Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  Who would it be? Who could help him get his daughters safely home—or at least most of the way home—while he went about his nefarious run to Terminal 5 in response to the imperious command of a woman who, he suspected, would have no qualms, if crossed, about blowing all his alibis out of the water. She probably kept a diary, for Christ’s sake. A database of misbehavior, escapades, interludes, romps and rumbles.

  That was not the only scheduling problem. With his publisher’s advances all spent and his spousely stipend failing to keep pace with the inflationary demands of the cocaine trade, he had been forced to look to his laurels, reaching back into his past to rekindle cold trails and contacts on the powdery routes that led from distant Colombia to the nostrils of North London. At his level of the business, there was no massive markup, but he had at least located a wholesaler further along the chain whose supplies enabled him to build a modest list of regular retail clients, serviced at various points—street corners and dark lanes, cemetery gates and car parks, anywhere free of London’s not-quite-ubiquitous network of CCTV surveillance cameras—on an axis from Camden to Crouch End and Muswell Hill.

  “Around tomorrow if you are?” he would ask in WhatsApp messages on a secret pay-as-you-go phone whose SIM card changed every month. And the orders would trickle in, enabling him to overcome his own supply problems. If you lived above the shop, he liked to tell himself, who could blame you for sampling the produce?

  Distribution, of course, was a big issue. Not quite as big as in, say, the popularized depictions of Narcos or Breaking Bad. No refrigerated trucks or carloads of hoodlums or planes and boats or cases of bananas loaded with narcotics. Or tugboats with tons of the stuff sealed in phony bulkheads and lockers. Or septic tank disposal drums with phony panels and false roofs. But a challenge, nonetheless, to keep his business free from likely detection by the twin authorities he feared to differing extents and for different reasons—the police, and his wife.

  Gerald Tremayne doubted that the overworked officers of the drug squad would keep regular tabs on him, but you could never tell when they might like to tickle one minor loose strand of the trade to see what else unraveled. Of far greater concern was the promise he had made to Dolores soon after they moved in together: his old ways were behind him, he had told her. Trust me, he had said. A new leaf. A new man. Husband and father. Responsible. Caring. Legal. I would never want to jeopardize the family status.

  From the very beginning, Dolores had placed a high priority on his promise. And one of her reasons for doing so went back to the very beginnings of her relationship with her husband and her father’s view of the budding romance between the undergrad and the plumber. For years as an exile, Stephen Nkandla had simply assumed that the life that had been forced upon him—far from the slums of Soweto or the high-rises of Sandton or the posh mansions of Bishopscourt—was simply his destiny, his niche in the struggle. But, as freedom had come and his beloved daughter had grown into womanhood, he had begun to entertain seductive musings about his origins and how he should relate to them. He was, after all, African, a son of Africa’s soil. His forebears stretched back, at least by association, to great warriors, Dingane and Shaka. For many of his adult years, he had been unable to rebond with the vistas of his childhood in the undulating verdancy of Zululand. When he fled north, the white authorities had declared him an outlaw. If he ever returned, the cops would nab him for sure and torture and possibly try and most certainly execute him. He was no Pimpernel to dodge his pursuers, that was for sure, no Houdini to escape their lethal grasp. Sometimes, in the lonely hours of exile, as he absorbed the culture that was all around him—figuratively, though not always literally in the alleyways of Camden Town—he looked to the great poets and scholars. The closest he came to an answer was in the work of T. S. Eliot, and one poem in particular. He was, Stephen Nkandla concluded, a Prufrock of the struggle, who would grow old and wear his trouser bottoms rolled. But after the apartheid ogres fell, and the great Mandela walked free, he began to revise his self-perception. The victory back home was his victory. More than many others he had sacrificed and struggled and, most of all, done his bit. Why should he not now return to the land for which he pined in his secret moments as he went about the business of recruitment and fund-raising and consciousness-raising and lies and propaganda in the service of the greatest principle of all: people were born equal and deserved to live that way, whatever their origins of class or gender or ethnicity. Once freedom came, surely, he could apply for a transfer to Pretoria, set up in Africa, await a substantial pension that would see him through in comfort, possibly accompanied by earnings that, under the new dispensation, flowed almost automatically from the policies of black economic empowerment. Finally, he would touch the soil of home and rediscover his roots. He imagined himself as the madala, the old man—Tata they would call him, like Mandela was called—and he would bounce grandchildren on his knee and sip single malt whisky when they were safely abed and ruminate on a life well spent that had brought its just rewards.

