Miles above the city, the sky is cluttered with hurtling, jet-propelled tubes of aluminum and highly flammable fluids, packed with hominids of all inclinations and identities, each seized with mounting, unspoken tension in anticipation of the bumpy descent: the screech of landing and the lurch of reverse thrust; the moment when the seat belt signs are extinguished and the unseemly scramble begins to retrieve the contents of the overhead baggage locker; the push and shove to escape the claustrophobia of the grounded craft, now so ungainly in earthbound mode compared to its avian elegance aloft; the race along moving belts and neon-lit corridors to cross the finishing line of passport control, baggage recovery, customs, scrummages for cabs, ill-tempered lines for onward transportation by train; the frantic scanning of name boards held by sad men in sad suits who drive tired Fords and Toyotas and sometimes Mercedes-Benzes back and forth between airports and offices as if bound to the tick-tock wand of a metronome. All part of a single competition to be first for reasons that none of the contestants could easily define except by saying that it is part of the human condition to hustle and bustle and get ahead and leave others behind in the daily marathon that, ultimately, ends in the same dark place for all us, with no winners or losers in the processes of decay.
Dust to dust.
X knows nothing of all this. The sky is too distant, beyond the transparent walls of her cell, where winged objects hurtle in and out of her field of vision, like gloves tossed in challenges to a duel from which, as a flat-cat, she is eternally barred and shielded. On this day, snuffling along the work surface, she knows even less. Her immediate quest for knowledge is limited to an urgent desire to identify the white powder that, initially, causes a feline sneeze and then—heavens above, Dolores is thinking—finds its way through the membrane of her nasal passages and into her bloodstream and her dainty cat’s brain, boosting the supply of chemicals that bring a sense of pleasure and well-being, confidence and a yearning to finally shake off the shackles of her condition as a creature of the indoors.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, a voice inside her is saying. But she cannot hear it, and would ignore it if she could.
On board the airborne aluminum tubes—on base leg, downwind and final approach, flaps extending, engines slowing, altimeter spinning counterclockwise, radios crackling with encoded gibberish in alpha-zulu-runway-five-ah-zero-roger-over-and-out-speak, transponders pinging, computers locked onto beacons—there are gradations of pain and comfort corresponding to the classes that separate passengers by wealth or connection or frequent flier points. Only two of those passengers concern us today.
They are both female. They are landing at different airports, flying in from two different destinations. There are some similarities. Both are wearing houndstooth suits in black and white check, initially made famous by a well-known Parisian couturier. Both have expensive, well-used hand luggage in the overhead locker.
Both have the look of people used to a degree of deference and respect. Unbeknown to one another, both are contemplating imminent reunion with Gerald Tremayne.
But there the similarities end.
One of the women is of darker skin than the other and seems out of place aboard the budget airline plane carrying her from Munich to Gatwick Airport south of London. She bought her seat late and was unable to secure a place near the front exit. She has just spent almost two hours jammed between fellow passengers as miserable as she was at the restricted leg room, the indifferent-to-nonexistent service, the sound of whining babies and cantankerous Arsenal fans returning from an unsuccessful joust with Bayern Munich. Ahead of her is the trudge through dank corridors, obstructed by lines at immigration and at the vending machines selling tickets on the Gatwick Express. This must be endured stoically. The only upside to the discomfort is that it has distracted her marginally from asking herself, over and over, two questions: what did the bizarre email from her daughter’s account mean? And, who will be the scapegoat for the emissions imbroglio that, she has an awful feeling, will balloon into something catastrophic once it is discovered that her company played a central part in the development of fraudulent software. It is quite probable that her bosses even now, like people cheating at that game where you pin a tail on a cardboard donkey—but without wearing the blindfold that is the whole point of it—are conspiring to dump the blame on her and others in her team who were sent out to peddle the duplicitous codes. Outsourcer’s remorse. Easily overcome by deceit.
The other woman has had an easier journey, surrounded by purring cabin staff responsive to her very few needs on the first-class run from New York, stretched out high above the Atlantic, remote from worldly concerns. As landing approaches she knows there will be no hustle and bustle and sharp elbows. She will be eased gently from the airplane, albeit into the cruder realities of Heathrow. She has access to a privileged line at passport control. She will not need to buy a train ticket because a handsome novelist will be awaiting her with a smile and the anticipation of intimate moments.
