Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  I suppose you would say this urge is a residual part of the DNA that links me to lions and tigers and the other truly big cats (big in the sense of absolute size rather than relatively big from regular free feeds in comparison with feral, street-smart versions of my species. Or big in the sense of plumpness requiring regular weigh-ins at the torture chamber of the white-coated bipeds who prescribe what Dolores knew to be something called Obesity Management. Imagine the humiliation if they did that to humans queuing at McDonald’s or Burger King or Krispy Kreme Doughnut—do not!—stands!).

  But what would I know about DNA, or cheetahs or pumas or ocelots or caracals for that matter? Or McDonald’s etc? I am, after all, a cat. A sly and clever cat, it is true. A wily, calculating and very very beautiful cat. But a cat nonetheless. A housebound flat-cat. I have no access to the terminology of human science, although I am struggling to acquire some biped language: the sound X, for instance. Eks, pronounced in varying degrees of approval or offense, denotes a request for my presence or a condemnation of some recent and unwelcome action; reward or reprimand.

  It is hard to discern the distinction because I have no access, either, to the human moral code.

  I am required, rather, to be somehow inscrutable, occasionally affectionate, and most often indifferent to human blandishments, except when my stomach tells me that the giant bipeds who think they understand me must be persuaded to forage on my behalf and offer provender.

  As a cat, I have impulses rather than detailed game plans, whose logic is not readily evident to the two-legged monsters I have acquired as my feeders, acolytes and servants. Or, indeed, to me.

  Why, for instance, do I sometimes take it into my head, at a time in the dark hours when no food or company is forthcoming, to propel myself at speed down the long, central corridor of the biped lair, tossing myself into the air with giddy loop-the-loops and high-dive twists to land on the human sleep-pad with such force that lights go on and the word eks is pronounced by a voice I recognize to be both male and angry.

  Why do I prowl across somnolent biped forms under feathery covers, probing with my paws for the firm, warm terrain of certain mysterious zones of their bodies?

  Are these the moments when they—humans, that is, not cats, of course—would prefer to be sleeping? How would I know? I have no real memory of my forebears. I was removed from my parents and siblings in my earliest days. I have lived since then in a moving forest of enormous legs many times my own height that end in a lower horizontal plane that could crush me—although that does not prevent me from trying to weave between them, potentially tripping them, sensing their presence through my whiskers, furry flanks and tail.

  I have no quadruped contacts or acquaintances. I sometimes think I am turning into a biped or that some process is underway to confuse my felinity with the otherness of my companions. My life is full of such barely perceived musings that cross my consciousness like shadows and then are gone, leaving only an interrogative trace. Like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

  The what?

  But why, despite my title as a flat-cat, with every known creature comfort of board and lodging, games, toys, catnip, regular meals, occasional “treats” resembling prawns (I know only that I like prawns, but I do not know what they are or do) would I plot and fret and try to position myself so that, when the bipeds fail to enforce the elaborate security precautions they undertake before opening the big white barrier leading to the universe beyond my immediate knowledge, I may propel myself at speed out into that space of heady liberation?

  And why, oh why, do I choose, during these giddy moments of freedom, to scamper upward, using the series of platforms that lead to other human boxes rather than down to where my instincts tell me there is access to the perils and delights of life beyond the cat flap—faint intimations of strange odors: leaf mold, urine, slugs, roots, traces of many other cats, pussies galore? (How do I even know how to describe these elements, other than by supposition about a world I have perceived through the hard, invisible, transparent barriers that enable me to sit for hours and follow the antics of flying, winged things, and loud rumbling large things and quadrupeds on leads that do not share my flat-cat ground rules? How can I prevent myself from inquiring into these mysteries, to the extent that I can? How can I know what curiosity did to the cat?)

