Day 22
Saturday March 13, 2021
Mark:
Our first 13th of the month. Do bad things happen on days of 13? I don’t even believe that Friday stuff, but I can’t help but have a little muse first thing this morning.
If anything, today is a bit of a lucky day. It’s the first day we feel really in any way settled in our new place. All the moving has been done and a bit part of what we think is the first really big part of organisation and cleaning. Sarah’s never really seen this as a permanent place for her, so it’s fair to say maintenance hasn’t quite been top of the agenda so we’ve had it at the top of ours. But today, for the first time, we feel like we have something of our own space. Our idea is to just take that absolute relief at having landed somewhere and do very little. Maybe a little bass and music practice, but very much as and when the time and mood takes us. If we’re to be totally honest with ourselves and you, we fully intend to spend today doing absolutely nothing but chilling and thinking nice things.
With those thoughts and our very newly discovered domestic wonderfulness, we settle down for a simple lunch of soup and bread using the desk just outside the kitchen and next to the bathroom as we haven’t quite got round to fixing proper dining arrangements in here yet. But it all still feels fantastic. It’s a beautiful practically central London day and the vibe is untouchable. What could possibly go wrong?
There’s a little sudden furry flurry of excitement as Sarah comes running through to retrieve Ron, her younger cat who has just run into the bathroom. When that happens, it can only mean one thing. Ron has gone under the bathtub. It’s a frustrating process for Sarah to have to get him out and once she does, she says that the cat is possibly just feeling a little unsettled at having new people in the place. She often seeks refuge under the bathtub, Sarah explains, but she’s apparently been doing it a little more than usual lately.
So Sarah says that it would be good if we could be extra vigilant for now and leave the bathroom door closed at all times. At least just for now until Ron settles down and hopefully starts to feel a little more comfortable with us. No problem. With that, Sarah goes back into the bathroom, emerges a few minutes later, and then leaves, without closing the door. Well, why should she automatically think that? It’s a brand new thing, right? I kinda notice the door’s been left open but I don’t really think too much of it. I’ll close it. Yes I will. In a minute. In a minute, I’ll get up and close it. No, really, I will. About two minutes later, Ron comes running back towards us and goes, yep, you’ve guessed it, into the bathroom.
Balls. I knew I should have shut that door already. I really don’t want Sarah to know the door’s already been left open long enough for the cat to get back in there. And kinda on our (my) watch. Alright, it wasn’t me who left it open, but I’ve been here with an open door all this time. All two minutes of it, at least a minute of which the door should have been shut. I know Sarah wouldn’t be too mad at this having happened so soon after it became a brand new thing. She might make a little thing of it like, ‘Guys, what did we all just agree?’ and fair enough. But I’d rather avoid even that, just deal with this quietly and quickly, and then make sure we don’t forget again.
So I go into the bathroom, and there Ron is, faithfully under the bathtub, just two red eyes hovering and staring at me with benign malevolence in the darkness. Yes, she has red eyes. The eyes of the other one are yellow. That’s how you tell these two almost identical white cats apart. I reach in with my hand trying not to scare her, but still trying to make her uncomfortable enough to run out. With my own cat Toffee, who I’ve now sadly left behind with Jenn at the old house, the faintest of movement inside a hiding place is enough to have her scurrying out in fright. Ron is clearly made of sterner stuff and knows she’s perfectly safe in there thankyou very much. I reach further and further in, but she just isn’t having it. She’s now gone deep and I’m almost lying on my belly trying to reach in. There’s a bunch of semi damp rags under here and, as I reach for Ron with my left and arm, reaching round a bathtub support to do so, I inadvertently move the rags away with my elbow. I’ll worry about that later. I should be worried about that now. Very worried.
Seeing something I haven’t, and very much realising something quite significant has happened that I have no clue of, Ron suddenly makes a dart for it. Great. She’s decided to come out. She disappears behind the support I was just reaching around and that’s it. She doesn’t emerge from behind the support. She just disappears. Down, it seemed like. Did I see that? Did she just suddenly lurch downwards? Surely not. It happened so quickly it doesn’t seem possible. Still not massively overly concerned, I peer in, up to and around the support pole. There’s no cat. She’s simply ceased to be. Just like that. Oh no no no no no. In a split second I realise what’s just happened and how and why. Those rags. They were stuffed into a hole in the floor. That cat, well, she’s gone through it. And is now, very most likely, on her way into the depths of this building. It’s one or two hundred years old and has been knocked all different kinds of ways into different apartments over a substantial amount of years. The walls and floors in between are nothing but impenetrable labyrinths, unseen by human eyes in generations. And I’ve just seen Sarah’s cat, no, I’ve just helped send Sarah’s cat, jump into that black void from which escape or retrieval may well be impossible. Did I mention today was the 13th? Oh balls.
