Smell No Evil started low because low was what they liked. Their little eyes flicked around towards him in the darkness. The ones making a racket stopped or at least turned the volume down. The ones that looked asleep raised their tiny heads and turned towards the greasy armchair in which he sat.
Smell No Evil opened his throat and let the sound pour out louder, the tone rising a little now. No words, just gentle human sound. He hoped there was comfort in it and it seemed that there was. A temporary calm fell on his neighbour’s spare bedroom.
As he sang, he did a quick tally. About 20, he reckoned, though it was dark and a few cages might have held two cats. Behind drawn curtains, an upended mattress sagged against the western windows to dampen the sound. Dark wooden panelling met sickly mustard wallpaper at a dado rail. This place had once been nana central. Now the floral carpet was matted with crushed cat biscuits and a chemical blue tarp glistened wet under the coops.
Ah, the harmonies! A big tortoiseshell had joined him now, stringing a low howl up against Smell No Evil’s shaky la-la-las and oh-oh-ohs. Then a screech cut through close by. A van door slid-slammed on the street so Smell No Evil bolted down the hall, snibbing the back door just as Gus slid in his key at the front.
Harvest night or just research? Creeping up the back stairs, Smell No Evil couldn’t hear any new cages clanking in, so probably the latter. Gus would have been doing the rounds with his torch and notebook, looking for reward posters. The heartless bastard had been on the prowl in Island Bay or Seatoun, monetising misery.
His upstairs flat smelled like cold gravy and drains but Smell No Evil’s mind had already flown off to softer, warmer suburbs. He pictured little Josh or Eleanor crying in their PJs in kitchens with sanded floors and empty cat baskets in the corner. He imagined untouched cat bowls; redundant scratching posts wrapped in beige carpet. Out beyond the double-glazing, there’d be landscaped gardens where populations of wax-eyes, skinks, and fantails were on the rise.
Suze picked up on the second ring. “What a prick,” said Smell No Evil. A ratty Bauhaus t-shirt clung around his belly, sweaty from the dash upstairs. The Formica tabletop was cold under his damp forearm. Down below his sitting room floor, he could hear Gus rummaging around. “What’s stopping him getting a real job?”
Suze laughed in his ear. “Same thing that’s stopped you all these years. Depressed job market. Poor personal hygiene. Low self-confidence. Under-developed inter-personal skills. Need I go on?”
When your best friend is also your only friend, it’s unfortunate if they’re also a bitch.
“And it’s not even easy money, is it?” said Suze, who would be lounging around naked in her flat as always, heaters blazing thermonuclear, drinking beer and watching old Tour de France races whirl through postcard villages on YouTube.
“There’s an awful lot of driving and some owners don’t even offer rewards.” Smell No Evil heard a click, a fizz, a monstrous wet gulp. Charming.
“Gus would be celebrated as an entrepreneur in some cultures. Here’s a shy little man-boy without much going for him, getting out there and generating an income stream, you know?"
Smell No Evil set off on his usual rant about cruelty and karma, punctuated by bored uh-huhs and sloppy burps from Suze. His words traversed a shaky circle, doubled back, hit the same dead ends.
As always, Suze suggested a call to the Police or the SPCA. As always, he declined, because many of the cats were now in poor health and would simply be euthanised.
Later, just as he was falling asleep, Smell No Evil heard the van head out again. Gus must have extra bills to pay. Smell No Evil thought of the furry little prisoners beneath his bedroom floor, mewling and stress-purring, pacing and napping. He thought about the families who loved them, eaten up with worry in twenty houses around the city.
The Bedford laboured up the hill above Miramar, cages creaking on the corners. As Gus rose above the bright jutting void of the airport runway, choppy whitecaps caught the streetlights along the coast road below.
Rich pickings around here. Lots of wealthy people who could pay rewards. Pampered cats galore and pockets of scrubby bush the little buggers loved to poke around in at night.
Best of all, the peninsula was awash with legit cage-traps set by DOC or local greenies. Nobody would think twice if they saw Gus up here after dark, just another wiry eco-soldier with a beard and a Swandri in a van plastered with Predator Free 2050 stickers.
He chugged past stands of ngaio and manuka, the close green scent undercut by aviation fuel and the iodine tang of the sea.
On a high cul-de-sac just beyond the last streetlight, Gus pulled over, slid out two cages and carried them uphill, ten metres from the last fence. He lay one down at the base of a scrubby mahoe, dropped a burlap sack beside it and walked on.
