Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  The partial or temporary metamorphosis can be the most fun. Take King Midas, he who loved gold so much that the gods gave him the power to turn everything he touched into gold. Not a wise man, you perceive; food and drink were a real problem, but what drove the lesson home was the chrysmetamorphosis of his daughter into a solid gold statue. Relieved of the godly gift of gold, Midas was asked to judge a musical competition between Apollo, playing his lyre, and Pan, playing his pipes. Of course Midas exhibited his usual execrable taste by declaring that Pan’s pipes were far superior to Apollo’s lyre. Apollo was so incensed that he devised a punishment to fit the crime: he gave King Midas a pair of ass’s ears, which Midas wore ever after, even as a judge in Hades. Clearly the gods adored Midas, I imagine because he was the perfect illustration of how stupid humanity could be.

  Like fables, metamorphic tales are always founded in human behavior, but once the species became crowded into cities having little or no contact with the agrarian or pastoral or nomadic origins, they went through a time of relative unimportance. Disease and starvation had more ephemeral causes than of yore, which accounts for the rise of the great monotheistic religions and their provision of more satisfactory answers than cosmogonies built on human-animal connections and mythical stories.

  But then there are children, who are natural exponents of anthropomorphic changes.

  It isn’t even necessary to kick-start the process with fairy tales or nursery rhymes; my brother, Carl, and I were never told any. All that is definite is that we had a pet cat named Kitty, and, as tiny tots, saw the penguins at the zoo.

  Penguins are utterly charming. First of all, they waddle, a kind of gait that has immense appeal. Why? Chiefly, I think, because a waddle has a clownish self-importance, and after that, doesn’t suggest physical suffering. The waddler is, to the beholder, well-fed, well-housed and well-loved. Added to which, the penguin has a happy face and a splendid costume, black-and-white, tailored, sleek. Witnessing a hundred fairy penguins marching to obtain their food in 1939 obviously impressed Carl and me to the point where, when it came time to select a hero-animal for our stories, Pengy the penguin was more desirable than any other. The heroine of course was Kitty, our cat.

  Carl’s and my waking lives consisted in keeping out from underfoot and effacing ourselves whenever an adult was nearby. In fine weather we were relegated to the backyard. Each day was something to be gotten through rather than anything pleasurable or exciting. What we lived for was bedtime, when our mother, Laurie, turned out the light and left us in the darkness.

  Then the real world slipped away and the world of Pengy and Kitty opened up; we lay, each in a narrow little bed, and told our story. Why was it about animals? The only reason I can arrive at is that animals were no threat, animals were friends, animals led lives independent of human troubles and worries.

  We were put to bed at 6 p.m. and aroused at 7 a.m.: far too long a period at thirteen hours! Especially for two night-owl kids, wide awake at 6 p.m. But interesting, that neither of us was afraid of the dark. To us, the darkness meant liberty.

  For long into the night, Carl and I talked. Or, actually, wove a story about a penguin named Pengy and a cat named Kitty. All through the boredom of the daylight hours each of us thought about Pengy and Kitty, the direction the coming night’s story was going to take.

  I don’t remember the names of the other characters in the saga, except that I imagine they were as down-to-earth as Pengy and Kitty: Doggy, Horsey, Kanga, while the villains would have been Australian animals like Dingo, Goanna, Wild Boar.

  Pengy and Kitty traveled the world. Four-legged animals walked upright. No one rode, no one flew. Birds were never a part of the story, good or evil.

  The Pengy and Kitty world was magical as well as wonderful. We lived in a region of arid plain, yet Pengy and Kitty lived in a lush environment, rich in color, surreal in nature. It was forested by gorgeous plants, many of which didn’t grow in the manner of plants; they were embroidered, beaded, spangled like a priest’s vestments, evidently where the idea came from.

  Admittedly we were forward kids who soaked up information, and these were the very serious years of World War II, 1939 to 1945. Our uncles were away fighting, and the women’s conversation was often cheerless. But Pengy and Kitty never went to war. They journeyed to meet the fellow denizens of their world, and even Wild Boar and Goanna were relatively benign. They ate rainbow-hued rocks that they shaved in tissue-fine layers to reveal the banks of color; each color had a different taste. And they drank fizzy lime-green soda that gushed out of lime-green tree trunks.

