‘Foxxa.’
It was Max who had named the cat. He had spent hours with her, when she first arrived, whispering to her from across the room: F, K, Ks, S, Sh. He had watched how she responded to each sound, was certain he had found the perfect name.
‘Foxxa.’
The cat chirruped. Max held out his hand, and she rolled on to her back, cupped her paws over his knuckles, bumped her head gently into his hand.
‘Crazy little tortie,’ he whispered.
She tripped out of the bower. Crazy little tortie was right. We hadn’t seen her in days.
Max walked out of the bower and towards the patio. I followed him. The cat was not there.
From the patio, the pretentious absurdity of the bower was even more striking. The whole garden was no more than five metres long, four metres wide. The bower swallowed at least a third of the usable space, making the garden even more cramped than it must have been when the neighbour moved in.
The cat appeared from under a bush, darted across the patio. Too late I saw that the back door was ajar. She paused for a moment, looking back at us.
‘Foxxa, no!’ said Max.
Her tail curled around the edge of the door, then she had disappeared inside.
Max was staring at the back door. I wondered if the neighbour was there behind its wired glass panels, just out of view. Max approached the door, pushing it fully open.
‘Max!’
I lunged towards him, but he slipped into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the garden.
‘Hello?’ I shouted. I waited at the door but there was no reply.
‘Come on, Dad,’ said Max.
I found him in the middle of the kitchen, the cat at his feet.
‘Max, we can’t be in here. Pick her up. Let’s go.’
Max walked to the light switch and turned on the light. Thrill of the illicit. We shouldn’t be in here.
‘Max,’ I said, ‘out. Now.’
He turned, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and the cat jumped easily up on to the work surface, blinking back at us.
‘She likes it here.’
‘Max … Max, pick her up.’
Max showed no sign of having heard me. I could read nothing in his gestures but a certain stiff-limbed determination. He had never disobeyed me so openly before.
Light flooded the white worktops, the ash cupboard fronts, the terracotta floor tiles. It was all so clean, so bright, so without blemish. I thought of our kitchen, with its identical dimensions. How alike, yet how different. On the table was a pile of clean clothes, still in their wrappers. Two suits, a stack of shirts, all fresh from the cleaners. No two-day-old saucepans stood unwashed in the sink. No food rotted here, no cat litter cracked underfoot, no spider plants went short of water.
From the middle of the kitchen you could see the front door. The neighbour had moved a wall; or perhaps he hadn’t moved a wall; perhaps he had simply moved the door to the middle of his kitchen wall. Natural light from both sides. Clever.
Max left the room. I looked back to where the cat had been standing, but she was no longer there. I could hear him calling to her, a gentle clicking noise at the back of his throat.
I followed him into the living room. Max was already at the central light switch. Our neighbour had added a plaster ceiling rose, and an antique crystal chandelier, which hung too low, dominating the little room. The neighbour had used low-energy bulbs in the chandelier, and they flicked into life, sending ugly ovoids of light up the seamless walls. What was this? And where was the cat?
Max found a second switch, and the bottom half of the room was lit by bulbs in the floor and skirting.
‘Pick up the cat, Max-Man. Time to go.’
He made a gesture. Arms open, palm up. Then he held up his hand. Listen, he seemed to be saying, and listen I did. A dog; traffic; a rooftop crow. People walked past, voices low, their shoes scuffing the pavement.
These houses should have front yards, Millicent would say: it’s like people walking through your living room. You could hear them so clearly, all those bad kids and badder adults: the change in their pockets, the phlegm in their throats, the half-whispered street deals and the Coke-can football matches. It was all so unbearably close.
But there was something else too, a dull, rhythmic tapping that I couldn’t place, couldn’t decipher. Max had located it, though. He pointed to the brown leather sofa. A dark stain was spreading out across the central cushion.
I looked at Max. Max looked at me.
‘Water,’ said Max.
Water dripping on to the leather sofa. Yes, that was the sound. Max looked up. I looked up. The plaster of the ceiling was bowing. No crack was visible, but at the lowest point water was gathering: gathering and falling in metronomic drops, beating out time on the wet leather below.
Now I could see that cat. She was halfway up the staircase, watching the tracks of the water through the air.
Max and I looked at each other. I could read nothing in my son’s expression beyond a certain patient expectancy.
‘Maybe you should shout up to him, Dad. Case he’s here.’
Maybe I should. Maybe I should have shouted louder as I’d skulked by the back door, because standing here in his living room, looking up his stairs towards the first floor, it felt a little late to be alerting him to our presence.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
‘It’s Alex. From next door.’
‘And Max,’ said Max quietly. ‘And Foxxa.’
‘Alex and Max,’ I shouted up. ‘We’ve come to get our cat.’
Nothing. Water falling against leather. Another street-dog. I looked again at Max.
‘You go first, Dad.’
He was right. I couldn’t send him upstairs in front of me. I had always suspected overly tidy men of having dark secrets in the bedroom.
‘Maybe he left a tap on,’ I said quietly.
‘Maybe.’ Max wrinkled his nose.
‘All right. Stay there.’
I saw the cat’s tail curl around a banister. I headed slowly up the stairs.
A click, and the landing light came on. Max had found that switch too.
Two rooms at the back, two at the front: just like ours. At the back the bathroom and the master bedroom, at the front the second bedroom and a tiny room that only estate agents called a bedroom. The cat was gone. The bathroom door was open.
The neighbour was in the bathtub, on his back, his legs and arms thrown out at discordant angles, as if something in his body was broken and couldn’t be repaired. His mouth was open, his lips were pulled back.
His eyes seemed held open by an unseen force; the left eye was shot through with blood. Blood was gathering around his nostrils too.
I did not retch, or cover my eyes, or cry, or any of the thousand things you’re supposed to do. Instead, and I say this with some shame, I heard and felt myself laugh. Perhaps it was the indignity of the half-erection standing proud from his lifeless body; perhaps it was simply my confusion.
I looked away from his penis, then back, and saw what prudishness had prevented me from seeing before. Lying