The world through the grille. Life chopped and quartered into squares. Sliced and diced. I am reminded of an ancient portcullis from the point of view of a besieged defender, looking out at a hostile horde readying towers and trebuchets, battering rams and ballistae. But how can X know that? Where did that idea, those soldierly words, come from?
X has been lured into the transportation box and me with her. We fit cozily, haunches to the rear, head facing forward, tail curled around like a huge traveling rug. I peer through the latticework of the door that has snapped shut on us, its catches firmly in place to forestall escape. I sense no panic from X. Not at first. She is used to this view, which usually precedes being placed on the big, pale seats of the car that covers distance without the expenditure of animal energy beyond the working of the controls—throttle, brake, brake, throttle; stop, usually at the place where the sado-biped prods and snips and probes with his sharp little devices and knuckled paws.
Makes me sick, in every sense.
Once, X had somehow contrived to devour the elasticated string used to hog-tie a rotisserie chicken as it turned on the spit. The cord had been cut and in the human rush to devour the hot, dead bird, the binding had fallen to the kitchen floor where X, smelling a delicious, rich, forbidden odor, proceeded to gobble it up, not even suspecting that its stretchy, nonorganic nature made it more or less indigestible.
“Where is the string?” Dolores asked in panic as X peered at her, licking her greasy chops.
“Oh, fuck. She’s eaten the string!”
X was rushed in the Range Rover—by Dolores, not Gerald—to the rooms that smelled of alien quadrupeds, and injected with something that induced her to vomit. And up came the string! In human terms, it would be like swallowing a length of mountaineer’s rope from the flanks of Mount Everest and then being forced to regurgitate it.
Bipeds rarely grasp the magnitude of such brushes with the unimaginable.
This time there is no Range Rover, no comforting hum of engine and automatic seven-speed gearbox, no gentle rhythm of tire on tarmac. X is bombarded with unfamiliar impressions from ear and eye and nostril. The world sways to Gerald Tremayne’s gait as he leaves the apartment, walks along the narrow path leading to what I know to be eight hundred acres of North London heathland, but which X does not know at all.
Gerald walks with a degree of urgency, passing by all my memories which I can no longer articulate—the huge magnolia tree, heavy with blazing white blossoms in its brief season, the frail-looking bench in the little spinney where I have often retreated from family tensions to smoke a clandestine cigarette, the array of blooms, the towering semi-blighted ash trees that form the frontier between public land and our private communal gardens.
Azaleas, roses, shrubs tended by an army of noisy gardeners with leaf blowers and lawn mowers; sacks for fallen leaves and cropped grass; chain saws that howl with malice. Past the rhododendron, the fir tree, the Escallonia, the Buddleia, the Ceratostigma—names I know because I once served as secretary on the gardening committee of our residents’ association, before my business success gnawed away at my availability for unpaid labor, banished any thought of “giving back” while there was still the prospect of taking salaries and bonuses and stock options in quasi-industrial proportions. And what else got consumed in this pell-mell rush for power and fame and riches? What other bonds and ties and nurtured interplays of texture and color became unraveled? Where else did my time disappear?
Don’t go there, Dolores, not now; not while your children are being drawn into a webbed world and your husband seems to have expanded his sphere of influence among the neighbors.
Really. Do NOT go there because the possibilities are endless.
Who else? The maid from Manila? Your friends with their broken marriages and singleton yearnings for a head on the shared pillow and a hand to clasp the neglected buttock? Old school memory-laners? Ex-partners on exploratory missions? Chance encounters? Pub pickups?
Gerald swings the cage and we, X and I, are treated to a dizzying view of sky and cloud above other apartments in our complex. It is like being at a mid-twentieth-century funfair, the kind you see in old black-and-white films (though not if you are a cat) where people sit in swing boats and pull on ropes to send themselves to giddy heights, craving the thrill of life beyond the horizontal where only some frail semblance of G-force prevents them from tumbling earthward. He reaches the small, metal gate. A new vista: narrow bars perceptible through the caged doors, as if the cell is opening and the prisoner is filled with inchoate terror at what lies beyond.
Free Nelson Mandela! The crowds await, heaving and bursting and pushing and shoving in anticipation of the first glimpse. Free Dolores Tremayne!
Gerald punches in the numeric code. Inside my furry new persona, I cannot recall it. Numbers have slipped from my data banks, although the human me, on the road in Munich or Detroit or Shanghai, virtually lives in an arithmetical, algorithmic world of computations. Excel spreadsheets, profit, loss, projections; the universe reduced to the math of money. EBITDA, gross, net, amortization, letters that open computer programs, numbers that open gates, just as his patter once unlocked my heart.
The human me knows the answer to the riddle of the gate’s opening but X, confronted with such routines, is mystified, defeated before the battle has even begun.