  But it was not, of course, that simple. The dream itself was arguably unrealistic, and his ties to his adoptive land were strong. His wife had clambered up the ever-shifting ladders of success within the National Health Service and had secured a high-ranking position as an administrator, overseeing several hospitals held by a single trust. She was happy, secure in her work. She felt no magnetic pull to Africa’s heaving bosom. Indeed she had once lectured him on the perils of resurgent tribalism. She had never, he suddenly realized, even bothered to learn a word of isiZulu. So how would she survive relocation to the banks of the Tugela River, where his ancestors lay uneasily in their graves, calling him home?

  They had their lovely home in Muswell Hill, close enough to the monument to O. R. Tambo, the revered hero of the struggle, to make it the destination of their strolls on winter mornings and summer evenings. Their jobs were secure. They did not live in fear of armed robbery and rape as so many people seemed to live back home, if home was what it still was. They were not besieged by or beholden to an extended family reliant on their largesse. Here, in London, they were in the mainstream of life. There, they would face ever greater pressures for favors and donations to cement their share of the patronage available to the formerly disadvantaged. And then there was their beloved daughter, the young Dolores, who had done well at all the schools she attended as a pupil. Apart from rare vacations “back home,” she had no natural affinity with Africa.

  Maybe, Stephen Nkandla began to think—without sharing these musings with his spouse—Dolores should get to know more real Africans, move in his circle of diplomats and business types; maybe—who could tell?—meet a handsome, young, uncorrupt, promising, well-credentialed South African man with whom to raise a family and build a life in the new-ish nation for which he had fought in the struggle. The dream was dashed most cruelly. When she returned from university, she had brought in tow the shifty Gerald Tremayne, introducing him to them as the love of her life, whom she wished to marry. For once, Stephen had objected. He recalled the moment vividly.

  His daughter had announced that she had a surprise to unveil at Sunday lunch. The surprise now stood on the doorstep in newly pressed jeans and a freshly laundered white shirt, faking a shy smile, clutching a bunch of flowers from which the Tesco price tag had been crudely removed. When Stephen Nkandla reluctantly grasped the “novelist” Gerald’s outstretched hand, he felt the calluses and muscling of manual labor. Novelist my foot, he grunted when none could hear him.

  His long years in the movement had exposed him to plenty of scoundrels and he knew one when he saw one. Like his daughter, his wife had fallen under the thrall of the chestnut-eyed charmer with his literary pretensions. But not Stephen Nkandla. He knew, from the first contact with Gerald, that his daughter would be better off taking her chances “back home” rather than setting up with this skollie. He knew she was making a mistake. Their children—his grandchildren—would be born into a society that mistrusted people of color, a
nd would always block their path. And just as soon as he could tell her so, he did.

  “This chap. This Tremayne. Is that even his real name? Are you sure he’s what he says he is? You have a great future in front of you. There are plenty more fish in the sea. You would be better off in Africa. Among your own kind. Not with this lumpenproletariat trickster.”

  Unusually, she argued back. What about the values of the struggle, the commitment to nonracialism? What about the natural alliance of workers and peasants? Yes, Gerald was white. Yes, their children would be what apartheid’s lexicon had defined formally as “colored.” As was Dolores herself, in case he had forgotten. Had he, her own father, not fought long years of punishment and exile to consign such branding to history? But Gerald was an honest man, a man of the working class, fired by the ambition to better himself, to look after his family, provide for them with his writing which would be stifled in South Africa, limited by the narrow visions of race and corruption that still drove the debate.

