Operation Tomcat

  OPERATION TOMCAT

  Tabitha Ormiston-Smith

  Copyright Tabitha Ormiston-Smith 2015

  Smashwords edition

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  OPERATION TOMCAT

  Tammy staggered up the last few steps and dumped the bags, just as one broke. A can of soup bounced off her foot and smashed a pane in the glass door. Wonderful. The perfect finish to a perfect day.

  She fumbled for her keys and after several tries managed to insert the right one. Stepping carefully around the broken glass, she fought an overwhelming urge to howl with grief, rage and despair. The house was a dump, an awful, frightful, cringeworthy dump. Even a full week of scrubbing everything and reducing her French manicure to jagged stumps hadn’t done much to alleviate its essential nastiness.

  Still, Tammy reflected as she arranged her groceries in the newly scrubbed kitchen cupboards, the house had one undeniable virtue, and that was that she could afford it. Just. Providing nothing went wrong with the car. By the time the lawyers had been paid, there had been only a pitiful remnant of their once healthy bank balance. Enough to buy this shitty house, in this shitty one-horse town, and start over.

  It had been easier for Neville. He had just moved into officers’ quarters at the base. A nice little bachelor apartment, with an endless supply of nubile young ensigns. It was alright for him, the cheating fucker. While she, Tammy, faithful wife of four and a half years, was reduced to squatting in this – well, whatever it was. The estate agent had called it a ‘renovator’s delight’. Pretentious fucker with his pointy shoes. House of Horrors was more like it. Still, at least she’d been able to move in right away, despite the settlement funds still not having come through from the lawyer. She’d negotiated a short-term rental agreement. The vendor had been happy enough to let her move in, pending settlement, for a small weekly rent. The house was so trashed she’d been able to get away without having to pay a bond. Just as well, because by the time she’d paid the removal guys, there was just about enough left in her account to buy a week’s groceries and a king-sized bottle of Domestos.

  Tammy cheered up slightly as she realised that, because contracts had already been signed for her purchase of the house, the vendor would be responsible, as landlord, for replacing the broken pane in the door. She’d go and see him about it tomorrow. First thing tomorrow. Right now, she needed tea. And then more tea. And ice on her foot. Bloody plastic bags. Serve her right, she supposed, for forgetting the green bags again.

  She was pouring her second cup of tea when it hit her. There she was relaxing, after a fashion anyway, thinking about which of the stack of frozen meals-for-one she’d bung in the microwave and looking forward to a hot shower and an early night, and there was a fanging great hole in the bloody front door. She’d be murdered in her bed like as not, in this awful neighbourhood. You could reach through a broken pane and undo the Yale lock. She’d seen it often enough in her student days, people in the flats had always been coming home drunk and losing their keys, and they’d break one pane and get in. Chucking the icepack she’d improvised from the surviving supermarket bag into the sink, she grabbed the dustpan from its niche above the fridge and went to survey the damage.

  Thank God she’d pulled up that awful seagrass matting, she thought as she swept slivers of glass from the bare floorboards. That would have been a real disaster, with bits of glass sticking in between all the gaps. She’d planned to leave it at first, until she could afford carpet or to get the floors done up, but it had smelt of piss, so she’d hauled it all out for the hard waste collection. It was still sitting in a sodden pile on the nature strip, making its unique contribution to the street’s general air of depravity.

  The broken pane was right at the bottom. Checking that her keys were in her jeans pocket, Tammy closed the door and knelt gingerly on the porch floor (the doormat had gone along with the seagrass matting) and reached through the hole, swearing as a jagged bit of glass still stuck to the frame caught on her sleeve. She couldn’t reach anywhere near the doorknob. Thank God. At least she’d be safe overnight.

  She was just about to withdraw (very slowly and carefully, because of the sharp edges) when she heard footsteps behind her, and a light, clear voice said “Hello, there!” in what were certainly tones of amusement.

  “I just got home and saw you seemed to be having some kind of problem,” the voice went on, in accents of pure North Shore. “Can I do anything? Do you need a doctor?”

  Frozen on her knees, bum in the air, Tammy wished for death, or the ground to swallow her up, or to have been born in Africa. Anything, really. She tugged sharply and got her arm out of the hole, tearing a big rip in her last clean shirt. She staggered to her feet.

