Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  A trail of treats leads to the newly liberated cat flap. X is following it with greedy enthusiasm, snuffling and munching her way inexorably toward the great barrier that separates her designated environment from the mysteries beyond it—her wardrobe to Narnia; her highway to the danger zone.

  The trail ends in what Dolores knows to be a prawn and rabbit cocktail treat carefully balanced on the lower frame of the flap. X prods at the delicacy with an inquiring jab of a paw and, lo, the flap swings forth and back. The treat falls to the carpeted floor, where X devours it. It produces a sense of deep satisfaction—reminiscent, as far as Dolores can understand, of the first sip of a good martini in the City Club in Manhattan, which she sometimes visits as a guest of business associates. Then it is gone. X wishes to repeat the experience, to rekindle the sensuous intimations of sea and burrow. She prods the flap again. And again. It swings forth and back on an expanding parabola with every punch. The treat, perhaps, lies beyond it. It is, perhaps, one of those moments she associates with bipeds who offer gratification in return for some learned procedure or action. Like defecating in a box. Or scratching at a post. Or not urinating in the base of a ficus tree. Responses structured for human convenience, according to principles enunciated initially, of course, for the dogs whose salivatory habits helped the Russian physiologist Pavlov define the conditioned reflex. Such nuggets of general knowledge, Dolores finds herself thinking in her lonely prison, are of little use in deterring X from pursuing the association of flap and food. Already, in other words, her reflex is conditioned. She will not need a bell or a buzzer to make the link. She is, after all, much smarter than any canine. But she is not so smart at all because her responses are based on the absence of threat, which is not how the real world functions. She is, in other words, a stranger to calamity, while the world beyond her immediate comfort zone overflows with jeopardy.

  X punches the flap again and pushes her head through the gap. She is now, more or less, committed to a course of action that may or may not lead to a treat. Maybe not the one she was programmed to expect, though. She is halfway through the great barrier, her head protruding into the area where the series of ascending and descending horizontal planes enables bipeds to achieve upward or downward mobility. Her front legs rest on the lower frame of the flap.

  No no no, Dolores is trying to scream, though sound is beyond her capabilities in this ethereal state of being. For a moment she thinks that X must resemble some gnarled farmer of preindustrial times, leaning companionably on a stable half-door to smoke a pipe, shoot the breeze, take the air, converse with passersby. Then she feels the muscles bunching in X’s rear legs. There is a mighty shove, and sudden propulsion, like a stopper pushed out of a bottle by a buildup of bubbles.

  Dolores struggles for the simile. She knows this. She knows precisely which liquid behaves in this manner. But at first she cannot recall it and she worries that the process by which she is seeking to humanize X is working in reverse and she is becoming felinized, losing her grasp on vocabulary, claimed by some mysterious, trans-species affliction—Katzheimer’s.

  Indifferent to Dolores’s musings, unaware of them except for a very vague and fleeting unease, X is in the central stairwell of the apartment house.

  She is free.

  She has slipped her bonds and has no idea what to do now. She looks up. She looks down. She hears sounds—roarings, clankings. She detects feral smells. She cannot name or identify them. The odors are alien yet vaguely familiar, wafting through the tunnels of time, beyond her ken.

  Her ears are pressed back on her skull.

  There are no treats.

  Champagne. Neighbor. The two thoughts come simultaneously. Dolores is pleased to be able to make her simile come true, and instantly alarmed that if Jenny Steinem should choose this moment to use the stairwell she will see X and take matters into her scrawny, nail-bitten, proprietorial hands that so recently claimed an easy intimacy with parts of Gerald’s body that were supposed to be kept in moral escrow pending Dolores’s return. But how can she share these misgivings with X, who wishes to explore and may, perchance, repeat the ablutions that got us all into this mess in the first place. Down below, a human voice is shouting. Incomprehensible noise to a cat, but laden with portents for those awaiting their own Pavlovian gratification from online shopping.

  The intercom! Delivery!

  Waitrose, Tesco, Amazon, HelloFresh, Topshop, UPS, DHL. All of those private space invaders of the new era.

