Cat Flap Read online

  “Pussy-cat,” “Poo-cat,” “Macavity,” “X.”

  Canine Studies. Dogography 101. Despite the appearance of immense stupidity, these quadrupeds have nonetheless trained their bipeds to use flexible devices to lob spheroids over great distances without changing course. The quadrupeds retrieve these objects and reward the bipeds’ skills in throwing them by returning them to feet encased in green rubber. With practice, the bipeds become increasingly skilled in the art of throwing, and go on to pursuits known as cricket and baseball, rarely thanking their canine trainers as they acknowledge the polite applause and the raucous roars of their supporters. With the frequency of this ritual, some of the spheroids have become layered in mud and saliva. They are not pleasant to behold. Even from afar, their odor is repulsive.

  Sometimes the quadrupeds test the bipeds by withdrawing the favor of the returned spheroid, preferring instead to gallivant and gambol among themselves, tails wagging, snouts yapping, inducing panic in bipeds appealing desperately for the four-legs-good to reward them.

  X notes that the quadrupeds have a curious means of communicating, prodding their noses into the rear ends of other quadrupeds. Disgusting! What do they say, hear? Information may be transmitted through the olfactory organs. Obviously enough. But surely these quadrupeds cannot derive pleasure from the odors of evacuation. Have they no sense of decorum? Or shame? Do they not acknowledge the essential privacy of bodily functions? They approach tall-growing things—larger versions of those she knows at home—cocking legs or squatting to urinate at will. No dark boxes here for the secret business of doing one’s business. No scrambled litter and furtive ablutions. No self-respect.

  They halt, willy-nilly, to deposit waste without regard for fellow creatures. And why should they worry when they have trained their bipeds to retrieve their droppings and carry them in little plastic bags like Bond Street shoppers bearing delicate and highly priced items?

  X is surprised by the comparison she makes, since she has no idea what shops are or what they are for. Or where or what Bond Street is.

  Now they are passing an expanse of water so huge that, for X, it might be the Pacific, but which is known to Dolores as a pond where dogs are allowed to leap in and retrieve sticks, then emerge to shake themselves as close as they can to their owners, or roll on their sides and backs in grass that may or may not be littered with canine feces that the biped collection process has overlooked. By accident or design.

  X notes that one notable area of teaching in which the quadrupeds have singularly failed is in their attempt to introduce the bipeds to water. No matter how often the quadrupeds induce their patrons to lob the spheroids into the various tracts of pond life with their resident populations of duck, swan, teal and coot, the bipeds refuse to follow, preferring to loiter on the bank and be sprinkled by the quadrupeds as they shake themselves dry. The bipeds, it seems, are inherently terrestrial, and faintly masochistic, beings.

  But it would be wrong to generalize. Out here, there are clearly subdivisions of the biped species. Some are clearly dangerous, not to be trusted alone, guarded by mobs of quadrupeds to keep them under control, tied to them by multiple leashes, like Gulliver tethered by Lilliputians, as if they are being restrained because of the hazard they present and their otherworldly strangeness.

  Other bipeds are not contained at all. They do not even keep company with quadrupeds. They seem to represent a separate breed with legs of pale flesh that has no fur, just a freckling of hair that would never keep the cold at bay.

  Dogography. Jogography. The biped fear of immobility, inertia—states of being prized by the higher species, such as cats.

  By contrast to the essential stillness of much of X’s day, these bipeds are in a state of constant agitation. Their legs scissor in an anguish of haste. Some are in such dread of the openness, the void, that they have taken to wheeled contraptions that carry them along, forcing their feet to revolve on mechanical treadmills. They pedal, swerve, curse, ring bells. Ting-a-ling.

  Two legs bad.

  Two wheels worse.

  Through the feline audio system, Dolores hears snatches of conversation that make her cry for help, though all that emerges is a forlorn mew.

  “So I am … like and … whatever.”

  Young girl voices recounting Facebook dramas they pursue on Twitter by way of WhatsApp and Instagram. A language unknown to Dolores growing up in the time of the Discman. Pre-mobile. Pre-touchscreen. Pre-selfie. They pass them descending as Gerald ascends Kite Hill, hoping in his darkest thoughts that he will find Pit Bull Open Day underway at the summit, with legions of canine killers unchained.

