by Jan Carson
Sorry was just contemplating an emergency exit when Mr Fluff began to claw mercilessly at the bare flesh of her left leg. This was no mean coincidence. The cat was trying to get her attention. Shoving the Mr Fluff aside, Sorry tried to ignore the persistent pinch of a guilty conscience. Mr Fluff continued to claw. As the cat’s claws needled in and out of her leg, leaving tiny pinprick indentations, Sorry realized that Mr Fluff was a time bomb waiting to go off. The cat knew too much. Over the past few months, Soren James Blue had exclusively confided in Mr Fluff. This one-sided arrangement had been ongoing for most of Sorry’s internment in the Baptist Retirement Village. Though lonelier than she’d ever been, it was not necessity so much as the unshakeable suspicion that Mr Fluff was much wiser than most human confidantes which had kept this conversation going. Mr Fluff knew everything and, having watched the drama unfold over the last few days, now felt greatly inclined to help.
Sinking her claws into Sorry’s leg for a final time and finding the girl unresponsive, Mr Fluff felt forced into an alternative plan of action. It was not her intention to shock but the situation required something abnormal. The cat untangled herself from Sorry’s legs and waddled into the circle’s centre, whereupon she opened her mouth and forced her vocal chords – previously inclined to produce succulent purrs and predatory hisses – to squeeze five, fat, human syllables into the room.
Sorry was not expecting Mr Fluff to speak, neither was she particularly shocked when the cat did. As a child she’d often heard Mr Fluff singing from the sanctuary of the condiment shelf in the fridge. On several occasions the cat had spoken directly to her; chiding, encouraging and instructing in a tone Sorry had come to associate with European nannies, the kind who wore uniforms and disciplined lavishly and made better parents than the two inferior adults assigned to her care. However, over the years she’d convinced herself that belief in a speaking cat should be listed alongside the other side effects of a troubled childhood: bulimia, vandalism and localized arson to catalogue her own particular obsessions. The sound of Mr Fluff speaking directly to the People’s Committee was stronger than déjà vu; the moment was an old nursery rhyme, long forgotten, and now recalled with searing exactitude. Certain childish smells – laundry, licquorice and pipe smoke – rose comfortingly in Sorry’s nostrils and, against all usual standards, she permitted herself an unsolicited smile.
Mr Fluff had never before and would never again address a crowd. Though she had over the years drafted, in preparation for her glory moment, a speech as eloquent and universal as the Sermon on the Mount, she was fully prepared to sacrifice her spotlight for the greater good. Mr Fluff was absolutely certain that this was exactly the correct instance to release her four words of wisdom upon an unsuspecting audience.
‘Tell the truth, Soren,’ announced Mr Fluff, loud enough for the entire People’s Committee to hear and turn, as quickly as their various elderly ailments would permit. Mrs Huxley let out a sharp, rickety breath; Roger Heinz reached for a cheese knife; and Irene, too daft to ignore the obvious, giggled like a schoolgirl as she shrieked, ‘The cat just spoke!’ In response to their curious glares, Mr Fluff emitted a brief, pretentious meow. It stuck in her throat like a make-believe accent. She could no longer do a passable impression of an ordinary cat. For a brief, breath-held moment the People’s Committee froze, tottering between awe and disgust. Then the room began to riot as all those capable of voluntary movement rushed towards Sorry and Mr Fluff. Like Pentecost unleashed, each one spoke loudly, at once, with various accentual affectations. Sorry found herself suddenly and without warning the center point in a circle of rabbling old people. She kept her seat on the carpet and from this dizzying angle attempted to field their frantic questions.
Yes, Mr Fluff had spoken.
No, she wasn’t particularly surprised, for she’d always known the cat could speak.
Yes, the cat was possessed, or maybe she was possessed. It was hard to tell. Perhaps, after lunch, Mrs Huxley could have a go at casting out their collective demons.
Yes, she would apologize to Mrs Huxley for her blatant impertinence.
No, she did not expect the cat to speak again and could they all piss off and leave her alone. The sight of so many old coots hovering overhead was beginning to make her dizzy.
