You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough

by Chris Pascoe

  A further ripping noise prompted me to gently edge Brum back towards her, and our cat-sandwich trio moved as one down to the sofa.

  ‘Can you get it off,’ she said, with a distaste normally reserved for something stuck to the bottom of your shoe, ‘I really don’t like cats.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m trying to,’ I assured her, wondering whether she’d thought my first attempt was part of some dance routine Brum and I performed with all new guests, ‘but his claws are stuck in your shirt. Can you try and unhook him?’

  A few tentative stabs at Brum’s paws told me she couldn’t. Brum, whose purring still reverberated around the room, began trying to kiss her.

  Maya felt the need to exert some sensible authority at this point, grabbing Brum’s tail, screaming ‘GET DOWN, CAT’ and yanking hard. This had three immediate effects. One was the hunching of Brum’s shoulders, another was the stubborn tightening of his grip and the third was another healthy r-i-p-p-p.

  Cheryl gave up trying to poke Brum’s paws into submission and began to panic.

  ‘Get it off me, please, get it off!’

  I moved on to the chair and began carefully extracting Brum’s claws from her shirt. The first paw came free easily enough, but I then noticed with some alarm that the other had not only made a total mess of the nice silk shirt but somehow hooked itself into the bra behind.

  ‘I think you need to help me here . . .’ I started to say.

  ‘GET IT OFF ME, GET IT OFF ME!’

  And so it was that within five minutes of meeting Lorraine’s oldest and dearest friend, Brum was ripping her shirt to bits and I was twanging her bra strap.

  She’d have been better off moving in with a band of woman-curious, lust-crazed hillbillies.

  I really hoped things would improve after a change of shirt. But as we sat sipping tea and watching Bob the Builder, Cheryl showed few signs of friendliness. In fact she didn’t seem to want to talk at all. I glanced at the clock. Lorraine wasn’t due home for three hours. It was going to be a very long afternoon.

  As we sat in silence, Brum appeared in front of the lounge window. He sat on his wall and stared in at Cheryl. I could sense her flinch at the sight of him. We sipped tea in silence. Bob the Builder sipped tea on TV. Maya sipped milk and muttered something about bricks and mortar and getting the flipping pointing right. Brum carried on staring at Cheryl. Something in her seemed to snap.

  ‘Does he have to sit there, just looking at me like that?’ Cheryl exploded, the sudden broken silence making Maya spill her milk and tut loudly.

  I apologised for him, adding that he was staring only because he was interested in her, which seeing as he’d just ripped the shirt off her back was probably already established. I got up to move him, and headed for the front door. As I opened it, it was Brum’s turn to jump. So consumed had he been in Cheryl-study he hadn’t seen me coming. It’s never a good idea to make that clumsy idiot jump on a six-inch surface and, just for a change, he slipped backwards off the wall, a hurt and accusing glance and a pointed paw his last contact with me before his descent into the undergrowth. I watched him emerge with half a bush stuck to his head, and shut the door.

  ‘There, that shifted him,’ I announced as I walked back into the house.

  I was amazed to see Cheryl laughing. Brum had worked his old magic. Had he fallen off the wall just to impress her? The old charmer. It might have taken another cat-life to do it, but he’d finally put her at ease. We chatted for half an hour and then Cheryl asked whether it’d be OK to have a shower before Lorraine got home.

  Not owning a shower and not wanting to get the hosepipe out, I suggested she take a bath. Off she went and Maya and I settled down for a deadly round of Hungry Hippos, a game involving a bunch of huge, chomping hippopotamus heads, which Maya says look just like me, catching marbles in their mouths. The game usually descends into chaos and violence, but we both tend to enjoy it.

  After three thrilling bouts Maya began blatantly cheating, and so I went off in a huff to make another cup of tea. No sooner had I left the kitchen clasping my hot drink than Cheryl began screaming blue murder in the bathroom.

  I rushed to the door in alarm.

  ‘Are you OK . . . Cheryl, Cheryl?’

  ‘ARRGH, GET OFF ME, GET OFF!’