Gerald pushes through the gate, swinging the transportation box dangerously close to a clump of nettles.
Gate fever.
In truth, the status accorded to cats has always baffled Gerald. He does not get it. Cats are a waste of space. They do nothing, give nothing, give nothing away. They are creations of humans who project peculiar, attractive qualities onto the feline emptiness. Cats remind him of actors mouthing parts invented by others; superb performers; mirrors of our secret desires. Even the world’s greatest brains—Einstein, for example—have been fascinated by cats. Or rather by the idea, posited by some Austrian physicist, that a single cat could at once be alive and dead, according to theories of quantum mechanics which, frankly, Gerald could live without. What was he called, the Austrian, who had somehow argued that if you put a cat in a steel box with a radioactive source and some poison, the cat would, by the theory of quantum superposition, be simultaneously subject to two contrary interpretations: alive or dead. For a moment he toyed with the idea, imagining X as the quantum cat, dispensing with the complexities, locked in a steel box with polonium-laced treats that would allow only one interpretation of her state of being: former, an ex-cat, a dead parrot.
Then there was that colleague of Dolores’s who had been posted to a new job as a lobbyist in Brussels and had been obliged to embark on the rituals of household removals—the surly packers, the clumsy unpackers, the chipped porcelain, the hanging around for enormous tips. All of that had been covered, of course, by the firm. But the one riddle—not the quantum riddle—lay in working out how to transport the family cat, a superior type of cat, a Russian Blue called Marley. Of course Marley has all the requisite vaccinations and certificates of rabies-free health to cross just about any frontier. But the simplest, most elegant solution that Dolores’s colleague could devise was to send him by cab. Not alone, of course. Marley would be escorted in the voluminous rear compartment of one of those new black cabs made by Mercedes, escorted across southern England, through the various controls for animals and humans at Folkestone, into the brief darkness of the Channel Tunnel and across the six-lane highways of northern Europe where gallant American GIs and British Tommys fought Fritz the German Hun with depressing regularity. Thus would Marley arrive in Brussels, peering from the smoked-glass windows at his new home city with much the same sense of ineffable superiority as a visiting president in a motorcade contemplating the unfamiliar sights of a minor ally or defeated foe.
But what was the Austrian called? Schirnding? Schopenhauer? Schiller? Schöneberg? Gerald halts for a quick séance with his cell phone’s search engine.
Schrödinger!
Erwin Schrödinger! (1887–1961)
Unaware of her perilous superposition, neither one thing nor the other, yet both at the same time, X peers out of the cage with a combination of curiosity and abject terror. It is an environment she has yearned for instinctively without being able to know it objectively. Its surfaces are uneven, seething with smells of small life. Its upper limit is far higher, intangible. It is so much wider. It has no ceiling. There are none of the stages of the human cross—eating, sitting, sleeping, shitting, staring at moving pictures in a box. There is no box, in fact. If you were to be located out here, or left out here, you would not know which way to go. Which way to turn! You would have so many options. How would you navigate? What would you eat? Where are the bowls of pellets and the device that pumps potable liquid from a spout? Where are the soft surfaces for naps and the rough posts for scratching? The defecatory litter?
She observes other quadrupeds which attach bipeds to their necks with slender leashes and tug them along. They come in many shapes and sizes, some not much bigger than X herself, small legs pumping in a blur of fur. Others are huge, towering, slow-moving, Jurassic beasts, ambling along as if the world was theirs, with their lolling tongues hanging like slices of raw veal. A barrage of odors. All hostile. Even the small ones. Atavistically inimical to feline interests. A cacophony of noises. Names, apparently. “Hugo,” “Algernon,” “Fenton,” “Milly.” All called out with a variety of biped anxiety or wrath or entreaty. “Barney,” “Bodger,” “Bentley,” “Bailey,” “Charlie,” “Buddy,” “Bella,” “Daisy,” “Princess,” “Rosie,” “Gonzo,” “Gizmo,” “Sadie,” “Seeley.” There has been talk in the biped world of cats using similar leashes to exercise their patrons, to distract them from the instinctive feline pursuit of lizards and rodents and flying things. As if! Just think for a moment of all those noises in addition to the bellows and wheedlings of the dog world. “Tigger,” “Tiddles,” “Marie,” “Berlioz,” “Mephisto,” “Eliot,” “Munkustrap,” “Quaxo,” “Bombalurina.”
“Pussy-cat,” “Poo-cat,” “Macavity,” “X.”