There’s nothing for it now but to tell Sarah as soon as possible what’s happened. When I tell her, the look of shock and panic on her face is total. I don’t know it yet, but this has long been one of her worst fears and now it’s happened. Not yet having really taken it in and not yet fully ready to be rational either, she refuses to believe I didn’t do anything intentionally. I of course had no idea the rags hid a hole but, at this immediately early stage, she’s somewhat hysterical and convinced I pulled them out myself, exposing the hole and allowing the cat to go through it. She does the hand thing and says she can’t talk to me now but I’m not leaving it like this and insist that she believes my truth. Once she’s had a frantic look under the bath for herself, she sees how this actually happened. At the same time I’m also telling her I’m sorry but I didn’t want her to know the door had been left open just two minutes after a very specific conversation about keeping it closed at all times. This is all happening so quickly and is so bewildering. Less than five minutes ago all was bliss and fluff. And now we’re in this total chaos and rage panic. With that in mind I don’t add that it was Sarah herself who really left the door open almost the instant she’d insisted on keeping it closed. Somehow I really don’t think that would help matters right now. Having composed herself a little, but still very clearly shaken, Sarah tells us that this happened to another cat in here five or six years ago. She says that he was gone for two weeks and came back black. ‘That’s hundreds of years of tunnels and who knows what down there,’ she says. Yeah. The reality of that is starting to hit both myself and Maja. ‘Guys,’ she says sadly, pleadingly. ‘Please, you can’t be here right now. I think it’s more likely Ron will come back if it’s just me here. Can you just go to your room.’ Still totally stunned by this wrecking ball that’s crashed into our world, we comply without thought or hesitation. But as soon as we’re there, we look at each other with a realisation which I give voice to. ‘We’ve just been sent to our room.’ Maja nods sadly. ‘This is really not good,’ I continue. ‘That cat could actually die. It might already be dead.’ I’m thinking of so many scenarios right now, some of which I mention, others I don’t. She might never be able to find her way out and could starve to death in there with no-one even knowing. Essentially an indoor cat, she could possibly find her way outside. If she does that, she’ll have little to no idea of how to behave in this car filled central London area. If she survives that gauntlet, I don’t see how she finds her way back to the apartment. Even if she does somehow find her way back, it’s not like she’s going to buzz the downstairs intercom. She has no idea what number apartment she lives in. No. Sarah’s baby, the so-called light of her life, is gone. Disappeared, dead, or at serious risk of death, or with little chance of finding her way back if she somehow doesn’t get/ hasn’t already been killed. I might as well say it now. It will be me that will have killed/ lost her. Happy Saturday 13th.
Where the hell do we go from this? My first thought is that we’re going to be needing Maja’s insurance policy already. After just four days. How can we carry on living here if the cat doesn’t come back? I don’t see how it could be possible. But even if she does come back, that might not be until tomorrow. Or two days, three days, a week, more. How tense will the atmosphere be like in here all that time? No. I just don’t see it.
It’s with all those thoughts swirling round my head that Sarah comes knocking, enters the room and says, ‘Guys, I don’t want you drinking in here anymore. I just don’t.’ Then she leaves. That does it for me. It might seem trivial, but if she’d said at the outset no drinking in the place at all, fine. We could have taken or left it, and we would have taken it. But to let us in and impose a rule like that now, after one incident, I’m really not happy about that. Apart from anything else, what house rule is she going to spring on us next? And after that? My immediate thought is that I suddenly don’t want to live here anymore and I say so. Let’s just move back to the house, however horrible that might be. At least it would be our horrible. Maja says we shouldn’t make any decisions like that in the heat of this moment and she’s totally right. Above everything, we just have to get out to clear our minds for a bit and make sense of all this. Sarah couldn’t agree more that we shouldn’t be here right now. But before we leave, she makes a point of telling us that she’s spoken to a good friend and neighbour about this and has come to realise that it wasn’t my fault at all, that she should have told us about the hole being there, and she totally accepts I exposed it completely accidentally. She also apologises for coming slamming down on the non drinking rule, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I was just lashing out and looking for things to blame, but this is your place and of course you can do what you want.’ Lovely to hear and an equilibrium of sorts has returned. But none of that changes the fact that Ron is still gone and probably not coming back. We wish her luck and leave.
