “Bombalurina.”