On the day Linda told me about the white cat I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. I tried to fill out job applications but I struggled to concentrate. At sunset I took a break and went to the supermarket. It was dark by the time I got home and I had to climb over the wall of the villa to get back in. I reached my foot onto the brick wall and lifted myself over the iron railings. Linda had promised to get an extra clicker to open the front gate but never did.
The moon was huge that night. I got changed into a bikini and went for a swim. I laid on my back and bobbed around on the water, like a leaf. The pool water was warm, like chicken soup. The smell of chlorine relaxed me. I closed my eyes.
Then I heard a splash. Something had entered the pool behind me. I thought it must be Linda, but when I turned she wasn’t there. Nothing was there. I grabbed my towel, went back to the pool house and locked the door. The AC was on full blast and goose pimples spread across my body. I climbed under the covers to get warm.
The next morning I woke up later than usual. I didn’t get out of bed for breakfast. My muscles felt tired and I had a fever. Around 11 am, Linda knocked at my door.
‘Everything OK in there? I want to show you something.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah, look at what I picked up from the store.’
A small harpoon appeared from behind her back and she presented it to me like a present.
‘Is that another gun?’
‘Something for the white cat. Will you help me, honey? I know you like to stay up late so we could take it in shifts. By the way, did you see that son of a bitch last night? It was drinking the pool water.’
I told her I had some work to do and shut the door.
For the next few days I avoided Linda as much as possible. Instead of eating breakfast in the kitchen, I kept bread and peanut butter in a plastic bag underneath my bed. I didn’t have a knife so I smeared the peanut butter on with my finger, tearing holes in the bread.
Each day grew hotter and more humid. I started to notice all the faults in the villa. Mould gathered on the ceiling. Door handles came off in my hand. Every afternoon, the smell of sewage cut through the scent of Linda’s jasmine and hibiscus. When I laid on a sun lounger, I was bothered by flies or red ants swarming in the grass. The palm tree by the pool had a rare disease and the fronds had withered and browned.
I was surprised to receive an email asking if I was available for work. I dressed in a blue shirt and pencil skirt and took a taxi to the company’s headquarters. Most of the desks were deserted and there were cardboard boxes full of papers on the floor. The managing director gave me a tour of the office and sat me at a desk next to a guy named Bill.
‘Bill can show you the ropes – just ignore him if he asks to borrow any money,’ the managing director joked and then left.
Bill wore blue jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. He was chubby with a large mop of curly hair. His arms were a battlefield of eczema. I noticed a large tub of E45 behind a tower of takeaway coffee cups on his desk.
It didn’t take long for Bill to set up my computer. There were a lot of emails to answer. For the rest of the week I worked late every night in the office. When I got home from work, I climbed over the wall and went for a midnight swim in the dark. I didn’t switch on the pool lights because I didn’t want Linda to know I’d come home. I only said hi to her on my way out in the morning. ‘Go get ’em, tiger,’ she would say and continue to water the plants.
By the end of the week I was exhausted. I left the office at 7 pm and stood in a long queue for a bus. The sun was setting and the humidity made me feel feverish and dizzy. Bill’s car pulled up and he offered me a ride. I said yes.
Instead of driving home, we went to a bar. I asked Bill a few questions about his life, out of politeness. He asked about my living situation and I described the villa to him.
‘So it’s just you two in the house, you and Linda?’ Bill asked. His chubby fingers wrapped around his beer bottle like a paw.
‘Well, technically Linda is in the villa and I’m in the pool house.’
‘What does Linda do?’
‘Insurance, I think. She rarely leaves the house.’
‘She must be divorced.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘There’s no way she could afford to have a villa on that compound. Someone must have given it to her.’
‘I don’t know. I think she’s just sick of life.’
When Bill drove me home, he parked outside the front gate and I asked if he wanted to come inside and see the villa. No guests were allowed onto the property without permission, Linda had said, but it was late and I decided to take the risk.
