You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough

by Chris Pascoe

  They used to be really common in Britain, but many farmers were wrongly convinced they killed sheep and ended up wiping them out in all but the central Welsh mountains, where sheep had greater worries on the ground. Big and formidable enough to convince people they killed sheep, eh? No wonder Brum dived like a fur-clad U-boat.

  Walking back up the road, I glanced across the fields and immediately spotted two red kites hovering majestically in the distance. As I pointed them out to Maya, they were joined by a third. Maya laughed aloud and told me that I was being stupid. They were quite clearly birds, not kites. Stupid possibly, unobservant definitely. Our living-room window faces this field. How on earth had I failed to see birds with two-metre wingspans?

  My only excuse is that the antics of two particular troublemakers occupy 99 per cent of my time and both involve looking down, rather than up.

  Auto-Brumism

  ‘If everyone hated you, you’d be paranoid too.’

  D.J. Hicks

  * * *

  MRS L. J. PASCOE

  RESULTS OF ALLERGY TESTING

  Following extensive laboratory allergy testing, we can confirm that you are allergic to the following substances / items:

  Cats

  Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any further queries.

  * * *

  Thus the summer deteriorated for my luckless feline friend. But it’d been coming for a while. For about the last five years, Lorraine has had an odd allergy. It involves an itchy face and hand rash and lots of amusing nasal-related fun, such as runny eyes and sneezing fits.

  As I moved in about five years ago and have been responsible for the majority of bad things in Lorraine’s life during the ensuing period, it was naturally assumed that the complaint was my doing. Whether I’d picked up deadly rural spores during my ill-fated farm days or was a major cause of stress-related illness was unclear. The untenable fact was that she was fine before I got there, and now she often wasn’t. Brum, arriving with me, obviously wasn’t the first cat to cohabit with Lorraine. It may have borne all the hallmarks of an allergy to his kind, but it obviously, absolutely wasn’t.

  It was.

  Why the addition of Brum to the household should have triggered a long-dormant inflammatory condition hasn’t been made at all clear. But then nothing has, really. It took the medical profession four years just to suggest an allergy test. Far be it from me to knock GPs and accuse them of merely grasping at straws rather than attempting to actually solve a problem, but not so far that I won’t. GPs grasped at straws rather than attempting to actually solve a problem.

  During the course of four years of regular visits, Lorraine was advised at different times to do each of the following:

  Change her brand of make-up

  Change her shampoos and bubble baths

  Give up alcohol

  Not change Maya’s nappies (Thank you, thank you very much)

  Use about a dozen different prescription hand and face creams, including lethal-sounding lotions containing steroids and the like

  Steer clear of Maya’s baby lotions, or possibly just steer clear of Maya

  Give up spicy food

  Give up alcohol this time, really

  Get me to change my shampoos, bubble bath and brands of make-up

  Change our heating system

  Thought we told you to give up alcohol

  Take up smoking so we can blame it on that

  etc, etc, etc.

  Finally she had an allergy test and Brum and Sammy passed it. The result list covered three whole pages, completely blank but for the word ‘cats’.

  Not surprisingly, it was Brum who got the entire blame. Fair enough in a way, Sammy hadn’t caused it before Brum’s arrival. It was him again. On many occasions it’s not so fair. Often Brum gets the sharp end of the stick where Sammy is concerned, simply because Sammy is elegant and shiny white and pretty and graceful and beautiful, and Brum is Brum. Tatty, spiky-haired little punk. Trailer trash to Sammy’s upper-class society girl.

  As a good example of this, I’ll relate a visit to the vet’s a couple of years back. Commissioner Herbert had ‘gone away’ for a while, I think to that place by the lake where everyone wears crisp white coats and nobody mentions long-haired tabbies.