  What on earth was going on in there! In sheer panic, and without a sensible thought in my head, I started to open the lockless door. NO! I couldn’t do that. She was in the bath. Presumably without clothes on. I’d be in huge trouble.

  She screamed again and there was much wild splashing.

  With mounting concern. I pushed the door farther but then lost my bottle, just as she yelled, ‘WHAT THE F*** IS THE F****** MATTER WITH THIS F****** CAT!’ I instantly slammed the door shut, but not before losing hold of my tea-mug. To all intents and purposes it must have looked as though I’d shoved open the door, lobbed a hot-tea hand grenade into the room and slammed the door to deflect the explosion.

  Whatever Brum was doing in there, I could only have made things worse.

  Suddenly the door burst open and a towel-draped Cheryl brushed past me and into her bedroom. She slammed the door behind her.

  I cautiously glanced into the bathroom. Apart from a floor covered in water and steaming tea, nothing looked amiss. I stepped inside. In the corner sat a smug tabby, casually washing and preening. I stared long and hard at him. Eventually he looked at me, in a casual ‘What?’ kind of way, performed the feline equivalent of a raised-eyebrow smirk and trotted past me into the hall.

  I studied the room for a clue to what might have happened here. By the amount of garden greenery beside the toilet, I immediately guessed that this had been Brum’s retreat following his earlier wall-fall. He’s pretty well hidden down there. Cheryl got in the bath without realising she shared the room with her new-found arch enemy.

  I shrugged. There were no further clues. I’d come up against a bathroom wall of silence. All I could be sure of was that it all ended with a tea grenade. I’d have to remember that. If, by some strange quirk of fate, I ever again needed to settle a dispute between a bathing woman and a slightly stupid cat . . . the best solution – chuck a cup of tea at them.

  Cheryl eventually emerged from her room and asked for a plaster, explaining that Brum had launched on to the side of the bath, seemingly from nowhere, and indulged in a little toe fishing.

  He’s done this to me before and it’s not nice. He spots your big toe in the water and claws it. You pull your toe away and he tries to reel it in by tickling your leg. Every now and then (although thankfully not this time) he leans too far forward and joins you in the bath.

  It was a while before a clean but bloodied Cheryl rejoined us in the lounge. Brum was nowhere to be seen, but he somehow had a ‘presence’. Cheryl twitched and reacted to every single noise in the house. It was as if an unseen Brum was even more dangerous than a visible one. As they say – keep your friends close, and your felines closer.

  But Brum didn’t suddenly materialise from the shadows. He was out for the next couple of hours. Somebody, somewhere might have seen a ridiculous accident that afternoon, but it wasn’t us.

  No, our afternoon went well. Maya and Cheryl became firm friends and even Sammy took a break from doing nothing to say a guarded hello, and Sammy at least has the social graces to say hello without shredding your clothing and cutting your toes. When not confronted with a frenziedly friendly tabby, Cheryl was quite an easy person to get on with.

  Lorraine eventually arrived home and we all went out for a meal at a local pub. Things were good. We came home and Lorraine and Cheryl settled in the lounge for a chat while I put the coffee on.

  There is definitely a hot drink connection to all this, because when I walked back into the lounge I was greeted by a huge, graunching crash followed by an avalanche. I stared in horror at a point just above Cheryl’s head. Cheryl looked up, but too late. Instantly, she was battered by an absolute deluge of ornamental cats.

  As bone-china Burmes
e and terracotta tortoiseshells rained down upon her head they were quickly followed by a wooden shelf and a screaming Brum.

  The shelf missed her left ear by three inches, cracking her across the skull. Brum and the shelf came as a package and he enjoyed a brief and impromptu game of ‘head seesaw’ before catapulting to the floor and scurrying round my legs in a bid to escape.

  Lorraine rushed to Cheryl’s aid. She seemed unhurt, if rubbing her head quite vigorously. I set down my tray and went after Brum. He and I were having it out this time. He’d personally seen to it that our guest’s first day was a nightmare. He’d ‘set about’ her from the moment she walked through the door. Not content with damaging her clothing, attacking her feet and ruining her bath, he’d now collapsed a wall shelf on her head. That bloody little scumrabbit was quite definitely for it.