As the circle began to look more and more like a lynch mob, Nate Grubbs intervened. Brandishing his coffee mug like a truncheon, he pressed for calm and the immediate return to matters more urgent. Unappeased but exhausted from the strain of standing upright for almost three consecutive minutes, the People’s Committee retired to their chairs and sofas, still mumbling into their shirt sleeves. One elderly individual reporting a speaking cat might be excused as Alzheimer’s; two, hysteria. A dozen simultaneous, identical hallucinations suggested the apparition was worryingly real. The cat had spoken four audible words of American English. Almost everyone had heard, though Simeon Klein, profoundly deaf but determined not to miss an emergency meeting, had only experienced the resulting commotion and a clumsily signed explanation leading him to believe the cat had eaten Mrs Kellerman’s knitting. The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs fell silent. As the silence grew louder it took on shapes: clouds and squares and entire rooms, ill-equipped with exits or entrances. No one felt much like speaking. Though, collectively and individually, the People’s Committee had weathered all manner of wars, tragedies and homegrown miracles, no one knew how to approach a situation suddenly populated with speaking cats and disappearing children.
Sensing her presence to be something of a distraction, Mr Fluff made a discreet exit, retreating to the comforting sanctuary of Irene’s fridge. She spent the next hour sucking her tail and leaving hairballs in the butter dish. It was years since Mr Fluff had last required a fridge. She returned to it now like a backslidden thumbsucker and the halogen-lit stillness helped to nurse her loss. She did not regret speaking out. Such outbursts were occasionally necessary. It had been good to hear her own voice again, to see her words evoke such flattering hysteria. However, like a wasp, once stung, she knew the power had now left her. Further voicings would turn her into a sideshow anecdote. Mr Fluff was a proud creature and the prospect of widespread infamy terrified her. So she settled into the cold meats shelf and quietly grew acclimatized to the idea of passing her remaining years as an ordinary cat.
In her absence Cunningham Holt spoke first. He felt it prudent to ignore Mr Fluff. The People’s Committee was tottering on the brink of hysterics and it was up to him to hold their focus. Further interrogation of the cat would leave them circling for hours on a subject secondary to Malcolm’s disappearance. ‘Is there something you want to tell us, Soren?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Sorry.
‘I think there is,’ replied Cunningham Holt. ‘I think you’ve got something important to tell us. I think you know something that could help Malcolm and I think you’re going to share everything you know because at the bottom of it all, you’re a much nicer little girl than you’d like us to believe.’
‘And,’ added Roger Heinz, ‘if you don’t tell us, I’ll run you through with Irene’s electric carving knife.’
Soren James Blue opened her mouth to retaliate and a thin, wavering sob, impotent as a length of damp toilet paper, leaked out. Sorry cried, eyes betraying the softer sentiments trapped behind her face. The threat of carving knives was wasted on her. Over the last six years she’d fielded insults – both ill-founded and conclusive – with the kind of unswerving forbearance usually found in a pro tennis player. Ugly words could rarely catch her, but the realization that Cunningham Holt saw, buried beneath the prickly pallor, a nice little girl, still redeemable, sliced her straight down the middle.
‘It’s alright, child,’ whispered Mrs Hunter Huxley, passing her an unused Kleenex, recently fished from the cavernous interior of Mrs George Kellerman’s Sunday go-to-meeting purse. ‘A good cry will do you the world of good. You just tell us in your own time.’
And so, whilst Roger Heinz pounded
around Bill and Irene’s living room, muttering suspiciously about double bluffs and untrustworthy sources, Soren James Blue nursed a glass of peach schnapps and in a quavering voice, which did not seem to belong to her, shared the humbling details of her summer in the Center. The People’s Committee were furniture for the telling. They neither spoke nor moved, nor felt the inclination to interrupt, and when the final revelation of the Treatment Room proved a little complex for the more elderly members to fully comprehend, Nate Grubbs raised his hand cautiously and asked if a further explanation might be possible. Sorry, for her previous sins, settled easily into the role of confessor. She was a natural storyteller, capable of embellishing where excess proved helpful and at other times clipping the unnecessary to create a streamlined progression from beginning to end. She was not funny. It was not a story which lent itself to humor. The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs appreciated her somber tone; they were not in the mood for comedy.
‘Well,’ announced Bill, when Sorry’s story had finally concluded. ‘Looks to me like we need to get Malcolm into the Director’s Treatment Room.’
The People’s Committee mumbled in general approval.
‘We can’t just walk in there,’ Sorry said. ‘My dad will kill me. No one’s supposed to know about the Treatment Room. He makes the patients sign a contract saying they won’t speak about it. He will actually, physically kill me if he catches me in there with you lot.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t catch us then.’