  My power of memory is of itself so capricious that I cannot recall what I truly remember and what I do not. But I believe there was an episode when the big white barrier of my prison opened for a long time and I sped and scuttled and headed uphill along the platforms and no biped pursued me and my hypersensitive ears detected the familiar sound of the barrier below closing. But I heard it from the outside! And I learned fear.

  If I knew what Stockholm syndrome was, I would say I displayed it because, without my biped captors to recapture me, I had no real idea what to do, or really where I was, except that the urge that sends me usually to my dark litter box came upon me and I had no means of access to my private place so, perforce, was obliged to perform the intimate act in the liberated zone and, out of courtesy, did so outside another of the barriers in a higher place than my usual habitat. The cat, in other words, shat on the mat.

  Then I detected the sound of the barrier below opening and voices crying, “X, X, X,” in various tones of despair, wheedling and pleading. I scuttled down the same platforms as I had just ascended. I ignored the evidence of my presence deposited on a higher plane. And I allowed myself to be picked up and nuzzled and given an inexplicable treat—a reward I assumed, and who could blame me, for leaving my waste matter at a distant barrier rather than on my own doorstep, following, I believe, a human adage, and so resolved that, if ever I staged another breakout, I would do the same in the same place and thus qualify for another treat.

  Well, you can’t always be 100 percent right, even as a cat. My toilet functions drew some kind of response from an upper-floor biped. I was reprimanded, although, being a cat, I could not link the raised angry unpleasant voices to a specific event, or even to myself. And so, of course, the next time I escaped, I ventured to the same place intent on repeating my performance to earn a new reward. But before I could even begin to arrange myself, a great towering barrier swung open and, looking upward, I found myself peering over vast distances into the face of an unknown biped who looked down at me with an expression recognizable—even across the chasm of the species—as one of pure malice that injected a kind of pinky, purply hue into features distorted by rage. There was noise, confusion. A second unrecognized biped stood behind the first. Neither of them wore the wrappings favored by their kind. Both appeared to be of a gender I had once been. But these impressions had barely been registered before, with my heightened sense of terminal, imminent threat, I became aware of a raised, swinging thing—the humanoid equivalent of a paw—that was accelerating toward me, and so I was able to turn and flee before it connected. And, for once, my inner navigational systems ordered descent and before I knew it I was hurtling back into more familiar environs where identifiable bipeds tut-tutted and hoisted me to great altitude to stroke my stomach.

  Human anger is not pleasant for small, vulnerable animals. Imagine if humans were shouted at by members of an alien species two hundred feet tall—they would soon understand why creatures develop bolt-holes between suitcases below sleep-pads, behind sofas near warmth, among the piles and layers of artificial skins the bipeds collect to adorn and shield themselves.

  My preferred retreat is only occasionally available when accidental access is permitted to the large, crowded, dark spaces where humans put the body coverings they use as compensation for having no fur, and the barriers which are usually closed are left open.

  (“No animal shall wear clothes.” Who said that? No, I don’t mean who said that as in which human folding paper thing contained that question. I mean: who said that in my head? Is there someone else in here with me? Because the answer to the former question would be Orwell’s pigs and I don’t even know how I would be
gin to know that. And the latter question would worry me—if I knew how to fret. But if there was someone in here with me, they could perhaps explain things to me, like: what is an Orwell? Who is a pig?)

  Reaching my favorite hiding place is an adventure in its own right because the only way to get there is vertically with a leap and a bound and a scramble that propels you upward, past the three shiny knobs of the places where bipeds store items to disguise their pudgy paws and enormous, inelegant (mostly) unlicked bottoms and onto the places above where, if you don’t fall, you can snuggle into the woolly, scented chest coverings and turn yourself around and look back onto the human sleep-pad and you can hear them calling, “X, X,” and know from the growing anxiety of their tones that they do not know where you are and worry that you have somehow gotten past the great white barrier again and have left your calling card on a higher plane.

