Cat Flap Read online

  She loathed the sight of young people (often black—in fact, usually black) being patted down by the police in the back streets near Camden tube station on the Northern Line. The skeletal women with track-marked arms and ferret eyes, panhandling among the tourists, filled her with rage at the suppliers. At people, in fact, just like Gerald Tremayne.

  And yet Gerald had a way of explaining it away. It was a sideline. He would not sell to people who could not afford. He did not do the really hard stuff. Recreational was all. Among people whose college years would inevitably end in degrees and good jobs and a return to sanity in homes where the favored drug was Chablis or Chardonnay or, at worst, gin and tonic. Of course, he felt guilt-stricken about it, but, in these blighted parts where the shipyards were shuttered and the mines were sealed, what choice was there? If you went to the job center and told them you wanted another chance—a sixth-form college, maybe, a proper apprenticeship in a real trade—they would laugh at you. So, yes, briefly and not forever, he did this hateful, hated business. His dealing was no more than the equivalent of Steve McQueen’s baseball in The Great Escape, pounding the prison walls. He was saving his earnings to get out. To concentrate on his real love—writing! He was building a stash of cash for his flight south to London and beyond—Paris and the grave of Jim Morrison; Tangier and Marrakech and Fez; the trail east through Istanbul to the ashrams of India. Okay, he had no fancy qualifications. But when he sat in the back of his white van, parked up in a lay-by, scribbling down his thoughts and ideas in pilfered notebooks, he knew for sure that his words made sense, wove spells, signposted the future. At home, in the bedroom he shared with a younger brother, he kept a laptop locked away under the bed and, late at night, began to transfer his notes into the outline, the framework of a plot, a story, a narrative. The baleful light from the screen lit up a face filled with amazement that he, Gerald Tremayne, no-goodnik, drug pusher, could build these fantastic phantoms that strutted the stage of his invention. The first seeds of Birth had been planted.

  When he told her this—his deepest secret—his eyes lit up with missionary zeal that sent a thrill through her. He was a storyteller whose story was his own. A pied piper.

  More than anything, he told her, he wanted out of this postindustrial penitentiary where he unblocked vomit-clogged student lavatories, replaced lightbulbs in dormitory corridors, fixed doors smashed and splintered in savage drunken paroxysms. Dolores took him at his word, believing that she was the only person with whom he shared this inner life of yearning and creativity. Because he told her so. Because he was a man of many personae to be buffed and polished and presented as needs dictated.

  His needs, of course.

  In his role as campus handyman, Gerald had access and cover for his covert trade and his skilled seduction. There were many lewd jokes about him. Envious male undergraduates spoke of his rattling the pipes, plumbing the depths, oiling the hinges. But, to Dolores, he offered a different face. When he discovered from her roommate that she was studying literature, he began to pepper his conversation with references to poets and writers, Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence—provincial men who had made good through language and their mastery of it. Finally, one day, he had brought her a USB stick. Read it, please, he wheedled in his Geordie accent. Tell me where I am going wrong. At first she resisted. She was not dumb. She knew his reputation from her roommate who told her explicitly to be careful where Gerald was concerned. And anyhow, she was a student, not a teacher. What would she know about first novels and literary pretensions? Maybe he saw the USB stick as the key to other things. There were few people of color on campus. Maybe he wanted a trophy. Well, look, I’ll just leave it here, he said, placing the USB on her desk one day when he dropped by to sell her friend a baggie of the best hash in Newcastle. Up to you. Take it or leave it. Read it, if you like. Or not.

  So she did, and it was not half bad, Dolores thought, surprised at the quality of the writing from the roughneck Tremayne, despite her desire to harbor no intellectual prejudice against the handyman-genius who had pirouetted into her life on paint-spattered, steel-capped boots, sneaking up on her while she was wrestling with economic theory and Milton. And sold class-A drugs to her fellow students, recruiting some of them as runners and decoys.

  Gerald became something of a fixture, offering discounted dope to Clarissa, sipping many cups of tea and coffee with Dolores, knowing, in the way that lotharios know and believe to be their right and destiny, that he did not need to hurry, that she would fall into his arms in the fullness of time if he took things easy, but would run a mile if he came on too strong. And she knew, too, that sooner or later, but preferably later, after a decent interval of circling and due diligence, they would tumble together when trust had built a carapace against the fear of exploitation or rejection. Against betrayal. The most heinous of outcomes.

  “It won’t last,” Clarissa said with the finality of unassailable conviction, beyond challenge or debate. “I know the type. Love you and leave you. You’re probably only thinking about it to annoy your dad. Or something Freudian or whatever.”

  While her roommate busied herself with rolling marijuana into a perfect reefer, Dolores considered her taunting proposition. What did she know about Freud? Or whatever? Clarissa was studying criminology, even as she committed crime to distract herself from the rigors of her course. She had her eye on a career in the police. Know thine enemy! But, Dolores conceded with some reluctance, Clarissa might have a point.