  And look at it this way, Pa, she said, if we went the South African route you would have to pay lobola—bride price—for me. And how many head of cattle do you think I am worth? After all this time in the U.K., would you even know where to buy a cow? They don’t grow on trees, you know. He had smiled, acknowledging her wit and her determination, but the argument was never really resolved, as family arguments often do remain in limbo, festering, denied, awaiting rancorous rebirth. And Dolores understood very well that if her husband went back to his old ways, her victory would slip away, and, with it, the respect that Stephen Nkandla had always paid her.

  She had never told Gerald about any of her battles with her father. She did not really need to. Stephen Nkandla had sought out Gerald before the wedding and informed him in no uncertain terms that if there was any whiff of betrayal, of malpractice, of activities incompatible with his status as a husband and breadwinner—in short if Gerald Tremayne’s behavior in any manner compromised the honor due to his bride and her family—then there would be trouble. And not just trouble in the sense of cross words and harsh reproaches. Stephen Nkandla reminded Gerald of his time during and before the struggle, of his facility with the short stabbing spear that gave Shaka’s armies the edge against outsiders who came to steal the land. He recalled, too, the dark days of the fight against the Boer, when a certain facility in the use of the Tokarev 9mm pistol and the AK-47 assault rifle was expected of him and his comrades.

  To reinforce his warning, Stephen Nkandla had invited Gerald to the loft of his home in North London where he kept, mothballed and wrapped in protective plastic, a leopard skin outfit with its arsenal of what South Africans called “cultural implements” that, at least in their own country, were permitted as a form of display.

  There was, for instance, the cow-hide shield with the horizontal markings and, most chillingly, a club with a rounded head, known as a knobkerrie; and an iron spear, polished, honed and known as an assegai.

  The same equipment had been used, Stephen Nkandla said, at Isandlwana in Zululand in 1879 when King Cetshwayo’s impis spilled much blood among the red tunics of the invaders, inflicting a defeat that ranked as the imperialists’ worst ever setback at the hands of an indigenous force—inferior in firepower, but vastly superior in numbers, guile, and guts, fighting to defend their own land, not to invade on behalf of some distant monarch.

  “It could always be used again,” Stephen said darkly, judging that the moment had come for a wider lesson to put the insurgent Englishman in his proper place.

  “Let me tell you something, while we are on the subject, something about your place in the world.”

  Gerald steeled himself for the worst, but, in fact, tended to agree with the message, as if sons of northern bus drivers and descendants of African pastors shared a similar view of the metropolitan hubris that overlay the view from London.

  “There are two forms of history,” Stephen began. “There is history and British history. In history, twenty million Soviets died in the battle against Hitler. In British history, the bulldog breed stood alone. Even the Americans barely get a look-in. Oversexed, overpaid…”

  “And over here,” Gerald broke in, recalling the refrain from his father’s tales of war as an air raid warden.

  “Indeed,” Stephen said with a hint of annoyance that his punchline had been so easily stolen.

  He gestured at the warrior’s accoutrements.

  “In history there was Isandlwana, a crushing defeat for the British at the hands of indigenous people who did not welcome them. But in British history, they prefer to focus on the follow-up engagement at Rorke’s Drift. A stunning victory! Of twenty-three Victoria Crosses awarded in the Zulu Wars, eleven—nearly half—were awarded to soldiers at Rorke’s Drift.

  “So you see, Tremayne, or whatever name you were born with, what I am saying is that we expect no honesty from the British. We expect perfidious Albion to be…?”

  “Perfidious,” Gerald mumbled.

  What Stephen Nkandla did not mention was that, throughout his adult life, the warrior outfit had been an unwelcome accoutrement, a source of inner conflict: if he was embarrassed by the idea of wearing it, he was embarrassed, too, at feeling that way, as if he were denying his roots.

  His own president, a fellow Zulu, had no such qualms. Wearing his leopard skin kit, the president had married several of his wives at ceremonies that followed Zulu tradition rather than imported Christian rituals. Attired as a paramount chief, he had attended the opening of parliament and his inauguration. With the finery that distinguished Dingane and his nduna, the president wanted to remind the world at large that, whatever the century, the African roots could not be enfeebled, the continent would not be denied.

