Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  Showtime!

  * * *

  Dolores has no hope of restraining X.

  X is flying, irrepressible. She claws furiously at the loosened tape until the flap swings wide. She thrusts her way through and, instead of following the familiar route upward, turns down toward the staircase that leads to the front door of the apartment house. She is aware of a shadowy presence that would normally persuade her to scuttle for safety. But safety is not on X’s agenda today.

  Dolores recognizes the figure on the upper flight of stairs as the duplicitous, deceiving, husband-stealing neighbor from higher in the block. But, along with rage, she also feels a kind of pity: Gerald’s women are all in the same nonexclusive, nonproprietary boat: they all have illusions of a special, unique place in his heart, but they are all betrayed as much as she is, because his heart is splintered, a hall of mirrors, a distortion. They are all fools, and she has joined them. They are foils to his ego and his insatiable physical needs. They offer their bodies for his use alone, while he spreads his favors wherever they may land, like sycamore seeds borne on the wind. He resembles a creature in one of those wildlife documentaries when some would-be David Attenborough, or even the great man himself, must yet again explain the imperative that bonds the humping tusker and the rutting stag and the roving husband-hunter-gatherer in the central male conundrum: how can I be sure that my genes survive the generations when I have no ultimate control over the crucible of their procreation? Only the female can be confident of her own claim to parentage. The act of gestation is the ultimate validator. So the male must perforce spread the love. It is the predator’s first and last line of defense.

  X is poised at the big, heavy front door with its frosted pains of mismatched glass and green institutional paintwork that makes it look—to humans—like a throwback to social housing in the 1930s. To cats, of course, it is merely a barrier that may open or close to no evident rhyme or reason.

  Now it opens. The postwoman—post-person? Who was the pre-person?—has pressed a button marked “Trades.”

  Trades!

  As if it were Downton Abbey. Or Buckingham Palace.

  The door swings open. The post-person is laden with parcels for delivery to online shoppers who scour the web for bargains on sale, or at least, for acquisitions that may be presented as such to their spouses. She steps forward, balancing her load as she pushes against the weight of the door. At just the moment when she is poised to overcome its inertial resistance, and is at the tipping point between effort and entrance, she is aware of a blur, a rush, a furball fired through her legs like a bazooka. The door, as it does, swings wide, abandoning all efforts to counter its weight. Like a duped jiujitsu combatant, the post-person finds herself pressing against zero opposition and stumbles. Packages in brown cardboard fly and fall and trip her. Biped down! The neighbor, following X, rushes toward her, and the postie thinks help is on the way, but it is not to be. Ms. Steinem—who is expecting no tribute this day from Amazon or J.Crew or House of Fraser—leaps over the fallen fulfillment operative in a single bound, intent on following X who has now scampered through the garden and is poised at the roadside, peering in wonder at a mighty red 214 single-decker bus that is roaring by.

  Yes, yes, Ms. Steinem hisses. Run out into the road, you evil, condom-piercing creature. Under the bus. Under anything—Jaguar or Bentley, Toyota or Škoda or Mercedes or Ford. Whatever! Run under those treaded tires that will squeeze the bejimminies out of you.

  But X turns right on the sidewalk, bushy tail high, like one of those objects held by tour guides so that their charges may keep track of them. Now she is heading south, eyes bright, an undefinable sense of purpose driving her every step.

  Dear God, Dolores is thinking. This is it. I am going to die in a cat’s body. I am going to be flattened on the road in a mess of fur and blood and broken bones. And when X dies will I also die, wherever I am? In Munich or Detroit or Osaka? Will my biped self simply evaporate from view, collapse in on itself as its spirit struggles free of the highway massacre? When the soul leaves the body, all life ends. It is a destiny to be averted at all costs.

  She feels like one of those figures in movie animations, perched aloft some monstrous beast and seeking to steer it.

  X, X, X, she screams. Listen to me! Do not leave the sidewalk. Do not cross the road. To get to the other side in response to any impulse. For both our sakes.

  But X gives no indication of heeding her.

  Finally, as a result of courage summoned from nowhere, she has fulfilled the destiny that generations of breeders sought to deny her. She is a flat-cat no more. She is beyond the flap, in the world where cats are supposed to be, breathing the air of freedom. The anxieties that always drove her to retreat into the family dwelling box, to seek refuge under biped sleeping pads, to mew plaintively when her pellet bowl is empty, have all fallen away. There is an urgency now. A mission that fuses her and Dolores Tremayne’s sheltering instincts into one. Something of the message on the glittery pad has seeped into her cunning cat’s brain. Something of the human reflex to change destiny has infiltrated her indolence.

