Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  Not that a royal standard flutters over the apartment house in the style of Buckingham Palace to signal her presence to an adoring nation, still less to deter trespassers on her turf.

  When the human Dolores was growing up, she had learned all about the monarchy and the queen and her ministers who offered her father sanctuary after his release from prison “back home” and his subsequent clandestine flight north, across African lands in the earliest days of the continent’s independence when that same monarch—or her representatives—presided routinely over the lowering of Britain’s banner and the lofting of new standards emblazoned with the colors Africa favored to show the blood of the martyrs, the mineral wealth, the riches of the fertile land and the skin color of the people, sometimes offset against an emblematic spear, or AK-47—the facilitators of freedom. Her father, Stephen Nkandla, was the son of a pastor in Zululand who taught him his reading and writing from works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. But that same dark, leather-bound tome with its gilt cross on the cover taught him other lessons about a freedom fighter called Jesus of Nazareth who sought a new order and performed miracles to implant it and walked on water and fed the masses with loaves and fishes. The sightless blinked into light. The crippled danced. Things changed. Lives changed. For the better, as they would in his own land if he only listened to the entreaties of the many apostles who came on secret missions and recruited him as their eyes and ears, standing watch on street corners to signal with a wave or a whistle the arrival of the security forces who might disrupt the planting of explosives in electric-power substations and oil-from-coal facilities. Had the outsiders considered this consequence of their actions when they came uninvited to his forebears’ lands, offering the Good Book to capture minds, but forgetting that its epistles and parables bore a message of sacrifice and renewal, of rising again? In his parallel life—pastor’s son and apprentice guerrilla, the teenage Stephen Nkandla won a place to study theology at the University of Fort Hare. But just before he packed his trunk to embark on his further education, and just after an explosion that went badly wrong, the police arrested him, citing various items of legislation designed to suppress communism and forestall terrorism. He was tried—as if there was any chance of acquittal!—and jailed and sent across a short choppy stretch of water from the mainland to serve his sentence. And, after his release, his comrades spirited him out of the country by circuitous routes through new nations tasting the first flavors of their freedom. By the time he arrived in England, of course, his spell on Robben Island had brought him into contact with precisely those same people the authorities did not wish him to meet but who chose him, with his effortless English and plausible, mission-boy manner to be their voice among the well-meaning and outraged liberals who would support the movement from afar. “Our struggle is peaceful,” he would tell the English people, such as his wife-to-be, who attended the meetings and discussion groups and fund-raisers. “But as our great leader has said, it is cause which we live and are prepared to die.” Blending BBC enunciation with the fervor of his father’s pulpit, his words—his sermons, as he thought of them—thrilled his audiences. Even the potential infiltrators from the British police special branch had to admit that he seemed somehow more credible than their contacts in the enemy camp, in the embassy on Trafalgar Square who fed them snippets of disinformation and sought clues about the next shipment of arms to be smuggled south. Stephen had fallen deeply in love with Dolores’s mother, Jane Duckworth, a trainee nurse at the Royal Free Hospital and fierce supporter of the struggle for justice in his faraway land. He had persuaded her to join the organization. He had coached her in the finer points of ideology. He had introduced her to some among the comrades whose missions and activities were far more covert than his. And he had fretted for weeks after she volunteered, without seeking his advice, to head south under cover as a tourist to take delivery of a satchel of stolen documents showing the design and layout of the nuclear power plant at Koeberg, near Cape Town. He knew such excursions were fraught with risk. The enemy had spies and moles everywhere. It was quite conceivable that the whole expedition had been set up as a provocation to demonstrate the implacably hostile and frankly murderous intentions of the freedom fighters. And, indeed, Stephen was extremely relieved, though not surprised, to learn that long before his future wife was scheduled to meet with the handlers who would arrange the transfer, the trap was sprung. A hapless undergraduate from the University of Cape Town was photographed and arrested taking receipt of a sheaf of bogus paperwork stamped “Top Secret” and, in Afrikaans, “Hoogs Geheim.” The case went quickly to court. The movement was held up to ridicule. When Jane Duckworth returned finally to London, Stephen Nkandla knew that she was not simply the love of his life, but a loyal and true servant of the struggle. He insisted on a church wedding—a nod to his father and to the freedom fighter called Jesus—to sanctify their vows and Dolores was not long in arriving soon thereafter, the object of deep adoration and the repository of her father’s frustrated ambition to do well at college and make a mark in the world from which his ancestors had long been excluded. When freedom came, far to the south, Stephen transferred his office from a dingy walk-up in Camden to the imposing and newly liberated embassy in Trafalgar Square that had for so long been the enemy’s headquarters and was now the very emblem of Africa’s greatest triumph.

