Two Old Fools in Turmoil

by Victoria Twead

  “She’s gorgeous! Indy, would you like a kitten?” Karly asked her daughter.

  Silly question.

  “Karly, are you seriously thinking of adopting a kitten today?” I asked.

  “Yes! Why not?”

  “What, just like that?” I asked, open-mouthed. “What about LJ? This kitten would be a tiny snack for him.”

  “He’ll be okay.”

  “But what about Cam?”

  “What about me?” said my son-in-law, appearing from behind, having finally found us.

  “Hey, Cam, I think we should adopt this kitten, the tabby one. What do you think?”

  “Yes, why not? Go for it. As long as it’s never allowed in our bedroom.”

  I stared at them both. I’m not impetuous by nature and I like to have a good think before I make any decision.

  Not so my daughter and son-in-law.

  Many of their major decisions are made on the spur of the moment. The kitten, however, was scrumptious and I was very excited.

  “Really?” I breathed.

  “Yes, really!” said Cam, laughing at my reaction.

  “Good! That’s settled then. I’ll go and find an assistant,” said Karly, turning away.

  As she spoke, an assistant materialised and unlocked the window. We watched as she reached inside and picked up the stripy ball of fluff.

  “Hi!” said my daughter, smiling. “Could we talk to you about that kitten, please? We think we’d like to adopt it.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry, but that customer over there has expressed an interest. She asked to see it with a view to adopting it.”

  Hugely deflated, we watched in dismay as a lady took the kitten and stroked it.

  “What about the black and white one?” asked Cam.

  “No,” said Karly sadly, “I wanted the tabby one.”

  “Well, she hasn’t made her mind up yet,” whispered the assistant who had left the lady to bond with the kitten. “It may be worth waiting.”

  Cam went off to pick up some shopping while Karly, Indy and I waited. We feigned interest in the canaries and goldfish, but it was the woman with the kitten we were watching the whole time. She examined every inch of it and held it up high for scrutiny. Then she stroked it again, while it squirmed and wriggled to be free.

  “She’s phoned her husband,” the assistant told us. “She wants his opinion.”

  The woman’s husband arrived, and together they examined the kitten. But by then, the kitten had lost patience and had became a twisting pin-cushion of spikes.

  At last, the woman handed the kitten back to the assistant. We watched, breath held. Were they taking the kitten home?

  The assistant spoke to the couple, and then walked over to us, smiling.

  “The other customers felt she wasn’t right for them. They said they didn’t connect with her. She’s yours if you still want her.”

  “Oh yes!” said Karly, holding out her arms.

  The instant she held the feisty kitten, a miraculous thing happened. The tiny cat relaxed. She sheathed her claws and transformed from a ball of needle-sharp spikes to a purring ball of soft down. Karly crouched down so that Indy could stroke it too. The kitten sighed, closed her eyes and purred herself to sleep.

  “Well,” said the assistant, “look at that!”

  “Are we having her?” asked Cam, returning.

  “Yes,” said the assistant. “I think this kitten has chosen her home.”

  Of course we weren’t allowed just to take the kitten there and then. Endless forms had to be filled out, papers signed and a vet’s appointment made for a final health check. Then Karly and Cam bought food, toys and kitty litter. While all these matters were being settled, I was delighted to see the little black and white kitten had also found a new home.

  “What shall we call her?” asked Cam when we finally drove home with her.

  “What about Banjo?” suggested Karly. “LJ is named after a hotel in Jindabyne, where we met,” she reminded me, “and Banjo’s is another Inn there.”

  I was trying not to think about LJ at home. His favourite toy of the moment was a squeaky ferret which he had ripped to pieces. This kitten was far smaller than the toy ferret. In fact she was barely the size of LJ’s paw.

  “Great idea,” said Cam. “Indy, can you say ‘Banjo’?”

  “Bandsaw,” said Indy, clear as a bell.

  “Say ‘Banjo’, Indy.”

  “Bandsaw.”

  “No, ‘Ban-jo’.”

