Cat Flap

by Alan S. Cowell

  “So where is she now? Sharon?” Rosemary knows she sounds snooty and is making a conscious effort to sound infinitely more superior, if only to mask the lurching queasiness that she is experiencing. She has clambered out of the car.

  Portia and Astra have followed her.

  “Ah there you are, Porsche,” the man says, “Recognize you from the photo you sent my Sharon. Hop in.”

  He takes her by the arm as if to propel her toward the white van.

  * * *

  This is a new twist, Gerald is thinking. Maybe I am in over my head. Maybe I have overreached myself.

  With the panache of a vaudeville magician Mathilde de Villeneuve has produced from her cleavage a silvery, ornate, spoon-like item that now brims with white powder. Presto! With her seat belt unlocked, she leans over the central console of the mighty beast and positions it under his nose.

  “Snort,” she instructs.

  He has already reached the point of sneezing from his previous ingestions but contrives to contain his hungry nostrils and follow her instructions. Thank the Lord for tinted glass windows, he is thinking. Vaguely, as they pass by the old Blustons store where ladies of a certain age bought frocks of a certain vintage, and the Mediterranean food shop and the pub that is always being revamped and, finally, the approaches to the tube station, he is aware of the traffic lights changing, separated from him by an unusual expanse of empty road (save for a couple of Lycra-clad cyclists—but they do not really count). The powder closes down some cognitive pathways, but opens up others designed for pleasure. The color signals jumble. Can red really mean halt, danger?

  A deep sniff with one hand on the steering wheel while the other uses the facility of the opposable thumb to pinch one nostril closed so that he is able to inhale abruptly, satisfyingly through the other.

  Sniff sniff vroom vroom.

  The beast leaps forward.

  His nose has begun to run a little.

  Not too far behind him, another color. Blue. Flashing blue. Better put some distance between the Range Rover and the source of the siren sound. This is definitely not the time to get busted. Not with this wild cargo on board.

  “Seat belt,” he commands. For some reason he thinks of that scene in the film about a great white shark where one of the actors says: “They’re all going to die.”

  “Fasten seat belts,” he repeats. “This could get hairy.”

  She obeys. Grins.

  Yay!

  Jaws.

  That one did not end happily, either. For the fish or the skipper out to catch it.

  * * *

  On the moving staircase with her carry-on tucked neatly against her legs, Dolores is aware of some excitement among her fellow travelers. Far more people than usual have left the train at Kentish Town. They are clutching smartphones and she catches incomprehensible references to signal strengths and hashtags. There is a bustle in the air, a sense of expectation, anticipation. Probably some weird concert at the Forum, that vast cavern where she and Gerald watched Ian Dury’s last gig and where people in all manner of bizarre clothing and hairstyle and skin piercings gather for arcane communion with cultlike bands. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. But no one is talking music or performers. She could swear she keeps on hearing the word “cat.”

  * * *

  Reg Crouch cannot make head nor tail of it, either.

  Well, the tail is evident, as is the head, in fact, but an understanding of the causal link between this bushy cat’s extremities and the crowd behind it eludes him completely. Breathlessly he dictates frantic notes into the record facility of his smartphone. Vast crowd. All races. Police escort. Happy-clappers. Hallelujah. Hippies. Webby peeps. Approaching Kentish Town tube. Destination unclear.

  The intrepid reporter jogs along the fringes of the crowd. Must be hundreds of them. Better make that thousands. To be on the safe side.

  He calls in.

  “Really weird,” he tells his news editor, who barks back: “I can fucking see that. Get me quotes. Color. File soonest. File oftenest.” Clearly, Reg thinks, his boss has regressed to some pre-internet age when cablese dictated curious usages to save on transmission costs charged by the word.

  The Golden Age. Trench coats. Trilby hats. Bush jackets and vast expense accounts in the tropics, in the battle zones. Typewriters and cleft sticks.

  Why you unswim sharkinfestedwaters? Frontwise soonest!

  How seeing crowd?