  “We must not squander the fruits of victory,” Stephen would tell Jane as they doted on their only daughter. “Our daughter will have everything we did not.”

  But, for all the wonderful educational advantages bestowed upon her as her legacy from her father’s struggle, Dolores cannot teach X to read. She cannot produce a Hamlet or a Gospel according to Luke to make words make sense to the feline mind that has become enmeshed with her own. Sometimes, by acts of supreme concentration and will, she propels the furry body that she has come to inhabit in the direction of her elder daughter’s iPad (John Lewis, £148.50) and maneuver her small, bewhiskered head at angles so that perhaps her new eyes will recognize something of whatever Portia is tip-tapping. It is hard for X to follow. There are hints of comprehension, without the fluidity of literacy. Why should there be? She is a cat. But she is a cat with a human heart, soul, mind, spirit—who knows?—locked inside, screaming for the sympathy and attention of a world that X interprets only on her own terms of sleeping corners and hiding places and food containers and dark zones of utter privacy. And how can Dolores interpret all these other inputs—sounds, smells, data transmitted by whisker, tail? The biped living cavern is an echo chamber that X categorizes by range and peril, but which Dolores would classify by activity and function—curses from the kitchen, and whispered giggles closer to hand, and the distant rumble of cars and buses that X hears coming long before humans do. Supper is being cooked. Her cherished iroko wood surface is probably being destroyed by heat rings and scalding spillages. Her nostrils detect odors denoting experiences denied to X—oil (burning slightly), tomatoes (chopped), garlic (crushed), meat (burning more deliberately). Other sounds: a cork from a wine bottle, the slosh of Sauvignon Blanc in a big, early-evening-in-the-kitchen wineglass. Heat. A lid prized from a pot. Steam.

  A sudden insight into the chaos on the screen, a brief moment when the squiggles and ciphers coalesce and make sense. As if a curtain is pulled aside and immediately closed, X recognizes a pattern she can decode without knowing its meaning.

  X can recognize letters! But she cannot understand what they say. Once, on an educational outing, Gerald and Dolores took their daughters to Bletchley Park, the wartime secret intelligence facility fifty miles north of London, to show them the origins and uses of math and computers. They had processed through the exhibits, the memorabilia, the snack bar, the mandatory shop. They had peered without much interest at the clunky Enigma machines that the British had captured and used to track German orders and deployments. To protect their insights into the enemy communications, the code breakers disguised their decryption of battle plans as reports by fi
ctitious agents in the enemy camp. The biggest secret of all—which had to be protected against all likelihood of detection by the German intelligence establishment—was that German secrets were not secret at all as far as the British were concerned. The family had attended a display of the Bombe—a brilliant early computer that clanked and clunked its way through the jumbles of hitherto unbreakable code. Of course, its power was far less than the computing oomph of the girls’ tablets and their parents’ smartphones. But the process—cracking one word to learn just how the Enigma machines had been calibrated on that particular day—drew a modicum of interest.

  Wettervorhersage, it turned out, was the key to a rare Nazi blunder. Wettervorhersage meant “weather forecast.” A German ship in the North Sea sent a daily signal prefaced by that single word, encoded as gibberish that would otherwise be uncrackable. According to the brochure at Bletchley, the odds against deciphering its meaning without the Bombe are 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 to 1. Almost as improbable as the chances of winning the lottery. (Almost on a par with Gerald’s Amazon ranking.) Yet even then, when the Enigma machine has worked its magic, someone using pen and paper must write down the coded letters and string them together and tap them out in Morse code on interceptable radio frequencies.