  “Bandsaw.”

  The kitten was purring loudly. We all looked at each other.

  “Why not? That’s a perfect name,” we all agreed.

  Bandsaw didn’t offer an opinion. She was fast asleep.

  Courgette (zucchini) and Cheese Balls

  Bolitas de calabacín y queso

  These are simply courgette and cheese balls, covered in breadcrumbs and fried.

  Ingredients

  One medium courgette (zucchini) peeled and grated

  3 eggs, 1 for coating

  100-125g (4oz) of grated cheese

  Fistful of chopped fresh parsley

  Salt and pepper

  Soft cheese for filling

  Breadcrumbs for mixing

  Breadcrumbs for coating

  Oil for frying

  Method

  In a bowl, beat two of the eggs.

  Stir in the grated cheese, parsley and a little salt and pepper.

  Stir in the grated courgette.

  Add a few heaped tablespoons of breadcrumbs until the mix is quite easy to form into balls – wet your hands first if it helps it stop sticking.

  Use about a rounded teaspoon of the mixture and form a flat, round shape. Pop a small amount of the soft cheese in the centre and gently form the courgette mixture around it until it is completely enveloped.

  Set the balls on a tray and pop into the fridge for at least an hour.

  Heat oil in a frying pan, deep or shallow, it doesn’t matter.

  Lightly whisk the last egg and put some more breadcrumbs into another bowl.

  Dip each ball into the egg, then breadcrumbs, and set aside.

  Fry in batches until golden brown and serve hot.

  14

  FOUR, EIGHT AND TWO

  I seemed to be the only one concerned about how LJ would react to our new kitten, Bandsaw. When we carried in the box he had a good sniff, then pawed it expectantly. Bandsaw’s eyes grew to the size of green frisbees and her fur stood on end.

  “I’m going to shut him in the garden,” said Karly. “He can see her through the window, but we won’t introduce them yet.”

  We stroked Bandsaw and set her on the floor to explore. But it was all too much for her and she shot under the sideboard and refused to come out. But the shyness didn’t last very long. Leaving her to adjust in her own time, we ignored her, and gradually she came out to explore the room, always bolting back to her hiding place at the first hint of danger.

  After a few days, she had gained enough confidence to visit every room in the house. She knew her way to the laundry where her food, water and litter tray were kept, and she enjoyed sitting on the windowsill and making faces at LJ outside.

  And she already had her favourite sleeping spots. One was on the lap of Indy’s big teddy bear. Another was on Karly’s laptop keyboard.

  “Oh for goodness sake,” I heard Karly exclaim. “Bandsaw, if I’d wanted to send an email saying ‘yyyyyyyyy tghhhhhh’ I’d have sent it myself.”

  But, of course, her favourite spot was on Cam and Karly’s bed.

  “Bandsaw, get off the bed!” I heard Cam say impatiently when he got home from work every night. “You’re not allowed in the bedroom!”

  Naturally, she didn’t move and just lay there blinking sleepily. So she was forcibly evicted, but that only made her more determined. By the end of the second week, she had worked out that if she sneaked into the bedroom very late at night and hid, she could later climb onto the bed and spend the whole nig
ht with the sleeping humans, who were too deeply asleep to notice her.

  “What’s Bandsaw doing in here?” asked Cam in the morning.

  “I don’t know, she must have got in,” Karly mumbled.

  “I thought we’d closed the bedroom door?”

  “So did I.”

  “But she’s not allowed in the bedroom.”

  “I know. You’d better tell her that.”

  Cats have an unerring sense of what they shouldn’t do, and glory in getting their own way.

  As for poor LJ, well, he was no match for the kitten either.

  Cam and Karly introduced them, slowly and calmly, always making sure that Bandsaw was never in any danger, and that she had places to escape to, like under furniture, should she need to. They let him sniff her. He was fascinated, but her fur stood on end, and she hissed at him. Undeterred, he pushed his big face closer. Out shot a lightning-fast paw, all claws unsheathed.

