The Cat Door into Summer

“...and this form is for any defects to the property that you become aware of after the listing appears,” said the real estate agent, turning the sheet of paper so that I could see it.

“Got it,” I said. “What level of detail should that go down to?”

“Say you take down a picture and there’s a damp patch behind it, that sort of thing," he answered. “Anything that you would have wanted to know before you bought the place yourself.”

We shook hands, and two days later my house was on the market.

It was a week later that I found the cat door.

My fat tabby Tiki had taken to sneaking into the back bedroom ever since I’d started to clear out my youngest’s stuff. To begin with I’d assumed that he just liked hiding there because he'd never been allowed in before, but lately there had been longer and longer periods where I couldn’t find him and I was worried that he had resumed his secret habit of shredding cardboard boxes. Normally I found that more amusing than irritating, but coming up to a house move it was definitely something I wanted to avoid.

So when I pulled my youngest’s old mattress away from where it had been leaning and saw a cat door fitted neatly above the skirting, a few things suddenly made sense. Tiki’s lengthening absences, obviously, but also the fact that he sometimes smelt of smoke when I picked him up - slightly worrying for an indoor cat. And then there was the draft that sometimes pushed down the hall, which I had tried and failed to trace. The occasional leaves in the hall. The mystery of the dead bird in my bedroom (again: no mean feat for an indoor cat).

All this went through my head in the time it took me to move the mattress out of the way, and well before the more obvious consideration that there was no cat door on the outside of the building. I went outside and stood staring stupidly at the wall in the rain, pacing to make sure I had the position right. No cat door. I went back inside to check if I was hallucinating but it was definitely there, a shabby little grey plastic thing with a piece of masking tape across the top of the frame.

I realised that there was something written on the masking tape, so I turned the light on and read, in wobbly biro capitals, the word ‘SUMMER’. It was only then that it occurred to me to push the door open, and when I did so all I could do for a long moment was simply gape.

The door opened into an untended flower meadow lit by slanting rays of late afternoon sunshine. Motes of thistledown drifted past on a breeze that I could actually feel, and a prickling in my nose told me my hayfever had just kicked into gear. I sat back in surprise and looked at the window in the bedroom. It was streaked by the cold wintry rain still falling outside, but on the other side of the cat door it was clearly and undeniably a beautiful summer’s afternoon in a world that might not even be my own.

There seemed to be only one sensible course of action, which was to close and lock the cat door with the turn button at the bottom, pull the mattress back into position, and make sure the cat was in the right universe while I waited for the kettle to boil. So that was what I did.

Later on though, I found myself staring at the real estate agent’s defect form and wondering what I should write. Nobody would buy the place if I said ‘oh, watch out for the dimensional portal, we’re not entirely sure where it goes’. There was something else at the back of my mind, too; a growing certainty that I’d read about something like this, and not too long ago. I took my cup of tea to the sitting room, and started to browse through my bookshelves.

Twenty minutes later, I had it. I still didn’t know the how and the why of it, but at least I understood *what* the cat door was. Smoothing the defect form out on the kitchen table I wrote as clearly as I could;

"Obscure 1950s science fiction reference in back bedroom."