Transgressions (31 page)

The first half of the garden jumped into ghostly focus: a frosted landscape, petrified, awesomely lovely. Except for one small flaw. That perfect snow was no longer virgin.

Across the center of the lawn was a set of deep little prints: delicate, precise, pawlike indentations. And running between each of them a splattered trail of dark stains.

She knew without looking any harder that it was blood.

twenty-one

T
he tracks petered out at the edge of the flower bed, as if the animal hadn’t had the stamina to make it to the cat flap.

She crept in low through the undergrowth, aware of the huge expanse of open garden behind her, feet and knees sinking into fresh snow. Somewhere here was Millie’s favorite spot, deep under the ceanothus bush and the holly, a place where in the hottest summer a cat could find shade. Now it offered total darkness, too dense even for the snow to penetrate. Darkness and cold.

“Millie . . .” she called softly. “Millie.”

The flashlight beam found the body first. She was sure the cat was dead from the way it was lying—not curled up to protect its own warmth but sprawled on its side, one leg stuck awkwardly out in front. It looked like the paw was hanging half off, one ear was badly mangled, and there was a sticky, matted quality to the fur behind the neck. But when she put out a hand to touch the body, it was warm, and the head jerked upward, as if in reflex to pain. “Oh, God, Millie. What happened to you?” The cat opened its mouth to tell her, but all that came out was a harsh, rattling breath, as if there were something in her lungs constricting the air supply.

She scooped up the limp body as gently as she could and maneuvered her way back onto the lawn.

The frost and the silence clung to them both. At the end of the garden she heard a sharp rustle. She whirled around, heart half out of her mouth with terror. The black tom flew toward the back wall, a streak of sable against the glowing white of the snow. In her arms Millie reared up, shaking and snarling, caught between pain and attack as the best form of defense. She held her tighter, waiting for the little body to collapse back into her arms.

Inside, she brought a towel from the linen closet and wrapped the animal carefully in its warm folds while she dialed an emergency number. A bleary voice answered: Mr. Vet, snug as a bug next to Mrs. Vet, a litter of roly-poly puppies asleep at the foot of their bed, no doubt.

She told it well: simple, clear, no cat lover’s hysteria or exaggeration. He started to take her more seriously when she described the rattle in the lungs.

“You’d better bring her in,” he said slightly breathlessly, as if he were already out of bed, pulling on his clothes with the phone to one ear. “Keep her warm, and don’t give her anything to drink. Just in case.”

H
e was waiting at the surgery door, the snow still on his boots. It felt like they were the only two people awake in the world. He let her in, then locked up again behind her. The place was freezing. The heating would take a while to catch up.

They went together into the consulting room. He laid the little body out on the table and examined her carefully. As he lifted the damaged leg, Millie let out a fierce yowl, flinching away from him. “Sorry, girl, sorry, take it easy. I’ll try not to hurt you again.” He used his right hand to hold her down while his left gently examined the fur behind her neck.

She studied his face; there was a crust of sleep at the corner of one eye. Did loving animals make you better with human beings? Probably not.

“Can you help keep her down while I listen to her lungs?” he said, pulling out a stethoscope. She held her gingerly, trying to judge which parts would hurt least, but on the table Millie wasn’t struggling anymore. “Does she get into a lot of fights?” He was frowning.

“Er . . . I don’t know. There’s a black tom who’s always around. They’ve had a couple of scraps. But—” She stopped.

“But what?”

She shook her head. His concentration went back to the cat. He listened to her chest, then put the stethoscope down and went again to the leg.

“Well, I can’t say for sure, but I think she may have been caught in some kind of trap. These wounds ’round the ear and the neck are pretty certainly fight wounds. But this paw has been half severed. It looks to me as if some sort of metal clamp has been on it.”

Metal clamp . . . She swallowed. “I . . . I’ve got this neighbor. . . . He . . . well, in the past he’s threatened her . . . says he doesn’t like cats in his garden.”

“And you think he could have done this?”

“I don’t know. Yes . . . maybe.”

He let out an angry breath. “Well, I suggest you get on to the RSPCA about him first thing tomorrow morning.”

Why not? Could be they’d do a better job than the police, she thought bitterly. Just as long as they didn’t send a woman officer.

“Is she . . . is she going to be all right?”

“Well, the leg is going to be a mess for a while, but I can’t detect any internal damage. I don’t think she’s punctured the lung. I suspect what happened is she got scared, had a vomit reaction, then swallowed it back the wrong way. I’m pretty certain that’s the constriction you could hear. Whatever attacked her she managed to fight off. I’ll give her a sedative and sew up that leg, then keep her in tonight for observation and do a couple more X-rays in the morning. Can you phone in tomorrow afternoon to check?”

“Of course.”

He put out a hand and massaged the cat gently under her chin. I bet he does that to all the ladies, she thought. “You’re a lucky girl,” he said softly. “You’re going to be fine.”

That makes two of us, she thought.

T
he house felt deathly quiet without Millie. From the cellar she got out her hammer, some nails, and the wooden back of an old picture frame. The noise probably woke half the neighborhood—it was only just after five—and it wasn’t exactly a professional job, but it worked. Nothing else was going to get through the cat flap till Millie came home.

She stared out at the lawn. The snow was a mess now, a blood trail, a deep set of cat prints and her own, clumsier ones. But not, as far as she could tell, anyone else’s. Whatever had been done to Millie, it hadn’t been done in her garden.

