by Will Wiles
Now, I had a clear recollection of the previous evening. I had been drinking, yes, but only a modest amount when set against the excess of recent nights. I had sat on the sofa, watching CNN, sipping wine and eating remains from the fridge. The cat had lain beside me, on its side, smiling a cat smile. Events in the past now rearranged themselves into a more legible narrative. There had been two cats. One had a white tip on its tail, the other did not. And one, I thought, was the hyperactive, inquisitive one that liked to play with corks, and drink; and the other was docile, lazier. It was only now that one was dead that I could see the difference between their personalities. It was only now, really, that I could see that they even had personalities, despite not being people: they were more than just automata. The way it, the surviving cat, had left just now – sudden, urgent, determined, at the wrong time of day – it was strange, and it had the undeniable stripe of personality.
Once the sun set yesterday, I realised that I was very tired. Without leaving the flat, I had exhausted myself. Before bedtime, however, I had remembered the pornography and the derangement of the bedroom. I spent a cathartic moment with one of the magazines, and then tidied them away, stacking them neatly, still in the date order I had arranged earlier. When I had heaved the bed back into place – guided by the indentations its feet had left in the floorboards – I was so tired that I wanted to fall immediately into it, into the escape of sleep. But the cat needed to go out, I thought, so I invited it to depart. It came with me to the door, but once there would not leave, backing from the exit in that perfect cat manner of total avoidance, the way magnets repel each other. I had little appetite for a struggle, and no energy to spend cajoling the animal, which threaded itself through my legs round and again, teasing and pandering. I let it stay.
I was still tired, I realised, now that the burst of adrenalin from the slammed door had worn off. My joints and muscles felt hollowed out, like compromised paper straws. There had been no noise of any kind from the kitchen or living room. Either the cleaner had left, and I had heard her parting shot, or she was still there and deliberately staying quiet, waiting for me.
I opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. The flat was empty, I was sure of it. I walked towards the living room. Had she been here at all? There was no evidence of cleaning – my empty wine glass still sat on the coffee table in front of the sofa, next to a plate that held a litter of cheese rinds and little ribbons of pink plastic peeled from the edges of slices of salami, the debris of my supper last night.
But something was different – I had walked right past it, on the other side of the glass partition, in the kitchen. First, I registered sheets of grimy newspaper spread on and hanging over the edge of Oskar’s steel counter. It made such a slight profile, I almost missed what had been laid on top of these sheets – the corpse of the cat. Risen, if not from the grave, then at least from the rubbish chute.
In something like a trance, I walked up to the counter, and the body. It had now been dead for at least 24 hours, and I was nervous of the air around it. How far had decomposition progressed? Obviously it wouldn’t be falling to bits yet, but would it stink? I tested the air cautiously; a faint smell of garbage.
It wasn’t falling apart, but it no longer looked as if it might at any moment spring awake. It was dirty, with a brown stain on the large white patch on its side, sprinkled with coffee grounds. No longer subject to continual preening and adjustment, the cat’s fur was disordered, and the skin beneath was grey. One of its rear legs was bent up in an uncomfortable manner under its belly. Both its eyes and its mouth were a little open. The tail was a bedraggled mess. It looked smaller than I remembered, as if it had deflated. The bones of its shoulder were clear under thin skin, and the break in its spine was more obvious, a pronounced and sickeningly unnatural geometry. The blood around its nose and mouth had dried, and shattered into tiny black crystals caught in the cold hairs.
‘Jesus,’ I said. I thought of devotional paintings, with their pornographic attentiveness to the anatomy of the tortured Christ’s emaciated frame, or the buckling body of a martyr, or the contortions of the residents of hell. With a dead thing in front of me, I could understand that sadistic pedantry. A clutter of grotesque details – the angularity of the shoulder, the contours around the eyes and the sudden inadequacy of the hair to conceal the papery skin, and of the skin to disguise the broken structures inside – crowded out a clear conception of the whole.
