Cat Flap

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tuesday night

  “London Zoo rescued a roaming European lynx from a Golders Green garden on Friday 4th May 2001 following a call from a member of the public to Barnet Borough Police reporting that they had seen a leopard sitting on the wall of their back garden.” (London Zoo Press Release, 8th May 2001)

  “The most wonderful things have happened and are continually happening to us.” Art glanced across to where his son lay in his cot. The small boy had closed his eyes and appeared to be asleep, his noisy breathing sounding regular and peaceful. Art lay down the book he had been reading aloud from and said half to his son, half to himself, “I think that’s enough for one night. I’ll finish that chapter tomorrow.”

  The title of the book that Art now replaced on the shelf, squeezing it in between works by Heuvelmans and by Shuker, by Coleman and by Izzard, was The Lost World - not the recent Michael Crichton novel, but the classic original story, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He had read the book countless times before, originally when just a young boy, but it still never failed to transport him back to a time when the world was not so known, and when adventure and discovery were the ambition of every school boy. It had been one of the earliest influences that had got him interested in cryptozoology, not that he was aware of the term or the subject at the time: that and the T.V. series presented by Arthur C. Clarke on his Mysterious World. Perhaps not quite the very earliest influence though: Art gazed down upon his infant son, and remembered himself, at an age not that much older than Luke was now, sitting alone at nursery school, unwilling to join in the ‘silly’ games that the other children were playing, instead sitting on the floor, his back firmly planted against the wall of his daytime prison, turning the pages and wondering at the illustrations of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are - if ever there was a book to stimulate young minds about the boundless possibilities of our world, there was one. How often had he dreamed of emulating the experiences of young explorer Max, of voyaging off to discover truly new lands; new creatures. It had been a boyhood dream, when others had fantasized about driving steam trains or being renowned football players or setting foot upon the moon. Now the infant steam train drivers are accountants and the budding football players are insurance salesmen and the hopeful astronauts are financial consultants, and Art? He still had his boyhood dream. And that couldn’t be such a bad thing. In this age of high speed travel, when the internationalism of modern media fools the western world into believing that we are all the same, by bringing directly into our comfortable homes the lifestyles of the - less fortunate? - world, it is reassuring to believe that there are still some corners of our globe that remain inaccessible to man and that some mysteries may remain forever hidden, because, although humanity may continually develop the technology to conquer ever more formidable locations, we will never lose the blind, instinctive faith that there is always something more out there; something forever out of reach, be it the aspiration of mowing our own front lawn as closely as our neighbour manages, anticipating proof that our belief in a superior God will one day be vindicated, or hoping, just hoping that we will be the person that brings back evidence that some small creature, previously thought to be long extinct and vanquished from every corner of this planet of ours, actually thrives in a remote place, undisturbed by man’s insistent scrutiny. Knowledge: our goal and our curse; the legacy we leave our future generations.

  •••

  Luke was trying to fall asleep in his cot. He had heard the story ‘dada’ had been reading to him several times before and he no more understood it this time around than he had done the first time he had heard it. It was only boredom that made him close his eyes now; a wishful hope that if he bluffed slumber this person would leave him in peace and cease his endless droning. He had decided that he was already old enough to draw his own conclusion about the nature of life: you sleep, eat, shit and then you sleep again. The rest is silence.

  •••

  Close to the canal bridge, beneath the tall tree with the large ball of mistletoe growing in the top branches, all was quiet. There were no lovers’ trysts planned for this evening, nor any prearranged ambushes or acts of violence. It was as though all the humans had been told to vacate the premises, allowing nature its free reign and its moment of peace and reflection.

  In the uppermost boughs of the tree, where the wood spindled away to the thinnest twigs, there the light breeze was still powerful enough to stir the structure, not allowing it a totally undisturbed rest; the wind, insistent like a toddler pulling on the arm of its mother, desperate to attract her attention, revealed its constant, invisible presence by its action on the objects around it, a catalyst against which everything else was powerless: the rustle of leaves in the trees, the ripples on the surface of the river. The high branches were silhouetted against the clear, night sky, illuminated by the weak light of a million distant stars. Below, in the tangle of the nether boughs, and lower still, close to the ground, where the straight trunk disappeared and merged with the surrounding vegetation, no light penetrated, or at least only the narrowest ray, a faint beam barely strong enough to reflect back from the vivid yellow iris and narrow, black, slitted pupil that shone out clear, like a brilliant gemstone in the darkness. The eye blinked once in surprise and then was gone.

  As if it had never been there at all.

  Epilogue

  Harold David Sherry. 1918-1961. R.I.P.

  It was a simple inscription, relating the barest facts of a life, revealing no details of a premature death. He’d read the words a thousand times before and yet he could still not attribute any other significance to that second date other than the date that his own life had been halted. As far as he was concerned the fading words on his father’s monument might equally have added to them: David William Sherry. 1950-1961. R.I.P. There had been nothing worthy of note to update his own personal biography since then. Now, if he was to die today, he would not even receive an epitaph with his own name upon it; his own dates; his own history. If he had done nothing else for him, his brother had at least honoured his promise to obtain a new passport for him; new papers: he has - had, it should more correctly be said - connections. It was the very least he could do for him. He had been owed. Big time. It was time that he was free. And his brother too - free from obligation. He had done him a favour. Fraternal duty had been satisfied on both sides.

  Which left just one last thing to set free. Any mourner or passer-by that afternoon in the cemetery, might have been surprised to notice a large, middle-aged, shaven-headed man standing beside one of the gravestones, suddenly reach inside his capacious overcoat and produce from inside a small, black-and-white kitten, which he then set down upon the broken stone slabs, and with shooing gestures with his hands, indicated for the cat to make itself scarce. The little animal took two uncertain steps away from its human protector, before turning its head and staring back at the man that had provided it with food and warmth for the past week. It opened its mouth as if to miaow a protest at this sudden abandonment, but then thinking better of it, turned again, and with three quick bounds disappeared behind another headstone and was soon swallowed up in the anonymity of the long grass, without so much as a second look back.