A trap. It was such a viciously corny piece of revenge, more befitting a bad movie than real life. Hit the family where it hurts. Boil the rabbit. But for all its melodrama it had worked. Millie
was
her family. She was all she had, and the idea of her with a foot half chewed off by steel jaws was exactly the kind of image she couldn’t handle: a combination of helplessness and pain, of being trapped in someone else’s fantasy of power.

First he steals my music, then he tries to rape me, then he mutilates my cat. That’s what you call attention, she thought. Or obsession. He loves me, he loves me not. . . . It reminded her of a joke about a woman being sexually assaulted by a gorilla. “I wouldn’t mind,” she says as she wakes up in a hospital bed, “only he doesn’t phone, doesn’t send flowers. . . .” She had laughed at the time. If only women
did
get off on rape. Then they really would have the boys by the short and curlies.

She locked the kitchen door and took the portable phone with her into the living room. She lit some candles and a fire and poured herself a large brandy. Stop thinking about him, she thought to herself, he wants you to be obsessed, too. That’s part of the pleasure, part of the power. So play him at his own game and forget him.

She picked up the TV remote and started zapping channels. Two were blank, one was a sports quiz, and the fourth was an archive collection of rock bands from the sixties, a decade when the world was black and white and there was revolution in the air. Or so the lyrics claimed. Hard to believe it now. She was too young to remember most of the bands the first time around, but those Carnaby Street–style suits and mop-tops were laughably reassuring. How could anyone have been threatened by those haircuts? Look at it all. Everything about the sixties was too close to the Formica fifties to have ever been taken seriously.

Or could it be that that was the secret of the past, that in retrospect it always seems more innocent than the present? She tried to imagine the England of the Black Death, of armies of flagellants, crusades, wars, and public disemboweling. How many women got raped and beaten then? It was probably a national pastime. Would the women have thought about it differently? Presumably something so prevalent can’t have been that traumatic? An unwanted prick would almost certainly have been less painful than a tooth abscess. And considerably less fatal. As a race we have gone soft on pain. When people’s lives were full of it, they must have learned to cope better. Anyway, the more suffering you notched up in this world the greater your chances were in the next. Lie back and think of heaven. More satisfying than England. Though might it not be even more satisfying to ram a red-hot poker up your assailant’s ass? In a world so familiar with pain they would have known a thing or two about punishment and revenge.

There you are again, she thought, back to
him,
giving him the pleasure of your obsession. Stop it. Stop it. She drained her glass and poured another. She took a long swig. The liquid warmed her more effectively than the central heating, but, then, the chill was more inside than out.

On the screen some pretty faces (there seemed to have been so many of them around at that time—interesting how their bodies look too skinny now, too boylike) gave way to cringingly youthful footage of the Rolling Stones. Jagger’s mouth yawned wide into the camera, a cheeky reminder of his posturing, fuck-you lust. They were playing a track she knew from a CD compilation, one of the early hits where their homage to R&B was so naked and so jubilant. “Under My Thumb”: an old-fashioned tale of boys behaving badly and assuming that the women got off on it. Maybe she should turn up the volume and let him hear it over the garden walls.

The sixties turned into a series of commercials for shampoo and new cars, then a rerun talk show on substance abuse. She snapped off the remote and, pouring herself more brandy, went for her own music instead.

The living room had no CD player (in the separation,
he
had gotten that), so she had to rely on vinyl. Even the feel of them was archaic now, clunky and clumsy compared with those silvery little spaceships of sound. But the choice was classic, a selection to match another set of TV archives dating from a world before Tom’s musical contempt had set out to persuade her that growing up was really growing away from the music of one’s youth into something more serious, more profound. She ran her fingers along yards of worn spines, each touch another summer, another late night, another affair. Easy come, easy go. How was it that what had once been so simple was now so hard? Maybe it was just practice after all. Practice and lifestyle. You don’t meet men unless you get out of the house, Elizabeth. Oh, I don’t know, she answered herself; if you spend enough time in your bedroom eventually they come to you. . . .

She went for happier times: Eddy Grant walking along a Caribbean beach but singing of Brixton. “Electric Avenue.” She’d been in her early twenties when this album came out. There was a love song on it that had made her toes curl, the rather cute lyrics saved by the lazy sex in his voice.

 

My heart does the tango
With every little move you make
I love you like a mango
Wish we can make it every day

Now it got her to her feet again, dancing her way into a new morning with an empty glass in her hand and the snow swirling outside.

By the time she turned the record over—how weird not to have all the tracks on the same side—she had finished the brandy bottle and was feeling considerably more mellow.

She lay down on the sofa and looked around the room. Since Tom left she hadn’t spent much time in here. There was something forlorn about the gaps where his furniture had been, and she hadn’t bothered to rearrange the leftovers. Had that chaise longue really been his? Her memory was that it had been her Barclaycard at the auction that weekend in Wales. It was a ridiculous spur-of-the-moment buy anyway. Too large to fit into the back of the car, so they’d had to travel back to London with it roped in, and the rear door open behind it. It had seemed funny at the time, the kind of thing that they were good at doing together, the kind of thing that separated them from the rest of the world. Or maybe it just meant they’d been happy then. Such a simple feeling, happiness. More like a lack of feeling really, an ordinariness, a sense of not being in pain.