  I’d taken the two of them in for flu jabs and flea treatments. The new vet saw Sammy and went all soppy, crooning lines like ‘Oh, now, she is beautiful, isn’t she’ and (tickling under the chin) ‘Aren’t you a lubbly liddle ting, then’. All this followed by a blunt, almost aggressive ‘Right, put the other one on the table’, and a quick stab in the back of the neck with a long needle. And then, bloody cheek, she said this, ‘We’ve got a new anti-flea treatment you may be interested in. It’s supposed to be marvellous. Only thing is, it’s another injection and it’s also pretty new and untested. You might want to try it on . . . that one . . . before giving it her.’ I still can’t believe to this day that she said that. In front of him as well.

  Another case of this automatic Brumism came from a midwife-cum-health-visitor appointed to visit our home during the months following Maya’s birth. She sat down on our sofa and went on for a couple of minutes about what a lovely cat Sammy was, totally ignoring Brum, who was sitting right in front of her and grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

  She was the loveliest, smiliest, friendliest and most bumbling midwife I’ve ever met, and I’ve met two, but what (I think) she said next I must attribute either to my mishearing her or to her rapid regional accent.

  She glanced at Brum and said, ‘Scumrabbit.’ It was said as one complete word, sort of quickly and angrily, and I had to rewind our conversation in an attempt to understand what she was saying. I couldn’t understand. I still don’t. At the time I smiled and said, ‘Eh . . . sorry?’

  Alas, the moment was gone and she was immediately rambling on about choking babies, or rather how to avoid choking babies . . . no, how to save babies from choking. Whatever she’d said, she’d certainly wiped the grin off Brum’s face.

  I’ll carry on with Sue the Midwife for a few moments, because during the next half-hour she not only showed me how to save babies from choking, but a few pretty nasty kung fu moves to try on them as well.

  Luckily, she demonstrated with a demo plastic doll and not a demo baby. While showing me how to take your choking baby and quickly lay it face down along your thigh, she slammed the poor doll’s face straight into our heavy wooden coffee table. It looked very much like a trained lab technician skilfully dispatching a laboratory rat.∗

  In the shock of realisation that, technically, she had just demonstrated how to ‘take the baby out’ rather than save it, she brought her leg back up much too sharply, cracking her shin on the table and sending the doll hurtling into the air on the wrong end of a vicious drop-kick.

  She completed the manoeuvre by screaming ‘AAAAAiiiiii’ in true Ninja style and grabbing her shin. The doll landed in our fireplace and it was all I could do not to stand and applaud.

  The cats had already registered respect for her fighting skills by fleeing the room as the first attack went in on the doll. They’d seen enough by then to know she wasn’t a midwife to mess with, especially as she’d already registered an abusive dislike of Brum.

  Sue was so embarrassed by the time she left, I felt I’d better not ask why she’d called my cat a scumrabbit. It’d probably have been the straw that broke the midwife’s back, so I left it at that and knew it was something we’d just have to live with.

  I’d met Sue only once before, just before Maya was born, and on first shaking hands had been quite relieved. She was fun, pleasant and modern, unlike her predecessor, who’d probably started out delivering chipmunks on the Ark. We’d got used to the old one telling Lorraine such things as ‘If Mummy’s lucky after the birth, Daddy may treat her to a nice clay wrap to help her get her figure back’ and, aside to me, ‘They’re a little expensive, Daddy, but you’ll find they’re worth splashing out on’. This despite the fa
ct that Lorraine out-earns me to the degree . . . er, well, the degree someone with a proper job out-earns a grown man who watches cats fall over all day and takes notes, in fact.

  After the well-meaning and efficient but ancient-attituded original, it was refreshing to meet somebody like Sue, even if she’d proved her talent for the ridiculous within ten minutes. You see, the baby-fighting incident wasn’t her first embarrassment of this nature. Upon that first handshake she’d proceeded to get on with her evening’s work, which on the surface appeared to be thoroughly terrifying ten mothers-to-be-any-minute-now and to cause ten already terrified husbands and partners to run for the vomitariums but was, in reality, lecturing a pre-natal class at High Wycombe Hospital.