  LJ retreated, a valuable lesson learned.

  Gradually dog and cat became accustomed to each other and shared their home peaceably. The No-Bedroom rule was dismissed as unworkable, and Bandsaw became Indy’s best friend.

  And so, family life continued.

  One day, Cam decided that he’d lay new wood floors throughout the house. As usual, the decision was instant and he began work immediately. First, he needed to jackhammer up all the old quarry tiles in the entrance hall. I cannot begin to describe the noise and dust that caused. Bandsaw hid in the most distant part of the house, and LJ stayed in the garden.

  Wise dog.

  Next, the carpet needed to come up, both in the dining room and Indy’s playroom. Every nail had to be pulled out by hand, and there were hundreds. Karly and I busied ourselves by pulling out nails, trying to keep on top of the dust, and ensuring that Indy’s feet never touched the ground. Not an easy task with an active toddler.

  At last Cam declared the preparations complete and consulted the company who were going to lay the new floor. No, the floor was not level enough, they said.

  So poor Cam went back to work.

  Finally, the floor was laid, and it looked stunning, well worth all the effort.

  Cam, like Becky’s Gresh, is the type of person who has to be doing jobs. Karly and I love to sit in the sun, or read, but Cam likes projects. The result of this is that their home is beautiful and is improved upon every month. And sometimes, his projects are very good for me.

  I will explain.

  I finally plucked up the courage to drive Karly’s car. It was much bigger than anything I’d driven before, and driving on Australian roads was new to me. Nevertheless, I soon got to grips with it and often borrowed the car. Perhaps I became over confident, because one day, as I reversed it down the steep drive and into the street, I misjudged the space, and drove the car over the corner of the front lawn. The big tyres gouged great lines out of the grass. Driving off to correct the mistake made it even worse. It had rained recently and the mud was churned up. It looked terrible and I was mortified.

  “Don’t worry,” said Karly, “Cam won’t mind.”

  I knew he wouldn’t but he worked so hard all day, and then laboured on the house every spare moment he had. I really didn’t want to add to his workload.

  When he arrived home, I rushed down to apologise.

  “I’m so sorry! It looks a real mess…”

  “Doesn’t matter one bit,” he said.

  “But it looks terrible!”

  “I was going to dig that bit up anyway. That was my project for this evening. There’s something wrong with the drainage there, the water doesn’t seem to run away, so I was going to investigate it.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “No, really. You’ve done me a favour, you started digging it up for me!”

  Time was screeching past, a fact that tugged at my emotions. I looked forward to being with Joe again and catching up with the village gossip. I wondered if Geronimo and the postlady, Valentina, had patched up their differences. And I wondered whether Lola Ufarte was behaving herself.

  On the other hand, being with the family and spending time with little Indy these last months had been amazing. And I’d had breakfast with wallabies hopping around, and typed to the sound of cockatoos screeching and kookaburras laughing. Leaving all this would be hard.

  February was my final month in Australia and it arrived too fast. I had always bemoaned the fact that my birthday fell in the middle of February, probably the coldest and most depressing month of the year in England. For the first time, my birthday celebrations would take place in summer.

  “What do you want to do for your birthday?” asked my daughter.

  “Oh, nothing really. No fuss.”

  When one reaches one’s sixties, birthdays don’t seem so important.

  But Karly planned a lovely day. In the morning, we had breakfast at a beach cafe and swam lengths of the ocean pool at Mona Vale. At teatime, we met up with family members at another beach. We sat at a picnic table amidst balloons and gifts, and drank sparkling wine and gin and tonics. Karly made me a Tim Tam cheesecake as a birthday cake, but I was relieved she hadn’t tried to cram sixty candles onto it. For those, like me, who hadn’t encountered Tim Tams before, they are very similar to the British chocolate Penguin.

  To me, it all seemed deliciously exotic. How fabulous to be able to frequent so many different beautiful beaches, so close to home. A staggering 80% of the population of Australia lives along the coast, and car parking is rarely a problem. Lifeguards keep watch during the swimming season and flags warn swimmers and surfers of dangerous currents. Picnic tables and seating, plus barbecues if you want them, are all provided. Australians take all this, and their wonderful climate, for granted, but for me it seemed like paradise.