  He’d gone, though. I don’t know how much force he’d hit the cat-flap with, but it was still swinging wildly. I contented myself with the knowledge that with a launch of that velocity, he’d have skidded at least two feet on his back and hit the outside wall like a bullet.

  Perfect retribution.

  Over the next three days, I made great efforts to keep Brum away from Cheryl. With the levels of assault he’d achieved on day one, his only way of peaking would have been to kill her, and I definitely don’t think that would’ve improved her mood.

  But Brum kept trying to reach Cheryl, and somehow Cheryl warmed to Brum, as most people (with the possible exception of a few embittered health workers) seem to do. In fact, on the day she left she actively sought him out to say goodbye.

  She found him on the front wall and held out a hand to stroke his head. Brum pressed his head into her palm in sheer delight and very nearly lost his balance again. Three pairs of hands reached out to steady him, and a brief, panicking-cat mêlée ensued. Shaken, hair on end, but trying desperately to remain cool in front of his new friend, Brum finally resumed his fond farewells. He lingered on the wall for some time afterwards, watching Cheryl drive away into the distance.

  Later she sent Lorraine an e-mail, thanking her for the weekend and saying she’d had a good time, while agreeing wholeheartedly that it was indeed a shame that they hadn’t had a gazebo to sit out in. She closed with the words, ‘Isn’t Brum great? What a little nutter. He really cheered me up!’

  It would seem Brum has his uses after all.

  Sammy’s Suicidal Shenanigans

  ‘Oh Woman! in our hours of ease,

  Uncertain, coy and hard to please,

  When pain and anguish wring the brow

  An even greater nuisance thou’

  Adaptation of a Sir Walter Scott poem

  In a year devoted solely to swelling Commissioner Herbert’s bank account, Sammy completely forgot her graceful, sleek and faultless status as ‘feline proper’ and fell off Brum’s wall.

  No falling with style for Sammy. No happy landings or surfing opportunities. None of that old nonsense – just PLOP, CRUNCH.

  At least, that’s what we think happened. Another Brum requisite of great falling, of course, is to be observed doing it by a number of stunned people and to injure as many of them as possible. Sammy completely failed to observe even these traditions. This was absolutely not a stylish fall. Our only clue that anything had happened at all was a wounded Sammy crawling in, dragging a limp hind leg and complaining bitterly.

  Our initial guess was that she’d been hit by a car, but our delighted vet assured us that her injuries proved much more ‘consistent with a really nasty fall’. We were then asked whether she ‘tends to climb trees’ or whether we had ‘any high walls around us’. High walls. The silly moggy had definitely fallen off Brum’s wall, hadn’t she? Five years of watching Brum’s death-defying leaps into oblivion without him getting so much as a scratch had obviously turned her head. She’d decided to have a go, and instantly broken a leg.

  I left her with the commissioner and headed home, seriously wondering whether Brum’s anti-cat gene might be catching. For a few minutes I actually wondered whether Sammy was more like Brum than we’d realised.

  I walked into the house and found Brum sitting in his food bowl.

  Moments later he turned himself the right way round and began eating. Another moment passed before he sneezed loudly, sending an explosion of food in all directions. He looked up at me briefly, his face smothered in meat and jelly. No . . . she’s nothing at all like him. Nobody is. Nobody alive, anyway.

  A broken leg led to a nightmare situation for Sammy. After her incredibly expensive operation (my unfathomable decision to forgo pet insurance, even with a cat like Brum bumbling about the house, had proved another financial master stroke) Sammy was confined to a cage. Commissioner Herbert insisted on it. Had it been Brum he was treating, I’d have been deeply suspicious that he’d instructed us to put Brum in a cage purely out of spite, but we knew of no feud with Sammy so we did as asked. It was essential she kept still – no jumping, no running, no sword juggling, no walking even, for five weeks. Maya lent Sammy her old playpen and, with a little modification, it served the purpose.

  Poor Sammy. Poor claustrophobic Sammy, who has a very good excuse for her hissy fits. She came from a broken home. The first home, that is. She broke the second one. That first home was a nightmare and involved beatings and imprisonment in dark cupboards. Now, we’d all like to give Sammy a good cuff round the ear but decent people restrain themselves.