  X to the rescue!

  She is a cat reborn, entering a new and exhilarating world.

  Dolores recognizes landmarks to which no flat-cat may be privy. The bright red postbox. The wooden garbage bin, often fly-tipped. The estate agent, often crooked. The sub post office. The beauty salon with its offers of facials and massages. The dry cleaner. The pizzeria. The Turkish place. The bus stop.

  How long will her coke-cat’s buzz endure before X awakens from this drug-fueled urge that is propelling her inexorably onward, along the sidewalk, beside the hedge protecting the Heath, the tennis courts, the bowling green that is sometimes a croquet lawn, the road that leads to the farmers’ market on Saturdays and the tennis courts where, in better days, she and Gerald knocked balls about and giggled with the girls?

  Dogs! There will be dogs. Pit bulls. Jack Russells. German shepherds. Doberman pinschers. Lurchers. Labradoodles. Newfies. Schnauzers. Dalmatians. Weimaraners. Bizarre names—so many foreigners! From far-flung exotic breeds. All sharing common characteristics—the urge to public defecation and the sniffing of private parts; the implacable bloodlust displayed toward cats; their mammoth jaws and saber teeth and lolling tongues. No wonder we need Brexit to take back control of our canines. From now on it will be British breeds FIRST.

  But X knows no fear. Of buses. Cars. Hounds. Cycles. People.

  A man is coming toward them with a slobbering, snarling bulldog on a leash, tugging at its walker who uses both hands to try to restrain it. But X does not waver. She accelerates toward the oncoming creature and, quite abruptly, balletically, leaps over the bulldog, leaving it mystified: surely there was a cat on the pavement that is now empty?

  Pedestrians, now, stop and peer and look at the sight of a rag doll–cum–Maine Coon flat-cat, all fluff and fur and piercing blue eyes, resisting all blandishments. Here, pussy, pretty pussy. Valuable pussy. Ransomable, reward-bearing fancy-cat. Dick Whittington redux. Driven to a place where the streets are paved with gold, along sidewalks smeared with spittle and the detritus of biped living—beer cans, fast-food wrappers. An obstacle course that X somehow navigates deftly, refusing to be distracted by the lure of strange odors, sights, temptations.

  Despite herself, Dolores is beginning to enjoy the ride. Or, at least, is resigned to its outcome. Hoping it will be quick and painless. Hoping that her biped self will survive. Wondering how she will break the news to the girls. The girls who play with tablets and laptops and risk terrible things from strangers.

  X glances back at the apartment house receding into the far distance, and Dolores shares the view. How odd it seems from the outside, without comforting enclosures and hiding places. How odd the outside world seems—a place of no enforced coordinates, of free will that may be translated into action, of tripwires that have no name.

  A crowd seems to have formed behind them, following this strangely mag
netic, magical cat. The bipeds are led by the upstairs neighbor who wants to be in at the kill. At this point in their odyssey, the pathway is narrow. A crowd of would-be fitness types has spilled out from the green fields of the Heath where they have been led in pseudo-military exercises by a man in camouflage fatigues barking orders at them. They had planned to jog the final section to their dispersal point, conveniently located opposite a public house. But Ms. Steinem blocks their path so their leader enjoins them to a form of slow advance with knees jerking high.

  Hut! Hut! Wait for it! Left right left right!

  Seeing this retinue in apparent thrall to a cat, others join in—a homeless person with a shopping trolley of rancid possessions, two women with double push-chairs heading initially for the Lidl shop, now, with their bewildered twins, carried along with the flow. Their chariots prevent anyone else from overtaking so the crowd grows larger, passing a school on lunch break where a mob of blazered students, desperately questing for an end to terminal, existential, adolescent ennui, joins the flying, halting, swelling wedge, using the occasion to light up clandestine cigarettes and exchange high fives. Bewildered, a clutch of schoolteachers resolves to keep an eye on their rogue charges, falling into line behind them, worried about health and safety issues if their pupils collide with buses or motorists or rival gangs. A lady in an oversized white coat and a peaked cap, who is bearing a sign that says “Stop! Children Crossing!” sees an opportunity to help and tries to shuffle along the flank of the multitude to head off vehicular confrontation.