  “Seagirls!” cried Indy, breaking into my thoughts.

  White seagulls screeched overhead, then landed close, watching to see if we had any scraps on offer.

  “One more card to open,” said Karly. “It’s from me and Cam.”

  I opened it, smiling. Inside the card was a confirmation of booking letter. I looked at it, puzzled.

  “We’ve booked a weekend at The Entrance,” said Karly.

  “How lovely!” I said. “Um, a weekend at the entrance of what exactly?”

  “It’s a place,” somebody explained. “A town, a seaside resort called The Entrance.”

  “How nice, but what a strange name for a town,” I remarked. “I wonder why it’s called that?”

  I had become accustomed to seeing Australian towns named after British towns, like Liverpool, Newcastle and Aberdeen. Also, there were many towns with aboriginal sounding names like Kangy Angy and Wagga Wagga, which apparently means ‘the place of many crows’. There is Boing Boing which means ‘mosquitoes buzzing’ and Humpybong which is in Queensland. There is even a town named 1770.

  Poring over a map one day, I’d amused myself at how many comical, often rather rude sounding, place names I could find. I lost count of how many Knobs, like Chinaman’s Knob, I found, but there were others, far ruder, that also appealed to my childish sense of humour. But maybe my favourite place-name was simply called Nowhere Else.

  “The Entrance is surrounded by water on three sides,” Cam explained. “It gets its name because it’s also the entrance to Tuggerah Lakes, a big lagoon.”

  “And they have daily pelican feeding,” added Karly.

  “Peliquins!” said Indy.

  “Sounds marvelous!” I said. “Can’t wait to see the peliquins being fed!”

  We stayed chatting, watching the waves tumbling up the sand. It was a birthday like no other I had ever had.

  Only Karly may have had reservations about the fun we had that day. As she sat on the grass playing with Indy, something bit her. It was most likely a bad-tempered spider that objected to her proximity. Two fang marks were clearly visible and her leg swelled up. We never saw the attacker.

  Yes, Australia is paradise, but not without its hazards
. At work, Cam once picked up a metre-long pipe, tilted it, and a highly venomous red-bellied black snake slid out and landed on his feet. He was chatting with his boss at the time, and the pair of them fled in different directions faster than speeding bullets.

  Of course not all Australian snakes are deadly, and neither are all the spiders dangerous. The huntsman, for instance, is huge, and for those with a fear of spiders, it’s the stuff of nightmares. However, it’s not aggressive, nor poisonous.

  Unfortunately, huntsman spiders have caused many a car crash. They seem to enjoy living in cars and are known to pop up unannounced, resulting in shocked drivers losing control.

  Somebody once told me that his father had a ‘pet’ huntsman that lived in his car, on the back parcel shelf. He named the spider Harold. All was well until his son-in-law borrowed the car one day and wasn’t told about the squatter. As they drove along, Harold reared up, probably just to say hello. The son-in-law caught sight of Harold in his rear view mirror and drove into the nearest tree. Neither spider nor driver were hurt, but the car was a write-off.

  Karly told me about the first huntsman she ever encountered. She and Cam were living with Cam’s parents at the time. As they settled down to sleep one night, Karly was just closing her eyes when she spotted a spider on the ceiling in the far corner of the room. She sat up.

  “Cam,” she whispered, “there’s a spider up there.”

  “Oh yes, I see it. It’s only a small one, go to sleep.”

  “I can’t. I can’t sleep knowing it’s there.”

  “But it’s tiny! It won’t do you any harm.”

  “I know, but I can’t relax knowing it’s there. Cam, please, please get rid of it.”

  Cam sighed, knowing there would be no peace until he removed it. He got out of bed and walked over to the corner of the room and looked up.

  “I can’t reach it. Honestly, it’s tiny. Really not worth worrying about.”