Thirty metres higher, he put down the other trap, then crouched for a few seconds, catching his breath. Fanning around to his left, large houses hugged the hill, lights burning into the night. Gus smelt burnt meat, heard bottle clinks and faint haw-haw-haw male laughter. A barbecue, on someone’s deck. Rich pricks, rattling around houses big enough to shelter a small village.
His eyes traced the highway back towards town, lifting up where the lights clustered denser. Kilbirnie. The house his grandma left him was in there. His bed, too. Better get on with it.
Gus opened the door, set the trip plate, scraped a dollop of baby food from his jar. He lubed the hinges and trigger assembly with puffs of vegetable oil spray, draped a sack over the back and sides, then walked back to the lower trap. Same again.
If you were a cat, he thought, this would look as dark and secret and safe as houses. You would go in there for a feed and a think and a scratch. You would assume God had made a place like this just for you.
Driving back down, he passed a fresh poster taped to a wiring box, a comb of phone-number tags fluttering below. Gus pulled over.
The photocopied image had been taken on a high deck, probably by some smug wanker in boat shoes. You could see a strip of pallid blue sea beyond a glass balustrade with square aluminium posts. In the foreground, a cat lay curled on a cane sofa.
Fuck’s sake. Does no one ever photograph their cat standing up? But there was a decent description in the text. White longhair, black splotch right rear leg. Much loved. Reward offered. Name? Chairman Meow. Gus chuckled. Fucking brilliant. It looked like one of his. He tore off a paper tab and felt a twist in his gut anticipating the phone call.
That was the worst part of this job. Working alone in the city’s hills and parks, setting new traplines along the greenbelt, that was golden. He felt like a kid again, back in those first few summers after his mum died, wagging school to roam the Ngatapa back-blocks with his .22.
The world smelled of comfortable rotting things and if you cried, no one could force a hug on you. Or you could laugh and laugh, blasting at rabbits along farm margins, birdsong rising after the bang. Seldom meeting another soul, he roved a wide domain, right up until the bankers stole his dad’s farm.
Gus still ran a movie of those safe places in his head whenever the city made his stomach clench. If it rained when he was a kid, he headed for a hillside where huge cabbage trees had been hollowed out by bushfires decades earlier. Gus would climb inside, nesting in the dry flaky wood, gazing over the steaming green world until he fell asleep.
These days, he was kept awake by the scrapes and thuds of the weirdo upstairs or hissy fits between his furry tenants. He liked having them around, even with the smell. It was like a private zoo, all these little lost souls depending on him.
He didn’t enjoy that business with the phone, though. People often sounded outraged when he enquired about the reward. Look, I found this cat, he’d say. I’ve been feeding it. I’ve been driving around trying to find its home. Sometimes he lied—I even took it to the vet.
How about fifty bucks, they would say. How about a hundred and fifty, was his stock reply. If they cut up rough, he’d hang up. Let them sweat a few days, then call again. Yes, they would say. Alright. A hundred and fifty it is.
Smell No Evil stood at his kitchen sink, visualising colourful deaths for his downstairs neighbour. His hands churned in the hot suds. Poison? Too incriminating. Gunshot? Likewise. Also, messy. What about that book where the rapist got stabbed with an icicle? Smell No Evil smiled at the elegance of a murder weapon that melted afterwards.
He pictured Gus’s sun-browned weasel face framed by fake satin, pale blue eyes sewn closed in his head, unseeing as marbles. His sneaky brain, his cruel heart—just cold gristle and meat. A cheap coffin, of course. Stained pine or ply. They would have to sew his suit to the lining to stop the weedy little unit sliding around when the pallbearers carried him in.
Smell No Evil rubbed a porthole in the condensation and looked out over grey and red rooftops. Evidence of his pathetic bachelor life dripped in the dishrack: one plate, one cup, one knife, one fork. On the stovetop, a lonely saucepan.
Black clouds rolled beyond the misted window. Gus would be out there right now with his bait and his cages, trying to beat the incoming rain. What made people turn down such dark roads? Smell No Evil’s own life hadn’t been flash but at least he‘d avoided outright evil. Disappointment was more his style.
A slow disappearing, a fading, a gathering in. A dissipation of energy and enthusiasm that surprised and alarmed him. Something, somehow, had turned down the volume of his days. A man who had once pounded out a ruckus in crowded bars now filled a mouldy bedsit with sighs.
