Until Dolores came along.
A cut above the rest in every way. A person of color. A different accent. Posh. Southern to my northern ears. Beyond availability. No known boyfriend on the scene. Library-bound. A swot. And, when I dropped by to supply her roommate with E and Charlie, surprised that I could also drop names from the books I had devoured—broadsides from the literary cannon in the siege of love. Ugh! I had read my D. H. Lawrence. I had lived it. I was the gamekeeper to all those lost souls in council flats, and semis in the suburbs and big, nob houses on the hill with their broken ballcocks and manky fuse boxes and rotting window frames. Not that she saw it that way. I tried all the names I could think of—poets and novelists, Eliot and Thomas, Dickens and McEwan. I knew she was interested and I knew she would not easily admit it, to me, to herself. Why would she? She was on track for the limelight. You could see it. Study, study, study. Postgrad course already booked down south at some fancy place on Regent’s Park. Then where? Business? Banks? Industry? Software? Hi-tech? Something brilliant for sure. And what was I? A drug dealer in oily jeans with a patina of paint on my steel-toed boots. A handyman good for freeing drains blocked with condoms and tampons and cocaine-tab-wrappers and dope baggies. Fused lights? Windows smashed in drunken brawl? Car won’t start? Itch needs scratching? Call for Gerry. Gerry Jones. Changed by deed poll to Tremayne when Pa left. Gerry the smitten provincial who read Baudelaire in translation and pined for his own black Venus. Gerald Tremayne, with a head full of strands and ideas and words and plots and characters swirling around for a Geordie trilogy—Birth, Marriage, and Death in a family not unlike my own: broken, fucked-up, dysfunctional, betrayed, belittled, shamed, humiliated, normal in this England about to go to war as a stooge of the Americans. Choose your own epithet or era. Treachery cuts across the aeons, poisoning its victims from womb to tomb.
I was there, in the background, when she went up on stage to take her degree. Her parents were all dressed up, proud as punch—African dad in a sleek, gray suit, English rose mother in floral dress and wide-brimmed hat. I had put on clean jeans and a button-down shirt and a soft jacket made of cashmere from the Oxfam shop. I’d even been to the barber’s shop for a haircut. I lurked and loitered, watching from the standing room at the back of the great hall as she went up in her gown and mortarboard and took the rolled paper that made her a bachelor of arts. There was a week left before she would pack up and go and leave my life forever unless I did something about it. So I introduced myself to her parents and tried to flatter her dad and smiled at her mum and extinguished the come-hither glitter. I offered her the latest printout of Birth Zero One. I offered her a lift to London, saying I’d planned anyhow to drive down that day because of the Cup Final at Wembley. I touched her arm as I made the pitch and saw the realization dawn in her eyes that there was a physical me, just waiting for the word. And, to hasten its arrival, I cleaned up my act and hosed down my van and fitted street-legal retreads from a dodgy scrapyard and threw away the mattress I kept in the back. I tidied my racks of tools and went to my supplier for the deal of a lifetime that took up a good chunk of my savings. And I gave the rest of my cash to Ma and told her I’d be back but I had to just try my hand on the wider stage.
“Just like Pa,” she said. “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“I’ll make you proud, Ma. You’ll see.” It was the litany of the generations born anywhere north of the Watford Gap on the M1 motorway: go south and prosper. Streets paved with gold.
But she was already too choked, dabbing at her eyes with an old apron she wore—as if, I swear, she was looking for a part in Coronation Street.
I said farewell to my brother and sisters and told them I would send money every week for them and keep in touch—the only promise I did keep. Don’t be like me, I told them. Don’t give up on school. Go to university and get degrees and good jobs and look after Ma like she’s looked after us.
“What’s so special about this girl?” my brother said. “Is it because she’s a darkie?”
It was the only time in my relationship with my siblings that my arm came up and my scarred knuckles bunched for the lightning jab and hook of the street fighter.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, facing me down, daring me to strike.
“I love her,” I said, lowering my arm. “That’s all. She’s the one.”
