by Chris Pascoe
Maya had her first exposure to death recently. Sammy had nipped out for a gentle stroll and a breath of fresh air, and so a sparrow lay butchered on the patio. Maya spotted it and legged it back into the house.
‘Daddy, Daddy,’ she cried. ‘A bird’s hit its head.’
I agreed that it did indeed look as if it had hit its head. Quite badly.
Maya suggested that it might have fallen out of a tree and asked when it would wake up. I told her it’d be OK soon and ushered her back inside, mentioning that Bob the Builder had just started as I know this simple daily event ends all rational thought.
I fully intended to go and dispose of the body but . . . you know, I got into Bob the Builder and all rational thought left my head too. I stared, totally enthralled, as Bob tried to convince some poor old lady that her roof needed fixing when it didn’t and then kicked over her garden wall and offered to fix it for five hundred quid. Something like that anyway. About three hours later I was just getting into Dora the Explorer when Maya came back into the room (I’ve no idea how long she’d been gone) with a thoughtful, worried expression on her face.
She sat down next to me, clearly thinking very hard indeed, something quite disturbingly alien in our house. I finally gave in, accepted that I’d now never know whether Dora managed to recapture Boots the Monkey’s red welly, and asked what was troubling her. She led me by the hand to the back door and stared out at the bird, which was still dead.
I winced and silently cursed Bob and all of his kind.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, Maya?’ I replied, a little too defensively.
‘Bird’s not good . . .’
Bird’s not good. Understating the problem possibly but I couldn’t have put it better myself. I felt I needed to come clean and clarify things.
‘Well, Maya, um, yes, you see, er, these things, they, er, happen, and they happen to . . . birds. OK? Understand? Good!’
I could see from her perplexed face that this wasn’t OK and she didn’t understand. I tried again.
‘Well, Maya, the thing is, it’s like this, you see, the bird didn’t just hurt its head. Sammy got it and . . . I’m afraid it won’t get much better.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, sometimes Sammy can be very bad for birds.’
‘Bird won’t get better?’
‘No, it won’t.’
‘Oh . . . it dead, then, is it?’
At least she was showing some degree of concern for the bird. When I was her age, a similar drama unfolded. A badly injured bird was sitting in the garden, having got into a nasty fight with Ringo Starr (a local tabby – cats have always been utter bastards really, haven’t they?). Dad knelt down and solemnly asked me how we could help the poor little thing. ‘Hit it on the head with a shovel, Daddy,’ came my happy reply.
There’s a photo of me as a three-year-old wearing a coat three sizes too big and pointing at a gravestone, seemingly in fits of laughter. I must have been a very strange kid indeed.
The day after the bird’s unfortunate demise (cold-blooded slaughter), Maya watched a wildlife documentary about big cats. They were bigger, and in some cases stripier, but they were a lot like Sammy. Suddenly Maya got it; everything clicked into place. All cats kill things. It’s their job, just like Mummy’s is driving off in the car and doing ‘stuff’ and Daddy’s is . . . not sure Daddy does anything, but pretty sure it’s something to do with gazebos that he doesn’t do. And there was more. The bigger the cat, the bigger the killed things. Sammy caught that bird but her chances of dragging home a zebra were slim. Lions and tigers were evidently even tougher than Sammy, and in any case, Sammy had got a bit too smiley of late. This instantly made them the coolest thing in Maya’s life.
Not that I necessarily agreed with Maya’s views. I think that if a domestic cat were the size of a lion or tiger, it would be a far more dangerous proposition than either. Why? Because the domestic cat is a murderous psychopath, that’s why!
There’s a whole world of domestic cats out there, just itching to kill for fun. I’ve often marvelled at this strange preoccupation with murder. Murder may sound a bit strong, but think about it: cats, in many countries at least, are well fed and watered. They have no need to kill, but they like to. They set out to kill, not for food, not for survival, but as a hobby. No other animal, besides humans, has a hobby like that.
Sure, some animals can go off the rails into a mad blood frenzy at times (I know I can), but cats kill with a happy smile and a seeming sense of utter joy. Look at how Sammy’s ill-fated bird must have copped it – ‘La-de-da-de-da – ah, the sunshine, the scent of flowers, what a lovely summer’s day . . . hang on, I’ll just murder this sparrow . . . it makes you happy to be alive, tra-la-la.’ Bloody little maniacs.
But Maya’s opinions are her own, and her obsession with lions and tigers became so great that she’d spend hours crawling on all fours roaring at people (and startled cats) and playfully gouging at their eyes with claw-like fingers. We decided to take her to the zoo to see the real thing, hoping she wouldn’t pick up a tip or two on mauling.