  There is a loud buzzing noise.

  A big door is open.

  The front door. Leading to the busy road outside.

  X has stiffened, every fiber alert for intelligence to explain what is happening around her. There is a rolling, bashing sort of noise and another sound from above. A screech or shriek.

  “Second floor.”

  The neighbor Steinem. The witch, bitch. Taking a delivery. From Spells “R” Us: eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, sweltered venom.

  X, you brindled cat, do not mew now, once, twice or thrice. Or her cauldron will bubble with us in it.

  Memory functioning okay, after all.

  But X has no intention of mewing. Dolores feels her fear. Noise from above and below. Hostile. Advancing. Pincer movement. She turns back to the front door, not even checking to establish whether the flap swings both ways, as the neighbor patently does. X launches herself with unheeding recklessness at the flap, head-butting her way back into captivity.

  “Could’ve sworn I saw a cat on the stairs,” Dolores hears the deliverywoman call up to the person waiting on the landing above.

  “Really?” Jenny Steinem replies icily. “We’ll see about that.”

  But the champagne cork is back in the bottle.

  * * *

  Frau Doktor Tremayne is invited to celebrate the successful outcome of three days of negotiations to conclude a deal for the supply of technology for the latest hybrid 7 Series saloons. The MoU covers most of the wizardry behind the central touch-screen that provides audio, navigational and road condition updates along with sub-programs to enhance economical running, power conservation and the modulation of the car’s internal climate. A separate program—the elephant in the techie room, so to speak; the software script that dares not say its name—provides fraudulent information to examiners in their white coats when the vehicle’s exhaust emissions are tested under laboratory conditions.

  Her interlocutors have haggled and wrangled and probed and argued and blocked and feinted. One has tried to get her drunk to betray company secrets. Another sought to lure her to a Bavarian hunting lodge for purposes of seduction in the forest, possibly to the same business-driven end. Dolores has maintained her composure. She has pretended to retreat from her last possible price, which she had inflated before the negotiations, and painstakingly explained all the gizmos and bells and whistles that make her offering so alluring. She has undermined her rivals’ exaggerated claims and assured continuity of production from her company’s assembly plants in Guangdong, Milton Keynes and Brno. She has produced the legal document for the lawyers to have one last look at before, on the fringes of the Geneva Motor Show, her chief executive and his German counterpart sign the formal agreement. She has one more night at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, which she plans to spend with a room service dinner and a book. She has checked in online for the next leg of her long and arduous business trip. Her boarding pass—Club World, aisle seat—is in her purse, alongside her passport and ESTA documents for Homeland Security. She has maintained her virtue. The drawbridge of her purity, though assailed, has stood firm. Unusually in conditions of siege, she has poured cold water rather than boiling oil on the ardor of the besiegers.

  “A glass of champagne?”

  “Champagne or Sekt?” It is an old joke among them since the earliest days of their business relationship when one of their negotiators tried to pass off Henkell Trocken as Bollinger.

  “Champagne. Echt!”

  A co
rk pops. Liquid is poured. Fizzing and bubbling into a glass. An echo of some other event. In some other place. Corks. Popping. Bubbles. Flaps.

  “Also, to our future cooperation and the conclusion of successful together-working!”

  There is a pause, a hitch in the proceedings. Silence. Embarrassment.

  “Frau Doktor? Frau Doktor Tremayne?”

  She hears the voice as if someone is trying to wake her from an unscheduled nap of uncertain duration.

  “Frau Tremayne. Geht’s Ihnen gut? You are okay? Please?”

  “What? Oh. Yes! Zum Wohl!” She recovers quickly for the toast, but for an inexplicable second she was not here, in this unadorned, wood-paneled meeting room in Munich, but in her own apartment house in London, seeing the world from ground level, knowing something was amiss. But what? Why should it be? Somehow the word champagne had echoed from a parallel universe. Like the froth surging from the neck of a badly opened bottle of Moët or Laurent-Perrier—the way Formula One drivers do it with their jeroboams on the podium when their bodies are finally still and safe—some distant reality had washed over her current coordinates, making her feel as if she were living in two simultaneous but separate worlds. In one world, in this formal chamber in Munich, she is centered, in control. But there, in that distant universe, something is wrong. If she is honest with herself—and who is so truthful to themselves these days that they would fit that description—she can begin to imagine why. So now there is a third world—an inner dialectic that unfolds below the surface of the niceties of her farewell drinks with the automakers of Bavaria. It has been there all the time, this galaxy, this meteor-storm of unresolved passions. But she had treated it as a black hole, a place that was there and not there all at once.