“And Ma? And the rest of us? Are we just scum?”
After Pa left, they had looked to me as the head of the household, the anchor. But, like some vessel pulled free of its berth by turbulent tides and irresistible currents, I had slipped my moorings, drifted into choppy waters with no chart or sextant or satnav to find my way home.
So here I am now, showered and spruced, sluiced clean of betrayal. At least Pa was honest and went where his heart took him, if that is what it was. I have stayed and shat in my own nest. I have allowed the your-place-or-mine spangle to return to my roaming eye. My moral compass has been warped by availability and opportunity, spinning giddily from north to south to east to west. I know it will not end here, with this latest one or two. Or three or four. How many? I lost count years ago. I look at my beautiful daughters and ask myself why I would jeopardize their well-being, their souls, their future. I think of my beautiful, passionate wife who trusts me and works to keep a roof over our heads, and love in our homestead and a future before us, and holidays in Alpine and Mediterranean and Caribbean settings, and I ask myself: why would you risk losing them for some chance encounter while you are trying to murder the family cat at the behest of a crazy neighbor, in a studio paid for by an errant French countess who might return at any moment? When I put the question like that I am taken aback by the extent of the huge web in which I have tangled myself. But I have no answer.
Right at the beginning, when we first moved south, I remember telling Dolores: “I will never let you down”—the most self-indulgent, touchy-feely of promises, the warm pledge of constancy, predictability, trustworthiness. Perhaps I meant it at the time. But I translated it into something else entirely. “I will always let you down. But I will never let you find out”—an altogether trickier proposition.
How on earth have I gotten here?
I am supposed to be a novelist but words elude me.
I am supposed to be faithful and true but I cannot do that, either. Why why why?
I have no answer to that, either. Except, of course, that the blame is not mine exclusively. Resisting temptation is not my strong suit. We met and married as equals. Now I am housebound, house spouse, househusband. It does not matter how often I tell myself that, in these modern times, there is no shame in that. It is a badge of honor to push the stroller with its all-terrain tires and disc brakes. It is a proclamation of manhood to wear the chest harness bearing the bairn, to load the marsupial shoulder bag with diapers and bottles and lotions and wipes. The very notion of the male breadwinner is an anachronism. The school run is asexual. Soccer moms. Hockey pops. The Range Rover is my mobile kraal, protecting the young from predators lurking below the mopane trees of Gospel Oak, the wait-a-bit thickets of South Grove.
Except that some ancient gene tells me it is not so. Does this gene come from my feckless father? Is it leeched from the stained soil of the northeast, seeping out from the tombs of mines and shipyards, where men in their flat caps toiled and delved, and women span and raised unruly broods of snotty children on diets of suet and tinned beans and medium-sliced white Wonderloaf smeared with Stork margarine and sliced Spam fried to a crisp in gobs of molten lard? I suspect, in fact, that there is nothing geographic in this gene. It is just as likely to be transmitted in posh southern mansions where tea does not mean supper and people say lavatory, not toilet, sofa, not couch, and make jokes about poor people nosing the brie; or in palm-shaded Mediterranean villas where the foie gras is washed down with sipped Sauternes. It is the gene that says: I am a man and men do not do women’s work! Men left alone will find mischief.
Men left alone are wal
king time bombs.
Dolores’s business trips just got longer, more convoluted. Her office hours extended into nights so that he became chef and storyteller and dishwasher and bottle-filler. While she traveled on business, in business class, he became the hunter-gatherer of the Waitrose shelves, the Top Shop lines. How, when, was he supposed to write? His day was set to the metronome of devoted parenthood. Tick, school. Tock, home. Tick, laundry. Tock, making the beds, de-turding the cat litter, buying lightbulbs, cooking suppers. Paying the cleaning lady to do the few tasks left over from his labors, his toil with the homework and the pots and pans at suppertime.
Not chicken and chips again, Dad!
It were good enough for me. And we never ’ad peas as weren’t mushy!—a northern accent that he affects now for effect, beyond his adopted, imperfect southern modulation.
Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, at the farmers’ market on the state school playing fields, he would espy a famous, Booker Prize–winning novelist buying his earthy organic carrots and leeks and fresh turbot and scallops. But that was Saturdays. What happened the rest of the time? No one, surely, no other artist, found his days so salami-sliced by the requirements of the brood.
And, if writing was out, how else was he expected to channel the creative flows? Was that what they meant by the objective correlative?
Gerald Tremayne strode across the road, ran up the stairs to the apartment three at a time, and noted that the treat on the frame of the cat flap was gone. Maybe, finally, X had disappeared and, with her, at least part of his potential downfall.
Then she materialized from nowhere at the corner where the vestibule met the passage.
Gerald retapes the flap so that the girls will not suspect perfidy. He picks up the keys to the school-run 4 × 4, needed to navigate the treacherous slopes, the dirt roads and bush trails, the swollen river-crossings and slicked mud slides and snowbound passes of Hampstead High Street and Highgate Hill.
“Still here, X?” His voice sounds a bit like a snarl.
“Well, not for much longer, buddy. I promise you that.”
twelve
Where do flat-cats go at night? Or when humans leave them to their own devices during the day in that expanse of time between hurried breakfast and evening Chardonnay? Emancipated cats roam. They prowl along the tops of walls and sprint from foxes and get run over and disappear and adopt new families who put food out for them. They stalk sparrows and voles. They mate with operatic anguish, disregarding bloodlines, pedigrees, household budgets. Black ones cross people’s paths and leave bipeds wondering whether that means good luck or bad.
X prefers to sleep. Day, night, whatever. Whenever. Deep sleep with the occasional twitch suggestive of impenetrable dreams.
She has identified designated locations where she takes her naps, perhaps according to the position of the sun, or dictated by the inner clock that ticks to the rhythm of her bowl being sprinkled with pellet resupply. One route takes her past the defecation box. Another leads to secret positions below human sleep-pads. An array of potential places combines two key strategic elements—comfort and security—within ear-range of sounds whose sequence and nature alert her to the impending presence of bipeds: a key in a remote lock, a footfall outside the great barrier, now breached, the faint rumble of a 4 × 4 pulling into the garage. Only in the small hours, when her liberated brothers and sisters crisscross the dark undergrowth and cropped lawns of the communal gardens, does she move silently from room to room, checking on the regularity of breathing, the snuffles of dreams whose secrets are unknowable. In human terms, she is the night nurse, patrolling the wards, alert for the final rattle.
Dolores is fighting this ingrained behavioral pattern for all she is worth. When X curls and settles, the inner part of her that is her mistress imagines herself with eyes wide and whiskers a-tremble, propelled by curiosity. X finds these urges unwelcome but not always resistible. Hardly has she seemed to snuggle down than she is up again, exploring. But why? There is no sign of food-bowl replenishment, no alarm reaching her from the staircase or the Chubb locks. Yet she has risen, sliding along the skirting board of the vast central tunnel of her prison, easing past the door that leads into the room of the younger humanoid playmate. She leaps onto a bed. Her paws are silent, the landing soft. No one stirs.
She is searching. For what, she does not know. She snuffles, sniffs. Jumps down from one bed, up onto another. Down again. Across a carpet. Up, now, onto the device that becomes a human sleeping bed when it is not a place for them to sit. And there it is. Whatever it is. Behind a soft, stuffed thing that she is pushing aside with her head. The flat shiny toy. But inverted, its glassy surface facing downward.
