Cat Flap

by Andrew Osmond

  Chapter Three: Saturday

  “In 1962, Ernest Jellett, a water board worker, was walking up a country lane near Farnham, when he was amazed to see a huge, cat like animal pursuing a rabbit ahead of him. He described the creature as having a round, flat face, like a big cat, with a long, tapering tail and huge paws. This has come to be regarded as the first official sighting of the Surrey Puma.”

  The clean-shaven face of cryptozoology. That was how Art liked to picture himself. Self-image: it can be a dangerous delusion. It is the lot of Man that he is generally defined by his job. Bank manager; soldier; accountant; farmer: they are neat boxes, out of which there is seldom any necessity to struggle. Now, if this job is a vocation; his career rather than his mere occupation, all is well and good, except come the time when that career eventually ends; when redundancy, retirement or sickness overtakes him and he is forced to relinquish his professional duties and, instead, is thrust into a cruel world devoid of identity. Retired bank manager; ex-soldier; redundant accountant; they all added up to a big zero. For Art this never had, and never would, be a problem. Art did a job. Plain and simple. Nothing more; nothing less. He spent an allotted number of hours - as pre-determined by a higher authority - at an allotted place - likewise decided - for an allotted amount of money. Filling in the specifics in Art’s case, this meant that he spent seventeen and a half hours a week in the Library at the University of London for a salary too vulgarly small to mention. Unlike Art’s colleagues though, he never considered himself a university worker; never wanted to be referred to as a librarian; never thought that he was included when memos came around addressed to ‘all clerical and related admin. staff’; never wanted to be put under any general banner by people who did not know him. When he was younger he would have argued passionately to be described as ‘an individual’, but as he grew older and increasingly found that the ‘cult of the individual’ only led to ‘the path of inactivity’ he had sought out a new direction for his life: something that gave meaning and, at the same time, was entirely within his own control; something that defined him; something that he could stand up and proudly say, “I am a ...” He was still not entirely sure when cryptozoology had come along and managed to fulfill these criteria, but he did know that it excites more interest when he introduces himself at parties now than it ever did as, “you must meet my friend, he’s a librarian.”

  Of course, becoming a father provided another way of defining himself.  For many people it was the ultimate description.  Parent.  Father.  They were fairly rigid terms; little opportunity for misrepresentation there.  But Art did not want to be just a parent; just a father: he knew that he had to hang on to something more; something from his responsibility-free days.  It was important, not just for him, but also for his child.  He wanted to be someone that his son would look up to. He recalled - he had time to do this, since he was currently on another one of his rabbit runs, this time around the cemetery; Luke once again asleep in his buggy - going along to a relatively well known footballer’s testimonial match some years before. It was an occasion for the supporters to turn out in recognition of their player’s solid ten years’ unstinting loyalty to the club and an opportunity to watch a game of football divorced from the usual pressures of league and cup. Art had never been a great fan of the player in question, rightly judging him too one-footed and a bit of a journeyman, whose career had flattered his talent, but he felt a pang of envy at him as he stepped out on the pitch that evening to receive his presentation before the game, his two small children on either side of him, enthusiastically cheered on by a partisan crowd of thirty thousand. At that moment, if never again, those kids must have thought, “now I’ve got a dad to be proud of.” Perhaps not, though. Perhaps it is subtler than that. Fatherhood had made Art look at his own dad with different eyes. As a child, it is easy to see your parents existing for no other reason than to feed and nurture and protect you, and to forget that they existed as individual human beings, both before you came into existence and after you were born as well. Perhaps it was because his own dad had been such a good and selfless father that he seldom ever thought of him in other terms; to imagine what his boyhood ambitions had been; to wonder if he was satisfied with the way his own life had turned out. As his child, Art had wanted to do things that would make him proud of him, but is that reward enough for thirty years of self-sacrifice? And yet when you hear parents speak of having a child as being the most worthwhile and important thing they ever did in their lives, is it a question of self-sacrifice at all, or is it just those little replicating genes again controlling the mind as well as the body? Art still didn’t know. He could only hope, that he would emulate his own father, and prove to be good enough for the job, and at the same time not forget who he was; somehow ensure that the individual he had always identified as himself, didn’t completely disappear under the title of father, so that Luke will recognize him for being a good man, as well as hopefully for being a good dad.