  Dolores feels like a message in a bottle that no one will ever open, destined to bob forever on shoreless oceans, a voice inside a cat crying for human help through a feline larynx.

  “And Loretta and Alice were … like.”

  Sound bites of modern living, played out in the privacy of bedrooms, hunched over communications devices, swiping and tip-tapping in predictive text, uploading images, howling in protest when others are uploaded. Boasts. Sullen silences. Status changes. Meet me at Kentish Town tube station. I am a young girl just like you. Dolores feels an unease she cannot define. Even beyond the awful premonitions of Gerald’s plan.

  “And Toby was … kind of … naked?”

  The rising interrogative tone of the postmodern sentence. Discuss.

  Through her highly developed sonic facility, X detects sounds that vary from the remotely familiar to the totally incomprehensible. She has no means of defining the distinctions as those of language. She cannot know that, as they progress, they are mingling with people of far-flung origins in Minsk or Moscow or Metz or Munich or Manila or even Manchester. Humanspeak is universally indecipherable beyond its suggestions of mood. As they progress, the air fills with snatches of French and Italian and Polish and Croat and Mandarin. Wary Russians skirt expansive Spaniards along the tended pathways. Dolores wants to scream or howl or mew, but the bipeds are enclosed in their own recounted dramas.

  Like Volodya told Miguel about Fifi that time in Shanghai?

  So I said to the producer I needed my agent’s sign-off on that.

  Entre nous.

  Just between the two of us.

  And it turned out. Kind of.

  Like chlamydia?

  But you never told me.

  Not that she ever cared. Mother. Or Father for that matter.

  And go south in the winter. But where? Where is safe? These days.

  Signboards to the meaning of life.

  X senses a greater pace, or urgency. Gerald is stretching his loping stride to the cusp of a jog. The acceleration is alarming for cat and hidden passenger alike. What is he planning?

  He is making sounds that a vestige of wifely consciousness recognizes as song.

  Everybody wants to eat a cat.

  Oh dear.

  X sees other creatures she knows she should pursue and hunt, red in tooth and feather. Dolores lists them as she was taught one early, cold morning.

  Dawn Chorus Day. The one day of the year when you venture forth in the crepuscular muzziness with the guide who knows all the names of all the winged creatures under the rising sun.

  Oh, for the innocence of it. Wrens, tits, woodpeckers of various hues, coots, moorhen, ducks (plain and mandarin), nuthatch, breeding swans with mom on egg duty and pop on patrol, blackbird, magpie, crows, ravens, pigeons, doves, a kestrel, a swarm of invading parakeets. Black birds walking like robed priests. Who said that? Gulls that swoop and call, far from crashing surf or shingly beach or windblown marsh. Doves that mate in a nanosecond flurry. Twitchers—birders they prefer to be called—in their baggy cargo pants, stalking their prey with field glasses that magnify them out of all proportion. Is it only birds they seek to spy on in this land of young girls on secret walks and young boys rolling spliffs and drinking stolen cider?

  Bring it all back, Dolores is thinking. Bring my life back.

  Bring me back.


  Gerald has drawn to a halt on Kite Hill. The place teems with bipeds of all sizes. Some are trying in vain to imitate the winged creatures, holding up scraps of bright material with tails and long strings that try to climb into the vast, blue dome above them, lofted by invisible forces. Are they hoping to fly? Will they be lifted off, high above London, like so many Mary Poppinses? Will they be eaten by enormous Brobdingnagian cats?

  Wind in the east, foretelling times of change, upheaval.

  Gerald places the transportation box on the ground where an unfamiliar element ruffles X’s pelt, bombards her nostrils. He takes off his denim jacket and lays it on the ground next to the transportation box and stretches his long, lanky frame alongside it. Dolores feels X shrink back from the latticed door where an enormous wet black nose has just introduced itself with a growl and a bark like a clap of thunder.

  “Nice doggie,” Gerald says, ruffling the long hair around the neck of a German shepherd that bares its teeth by way of response.

  Dolores recalls another wildlife list—Rottweilers, Dobermans, pit bulls, Staffies, Russells, Pointers. Lurchers. Weimaraners. Tiny Shih Tzus. Schnauzers with Falstaffian beards. Retrievers with soft mouths. Guard dogs with hair-trigger rage. Attack dogs boiling with bloodlust. All of them leash-free in the bright breezy world beyond the transportation box.

