Con was certain there were behaviours he found more objectionable than people talking to their pets, but failed to summon an example. He couldn't help but picture Pandora as Blofeld in a blouse.
Pandora had him categorized as soon as she registered the vulgarity of the wines he'd brought. He'd stumbled into money by possession of some dubious, grubby talent; he was what was known as a 'dot com millionaire', whatever that was. A lout with a manicure and an eighty-dollar buzz cut, he was obviously confused about his social status. His attire of Ben Sherman T-shirt beneath an expensive silk Armani suit, and pristine Reebok running shoes, shouted that he was successful, but at heart wanted to remain 'one of the lads'.
Despite his guardedness she was able to extract a confession that he was a recent divorcee, with a son that was living with its mother. He nurtured aspirations to challenge for custody of the child. Unfortunately she wasn't able to ascertain the circumstances that had led to the divorce.
She introduced him to Maxie; one could tell a great deal about a person's character from their attitude to pets. He commented that animals belonged in the wild, that it was cruel and perverse to use them as a substitute for children. Finally he had nailed his colours to the mast; he was a woolly-minded champagne socialist who enjoyed nothing more than to bait decent folk. There was no future for him at Kiwi Gardens.
Con opened the back door for the dog before it could scratch the woodwork. 'Flouncer' was its name, one that the poor creature had been saddled with by the delectable Nikki, while they'd still been a family. Con suspected she'd chosen such a despicable, unutterable name simply to annoy him. Any woman who'd name an animal 'Flouncer' had to be a gold-digging bitch. There was one reason only why Con had agreed to provide a home for the creature: it was beloved by his son, Ben.
The dog scratched its muzzle, which Con noticed was bloodied. The blood didn't belong to the dog; he was certain of that. There were small downy feathers embedded in the blood, and bugger me with a broom handle, if there weren't fleas crawling over the muzzle and forehead. Con recoiled in disgust and shooed the dog outside. It was bad enough he had to let the thing sleep in the sunroom, which is why it was less than a week since he'd paid good money for a thorough de-fleaing, de-lousing, de-worming, grooming, and general pampering.
The dog turned and padded off down the garden. Con decided to follow. In a clearing behind a cluster of rhododendron bushes, he found a dead pukeko. Both of its eyes had been eaten and its belly ripped open, entrails strewn nearby like a piece of prize-winning modern art. Con dissuaded the dog from having another sniff at it with a hissed 'fuck off' and a toe poke. He hunkered down as close to the pukeko as he dared and found what he was looking for: an infestation of fleas in its plumage.
As he straightened up he saw the cat. The chocolate markings and baleful almond eyes were unmistakeable: it was the creature from next door. The fence separating his garden from Catweasel's was around eight feet high and afforded him plenty of privacy.
He lunged for the cat, intending to boot it to the bottom of the garden.
Unfortunately, his foot connected only with thin-air. He ended up on his arse. The cat appeared to sneer at him before disappearing through a gap between two fence panels back to its own territory.
Pandora noticed that he was wearing a silver earring that had been absent the previous evening. A thirty-five-year-old man trying to dress like a teenager was a pitiful sight. She wrinkled her nose at the odour of sleep-sweat that emanated from him.
“Good morning, Mr Cartwright.”
“Pandora. Listen, this isn't a big deal, but I think it's important we nip it in the bud. Your cat-“
“Maximus,” she insisted.
“Maximus, yes, has killed a bird and dismembered it for my dog to find. And now he's picked up fleas.”
She gave him her best look of hurt astonishment. “Are you telling me that Maxie has given your dog fleas?”
“Yes I am. As I said, no big deal, but a stitch in time, et cetera.”
She decided to employ that particular brand of condescension that had been Margaret Thatcher's stock-in-trade, which one might use to address a retarded child. “Mr Cartwright, your dog could have acquired fleas from any of a number of sources, but certainly not my Maxie. He wouldn't hurt a fly.”
Sceptically: “Then why have you named it Maximus?”
“Good day, Mr Cartwright.”
She shut the door in his face.
It was one thing to make the sacrifice of housing the dog in order to maintain Ben's respect and affection, but he drew the line well short of allowing it to do its business on his property. He had trained the animal to expect its daily walk at 9.15 am in nearby woodland, whereupon it was permitted to evacuate bowel and bladder. He would not allow it back into the 4WD until both tasks had been completed.
This morning, however, he decided on a change of routine. He led it to the section of his garden where he'd found the pukeko (now disposed of). He pulled apart the loose upright of fence to make a gap large enough for the dog to squeeze through. He tugged its collar so that it was forced to look up at him, nose to nose.
“Drop your guts, dog.”