  Reg glances skyward, his attention seized by the clatter of a helicopter emblazoned with the logo of a twenty-four-hour news channel that is doubtless providing breathless live coverage to TV sets across the nation, including the ginormous fifty-inch HD jobby in the newsroom to which his editor is forever glued. Must be big, he thinks, to merit the chopper. Could be big for me, too. The big break. Finally. “Sun Reporter Uncovers Cat Cult.” “Feline Frolics Frenzy.” Scoop!

  “What’s its name?” he asks a woman who is jogging alongside him at the head of the ever-expanding crowd.

  “Fucking cat!” Jenny Steinem shrieks in reply. “Fucking, fucking, awful fucking cat.”

  “Funny name,” Reg shouts back, his voice battling against the decibel wave of rotor blades, police sirens, hallelujahs.

  “X,” the woman shouts, her reddening face close to his. “X. X. X. Fucking X.”

  “Sex?”

  Most of her gabbled reply is lost but he catches “pregnant” and his mind boggles.

  “Feline Fertility Frenzy in Cat Cult Sexcapade. Sex Cat Shocker!”

  “No Nazis? Golf?” he says in what he imagines to be a suave and worldly-sounding follow-up, recalling his boss’s offer of a bonus in return for those prized elements.

  “Nazi Sex Cat in Golf Fertility Scam.”

  “What?” the woman screams. “Are you insane?”

  But Reg has jogged forward for a better view. Ever the intrepid newshound. “Cat Made Me Pregnant, Says Nazi Golf Champ.” He had forgotten to ask her name, he realized. But that was a minor point. A trivial factoid like a real name could really hamper the processes of news creation. “Cottaging Cat Tells All.” “Tabby Tees Off Hitler Revival Tourney.” “Moggy Made Me Mum, Says Nazi Golf Jogger.” “Pussy Galore in Sex Kitten Cover-up.” The possibilities were endless.

  At the roadside, he sees a large black Mercedes, hemmed in by the crowd, unable to move. The rear door opens. A patrician-looking man in an elegant dark suit clambers out, accompanied by a mean, muscled character concealing a cudgel, scanning the chaotic scenes that are being witnessed. Reg approaches and asks his name, but before he can run through the interviewer’s litany of questions—who, why, how, where, when, what, and how much shall I write this check for?—his cell phone rings and the display shows him that it is his superior calling for an update.

  “Any Nazis yet?” the editor shouts.

  “Not really,” Reg replies.

  Stephen Nkandla has espied a silver estate car and a rusty white van and begins to trot toward them, moving with surprising speed and nimbleness, outpacing even the cat. The chauffeur lopes alongside. In his mind, he is crossing the barren lands on the approaches to Baghdad. The training has kicked in. The responses to whatever will happen have been programmed in on training missions in the Brecon Beacons and remote regions of Kenya. Whatever happens now has been foretold in the manuals that teach young soldiers how to kill with a rolled-up newspaper.

  “There’s a weird-looking guy here,” Reg is telling his editor. “He’s carrying a club.”

  “Did you say golf club?” the editor asks him in something approaching awe. “Well I’ll be…” but his words are lost in the clatter of the helicopter’s rotor blades and the roar of the crowd.

  * * *

  The man Rosemary Saunders has identified as comparable to a ferret, stoat or weasel, or possibly a rat, seems to be slowly concluding that things are not going exactly according to plan.

  “Do you actually have a daughter called Sharon?” Rosemary asks imperiously.

 
“She said she’d be here herself,” Portia says, digging in her heels, embracing Astra with the one arm to which the verminous figure is not clinging. She feels his grasp loosen. She sees a look of alarm cross his face. The sound of police sirens is getting closer. But that is not all.

  Around a corner to the north, he is aware of a sudden bedlam, a pullulating throng of people to all intents and purposes following a cat. A cat that now seems to have zeroed in on him. A cat that is sprinting at an impossible pace, pursued by the baying crowd. Is this what foxhunting looks like? Massive numbers in pursuit of a single quarry? But that is not what is happening here. The cat is leading. The pied pussy of Hamelin. It is leading the horde toward the single rat. It is sprinting. It has crossed the road. It stops. It surveys the scene before it. The congregation behind it stops too. People collide with the people in front, like a highway pileup, but no one remonstrates or threatens lawsuits. For a second the frame freezes. No one moves or speaks. The silence is incomplete because of the clattering helicopter up above. Reg Crouch is reminded of those frustrating moments when you are trying to stream videos and movement gives way to buffering. Then the cat lowers itself to the ground. Its haunches sway. Its feather-duster tail flicks from side to side. The muscles bunch in its rear legs. Don’t stop now, Dolores is screaming silently. For God’s sake, X, do something.