Out on the street, Maja says, ‘Wow. Our first crisis.’ Yes, no other way to put it. It very much is. We walk slowly to Hampstead Heath, all the while trying to take it in but we just can’t. I just say over and over again, ‘I’ve killed her cat.’ I don’t see any way back from this. We talk about the prospect of moving back to the house, which would mean moving back in to live with Jenn which Maja is not keen on at all. The two of them did not speak a word to each other all the time Maja was there and she does not want to return to that atmosphere. Option two is staying where we are and dealing with whatever fall-out that entails. Not a good secondary option at all. We really, truly, do not know what to do about this. The one thing we’re lucky about, Ha! Lucky?, is that the weather is nice. This is Corona, lockdown London. Once you leave the house, you’re outside and that’s it. If it was raining or cold, there would be nowhere to go and have a sit-down in. No cafe, bar or library. Nothing. We probably would have ended up riding the bus or tube just to get out of the weather, but thankfully we don’t have to think about that. Instead, we have the wonderful Hampstead Heath to roam about on. I’ve never enjoyed being here less. But there’s no escape. No matter where we go, nothing can change the situation or the crisis clouds that have now gathered all around us.
We walk around like this for four hours, never quite leaving our dazed, bewildered, slightly scared state. It’s around the four hour mark that Maja says, ‘I think it’s time to go home.’ Home? I suppose it is, but for how long? With foreboding, we make our way back, each step taking us closer to whatever the hell we’re going to find upon opening the door. We arrive at the street and I pull Maja back for a few pep talk words. ‘We’re about to walk into the fire,’ I say. ‘We go in there together, and face whatever we come up against together.’ She nods with defiance. We’re going to front up to this and we’re going to do it now. We pause for a few seconds to individually steel ourselves and then turn and deliberately walk towards a world of doubt, confusion and possible retribution. Chaos, grief, anger? We have no idea what we’ll be met with. But we’re about to put ourselves right in the middle of it all and accept whatever comes our way and whatever that could mean. Our minds are blank. We have no idea of any of this so can’t even see a way to the immediate future, that future being just seconds away and behind one single door. We enter the apartment block and walk up the stairs, heads held high but stomachs brought to a ridiculous low. This is climbing over the top of the trenches territory. We’re in no-man’s land now and any moment the machine guns are going to open up. Will we make it through? At the front door I turn the key and look at Maja. ‘This is it. Let’s go.’
We enter the apartment and it explodes.
‘Guys, guys, did you get my message?’ We didn’t but this is not at all what we expected. Sarah’s happy, jubilant even, that we’re back. She runs out of the main room and calls to us from the end of the corridor. ‘She came back. She came back.’ She’s almost crying with relief as she says the words. ‘Half an hour ago. I sent you a message to tell you. Oh I love you guys. You must have really been through it.’ Oh, we have. Her relief shoots through us like a wave of lasers and we run to her to be enveloped in the hugest of group hugs. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. It’s over, it’s over.’ From what we can gather, and no-one can be really certain anyway, Ron never went very far into the hole and so the nightmare scenario of her becoming irretrievably lost in the labyrinth of Victorian architecture never happened. And when she was ready, she just jumped back out again and into the arms of a disbelieving, hysterically jubilant Sarah who is now full of joy and how wonderful she thinks the two of us are all over again. In short, it’s like the whole episode of horribleness ever happened. But me and Maja look at each other and we know. We’ve been seriously tested today. We’ve stared at the fire, held hands and walked, together, right into it. And here we are on the other side. All happy again and harmony in the apartment once more restored. Oh, and while we were out, Sarah and a friend did the underside of the bath and plugged the hole up properly with tiles. So, no more hole, and no more mystery damp rags under the bath hiding a mystery in the hope no-one would one day push them aside while a cat was under there.