Canine Studies. Dogography 101. Despite the appearance of immense stupidity, these quadrupeds have nonetheless trained their bipeds to use flexible devices to lob spheroids over great distances without changing course. The quadrupeds retrieve these objects and reward the bipeds’ skills in throwing them by returning them to feet encased in green rubber. With practice, the bipeds become increasingly skilled in the art of throwing, and go on to pursuits known as cricket and baseball, rarely thanking their canine trainers as they acknowledge the polite applause and the raucous roars of their supporters. With the frequency of this ritual, some of the spheroids have become layered in mud and saliva. They are not pleasant to behold. Even from afar, their odor is repulsive.
Sometimes the quadrupeds test the bipeds by withdrawing the favor of the returned spheroid, preferring instead to gallivant and gambol among themselves, tails wagging, snouts yapping, inducing panic in bipeds appealing desperately for the four-legs-good to reward them.
X notes that the quadrupeds have a curious means of communicating, prodding their noses into the rear ends of other quadrupeds. Disgusting! What do they say, hear? Information may be transmitted through the olfactory organs. Obviously enough. But surely these quadrupeds cannot derive pleasure from the odors of evacuation. Have they no sense of decorum? Or shame? Do they not acknowledge the essential privacy of bodily functions? They approach tall-growing things—larger versions of those she knows at home—cocking legs or squatting to urinate at will. No dark boxes here for the secret business of doing one’s business. No scrambled litter and furtive ablutions. No self-respect.
They halt, willy-nilly, to deposit waste without regard for fellow creatures. And why should they worry when they have trained their bipeds to retrieve their droppings and carry them in little plastic bags like Bond Street shoppers bearing delicate and highly priced items?
X is surprised by the comparison she makes, since she has no idea what shops are or what they are for. Or where or what Bond Street is.
Now they are passing an expanse of water so huge that, for X, it might be the Pacific, but which is known to Dolores as a pond where dogs are allowed to leap in and retrieve sticks, then emerge to shake themselves as close as they can to their owners, or roll on their sides and backs in grass that may or may not be littered with canine feces that the biped collection process has overlooked. By accident or design.
X notes that one notable area of teaching in which the quadrupeds have singularly failed is in their attempt to introduce the bipeds to water. No matter how often the quadrupeds induce their patrons to lob the spheroids into the various tracts of pond life with their resident populations of duck, swan, teal and coot, the bipeds refuse to follow, preferring to loiter on the bank and be sprinkled by the quadrupeds as they shake themselves dry. The bipeds, it seems, are inherently terrestrial, and faintly masochistic, beings.
But it would be wrong to generalize. Out here, there are clearly subdivisions of the biped species. Some are clearly dangerous, not to be trusted alone, guarded by mobs of quadrupeds to keep them under control, tied to them by multiple leashes, like Gulliver tethered by Lilliputians, as if they are being restrained because of the hazard they present and their otherworldly strangeness.
Other bipeds are not contained at all. They do not even keep company with quadrupeds. They seem to represent a separate breed with legs of pale flesh that has no fur, just a freckling of hair that would never keep the cold at bay.
Dogography. Jogography. The biped fear of immobility, inertia—states of being prized by the higher species, such as cats.
By contrast to the essential stillness of much of X’s day, these bipeds are in a state of constant agitation. Their legs scissor in an anguish of haste. Some are in such dread of the openness, the void, that they have taken to wheeled contraptions that carry them along, forcing their feet to revolve on mechanical treadmills. They pedal, swerve, curse, ring bells. Ting-a-ling.
Two legs bad.
Two wheels worse.
Through the feline audio system, Dolores hears snatches of conversation that make her cry for help, though all that emerges is a forlorn mew.
“So I am … like and … whatever.”
Young girl voices recounting Facebook dramas they pursue on Twitter by way of WhatsApp and Instagram. A language unknown to Dolores growing up in the time of the Discman. Pre-mobile. Pre-touchscreen. Pre-selfie. They pass them descending as Gerald ascends Kite Hill, hoping in his darkest thoughts that he will find Pit Bull Open Day underway at the summit, with legions of canine killers unchained.
Dolores feels like a message in a bottle that no one will ever open, destined to bob forever on shoreless oceans, a voice inside a cat crying for human help through a feline larynx.
“And Loretta and Alice were … like.”
Sound bites of modern living, played out in the privacy of bedrooms, hunched over communications devices, swiping and tip-tapping in predictive text, uploading images, howling in protest when others are uploaded. Boasts. Sullen silences. Status changes. Meet me at Kentish Town tube station. I am a young girl just like you. Dolores feels an unease she cannot define. Even beyond the awful premonitions of Gerald’s plan.
“And Toby was … kind of … naked?”
The rising interrogative tone of the postmodern sentence. Discuss.