  X does just that.

  Like a Top Gun missile locked on to its target, X hurtles forward, propelled by unimaginable forces. Closing on her target, she leaps into flight. Her needle fangs sink into his arm. Red in tooth and claw. Forget the fox. The hunter is now the hunted. The tables are turned on the preying predator. Through her cat’s eyes, Dolores has a front-row seat. She is on the flight deck of justice. And she understands.

  X has saved the day—and the daughter—in a way that the inner Dolores, bereft of motor facilities, could not. X is not just some cat. She is the avenging sword. X as in Excalibur, so bright in the enemy’s eyes that it blinded him.

  Ferret, stoat, or weasel is afraid. It has all gone pear-shaped. Weeks, months of grooming gone to waste. At the very moment of the snatch. The pain in his arm is indescribable. The cat has jaws of iron and incisors sharper than a dentist’s drill, puncturing skin, sliding into veins and arteries, grinding toward bone.

  He releases Portia.

  The cat releases him.

  He leaps into his white van and turns the key to cajole the tired, rumbly, reluctant diesel into action. It takes a while. Siren noise grows louder. Crowd approaching. Strangers. Faces. Black man accompanied by murderous white man. With club. Voices. What’s all this then?

  Some callow youth with a smartphone starts asking him questions about golf and Hitler.

  The engine catches and he slams the gear lever and slips the clutch all in one blind moment. At least the lights are not red, he thinks as the van lurches forward and to his right he is suddenly aware of onrushing chrome and steel and blue paintwork and a huge impact that knocks his old white van onto its rusting flank with deafening noises of grating, rending metal. The van scrapes and screeches along the road, gored by the roaring Range Rover, and he is lying on his side with his blood seeping through the shattered window onto the highway and he knows he is going to die or at least go to jail and thinks that, of the two, death would probably be preferable.

  “It’s Daddy! He came to save us,” Portia exclaims, seeing the Range Rover.

  “But who’s that with him?” Astra inquires.

  “And what are those big white bags in the car?”

  “And why is that man with Granddad bashing Daddy’s car?”

  * * *

  Dolores with her roll-on, business class–sized cabin baggage feels as if she has been ejected out of the entrance to the Kentish Town tube station like a stopper from a bottle, surrounded by many other stoppers, all popping simultaneously. Somehow, as the escalator rose up from deep-belowground tracks, a mass, collective urge seemed to grasp her and her fellow travelers, drawn to noise and mayhem outside, pulling them, molding them into a unit that overcame the exit barriers and surged forward only to come to an abrupt halt at a scene of incomprehensible chaos.

  At first, her cognitive faculties are overwhelmed by a barrage of random impressions. For instance, she sees her daughters and X, the cat. And Rosemary Saunders, the school busybody/super soccer mom. She sees the family car, its front end mangled and shoving up against the oily, messy underside of another vehicle, which has capsized, spilling fluids onto the road. She sees her husband pinioned by a big white air bag. He seems to be nodding and shrugging and trying to smile. But next to him is a stranger, also trapped by an air bag. A stranger dressed as a pole dancer. And outside the car, a man accompanying her own father is using a cultural implement to launch alternating onslaughts against the battered van and the stricken Range Rover.

  Some kind of rescue?

  But none of these perceptions have any substance that might explain the scene around them.

  For instance, there is a great crowd of people. Some of them are busy tweeting and WhatsApping and Snapchatting on their phones. Others have burst into a hymn to praise the Lord. There is a helicopter thwacking the air overhead. And police officers looking bemused, calling for backup—fire service, ambulance, paramedics, social services, and, more surreptitiously, contacts in the news media known to pay handsomely for tip-offs. There is her neighbor, Jenny Steinem, standing next to the wreck of the family Range Rover, shouting at the trapped woman, as if berating her.

