by Will Wiles
A troubling thought occurred. Would he miss the magazines that I had been compelled to throw away? How closely did he keep tabs on his little library? It would be typical for him to keep an exact mental record of the titles in his possession, but then it would also be typical for him to keep the magazines in chronological order in a series of slipcases, and instead they were heaped without an obvious system or care. Would he know that I had ‘taken’ four? If he did, his range of response was limited – he would not be able to acknowledge the loss without admitting to ownership in the first place. And besides, the disappearance of these magazines was nothing against the destruction of the floor.
In a way, then, I could do whatever I pleased with the porn. If it was over between us, if we were now simply counting the hours until Oskar despised me for what I had done – or rather, for what had happened on my watch – it would be satisfying to walk away knowing I had left signs that showed I had discovered his collection. I would be leaving evidence that I had found a flaw in him. I scooped an armful of magazines closer to me and began to arrange them into piles by cover date.
Something immediately stood out amid the smut – a sheet of paper. It had been tucked into the heap on Oskar’s side of the bed. And, in his handwriting:
You should respect my privacy. But I expected you to poke about a bit. See: we are all human. Clean up after yourself.
Oskar
My grip on the note must have loosened, because it fell from my fingers and slid across the floor, disturbing a couple of lazy dustballs.
I wanted to swallow, but my mouth was again an acid waste. Dehydration, a consequence of the hangover and also the cause of the muffled banging in my head. What I needed was a glass of water. I stood up, and my legs almost failed me, causing me to lurch. My knees were drying glue.
With more effort than should have been necessary, I made it through to the kitchen. The cat on the chair, hearing me come in, jumped up and started meowing loudly, and head-butting my suddenly enfeebled legs. I realised that it was now the later part of the afternoon, and the cats had not yet been fed. Sod them, I thought, they can wait, a bit of a delay before their breakfast wouldn’t kill them.
I twisted the tap over the kitchen sink forcefully and a quick blast of water hit my glass and fountained up, splashing onto my shirt and down onto the floor. After shutting off the flow, I stood there a moment, legs quivering at the knees, breathing heavily.
This wasn’t just dehydration. I was angry, more than angry, furious, shaking with rage.
How dare he? How dare he assume that I would look? That tone – the affected air of weary tolerance, an adult addressing a child. As for the offensiveness of ‘Clean up after yourself’ – the only reason I had been down there in the first place was to clean up after his pets. They were the ones with the incontinent personal habits, he was the one with the porn, and yet I was the one who was expected to feel guilty.
The cat was still nutting my legs. I looked down at it, and it looked plaintively up at me. For a moment, I hated it, I despised its dependence on me. But for all the insolent entitlement in its attitude, it was still quite cute. I bent down to stroke it, and it stood up on its hind legs to meet my hand.
‘Were you the one that spewed under the bed?’ I asked the cat. It ignored my question. ‘I’ll get your food when I’ve tidied up in the bedroom,’ I said.
Clean up after yourself. I would certainly do that. The truly detestable thing about Oskar’s note was that he had no idea if I was snooping or not. He had been content to accuse me in writing of invading his privacy, comfortable in the knowledge that I wouldn’t discover the contempt he had for me if I didn’t discover his porn, and apparently not even considering that I might find the stash without meaning to intrude. Well, I had tripped into his little trap without meaning to pry, something he apparently didn’t think possible. The stained magazines were gone now, so I had no way of proving my version of how I came to find his collection; so, I thought, I might as well eradicate any doubt he might have about whether I had discovered it or not. I wanted to make sure that he knew that I knew.
I returned to the bedroom, and started methodically organising the magazines by title and date, ending up with half a dozen neat stacks. My plan, at first, had been to simply leave these in a disciplined row under the bed, but I was concerned that Oskar might not appreciate the effort that I had put in on his behalf. What was needed was some sort of series of files and folders, and I was pretty sure that I would find some in the study.
The door to the room where Oskar composed his music was ajar, and pushing it open disturbed the still air beyond. I was struck, again, by the peace of the study, its focused calm, its illusion of isolation from the rest of the flat. It had not been ploughed up by the jangling energy of my busy activities in the other rooms, and the street noise seemed muted. Even the light here was different – it seemed to slant most attractively, italicised for emphasis, soft and pale as vellum, enlivened by the pirouetting points that rose from the seams of dust cultivated by stockpiles of paper. It was restful, but wholly awake.
Nevertheless, stepping into the study unnerved me; a loose end uncoiled deep in my base memory. I had forgotten...it eluded me. My pulse raised its tempo. Had I been in here last night? I sniffed the air, and there was something at its edge. My eyes went to a sharp focus and started to roam the detail of the room. And I stopped. I had been in here. I must have been very drunk because it seemed I had taken off my socks and left them hanging over the edge of the piano. I moved to retrieve them.
It was not my socks. It was feet. Feet and legs and tail. The top of the piano was a couple of inches open; holding it open was the body of one of the cats, leaving its furry hindquarters dangling on the outside. The rest of the cat was hidden from view, but the limp legs, the straight, heavy tail, and the uncanny angle of its spine where it met the piano lid clearly showed that it was dead.