  “Lots of nice wuff-wuffs, eh, X?

  “Had to make a plan, X. After that stunt in the bedroom. One of you had to go. Tails, you lose. Cat-o’-nine-tails. And nine lives and now they ran out. I guess every dog has his day. Cats, too. An accident, I’ll have to say. How you escaped, and then what? Flattened by the two-one-four bus? Disappeared? We can put up signs around the neighborhood—pictures of you with your big blue eyes. But no one will find you, of course, because you’ll be the dog’s breakfast by then. Ha-ha. And we’ll get a new little pet. Maybe a budgerigar or something with no teeth. And they’ll forget you in time.”

  The killer’s lament. I didn’t want to. He/she forced me to do it. It was for the best. Don’t you see? The only way. A clean decisive moment. The final solution.

  “What a pretty pussy.”

  A new human voice. Unfamiliar but not hostile. Female. Comforting.

  “Indeed,” Gerald is saying.

  The woman—girl?—is squatting on her haunches next to the transportation box. Her voice has a faintly European lilt to it—Germanic, Nordic? She has blond hair and blue eyes and clear skin. She has been peering through the latticework, into the dungeon. X has been opening and closing her equally blue eyes to signal instant affection. Gerald shifts his lower body to suggest a similar reaction.

  “Gerald,” Gerald says, sitting up and offering his hand in friendship and preliminary maneuver.

  OMG, Dolores is thinking. You are still stained from the upstairs bitch and now this!

  The girl-woman extends her hand. Then pauses as her eyes widen to impossible dimensions.

  “I know you,” she blurts. “Gerald Tremayne. The novelist! Birth was sooo beautiful. You signed it for me at Hay. I listened to your talk. I can’t believe it.”

  Dolores can vaguely remember. X, of course, has no idea what is going on. Bipeds are an odd bunch. Their moods shift inexplicably, and something is now intangibly different. The coordinates have switched, slipped, flipped. Unintended consequences govern events. How can X know that the intervention of this biped has saved her from release into the open where the quadrupeds would have hounded her and run her to ground and torn her to shreds, as surely as … as what?

  As a foxhunt with dogs, Dolores tells her, as a terrier with a rat, a Russell with a rabbit, a leopard with a kudu. But X does not hear. What is a fox, terrier, Russell or leopard to a flat-cat? What is a hunt to a creature that lives from bowl to bowl, from pellet to pellet, delivered on schedule, multiple squares a day?

  “Of course,” Gerald is now saying. “You came up after the talk. You already had the book. To Sabina.”

  “‘With warm regards for the future,’” she recalls. “Omigod. You remembered my name!”

  “From Austria. Linz. Of course.”

  The girl-woman almost swoons.

  Dolores looks more closely through her cat’s eyes. There are no dark roots in the apparition’s fur; even her eyebrows are tantalizingly, naturally blond. How different can this be, in expectation, from Gerald’s marital crossing of colors, their long bodies stretched side by side, chiaroscuro?

  Is it because she is white? Or is it just because he is who—and what—he is? Pheromones. Testosterone. Unseen, undeniable comingling in the air between them, in their glances and subliminal messages. The urge to touch. Hold.

  And she is young enough to be his daughter.

  “‘And the future is now!’” The girl-woman giggles in wide-eyed wonderment. There is no malice, no aforethought. It has just happened. A miracle. Across a crowded hill, full of dogs and walkers.

  “I can’t believe it, Mr. Tremayne.”

  “Gerald. Please. Call me Gerald.”

  There is a pause. Beyond the grille of the transportation box, X is aware of the quadrupeds with their panting halitosis and hyper-lubricious tongues and enormous white teeth fixed in jaws that have evolved to seize the necks of bulls and not let go. What chance for a tiny fluffy cat among such creatures?

  “Do you often do this? Gerald? When you are writing?”

  Oh, if only I could answer that question for you, Mr. Tremayne! Gerald!