The cleaner must have gone down to the bins at the terminus of the rubbish chute and – my imagination recoiled from serving up a mental picture of this part – searched around for the cat. Then she had wrapped it in newspaper and brought it up here to leave for me. Why? To confront me? Or because this kind of refuse didn’t belong in the chute? If she had wanted to confront me, why didn’t she hang around and make a real scene of it? Instead, she had simply dumped the body and fled. Normally it was cats that left dead things for people to find and puzzle over. How would a cat feel about being treated this way? Maybe this was exactly what it would have wanted.
There didn’t seem to be any way of interpreting this development as a benign act on the part of the cleaner. I did not believe that she felt she was doing me a favour (‘you dropped this’). Clearly, this was a rebuke – either for the murder of puss, or for the callous handling of the last rites, or for some unlikely infraction of a local waste-disposal ordinance. But – this realisation appeared by fractions – these considerations were for the time being a distraction from the fact that a dead cat, dragged out of a dumpster, was laid out on Oskar’s kitchen counter. And I had my doubts about the provenance and cleanliness of the newspaper it reclined on, let alone its effectiveness as a barrier. What if there was...oozing? Oskar’s steel surface had an autopsy feel to it, but whatever its aseptic air, you would not be happy preparing food on a morgue slab.
It (the cadaver was now clearly an it) had to go. Quickly. Processes, natural processes involving microbes and gases and fluids, were advancing inexorably. I had no doubt that these processes were fascinating, perhaps even beautiful, when filmed by a BBC crew and then broadcast to me in my living room, but they could not be permitted to perform their magic in Oskar’s kitchen. For a brief moment, I pondered dumping the thing right back down the rubbish chute, a notion I quickly put from my mind. I could not tolerate the possibility, however slender, of the cat making another comeback tour. This second coming was irksome enough, a third coming could not be permitted. A more permanent solution, something outside the influence of the cleaner, would have to be arranged.
For the moment, the priority was getting the animal off the counter. I took a bin-bag from the cupboard and laid it out on the floor. Then, I picked up the sheet of newspaper by the sides, lifting the cat as if it was on a stretcher, and set it down on the bin-bag. It did not look much more at home there, diminished, wretched thing that it was, but I no longer feared seepage.
What to do? Some dark alley perhaps, a place already strewn with trash, where an extra bag would not look out of place. But this alley was abstract – I knew of only one actual place like that, the passage by the museum with the pockmarked walls. I did not fancy carrying the dead cat all the way into the centre. In fact, I had no desire to carry it anywhere at all, let alone to wander around with it, looking for a suitable spot to dump and run. And yet I realised that I knew pitiably little of this city; I had not yet fully seen its public face, let alone explored its hiding places. My excursions now all felt like hurried affairs, without the leisure to observe and discover.
Except my walk to the canal. The thought of the canal was like lifting a latch, and a door swung open. The canal. How many dead cats had it consumed in its time? And dogs, and rats, and no doubt people. A splash, a lingering roll on the surface, and then down into the forgetful black water, with only ripples for a wave goodbye. Yes, the canal now seemed a pleasing prospect. I looked forward to seeing it again.
I took another bin-bag and used it to pick up t
he cat’s body without touching the still fur and dead flesh. Its heavy coldness could be felt through the thin plastic. With what I thought to be an artful movement, I then turned the bag inside out around the chilly little corpse. Congratulating myself on this hygienic manoeuvre, I let my concentration slip, and without thinking squeezed the closed bag to push out any trapped air, receiving a blast of the dumpster smell directly in the face, a smell now augmented by the unmistakable taint of...or was I imagining? Still, I retched, my face pinched in spasm and a whirlpool turned in my gut. When I opened my eyes again they filled with tears, and I quickly shut them.