  Dolores cannot decide whether X is the fox and they are the hounds, or whether she is the pied piper of Hamlin and they are the rats. The latter seems more appropriate. Especially in Ms. Steinem’s case. The ur-rat; the uber-rat; the rat par excellence with its mean little claws and toxic teeth and furtive scuttlings.

  Somehow, X has crossed a road junction at a traffic light with a sign in green signaling safety to human pedestrians but offering no special guidance to her kind. Ahead there will be the Costcutter where you can return unwanted delivery items, or buy smokes and booze and milk; and the pub where they advertise real ale and Scotch eggs; and the auto body shop where they repair crumpled Porsches and dinged Bentleys; and the bridge under the rumbling railroad; the carpet shops; that funny little Italian place where they always mean to eat but never do; the medical center where humans go for their coughs and sneezes and aches and pains, their pills and potions and referrals and dismissals; the fire station—bells ringing, siren sounding, lights flashing. How can X be route-finding like this? Dolores wonders, imagining that maybe the cat has raided her home computer and downloaded the satnav software that she sells to high-end car production companies.

  Heavens, she thinks, we might even make it to Kentish Town tube station. She finds herself giggling, hysterically: I hope X packed her travel card. The world’s her Oyster. But where would she put it?

  Tee-hee.

  * * *

  Gerald’s fears and hopes are confirmed in equal measures when the JFK passengers begin arriving at Terminal 5. He has been prowling among the men with their signboards who stand immobile, bored, awaiting their clients, fidgety, glancing at their watches, calculating parking charges, tips, delays, traffic reports, oil changes for the VW Sharans and Toyota Priuses wedged among the big shiny SUVs in the multidecked parking lot. Their boards identify their soon-to-be passengers by name, as if they had all lost their owners and were lining up for the hoped-for rediscovery, like stray dogs at the pound. Who were all these people whose names adorned the boards or were printed on A4 paper in large black font-sizes, or glowed from tablets? Barry Schmitz; Felicity Woodburn; Slough Ergonomics; Dominic Brown; Arthur Green; Fred White; Nelly Black; Permanent Rose. Why no Blues, Yellows, Purples? How come the evolution of names has denied the existence of Reds and Umbers, Aquamarines, Mauves? Or were there secret armies of Jimmy Ceruleans and Fanny Cadmiums and Algernon Phthalos and Shrinking Violets, too shy or poor or embarrassed to have their names on boards held by men as still as statues at Heathrow Airport? Were the tube trains and buses from the airport filled with skulking Alan Alizarins and Doris Dioxazines? Gerald had once tried his hand at painting, an ill-starred foray into a different form that seemed initially to hold much promise. He fitted the part—hollow cheeks, unkempt hair, legs in faded denims spattered with paint in colors of all permutations, Payne’s grey and burnt sienna and titanium white and cobalt blue. He had painted and painted and gone to classes and painted glasses of water and gaudy flowers and ships at sea and, once, a naked woman whose olive body he felt ashamed to have insulted with his daubings. So much so that he had apologized after class. Only to be ignored. Only for the class tutor to inspect his depiction of her and whisper: “Don’t give up the day job, Gerald. Not just yet.”

  The memory of the humiliation jars him, bounces him back to the present. How has he gotten to this thought, from the meet ’n’ greet zone of Terminal 5 to the erogenous zones of a naked stranger? Was this where all his neural pathways led? Should he make a note of this stream of consciousness depravity in his old, battered, rarely referenced Moleskine notebook where he jotted ever fewer great inspirations as the moments of illumination themselves dwindled, as his muse forsook him in every way except the licentious? Or should he rather just let it float off into that nebulous Bermuda Triangle of memories never to be retrieved—incomplete, ill-formed, half-baked; the stuff of male reverie; everything channeled, inexorably, inevitably, irreducibly toward the cleft of thigh and swell of bosom that drew a man’s thoughts and dreams and musings from any single starting point—you name it: a bus stop, a café, a postcard, a brick wall, Costa coffee, AP cars—to the confessional of carnal fulfillment. Forgive me, Your Eminence, for I have sinned and wish to do so again and again and again.

  There was a stirring among the drivers and greeters. He sensed it before he saw her. He thought there might be a communal shift toward tumescence and all the signboards would be lowered, simultaneously and strategically, to cover the shame.