  The stranger was a tall, blonde woman about Tammy’s age. She looked like an advertisement. She was the kind of woman you saw in a full-length photo in Vogue, with a leopard on a chain, advertising a luxury car, or a solid gold Rolex, or something. Something Tammy couldn’t afford. Not that she could afford Vogue now.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered, her face burning. Great, as usual she was turning red. “I was just, um, testing the door.”

  “And did it pass?”

  “I, um, see the pane’s broken, and I was testing to see if a person could get in that way, see, just in case....”

  “I saw you moving in on Saturday, but I thought you might not be quite ready for visitors just at first. It’s so difficult moving, isn’t it? I’m Vanessa Carlson, by the way. That’s my house, just opposite.”

  Tammy looked across to where a floodlit McMansion sat in solitary splendour, sticking up above the more or less general depravity of the rest of the street. There was what looked like a late-model Porsche in the driveway. The whole affair looked like a wedding cake in the middle of a garbage tip. Tammy ground her teeth.

  “Um, Tammy Norman. I just moved in... oh, yeah, you know that.” Like a drowning man going down for the third time, Tammy snatched at normality. “Um, would you like to come in? I was just putting the kettle on.”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Tammy only dropped the keys twice getting the door open, which, she thought bitterly, was probably some kind of record for her. Vanessa Carlson stepped confidently across the threshold, already chattering away. “I just love what you’ve done with the...” she trailed into silence as she took in Tammy’s front room, almost completely empty and still smelling damply of tea tree oil.

  Insincere bitch, thought Tammy. That stopped her stock phrase in its tracks. She sniffed, and felt marginally better.

  “I’ve been mainly just cleaning and scrubbing so far. It was a bit of a mess,” she said as she led the way to the kitchen.

  “Oh, I know! I mean, I can imagine! After the trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Oh, didn’t you know? The people who lived here before went crazy, they must have had a bad lot of drugs or something, they were taken away by the police in the end. Such a relief, you know? All that heavy metal music at all hours of the night. I expect they’re in rehab somewhere. Or prison, or something.” She settled herself at the kitchen table, looking surprisingly comfortable in the shabby little kitchen. At least it was clean, Tammy comforted herself. She’d stake her life there was no cleaner kitchen in the whole of Australia. The smell of Domes
tos and tea tree oil would air out. One day.

  “So what made you choose Yarrangong? You’re not local, are you?”

  “No, I’m from Melbourne. My husband – ex-husband, was in the Navy down there. We, I mean I, just wanted to get right away after the divorce, a totally new place, you know? And Yarrangong, well, I thought it would be nice to get somewhere warmer, I looked all round this part of the country....” What the hell, Tammy thought, there was no use pretending. “This was actually the only house I found that I could afford. There wasn’t much left after....”

  “After the divorce. I know what it’s like. Those lawyers certainly know how to charge, don’t they?” Vanessa’s tone warmed in sympathy, and Tammy found herself liking the woman a little bit, in spite of her annoying perfection.

  “You’re not wrong. What about you, are you married?” She had to be, Tammy thought. A yuppie husband, probably a family lawyer, and 2.4 perfect blond children. For sure.

  “Yes, my husband, Mario, is away on business.”

  “That’s a bummer. Will he be gone long?”

  Vanessa sighed. “Could be, it seems to be taking a while this time. Probably another year, we think.”

  “A year! Holy shit! You must miss him.” And worry what he’s up to, Tammy thought bitterly, if he was anything like bloody Neville.

  Vanessa sighed again, a long, melodramatic production that somehow, Tammy thought, seemed a bit overdone, a little... deliberate.

  “I do, I do miss him terribly, but it can’t be helped. So, what are you planning with this house? You’re renovating, of course?”

  “Yeah, well it’ll be a long business. I pretty well spent everything I had to buy it, so I guess I’ll be just doing it a bit at a time as I can afford things.”

  “And have you found a job yet?” Smug bitch. She probably hadn’t worked a day in her life. Tammy’s face burned with shame.