  Dolores’s memory is generating an inner slideshow of episodes that she now sees without the benefit of the doubt or of any doubt at all; moments at book fairs, in restaurants, on trains, airplanes, on street corners, book tours, family vacations goddammit, when apparently chance conversations led to absences for which she had blithely, trustingly sought no explanation and for which only the flimsiest explanations had been offered. Like that time in Devon when the girls were tiny and Gerald went off in search of ice cream and came back hours later with nothing to show for his foraging because the 99-er ice creams had melted and the chocolate wafers had all fallen into the sand. What a fool she had been!

  “Well, you know,” Gerald ventures, “I guess it just falls to me to make sure that this little creature has some quality of life … now that my wife is … away.”

  The word away plops into the sentence like a depth charge, heavy with enormous consequences. He has switched his facial expression from “aw, shucks—fancy little old me in charge of the family cat” to “flinty gaze into middle distance, denoting an irreducible core of pain that might only be salved by the touch of a virgin.”

  My wife is away, for which read mad, faithless, imprisoned for some awful ill-defined crime. Away with the fairies. With her best friend’s husband. With the gurus of rehab, the high priests of therapy. Away with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of gin. Away in the realms of Gabriel or Beelzebub depending on the final judgement. Anything but: away on a business trip to earn the money that pays the bills and keeps the coke dealer in custom.

  * * *

  When they met in the northeast of England, she had been doing a double honors course in Eng. Lit. and Business Administration, prior to her MBA in London. He worked on the maintenance staff, a roguish, raffish, piratical figure often compared by undergraduates to the actor Johnny Depp—long-haired, twinkly eyed, laden with knowledge of the kind they did not teach in their academic courses. Such as where the better quality of narcotics could be had, the safest E, the purest Charlie—(“Smack I don’t do,” he would say haughtily. “Crack neither.”)—transactions he liked to define as a legitimate redistribution of wealth from the bourgeoisie, in the form of its offspring, to the proletariat, represented by himself. Plus handling charges to offset the obvious risks.

  A diamond in the rough, awaiting her tender attentions to cut and polish to human perfection.

  She knew him from his association with Clarissa Fawcett, her college roommate—locally rooted and well-versed in the wiles of men of Gerald Tremayne’s background—from whom
he extracted a substantial chunk of the money sent by her parents for scholarly maintenance, arriving in his white van and dropping by their shared digs, his leather belt-pouch laden with narcotic offerings hidden among the camouflaging cargo of hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, spirit levels, wrenches.

  Dolores did not approve of his secret trade. In her native Camden, where she had attended the prestigious girls’ school, she had seen the results of his business at close quarters, among friends who battled in vain against the lure of skunk and E and K, uppers, downers, killers. She had seen the way the drugs warped minds, dictated behavior and scuppered moral standards as her friends fell victim to the promise of easy highs to banish teenage lows, craving transportation—trips, sometimes—to alternate worlds where doubt was banished and colors merged and people chilled. Whence there was no return.

  When she realized why the dashing Gerald visited Clarissa, she was at first quite shocked that the handsome, soi-disant maintenance man was no more than the penultimate link in a chain of supply and demand that started on distant plantations of opium poppies, and coca plants and marijuana bushes, and led through hydroponic labs closer to home and tiny weighing scales in shuttered rooms to the end product sold to her friend in slender paper wraps and little plastic bank bags. Every step along the way contained the seeds and fruits of extreme violence, borne by the promise of easy money in fabled amounts. She felt angry that her friend’s friend had duped her into assuming that he was simply a visitor, an admirer, a gentleman caller from a nonacademic but wholesome blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth universe of manual work and support for soccer teams and pubs and pints.

  In part, Dolores’s annoyance—at her roommate as much as at Gerald—drew on her pity for hapless mules caught with condoms of cocaine bursting in their guts, and foolish British grannies who believe that the gift of a statuette from a Thai lothario was no more than that—certainly not an instant qualification for a near-certain death sentence. Back home, the streets around the market stalls at Camden Lock seemed so exotic and buzzy to foreign visitors who flocked there in great numbers to buy junk clothing and seek the frisson of proximity to danger, among the crowds of spindly dealers in baseball hats and bulky law enforcement officers in Kevlar vests designed to thwart knife attacks. But to Dolores, these same thoroughfares and dark corners were a totem of failure—the failure of her people to rise above the trap of being poor and bereft of prospects, gallery exhibits for visitors from Europe who, their hungers sated, would return to better worlds where societies looked after their own and did not abandon them to wasted lives.