Through her highly developed sonic facility, X detects sounds that vary from the remotely familiar to the totally incomprehensible. She has no means of defining the distinctions as those of language. She cannot know that, as they progress, they are mingling with people of far-flung origins in Minsk or Moscow or Metz or Munich or Manila or even Manchester. Humanspeak is universally indecipherable beyond its suggestions of mood. As they progress, the air fills with snatches of French and Italian and Polish and Croat and Mandarin. Wary Russians skirt expansive Spaniards along the tended pathways. Dolores wants to scream or howl or mew, but the bipeds are enclosed in their own recounted dramas.
Like Volodya told Miguel about Fifi that time in Shanghai?
So I said to the producer I needed my agent’s sign-off on that.
Entre nous.
Just between the two of us.
And it turned out. Kind of.
Like chlamydia?
But you never told me.
Not that she ever cared. Mother. Or Father for that matter.
And go south in the winter. But where? Where is safe? These days.
Signboards to the meaning of life.
X senses a greater pace, or urgency. Gerald is stretching his loping stride to the cusp of a jog. The acceleration is alarming for cat and hidden passenger alike. What is he planning?
He is making sounds that a vestige of wifely consciousness recognizes as song.
Everybody wants to eat a cat.
Oh dear.
X sees other creatures she knows she should pursue and hunt, red in tooth and feather. Dolores lists them as she was taught one early, cold morning.
Dawn Chorus Day. The one day of the year when you venture forth in the crepuscular muzziness with the guide who knows all the names of all the winged creatures under the rising sun.
Oh, for the innocence of it. Wrens, tits, woodpeckers of various hues, coots, moorhen, ducks (plain and mandarin), nuthatch, breeding swans with mom on egg duty and pop on patrol, blackbird, magpie, crows, ravens, pigeons, doves, a kestrel, a swarm of invading parakeets. Black birds walking like robed priests. Who said that? Gulls that swoop and call, far from crashing surf or shingly beach or windblown marsh. Doves that mate in a nanosecond flurry. Twitchers—birders they prefer to be called—in their baggy cargo pants, stalking their prey with field glasses that magnify them out of all proportion. Is it only birds they seek to spy on in this land of young girls on secret walks and young boys rolling spliffs and drinking stolen cider?
Bring it all back, Dolores is thinking. Bring my life back.
Bring me back.
Gerald has drawn to a halt on Kite Hill. The place teems with bipeds of all sizes. Some are trying in vain to imitate the winged creatures, holding up scraps of bright material with tails and long strings that try to climb into the vast, blue dome above them, lofted by invisible forces. Are they hoping to fly? Will they be lifted off, high above London, like so many Mary Poppinses? Will they be eaten by enormous Brobdingnagian cats?
Wind in the east, foretelling times of change, upheaval.
Gerald places the transportation box on the ground where an unfamiliar element ruffles X’s pelt, bombards her nostrils. He takes off his denim jacket and lays it on the ground next to the transportation box and stretches his long, lanky frame alongside it. Dolores feels X shrink back from the latticed door where an enormous wet black nose has just introduced itself with a growl and a bark like a clap of thunder.
“Nice doggie,” Gerald says, ruffling the long hair around the neck of a German shepherd that bares its teeth by way of response.
Dolores recalls another wildlife list—Rottweilers, Dobermans, pit bulls, Staffies, Russells, Pointers. Lurchers. Weimaraners. Tiny Shih Tzus. Schnauzers with Falstaffian beards. Retrievers with soft mouths. Guard dogs with hair-trigger rage. Attack dogs boiling with bloodlust. All of them leash-free in the bright breezy world beyond the transportation box.
“Lots of nice wuff-wuffs, eh, X?
“Had to make a plan, X. After that stunt in the bedroom. One of you had to go. Tails, you lose. Cat-o’-nine-tails. And nine lives and now they ran out. I guess every dog has his day. Cats, too. An accident, I’ll have to say. How you escaped, and then what? Flattened by the two-one-four bus? Disappeared? We can put up signs around the neighborhood—pictures of you with your big blue eyes. But no one will find you, of course, because you’ll be the dog’s breakfast by then. Ha-ha. And we’ll get a new little pet. Maybe a budgerigar or something with no teeth. And they’ll forget you in time.”
The killer’s lament. I didn’t want to. He/she forced me to do it. It was for the best. Don’t you see? The only way. A clean decisive moment. The final solution.
“What a pretty pussy.”
A new human voice. Unfamiliar but not hostile. Female. Comforting.
“Indeed,” Gerald is saying.
The woman—girl?—is squatting on her haunches next to the transportation box. Her voice has a faintly European lilt to it—Germanic, Nordic? She has blond hair and blue eyes and clear skin. She has been peering through the latticework, into the dungeon. X has been opening and closing her equally blue eyes to signal instant affection. Gerald shifts his lower body to suggest a similar reaction.
“Gerald,” Gerald says, sitting up and offering his hand in friendship and preliminary maneuver.
OMG, Dolores is thinking. You are still stained from the upstairs bitch and now this!