  After opening with a few happy sing-song lines about how unimaginably horrific and painful childbirth is, she attempted to run a video of a woman giving birth. Unfortunately she had no idea how to work the VCR and spent a few minutes muttering and giggling nervously as she tried to rewind the tape. She finally had to settle for a slow rewind with a picture on the screen, and left the room to get some notes while the tape made its laborious way back. The result was that her entire audience sat and stared in horrified silence, forced to watch as a red and blotchy baby was hurriedly pushed back into a screaming woman’s vagina. I don’t know about everybody else in that room but it certainly left me emotionally scarred, I can tell you.

  Back to the point – Lorraine’s allergic to Brum. Maybe most people are, which would cast light on the aforementioned instant dislike some seem to display towards him. Brum therefore had more setbacks to deal with, in the form of sanctions brought to bear against both himself and Sammy, namely being banned from our bedroom and not allowed to sit on Lorraine’s lap, not that they often did for long anyway – the constant sneezing irritated them beyond belief.

  The scumrabbit and his mate should have accepted that. Had Lorraine not been a cat-lover and miacis fancier,∗ she might well have made things an awful lot worse for the pair of them. They could have been respectfully asked to leave, for instance. Or banned from the house and forced to live on the streets with a gang of hard-nosed ferals in bowler hats and the like.

  But did they accept it? Of course not.

  Not for the first time, the cats declared a state of open rebellion. It was them against us. Two tiny fluffy felines against two big strapping humans. We didn’t stand a chance.

  The thing to remember in a war with cats is that they fight nasty. Not ‘burning effigies of us in the street while all the neighbours look on’ nasty, but nasty nevertheless (having said that . . . no, no, it couldn’t have been them). Our massive advantages in air power (five feet taller than them), military might (twelve stone heavier than them – no, for pity’s sake, I know, Lorraine, not in your case. Strewth) and strategic know-how (a brain over double the size that we use only half of) counted for absolutely nothing against their furry guerrilla tactics. We could keep closing the bedroom door but we’d always forget, just for a second, and they’d be in there like a shot. As the infamous saying almost goes . . . cats only need to get lucky once.

  The area outside the closed bedroom door became no man’s land. The minute we were out of sight they were busy, raking the door and ripping up the carpet in a frenzied attempt to burrow under it or maybe even dig trenches. It soon became apparent that we were in a ‘destroy the house to save it’ situation. We were in trouble. We needed help. Cometh the Ice-toddler. Cometh Maya.

  Maya – twenty-two pounds of manic cat-lover.

  Maya – whose gentle strokes amount to club-fisted poundings, reminiscent of something animal rights protesters present as video evidence.

  Maya – who loves Brum and Sammy so much she could hug them to death, and probably will.

  Maya’s main weapon was reputation. The cats’ healthy respect for her, bordering on fear, gave her an edge that we, who get no respect whatsoever, couldn’t hope to match. But how to get the largely neutral Maya into the war?

  Easy. Tell her she’s your little helper. She wants to help with everything. If you’re tidying up she helps by emptying bins all over the carpet; if you’re making the beds she’ll strip them for you. But she really does want to help, she’s just heavy handed. And heavy handed was exactly what was required here.

  We told her the cats weren’t allowed in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom and settled back to watch the carnage.

  Zero tolerance would be an understatement. For the first time I saw in Maya the dubious qualities of the Hitler Youth. Her energy in carrying out her pedantic task was breathtaking.

  Wherever the cats went she went. She stalked them like their shadows. She knew exactly what they were up to at all times, and reported back to us in detail.

  ‘Brummy’s eat Sammy’s dinner.’

  ‘Sammy hit Brummy with its claws.’

  ‘Brummy’s done a sick in your shoe, Daddy.’

  And if they so much as dared walk towards the bedroom door, she was at them, whooping and screaming, arms flaying about like a demented chimpanzee, chasing them all the way to the cat-flap, which Sammy was able to escape through with rather more ease than Brum. She even extended her area of jurisdiction to the kitchen work surfaces and her own bed, protecting everything with a crazed passion and glee.

  The result of her relentless onslaught was that Brum was soon able to claim one hundred per cent consistency in all wars fought. Total, utter, wretched defeat and disaster.

