‘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.
‘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.