  As an adolescent Dolores had seemed to bypass the rebellious phase. A model daughter. Good grades. No unexplained all-nighters. No motorbike howl to signal the arrival of an unsuitable suitor in greasy leathers athwart some overpowered machine. So maybe, belatedly, this was her gesture, her catch-up revolt against parental—paternal—authority. Against all her father’s hints of African dreams and re-nurtured roots in a faraway never-never land.

  Roots! Her roots were in Camden or Newcastle, not Johannesburg or Cape Town. So why not make that clear with her rough-edged, flat-voweled beau.

  “Not really,” she said. “Not really Freud.”

  They were sitting in their shared sitting room, cluttered with Dolores’s books and her roommates’ bongs and the familiar accoutrements of student life: folders and files stacked neatly in Dolores’s sphere of influence; empty takeout boxes on Clarissa’s.

  “Well what then?” Clarissa inquired, firing up her creation and inhaling deeply.

  It was a good question.

  Maybe it was just her genes demanding non-conformism, rebellion. When her mother met her father, after all, he was not just some rebellious youth. He was a terrorist, a freedom fighter, the product of another continent, another race. Soviet-trained. Moscow rules! She was an English rose, her blue eyes passed down to her daughter in the mingling of chromosomes that sealed the parental bonding. He had grown up shoeless in Zululand; she had worn heels that tip-tapped on the cobblestones. He offered his hand. She defied her elders and took it, back in those days when such trysts were a novelty tantamount to revolt. So it was only natural that the child of this union would seek romance in a different milieu.

  And she had found it—it had crept up on her, ambushed her—in this sharp-edged outcast with dreams far beyond the frontiers of his social legacy. If her father had yearned and struggled for political liberation through the barrel of a gun, then Gerald was the creative equivalent, struggling for the liberation of the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs that poured forth with all the insistence and clamor of a Kalashnikov on automatic fire. And she, Dolores, would be his muse, his commissar, honing and channeling the inchoate passions. His Beatrice. She would not be the first upwardly mobile woman to fall for a man from lower on society’s imposed ladder, seeking to escape a different world that doomed its inhabitants to narrow horizons and institutional mediocrity. If anything her father should be proud of her. Her love was a mighty blow for the class struggle, the fight for a society free of prejudice and injustice, the battle
to dismantle the barriers of heritage.

  “Pygmalion!” Clarissa suddenly barked from within her narcotic fug in one of those lightbulb-illuminating, penny-dropping, gotcha moments. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? Except it’s in reverse. You’re Henry Higgins and he’s Mary Doolittle.”

  “Eliza. It’s Eliza Doolittle. And. No. It’s not Pygmalion.”

  But the notion settled, and with it the uneasy question of whether her heart’s desire had become entangled with some strange evangelism. How many women, after all, devoted far too much of their energy and forgiveness to the enhancement and improvement of their chosen partner?

  In the end, when she completed her studies, he offered to help her move her boxes and books and files and folders down to London. Gallantly, he declined her offer to pay for the diesel, resisting the counter-suggestion to go Dutch. As they left the northeast in his white van with its freckles of rust and belches of diesel fumes, she did not pay too much attention to his bulky tote bag and laptop computer that had somehow been packed along with her worldly possessions. Not to mention his battered toolbox with its shelves and nooks and crannies laden with all manner of equipment and widgets and pouches and baggies. The portable electric drill and its charger should have offered her a clue to his intentions, and perhaps it did, along with the thrill of knowing what could not yet be said out loud.

  Companionably, happily, they bowled down the M1 and into North London. And there they stayed. To this day.

  Surely, she told herself now, swaying and bouncing in the transportation box, it had not been all cynical on his part. Surely there had been love? Surely the arrival of the girls had placed their bonds and vows on a different, unassailable plane, built a palisade against temptation and all-too-easy conquest?

  But when had it ended? How had she not seen his roving-eye, his default setting, reasserting itself as she clambered the corporate ladder, rising into a stratosphere that offered no space for husband or family? Had he even waited the mandatory seven years before scratching the itch? At the beginning he had made his contribution. North London offered rich pickings for a man of his accomplishments—in many ways, she now suspected—and he soon had a client list of handiwork-challenged householders who reached for his cell phone number to deal with fused electrics and frozen boilers, broken sash windows and dripping taps, showers that backed up behind grease-trap drains. And then there was the second list of customers seeking edgy exhilaration or numbed torpor, often at the same addresses, just at different times of the day. Or night. Between those sorties, she heard him tap-tapping away with single fingers on the laptop, Birth building in range and might to its magisterial, soon-to-be-bestselling 630 pages of chronicles from the north, an early Knausgaard of detailed observation and generational dysfunction.