  Why was he spending all this valuable time musing about Luke though? His son’s somnolent hours were the only opportunity that he had these days to indulge his alter ego. He felt a bit like Clark Kent - mild mannered, office worker by day; world-saving, super hero by night. Okay, so perhaps not exactly like Clark Kent, but he was willing to bet that the few people who even happened to notice the insignificant, anoraked figure pushing his infant son around the graveyard that morning, would never have begun to imagine that this was a man who hunted for monsters.

  That is the popular impression of cryptozoology. Monster hunters. Mad scientists and loony amateurs. Well, Art was certainly no mad scientist. Not enough initials after his name for that. Loony amateur? It perhaps depended on who was describing him. His wife had called him such, and worse, often enough. It all came back to that problem of self-image.

  There were few other people in the cemetery to interrupt Art’s train of thought, but an unusually strong burst of wind brought him back to the present and made him concentrate on his surroundings. It had been a miserable January, colder than for several years, and it looked as though February was going to continue much the same, wet and wintery. The graveyard probably did not feature high on many people’s list of preferred walks in the vicinity, but for Art it was both conveniently close to his home, while at the same time being just far enough away to allow an opportunity for the rocking motion of the buggy to send his son into a deep slumber. The wind howled again and Art drew the collar of his coat closer about him and looked down to check that Luke was not getting too cold or wet. Beyond the cemetery wall the four floodlights at the football stadium towered high, like metallic dinosaurs looking down on a feast. Watford must be playing at home this afternoon; Art had passed several mobile hot-dog vans setting up in the street outside, ready to ply their trade to the passing throngs. He had only just finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces, and should he ever have been tempted to sample the wares of these alfresco merchants, after reading the exploits of Ignatius J. Reilly and his time with Paradise Vendors Incorporated, he would have thought again. He pushed the buggy past the central stone-built chapel with its neo-Gothic windows, circumventing it on three sides in a withershins direction, and smiled - as he always did - when he saw the modern No Smoking symbol on the crematorium door. Avenues of rain-drenched, grey headstones lead off in all directions. He started along one path that he was particularly familiar with - the Baskerville family, a fine name, late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century; Buddy, ‘suffer the children’; Reg and Stan, brothers killed in different fields of combat during the War; each in their time a novel, now condensed to a sentence; their story unknown except to a very few - but halted seeing a couple, both dressed in black, some distance ahead of him. They too must have a story. The woman looked elderly and was being supported both by her companion and with the aid of a stick; they walked slowly, but purposefully, in the direction of a blue car that was parked close to the crematorium building with
in the cemetery grounds. Mother and son perhaps? Visiting the father’s grave? A recent bereavement? It seemed quite likely. But who could tell. It was pure speculation. They could have been local historians or even visiting football supporters killing - ho, ho - a couple of hours before kick-off. At that very moment, they were probably inventing an equally inaccurate explanation for Art’s presence: “poor man, wife perhaps died in childbirth”.

