Chapter 25 Cat Camera
Cat Camera
My own face fills the screen as I flick on the camera, the footage from earlier this morning.
It’s disconcerting, as unnerving as watching the sleepwalking footage, in many ways: my hair is as yet unbrushed, my pajamas baggy and unflattering, the angle of my face and intensity of my gaze not ideal, either. It’s not what I need to see after my drink with Matt.
I fast-forward until grass blurs the screen.
Suddenly we are up on the wall that runs along the back gardens. A whole other street of people. I try to follow his route, our route, as we bob and weave under branches, and over crops of climbing ivy.
On the right of the screen, I think I recognize what looks like the back of the shop at the end of our street, but then we are leaping down and through various broken fence panels until I have no idea where we have ended up.
We emerge into the back garden of a derelict building. Oil drums litter the ground and a ripped blue tarp covers an open rear section of the house.
Perhaps someone ran out of money for their refurbishment? I think of wheeler-dealer Greg and wonder if this is one of his.
But I am wrong. When we enter the kitchen, I see it has been burnt out, not renovated, sections of the kitchen and hallway black, the paintwork and wall bubbled and charred.
I don’t recall having seen a burnt-out building on any of the surrounding streets but there are a lot of houses around here, and for all I know the house could look pristine from the front.
Blue’s paws dip in shot, delicately hopping from one wobbling board to another as the floor drops away dramatically either side of us. We back up slowly, and find that beneath is nothing but rubble and rainwater.
I fast-forward out of the burnt house, and other buildings flash past, taller and grander than our street. Who are these people—what do they do to afford all this?
The glowing glass extensions here rise several floors up, mezzanines, balconies, giant artworks suspended over open multiuse areas.
I feel a yawn of need inside me, desire for these houses, these lives.
I fast-forward again, hoping for interaction or access to one of the showstopping houses. But then I find something even better.
We are high up on the roof, the sky wide open, the clouds pink and peach, across London’s skyline. In the far distance, the red blink of the lights atop Canary Wharf just visible.
We stare out at it all, our domain, the wind tousling the fur at the top of the screen. It looks so peaceful up here. Blue’s world is so peaceful.
Our view jerks up, a seagull, flying low. We watch it, then the camera dips to look over the roof parapet, down at the street below.
The view is sickening, three floors down to the pavement beneath, where a woman with an infant buggy passes by.
I wonder if it is Matt’s sister, Grace, dropping off Isla. But Isla’s buggy is pink, not green.
The street below looks familiar, but then they all do from this angle.
I pause the video and scan the cars on the street below, looking for one I might know. Then I spot something I recognize, an old cream-colored camper van under a tree, in the bottom right of the screen. I walk past it on the way to the shops. That’s Gleeston Road. Two streets away.
I press play and we continue our journey along the front of the top-floor windows of Gleeston Road.
In the first window, a fifty-year-old woman works at her desktop in an oppressively bright home office. She does not look up as we pass.
Two darkened windows go by, then a light: a top-floor playroom, toddler twins sitting cross-legged on a ladybird rug watching a Disney movie, mesmerized, their young mum asleep on a beanbag between them.
I recognize her, having seen her several times making her daily trek to the park with her heavy-looking double buggy.
No wonder she’s tired. I’m tired just getting up to feed Blue and letting him out.
I promise myself I’ll say hi to her the next time I see her in the coffee shop queue.
She looks like she could use an adult conversation.
But we have moved on: an empty spare bedroom, just visible past the sun-reflecting window, which momentarily blinds me.
Then the next window, a home gym, a large sepia wall print of a young, shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger staring back at us. Weights sit in neat racks; a few machines are plugged into the walls.
The window in the next house is open. Blue stops. Inside, lurid seventies chintz furniture, which is odd, given the design-conscious area we live in. I pause the video and inspect the image.
This is one of the rare unrenovated houses in the area, I realize. The owners must have been in there since the seventies, and left it unchanged since then. A time capsule: the chintz faded, the carpet a bright pop of threadbare tangerine.
I fast-forward, and we move on and down walls and through gardens until I catch another human face.
I press play. It is a woman in her back garden. Early thirties. A small trowel in hand, gardening gloves on.
We are watching her from back on the wall.
She is bent over when she sees us but straightens to take us in.
She smiles, says something, but we do not approach.
She is amused by our stubbornness. She’s beautiful: long, curly dark hair, dungarees, cheeks red in the heat, with an Oxfam charity shop lanyard around her neck.
This could be Lucy Kiefler, she volunteers at one of the local charity shops.
Which would mean, if she is, that somehow we are back on our road, at Number 22.
Our route was bizarre and entirely nonlinear.
I pause on Lucy. She doesn’t look broken—she looks happy. I glance past her to the house; it is not in disarray, but in fact appears to be the coziest house on our street, with its quaint, cottagey design. I press play again and Lucy returns to her digging as we move on.
I scrub forward, a road, another street, back gardens, a dog, trees, trees, trees, then I stop suddenly when I see something I recognize. It’s a low basement window. I shift forward. It wasn’t in my mind; this basement is real. Shit.