  The dark cupboards having left her deeply afraid of confinement of any kind, being locked in a barred cage for five weeks had to be about the harshest case of ‘facing your fears head on’ therapy possible. A bit like becoming a deep-sea diver to ease a dread of water.

  And of course, her detention coinciding with me being at home for the summer, Sammy fully blamed her predicament on my wicked presence. In fact, as the household’s official administerer of all cat medicines and receiver of multiple flesh wounds for my trouble, this was hardly the first time my relationship with Sammy had gone through the floor for health-related reasons.

  Our opening medicinal clash had centred on an ear infection. Just when Sammy was showing indications that she might allow me to stay in her house (she hissed at me only on one in five meetings – an all-time low) I suddenly picked her up, mumbling soothing words that must have sounded deranged in the light of what was happening, pinned her to the sofa and squirted a jet of liquid straight into her ear. All this rather displeased her. Especially as my sudden odd behaviour became, necessarily, a serial habit. Three times a day, which was more or less every time I saw her, I’d chase her round the room, corner her, grab her and fire streams of cold gunge into her ear. She took it all well, hurriedly removing the skin from my face and hands and inflicting bite wounds a pit-bull terrier would’ve been proud of.

  All in all a good little bonding exercise. I may have to think about producing a helpful pamphlet on my experiences, ‘How to gain your cat’s trust and lose a pint of blood a day – an easy-step guide’.

  And after all that nonsense – now this. Now I’d locked her in a cage in the kitchen, her cat basket in one corner, her litter tray in the other, and bars all around her.

  Even worse were the visiting hours.

  Every time she looked up either a big daft and totally fascinated tabby face gazed in, or an excited toddler pushed unwanted toys and presents through her prison bars (all had to be first checked for saws, files and contraband catnip, of course). And, worst of all, twice a day I’d lift her out and push a selection of foul-tasting tablets into her mouth. She was deliriously happy, I can tell you.

  Then, something else went wrong with her. Her breathing became erratic and harsh. Back to the commissioner, who was now taking a higher percentage of our earnings than the taxman, and who now diagnosed her as having unrelated lung problems and prescribed a course of steroids.

  It was my turn to feel unsettled. This already big, strong, super-fecund∗ bitch-cat whose claw patterns were now indelibly etched on the backs of my hands a
nd whose full dental records could be studied on my wrists was going on a course of steroids just at a time when she had a major issue with me. The last thing I needed was a steroid-enhanced-pumped-up-muscle-Sammy coming out of that cage in a few weeks’ time.

  To accentuate my feelings of unease, something odd began happening almost as soon as the first steroid passed between her snapping teeth (along with an antibiotic and one or two thousand painkillers).

  Having taken her pills, she settled back into her basket, there being little else to do in a six-by-five cage. Normal enough, but then she started purring loudly. So loudly that Brum, idly watching her every movement, was quite taken aback. His ears went back, his eyes became huge green saucers, his hackles rose and he edged out of the room.

  He’d never heard anything like it from her, you see. Sammy never, ever purrs. She’s far too cool for that sort of thing, and she’d really hate us to think she was happy about anything.

  And here she was, purring so loudly she was creating an echo. It was most peculiar. She also appeared to be grinning in a very Brum-like manner, eyes closed, mouth turned right up at the edges in a look of sheer blissful contentment. I watched her in awe for a few minutes and grabbed the steroid bottle, checking its label and sniffing it for signs of Class A narcotics. After a while I shrugged, gave up trying to guess what was going on and went to get her some munchies.

  This most un-Sammyesque behaviour continued for weeks, even after the steroids ran out (although she was a bit grumpy on the way down for a day or two). For the rest of her sentence she let me administer her painkillers without a bloodbath and even let Maya stroke her through the bars of her cage.

  I couldn’t help thinking it was a ploy. She was looking for early release, and as soon as she got out, she’d kill us. Especially me, whom she’d probably kill a few times. But on that happy day that the cage became a playpen once more, Sammy lay in her basket and grinned at us all in the same merry manner. After a couple of smiley days, we realised she had no intention of getting up.