  “Sort of, just at Safeway. Just until things...” she trailed off miserably. It wasn’t that she was a snob, but just the thought of the checkout waiting for her on Monday brought back the humiliation she’d felt at the dole office. An honours degree in Fine Arts evidently wasn’t as good as a typing certificate, and she’d been made to feel like some kind of selfish parasite for having it. It certainly didn’t count as a qualification, the man at the counter had sneered. Now if she’d had a certificate in Food Handling, or Mixology (whatever the hell that was, Tammy thought in irritation). The man had rung up Safeway for her on the spot. “No skills,” he had said, “but you can train her on the job.”

  Vanessa Carlson was now holding forth about her own job teaching Home Economics at all three of the town’s high schools, in between dropping the names of various television celebrities. Her husband must be in the entertainment business, Tammy thought. She certainly didn’t meet all those glamorous types teaching Home Ec here in Yarrangong. It was a nice enough town in its way, but with a population of only sixty thousand, it was hardly the mecca of Show Biz.

  From her own job, Vanessa moved smoothly into Tammy’s situation. “I’d fix that door myself if I were you. Fred Steiner’s too lazy to get out of his own way. He wouldn’t get out of his own way if his arse was on fire. Have you seen his house? It’s the one three doors down, with all the dead cars in the front yard. Honestly, I don’t know why the council don’t do something. It’s a health hazard.”

  ***

  The cat was small, neat and perfect, with a ridiculously long tail. He stepped fastidiously through the broken pane, shaking his hind feet after him, and strolled across the room.

  Tammy, who had been staring vacantly into space, pretending to be planning a colour scheme for her sitting room, but actually listening to the echoing silence and feeling sorry for herself, looked up at the movement and froze, her breath catching in delight. She loved cats, and had been planning to adopt one as soon as she was settled with money coming in. She hardly dared to breathe as the cat jumped onto her lap, knocking several colour charts to the floor. She stroked him tentatively, eliciting a loud, rattling purr.

  The cat was the traditional kind, Tammy’s favourite: black, with white paws and a white shirt front. A massive diamond collar encircled his neck.

  He must belong to Vanessa, Tammy decided. Only one house in the street was ostentatious enough to have a diamond collar on the cat. She turned the collar round, but there were no identification tags. Yes, it had to be Vanessa. Spend money on something for show, and completely ignore the one sensible reason for putting a collar on a cat. She edged two fingers inside the collar. A bit snug, but not impossibly tight.

  “So, what’s your name, fluffball? Hmm? Are you hungry?”

  The cat responded by purring even more loudly and kneading Tammy’s leg with sharp little claws.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart? Are you hungry? Would you like some milk?”

  The cat jumped off Tammy’s lap and ran into the kitchen. He seemed to know where everything was, Tammy thought as she followed him. He sat expectantly in front of the refrigerator, and had to be nudged aside to allow the door to open. Tammy poured him a careful amount of milk in a saucer and set it on the scrubbed floor. He stood on the edge, tipping the milk all over the floor, sniffed at the resultant puddle, shook his feet and jumped up onto the kitchen table.

  She ought to ring up Vanessa and let her know her cat was here, she knew. But what could it hurt, just for this evening, to pretend? Just for a few hours, to have someone else alive in the place. Besides, she didn’t know Vanessa’s phone number, she told herself. Tammy wasn’t taking well to solitary life. On the bases, there’d always been the other Navy wives, and although they’d moved around quite a lot, there had always been new friends to take the place of the old. Not a very satisfying way to live long term, she’d often thought; there had never been any sense of permanence or stability, but there had always been company, and Tammy found the silence of the empty house daunting. When you lived completely alone, the emptiness of the house was somehow different from the emptiness of a house you shared with someone else who was absent. It echoed more, or something.

  Having successively declined salami, cheese, the one small steak Tammy had bought to be saved as a treat for herself after her first day at work, and a can of tuna, the cat leapt off the table, plopping to the floor right in the middle of the spilled milk, and strolled back into the sitting room, a trail of milky paw prints marking his progress. He settled into the chair Tammy had vacated, stamped round and round several dozen times, curled up with his tail over his nose, and appeared to go fast asleep. Tammy sighed and put the now finely chopped steak back in the refrigerator. She could make a stirfry, she supposed, instead of grilling it. She certainly couldn’t afford to waste it. It was going to be touch and go till her first paycheck as it was.

