X does not look back. She does not recognize the feeling of trepidation, of looming disaster that consumes the Dolores within. She cannot divine the nature of the magnetic attraction that draws her forward. Never a great one for sustained exercise—cats of any configuration, from cheetahs to ginger toms, rarely have stamina—she has nonetheless accelerated, upped the pace, lengthened her stride. From the front row of her new followers, she looks with her furry thighs as if she is wearing raggedy culottes. Cyclists are now drawn in and the rabble overflows the sidewalk. Police officers in a patrol car drive by in the opposite direction and call in a situation report then hang a one-eighty, keeping well back, but filming the unusual phenomenon. In distant reaches of Highgate and Mornington Crescent and Regent’s Park, responding to the call, other officers hit the buttons for bells and sirens. Someone calls the RSPCA. And the shelter for orphaned animals.
Twitter addicts nudge one another on buses and comment on the strangeness of the times.
Hashtag #runawaycat.
Trending.
X is trending! Viral!
Someone calls The Sun on a cell phone, requesting a tipster’s fee. A bored news editor pricks up his ears, recalling the musty dictum from the storage vaults of time that cats, golf and Nazis always sell vast numbers of newspapers. He senses potential and authorizes the tip-off fee. Fifty quid. Five hundred for a man-eating Bengal tiger on the loose in a Soho strip joint. But you can’t have everything.
Eyeing a vast room with many empty desks from the latest round of buyouts and departures, the news editor singles out Reg Crouch, a junior reporter who has been dreaming of interviews with naked celebs, or B-list movie stars poised to leap in a suicide death pact. A couple of days earlier, the news editor had sent Reg out on a story about a parrot stuck in a tree and his reporter had bravely clambered to the rescue. Pretty Polly! The boy clearly had affinity with furry, feathered species. A big mistake.
Since Reg’s photograph appeared in the newspaper with the rescued parrot perched on his extended index finger, the phone has been ringing off the hook. Who knew people had so many animals to lose? Lemurs. Ferrets. Stoats. Weasels. Rats. Mice. Hamsters. Badgers. Hedgehogs. Rabbits. Parakeets. Cockatoos. Budgerigars. Canaries. Guinea pigs. Sloths. Ducks. Geese. Teals. Coots. Baby hippos (really!). Diplodocus. Tyrannosaurus rex (not really!). Hah bloody hah!
LOL.
“Cat story for a change,” the news editor says. “Take a cab.”
“Run out of fucking parrots, did they?” Reg mutters under his breath.
“Page one if you find a Nazi on a golf cart to go with it.” The news editor cackles, his chest erupting into a bubbly, wheezy emphysemic gurgle.
Nazis? Golf? The old bugger’s lost it, Reg thinks. But at least it’s on expenses. At least it’s not another effing parrot.
* * *
X is galloping. She still has not figured anything out. How could she? She is a cat. An out-of-control, tearaway cat propelled by some crazy instinct. Dolores, along for the ride, is filled with terror. She cannot know what—if anything—X has in mind. With so many reasons to be fearful, she does not know where to begin to tabulate them.
The followers are multiplying. Ms. Steinem has maintained pole position, despite being jostled by the mass of jogging, trotting people who struggle to keep pace with the unexpectedly athletic cat, loping like a cheetah about to switch on the afterburners. The great, bustling procession is approaching a church, a towering edifice in blackened stone. Congregants pour out, raising their hands skyward in thanks and wonder.
And as X is now drawing nigh, the disciples begin to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works which they had seen.
Where did that come from? Dolores wonders.
Her cats’ ears pick up a new sound. Hallelujah.
Hallelujah? Dolores is thinking. Halle-bloody-lujah?
Her cats’ eyes widen in amazement for—lo—congregants are laying down their coats and jackets and X is sprinting across them. It is too late to stem the tide.
“Teacher, rebuke thy disciples,” Dolores is thinking. “And he answered and said, I tell you that, if these shall hold their peace, the stones will cry out.”