  In front of her, a young man on a mobile phone is saying: “That’s it, chief. Right. ‘Family Cat Thwarts Sex Fiend.’ What? No. No Nazis or anything. We got a bloke with a swastika tattoo. Not enough? Fair enough. Sorry. Yeah. What? Okay. If you like. You can call it a golf club if you like. I mean, at this stage, who’s going to argue?”

  Dolores Tremayne crosses the road and embraces her daughters. X, the family cat, leaps into her arms and peers into her eyes. She is transfixed by this gaze. She sees other eyes, frantic, like a prisoner’s, behind the cat’s blue retinae, which have locked on to her, unblinking, and she cannot help but feel that she is caught up in some kind of upload-download data-switch in which terabytes of the most unwholesome material are being transferred from her cat into the depths of her soul. She reels, staggers slightly, as this avalanche of unprocessed images which she never wished to see—many of them extremely lewd—fills her mind like a living nightmare. There are snatches of conversation, dramas she cannot understand involving flight and hiding and the cat flap and dogs and the face of a pretty young woman framed in the portcullis of the cat-box.

  She is the feline confessor—forgive me, Mother, for I have witnessed sin against you. She is X’s debrief officer. And then what happened? You have done well, Agent X. What else did you see?

  On the fringes of the crowd, Rosemary Saunders is already on the phone to the soccer mom’s support society, giving chapter and verse. “I’m not saying it’s anything to do with skin color,” she is saying. “But, well … no smoke without fire. Yes, I did say a club. Her father, I think. And the other one? Some kind of stripper, by the look of it. It’s those poor girls I feel sorry for.” Her interlocutors are spellbound. So just imagine, they will say forever more, Dolores Tremayne’s husband was caught with an erotic dancer with a golf club of all things! At least that’s what it will say in the papers.

  Her daughters study the sudden unscheduled apparition of this person they know as their mother and see that she is staring intently at X, sometimes nodding as if absorbing a fine point in a legal argument, sometimes raising her eyebrows in shock or surprise. Sometimes she breaks her communion with the cat to glance at her husband and the neighbor and the jazzy woman next to him in the car whose face seems dusted in white powder, rather like one of those old-fashioned circus clowns. When she is transfixed by the cat, her expression is intense, interrogatory, understanding, beyond shock, essentially warm, betraying a kind of intimacy without words or purrs. But when she surveys he
r husband and his companion and their neighbor—knowing now what she has learned—her eyes turn blank and cold. And when her eyes roam over her lovely daughters, she wants at once to go home with them to cuddle but not to go home to the arena of betrayal.

  “Excuse me, madam.” It is a police officer.

  “Do you know the gentleman in the Range Rover?”

  “I did once,” she says. “Or at least I thought I did.”

  “And the lady?”

  “Only generically.”

  “And the gentleman with the club?”

  “Not really. But by the way…”

  “Yes, madam?”

  “The club?”

  “Yes, madam?”

  “It’s a cultural implement.”

  “Of course, madam.”

  Inside the overturned white van, the man with the swastika—his name, as it is given on the sex offenders’ list, is Lionel Jones, but he has other aliases—knows that he has finally run out of escape routes. He has no daughter called Sharon. His wife and two sons left him long ago after the first conviction. He lives alone in a rented studio apartment across the way from a primary school. The name on the short lease is John Gillingham. His laptop, his HD movie camera, and his binoculars are pretty much his only possessions of any value. And once the police get into the laptop with its massive harvest from the dark web, the case will be open and shut. Send him down, the judge will say, without the option of parole or remission. Forgive me, Father, he thinks—a snippet of God talk linked irrevocably to the memory of the first exploratory touchings of his cassocked confessor. Lying in his van with a variety of superficial wounds oozing small amounts of blood, he is vaguely hoping that he has suffered some terminal internal injury that he cannot yet feel because of the adrenaline rush. Anything, he figures, will be better than being sent back inside where the other prisoners have their own ways of dealing with his kind. There is a terrible racket in his ears as the emergency services go to work with a huge whirring circular saw to extricate him from the wreckage—the opening bars of the music he will have to face. Someone else seems to be beating on his van with some kind of club, as if it were an infernal kettledrum. He wishes they would all go away. He wishes to be left alone. Forever. But that cannot be.