X rolls onto her back and pushes her front paws underneath it and tries to lift it, like an Olympic medalist struggling with a bar of enormous weights. She succeeds. But only partially. The object—cold, smooth, silvery, with faint odors of human fingers—is still horizontal, lying at the base of the vertical rear plane of the sitting place, its reflective face with the weird symbols still hidden. Time for the head. To push and nudge again. The shiny thing reaches the vertical. Now she sits before it. She peers at it. It tells her nothing. It has nothing to tell her. It is inanimate. Its flanks do not rise and fall to the beat and swelling of heart and lungs. It has no relevance to her. It is part of the biped world, as useful to a cat as a violin to a slug, though she does not know what either of those concepts entail. But something inside her does. Something inside her is peppering her with whispered instructions just beyond her range of perceptions, telling her to do what she does at windows, to wave to the world outside like a circus animal. (What she is really saying when she does that is: help! set me free! I am imprisoned by bipeds.)
But why should she do that? Who is telling her to do that? What would it achieve? Who cares?
Enough already. Enough work and obedience for one non–sleep cycle.
She plops back into repose mode. Tailed furled. Head tucked. The shiny toy, now in the vertical plane, rises above her in delicate balance between opposing gravitational forces, and she, secure in the horizontal plane, snoozes at its feet.
Fuck fuck fuck. Wake up, Dolores shouts. Please, X.
WAKE THE FUCK UP!
But there is no sound that resembles these words or indicates that their message has been received. There is only the almost subsonic purring that turns her entire body into a basso profundo echo chamber.
* * *
Tonight, ladies, pasta!
We had pasta last night.
Just joking. Burgers. Fries. Onion rings. Ketchup.
But Mom says we aren’t allowed that more than once a month.
Right. So what would you like? Linguine alle vongole? Tournedos Rossini? Coquilles Saint Jacques à la Normande? Geschnetzeltes mit Rösti? Crispy fried Peking duck with all the trimmings and hoisin sauce? I know. How about chicken and chips?
Not chicken and chips again, Dad!
They all laugh. They tumble through the great barrier and I weave figures of eight between this mobile thicket of soaring legs, cloaked variously in white knee socks and faded denim.
I like this moment. The larger male biped—who provokes faint memories of generalized hostility without a specific cause—maneuvers devices that produce liquid and steam in the section of the humanoid prison where feeding substances are prepared. (And where my bowl of unchanging pellets is left for me.) The smaller females drop heavy burdens onto the base of their sleeping box and turn their attentions to me, scratching the top of my head and massaging my neck and rolling me onto my back to rub my abdomen. I reward them by allowing them to manipulate wands with bright ticklish things that they wave in the air and I indulge them by jumping for them. The things we do for bipeds without their realizing who is in control.
Or, at least, that is how it always used to be. Sometimes there are fleeting images of a time beyond recall, when my magnificent bushy tail is no more than a root, and my energies are boundless. It was a tim
e, though I cannot know how, or know how I know, when my instincts and needs ranged over a wide gamut of demands—for food, sleep, play and something I never had before the journey to the bad-smelling place where bipeds in white perform painful acts. It was a time before I became a secondary attraction among those who share this vast cavern with me. Before the shiny metal things arrived and the squeals of delight were transferred from animate kitten to inanimate object.
There is a moment, of course, when the junior bipeds devote some small attention to me. But I sense their interest has waned. Their brows furrow now as they peer into the silver things, large and small, stroking and tapping. What are these impostors, these insurgents? They cannot jump or bite feathers or chase tiny red dots of laser light. They are cold. Like me, they respond to soft caresses, but they require no pellets, no chamber of defecation. They sleep when the junior bipeds are not there, and awake—unlike me—on demand. As the junior bipeds pore over their new companions I peer over their shoulders. Some things seem familiar. Noses. Hair. Teeth. Mysterious replicas of the junior bipeds with other humans displaying signs of contentment through bared fangs that, in my world, send just the opposite signal.
With a jolt Dolores Tremayne recognizes her human self through the eyes of a cat, fuzzy, incomplete. She tries to steer X closer to the procession of images. Words bounce around randomly in her feline head, as comprehensible as hieroglyphics. Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat. Her children are checking their messages. Her husband is in the kitchen, sexually sated, cooking some meal that comes from a supplier of raw ingredients and recipes who delivers once a week. And who else delivers to his door? Who delivers what during her absences, perhaps even before them on those few occasions when she is technically “at home”?
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