‘You’ll have to climb over the wall though.’
‘What?’
‘Linda hasn’t given me a clicker yet. For the front gate. Don’t worry it’s fun – we can pretend we’re burglars.’
Bill struggled to swing his leg over the railings on the top of the wall. He listened to my step-by-step instructions and landed softly on the grass. He looked cute, like a racoon. I showed him the swimming pool and the garden, which shone nicely in the moonlight, and opened the door of the poolhouse.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘It’s small, I know.’
His eyes scanned the metal bed frame and the lino floor. ‘How much do you pay her for this?’
‘It’s cheap.’
‘You know it’s the maid’s room, right?’
I heard the door click behind me.
Bill must have seen the look in my eye. ‘Families in these villas always make their maids sleep in an outhouse,’ he said. ‘You’ve made it nice though.’
A lizard ran up the wall and I jumped. Bill put his arm around me to calm me down and then kissed me. The sex was clumsy even though it felt rehearsed. Afterwards, he snored and I couldn’t sleep. Around 4 am he started to grind his teeth.
I woke up to the sound of the front gate and Linda’s SUV pulling out of the driveway. She liked to spend a few hours in the mall at the weekend. I pushed Bill’s fat arm to wake him. His eyes opened and he smiled at me. I regretted hating him so much while he was asleep.
‘Do you want to go for a swim? Linda won’t be back for a few hours.’
The sun was bright and the pool water was hot against our skin. We swam and then we kissed some more.
‘You know, I’m happy they hired you,’ he said and pulled his face away from mine. It was a surprise.’
‘A surprise?’
‘Have you decided what you’ll do when the office closes? You can’t stay here.’ He studied my face the same way he had studied the room. ‘Oh, you didn’t know.’
The company was on its last legs, Bill explained. Most of the staff had been made redundant before I arrived. He was hanging around for some extra money before he went travelling.
Bill left before midday. I guessed Linda would return around 1 pm and she did.
‘Hello stranger,’ she said. I was lying on the sun lounger, drenched in sweat. ‘Would you mind helping me unload the trunk? I struck gold at the garden store.’
‘Sure.’ I was glad to see her.
The trunk was full of strips of bamboo, different types of rope and a lever mechanism. Linda passed a bundle to me, then I carried the bundle inside the villa. Once the job was done, we stood in the kitchen and drank lemonade.
‘I’m making a cage.’
‘You’re what?’
‘A cage. For the white cat. It won’t know what hit it.’
She planned to build the cage by weaving the bamboo together like a basket. I helped her cut the wood into identical lengths and collected some of the dead fronds from the palm trees to camouflage it. She screwed the lever mechanism onto the outside of the villa, next to the swimming pool.
‘All you’ve got to do is lie on a sun lounger. Put one hand on the rope, the other hand on a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and wait for the cat to fall into the trap,’ she said and demonstrated the technique.
&
nbsp; ‘Wow, it works.’
‘Of course it does.’
Linda manned the cage for a few hours each day. When I came home late from work, she would leave potato chips and a can of beer for me to take over on the lounger. It was relaxing to sit by the pool and rest.
I considered telling Bill about the cage but I knew he wouldn’t understand. We went for lunch together a couple of times after he stayed over. He talked a lot about his upcoming travels.
One night, Linda waited for me by the pool until I got home. She was wearing a large sun hat and looked happy.
‘We did it!’ She jumped up and handed me a glass of wine.
I looked up to where the cage should have been hanging from its rope, but the cage was gone.
‘We did it?’
‘Yes, ma’am. That nasty son of a bitch kept wriggling and hissing but I took care of it.’
She hadn’t been able to shoot it with the harpoon. Instead she put the cat in a potato sack and fastened it with a seat belt on the passenger seat. She drove for an hour along the highway and into the desert. When there were no more buildings in sight, she threw the potato sack out of the door and drove away as fast as she could.