  After cleaning up the spilt milk and rejected food offerings, Tammy picked up the scattered colour charts, stretched herself on the sofa and returned to her deliberations. She couldn’t decide between mushroom, pale yellow and peach. It definitely had to be a warm colour, she decided, shuddering at the horridly vivid walls, which appeared to have been painted with swimming pool paint. Or perhaps all white? There was something about an all white room. But that would go better in the kitchen, she decided.

  She glanced up at the cat, but it had not moved. How amazingly different the room felt, Tammy mused, with another living occupant. It seemed, somehow, to take the edge off the silence, as though the sharp sounds of loneliness were muffled by fur.

  ***

  Next morning the cat had gone, presumably back the way it had come, through the broken pane. Tammy, who’d woken early and rushed to the sitting room in her pyjamas, felt oddly let down, but told herself briskly that it was a good thing, too, and Vanessa must have been terribly worried. The cat had still been asleep when she’d called it a night at eleven-thirty, and she’d gone to bed, guiltily aware that it was now too late to call anyone, and even more guiltily hoping the cat might stay all night, and perhaps even
come and join her in bed. But the chair was starkly empty, with only a patch of black fur to show that the whole thing hadn’t been a dream.

  Vanessa was at home when Tammy rang her pretentious, gold-plated doorbell. She greeted Tammy with cries of rapture and ushered her into a pastel blue kitchen with neutral-toned furnishings. The round, glass-topped table held a vase of flowers in various shades of pink, clearly a florist’s bouquet. It would be very easy to hate Vanessa, Tammy thought, but couldn’t quite manage it in the face of Vanessa’s cheerful friendliness.

  “I had a little visitor last night,” she said. “A cat, I thought it must be yours?”

  Vanessa shrieked with horror. “A cat? Heavens no, I can’t stand cats. Always scratching the furniture and sicking up everywhere. Can’t have a bar of them. Why did you think it was mine?”

  “Well, it had this really fancy collar on, all over diamonds, well I suppose they’d be crystals really, but it looked so decoratey, kind of thing....” Tammy trailed off, embarrassed.

  “Well, it certainly isn’t mine. I don’t know whose it would be, either. Milk and sugar?”

  “Just milk, thanks. You’ve no idea at all whose it might be, then? It was quite small, black with white paws and a white front.”

  Vanessa shrugged. “No idea. I’ve never seen one like that around here, though. Did it go away again?”

  “Yes, it was gone when I woke up this morning.” Tammy stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “I suppose it was just checking out the new arrival.” She was surprised at the pang of loneliness she felt at the thought that she might not see the cat again.

  ***

  The cat appeared again that night, and also on the two following nights, staying till about ten-thirty each time. Tammy fell into the habit of watching out the front window every evening for it to appear. Although it never arrived earlier than a few minutes past eight, she would start looking hopefully out every few minutes as soon as it got dark. As soon as it arrived, she’d pour out a saucer of milk (the cat liked only chocolate milk, she’d discovered when it’d hopped up on the table and calmly helped itself out of her glass) and settle down for a nice long chat. She told the cat, whom she addressed variously as Princess, Sweetie and FluffyBum, all about Neville, the early days of their love, how perfect it had been, and all about how she’d caught the cheating fucker boffing her friend Maureen, right on her own kitchen table when she’d come home unexpectedly because her yoga class had been cancelled. She recounted the sad history of the death of their marriage, the fruitless attempts at counselling, where the counsellor had taken Neville’s side and basically said the whole thing was her fault for not being more sexually adventurous, and digressed into a discussion of those more perverse of Neville’s inclinations that she’d never been able to bring herself to gratify. She shared her dreams for the future, of finding True Love with a Real Man, who must be out there somewhere, after all, mustn’t he Princess, there’s someone for everyone. She confessed her guilty fantasies of revenge, and some that were not fantasies (she’d been reading About Three Authors at the time, and when she had moved out it had seemed a shame not to leave a few prawns in the pelmets). She told the cat how hard it was being suddenly celibate when she’d been married all those years, especially on hot nights, and this far north, all the nights were hot.