  All memory of the content of these years-long adventures has gone, but perhaps what our never-ending story showed was how two bored, bright children endowed their lives with excitement, interest, a fantasy that perhaps saved us from becoming warped, or twisted, or horrible. Not a conundrum I’m equipped to answer, save that the story was very much a give-and-take between us. Carl was as eloquent and inventive as I was.

  After years of trying, Laurie finally cured us. Carl was five and I was six when the solution occurred: Laurie moved our grandmother, Nanna, into our room with us.

  Nanna was a dear old woman, our sole ally in surviving Laurie, but to have to share a bedroom with her was a cruel punishment. For her, poor soul, as much as for us. But Laurie never counted the cost, even when she had to walk across the bodies. The only thing that mattered to Laurie was winning.

  I have used Carl and me as data. We received no external stimuli like fairy tales or nursery rhymes, yet still we were pushed to tell stories that extended human thought and activities to creatures manifestly lacking them. Which says that the human connection to our original world is far deeper, far older than so-called civilization. We are in league with the good animals against the bad ones, and in humanizing them, make them equal partners in the enterprise.

  Nowadays a human being’s divorcement from his origins is more complete than ever before in most cases; he and his live in cities, may never have seen open countryside, or a cow, or hen, or earthworm. Milk comes in containers, eggs are all the same size, and a square of plastic cheese exactly covers a slice of pre-cut bread. An acquaintance of mine who shall be nameless breathessly confided in me a great discovery: after a lifetime of heating frozen French fries in an oven, he found out that he could make his French fires from potatoes. It had never occurred to him that French fries were potatoes.

  In such circumstances, is it any wonder that metamorphosis has taken some weird turns in direction? Like Superman? In and out of a phone booth, from milquetoast to alpha male with super powers. Wonder Woman. Captain Marvel. Batman. A latter-day pantheon of demigods fulfilling the role of what used to be the inhabitants of Mount Olympus. The usual phrase is “escapist nonsense” — but that’s too trite. The demigod retains his importance long after childhood has been left behind.

  But flesh is weak, squashable, easily killed. So now there are the machines: Transformers and their confederates, gigantic, shape-changing, all-powerful, hungering to replace human civilization with a world peopled by machines. Animal power has been conquered. Now the threat comes from the machine. Deus ex machina lives.

  Only where do we go from Transformers?

  HANDSOME IS AS HANDSOME DOES

  Once upon a time there was a very conceited pussycat. His family background and his genetic composition were mysteries known only to God, but they had, nonetheless, dowered him with a remarkable and unique beauty. For instance, his hair was long, but the fur lay sleek and close where this looked best, while in other areas requiring a bouffant look it stood up and out like a bunny’s powder-puff. From early kittenhood he was enormously fat, but instead of, in the manner of cats, having a huge barrel of a belly slung hammocklike on two skinny hind legs, his belly fur wrapped it like silk, even as the fur on his hind legs stood out in a fluffy mass. And his binny-bag, which was the separate stockpile of fat attached sporranlike between his back legs, was fluffy enough to seem frilly as it knocked ar
ound his knees when he strolled along. For what it is vitally important to understand is that from the rear — always a fat cat’s visual downfall — he appeared magnificent, his embonpoint seeming of a normal size because of his beautiful fluffy britches and binny-bag, and the plumy tail that waved above them proudly.

  Naturally his head was noble. Nor was it, in the manner of long-haired cats, squashed in like a pugdog’s, thereby reducing the brain-pan to the size of a haricot bean and the I.Q. to a level down around a planaria’s. No, he was at the very uppermost end of the feline intelligence scale. His eyes were a vivid blue-green and his features smilingly charming, even to a retroussé nose. The color of his coat was a uniform dark grey shot with stunning silver highlights, for every one of his billions of hairs was dark grey until toward its tip, where it became a silvery-white. All in all, this very conceited pussycat had a lot to be conceited about, and saw nothing intrinsically, morally, ethically or philosophically wrong with being conceited. It was his due.