Luke. Ch. 19, v. 40.
Luke? X wonders.
* * *
It has been one of the better days of Stephen Nkandla’s career. Not on a scale, say, with Mandela’s walking free in Cape Town, or the first elections, or winning the World Cup rugby game, but, nonetheless, a satisfying victory. On days like this, he feels the struggle has not been all in vain. The grand designs framed by Mandela and his cohort, denied by venal successors, have been reaffirmed. Sanity has survived one more encounter with its adversaries.
The tussle—a rerun of so many earlier skirmishes—had been with his immediate boss, the high commissioner, who is a close ally of the ultimate boss, the president back home. The high commissioner is his de facto viceroy at the Court of St. James’s and operates with the implicit weight and gravitas of presidential authority. Sometimes, Stephen thinks, she believes she is part of the president, a remote but organically identical expression of his will. Like in those sci-fi movies where a space battleship ventures far into alien galaxies but, eventually, is reunited with the parent station, making both components whole again. Never is this umbilicus more clearly apparent than in the days leading up to the arrival of the president, His Comrade Excellency, as she calls him. She who insists on being addressed as Comrade High Commissioner.
With a state visit looming, the issue of the customary adornments had arisen yet again. She had ordered a full dress rehearsal for the president’s entourage who would accompany him to the centerpiece of the ceremonies—the ceremonial dinner at Buckingham Palace, hosted by Comrade Queen Elizabeth II. The invitation issued by the flunkeys of protocol had offered national dress as a sartorial option, providing the perfect pretext for a political statement, a message to Her Majesty that her forebears’ onetime imperial fief, five thousand miles to the south, at the tip of that grand continent of savannas and rain forests, the cradle of civilization, was not hers anymore.
National dress, it would be. The full fig—African style.
Each individual item must be inspected for wear, tear, fit and authenticity. The blade of each assegai must be gleaming. The rounded head of each knobkerrie must be burnished. There could be no trace of moth damage from storage; no exemption, on animal welfare or any other grounds, from the obligation to wear the full outfit during the state banquet. If, as happened frequently enough, the wearer had outgrown his kit in the period since its last use, then he must diet to scale. The comrade president, himself no stripling, availed himself of a seemingly endless supply of leopards prepared to die in the cause of his expanding girth. But the less privileged must make the sacrifices they were called upon to make and slim down to the required dimensions in advance of the state banquet.
And that was when Stephen Nkandla launched his revolt, having prepared the ground carefully, selected his allies, neutralized his rivals, wheeled and dealed.
The high commissioner had called an inspection, a roll call, in the dark, vast underground ballroom of the imposing building on Trafalgar Square, where, in the headier days of virtuous protest, peace-loving activists in duffle coats had paraded with their placards and banners on the sidewalks while the representatives of the hated racial state peered out on them from within and photographed them for their files.
And in that spirit of the struggle for freedom, her underlings now said: no. They would not wear traditional dress. They would wear lounge suits or even white tie and tails. But not leopard skin.
He had marshalled his arguments. Back home, he said, the codes and traditions of life were well understood. Here they were not. The climate could hardly be relied on, either, to permit such apparel. And diplomats could hardly be expected to pull on their Burberry raincoats over traditional dress in the event of a shower of rain or unforecast blizzard.
And another thing:
how would this latter-day impi get around town? The route around The Mall and Constitution Hill was hardly the rolling veld of Zululand.
It would certainly be most inappropriate for diplomats in their full regalia to return home from the state dinner on public transport. The London subway, the tube, made no provision for cultural implements. And the sight of senior personnel in the pelts of dead animals might easily be misinterpreted, or captured on cell phone cameras and circulated, even ridiculed, on social media that would certainly come to the attention of the comrade president’s office back home. There would, he said, almost inevitably, be selfies taken by scantily clad young white women sitting alongside scantily clad black diplomats. There might be scuffles with extreme rightists imagining themselves avenging Lord Chelmsford’s men at Isandlwana. Or animal rights activists campaigning against the slaughter of big or any other cats. There would, quite conceivably, be arrests leading to diplomatic demarches and protests. If the British Transport Police could routinely stop and search young black men carrying hidden penknives, imagine what they would do to middle-aged black men carrying spears.