She has not yet decided on the precise moment to break the news to him that it is all over. The jig is up. The love-nest lease agreement rescinded in a way that will make him liable for outstanding payments. She has diverted herself by considering her options. Will she tell him before they arrive at their eyrie or later, when he has been permitted, unwittingly, his valedictory trot around the paddock of their shared passions? In her carry-on bag, she has packed excruciatingly tight jeans, monstrous platform shoes, a ragged T-shirt that advertises her sculpted bosom and a black leather jacket. En route to the immigration formalities she plans to change out of her business suit and into these other clothes. Jekyll and Hyde bis. In truth, she has an unaccustomed soft spot for this plumber-cum-writer who, like her, wrestles with origins that dictate so many of his responses. But she lives in a world of hard choices and ruthless decisions that will determine her future comfort and prosperity. Wherever she came from, she understood where she wanted to be next, and how to get there.
Late the previous night she departed JFK as the newest trophy of an eminent, if gullible and infatuated Wall Street figure whose role, she had decided, is to replace her onetime diplomat husband as her guardian, sponsor, spouse, and source of infinite credit. In her heart she knows she has not resolved the central question of where true north lies on the compass of her dreams. She requires no financial support, since her coffers have filled amply over the years through her activities on behalf of the family businesses and through the judicious deployment of lawyers versed in the twin arts of the prenup and the postnup. Yet, she cannot escape the visceral pull of perilous adventure, defying gravity itself on the high-wire of risk. In her new life-to-be she will again be the glittery hostess at homes on Park Avenue and in the Hamptons, just as she once ruled the salons of diplomacy. But potent currents still propel her into tangled, inexplicable liaisons. She will never know for sure when the call to the dark side will summon her, as it did to the unexpected intrusion of Gerald Tremayne in London. And so, for now, she has resolved that it is time to fortify her defenses. After her last-fling stopover with Gerald Tremayne she will fly on to Paris to meet with her new American beau, who is already there on a business trip, awaiting her in a suite at the George V just off the Champs-Élysées.
On final approach, she reaches her decision.
In the arrivals area of Terminal 5, Mathilde de Villeneuve will, for the last time, strut her stuff in her night-owl colors. Thereafter, she will never see Gerald again. That, at least, is her plan and, as we all know, even the best-laid stratagems may go awry.
She commandeers a cubicle in the restrooms on the way to immigration and opens her carry-on to change.
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 magnetic, 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.
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.”
“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 her 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.
The Range Rover is hosting a different drama, three acts in one. Mathilde de Villeneuve has recovered her composure. She has located her cell phone and has called in the cavalry—a firm of lawyers specializing in the art of the super-injunction. Already the advocates have set many clocks ticking and dispatched a representative—posthaste—to the scene of the alleged incident in which their client has been an unwitting and wholly innocent bystander. M’lud. Senior partners are launching the telephonic equivalent of a Grad missile onslaught to various mainstream media editors and website operators to ensure that no mention is made of her. Surprisingly, at one tabloid where the upholders of the law and beneficiaries of the legal system usually expect resistance and counterattacks, their interlocutor seeks guarantees from them that the super-injunction does not cover reporting of golf, Nazis or cats. Once satisfied on that score, the news editor—a bastion of journalistic probity—agrees to the terms of the order about to be issued by a compliant judge. Not only will there be no mention of Mathilde de Villeneuve, there will be no mention of the order preventing publication of her name, image or any form of identification. Webbie types go to work with their pixelation tools. Photoshop will do for the rest. Publicly, Mathilde has ceased to exist.
But not Gerald Tremayne. As a precaution, he has quickly swallowed the rest of his stash, figuring erroneously that, with any luck, a mild cardiac episode will win him a sympathy vote and head off close scrutiny by the increasing numbers of perplexed law enforcement officers milling around. To his amazement, Mathilde de Villeneuve has wriggled free of the air bag and transferred herself to the rear seat of the vehicle, opened her carry-on bag and with remarkable speed changed her clothing into a houndstooth business suit. Through the still intact rearview mirror, he watches, transfixed by her quick thinking and decisive actions, as she rearranges her hair, removes the more excessive flourishes of her artiste’s makeup and puts on a pair of dark glasses. Shielded from public view by the tinted rear windows, and carrying only a handbag stuffed with essential accoutrements—passports, credit cards, bearer bonds, jewelry, and cash in large denominations of several currencies—she scrambles over the backseat into the voluminous luggage compartment, where she activates the emergency locking device to slide out of the Range Rover and disappear among crowds of people too distracted by the overall drama to absorb the full significance of such minutiae.
To look at her, Gerald thinks, you’d think she was born and raised to the ways of evading detection and arrest. And probably, she was. She has gone. Jumped ship. Scarpered. Flown the coop. Just as he would, if he could.