He unleashed it and helped it through the gap into Catweasel's garden.
Con completed three hours of blue-sky research online into the future of Internet security; he had two or three ideas he would chew over with his tech people. Surprisingly, the dog had failed to disturb him with its infuriating scratching to be let back into the sunroom.
A few tentative calls to heel from the patio followed by a thorough search of the garden failed to locate the wretched animal. He returned to the gap in the fence, getting down on one knee to get a good visual sweep of Catweasel's garden. The dog was nowhere to be seen within the over-manicured mosaic of shrubbery, rockery, lawn, and mandatory water feature.
“Mr Cartwright,” Pandora greeted from her doorway. “You're becoming a regular visitor.”
“I'll get straight to the point. I've misplaced my dog.”
She arched her eyebrows in polite contempt, a manoeuvre she'd spent years perfecting, designed to infuriate and humiliate. “Really? How careless of you.”
“I believe it somehow got into your back garden.”
He hadn't posed an explicit question so she felt no obligation to supply an answer; she simply maintained a silence. She smiled as a tic appeared beneath his left eye.
“Do you mind if I go through to look for it?”
“A cocker spaniel around so big?” She held her hands at an appropriate separation.
“Yes.”
“Black and white?”
“Black and white,” he confirmed.
“Has a silver name tag with the word 'Flouncer' engraved on it?”
Clenched teeth: “That's right.”
“Oh that's your dog?” She gave him her best oh-so-innocent-silly-me look. “I'm afraid that I had the council come along to impound it.”
Con had Ben stay with him every second weekend. The boy was due to arrive within twenty minutes, giving him no time to collect the dog from the pound first. He knew he had Ben's love, but wanted his respect too. Fair cop, it had been Con who'd had the affair that had led to the dissolution of the family unit, but within a fortnight of receiving the decree nisi, Nikki had moved herself and Ben into the home of a muscle-bound meathead with an allergy to dog hairs by the name of Rocky.
Con cringed at the thought of the cultural and intellectual vacuum in which Ben was being raised at Chez Rocky. He was a bright kid, always coming at or near, the top of the class, excelling in maths and science, a chip off the old block. Since the break-up, however, his school reports had been deteriorating. Now that Con had a stable base in Christchurch and was able to work from home most days, he would very soon make an application for custody.
Con's stock with Ben failed to rise by one iota as they endured the ignominy of collecting Ben's beloved pooch from the pound. Con spared no effort, no expense, in trying to make it up to his son over the remainder of the weekend. However, as Rocky the meathead pulled up in his penis-compensator sports car to collect him, Ben's parting words were: “Dad, will you try to take better care of Flouncer?”
It hadn't escaped Con's attention that Catweasel's pride and joy had been swaggering around his garden all weekend. At nine a.m. on Monday he punched a call through to the council. After venting his spleen on an unsympathetic ear, he was informed that cat trespass was not an issue with which the council got involved. Naturally, he had recourse to legal action, and could find a good solicitor in the Yellow Pages under 'S'. He spent the next two days in Auckland attending an international conference on the threat of computer hacking, during which his mind was relieved of the burden of any consideration of Catweasel and her hateful prize pet.
On the final morning, as he was checking his inbox from his hotel room, he came across an email from an unexpected source: Pandora Finch. The subject read 'Victorious!'; the body contained simply a link to a website of The North Canterbury Shorthair Society. One mouse click and he was directed to the 'News' web page, which yelled in tabloid fashion that the NCSHA's esteemed president had taken top prize at a recent national show. There was a high-resolution photo of Catweasel cuddling her moggy, grinning in triumph.
Teeth gritted, Con slammed shut the lid of his laptop hard enough to rupture its LCD screen.
From the head of her expansive kauri dining table, Pandora presided over the monthly meeting of the Kiwi Gardens Residents Association. Beside her, Garfield recorded the minutes on a laptop.
Representatives were present from each of the twelve households that comprised the Kiwi Gardens community. She'd initially considered excluding Cartwright, but it had struck her that this would be the ideal forum at which to allow him to expose himself for the grubby parvenu that he was. Over the coming weeks, she would consult with key members to discuss strategies for ejecting him from Kiwi Gardens; surely he would feel more at home in a gaudy glass-fronted Clearwater apartment with all the other high-tech barrow boys.
The first item on the agenda was a motion to establish a vetting procedure for potential new residents of Kiwi Gardens.
An hour later, as she brought the meeting to a close and scooped up her Maxie for a cuddle, Cartwright raised his hand. “Yes, Mr Cartwright.”
“I believe congratulations are in order.”
“You mean the cat show? Thank you.”