  At first, she thought her marriage was skewed because she was doing all the heavy lifting. She worked and earned and traveled and struck deals and burned the midnight oil over spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. She considered CVs for new members of her team and kowtowed to her superiors and put up with the whispered remarks around the watercooler. Success breeds envy, but minority success—success by ambitious members of ethnic minorities—corrodes. And all the while she was doing this and the money was piling up in their joint bank account, he was home and spending it.

  Then she thought she had gotten it the wrong way around. She had been remiss. Serially. Chronically. Consumed with career, promotion, fleeting glory, appointment to the executive committee, expanding power, stock options, mentions in trade magazines. The big profile in the Weekend FT. Glass ceilings shattering. When all the while she should be doing things like they used to, when she was his muse, his soul mate. Homework. Little dinners en famille instead of salvers delivered by liveried flunkeys who could barely believe that they had finished up waiting on a woman of color. She had been unfair. She checked his credit cards and accounts. True, there was nothing coming in from his publishers. But everything else seemed accounted for. Maybe the fuel bill for the Range Rover was a bit OTT. Maybe there were some cash withdrawals that were something of a puzzle. But you could not spy on genius. And there was no doubt that he was a genius. You couldn’t analyze creativity on an Excel spreadsheet.

  But how could she synthesize these propositions? After this trip, maybe there would be a way to reshape the agenda, the SOP. She would crank it back, delegate. Send underlings to do the grunt work. Like her bosses sent her. Just one last push from her current mission: the big one in Detroit after yet one more long haul from Germany. Then home. Hearth. Matters of the heart.

  There is a fleeting memory from before she left home.

  Unusually, X, the family cat, has jumped up into her lap, just as Dolores is considering how different life would be without frequent-flyer phobias, airline angst, business-class blues. The cat is, generally speaking, much more aloof, refusing to seek the warmth of human contact. Dolores is slightly concerned that her elegant traveling suit will be covered in telltale cat hair, requiring attention with the adhesive roller kept by the front door, used most frequently to remove traces of errant pelt from the girls’ school blazers after they have chased and grabbed the cat for a cuddle. But this time it nestles and cranes its head upward. X’s blue eyes fix Dolores’s brown eyes with an unusual intensity, and she reciprocates with an equally piercing gaze. Later, she will think of one of those moments when one person stares at another interrogatively and the object of that look offers optical encouragement to proceed. Like people on a first or possibly second date. It is not clear to Dolores who has initiated the process. An invitation has been made and accepted. With their gazes locked together, something passes between them.

  What nonsense, she remembers thinking.

  eleven

  She was, as suspected and for the record, FYI, entre nous, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, a natural blonde. I have her phone number but she does not have mine. She knows my name and address—I must be getting careless—but she has accepted the argument that, as a single parent and creative novelist, I require an occasional muse rather than a permanent companion. She has had a happy outcome. A walk in the park has turned into a roll in the hay with a literary figure. Major? Minor? Already forgotten? Does it matter? I have planted a tiny seed of self-reproach that her actions qualify her as a home-wrecker. We shower together. One thing leads to another. We shower again. She lets herself out, on track, I assume, to return to her day occupation as a student of art and her night job waitressing in Soho to help finance the living costs of the course gifted to her by doting parents. She lives in a flat-share in faraway Fulham, she has told me, and has traveled across London in quest of a breath of fresh air. Will she tell all? I doubt it. The tabloids would not be interested and there is no prospect of her tittle-tattle filtering back to the school-run set.

