After a look at me Alice sat down on her heels and made the same noise. The cat immediately stopped in its tracks and looked at her. She made the noise again and the cat turned, glanced down the street for no apparent reason, and then confidently made its way up the steps to weave in and out of her legs.
“That is truly amazing,” I said. “He is not a friendly cat.”
She took the cat in her arms and stood up.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. The cat sat up against her chest, looking around benignly. I reached out to rub its nose and felt the warm vibration of a purr. The two of us made a fuss of him for a few moments, and then she put him down. She replaced her helmet, climbed on her bike, and then, with a wave, set off.
Back in the flat I tidied away the boxes, anal-retentive that I am, before settling down to immerse myself in the new machine. On impulse I called Nancy, to let her know the system had finally arrived.
I got one of her assistants instead. She didn’t put me on hold, and I heard Nancy say “Tell him I’ll call him hack” in the background. I said good-bye to Trish with fairly good grace, trying not to mind.
Voice recognition software hadn’t been included, it turned out, nor anything to put in the CD-ROM drive. The telecommunications functions wouldn’t work without an expensive add-on, which Callhaven didn’t expect for four to six weeks. Apart from that, it was great.
Nancy cooked that evening. We tended to take it in turns, though she was much better at it than me. Nancy is good at most things. She’s accomplished.
There’s a lot of infighting in the world of Personnel, it would appear, and Nancy was in feisty form that evening, having outmaneuvered some coworker. I drank a glass of red wine and leaned against the counter while she whirled ingredients around. She told me about her day, and I listened and laughed. I didn’t tell her much about mine, only that it had gone okay. Her threshold for hearing about the world of freelance graphic design was pretty low. She’d listen with relatively good grace if I really had to get something out of my system, but she didn’t understand it and didn’t seem to want to. No reason why she should, of course. I didn’t mention the new computer sitting on my desk, and neither did she.
Dinner was very good. It was chicken, but she’d done something intriguing to it with spices. I ate as much as I could, but there was a little left. I tried to get her to finish it, but she wouldn’t. I reassured her that she hadn’t eaten too much, in the way that sometimes seemed to help, but her mood dipped and she didn’t have any dessert. I steered her toward the sofa and took the stuff out to wash up and make some coffee.
While I was standing at the sink, scrubbing the plates and thinking vaguely about the mountain of things I had to do the next day, I noticed a cat sitting on a wall across the street. It was a sort of very dark brown color, almost black, and I hadn’t seen it before. It was crouched down, watching a twittering bird with that catty concentration that combines complete attention with the sense that they might at any moment break off and wash their foot instead. The bird eventually fluttered chaotically off and the cat watched it for a moment before sitting upright, as if drawing a line under that particular diversion.
Then the cat’s head turned, and it looked straight at me. It was a good twenty yards away, but I could see its eyes very clearly. It kept looking, and after a while I laughed, slightly taken aback. I even looked away for a moment, but when I looked back it was still there, still looking.
The kettle boiled and I turned to tip water into a couple of mugs of Nescafé. When I glanced out of the window on the way out of the kitchen the cat was gone.
Nancy wasn’t in the lounge when I got there, so I settled on the sofa and lit a cigarette. After about five minutes the toilet flushed upstairs, and I sighed.
My reassurances hadn’t done any good at all.
A couple of days came and went, with the usual flurry of deadlines and redrafts. I went to a social evening at Nancy’s office and spent a few hours being ignored and patronized by her power-dressed colleagues, while she stood and sparkled in the center. I messed up a print job and had to cover the cost of doing it again. Good things happened, too, I guess, but it’s the others that stick in your mind.
One afternoon the buzzer went and I wandered absentmindedly downstairs to get the door. As I opened it I saw a flick of brown hair and saw that it was Alice.
“Hello there,” I said, strangely pleased.
“Hello yourself.” She smiled. “Got a parcel for you.” I took it and looked at the label. Color proofs from the repro house. Yawn. She must have been looking at my face, because she laughed. “Nothing very exciting, then.”
“Hardly.” After I’d signed the delivery note, I looked up at her. She was still smiling, I think, though it was difficult to tell. Her face looked as if it always was.
“Well,” she said, “I can either go straight to Peckham to pick up something else that’s dull, or you can tell me about the telecommunications features.”
Very surprised, I stared at her for a moment, then stepped back to let her in.
“Bastards,” she said indignantly when I told her about the things that hadn’t been shipped with the machine, and she looked genuinely annoyed. I told her about the telecoms stuff anyway, as we sat on the sofa and drank coffee. Mainly we just chatted, but not for very long, and when she got to the end of the road on her bike she turned and waved before turning the corner.
That night Nancy went to Sainsbury’s on the way home from work. I caught her eye as she unpacked the biscuits and brownies, potato chips and pastries, but she just stared back at me, and I looked away. She was having a hard time at work. Deflecting my gaze to the window, I noticed the dark cat was sitting on the wall opposite. It wasn’t doing much, simply peering vaguely this way and that, watching things I couldn’t see. It seemed to look up at the window for a moment, but then leapt down off the wall and wandered away down the street.
I cooked dinner and Nancy didn’t eat much, but she stayed in the kitchen when I went into the living room to finish off a job. When I made our cups of tea to drink in bed I noticed that the bin had been emptied, and the gray bag stood, neatly tied, to one side. When I nudged it with my foot it rustled, full of empty packets. Upstairs the bathroom door was pulled shut, and the key turned in the lock.
I saw Alice a few more times in the next few weeks. A couple of major jobs were reaching crisis point at the same time, and there seemed to be a semi-constant flurry of bikes coming up to the house. On three or four of those occasions it was Alice whom I saw when I opened the door.
Apart from one, when she had to turn straight around on pain of death, she came in for a coffee each time. We’d chat about this and that, and when the voice recognition software finally arrived I showed her how it worked. I had a rip-off copy, from a friend who’d sourced it from the States. You had to do an impersonation of an American accent to get the machine to understand anything you said, and my attempts to do so made Alice laugh a lot. Which is curious, because it made Nancy merely sniff and ask me whether I’d put the new computer on the insurance.
Nancy was having a bit of a hard time, those couple of weeks. Her so-called boss was dumping more and more responsibility onto her while stalwartly refusing to give her more credit. Nancy’s world was very real to her, and she relentlessly kept me up to date on it: the doings of her boss were more familiar to me by then than the activities of most of my friends. She got her company car upgraded, which was a nice thing. She screeched up to the house one evening in something small and red and sporty, and hollered up to the window. I scampered down and she took us hurtling around North London, driving with her customary verve and confidence. On impulse we stopped at an Italian restaurant we sometimes went to, and they miraculously had a table. Over coffee we took each other’s hands and said we loved one another, which we hadn’t done for a while.