  The Achilles’ heel.

  But “Kentish Town.” What is that code for? How many potential permutations of meaning can there be? The other big flaw in the Enigma machine was that it could not encode any single letter as itself—an S en clair could not be an S in code. Yet, maybe Kentish Town means just that—the place down the road where the Northern Line tube intersects with the C2 bus route. Keep it simple!

  Portia’s tapping and stroking creates formulations that remind Dolores of words that cats may never know.

  Tube.

  Meet you.

  Girl just like you.

  Wettervorhersage.

  Okay.

  The words filter through her feline synapses, neurons, dendrites, axons, bouncing around from entorhinal cortex to thalamus to subthalamus and hypothalamus. Her eyes are not designed for reading. Her vertical pupils enable her to gauge distances for a leap to seize a prey. But what use is that to her? Her food bowl does not move. It does not range the savanna or lurk in the mopani scrub. She does not need to pounce on it. There is no great annual migration of food bowls that requires guile and stealth to remain downwind. When she eats, she feels a primal urge for protection while she is vulnerable in the act of bowing over her rationed pellets. Indeed she has persuaded the kinder bipeds to stand guard over her while she eats. Otherwise she goes hungry. She forgets her schedule. She forgets many things after a few minutes but sometimes older memories of distant kindnesses help her evaluate strange bipeds. Even if she could read words they would not lodge for long.

  Tomorrow.

  What is that? Time is a cycle from light to darkness but it does not have yesterdays and next days and appointments and agendas.

  Why, then, is this combination of figments somehow a source of unease? What are all those concepts of meeting, of specific places, of a time outside the set pattern from waking to sleeping? Where in the vast galaxy of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 to 1 have the celestial alignments narrowed, maybe to 10 to 1 or 5 to 1 or something manageable if not yet known?

  Wettervorhersage.

  Weather forecast.

  Meeting at Kentish Town with a stranger, a girl like you.

  Meeting. Stranger. Omigod.

  Where did that come from? Where has it gone?

  The wheels click. The Bombe whirs. The circuits flicker and die.

  * * *

  Supper’s ready, girls. It is the male biped.

  Spag bol.

  Oh, not spag bol, Dad.

  Better than chicken and chips, Astra whispers.

  Giggles.

  Coming!

  Just joking. New recipe. Butter-fried chicken with feta, leek and minted potato. Or was it chunky chicken with chorizo? Or KFC after all?

  Groan.

  They leave.

  Their silvery screens are emitting light. They have not extinguished them. They rely on them to choose their own hours of rest.

  Dolores summons all the mental reserves she can to prevent X from trotting after them in the vain hope that, this time, her diet will include some item from the biped eating platform that will be more attractive to her primeval taste for flesh, fish, wing, feather, fur. Alluring but alien. How can she understand her appetites for these warm, living, fleshy things that she has never sampled? How can you know what you have never known?

  She peers at the surface of the iPad. There is an empty space at the top and, below it, a row of incomprehensible symbols. A force X cannot understand is moving her front paw over this mishmash, halting sometimes to press downward. Four times. When she presses at the bottom of the screen, something similar appears higher up in an open space. Then her paw moves higher up the screen to more pictograms. (What are they, for goodness’ sake? What is goodness?) Another push.

  It is as much as can be achieved.

  X has decided it is time to head to the kitchen and Dolores must accompany her. She wanted to stay with the tablet and try to determine whether it had yielded up some magic words—message sent. But what was the message? And who might it have been sent to?

  So there you are, X. Where have you been? Surfing the web? Looking for tomcats? Checking the weather forecast?