  A large, black crow was cawing mournfully from the top of a Celtic-style cross, his baleful message sounding across the silent tombs. The bird watched suspiciously as Art approached, before taking wing, flying only as far as the high branches of a green cedar tree, waiting for the interloper to move on. A group of a dozen starlings, not so fearful of the human presence, pecked away at something that the rain had brought to the surface in the short grass. There were red and black fruit on the hawthorn bushes and, here and there in the soil, tiny new green shoots which looked like wild crocuses, and which offered a greater reason to be optimistic about the continuum of existence than the lifeless bundles of cut blooms that decorated the occasional monument. The petty-cash tin was something of an anomaly, though.  It was lying in the middle of the path and brought Art up with a start.  He shuddered involuntarily, experiencing the kind of frisson one would commonly associate with being surprised by a living presence, or when viewing something unnatural or horrific, not the normal reaction to an inanimate hulk of metal.  It was the immediate mental association that the tin box caused that provoked the reaction.  He realized instantly that he was looking at the discarded spoils from a robbery: the scenario was not hard to imagine.  The High Street was not very far away, some of the smaller, specialist shops in the side roads even closer; an opportunist thief had perhaps seen a moment when the shop till was left untended, snuck behind the counter and grabbed whatever was immediately at hand, and then run.  A petty-cash tin would constitute a good day’s work.  The relative quiet of the graveyard would be the ideal place to sort the ill-gotten wheat from the chaff.  There were a few damp papers, the ink blurred by the rain, lying beside the tin.  Art could not read them from where he was standing and he did not bother to kneel down to take a closer look.  It was still a filthy day: the rain was coming on stronger again now and Art suddenly just wished to be away from this place.  He had no anxiety that the thief might still be around, Art was sure that he was long gone, but he felt cold and damp and the lure of his secure house and a warm drink was proving strong.  He would never be able to survive outside for long: living rough, it sounded romantic in theory, but in practice...  He did not know how the homeless coped.  Of course, in many cases they simply didn’t, he knew. Why didn’t they just all rise up in rebellion?  What had they to lose?  It was a bit of a Raskolnikov-type dilemma.  When you have nothing, you can still cling on to your values.  He was being a prig.  What did he know? He had never been in such a situation; never even been close to it, thank God - or thank those genes again.  Art thought that he would quickly sacrifice his own values if ever he were cold or hungry or frightened. Morals were a prerogative of the fortunate and the advantaged: a roof can provide more than mere shelter. There did not seem to be that many genuinely homeless people in Watford: a few colourful down-and-outs drinking from cans in Market Street and a smattering of vacant-eyed inhabitants of the ‘care’ centre, who would wander the shopping streets and sit on the benches in the Harlequin Centre by day, but who would all have mysteriously disappeared come nightfall. In London, though, in the dark doorways along the Strand, or where the building work was going on along Kingsway, and in the maze of little dark alleys and service roads behind the shops between Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, the area in the past which would have been the notorious old St Giles ghetto, there, after dark, Art had seen people who truly lived their lives on the street. Not all young men, as is the popular impression - those seeking and not finding their fortune in the Big City - but elderly men and women too. He used to pass one old woman huddled, her arms wrapped protectively around a posse of supermarket carrier bags containing all her possessions, in a Kingsway doorway nearly every day. Every day for a year; two years perhaps. Until, one day, she wasn’t there. He liked to think that she had perhaps been plucked from the streets by a kindly soul, set up in a better place, was being cared for and looked after, but Art knew the truth was seldom so sympathetic and the homeless far from picaresque. He wouldn’t last a week, let alone a year. But what if they did all rise up? What a scary place London then? Where instead, every person that now apologetically asked you for change was a ruthless mugger and every sleeping body beneath their cardboard blanket a potential murderer. What point speculation? It didn’t solve what to do about the matter of the petty-cash box. Art swung the buggy round on its back wheels in a neat half turn. Leave it. Someone else would discover it. Someone else could report it. Art pulled the hood of his coat over his head again and set off in the direction of home.

  It was two hours later that Jennifer Tate noticed the same metal petty-cash tin and reported it to council worker Jim Marcello who was tending the cemetery grounds. It was four hours later, on his way home from work, that Jim Marcello, driving his regulation white van resplendent with the Watford Council orange sun logo above the optimistic message “Way Ahead”, dropped off the tin at the local police station in the aptly named Shady Lane. It was four days later that the cash box arrived on the desk of D. S. James Leigh at Hertfordshire C.I.D. headquarters and from there, only seventeen minutes later - even allowing for a slight traffic delay on the one-way system - before James Leigh was turning into the driveway, for a second time, of Mick Jones’s farmhouse.