  But there is always a fly in the ointment, a black person in the woodpile, a flaw in the indictment. His name. Had he belonged to a gay man, he would have been Woodrow Wilson or Pithecanthropuss; an elderly woman would have called him Prince Nanki-poo or Count von Picklegruber; a married couple might have plumped for Gorgeous George or Handsome Harry; and a young man might perhaps have dubbed him Fat Cat or Walrus Whiskers. As his name, however, had been the joint choice of a six-year-old girl and her granny, he became Fluffy Britches. Oh, oh, oh, oh! Fluffy Britches! A monicker lacking dignity, impressiveness, or any suggestion of the colossal ego dwelling inside this enormously conceited pussycat. He boiled, he steamed, he simmered, he stewed, he did everything he could think of to repudiate such a ludicrously pedestrian name. With the result that the cute kitten grew into a surly, mean-tempered, rather horrible pussycat who scratched the kids, shredded the upholstery and pissed on the carpet.

  At one year of age he had definitely outgrown his welcome, so he was donated to a fortyish spinster lady who didn’t like Fluffy Britches either. Despite which, she quailed at going through the agonies of training Fluffy Britches to answer to a new name, as she had no idea that Fluffy Britches was quite intelligent enough to leap at a new name — if, that is, he liked it. His new mistress’s solution was to drop the Britches entirely and keep right on calling him Fluffy. Except that She said Phluphphy.

  It burst on Phluphphy in a gargantuan, shimmering, opalescent milky-blue bubble like an explosive rain of jewels, flowers, intoxicating perfumes, Vatican boys’ choirs, trills and tra-la-las without end. He was cast into an ecstasy so great that it is fair to say he never quite came all the way down again. Finally he had a name that indicated his uniqueness!

  “Phluphphy, Phluphphy!” he chanted over and over as he investigated his new environment. “I am Phluphphy!”

  He experimented with ways to say it, noting that every “ph” could assume a different nuance from all others, from huge and hazy blue bubbles to trickles of bubbles near as small as dots. It dripped off the tongue, it slid down the throat, it finally gave meaning to the tonsils.

  He stopped scratching people, shredding the upholstery and pissing on the carpet. Instead, he perched on the edge of the toilet seat and did his Number Ones and his Number Twos directly into the toilet bowl. His mistress was ravished — um, well, metaphorically so, at any rate. That he didn’t flush the bowl was not lack of manual dexterity; simply he thought the task beneath him.

  Phluphphy had a favorite room in his new house. Baskets of ferns hung from a glass ceiling and some of its walls were made of insect screening, giving it an outdoorsy ambience that Phluphphy relished, as it carried none of the perils inherent in outdoor living, like bits and burrs in the coat, mud on the paws, and a spooky sense of not being in command. Thus he spent many hours sleeping in one of the big, comfortably upholstered easychairs under the ferny canopy. These were proper cat-naps: one segment of his brain was always awake, always listening. For instance, the wakeful part would hear his mistress coming, the signal to roll over onto his back and stick all four legs into the air — another metaphorically ravishing sight. Once She (as he called her) had oohed and aahed at his trick, she always rushed off to fetch him a special treat — chicken breast lightly poached in white wine. In fact, She fed Phluphphy a menu straight from pussycat paradise — chicken breasts, juicy cubes of raw fillet steak carefully trimmed of fat, and king prawns cooked in dry vermouth.

  One day about two months after his arrival, Phluphphy thought he heard Her coming, and began to roll onto his back. Then a movement in a basket of feathery fern adjacent to a wall of insect screening caught his eye; he stopped in mid-roll. A pointed little head with two beady eyes thrust itself out of the fern, followed by a slender grey body and an extremely long, naked tail. Fascinated, Phluphphy watched the creature nimbly claw down the mesh wall until it reached the floor. Further progress was impossible: one of Phluphphy’s lionlike paws was anchoring the tip of its tail, a movement of astonishing rapidity for what had been judged a dumb, torpid, pampered pussycat.

  “Who and what are you?” Phluphphy asked, some atavistic sense telling him that he beheld a food source for pussycats, yet in no way tempted because he could see no taste thrill in the creature to equal a plump poached prawn.