I stepped slowly over, and stroked the back of my fingers down the side of one of the hanging legs. The fur was still soft, but cold, even in the bowing sunlight. And I was cold, I shivered, feeling the shadow of a great bulkhead of duty falling across me.
Nothing happened for a short time; I know, because I stood there, watching it not happen. The legs did not suddenly kick, the tail did not curl, warmth did not flood back into those sad flanks. The cat was still dead. Any chance for that outcome to be averted had slipped away, a chain of bubbles exploding in the wake of a departing ocean liner, the white end of the tail pointed straight down, the stopped weight of a stopped clock.
The piano lid had dropped onto the cat, breaking its spine. So the piano had been open – I had left it open. The cat must have jumped up and dislodged the strut that held up the lid; maybe it had stood on the edge, rubbing against the strut. The caricature drunk supporting himself on a lamp post. Slam. Had it been quick? There was no blood on the outside, no scratch-marks. The body would have to be moved, I thought. I made a mental edit: I would have to move the body. It could hardly be left like this. But where?
There was also the question of Oskar. He would hardly be happy that I...that his cat was dead. He had, with pedantic predictability, been right: I should not have been fiddling with the piano. But, I recalled, the lid was left up because I had been interrupted by a phone call from Oskar. If he had not insisted on sending me to a concert, this might not have happened. If the cat had been drunk when it had its accident, then really the cleaner had to shoulder some of the blame for its death – she did not check the cork in the bottle before placing it on its side in the rack. And that was before we came to the cats themselves, that pair of whiskered saboteurs. If you are going to share your world with stupid animals, you have to make allowances for the fact that they are going to do stupid things.
But now the stupid thing was dead. Putting aside what Oskar might want to do to me, what would he want done with the body? Burial? Where? That was senseless, there was no garden and no way that I was venturing into a park with a
dead cat and shovel. But did it have to be me? Maybe Oskar would rather conduct the solemnities himself. In which case, it would have to be the freezer for puss. There would be no lying in state on the kitchen counter. And imagine the homecoming, once I had left notes of my own – ‘an accident...unsure what to do...flight to catch...’ – with, perhaps, a note on the bag containing the carcass, as if identifying a leftover casserole. Those labels never stayed stuck. And I didn’t much like the thought of the body lying in there while I was staying in the house. Was it hygienic to keep a dead cat in a freezer? It could be wrapped up, of course, in a bin-liner, but was it even hygienic to keep a bin-liner in the freezer?
Of course it was. I shook myself to derail that decreasingly sane train of thought, and paced over to the window, looking away from the little feet and their little furry toes. Of course it was hygienic to put a bin-liner in the freezer, they did not come pre-slimed with garbage. It was perfectly sanitary itself, even if it was meant for an unsanitary purpose. That was the advantage, I thought, of living in a building like this: not having to deal with the bins.
I could drop the cat down the rubbish chute. That way, it would simply disappear. Oskar would not have to know how it died – maybe I did not have to know how it died. It just didn’t come back one morning. Very sad. Maybe it had been hit by a car...I didn’t even have to put it in a bin-bag. It was better not to – if the body was discovered in the dumpster, it wouldn’t look like foul play, it would look as if it had fallen from somewhere, or someone had found the body and slung it in there. How much forensic effort would be devoted to it, really? Besides, my conscience was clear. It wasn’t as if I had killed the thing.
So, it was the chute for whiskers. Unless, of course, he had left something inside the piano. Crime-scene horrors of blood and vomit flashed in my mind – if anything like that had happened, then the jig was up.
I slipped my thumb under the lid of the piano, using the gap left by the wedged body of the cat. Then I lifted the lid.
The cat moved. I saw it raise its front paws and quickly begin to slide back out of the piano. Its head reared up. A spasm of panic flowed through me and I slammed the lid back down, hard, onto the cat’s neck and front legs and the beefy base of my thumb. A flat, hellish chord sounded from the piano’s jarred strings and hammers and pain shot up my arm like an electrical discharge. Blood sounded in my ears as the echo of the slam resounded in the small room, and my knees buckled. I think I must have cried out, and a spray of acid rose in my throat.
The weight of the lid had been holding the cat in place, stopping it from falling onto the floor. Now, again, it was being held in place by the lid, this time because I was pressing down on it, and my agonised thumb underneath. Lifting the lid, or even relieving the pressure on it, would cause the cat to drop on the floor, an act that seemed unthinkably profane. But I had to release my thumb. The only course of action was to hold on to the cat, something I had no desire to do. But the radiating waves of pain from my crushed digit left me no option.
I took hold of the cat around one of its rear legs with my free hand. The fur felt fake, the limb underneath cold and thin. For no reason, I feared that the body might just fall apart in my hands, unspooling into a heap of guts and strips of muscle. I freed my finger, and the body slipped out of the piano, a tug of weight on my arm.
