Chapter 18 Cat Camera
Cat Camera
We are moving slowly along a wall, the camera swinging from side to side. This is our street; I recognize the backs of a few houses.
A washing line, its bed sheets sailing in the morning breeze, then a garden dotted with raised beds, protected with gossamer bird-proof netting.
We reach the next garden and catch sight of a human. We are only a few houses down from mine.
We stop, sit, watch. It is a man in a sports cap, back to us, in gym gear.
He is eating at a garden table, behind him the most enormous architectural glass extension I have ever seen.
We rise and move closer. He is eating scrambled eggs straight out of a small Tupperware container that is raised so close to his mouth that he barely needs to fork it in, his face still partially obscured.
His back door is open. We plop effortlessly down onto his grassy lawn, and I scrub forward until Blue does the inevitable and enters the house.
We slip past the distracted homeowner, and the renovation rolls out before us, breathtakingly airy and light, the garden somehow seeming to mesh seamlessly into the vast glass back of the house.
The footprint of this house is very similar to my own, though mine does not, of course, have this architectural wonder of an extension.
Blue scampers behind the kitchen island and, once safe, turns back to look out at the man.
Then I see, with a sudden bump of adrenaline, that the man on the terrace is Matt.
I sit up fast, Blue looking over at me with mild displeasure. Back on the screen I see Matt’s house, only four doors along from me—the house I walked him to with the pram—not his renovation site a few streets away.
Wait. Did Matt send me that threatening text?
No, it can’t have been. I check the time stamp; I’ve seen him since this was recorded, and he seemed fine; he even asked me out for coffee again.
Onscreen it is morning, a few hours before I met him near his second house. Matt has been to the gym, his T-shirt damp under the arms and on the chest, his skin glistening, his hair half-hidden under a cap.
He looks good—I instantly get a kick of self-admonishment, the fact that I shouldn’t be watching this beyond evident. I should fast-forward and focus on who it was who saw Blue’s collar and sent me that message.
I pause. Matt’s face is frozen on the screen. My fingers move to scrub the recording on, but instead I press play.
The camera swoops, with dronelike ease, revealing the glass extension, its jutting, unexpected angles, its experimental form.
I recall Matt saying he designed it himself, and if he’d invited me in that first day we met, I know now that the impact of it would have literally stopped me in my tracks.
Without a doubt, this house is a lot more expensive than mine.
Blue scans the kitchen: a large, family-friendly double fridge; expensive, luxury cooking appliances; a mixer for making all those cupcakes with his child when she gets old enough; a steamer to get in those healthy vegetables; a state-of-the-art sound system that will no doubt pump out “Bluey” and “Baby Shark” before too long, where it once no doubt played Radiohead and Eno.
But then something snags in my mind. This kitchen is immaculate. There’s no mess here, and, more to the point, no actual baby paraphernalia, and no baby or evidence of a mother on maternity leave, just beautifully clean surfaces…not a sterilizer or bottle rack in sight.
There is actually no evidence of a family except my own imaginings of one. I look again: a fully stocked wine cooler, and inside, a raft of expensive Champagne bottles: the pop of yellow of Veuve Clicquot, the signature green-gold shield on Dom Pérignon.
The order here is breathtaking: lined up on the counter, beside a gleaming coffee-shop-grade coffee machine, a full array of syrups, and biscuits stacked artfully in matching glass jars, like a sweet shop, stormy swirls of Carrara marble running behind it all.
If this is what his current house looks like, I can’t imagine what his renovation will end up looking like.
We slink along the skirting, careful to avoid detection as we skip up the three steps into the hallway and safely out of the homeowner’s view.
The hallway’s wooden floorboards look recently laid, their finish Scandinavian in style.
On the antique wooden hall table, tall, lollipop-type dried flowers rest in a rough-hewn ceramic vase, beside that a large vine-tomato-scented candle from a well-known Spanish designer, and next to it a small stack of mail.
By the front door, six sparsely populated hallway hooks hold only one, distinctly male, coat and an umbrella.
I stop the video and lean in to the screen.
One coat?