He is alone in the car, but not in the world.
Outside the driver’s side window, Stephen Nkandla’s face is set in a rictus of rage. Gerald cannot hear what his father-in-law is saying but he understands well enough the general drift. I knew, from the beginning, that you were a scoundrel, a mountebank, a charlatan, a rogue, a villain. White trash! I knew you were not worthy of my daughter. And now you have brought eternal shame upon us.
Through the crowds, Gerald notices a lithe, muscled man wearing a chauffeur’s uniform and carrying an African-looking club. He has been beating on the side of the white van as if he wished to destroy its relative symmetry forever. But now he is elbowing his way forward, nodding in a familiar sort of way to the senior police officers on the scene. There is some discussion between them. A decision is being weighed, though Gerald cannot know this, between the illegality of abetting the departure of a witness from the scene of a crime and a diplomatic incident that will bring all kind of besuited intercessions at Scotland Yard from the mandarins of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street. Wisdom prevails. The chauffeur approaches the father-in-law. Better leave now while we can, sir, he is saying. Don’t want to cause all kinds of démarches and whatnot, do we, sir? He conceals the short, stubby knobkerrie under his jacket. He leads the crestfallen warrior away. There will be another day. Another Isandlwana. You haven’t heard the last of this, Stephen Nkandla calls back over his shoulder. Already his chauffeur-savior is on his phone, phoning the embassy’s legal attaché to ensure that a word is had with people who know how to put the genie back in the bottle. It will be a good day for the lawyers.
Though not, as noted earlier, for Gerald Tremayne.
He does not know how his wife knows all that she knows. But he knows she knows everything. It is something to do with the cat, evidently, the cat that led the bipeds in a merry dance all the way to Kentish Town tube station. The cat that spied on him, tailed him, infiltrated his secret domain. Nibbled his prophylactic. Enraged his all-too-irascible mistress, who has now turned on her heels and is walking back toward the apartment house, stiff with humiliation and vengeful fury.
The cat that spilled the beans to his wife.
How had she known to return precisely at this moment of cathartic craziness? Should she not be high above the Atlantic, en route to Detroit?
Through the windscreen he looks balefully at Dolores and his two daughters and their cat, all interwoven with arms and paws. His novelist’s inventive imagination offers him best-case scenarios. He will explain all. His side of the story. Cats can be mistaken, you know, honey. They don’t see things like you and me. Nothing really happened. I did not have sex with that woman. Well, okay, just a bit. Almost a virgin. And the entertainer? An old friend from before. Just giving her a lift.
From Heathrow? On a school day?
But I saved the day. Knight in shining armor. Broadsided the bounder. Rescued our daughter from a fate worse than death.
You mean Rosemary Saunders? Your partner in this venture? Another of your trophies? And how, for God’s sake, had it gotten this far with some pedophile pervert about to make off with her in broad daylight?
Contrition. Full disclosure. The only route. Counseling. Addictive personality, Your Honor. He looked again at Dolores and knew from her granite glare that it would not wash. Over Dolores’s shoulder, beyond the crowds and the policemen and the fire trucks and the news crews, his Wordsworthian inner eye that will be the bliss of future solitude conjured the bleak reaches of the M1 highway unfurling northward through endless snarl-ups and speed traps and trucks, past Milton Keynes and Watford Gap and Northampton and Leeds—all the way back to where he had started in the northeast, a small-town dealer who had stumbled into the limelight, dazzled and doomed.
Maybe his face in the news would help sales. Genius in freefall. Icarus.
Maybe there was a book in it.
And then again.
Maybe not.
As if waking from a dream, Stephen Nkandla breaks away from his chauffeur’s solicitous, guiding hand and hurries to his daughter’s side. He embraces two generations of his descendants. Plus a cat. He gestures to his driver to prepare the Mercedes for the getaway, shepherding his tribe away. A tyro paparazzo raises a camera but there is a lightning flash of a knobkerrie and it falls to the ground in several pieces. A man in a chauffeur’s traditional dress—dark suit, white shirt, black tie—retrieves the data card from the debris. Then the family members are piling into the plush cocoon of the car—Dolores and her girls in the rear seat, her father riding shotgun up front. X is experiencing strange things. A burden has been lifted; a demon has been excised from deep within, though she has lost the ability to articulate such notions.
The last Gerald sees of his family is the cameo of his daughters’ puzzled and tearful faces, framed in the rear window of the big black car as it pulls into the thinning crowd and nudges forward. And the last vision they have of him on that awful day of rescue and recrimination is of a police officer prizing open the door of his crumpled chariot and leading him away.