The bag now clung close to the curve of the cat’s spine – a curve kinked where the vertebrae had been shattered by the piano lid, a lid that should not have been left open. My fault, there. But Oskar had called – a little later, a little earlier, and the piano would have been left closed. I knotted the bin-bag three tight times. Then I took some spray cleaner from under the sink, squirted a generous amount onto the counter, and wiped it meticulously clean. I fancied that I could still taste the smell from the bag, that awful hint of something wrapped in it, and I welcomed the citrus-chemical assault of the cleaning liquid against the soft membranes of the sinuses. Acidic, astringent, potent. When I got back from the canal, I was going to unleash chemical hell on that floor. It was going to get everything in Oskar’s arsenal. The thought of erasure was comforting. The cat slipping into the water; the stain effervescing and lifting from the wood, undone by some magical property of chemistry.
I looked down at the bag. Could a bystander tell what it contained? That curl of the spine and the body – did it clearly say ‘cat’? Or, precisely, ‘dead cat’? It looked, to me, like a cat, but I already knew what was in there. There was no obvious head...and I saw that I had put the bag down by the stain, partly on it, so that the blue-red residue of the wine appeared to have sprayed outwards from the cat’s head and neck. The scene resembled the halo of gore that accompanied a gangland killing in the films, complete with a victim in its black plastic institutional shroud, patiently waiting for its unhurried lift to the morgue while the experts appraised the splatter and talked of trajectories and trace evidence. Traces: they would rebuild the past, pull back the fleeing moments, reassemble the event by studying what it had left behind. The thought of wiping the slate was a fantasy, something was always left behind, some eloquent detail or blemish that would talk and talk until it revealed the truth. Or an ugly, blame-filled version of the truth. When people follow back these trajectories, they expect culprits to be standing at the other end of them. Even if there was no culprit.
This was crazy, I thought, spinning these ideas over and over. Perhaps I was crazy, grip loosened by solitude and the small, furry spectre of death. But that in itself was not a wholly sane thought – whoever went mad after less than a week alone? And not even entirely alone. The dead cat was here, and sharing my space with it was bringing on these thoughts. Its presence went far beyond that little wrapped form, filling the air with a sort of karmic radioactivity, permeating the flat to its corners and secret places. No wonder its friend had fled so dramatically when it got wind of what the cleaner had brought in.
I took a deep breath, but bungled it somehow, and it came out in a whimper, so I took another. Then I picked up the bag by its knotted black neck, feeling again its particular weight; not heaviness, but a certain gravity. With another deep breath, I walked briskly towards, and through, the front door of the flat, slamming it behind me and trotting down the stairs. I was not going to repeat the mistake I made last time, waiting too long and missing my opportunity. If I moved fast enough, I was sure I could make it out of the building before the cleaner was able to intercept me, and see the bag, which I now, only now, realised I could have concealed in my holdall – but I was out already, on the faded pavement, and the main door went whump behind me. I stopped, and the bag swung to knock sickeningly against my leg. There hadn’t been the slightest sign or sound of the cleaner. She had missed me, or I had missed her. It was a bright day, and the sun gleamed on the dark varnished door and its bright brass fittings, even making the dull grey metal of the entryphone shine, its column of buttons like the front of a bell-boy’s waistcoat.
The street was quiet, with few passing cars and no nearby pedestrians, but I felt a quick jab of paranoia. What was I doing just standing here? Once again, I had drifted into reverie when I should have been taking action. The sooner this sordid business was over with, the better. I set off towards the canal, the bag now and then bouncing against the side of my knee.
The canal had blackened in my memory, intensifying in the mind’s eye into a flow of tar through a coal channel. Seeing it again, the water looked paler, but no fresher – a milky grey, unhealthily still, fringed with twists of hydrocarbon rainbow. Despite the pleasant weather, there was no one on the towpath – none of the joggers, cyclists or optimistic anglers who might enliven a British canal. I began to walk along the towpath, attempting to look like a man out for a relaxing stroll. Sweat prickled up my arms and down my back, and slimed my grasp on the black plastic. The only living things in sight were the thuggish weeds, some as developed as bushes, which pushed their way through the crumbling mortar of the retaining walls and the wounded slabs underfoot, and the incomprehensible algal scum that crusted the edge of the water. I scanned the ground ahead of me, wary of my footing, but also on the lookout for heavy objects that could weigh down the bag. When I imagined myself throwing the bag into the water, I saw its splash and its lazy turn as it settled into its new conditions, finding its weight and then diminishing, swallowed by ripples...but sometimes I saw it turn and persist, pockets of air consolidating and inflating the plastic, giving it buoyancy...and a new black islet being born, bobbing in the grey water, an outcropping of guilt drifting out of my control, a marker...of course, the chances of anyone finding it, investigating it, would be minimal, infinitesimal, but I was not trusting my luck. It had to sink, it had to vanish. I wanted a weight.