A framed gig poster hung beside the stove, flecked with cooking oil. His old band, Darwin’s Apes, in the 80s. The singer’s hands covered his eyes, back-combed fringe flopping over fingers fat with rings. The bass-player was blocking his ears, an in-joke because the guy’s playing had been borderline unlistenable.
Gazza came next, the rhythm guitarist: tall and hyper but sad around the eyes, one thin hand clamped across his mouth, rollie stains across two fingers, nails painted a gothy black. And then his own younger self, on drums and oh-oh-oh backing vocals, right there on the far end, pinching his nose.
“We were fucking terrible,” he told Suze when she asked about it one day. “People only got us to open for them so they sounded good by comparison.”
Suze regarded the poster closely. She pointed out that Smell No Evil had been considerably skinnier then and was now a fat fuck. “It’s interesting to see you without so many chins, with a bit more hair. I bet you got some action now and then, if the bar was dark and the girl was desperate.” She paused like a pro, gave the knife a final twist. “Assuming the rest of the band had already turned her down.”
Smell No Evil thought of humid rooms and charging guitars when he looked at that poster. He smelled vinegar and ashtrays and sweat. He felt his younger self moving with pleasure and purpose across gummy beer-soaked carpets that stuck to your shoes. That poster was the only thing in this shithole that Smell No Evil cared about, apart from those poor bloody cats downstairs.
La-la-la and oh-oh-oh. Another song might lift their spirits. He let himself in with the key under the dead geranium. Their sounds shifted a little as he creaked down into Gus’s disgusting armchair.
A warm sound rumbled up out of him. The feeling of it vibrating in his chest always took Smell No Evil by surprise and when a couple of the cats climbed up on the sound with their own shaky voices, it was too much. Tears rolled down his cheeks, wetting his neck.
To belong to a person but have your own little life running parallel—this was an arrangement a cat understood. It wasn’t just food and a mat by the fire they wanted; it was another warm body and brain humming away nearby.
People said pet-owners were compassionate but really, it was cats who did us a kindness by sticking around. People were selfish, broken, brazen. In every city, town and village the world over, humans did fucked-up things every single day.
The previous week, Smell No Evil had noticed three parallel scratches in the footpath as he walked home from the dairy. Opposite the bus depot, the scratches veered left into his own address. He followed them down the side of the house, past Gus’s door, to the shared washhouse beside the back stairs. Fuck’s sake. Someone had stolen the buggered old wringer washing machine and pushed it down the road on rusty castors.
“Be on the lookout for a local junkie who’s now on the nod,” said Suze when he’d told her. “Or a student with suspiciously clean clothes.”
Gus came up to see him that same night, even though Smell No Evil had been giving him the big freeze for months. He looked like a child in his dad’s clothes, little elbow jutting against the doorframe, gumboots planted wide, oversized blue-and-black Swandri swallowing him like a bogan tent.
A waft of cheap cat biscuits and tobacco lifted off him. Concerned furrows appeared between his crew-cut and the pale blue eyes that were his only attractive feature. Gus flapped his thin lips and the usual shit flowed out. Theft was just part of modern life, he said, oblivious to the irony. Some people had a piss-poor work ethic and simply helped themselves. Gus was prepared to buy another machine, he said, and a lock for the washhouse. Smell No Evil could barely look at the little creep. He would use the laundromat on Coutts Street. No clothes of his were going into a washing machine funded by ransomed cats.
Suze strode alongside the Audi, dragging her house key along its silver flank. Satisfying curlicues of paint peeled away as the key screeched through. It was a beautiful piece of engineering. She could picture herself driving a car like this along the high alpine roads you saw in those food shows where some wrinkly Englishman sets off to patronise nonnas in village kitchens in Italy. It had heated seats, no doubt. You could drive naked through the snow and feel expensive warmth seep up through your arse.
The car was parked in the bike lane. Suze was on her way home, blasted from after-work drinks at the gym. A foul wind shuddered between the office buildings. These rich pricks gotta learn, she thought, tilting her bike back off the lamppost.
Then she was away. She felt the slippery pistons of her quads pumping and a lactic heat in her calves. Her parka snapped as she pounded into the headwind around the bays. It felt good—your body toned and ready, not complaining, just serving your needs.
All day at work she showed lardy newbies how to use free weights, treadmills, rowing machines, knowing they’d only last a few weeks before letting it slide. She wanted to say, look, mate, it’s not that fucking complicated; just walk up a few hills or buy yourself a bike. Suze heard the satisfying tap of aluminium cans jiggling in her panniers. Protein in one side, beers in the other—everything that was needed to feed the machine.