  That desire extended particularly to forays overseas. The president had argued forcefully that traditional dress should be worn by all of his country’s diplomats during state visits and other such occasions. If the British sought to impress their former subjects with ceremonial rides in gilded carriages and state banquets and plumed hats, then it was only appropriate for the visitors to offer a riposte in kind. If you insist on thinking of us as half-naked savages, here we are—semi-clad and armed to the teeth in Buckingham Palace!

  It had taken all of Stephen Nkandla’s powers of dissuasion to point out the downsides of the presidential proposition that a black man draped in leopard skin constituted the most potent of anti-imperialist gestures toward his hosts, a kind of sartorial V-sign.

  In some ways, Stephen Nkandla could see the point. But he understood his adoptive land far more than his leader even pretended to. Not far beneath the pinstriped façade of modern Britain, ugly sentiments coursed in powerful streams. So why pander to the hidden agenda of racial supremacy by offering stereotypes from different times? For his part, in any event, Stephen Nkandla had always preferred to regard himself as more of a universalist, a modernist, a jacket-and-trousers man, uncomfortable with emblems that predated the motor car and wireless communications. He was a creature of the present, sustained by the movement’s commitment to nonracialism and its eschewal of tribal distinctions. He liked tweed jackets and slippers and a pipe of tobacco. His discomfort with the shield and assegai and knobkerrie went deep. When the presidential state visits came around, he knew, he would again have no choice—like many of his diplomatic colleagues—but to resist his leader’s entreaties. Like Isandlwana, the battle might well be won on one day, only to be refought the next. So far he had triumphed, but that outcome could not be guaranteed forever. And no one gave Victoria Crosses for standing up to His Excellency.

  Dolores had never learned of the encounter between her husband and her father, though she was aware that—as the years went by through births and christenings and Nativity plays and sports days—the relationship between them never rose much on the temperature charts of amity. Not so much a cold war. More a tepid truce. Even without his father-in-law’s warning, Gerald Tremayne understood that he was playing a dangerous game.

  I
f he was unmasked as a dealer, a pusher, how would the girls ever maintain their life of posh school and posh sleepovers and posh friends? How would Dolores explain the shame to her bosses? Or be dissuaded from tossing him out on his heels, packing him off to Newcastle in disgrace and failure? How do you explain to the goose that you have snorted away the golden egg? Not to mention his status as an author. How do you tell your agent and publisher that you have been supplementing the nonexistent output from the silent word processor by peddling narcotics?

  Somehow, it was easier to answer any of those questions if you had a reliable personal supply of your own merchandise to numb you to the consequences. A bit like the waiter, Karl, in that Bogart movie, telling Rick Blaine that he was becoming his own best customer.

  But you had to be discreet. There was no sense in cruising Camden in a black BMW with smoked-glass windows, looking for passing trade. Only if you looked like a drug dealer, Gerald reasoned, would you draw the unwanted attentions of the constabulary. The trick was to be counterintuitive, to look like anything but an identikit dope peddler. As he had learned in his earliest days, you needed a cover. You needed the appearance of a definite, legitimate mission.

  Since plumbing and handiwork were no longer viable disguises, as they had been at the time he first met his wife, he had hit on the idea of disguising his supply run as part of his fitness regime. Two birds with one stone. He carried his product in a rucksack, individual deliveries wrapped in cling-film—a gram here, a couple there. Nothing too ambitious or perilous (although class-A drugs in any quantity courted serious trouble). He listened to music on his headphones as he ran with his deceptively speedy loping gait between his points of contact and trade—time-consuming, of course, but who would suspect a jogger? Even one with social connections who seemed happy to meet with him for a few fleeting seconds and a handshake at the venues on his route between bandstands in the park and secluded suburban driveways. He wore dark glasses and a beanie hat, just in case any of his clients might harbor a literary bent and recognize him from his appearances at book fairs or television talk shows—infrequent as those occasions had become. But you couldn’t be too careful. If a young woman on Hampstead Heath could recognize him so could some saddo clutching his grimy banknotes in anticipation of a fleeting high. It would have been easier—if less aerobic—to use the Range Rover. But then he might have drawn even more attention. The last thing he wanted to do behind the tinted windows of the V-8 steed was to fit the identikit picture of the parasite he had reverted to being.