Invoking his land’s hard-won democracy, for which so many had lost their lives, Stephen Nkandla called for a binding vote. Overwhelmingly, the motion was carried: traditional regalia would be optional, but the favored choice was for suit and tie, dickie bow and cummerbund. Officers of the diplomatic mission would be free to dispose—or not—of their outfits as they saw fit.
To mark his triumph, Stephen Nkandla had insisted that he be taken home, befitting his rank as deputy chief of mission, in the high commissioner’s own chauffeur-driven, S-Class Mercedes with its deep leather seats and tinted glass windows and deferential local hire driver who had once worked for the special forces and now made a good living in close security.
The murderous cultural artifacts were laid reverentially in the trunk.
In the scheme of things, it was a modest triumph at best and whatever grim satisfaction he felt as the sleek, black sedan pulled out of the underground garage in Trafalgar Square evaporated not long afterward when, for all his qualifications with the SAS, driving heavily armed, stripped-down Land Rovers across the desert, and springing reflexively to the attack in the face of challenge, the chauffeur failed to spot a huge crowd of people on the street just north of the Kentish Town tube station and found the car hemmed in on all sides by people waving cell phones and shouting what sounded like religious incantations.
Stephen Nkandla could have taken the crowd in his stride. He could have sat out whatever was happening in the bulletproof, centrally locked, air-conditioned security of the big car. But, when he caught sight of an animal that he recognized as his daughter’s family’s pet cat, and, just behind her, a woman he recognized as his daughter’s snotty neighbor, he began to sense unease.
“Let me out,” he told the driver.
“It is not safe out there.”
“I will be the judge of that.”
The driver sighed, rolled his eyes and flicked a switch to release the dead bolts in the armored rear doors. Stephen Nkandla scanned the crowd.
“Perhaps you had better come with me,” he told the chauffeur, who flipped open the trunk and slipped the knobkerrie under his jacket.
“Can’t be too careful, sir,” he said.
“Quite.”
He had hardly advanced more than a few paces when a callow youth with notebook and pen approached him and began asking the most ridiculous questions about golf and Hitler, inquiring, too, about Stephen’s name, which he had no desire to divulge to anybody.
* * *
Dolores Tremayne, in human form, clambers from the Gatwick Express and considers phoning home, but there is such a huge throng of people at Victoria Station that it hardly seems worth the effort to find space to stop and make the call so she plows gallantly on, tugging her carry-on bag behind her like a badly trained puppy. It won’t be long, in any event. And maybe Gerald and the girls will be pleasantly surprised. She will be home in time for tea. She will shower to sluice off the grime of budget travel, and distribute gifts and hug everybody and cuddle the cat and know she is locked into ideal coordinates. Gently she will investigate the bizarre email from her daughter’s iPad, without fuss or pulled fingernails, in that motherly way that induces confession without seeming to, third degree by stealth. Then, perhaps, when the girls are asleep, she and Gerald will reconnect and she will promise never ever ever to stay away so long again.
She considers taking a cab but figures that public transport, though less comfortable, will be much quicker.
She follows the floor-level markings that indicate the way to the tube station. Victoria line to Euston. Switch platforms for the Northern Line to Kentish Town.
Not long now.
* * *
Rosemary Saunders is frankly perplexed. The instructions were quite clear. Drop the girls at Kentish Town and see them onto the northbound C2 or 214. They have their Oyster cards, their house keys, their phones with the emergency service number preprogrammed. Police. Fire. Ambulance. They will not need any of them. They know the route, the drill, the protocols of passage through hazardous NW5 where the bad people lurk, sell drugs, have babies, eat McDonald’s, pepper their protestations with expletives every second word. The bus stop they are heading for is close to home. There is a brief stretch of gentrified street, then the safe haven of the apartment. Nothing can happen to them. No trolls to leap out from under bridges, monsters to burst through the tectonic plates of planet Earth, marauding bands to sweep in on horseback from Hampstead Heath, sabers glistening, cloaks flowing. Gerald has assured her of that much at least.