  Again.

  three

  Dolores Tremayne found herself snooting and snuffling across the cork floor in the kitchen. In her human experience, the only time she could recall nostrils being put to comparable use was when associates at college or at work gatherings—flatmates, candidate lovers, high-flying executives before the inevitable fall—ingested lines of white powder, which she declined, in part out of fear of losing control to some chemical reaction and in part out of revulsion at the global trade in narcotics that ruined lives and diverted billions from state exchequers where they might be better spent on health care and schooling and other human requirements. But now her snoots and sniffles seemed reflexive rather than recreational, as if she was questing for something she could not immediately identify, like a person looking for a light switch in a darkened room, or programming a GPS while on the move in unknown, threatening neighborhoods.

  She was not, of course, a person per se. She was, physically at least, a cat. Or at least she was a human in thrall to a cat, locked into a cat, as bonded to X as Nelson Mandela to his jailers on Robben Island, from which there was never any unplanned escape. The comparison had little relevance to her since she had no means of discourse, of negotiation with her captor. X—or Dolores within—would not be freed because the world demanded it at rock concerts, or threatened punishment unless the cage was unlocked. She did not even know whether X herself could hear her captive’s Cry Freedom.

  She navigated past a fragment of what her human mind knew to be a snapped-off corner of potato chip, but her feline appetites displayed no interest. (The Dolores in her fretted that the cleaning lady from the Philippines must have missed it and her family did not seem to care about this rodent-luring debris.) She moved on. She was not a dog, a canine vacuum cleaner devouring any fallen item. Cats had higher standards. She crossed the kitchen, navigating through an enormous arch that reminded her human side of the central cavity of the Arc de Triomphe. She crossed some light-colored material, amid blocks of seating arrangements for bipeds. At her level—and she knew this because it had been on her human mind for weeks—a tall mirror had been placed on its side along a skirting board until she and her husband agreed where to install it. Passing it now, she saw a faintly haughty creature—long-haired, slinky, sloe-eyed, blue-retinaed, endowed with a pelt of unique shadings: ivory, burnt umber, charcoal. Its face was dark and smoky, like a Venetian carnival mask against the lighter tones of its cranium and body. Its ears were almost black, set on either side of a wedge of pale fur extending from its blond spine. If you were human and had studied your kings and queens of England, a ruff of pure white around the neck would recall Elizabethan fashions.

  The flanks were mottled with darker patches, like the markings of a parrot fish. Its paws were dark with silky hair between the pads, and its tail a great, gray brush that would outdo any fox.

  That is me! That is what I have become. To be part of X, Dolores found herself thinking, was quite an honor. If she was a cat, then she was a superior version of the species.

  Appropriately enough. In her human life, Dolores Tremayne was a powerhouse, indomitable, the embodiment of the new, female, formerly disadvantaged executive. She had overcome the stereotypes of race and gender, bursting through glass walls and ceilings, propelling herself upward with ballistic purpose. Like scientists at Mission Control, invested in her success and in awe of her celestial ascent, her family watched her zoom into the stratosphere then welcomed her back with her payload of promotions and bonuses and exotica from distant galaxies—ostrich eggs from Johannesburg; megapixel, multizoom HD-enabled cameras from Hong Kong; gold chains from Dubai; backgammon sets inlaid with mother-of-pearl from Beirut and Cairo; jade from Beijing; iPads from New York.

  Her perfect achievement could not be measured purely in income, although that was satisfyingly substantial. She had given birth to two beautiful daughters. She financed the writerly ambitions of her deliciously sexy husband (“white British,” according to the forms he filled out) who seemed happy enough to stay home and do the school run and supervise the staff in the hours of downtime between bouts of halting, anguished composition and the necessary displacement activities that nourish the creative soul.

  His first novel—Birth—had been well received, if not well sold or marketed. He had a three-book contract, and she assumed that, in her absences, he was gestating the second of the trilogy. In the days of mechanical typewriters and A4 paper, she might have expected to see a slowly growing pile of completed script next to the clattering keys, like in that movie in the empty hotel with the famous actor and the boy and the woman. But that measure of progress had given way to the inscrutability of a hard drive and a backup USB stick, neither of which offered any clue to the work in progress.