  He could understand why. This time, she had gone too far. Over the top. Irresistible.

  Start at the top.

  Her hair was bunched up so that it looked as if she spent most of her life in bed, a great, tarty tangle of locks and scarves and beads. She had made up her eyes with mascara that flew off in points to the left and right. Her dark irises resembled impenetrable pools from which you would never resurface. Shark’s eyes—deadly, unflinching, intent on the fulfillment of instinct, appetite. Bloodred lipstick. Her face tilted up like a flamenco dancer. Except that flamenco dancers did not wear worn, torn T-shirts with a V-plunge neckline, an iron crucifix; black leather jacket that was never designed to disguise the hourglass waistline; low-hip jeans tight across buttocks and crotch; and platform shoes that made her slender, muscle-sculpted legs impossibly long.

  She locked eyes on his. He stood transfixed. The ranks of drivers from AP Cars and GLH and Acme minicabs and Addison Lee and Uber blurred into soft focus. The other arriving passengers became a gray featureless wave of decelerated movement. Only she had color, pyrotechnic spangles among cold coals and dry embers.

  Who was meeting her, this apparition? Who had the sheer fortune to be chosen by her for what any spectator knew with certainty would follow in some apartment or hotel room or boudoir hung with silks, clothing cast aside in wild abandon? Gerald found himself grinning and struggled to compose his features into a worldlier expression. Knowing what only he could know or anticipate among this gallery of losers and no-goodniks, waiting spouses and brothers and sisters and lovers, pickpockets and spies and chancers and panhandlers, privileged to witness her swoon into his arms, the first tongue-tying kiss, the brush of her ringed hand across his bulging groin, the clutch of his fingers around her rump.

  Now, they are heading north in the mighty 4 × 4 steed. He asks her the time and she gives him the hour in New York, five zones away. He checks his watch for more parochial calculations. Apartment. Welcome. Fulfillment. Home
before the children. Shower and spag bol. Sublime to ridiculous. The schedule will demand calibrations of speed and euphoria in equal proportions. Was it extreme risk or simple insanity? She is curled in the leather passenger seat. Her hand has rested on his upper thigh for much of the journey. Close to his true brain; the epicenter of thought, planning, analysis. But now her fingers are busy with credit card and mirror. Chop chop chop. White powder given freely from his stash. Caution is thrown to the winds. He has already partaken. So has she. They are competing for the highest high, the first cardiac tremor. He has sniffed the stuff off a thumbnail, indifferent to the police patrol car next to him in the traffic whose occupants miraculously do not espy this chemically-fueled disdain. And now she must dip in again. On the SUV’s dashboard a warning light is blinking because she has unhooked her seat belt in order to deal with her class-A business, but nothing can happen to them. They are immune to disaster, set free from tawdry concerns. There is a purity in all this. A beautiful woman. A vehicle with such effortless muscle, such irrepressible verve that it leapfrogs traffic lights, surging forward unscathed as the colors change from green to amber to red. Lesser cars ahead pull over in fear and loathing as their drivers espy the massive chrome grille in their rearview mirror, bearing down on them, barracuda teeth bared for the kill. Pedestrians leap for safety as the realization dawns that the beast will not slow for them, whatever the Highway Code may say about their priority.

  Westway. St. John’s Wood. Regent’s Park. Camden.

  The lure of the tryst.

  Vroom vroom.

  * * *

  X has moved into a higher gear. She does not know why. Her bushy tail is erect, a beacon to her followers, who are increasing in number, curious about this messiah leading her apostles south toward Kentish Town. What can it mean? Many people have joined the motley. Some even swigged down their pints in the Southampton Arms and hurried to join the pilgrimage. Among them are students; goths heading initially to stand in line for the latest wild performance at the Forum but now distracted; office workers abandoning smoke breaks, still clutching cardboard cups of flat white and latte and mocca-chocca-chino. Two video journalists checking the latest social media alerts on their cell phones have jumped off a C2 bus heading north to join the mob heading south. One of them tweets to her 27,000 followers: Weird scene at #KentishTown fire station. Hundreds follow blue-eyed #cat on #HighgateRoad. The other sends a photograph to his 14,000 followers on Instagram. Both can handle Facebook posts while loping to catch up with the peloton of bipeds pursuing the mystery quadruped. Two legs far outnumber four.