  As he struggled with recalcitrant sentences and words that sent him rummaging through the thesaurus, he acquired an agent who stirred a flurry of interest at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The monkey wrench gave way to the workstation, the drill to the desk. Windows XP displaced window sashes, the rough diamond polished and faceted, the toolbox banished to the storeroom in the cellars below their mansion block. The client list for his potions narrowed to personal use, sustained by his allowance from the joint account she set up as success took her into the rarefied financial reaches where dependents became tax breaks. When a ballcock broke, or a water filter needed replacing below the white Belfast sink, he called in a plumber and watched with a mildly critical air as some artisan from eastern Europe completed a task he could just as easily have performed himself and to far better effect. Had he bothered to help when they had the kitchen renovated; or the big living room repainted; or when the shower rooms were rebuilt and replumbed; or when the bookcases were extended to make space for the foreign translations and manifold editions of Birth; or when the units around the fireplace were revamped to accommodate the wide-screen television which she often found tuned to the sports channels when he told her he had been hard at work on Marriage, or mapping out Death? And when had he last told her he loved her? And when, for that matter, had she uttered that same incantation, the three-word antidote to the entropy of passion?

  They are nearing the end of the walk back from the jaws of death.

  “And do you work from home, er, Gerald?”

  “I have a little place. An office just across the road.”

  News to me, X heard an alien voice murmuring from somewhere inside her own head.

  “I could show you if you like,” he was saying. “I’ll just drop off the cat.”

  Dolores feels the powerful bound of his long legs as he leaps up the stairs to their apartment, three at a time. She wishes Jenny Steinem, their neighbor, could see him now and share this knowledge of deceit. The door with its double Chubb locks swings open. The transportation box hits the floor with a thud on the sea-grass carpet. The portcullis door swings open and X stretches her way out of it, her bottom raised, her front paws spread before her, digging into the familiar roughness of the carpeting where her claws find easy purchase.

  X turns back and does not grasp what Dolores sees through those bright, blue, rag-doll eyes. Gerald is removing the tape from the cat flap, the outer wall of the keep, the last bastion, the path to freedom and foxes and dogs and BMWs and the 214 bus pounding up and down the hill. Again, he has reached for the eat-me pellets of prawn, tuna, salmon, rabbit essences, laying a trail that leads to the flap.

  “There you go, X. Enjoy,” he says, swinging the flap open and closed with his sneakered foot. “I know I will.”

  In anyone else, she might admire the libidinous stamina, if not the bottomless capacity to deceive. If she had maintained her status as the object of the former, there would be no need for the latter. But, through her cat’s eyes, the world has been turned on its head.

  nine

  Had he wanted it this way? Had it ever, really, not been this way?

  Gerald Tremayne looked down into the cat’s blue eyes and, for a second, thought he saw some distant yet familiar glimmer that disappeared as quickly as it flared. Reproach? Anger? Hurt?

  Anthropomorphistic crap!

  It was a cat. A cat that had, through its own doing, gotten in the way, interposed itself in matters that could only be resolved by its abrupt—yet explicable—demise. A kitten could, if necessary, be found to replace the soggy mass of redness and bloodied fur that would presently adorn the wheels of some fund manager’s Bentley (nothing but the best for X, of course. As it had always been). Or even a puppy—sweet little demander of thrice-daily walks and opportunities for conversation with lonely dog owners only waiting to shed their Wellington boots and matching Barbour coats in clandestine couplings.

  Of course, he would have to replace the cleaning lady, too, since she, it would transpire, in her zeal unlocked the cat flap. He would personally interview potential successors, sketch out their responsibilities, his expectations of them. Or was that going a bit too far, sailing a bit too close to the wind?

  This, he thought with a sudden, short-lived injection of melancholy and self-pity, was what his life had become. No wonder that the second volume of the trilogy was little more than an empty USB stick, a Word folder whose edit-trace described a dwindling parabola of deletions and deductions and excisions and subtractions and contractions that created a void, a zero, a chapter heading leading nowhere.

  All work and no play.

  Red Rum, Dead Cat.

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  How could anyone expect his genius to blossom between the cat litter and the school run? He had tried. God knows he had tried. But how often was irresistible temptation strewn across his path? Through no fault of his own. And now again. His burden. His gift to the world.

  She was waiting outside the apartment house.

  Ingrid? Eva? Brunhilde? Agata? Ulrika? Annette? Sabrina? Sabena?

  Sabina.

  She smiled prettily, slightly nervously.

  “Sorry that took a moment. Had to settle the
pussy down. There’s always so much to do when you are, you know, alone?”

  “Oh, I know,” Sabina said. “You poor man.”

  Cast the line. Set the hook.

  Glancing over his shoulder as they crossed the busy road that ran past the front garden of the apartment house, he caught a glimpse from the window above his own apartment of Jenny Steinem staring down at them. Shit. How to describe her expression? Puzzled? Aggrieved? Below her, in the bay window of his own living room, X had taken up position on a bookcase and was pawing at the window the way cats do, though there was something frenetic in her manner, something desperate. He waved casually.

  “Who was that?”

  “No one special. Just the cat,” said the spider to the fly.

  Sabina looked back.

  “Wie süß!” she said.

  “What?”

  “How sweet. The way she paws at the window. As if she’s saying, you know, good-bye. Like a lover.” She giggled.

  “Oh yes, a real sweetie. All I’ve got left in some ways.”