I know it’s summer, but one coat is a little odd. No wife’s coat. And now that I think about it, no pram clogging up this whole beautiful aesthetic. Where is his family?
Is he divorced, too?
They’re probably just out—that would explain the absence of people, coats, and pram. They’re probably just out.
I press play again.
The stairs leading up into the house are unencumbered with shoes, or wet-wipe packets, the banisters free of draped sunhats and hastily whipped-off pram blankets. Instead, it looks recently hoovered, a chic jute runner tidily leading up into the rest of his quiet house.
An odd feeling comes over me. I don’t think they are out. I don’t think Matt has a wife, or a baby.
But I saw his baby. Didn’t I?
I draw back as we look up to see a chandelier of origami birds dangling: the birds, like crystals, jostle slightly in the warm breeze blowing in from the open back door.
The fixtures in here are intricate, beautiful, and expensive, almost like in a trendy hotel lobby rather than the home of a young parent. Matt’s house is not what I imagined, at all.
Instead of the newborn bomb site I expected—what I remember heart-achingly from my friends’ early-parenting days, with their puree-smeared upholstery, unexpected and uncategorizable mess, the used plates of half-eaten toast, and babyproofed furniture—I am greeted by one of the most immaculate homes I have ever seen.
I recall friends, who had been stylish and on top of life pre-baby, forced unwillingly into a chaotic world of mess and uncertainty.
We enter the sitting room. It is white: white walls, white rug, and a white sofa.
I pause the video again and stare at it.
There’s not a stain on it. And the whole white room is spotless.
This is not a baby’s house. It can’t be. Who is this man, and whose baby did he have?
I restart the video.
We approach a low glass coffee table that sits, like an island, at the white rug’s center. Blue rises and rubs his chin on the glass table’s angled edge. Books are stacked artfully on the table’s surface. The glass is clear and unsmudged, the books in mint condition.
The table’s angled edges are lethal and at exact baby height. Sharp edges are everywhere in this room, everywhere in this house.
We glide farther into the room. It is sparsely minimal, no toys, knickknacks, signs of any other people living here.
There’s a chance Matt and his partner might have bought all this sharp, white furniture pre-baby, but how long pre-baby?
Because the house looks newly decorated.
I try to remember what Matt told me, but I realize he didn’t really tell me much; I just enjoyed his charm and the ease of the conversation.
I scrub farther forward; we trot double speed up his jute-lined stairs and peep into a bedroom.
There is no one there: a window open, the breeze ruffling the blind, a desk with the standard large Mac desktop. It is a home office: on its walls hang large, framed photographs of architectural buildings that loom down at us.
I scrub forward, my curiosity piqued to the point of irritation. My frown deepens: another spare room. A bed, neatly made, a chair, a bedside table, and lamp. Nothing else.
I scrub again, as we zip up another flight of stairs, to the final, and largest, bedroom.
Light pours into the sparse, wood-floored room from the two large windows, the linen blinds fluttering.
We scan the space: a double bed, covered in pastel-hued sheets and pillowcases. The room is pale, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the bed housing artful terra-cotta and ceramic pots.
Only one side of the bed seems to be in use, with one bedside table with books, a clock, a neat charger tray, Tylenol, and a quarter-full glass of water. The other nightstand holds only a lamp.
One wardrobe. One functioning nightstand. No baby. And a man eager to meet for coffee.
But we do not stop to investigate further. In two bounds, we are up on the shelves and then the windowsill, dipping under the blind, and breaking out onto the sun-soaked roof ledge that connects all of the houses on our street.
There is no crib in Matt’s house.
Matt must live alone.
My rational mind says that they must be divorced, separated, the mother and child living elsewhere, but I can’t help but think there is something slightly off here.
I force myself to stop. Matt’s wife and baby are not locked away somewhere in this house, as he sits outside eating scrambled eggs. My thought spiral is now getting ridiculous.
We glide along the ledge, the drop beside us a twenty-five-foot fall straight onto wrought-iron fencing, tarmac, or the parked cars beneath.
Up here, windows flash past—other lives stored away inside.
A gull passes low over the void beside us, drawing our eye, and the London skyline bursts into view through the simmering summer-heat haze.