It’s the window where I saw the woman with the bruised face. A burst of apprehension detonates inside me. I let the footage run.
We approach the window. I grab the laptop screen and pull it close. Inside the basement room the woman has already seen us arriving.
She smiles at us. I see now the full extent of her injuries. Her lip is split, the skin tight and pinched around the wound, but she is pretty.
She has pale-blond hair, cut unevenly, and soft blond lashes, and blond eyebrows that almost disappear in the light as she moves toward us.
She reaches the window, tapping her short fingernails on the glass. We headbutt the glass; we want to come in.
She smiles at the eagerness. Her teeth are straight and white. She can’t be much more than thirty. Aside from her injuries, she is healthy. Her cheeks look hot with relief and excitement at seeing us.
Except of course she has not seen us. She only sees Blue.
She says something to him, unintelligible, then struggles with the latch on the small thin window to let us in. With a shudder, it opens inward, the external steel bars blocking it from opening outward.
We slip through, where no human could, and she quickly shuts the window behind us.
A chill shudders through me, at the realization that I was right the first time I saw this.
I see as Blue scans it that the room doesn’t appear to have a door handle to leave via.
Everything in the room looks purpose-built, a hotel room, but one you would never want to stay in.
It looks like something from one of the Netflix documentaries Ben used to put on—a bunker of some kind.
Where is this place? Which house is this beneath? I lean even closer to the screen.
We drop down onto the floor of the basement room. As I had noticed before, the carpet is made up of office-grade tiles, easy to clean, easy to remove.
We wander the space, the woman letting us roam. I study the walls as we pass them.
The outline of a door is visible on the far-left-hand wall, but there is no handle on this side. There is no handle.
Around the door are nail marks, and savage dent marks in the plywood, as if something has been repeatedly smashed up against it.
We turn back to her as if she has said something. She is down on the floor, a pillow beneath her, her features soft, as she beckons us over. She is talking, her lips unreadable, but her expression calm and kind.
It is only when we are face-to-face with her, at eye level, that she sees us and shoots up to sitting.
Open-mouthed, she lifts Blue and stares directly into the camera lens, at first confused, then I see understanding drop in. Her eyes widen, her pupils flaring, as, with a sharp intake of breath, she bolts up to standing, setting us down.
She is pacing, fast.
She lurches back to us and lifts Blue again, the camera trained directly at her eye height, as she stares into it and mouths, “Oh my God!” her lips shaping the words, her eyes filling with emotion. “Oh my God! Oh my God.” Then an almost frantic, “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”
She is shuddering with emotion, then seeming to realize Blue’s discomfort, his back legs, claws out, rising into the shot. She delicately returns him to the floor and fumbles off his collar.
We are suddenly free of Blue’s neck and flying through the air in her hands.
She places us down on the table, angled on her. She adjusts us, fingers shaking, her breath coming in high, tightly panicked snatches, her eyes flicking constantly, feverishly, to the locked door.
She is talking fast, too fast. I have to scrub back to decipher from her lips what she is saying.
“If you can see this: help me. You need to help me.”
I slam the laptop shut and I am on my feet now, too, pacing just as she did.
Oh my God. The words on the collar that first day were real. She scratched them into Blue’s collar. Blue found her. She needs help.
I grab my phone and dial the police, but then stop. What do I say? I don’t know who she is or where she is.
I place the phone back onto the coffee table and open the laptop again.
The woman is inspecting the camera, then seems to realize there is no mic. She places us back on the table, and, raising a hand, signals for us to stay, wait.
I hunch over the screen, waiting, my hand to my mouth.
I watch as she hobbles away to the edge of the small room, and pulls up a loose carpet tile.
She returns to the table with a splintered pen and some squares of toilet tissue.
She lays them out methodically on the tabletop, blowing out calming breaths as she tries to stay focused, every now and again her eyes flashing up to the closed door.
She bends and writes, her hand moving delicately, with intense determination.
My eyes flit back to the locked door every time hers do, both of us expecting someone to careen in and restrain her, but they do not.
Finally, the woman raises the tissue to the camera.
Help me. My name is Anna Derwent.
She holds it up for a long time, then writes again. I scrub forward to the next note.
I have been here about a year.
And the next.
His name is Simon Hughes.
And the next.
I don’t know where the house is.
I can only see the garden.
The final square says, simply:
Help me.
She lowers it and looks to the door. It does not open.
The woman’s attention snaps back to Blue; I can see him clearly now that we are not attached to him. He must be meowing; his whole body is shuddering with it.
The woman looks over to a small shelf above the sink, where several small tins of food are stacked.
She fetches one and opens the ring-pull can, placing it in front of the camera on the table. It is tuna.
Blue leaps up in front of us and starts eating.
The woman reattaches us to his neck as he eats.
I scrub forward: the tuna is finished; she lifts us back up to the window and shoos us away.
In the nondescript garden, we watch Anna Derwent seal the small window behind us. She balls up and flushes the tissues, rinses the tin of tuna. We turn away and gambol into the bushes.
Her name is Anna Derwent, and his name is Simon Hughes.