The girl-woman extends her hand. Then pauses as her eyes widen to impossible dimensions.
“I know you,” she blurts. “Gerald Tremayne. The novelist! Birth was sooo beautiful. You signed it for me at Hay. I listened to your talk. I can’t believe it.”
Dolores can vaguely remember. X, of course, has no idea what is going on. Bipeds are an odd bunch. Their moods shift inexplicably, and something is now intangibly different. The coordinates have switched, slipped, flipped. Unintended consequences govern events. How can X know that the intervention of this biped has saved her from release into the open where the quadrupeds would have hounded her and run her to ground and torn her to shreds, as surely as … as what?
As a foxhunt with dogs, Dolores tells her, as a terrier with a rat, a Russell with a rabbit, a leopard with a kudu. But X does not hear. What is a fox, terrier, Russell or leopard to a flat-cat? What is a hunt to a creature that lives from bowl to bowl, from pellet to pellet, delivered on schedule, multiple squares a day?
“Of course,” Gerald is now saying. “You came up after the talk. You already had the book. To Sabina.”
“‘With warm regards for the future,’” she recalls. “Omigod. You remembered my name!”
“From Austria. Linz. Of course.”
The girl-woman almost swoons.
Dolores looks more closely through her cat’s eyes. There are no dark roots in the apparition’s fur; even her eyebrows are tantalizingly, naturally blond. How different can this be, in expectation, from Gerald’s marital crossing of colors, their long bodies stretched side by side, chiaroscuro?
Is it because she is white? Or is it just because he is who—and what—he is? Pheromones. Testosterone. Unseen, undeniable comingling in the air between them, in their glances and subliminal messages. The urge to touch. Hold.
And she is young enough to be his daughter.
“‘And the future is now!’” The girl-woman giggles in wide-eyed wonderment. There is no malice, no aforethought. It has just happened. A miracle. Across a crowded hill, full of dogs and walkers.
“I can’t believe it, Mr. Tremayne.”
“Gerald. Please. Call me Gerald.”
There is a pause. Beyond the grille of the transportation box, X is aware of the quadrupeds with their panting halitosis and hyper-lubricious tongues and enormous white teeth fixed in jaws that have evolved to seize the necks of bulls and not let go. What chance for a tiny fluffy cat among such creatures?
“Do you often do this? Gerald? When you are writing?”
Oh, if only I could answer that question for you, Mr. Tremayne! Gerald!
Dolores’s memory is generating an inner slideshow of episodes that she now sees without the benefit of the doubt or of any doubt at all; moments at book fairs, in restaurants, on trains, airplanes, on street corners, book tours, family vacations goddammit, when apparently chance conversations led to absences for which she had blithely, trustingly sought no explanation and for which only the flimsiest explanations had been offered. Like that time in Devon when the girls were tiny and Gerald went off in search of ice cream and came back hours later with nothing to show for his foraging because the 99-er ice creams had melted and the chocolate wafers had all fallen into the sand. What a fool she had been!
“Well, you know,” Gerald ventures, “I guess it just falls to me to make sure that this little creature has some quality of life … now that my wife is … away.”
The word away plops into the sentence like a depth charge, heavy with enormous consequences. He has switched his facial expression from “aw, shucks—fancy little old me in charge of the family cat” to “flinty gaze into middle distance, denoting an irreducible core of pain that might only be salved by the touch of a virgin.”
My wife is away, for which read mad, faithless, imprisoned for some awful ill-defined crime. Away with the fairies. With her best friend’s husband. With the gurus of rehab, the high priests of therapy. Away with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of gin. Away in the realms of Gabriel or Beelzebub depending on the final judgement. Anything but: away on a business trip to earn the money that pays the bills and keeps the coke dealer in custom.
* * *
When they met in the northeast of England, she had been doing a double honors course in Eng. Lit. and Business Administration, prior to her MBA in London. He worked on the maintenance staff, a roguish, raffish, piratical figure often compared by undergraduates to the actor Johnny Depp—long-haired, twinkly eyed, laden with knowledge of the kind they did not teach in their academic courses. Such as where the better quality of narcotics could be had, the safest E, the purest Charlie—(“Smack I don’t do,” he would say haughtily. “Crack neither.”)—transactions he liked to define as a legitimate redistribution of wealth from the bourgeoisie, in the form of its offspring, to the proletariat, represented by himself. Plus handling charges to offset the obvious risks.
A diamond in the rough, awaiting her tender attentions to cut and polish to human perfection.
She knew him from his association with Clarissa Fawcett, her college roommate—locally rooted and well-versed in the wiles of men of Gerald Tremayne’s background—from whom he extracted a substantial chunk of the money sent by her parents for scholarly maintenance, arriving in his white van and dropping by their shared digs, his leather belt-pouch laden with narcotic offerings hidden among the camouflaging cargo of hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, spirit levels, wrenches.