  More giggles.

  thirteen

  Gerald Tremayne may have his faults but—call him old-fashioned—he is pretty tough on the internet. His daughters are allowed to use their tablets and laptops only for half an hour before dinner and homework. Their mobiles have limited data use. He has set the parental controls to shield them from premature exposure to the depravities of which humans are not only capable but desirous, and in which he personally excels. They protest, of course, but so far, he believes, they have followed his regimen. And unbeknown to them, he has their logon IDs and passwords. He does not like to pry, of course. Sometimes, it is squirmy to see the kind of crap that preteen girls commit to the cyber world they inhabit. But it has to be done. Far more than most, he knows that humans are prey to levels of unscrupulousness. He hopes they have not inherited his faithless genes. He prays they will never meet a fellow initiate in the arts of exploitation. For Gerald Tremayne knows the tricks, the buttons to press, the vulnerabilities of youth that expose girls like his daughters to bamboozlement. He understands the insecurities that turn adolescence and its approaches into a minefield of hazard. So, usually, he makes regular checks on their web traffic, their selfies, their exchanges on bizarrely titled social media sites. Sometimes he is touched by their innocence. Sometimes troubled by the gradually expanding frontiers of their knowledge and suspicions about life beyond the homestead. Sometimes, he just wants to know what kind of chitchat they are exchanging with their distant mother on her unending journeys that leave him as a single parent with the awesome burden of protecting their fragile, tender innocence from a depraved world. And sometimes, there are lapses.

  Like in the past few days when he has been distracted. Crazy neighbor. Mad cat. Chance encounters. All time-consuming. Requiring extra attention to the banality of subterfuge—the laundered sheets, the patches of plausible explanation to cover the inexplicable gaps in his daily agenda. Where were you when? And with whom? In case the questions were ever asked. Not that they often were. Dolores was beginning to seem remote, a temporary sojourner. The girls were beginning to ask less frequently: when is Mummy coming home?

  Oddly, though, his wife seemed incurious about events in her absence. She returned from her trips, laden with gifts. She was passionate. Demanding even. Sometimes, he congratulated himself on the inordinate amount of time he devoted to maintaining his skills of tumescent endurance for her immediate benefit and gratification, as if his dalliances and liaisons were, in reality, merely one more form of worship of the Goddess Dolores, font of all wealth and comfort; as if his paramou
rs were no more than sparring partners ahead of the big bout, runners to keep the pace before he sprinted for gold. He avoided innovation with her when they tumbled together on her return. Sometimes she timed her arrival in early afternoon so that they could get to know one another again before the school run. Innovation would have been a dead giveaway. Where did you learn that little trick, she might ask? Not an easy question for the errant husband. Learn what? I thought you liked it that way? From the chandeliers.

  More lies.

  And now this.

  Rising early for the breakfast routines, Gerald Tremayne had checked his own email (he made no restrictions on his own web usage and was always careful to cover his tracks). He had almost choked on his strong black coffee.

  “Cheri. I will be en route Kennedy/Heathrow by the time you get this. But please, come and pick me up (Terminal 5) and carry me off to our love nest above the shrink’s. I will be discreet, I promise. And no one will know where I am. Except you. Until then—your lover. And landlady! XX.”

  Oh Christ. Oh fuck. Fuck a duck.

  He tried her cell phone. No reply. Switched off. Out of credit. Number changed. Seized by private detectives working on her divorce case. Desperate for evidence of misbehavior. Who could tell? Who could ever tell with her? Would she arrive in demure diplomatic duds or raunchy rock-star regalia, sliding stilt-like on skinny heron legs through Terminal 5, swinging her tight ass through the immigration lines and the customs and the duty-free?

  He checked the wall calendar. No hockey, soccer, debating society, harp lessons, cello class. For either of his daughters. They would end their school day at the same hour precisely. He checked the contacts list of his phone, scrolling through a list of likely substitutes in the run to retrieve offspring—au pairs, P.A.s, wives mostly. Despite the gender revolution and the feminist tsunami, there were few househusbands to keep him company outside the school walls, among the massed ranks of 4 × 4s that prowled South Hampstead and Swiss Cottage and St. John’s Avenue, encasing their charges in steel and technology, shielding them from lesser beings in rickety rattletraps and fleet saloons offered as perks of the job.