Finding an unexplored avenue of pluck, I lifted the cat above my head to inspect its face. A bead of black blood had dried under its nose, and the short white fur near its mouth had traces of purple. Its first drink, and it gets itself killed.
I opened the front door a crack, keeping the ex-puss out of sight, and listened. The air in the stairwell was cool and still. If my neighbours were in, they were staying quiet. I could hear no TVs or music, no banging or crockery or crying children. It occurred to me that I had not seen or heard anyone in the building since I arrived here. The block might as well be abandoned. Apart from the cleaner.
She was nowhere. No sound, no movement. I could see the rubbish chute, a worn metal hatch losing its paint at the edges, like a prison door or a washing machine from a Laundromat. I remembered the washing machines at university, in the basement, drab, faintly military, things, their chemical reek, their thunder in the bowels of the building, the steamy heat they pumped out, turning that small, poorly ventilated space into a sauna. Water would drip from the ceiling, which had a shiny yellow-white coat of paint at the start of each year and an ascendant rash of black mould at the end. There were no dryers – instead, clothes were dried on stands in one’s room, infecting it with damp. For me, more often, the clothes stayed wetly tangled in their plastic laundry bag, where they sometimes cultivated mould of their own. I remember Oskar looking at the pink and white cube of that bag and his lip wrinkling, testing the air for mildew.
Why think of this now? Proustian procrastination. I was stalling. There was no one in the hall, now was the right time to move, to rid myself of the cat’s body, the fur and flesh of its leg now warmed by my hand, the bone like something from the butcher.
Now was the right time to move. If I waited any longer, it would be the wrong time. Or would it? Now.
No.
I could see the rubbish chute on the landing between floors. I knew exactly what it would take to get there, get it done, how little it would take. I could break it into a small number of actions, each nothing in itself: a push through the door, a score of brisk steps, an arm to lower the hatch, an arm to hoist the cat, release one, release the other. Or I could stand here all day, a dead thing in my hand.
Now now now.
A lead weight swinging in the pit of my chest kept time as I strode out of Oskar’s front door and onto the stairs, and the body of the cat swung too, brushing against my side. I did not want to look at the sorry thing, not in these last seconds we were together, especially not at its sad little face as I dumped it with the other rubbish. The metal hatch of the chute opened easier than I expected, with an affirmative squeal. As I lifted the cat up, ready to drop it in, I found I could not resist a final look. It seemed only courteous to pay something a little like my last respects. I part closed the hatch to relieve the pressure on my other arm, which was battling the powerful spring that strained to close the chute, and examined the skinny corpse. Its fur was disarranged in places, revealing swatches of pale grey-pink flesh, and its eyes had nearly closed. It was no longer cute.
The hatch was only open by a couple of inches; I didn’t want it to slam shut with the usual big bang. Carefully, I slotted the cat’s dangling front paws into the aperture, lowered in the lolling head, and let go with both hands.
Some feline hairs had adhered to my palm, and I was clapping my hands to dislodge them while turning to walk back up to Oskar’s flat when I saw the cleaner at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. Her eyes and mouth were circles of shock.
Neither of us moved. How much had she seen? Her expression made it clear that she believed she had seen something bad. But was there time to see anything with any certainty? Could I simply deny everything? Scant seconds had elapsed – it had all been over very quickly, she had definitely not been there when I emerged from the flat, and her vantage point wasn’t good enough to see much more than my back. There was no way that she could have caught more than a glimpse, a blur, and surely it would be simple to claim (to whom?) that all she had seen was a plastic bag, not...what she was alleging...to whom? To the police? It’s...it was only a cat, and it died in an accident...she had seen nothing, this was an outrage, she was in no position to accuse, to judge...
She was still looking at me, and her mouth opened and closed like a goldfish. Then, she took a step towards me, onto the stairs, and I instinctively flinched back. She raised her hand; she was pointing at me, eyes wide and mad, as she ascended the stairs. Her mouth opened and closed again, formed a word, and she was still pointing at me, or past me, transfixed in some sort of visceral, muscular motion of accusation and condemnation. I thought of Donald Sutherland in the
final scene of the 1970s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, arm raised like a rifle, face contorted with hatred, alien and loathsome. I thought of the ghost advancing on Don Juan at the end of the opera. She was approaching.
‘What’s the matter?’ I stammered, attempting nonchalance. I was frozen to the core; no part of my body could make a movement that did not seem like an admission of some kind of guilt. And yet standing here in this spell seemed to be the guiltiest act of all. I did not know what an innocent action would look like, or what an innocent word might sound like. ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.
The cleaner was nearing the top of the stairs now, almost on the landing with me, still pointing, still staring, still mouthing something. She was, I realised, surprisingly intimidating, wrapped in a protective binding of gristle and rind and ancient artificial fibres, an armoured hulk in a headscarf, especially with that stumpy, meaty arm stretched out towards me. Except that it wasn’t really pointed at me at all. As she drew closer, it became obvious that she was pointing past me, to something behind me, towards the chute.