Dolores did not approve of his secret trade. In her native Camden, where she had attended the prestigious girls’ school, she had seen the results of his business at close quarters, among friends who battled in vain against the lure of skunk and E and K, uppers, downers, killers. She had seen the way the drugs warped minds, dictated behavior and scuppered moral standards as her friends fell victim to the promise of easy highs to banish teenage lows, craving transportation—trips, sometimes—to alternate worlds where doubt was banished and colors merged and people chilled. Whence there was no return.
When she realized why the dashing Gerald visited Clarissa, she was at first quite shocked that the handsome, soi-disant maintenance man was no more than the penultimate link in a chain of supply and demand that started on distant plantations of opium poppies, and coca plants and marijuana bushes, and led through hydroponic labs closer to home and tiny weighing scales in shuttered rooms to the end product sold to her friend in slender paper wraps and little plastic bank bags. Every step along the way contained the seeds and fruits of extreme violence, borne by the promise of easy money in fabled amounts. She felt angry that her friend’s friend had duped her into assuming that he was simply a visitor, an admirer, a gentleman caller from a nonacademic but wholesome blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth universe of manual work and support for soccer teams and pubs and pints.
In part, Dolores’s annoyance—at her roommate as much as at Gerald—drew on her pity for hapless mules caught with condoms of cocaine bursting in their guts, and foolish British grannies who believe that the gift of a statuette from a Thai lothario was no more than that—certainly not an instant qualification for a near-certain death sentence. Back home, the streets around the market stalls at Camden Lock seemed so exotic and buzzy to foreign visitors who flocked there in great numbers to buy junk clothing and seek the frisson of proximity to danger, among the crowds of spindly dealers in baseball hats and bulky law enforcement officers in Kevlar vests designed to thwart knife attacks. But to Dolores, these same thoroughfares and dark corners were a totem of failure—the failure of her people to rise above the trap of being poor and bereft of prospects, gallery exhibits for visitors from Europe who, their hungers sated, would return to better worlds where societies looked after their own and did not abandon them to wasted lives.
She loathed the sight of young people (often black—in fact, usually black) being patted down by the police in the back streets near Camden tube station on the Northern Line. The skeletal women with track-marked arms and ferret eyes, panhandling among the tourists, filled her with rage at the suppliers. At people, in fact, just like Gerald Tremayne.
And yet Gerald had a way of explaining it away. It was a sideline. He would not sell to people who could not afford. He did not do the really hard stuff. Recreational was all. Among people whose college years would inevitably end in degrees and good jobs and a return to sanity in homes where the favored drug was Chablis or Chardonnay or, at worst, gin and tonic. Of course, he felt guilt-stricken about it, but, in these blighted parts where the shipyards were shuttered and the mines were sealed, what choice was there? If you went to the job center and told them you wanted another chance—a sixth-form college, maybe, a proper apprenticeship in a real trade—they would laugh at you. So, yes, briefly and not forever, he did this hateful, hated business. His dealing was no more than the equivalent of Steve McQueen’s baseball in The Great Escape, pounding the prison walls. He was saving his earnings to get out. To concentrate on his real love—writing! He was building a stash of cash for his flight south to London and beyond—Paris and the grave of Jim Morrison; Tangier and Marrakech and Fez; the trail east through Istanbul to the ashrams of India. Okay, he had no fancy qualifications. But when he sat in the back of his white van, parked up in a lay-by, scribbling down his thoughts and ideas in pilfered notebooks, he knew for sure that his words made sense, wove spells, signposted the future. At home, in the bedroom he shared with a younger brother, he kept a laptop locked away under the bed and, late at night, began to transfer his notes into the outline, the framework of a plot, a story, a narrative. The baleful light from the screen lit up a face filled with amazement that he, Gerald Tremayne, no-goodnik, drug pusher, could build these fantastic phantoms that strutted the stage of his invention. The first seeds of Birth had been planted.
When he told her this—his deepest secret—his eyes lit up with missionary zeal that sent a thrill through her. He was a storyteller whose story was his own. A pied piper.
More than anything, he told her, he wanted out of this postindustrial penitentiary where he unblocked vomit-clogged student lavatories, replaced lightbulbs in dormitory corridors, fixed doors smashed and splintered in savage drunken paroxysms. Dolores took him at his word, believing that she was the only person with whom he shared this inner life of yearning and creativity. Because he told her so. Because he was a man of many personae to be buffed and polished and presented as needs dictated.
His needs, of course.