‘See, I am an animal person,’ she said. Deep red scratches covered her arms and legs. Her whole body smelt of antiseptic and sun cream.
‘Yes, you are.’
My last day in the office was uneventful. The managing director walked past my desk a few times and counted the computers, desks and chairs. I had no reason to say goodbye to Bill so I snuck out while he was at lunch and took a bus home.
There was a note on the door of the pool house: Gone away for a week. Eggs in the fridge, feel free to eat them or they’ll go bad. Clicker on the breakfast bar. Enjoy! Linda x
I wondered where she might have gone. I tried to imagine her in an airport, wheeling her suitcase through the departure hall in her denim cut-offs. Or sitting on a plane, eating a bag of nuts.
A girl who worked as cabin crew once told me they keep a special blanket on board every flight, in case someone dies. The body is covered by the blanket and left buckled in its seat, so passengers won’t be disturbed by the sight of a dead man or woman being carried down the aisle.
I hoped Linda wouldn’t die on her flight. Villa Aloha felt strange without her. I went to the kitchen and ate some eggs. Then I took one of her beers out to the pool and waited until dark to swim.
The worst of the summer temperatures were over now. The heat had started to break. As I swam, a breeze floated across the garden and the shadows of the palm tree fronds twinkled across the water, like fingers on a piano.
That’s when I saw it. Its pink sores shone under the moonlight. It had a missing eye and a missing ear too. Its white fur looked wet.
I swam towards it and let out a miaow, but it didn’t miaow back. It looked tired. The cat laid down on the grass next to the pool and seemed to fall asleep. As if it had walked for miles across the desert, to rest its legs, to swim.
TIM ETCHELLS
MAXINE
In the year of Asbestos, country of Endland (sic), Maxine gets a job to read words to a blind man called Casper, what lives alone outside the peripheral ring-road, in a district beyond all forces of yuppification.
Maxine don’t know too much bout ‘geo-demographic dynamics’ etc that is talked about on TV but she knows very well that a powerful permanent hex-ring of dog shit, broke glass and partly crushed up Strongbow cans is keeping the Stasis in that neighbourhood.
On her journey that morning by olde tram she chews gum forever, her jaw a machinery, eyes bright. Kids in prams nearby look from M to their mothers what have ‘long since forgotten how to cry’ ©. Tram passes through the city (S______). Getting off at the stop right near Casper’s place M. takes the gum out + sticks it to a poster for some new Bangla movie, kneading residue deep in the pixelated faces of stars, their transfigured appearance what she hopes will be an omen for the day. Something has to change.
Casper’s place, a shithole on 33rd floor.
As a startup for reading he asks Maxine to take 3 chapters from a closed-down airport novel called A Romance of Sadie. The book is just a turgid paste of words that knots up in her brain and mouth and M. finds it boring, wishing there was something less predictable – a story about robots and consciousness, a story about a new kind of sunlight – anything but reading porn to old blokes.
When the reading is all done Casper pays her (£4.50 the hour) and she goes home.
Other jobs of Maxine involve reading to:
– hyperactive children
– persons/animals in a coma
– voice recognition software
– dying persons/animals
– prisoners
– the dead
etc
One night there is a bombing in centre of town. Front of shops are hanging all off again and main entrance of the shopping mall is a cliché debris of twisted metal, filthy trashed consumer items and limbs/body parts all motherfuckered into dust. Pundits arrive and set up to start filming segments, rearranging debris and other aspects of the carnage. All around taxis and private cars double-up as improvised ambulances, every single bystander a temporary trauma nurse, every driver an unqualified maniac of urgency, every victim screaming blood out all over upholstery and no one knows what’s on the radio.
On the pavement near the bomb scene, a spray paint graffiti makes a promise or prediction that nobody reads: the thoughts of the living replaced with those of the dead.