I walked on. It was becoming clear that my memory had made all sorts of embellishments to the canal. The path, in my recollection, had been strewn with stones, bricks and rubble of all descriptions. In fact, it had a generous frosting of litter in the bushes and weeds at its edges, but little that was heavy enough to sink the bag. Splintered fragments of wooden pallets, small chunks of polystyrene packing rounded and browned with time, yoghurt pots, soft drink cans, used condoms. The arm of a shop mannequin, its hand lacking fingers. A coverless paperback book, laced with wormholes.
After a lengthy walk, I came across a short metal pipe, coated with rust, which seemed to suit my purposes. It was certainly heavy enough, and it was easy to tie the neck of the bag around it. With that done, I realised with a touch of surprise that the preparations were complete and that this spot was as good as any for the final act. I glanced left, right and up, checking for onlookers. The path was deserted in both directions and the few windows that watched over this site were empty, obviously industrial, large grids of glass with random panes smashed out like moves in a game of dereliction. I threw the pole, underarm, aiming for the middle of the canal. It and the bag struck the water with a clumsy splash, larger than I expected, and the bag twisted under. The loathsome black plastic bubble rose, as I had seen it in my mind, but was quickly pulled beneath the surface by the sinking pole. I watched the concentric rings spread out on the water, and thought of some hateful black frog with a bulging, subsiding, bulging goitre under its glum mouth. That bubble was a little scrap of atmosphere trapped in the canal. How long would it take for the plastic to degrade, for the air to leak out, and for the little submersible to complete its descent?
It occurred to me that I could have punctured the bag, allowing the air to exit and ensuring that it sank. But that would have meant risking odour, and I could not stomach that. Still, I now thought, it would be a long time before the water came in contact with the cat’s body – would it decay properly? Would it, perhaps, mummify instea
d, like an Egyptian temple animal in a little household-hygiene sarcophagus? I was fairly certain that the water would get to it before that long...but there was always the possibility that the canal was so polluted that it had the properties of embalming fluid, another way that the cat could be cheated of its opportunity to relax into microbial sludge.
These thoughts of the cat’s onward journey were filling me with little worms of guilt. Best just to forget it now – it was gone, no longer a cat, no longer anything, an abstract, a memory. The palm of my right hand, slicked with sweat from holding the bag, was clammy despite the warmth of the day. The ripples had dispersed, radiated out to nothing, a lost broadcast, and the canal had resumed its stagnant stillness. It was impossible to identify the exact location where the bag had hit the water. All was quiet. Even the background buzz of the city was subdued.
I made a secret promise to myself: I would not return to the canal. This was my final moment with it. I would turn my back on it. Up ahead, I could see a flight of steps in a recess in the retaining wall, leading back up to street level. Although I would follow the canal back – through necessity, I had no other means of navigation – I would not return along the towpath.
There was no street at street level. The steps led up to a large expanse of open ground. Weeds sprouted extravagantly here and there. For a terrible moment I thought that the city had disappeared – that it had been scoured from the Earth by some catastrophe while I had been beside the canal. How long had I been down there? How far had I walked – was it possible that I had actually left the city, walked beyond its limits? But as I reached the top of the stairs, I saw buildings. Ahead, away from the canal, was a long, slab-like, brick industrial building, dark and broken, its roof sagging. Beyond it, further down the canal, was a collection of freight railcars. Apart from the crumbling mill structure there were further low buildings, indistinct in the summer haze. In the other direction, back the way I had come, was another large, stained brick complex, its windows shattered, greenery frothing out of its gutters. Stillness and dust filled the air.