  Despite a formidable ally in Sammy, he’d found no recourse but persistent retreat, and also found to his cost that Sammy was much better at retreating than he was, leaving him to fight every rearguard action, i.e. having his tail hauled back by a jeering toddler and getting his front end batted around by Sammy in all the excitement. Shot by both sides.

  What really worries me about all this is – what if the doctors got it wrong? I know it’s unthinkable that the medical profession could have made a mistake but consider this . . . it takes seven years to train a vet, and only five to train a doctor.

  Bearing this in mind, we have to draw the conclusion that vets are almost fifty per cent better trained than doctors and therefore, medically speaking, we humans are treated worse than dogs. Of course, you could bring sensible arguments into it, like the fact that animals can’t tell you what’s wrong so those extra two years are all about the extra skills needed in diagnosis, but why on earth would we want to do that?

  Whether fought for valid reasons, or just for fun, the war drew to a close. Brum, who expects to lose every campaign he enters, accepted the new regime with resigned subservience. But for Sammy, the sheer indignation of being beaten by a jeering toddler was a little too much to stomach. For almost two weeks Sammy refused to enter the house, banishing herself to the back garden and systematically unleashing an onslaught the likes of which the bird and rodent world had never seen.

  ‘Shame she hasn’t got a gazebo out there for a bit of shelter,’ observed Lorraine.

  One war was over, but another raged on.

  A Break with Brum

  ‘Why is it that wherever I go, the resident idiot heads straight for me?’

  Gwyn Thomas

  Tired and edgy? Under intense pressure? Feel you need to get away from it all for a few days? How about a weekend break with Brum? That should finish you off.

  When an old friend of Lorraine’s confided in her that life was getting on top of her, Lorraine inexplicably reasoned that a few days in our company might help matters. And so it was that Cheryl arrived on our doorstep, travel-bag in hand, one Friday lunchtime.

  Had Lorraine been at home to greet her, I feel quite sure that this poor woman, already in a state of tired, nervous disillusionment, would’ve probably had quite a pleasant start to her long weekend. But Lorraine wasn’t at home. Lorraine had been forced to work (her bosses are always forcing her to work) on her planned afternoon off, mainly because of dark and menacing events suddenly unfolding at the Slough office (somebody had been caught smiling and so taken for
tests). As it was, the door was answered by a man grinning disturbingly, a scruffy, worried-looking tabby cat and a wildly babbling toddler. In the background a white cat glared in narrow-eyed hatred and sharpened its claws threateningly.

  Cheryl smiled and in my haste to make her feel welcome I hauled her through the door by her travel-bag. Assuming she would let go at some point I then dragged her a few feet down the hall. It was about then that I realised she really didn’t want me to carry her bag. The problem seemed to be that she didn’t know who we were.

  I’d never met Cheryl before. She’s from up in the grim dark North, and until now only a crackling second-hand voice on the phone. She knew of me, and she knew of Maya, but she also had the wrong house number written down. When she’d knocked five doors down, therefore, and been told by the residents they’d never heard of us, she started systematically working her way up the street, calling at four empty houses before being wrenched bodily through the door of the fifth.

  Everybody stopped. She asked whether I was Chris, and relaxed greatly when I confirmed I was. I showed her to her room, my back-bedroom office, and went off to make her a cup of tea, calling to her to make herself at home in the lounge whenever she was ready.

  A few minutes later, I walked into the living room, two cups of tea in hand and Maya at my side, to find Cheryl’s face contorted in terror. The cause of her discomfort was quite clearly the dirty great tabby sitting on her lap and leering straight into her face, his purr sounding off like a pneumatic drill. The farther Cheryl craned her neck back and away from her new friend, the farther he pushed his face into hers. By the time I’d put the cups down and grabbed him, he was near rubbing noses with her.

  I pulled Brum away. The sound of tearing fabric wasn’t encouraging. Neither was the fact that Cheryl appeared to be coming with us. I tried to lever Brum away at a steeper angle, but his claws were quite clearly hooked firmly into her silky top.