Rescue workers are going back and forth w the wounded, shaking their heads at the dead deceased that lie carelessly anywhere. All the while sniffer dogs and assorted looters emboldened by breakdown of lawlessness freely walk the rubble, attentive to strange vibrations from down below fallen masonry and looking for stuff to ‘purloin’.
The air in all directions is ‘alive with distant sirens’ when Maxine gets there to scene of explosion – reporting for reading duties. A Doctor on all day and all night shift sends her Immediately to the commandeered Gymnasium of a nearby school what has been turned into a temporary hospital/morgue. The whole place is stuffed with the wounded/dead pulled out and then carried from their wannabe graves under the waste-scape that used to be Primark or possibly Lidl, no one seems to remember or care.
Later, in the Hillsborough classroom with a frieze done by kids depicting the naïve evolution of quadrupeds, Maxine cleans wounds with Amateur knowledge and bulk-buy disinfectant, comforting persons in distress and isolating those in danger to others or themselves. When electric power predictably fails she wanders in the Great Hall and reads in whispers by candlelight to those wounded still capable of listening.
She reads from her favourite stories like Kick-Boxer by Andrej Rublev and Corrosive Surface of a Pessimist Malefactor by Samira Shapiro Sustenance. She reads from A History of Starvation and Advent Adventures of the Anal Adventurers #5. She reads from Soil Stealers and Full Power Harry Goes Back Underwater in London & Paris. She reads from Long Tuesday and A Manual for the Strict Correction of Boys (Revised Edition).
In half-light of the hall people are dying, wounds bleeding out all about, as the poets say, and ‘ketchup all over the screen’ ©. Some of the dying have real faces, others just faces from AI. M. tries her best to focus on real ones but sometimes gets confused. Over time the AI gets easier to spot cos those figures in particular seem to lose interest in her reading the more it goes on – their composite faces a mesh of glitch inattention, eyes wandering, artefacting earnestness, then wandering again.
As the night wears down further to the bones M. finds herself with a small group of badly injured schoolgirls, their bodies hidden deep down under swaddling of bandages. She reads from All New Nature Boy, Sally Knew Best, Blunt Instrument and Peter Leper Jones. She reads from Hirashima!, Forgotten Moments and Gogolo Ultima Gogolo Poveraa. She reads and reads until the dawn light is creeping in around her unannounced and all the wounded and all the dead and all the murals what th
e schoolkids have drawn up there on the wall and everything is all touched by the very 1st and very fine and very golden rays of early mourning sun.
After the episode with the bombing there is a global slowdown and in accordance all around Endland (sic) things get slower and slower. Cars go slow on the roads, people shuffle slow and then slower on pavements and everyone – human and animal – takes a long time to make decisions about anything or do anything at all.
Scientists of Endland mount a huge competition to see what the cause and solution to the slowdown is, with New Universities and olden think-tanks etc competing to demonstrate they profound understanding and business acumen. But on the day comes to announce winner of the competition it is rapidly uncovered that there has been a terrible fraud and the ‘Prise Money’ stolen slowly cent by cent and siphoned/sent off to the Canary Islands in a unreachable Offshore Account.
For reasons that make no sense Maxine is selected to investigate the fraud. She has to journey to another city where she is given lodging in a squatted shop unit with some guys that speak only English and who are apparently running a startup sweatshop to assemble illegal umbrellas. Maxine takes a mattress in the disconnecting corridor but can’t sleep after work at the Fraud Squad cos the constant hammering, bending of metal and sweating of fabric. At intervals above the din come squeals of delight by the children (of the guys), who are from time to time sent outside for random testing of the umbrellas in the test-rain that falls from a hose-pipe, each test session a metaphysical whirlwind of childish unruly footwork, splashing and twirling in all directionz and all of it is watched by Maxine as she peeps out of a spy hole in her ‘living space’ while the kids, unaware of any audience, move across the concrete of the forecourt like a cut-price 3rd-rate Gene Kelly routine badly motion-captured by drunks.
Best British Short Stories 2020 Page 16