We were as excited as she was, and I haven’t been excited about zoos since a 1976 school trip to Whipsnade, when a free-range wallaby stole my duffel bag. A quarter of an hour it took me to get it back, running back and forth across a muddy field in front of all my jeering classmates. And I only got it then because the stupid little bouncing marsupial git dropped it in a pile of crap. Anyway, no need to get all bitter and twisted about wallabies again. That was a long time ago. Move on. Let it go.
We went through the elephants and giraffes at breakneck speed. All Maya wanted to see was a lion. We came to a picnic green and I pointed, misguidedly, to the lion enclosure on its far side. Maya was off, bounding full throttle across the green, straight over tartan picnic rugs, closely followed by me and then, some way back, Lorraine, who may be good at many things but her dash and reaction are less than brilliant – putting one very much in mind of the QE2 on a two-mile turning manoeuvre.
By the time I caught Maya mid-stride and lifted her wildly kicking body over the centre of a disgruntled family’s lunch, she was totally breathless and constantly repeating the line ‘Huh huh huh cough lions lions LIONS’. It was like a scene from a Tarzan movie.
We waited for a very long time, and when Lorraine finally arrived, constantly repeating the line ‘Huh huh huh cough Maya Maya MAYA’, we walked the final ten yards and joined a huge throng around the lion cage. A lioness stood atop a boulder, head held high as if posing for a photo shoot, aloof and proud.
Maya stared at her for some time. Finally she muttered, ‘Cow.’
Cow? Cow? Did she think this magnificent creature was a cow?
Lorraine and I looked at one another and then at Maya and both repeated, ‘Cow?’
‘Cow,’ confirmed Maya. She turned and left.
We hurried after her, trying to explain she’d just seen an agile, streamlined killing machine, not a cumbersome grass-muncher, but she was having none of it. She wanted to see a tiger now. That had to be impressive. Surely.
It was. Tigers are top cats. Tigers are even tougher than lions. And stripier. And this tiger was furious. Zoos are often classed as cruel and, watching this poor animal working itself into a frenzy of rage at the crowd of people leering at it, you had to agree.
But the tiger did look incredibly mean and impressive, just two feet away on the other side of a reinforced sheet of glass so unnervingly clear that it appeared not to be there at all. When the livid beast suddenly lurched at us and growled, everybody instinctively jumped backwards. Not Maya, though. She jumped forward. In fact, she pounced.
The slightly surprised tiger glared at this impudent cub and gave an ear-splitting roar. Maya, nose to nose with an enraged tiger, stared back in a bored sort of way and whispered, ‘Moo.’
Then she turned on her heels, spat the word ‘cow’ with utter contempt and paced off to find some monkeys. The tiger watched her go. His fearsome symmetry
had been compromised – he had failed to even slightly bother a pint-sized Mowgli in a dress. In his face I could see the type of disappointment Brum experiences on a daily basis.
Maya’s big-cat admiration was over – very quickly replaced by an obsession with a leering chimpanzee and a penchant for asking very awkward questions along the lines of ‘What was the funny thing the big monkey was doing in its prison?’ Nasty, vile little creature. The chimp, that is, not Maya.
I’ve pondered Maya’s big-cat attitude since, and I must assume that, despite all I’ve said about the sheer murderousness of the average domestic feline, living with Brum all her life has so thoroughly eroded her ability to take cats seriously that she fails to see even a snarling tiger as anything more deadly than a cow.
Dave’s Diary
‘Ignorance of one’s misfortunes is clear gain.’
Euripides
Poppy, our next-door-neighbour cat, has long been attached to a piece of string. As she’s slightly loopy and prone to wandering merrily into oncoming traffic, her owner has restricted her outdoor activities by keeping her on a long length of string, attached to a heavy weight at the top of his steps.
In the year and a half since Poppy moved in next door, Brum’s fascination with her, or more likely her bit of string, hasn’t waned. He never dares go too close, instead watching awestruck from a distance, usually from our front wall. Sammy can’t be bothered with it all. She behaves as if Poppy and her bit of string aren’t even there. I’m sure her attitude would be something along the lines of ‘Yeah, like, soooo? . . . it’s a bit of string, Brum, get over it’. Having said that, I now wonder whether her falling off the wall wasn’t caused by leaning too far out for a sneaky voyeuristic string-peek. You never know.