  She did not pry.

  She was too busy to pry.

  She did not ask to see his latest effort.

  All work and no play.

  The book. The movie. What was it called?

  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That was all the fake author had written. Page after page of it. Volumes worthy in bulk of Tolstoy, but worth their weight only in paper, used paper at that. Paper soiled by fraudulent effort. But if you flipped the adage—all play and no work—what happened in Gerald’s life? And with whom did he play?

  REDRUM! Murder spelled backward. That was one of the linguistic tricks in the book. What does it take to drive a biped to that extreme sanction, to give someone a real redrummering?

  Jack Nicholson. The star. No dull boy there, of course.

  In secret, part of her calculated that provided Gerald looked after the girls—who adored having a long-haired, bohemian father whose brown-eyed gaze melted the hardest teacherly hearts, male or female, at parents’ evening—then that was fine.

  And another part thought that, as long as their separations ended in passionate coupling that seemed to have lost none of its multiple magic over the years, that was fine, too, a bonus, an affirmation that their relationship, built on absences rather than shared drudgery, enabled them to survive the advancing years that frayed the fabric of so many of her friends’ marriages.

  But another part of her frowned in puzzlement: the first novel had been published three years earlier. In a business that determined success or failure with unseemly haste, it had slipped into oblivion. He gave talks about the “craft of the novel” at obscure literary festivals, allowing tantalizing hints of his rough-diamond-northern-English accent to creep back into his voice, as if to suggest a life of deprivation and hardship at the lonesome coalface of composition. (Coalface had once been a possible alternative name for X, but had been considered far too literal. Possibly offensive.) The paperback of Birth would be stacked on a table for him to sign for those who purchased it—many of them, she had noticed at one gathering, quite comely young women. But, despite his promotional efforts, his wit, his charm, his slick manipulation of audiences, his Amazon ranking seemed like a mathematical impossibility: were there really 3,780,922 books that were better loved than his? He had extended and re-extended the delivery date for the second of the trilogy—Marriag
e—and the slow pace of the artistic endeavor gave her cause to worry whether it was not only the title but also their eponymous civil state that was holding him back from realizing what the kinder reviewers had called the promise of his debut oeuvre.

  The third volume—Death—seemed far-distant and she prayed that it would become a reality before life, or, in this case, its termination, came to imitate art.

  The Shining. That was the name of the film. And the book. Stephen King the author.

  Had Stephen King ever seen a single word of his placed at 3,780,923 on the lists? Doubtful.

  No longer snooting, X has determined that it is time to patrol the perimeters of her domain. X saunters down the long central corridor.

  Sit back. Enjoy the ride.

  They are in the guest bedroom now, she and X.

  * * *

  I spring upward from the carpet. The sleep-pad feels unpleasantly soft with no biped bumps and bones to guide my paws. No temperature spikes to draw my heat-seeking explorations. No sound of breath, grunts, whimpers, snores.

  The sleep-pad is empty. There is no immediate danger but, as a cat, I know how easily that can change. Part of the whiteness has been folded back, so there is a soft, yielding ridge, then a smooth plain, then the mountain range called Pillows. Next to the sleep-pad, the humans keep containers and artificial suns that they control in their biped way, turning day into night, night into day, conjuring giddy images from darkened picture boxes.

  There is a silvery, slidy square of something alien that I flip with my paw.

  It falls from its place on a flat area below the artificial sun. I push it hither and thither. It is not terribly interesting. There is no purchase for a sharp, extended claw. It does not squeal or take flight. It has no tail or fur and holds no promise of sustenance. I bat it back and forth a bit but it does not seem to want to play. I sniff it. Neutral. Shades of chemical. Notes of lubricant. Unpleasant but inspiring curiosity.