  The creature adopted an air of nonchalance, sangfroid, even insouciance. “Namel’s Jim, ’n’ I’m a rat.”

  “Oh, for elocution’s sake, articulate your words! I can’t abide people who mumble!” snapped Phluphphy. “I will permit you to call yourself Jim, but kindly introduce yourself by your proper name, which is James.” He bethought himself of something. “Now I know why She has a jar in the laundry labeled POISONED WHEAT.”

  “It’s a crime, you know, what the Sentimentalists have done to toxins,” Jim said, perching his haunches on the base of his tail as if settling to enjoy a long, clever, philosophical chat. “I could feed my entire family on the wheat — sixteen in this litter — except that She never puts enough down. As I said to old Sid the cockroach, where would we pests and vermin be if it weren’t for the political agitation for milder toxins sponsored by the Sentimentalists?”

  “Dead?” Phluphphy suggested.

  “Right on! As doornails. Though I’ve never met a doornail that was alive. Have you?”

  “I am glad to say I have never met a doornail, dead or alive. That is because I am neither pest nor vermin. I am top of the trees, ferns, the social pyramid and everything else, and my next question is, where are you going?”

  Jim collapsed in an obeisance, nose on front paws. “I admit to all of that,” he said obscurely, “but who are you?”

  “I am Phluphphy.” Opalescent blue bubbles, ethereal rainbows, a glissando so complex Chopin could have played it only if he had ten fingers on either hand, fairy bells.

  Jim absolutely groveled. “You have The Name! You are The Emperor! All hail, all hail!”

  “Arise, James! You are a very small all, but I will let you live because of your keen perception. To repeat myself — I never will again! — where are you going?”

  “Er — um — ah — actually I was going to nick two cubes of your yummy freshly diced fat-free fillet steak, Your Exalted and Imperial Majesty. I nick two cubes every day because you don’t notice two missing cubes and because two are enough to round out my family’s diet of Sentimentally detoxified poisoned wheat.”

  “Stealing from your Emperor?” Phluphphy growled.

  “Oh, give us a break! How was I to know your name? And the thing is, Your Exalted and Imperial Majesty, that I can’t stop now,” said Jim in sickeningly obsequious tones. “The wife and I might manage, but not Maude, Matilda, Maximilian, Erich, Heinrich, Sebastian, Prudence, Suzanne, Patricia, Guiseppe, Pierre, Raoul, Charles, Cynthia, Augusta-Viktoria and Manfred-Maria-Schnuller.”

  “Sixteen is correct,” Phluphphy commented. “Very large!”

  “About average. Sid the cockroach has 27,000 children per year — naming them is a nightma
re, he says.”

  “I have no siblings,” said Phluphphy grandly.

  “Of course you don’t, Your Exalted and Imperial Majesty! Perfection, once attained, cannot be duplicated,” fawned Jim.

  Phluphphy removed his paw. “Very well, Jim. You may feed your family two overlooked cubes of my yummy raw, freshly diced, fat-free fillet steak every day — on condition that no other rats enter these premises, and that Sid the cockroach takes his 27,000 children elsewhere. Tell him that if he attempts to remain here, I will moult my hundred billion hairs, suffocating them all.”

  And so it was arranged. In Jim, Phluphphy had his second subject (She was his first), and She had a relatively pest-free home. Besides which, Jim had the opportunity to turn his fern basket into a sumptuous rodent palace, exactly right for a lord privy seal or chancellor. Since Jim was firm about evicting his children as soon as they were grown, they went forth into the world to preach Phluphphyism, which was the gospel of coming to an arrangement with the human family’s pet.

  I, thought Phluphphy one day as She came in to find him on his back with all four feet in the air, have become an emperor, but my realm is sorely limited. Despite the opalescent blues and rainbow hues of my name, there is a pit of emptiness at the core of my purrpussa. Vermin like Sid the cockroach I can do without, and I am not foolish enough to allow more than one rodent subject and his family within these walls. Therefore in order to gather additional subjects, I have to cast my net wider. I must do what I dread doing: venture into the backyard.