‘Or we could shoot him,’ proposed Roger Heinz. ‘We’d have the run of the Center for ten minutes if we shot him. That would be more than enough time to get Malcolm sorted out and if we get Irene to do it she can plead insanity; she probably wouldn’t even do prison time.’
‘We could use Nate’s gun,’ added Irene. In her younger years she’d spent summer vacations trekking the Oregon wilderness with the Girl Scouts of America. Six consecutive summers of survival training had left her above averagely adept with an air rifle and prone to inappropriate outbursts of bloodlust. The prospect of murdering the Director had excited Irene in a fashion Bill had neither seen nor experienced in all their decades of marriage.
‘We can’t go round shooting people,’ Bill stated bluntly. His wife’s willingness to assassinate the Director had thrown him. Lately he’d begun to wonder if Irene was the same woman he’d first embraced on her parents’ porch in 1946. Frequently he woke to the creeping suspicion that a changeling wife was now occupying the left side of their king-size bed. He said nothing for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of their comings and goings. The previous spring, however, he’d taken up vegetable gardening as a means of legitimate and daily escape.
‘You’re right Bill,’ agreed Cunningham Holt. ‘But we could use Nate’s gun for a distraction.’
The prospect of a tactical diversion served to satisfy everyone. Sorry, at first reluctant to become involved, seemed reassured that the Director would never know anything. The Mrs Huxley and Kellerman were collectively delighted by the prospect of something concrete and potentially life-threatening to pray about and Malcolm Orange was simply relieved to have a group of adults, albeit rather elderly adults, take responsibility for his problems. Over mugs of acrid Folgers, the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs began to plot. Roger Heinz bucked democracy and voted himself Commander-in-Chief of the afternoon’s operations. No one argued. On the reverse of a disposable Christmas tablecloth, he drew up a plan of attack.
The People’s Committee would split into two individual units. The first unit, comprising Malcolm Orange, Soren, Cunningham Holt and Roger Heinz, would wait by the laundry room and, upon receipt of a secret signal (a shipping flare most likely), breach the Center via the fire exit doors and proceed directly to the Treatment Room. Meanwhile, the secondary unit, comprised of Bill, Irene, Nate Grubbs and Clary O’Hare, would occupy the reception area, mounting a choral singing demonstration in revolt against the planned closure of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. If this tactical diversion was not spectacle enough to draw the entire Center staff, Director included, to the reception area, allowing unsupervised access to the rear fire exit, Irene would either faint or fire Nate Grubbs’ shotgun at the ceiling. The appropriate action would be left to the discretion of Irene. (With hindsight, reliance upon Irene’s good sense would prove to be the only weak link in an otherwise watertight plan.) The remaining members of the People’s Committee would man base camp at Chalet 11, maintaining a round-the-clock prayer vigil, producing constant supplies of instant coffee and oatmeal cookies, and ensuring no further harm came to the infant Ross.
It was a good plan. Everyone agreed except Simeon Klein who, despite the helpful diagrams, could not quite understand why they were attacking the Center. The ladies immediately migrated towards the kitchen and began to bake furiously, offering up sanctimonious Our Fathers between the thrusting beats of Irene’s food processor. With no appropriate harness for child restraint available, Ross was unceremoniously wedged into the cutlery drawer. His tiny body was clamped firmly between a selection of kitchen utensils and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. From this supine position he spent an oblivious afternoon monitoring the swirling rounds of the ceiling fan and feasting on the odd spoonful of cake mix.
Malcolm, Cunningham Holt and Nate Grubbs were dispatched to the wardrobe in the master bedroom of Chalet 3 with the express purpose of retrieving the shotgun. Regardless of Bill’s reservations, the People’s Committee had agreed that Irene’s ‘scene’ in reception would be all the more attention-grabbing if accompanied by a firearm of some sort. Though Roger Heinz talked constantly of heavy artillery, his actual collection of weapons included nothing more threatening than a sharpened tin opener.
Nate Grubbs’ now legendary shotgun had been borrowed from a former colleague in the Fall of 1985 and remained the only firearm on the cul-de-sac. Late summer 1985 had been a particularly humid season. Raccoons and other wildish creatures, normally inclined to hide out under porch and attic, had been sweated onto suburban streets, for the most part ferociously unimpressed with the change of scenery. There had been a preternaturally high number of rabid possum attacks in the greater Portland area. Several small children had lost limbs and facial appendages. An elderly man in Selwood had slept soundly, anesthetized on hay fever medication, whilst a posse of marauding possums chewed right through his left wrist. The mayor had cautioned Portland’s residents to arm themselves appropriately against the possibility of further violent attacks. Nate Grubbs, sixty-seven and still blessed with un-spectacled vision, had been appointed guardian of the cul-de-sac and acquired a firearm in preparation.