  I open the studio windows to air the place. Can I really have done this? Double-deception? Betraying wife, mistress in one day? Betrayal, of course, is the inherent peril of love, the worm in the apple. Think of all those literary figures whose souls are tortured, and how often is deceit the source of the self-flagellation? Humans are frail, led by random encounters and physical urges. It should stop when the kids arrive on the scene, but it doesn’t. Swans show far greater commitment to monogamy than humans do, without the vows and contractual safeguards of wealth in the event of separation. You see them on the Highgate Ponds. The female warms the eggs, the male patrols, protects—no pursuit of paramour swans or wayward geese or horny little terns for him. The eggs hatch, the cygnets arrive, gray and sweet and fluffy, and the parents bracket them in regal procession around the earthly feeding grounds. Royal game, of course. And better behaved than most of the Royal Family.

  So why am I more a cuckoo than a swan, laying my eggs in foreign nests? No wonder Marriage is stalled. My stamina, my creativity, has been diverted into the rut of physical passion. The juices flow as the libido demands. There is nothing left for words on screen. No time. No energy. Still, I am quite pleased with my continued ability to perform on demand.

  When we met, Dolores and I, it seemed different. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t do any of the drugs I was selling. Definitely a plus! She didn’t put out. Not an unambiguous plus, but all the same alluring, attractive. The virgin bride. And of course she possessed the knowledge of literature over the centuries. I was clay to be molded. Clunky, obdurate clay, perhaps. But good northern loam awaiting her touch to transform this rough patch of weed and nettle and thistle into a beautiful, landscaped garden.

  It can’t have been easy for her. My education stopped at sixteen when I went to work to feed the family after Dad went AWOL with a lady bus-driver-whore-bitch from the depot where he was the chief mechanic. That came as a shock to all of us. And to Ma especially, of course. Five mouths to feed and no job. In those days, up in the northeast, all the old work had gone—outdated, outsourced, overtaken, globalized, sold off by the fund managers and sundry crooks of the south. Ma had such a thick accent that they laughed her out of the line of call-center job
applicants. She had no head for computers. All she’d done was build a life in a rented row house around Pa and me and my brother and sisters—all younger, traipsing to school in their worn-out, hand-me-down blazers with the patched elbows and frayed cuffs. And Pa off somewhere on the bus driver’s pension, living it large in Benidorm. He sent us a card once, to us kids, saying we were welcome to come for a holiday. No way, Pops. We burned the card, ceremonially. Not even return to sender. Just a dad not known to any of us since the Pa who accompanied us through Christmases and birthdays and holidays on caravan sites in the Lake District, first bicycles and games of cricket in the park, and parents’ evenings at the crummy schools and breakfasts sizzling in the pan with bacon smells filling the house the morning after the payday binge—that Pa—had just fucked off. Pa became a memory. And a painful one at that. Without telling the others, I scrambled enough cash together to go and visit to try to persuade him to come home. But just going to Benidorm was a humiliation, a reminder of his betrayal, his abandonment of Ma. All the sunshine and the cheap living and the flowing Rioja—not to mention the sight of him and his floozy together—just reminded me of the crap he had left for us: social payments and shoplifting at Lidl.

  “We’re still family, son,” he said.

  “No we’re fucking not.”

  I became a breadwinner, surreptitiously since Ma needed the benefits money, too, so we couldn’t tell them at the job center that I was, to all intents and purposes, an undeclared apprentice, working for the local plumber-cum-carpenter-cum-electrician-cum-handyman. Cheaper for cash, luv, we’d tell our customers. No VAT. No HMRC. No name, no pack drill. Just wads of grimy notes, stuffed into grimy jeans. And, removing or maybe not removing said jeans, depending on the haste of the moment, the occasional cliché shag that replaced my cherry innocence with the twisted cynicism of the lothario. Lust on demand. Lust like the first, most enduring drug. Even before the local pot dealer spotted the potential of my white van cover as mule and delivery boy, I was addicted to gratification, conquest. I could never look at a woman without wanting her. And they knew. Some inscrutable signal sent the clearest of messages about what I was offering and what I was not, about the utter dishonor of my intentions.