In his role as campus handyman, Gerald had access and cover for his covert trade and his skilled seduction. There were many lewd jokes about him. Envious male undergraduates spoke of his rattling the pipes, plumbing the depths, oiling the hinges. But, to Dolores, he offered a different face. When he discovered from her roommate that she was studying literature, he began to pepper his conversation with references to poets and writers, Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence—provincial men who had made good through language and their mastery of it. Finally, one day, he had brought her a USB stick. Read it, please, he wheedled in his Geordie accent. Tell me where I am going wrong. At first she resisted. She was not dumb. She knew his reputation from her roommate who told her explicitly to be careful where Gerald was concerned. And anyhow, she was a student, not a teacher. What would she know about first novels and literary pretensions? Maybe he saw the USB stick as the key to other things. There were few people of color on campus. Maybe he wanted a trophy. Well, look, I’ll just leave it here, he said, placing the USB on her desk one day when he dropped by to sell her friend a baggie of the best hash in Newcastle. Up to you. Take it or leave it. Read it, if you like. Or not.
So she did, and it was not half bad, Dolores thought, surprised at the quality of the writing from the roughneck Tremayne, despite her desire to harbor no intellectual prejudice against the handyman-genius who had pirouetted into her life on paint-spattered, steel-capped boots, sneaking up on her while she was wrestling with economic theory and Milton. And sold class-A drugs to her fellow students, recruiting some of them as runners and decoys.
Gerald became something of a fixture, offering discounted dope to Clarissa, sipping many cups of tea and coffee with Dolores, knowing, in the way that lotharios know and believe to be their right and destiny, that he did not need to hurry, that she would fall into his arms in the fullness of time if he took things easy, but would run a mile if he came on too strong. And she knew, too, that sooner or later, but preferably later, after a decent interval of circling and due diligence, they would tumble together when trust had built a carapace against the fear of exploitation or rejection. Against betrayal. The most heinous of outcomes.
“It won’t last,” Clarissa said with the finality of unassailable conviction, beyond challenge or debate. “I know the type. Love you and leave you. You’re probably only thinking about it to annoy your dad. Or something Freudian or whatever.”
While her roommate busied herself with rolling marijuana into a perfect reefer, Dolores considered her taunting proposition. What did she know about Freud? Or whatever? Clarissa was studying criminology, even as she committed crime to distract herself from the rigors of her course. She had her eye on a career in the police. Know thine enemy! But, Dolores conceded with some reluctance, Clarissa might have a point.
As an adolescent Dolores had seemed to bypass the rebellious phase. A model daughter. Good grades. No unexplained all-nighters. No motorbike howl to signal the arrival of an unsuitable suitor in greasy leathers athwart some overpowered machine. So maybe, belatedly, this was her gesture, her catch-up revolt against parental—paternal—authority. Against all her father’s hints of African dreams and re-nurtured roots in a faraway never-never land.
Roots! Her roots were in Camden or Newcastle, not Johannesburg or Cape Town. So why not make that clear with her rough-edged, flat-voweled beau.
“Not really,” she said. “Not really Freud.”
They were sitting in their shared sitting room, cluttered with Dolores’s books and her roommates’ bongs and the familiar accoutrements of student life: folders and files stacked neatly in Dolores’s sphere of influence; empty takeout boxes on Clarissa’s.
“Well what then?” Clarissa inquired, firing up her creation and inhaling deeply.
It was a good question.
Maybe it was just her genes demanding non-conformism, rebellion. When her mother met her father, after all, he was not just some rebellious youth. He was a terrorist, a freedom fighter, the product of another continent, another race. Soviet-trained. Moscow rules! She was an English rose, her blue eyes passed down to her daughter in the mingling of chromosomes that sealed the parental bonding. He had grown up shoeless in Zululand; she had worn heels that tip-tapped on the cobblestones. He offered his hand. She defied her elders and took it, back in those days when such trysts were a novelty tantamount to revolt. So it was only natural that the child of this union would seek romance in a different milieu.
And she had found it—it had crept up on her, ambushed her—in this sharp-edged outcast with dreams far beyond the frontiers of his social legacy. If her father had yearned and struggled for political liberation through the barrel of a gun, then Gerald was the creative equivalent, struggling for the liberation of the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs that poured forth with all the insistence and clamor of a Kalashnikov on automatic fire. And she, Dolores, would be his muse, his commissar, honing and channeling the inchoate passions. His Beatrice. She would not be the first upwardly mobile woman to fall for a man from lower on society’s imposed ladder, seeking to escape a different world that doomed its inhabitants to narrow horizons and institutional mediocrity. If anything her father should be proud of her. Her love was a mighty blow for the class struggle, the fight for a society free of prejudice and injustice, the battle to dismantle the barriers of heritage.
“Pygmalion!” Clarissa suddenly barked from within her narcotic fug in one of those lightbulb-illuminating, penny-dropping, gotcha moments. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? Except it’s in reverse. You’re Henry Higgins and he’s Mary Doolittle.”