Though the Baptist Retirement Village had glided towards Thanksgiving without so much as a possum poop sighting, Nate Grubbs had grown accustomed to patrolling the turn circle, shotgun cocked against his shoulder, primed to protect his friends and neighbors. Originally he’d intended to return the borrowed gun once the rainy season set in and most giant rodents turned their attention towards hibernation. However, by the end of September 1985 the old man had developed a fondness for firearms and the way the cul-de-sac’s ladies seemed to view him differently with a shotgun on his shoulder. He decided to hold on to the gun until absolutely forced to return it.
The situation remained unchanged until the week before Thanksgiving when Nate Grubbs, in a fit of self-pity brought on by the anniversary of his third wife’s tragic death, swapped his single nightcap for half a bottle of whiskey. The following morning there were bullet holes in the bathroom ceiling and Nate could not recall if the gun had been placed in its customary storage spot – behind the pullover shelf in his wardrobe – cocked, or as was his normal custom, methodically unloaded with the safety on. With no means of ensuring the shotgun would not go off as soon as he opened the door, Nate Grubbs had determined never to open his wardrobe again. For months he’d worn the same burgundy pullover and slacks. Eventually, when practicality necessi
tated, he’d purchased a single set of secondary clothes which he’d been wearing in bipartisan rotation for the past six years. ‘Better to lose a few pullovers than an arm,’ he liked to say each time the anecdote was recounted to a fresh resident. Nate Grubbs’ former colleague, under the mistaken belief that Portland was still plagued by armies of rabid possums, had yet to enquire about the return of his shotgun.
‘How do we know it’s safe to open the wardrobe now?’ asked Malcolm Orange as the reconnaissance team shuffled across the cul-de-sac from Chalet 13 to 3.
‘We don’t,’ replied Cunningham Holt grimly. ‘All we can do is be careful and hope for the best.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ added Nate Grubbs. Though not by birth an optimist, a series of lucky scratch cards and a dalliance with a fifty-five-year-old brunette in the parking lot of the 82nd Street Rite Aid had lately left him a great believer in good fortune. ‘I’m almost sure I didn’t load it.’
‘Last week you said you’d put money on the damn thing being loaded.’
‘It was eight years ago. You can hardly expect me to remember, Cunningham. We’ll just open the door real slow and it’ll be fine.’
Five minutes later the two old men found themselves standing in front of the wardrobe door. For safety’s sake, they’d insisted Malcolm stand in the hallway and Malcolm, equally insistent upon risk reduction, had coerced the two old men into donning a pair of metallic mixing bowls for helmets. From a distance they looked like First World War soldiers. Up close they looked like two senile old men in mixing bowls, storming a flat-pack wardrobe.
‘You take the lead, Cunningham,’ urged Nate Grubbs, suddenly convinced that the shotgun was not only loaded but cocked to go off at the slightest movement.
Cunningham Holt reached for the wardrobe handle, turned it ninety-five degrees clockwise and without further ado began to slowly open the door. Through the opening door Nate Grubbs could make out a slim, ever-expanding slice of pullovers, pants and dress shirts. He was just beginning to mentally match an outfit for next year’s Thanksgiving Turkey and Tipples Tea Dance when the bedroom door burst open, admitting first Malcolm and then Irene. As Irene tripped on the carpet edge, an entire tray full of coffee mugs came flinging free of her hands, hurtling towards Cunningham Holt. Most of the scalding hot coffee made contact with his face and neck whilst a smaller amount continued its trajectory, splattering the bedroom walls with a garish constellation of mud-colored teardrops. Nate Grubbs remained almost entirely protected behind the bedroom door. Malcolm was a muddle of arms and disappearing legs, tangling on the pastel-blue carpet as he tried to drag Irene back through the bedroom door. All were caught in a single moment of great stillness and then, like the beginning of the universe, everything happened suddenly, all at once, with great noise. In the ensuing melee Cunningham Holt drew back, yanking open the wardrobe door and instigating a landslide of V-neck pullovers, polyester slacks and the infamous shotgun, cocked and more than relieved to unload its contents upon impact with the bedroom floor.