“Unfortunately I've been busy - haven't had a chance to follow the link you sent me.”
“What a pity. Still, you aren't an ailurophile by any stretch of the imagination, are you?”
He nodded at Garfield's laptop. “That machine got an Internet connection?”
“Wireless,” Garfield boasted.
“OK, then, Pandora can show us the pictures and talk us through the action.”
Her guests gave a sycophantic murmur of encouragement. She hoped he wouldn't be foolish enough to try to ridicule her; he would come off second best. She nodded to an expectant Garfield, who opened a web browser and navigated to the 'News' page of the Shorthair Association website. He turned the laptop around so that the esteemed residents of Kiwi Gardens could view his lady wife in her moment of glory. Pandora prepared her best modest face.
The audience took a collective gasp of horror, and stared at the screen like a school of goldfish. She hurried her glasses on and rotated the laptop towards her.
The web page showed a cleverly doctored image of her own head superimposed upon the body of a splay-legged porn actress who was in the process of receiving oral gratification from a Bengal cat.
Con was climbing out of his BMW at the supermarket car park. He felt his sphincter loosen marginally as a hand grabbed the soft flesh of his upper inner right thigh. He was spun around and pushed against the door of the BMW to find himself face to face with Catweasel.
Her face was ashen, devoid of makeup. She spoke to him in barely more than a whisper, her nose mere millimetres from his: “This is my proposition: we discontinue our feud. You put your house on the market and bid farewell to Kiwi Gardens. I will refrain from prosecuting you for defamation of character, pornography, computer hacking, and anything else my expensive lawyer can think of.” She added as punctuation: “Allow me to assure you that matters can escalate considerably.”
Con considered denying that he had been the one who'd hacked her website, or at least, to challenge her to prove it. However he was mindful of the fact that she had a fistful of his right thigh and it hurt like buggery. She seemed to read his mind, releasing her hold.
Con deliberated. Things had become pretty nasty. It would be no big deal for him to move house; he disliked all the neighbours anyway. Before their marriage had started heading south, Nikki had often extolled his positive qualities, two of which were compassion and shrewdness. Towards the end she had developed a fondness for reminding him of his less savoury qualities, the most significant being a pathological inability to retreat from any confrontation. He'd dismissed her observations as sour grapes, but now he appreciated their truth.
He smiled at Catweasel. “I've decided I rather like living at Kiwi Gardens. So you can take your proposition and push it up your fat arse. Do your worst, neighbour.”
Pandora ensured that she was out pruning the rose bushes in her front garden when the police arrived. Cartwright opened the door to them and examined the senior sergeant's warrant card. “What has she accused me of?” he sighed.
She saw the sergeant's eyebrows rise. “We'll discuss that at the station, sir.”
Cartwright folded his arms. “What if I don't want to come?”
“I can arrest you, if you like, sir. I'll make a big bloody show of it. Give the curtain-twitchers fodder for gossip until we get around to charging you.”
She inhaled the sweet fragrance of Rugosa rose as she watched the blood drain from his face. “I think I should call my solicitor.”
“An excellent idea, sir.”
The police grilled Con for six hours before allowing him to leave the station uncharged. Once back home he headed straight for the bottle of Jack Daniels. The shake in his hands began to subside as he was finishing his third glass.
It was his worst nightmare realised. The police had received an anonymous tip off that he'd been interfering with a child, a resident of Kiwi Gardens, using his cute little dog as a lure. Con was confident that the police investigation would ultimately demonstrate he was no child molester. Even if he was not charged and therefore saved several months of horrific uncertainty prior to trial (which of course would be laughed out of court) he understood that his reputation would be forever tarnished. Friends and family would never look at him quite the same; there'd always be an element of doubt. And of course any challenge to win custody of Ben would now be seriously undermined.
Pandora watched as Garfield slit open the padded A5 postbag that had this moment arrived via registered post. He teased the contents from the bag on to their dining room table. The single item that emerged was approximately spherical, gelatinous, and as it rolled to a halt, unmistakeable as one of Maxie's eyeballs. The fiery yellow of the iris had become somewhat subdued, but the pupil was still a perfect almond-shape.
Pandora screamed so loudly and shrilly that Garfield cowered from her in terror.
Con was dreaming of eloping with Ben to some paradise island where Nikki and Rocky would never find them, when he was awoken by what sounded like the muted bark of his mutt of a dog. Drowsily, he listened for further sounds but none came.
A moment later he was fully roused from his twilight slumber as a pair of men wearing stockings for masks, burst through his bedroom door. As he sat up, each produced a heavy-looking silenced pistol from beneath his coat and shot him numerous times in the chest and head.