Steak and eggs in the same pan, beer in her hand, clothes off, TV on, your mind going slack as alcohol dissolved the day’s cares. Keeping it down to just one six-pack per night was the aim but a day spent dealing with sweaty wankers in brand-new sportswear could give a woman a powerful thirst.
A digital chime started up in the depths of her saddlebag so she squeaked to the curb. One missed call. Smell No Evil, yet again, losing his shit. How many times could you have the same conversation? Do something, she had told him. The world will not intervene to fix your life. Yes, the catnapping thing was a travesty. Yes, Gus was a waste of skin. Yes, Smell No Evil’s flat sucked and his life sucked and loneliness sucked, but sucking was the natural state of the world. Look at gravity!
Suze laughed out loud. Smell No Evil’s victim schtick was unappealing in a best mate. If there’s one thing Suze’s own shitty family had taught her, it’s that you need to become a moving target if you don’t want to get hit. Get fast, get strong, get even, get gone.
Her hamstrings were screaming by the time she came up behind another car parked in the bike lane. A black SUV, shiny as a puddle of ink, blocked her rightful passage home to food and beer.
Lights from the bungalows across the road threw yellow oblongs onto the wet tarmac. She went around the seaward side, out of sight, and the key bit deep as she worked up a sweat, sprung low on her haunches, then stood to admire her work.
The U and the C were a bit wonky, because curves were difficult, but the fresh silver gouges pulled all available light to them, standing out stark against the polished black surface. Here was a raw public wound in sleek private property. Anger and money had collided on a mobile metal billboard that now said CUNT.
Sirens sit near the top of a very long list of things cats do not like. Fair enough: it’s as if someone has run the sound of a howling, spitting robot cat-fight through an amplifier. Speeding fire trucks and police cars also spark maydays in their tiny brains. These things deliver death if you’re too slow to get out of their way.
So mostly, they hid, although a few unusually brave or stupid ones just stood nearby alongside parked cars. Half a dozen cats crouched under buses in the depot, keeping their own quiet counsel. A few doors down, a marmalade and two grey tabbies huddled beside a corrugated iron fence behind a row of feijoas. Right next door, a white cat with one black leg drifted ghostly between a clump of flax and an empty carport. The only casualty was a spooked Maine Coon who ran all the way to Rongotai Road before being smashed flat by a builder’s ute.
An orange tinge seeped into the damp night air as flames ate the old wood with a crackling hunger. The roofing iron twisted and creaked and there were loud pops as windows blew out, showering glass onto a back yard littered with open cages.
It was the biggest drama in the street in a very long time but Gus missed it because he was out catting and Smell No Evil wasn’t there to see it, either.
“We will watch bad movies and drink beer,” Suze had said when she phoned to invite him over the night before. “I’ll sort out dinner, so you can take a break from that eternal stew of yours.”
She would be late back, so just let himself in and bring his sleeping bag so he could sleep over.
“It will be a night to remember,” she said and this was true. Suze arrived around 10pm, carrying a take-out curry and some secret thing, wrapped in her op-shop overcoat. Her eyes were even wilder that usual. She headed straight for the shower.
“You sort out the plates and the paper towels,” she hollered from the bathroom. A few minutes later, she walked into the living room, naked, glorious.
They sat cross-legged on her sitting room carpet and started into the pakoras. The impressive pelt between Suze’s legs seemed dangerously close to the vindaloo. She opened another beer, raised a toast.
“To my best and only friend, whose principal problem is inertia.” Suze took a deep slug, raised it again. “If a rolling stone gathers no moss then you are mossy as fuck.”
She chugged another mouthful then wiped her mouth up her forearm, leaving a damp trail on her brown skin. Under fresh soap, she smelled like his older brother when they were teenagers, creeping around with a plastic tube to fill up the Velox.
“If anyone ever needed a new start, it’s you. You are a slave to old catastrophes, but I love you despite myself and have got you a present.”
Suze walked to her bedroom, and came back carrying something flat and square, now wrapped in her pink dressing-gown.
Oh-oh-oh and la-la-la. Smell No Evil knew immediately what it was. She’d even cleaned the glass. They would need to get their stories straight and stick to them, said Suze. Then she would help him find a new shithole where he could display the only known photographic evidence of Darwin’s Apes.