So who is the man in the grubby white van, gesticulating to the girls? Why is there a stained and simply yucky mattress on the floor of the van?
Astra and Portia have been crammed into the back of Rosemary’s Mercedes along with the Saunders girls. The car smells of wet dog, mud, gym kit, dubbin, a lost wedge of Brie de Meaux, Chanel No. 5. They have traveled on unfamiliar routes into the dark zones where people choose to live on top of each other, higgledy-piggledy, in apartment houses built by the local authorities, rather than in the five-or six-or more-bedroom places in luscious, leafy gardens which her husband has chosen for her and her brood.
Rosemary has gotten lost several times, forced to pull over and enter coordinates into the satnav, chart a course between rude bus drivers and motorists in old vehicles equipped with squeaky brakes and loud horns, who prefer to lower the windows rather than switch on the AC, perhaps because they smoke cigarettes and expectorate and offer ribald remarks to young female pedestrians with their hair scraped back—the Kentish Town face-lift—wearing Jeggings as if sprayed on in a paint shop. On this journey there have been old immigrant ladies pulling shopping trollies on zebra crossings where Rosemary had not planned to stop for them but who proceeded anyhow. There have been bleary, myopic eyes peering out from Dickensian visages that show endless defeats in life’s battles, marked out in pouches of pink, pale flesh and broken veins and teeth no longer capable of challenging a peach, let alone an apple; eyes that fill with resentment at the silvery car with its cargo of healthy, self-confident people whose glittery trajectory is already foretold. There has been a panicked misturn down a skanky-looking cul-de-sac that resembled a canyon of boarded-up windows and grimy lace curtains and tiny front yards filled with unspeakable sinks, toilets, washing machines, ladders, scaffolding and builders’ cleft buttocks hanging from windowsills. It is perhaps this vision of nether quarters that inspires the next question.
“What does cul mean, Mummy?” one of the Saunders girls asks knowingly, coquettishly, with perfect French enunciation. The other Saunders girls giggle. Astra and Portia exchange swift rolled-eyed glances.
“Not now, dear. Google it,” Rosemary replies, reversing hectically between parked cars, narrowly avoiding the creation of an evidential trail of wing-mirrors and insurance claims. And yet more scrapes, dings, dents, scratches to annoy her husband.
/> “Google, not giggle,” Rosemary says—an adage for life delivered with a dollop of tart rebuke. No one speaks for a bit. There is a honking of car horns as the big Mercedes station wagon hurtles backward out of the cul-de-sac into the flow of traffic, past the signs warning motorists that they are entering a dead-end, bereft of egress.
“Bottom,” another of the Saunders girls says suddenly.
“Bum,” says another.
“Arse.”
“For Christ’s sake. What do they teach you at that school?”
“French, Mama. Le Français.”
But now they are at the handover point designated by the handsome first novelist and househusband (who, as we know—but Rosemary cannot—is quite close by).
Since the people from Neighborhood Watch came by to explain the criminal classes to the chattering classes, Rosemary has sought to hone her powers of observation and she has come up with weasely, or at least rodentesque, to describe the man with the white van who is speaking to her, his words borne on waves of breath that make you wonder where exactly he has been feeding. There is a tattoo on his hand that resembles a swastika. He is wearing an army-surplus combat jacket. Hardly the type of person, Rosemary thinks, to be consorting with. But then, these days, one could never tell. Or, at least, never admit to knowing the distinction between the real people and the rest.
“My daughter, see?” he is saying. “Sharon. A devil for the computer. Always on it. Me I can take it or leave. Internet. But she’s a devil for it.”
Cat Flap Page 16