“Eliza. It’s Eliza Doolittle. And. No. It’s not Pygmalion.”
But the notion settled, and with it the uneasy question of whether her heart’s desire had become entangled with some strange evangelism. How many women, after all, devoted far too much of their energy and forgiveness to the enhancement and improvement of their chosen partner?
In the end, when she completed her studies, he offered to help her move her boxes and books and files and folders down to London. Gallantly, he declined her offer to pay for the diesel, resisting the counter-suggestion to go Dutch. As they left the northeast in his white van with its freckles of rust and belches of diesel fumes, she did not pay too much attention to his bulky tote bag and laptop computer that had somehow been packed along with her worldly possessions. Not to mention his battered toolbox with its shelves and nooks and crannies laden with all manner of equipment and widgets and pouches and baggies. The portable electric drill and its charger should have offered her a clue to his intentions, and perhaps it did, along with the thrill of knowing what could not yet be said out loud.
Companionably, happily, they bowled down the M1 and into North London. And there they stayed. To this day.
Surely, she told herself now, swaying and bouncing in the transportation box, it had not been all cynical on his part. Surely there had been love? Surely the arrival of the girls had placed their bonds and vows on a different, unassailable plane, built a palisade against temptation and all-too-easy conquest?
But when had it ended? How had she not seen his roving-eye, his default setting, reasserting itself as she clambered the corporate ladder, rising into a stratosphere that offered no space for husband or family? Had he even waited the mandatory seven years before scratching the itch? At the beginning he had made his contribution. North London offered rich pickings for a man of his accomplishments—in many ways, she now suspected—and he soon had a client list of handiwork-challenged householders who reached for his cell phone number to deal with fused electrics and frozen boilers, broken sash windows and dripping taps, showers that backed up behind grease-trap drains. And then there was the second list of customers seeking edgy exhilaration or numbed torpor, often at the same addresses, just at different times of the day. Or night. Between those sorties, she heard him tap-tapping away with single fingers on the laptop, Birth building in range and might to its magisterial, soon-to-be-bestselling 630 pages of chronicles from the north, an early Knausgaard of detailed observation and generational dysfunction.
As he struggled with recalcitrant sentences and words that sent him rummaging through the thesaurus, he acquired an agent who stirred a flurry of interest at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The monkey wrench gave way to the workstation, the drill to the desk. Windows XP displaced window sashes, the rough diamond polished and faceted, the toolbox banished to the storeroom in the cellars below their mansion block. The client list for his potions narrowed to personal use, sustained by his allowance from the joint account she set up as success took her into the rarefied financial reaches where dependents became tax breaks. When a ballcock broke, or a water filter needed replacing below the white Belfast sink, he called in a plumber and watched with a mildly critical air as some artisan from eastern Europe completed a task he could just as easily have performed himself and to far better effect. Had he bothered to help when they had the kitchen renovated; or the big living room repainted; or when the shower rooms were rebuilt and replumbed; or when the bookcases were extended to make space for the foreign translations and manifold editions of Birth; or when the units around the fireplace were revamped to accommodate the wide-screen television which she often found tuned to the sports channels when he told her he had been hard at work on Marriage, or mapping out Death? And when had he last told her he loved her? And when, for that matter, had she uttered that same incantation, the three-word antidote to the entropy of passion?
They are nearing the end of the walk back from the jaws of death.
“And do you work from home, er, Gerald?”
“I have a little place. An office just across the road.”
News to me, X heard an alien voice murmuring from somewhere inside her own head.
“I could show you if you like,” he was saying. “I’ll just drop off the cat.”
Dolores feels the powerful bound of his long legs as he leaps up the stairs to their apartment, three at a time. She wishes Jenny Steinem, their neighbor, could see him now and share this knowledge of deceit. The door with its double Chubb locks swings open. The transportation box hits the floor with a thud on the sea-grass carpet. The portcullis door swings open and X stretches her way out of it, her bottom raised, her front paws spread before her, digging into the familiar roughness of the carpeting where her claws find easy purchase.
X turns back and does not grasp what Dolores sees through those bright, blue, rag-doll eyes. Gerald is removing the tape from the cat flap, the outer wall of the keep, the last bastion, the path to freedom and foxes and dogs and BMWs and the 214 bus pounding up and down the hill. Again, he has reached for the eat-me pellets of prawn, tuna, salmon, rabbit essences, laying a trail that leads to the flap.
“There you go, X. Enjoy,” he says, swinging the flap open and closed with his sneakered foot. “I know I will.”
In anyone else, she might admire the libidinous stamina, if not the bottomless capacity to deceive. If she had maintained her status as the object of the former, there would be no need for the latter. But, through her cat’s eyes, the world has been turned on its head.