Sammy may or may not be interested in string or Poppy, but she does get much closer to both of them than Brum. Sammy uses the rooftops as a mode of transport, something Brum rarely does, thankfully. As our house is joined to Poppy’s, Sammy will often stroll over Poppy’s head and suddenly plop down beside her, giving the poor befuddled cat a near-heart-attack before casually carrying on her way, making no attempt at friendly small talk whatsoever.
I strongly suspect Brum watched Sammy do this on more than one occasion before deciding to try it out for himself. The possibility of Brum ‘dropping in unexpectedly’ and not landing with a force normally associated with a thousand-megaton bomb is almost non-existent. Something had to go badly wrong. It did.
On a roof full of tiny tiles, one was bound to be loose. The chances of Brum finding that particular tile were evens at best. My neighbour, Dave, just happened to be out in his front garden when events unfolded. How terrible if he hadn’t been. How terrible it would have been if nobody had witnessed this act of tragicomic genius. How many of Brum’s classic stunts are missed?
The moment Dave saw Brum on the roof he clasped his hands to his head and gritted his teeth. What on earth was that bloody cat going to do this time?
Whereas Sammy skips daintily along the sloping rooftops, I’m reliably informed that Brum executed the manoeuvre in exactly the same way you’d expect a horse to. He was all over the place. His legs kept splaying out in opposite directions. He was moving sideways, one paw at a time, his face set in tense concentration. As he reached a point somewhere above Poppy’s head, he began a slow, anxious descent towards the guttering.
All the while, he was emitting a high-pitched miaowing sound (I’ve no idea why) and this somehow slowly penetrated Poppy’s dulled senses (we really are dealing with two ‘switched-on’ cats here, aren’t we).
She began looking around, trying to work out where the cat noises were coming from. Finally she looked up.
She could see nothing because of the overhang, so decided to jump on to the wall in front of the house to take a look (Dave’s front wall is exactly the same as ours, by the way – a flight of steps leads up to a walled path that runs along the front of the house to the front door. In front of the wall is a steep drop to the lawn).
At the precise moment Poppy jumped, Brum hit the loose tile, his careful descent became a full-on galloping run and he leapt from the roof at a 45-degree angle. He missed Poppy by a cat’s whisker, sailing past her over the wall and immediately plunging down towards Dave on the lawn below.
Suddenly, a stunned Poppy was wrenched sideways by the neck and came careering down with him. Brum had missed her, but not her bit of string, which had stretched out on the wall alongside her, providing a sudden obstacle for Brum, who hurtled into it and took it with him like a feline marathon winner. In all the excitement Dave stepped back into a bush, lost his footing and fell out on to the pavement, just as two cats crashed at his upturned feet with piercing shrieks.
From the wall swung Poppy’s vacated elastic collar.
Dave retrieved Poppy, and Brum made his own way home. No sooner had Dave safely deposited the shocked and shaken Poppy back through his door than he was excitedly knocking on mine.
Brum had only just joined me as I opened the door to find a bedraggled neighbour in fits of helpless laughter. He couldn’t even speak, he just pointed at Brum and started laughing even louder.
Brum stared at me with wide-eyed wonder and I stared at Brum. At that moment I seriously considered the possibility that the man next door was a madman. How often does somebody come knocking at your door merely to laugh at your cat? I stood for a while, waiting for him to calm down, but he couldn’t. It became infectious. I started laughing. I swear Brum was laughing too, but I couldn’t hear a thing over our guffaws – he may well have been hissing.
At this point Lorraine arrived home, easing her way past the laughing trio at the door with a perplexed smile. Dave just kept laughing hard, and then his laughter became coughing. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he choked half to death on my doorstop while my cat and I laughed at him. Eventually he slapped my arm and just walked off.
I watched him go, coughing and spluttering between his laughs as he disappeared through his front door.
I went inside, where Lorraine was skilfully juggling Maya and a cup of tea.
‘What were you two finding so hilarious?’ asked Lorraine.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I told her, honestly.
When Dave finally felt well enough to speak again, he told me the full, sorry tale. He said that he knew there was going to be an accident the moment he saw Brum up there. What other cat can instil that sort of confidence, or complete lack of it? A cat on a roof should be an ‘easy viewing’ sort of sight. They do it all the time. Why would you think they’d fall? It was at this point that Dave began reeling off a catalogue of accidents that, until that point, I’d no idea Brum had been involved in. My niggling suspicion that I miss many of Brum’s crazy antics suddenly became solid fact.
I knew that Brum was a curse to delivery people, for instance; mainly the paper boy, and he’d certainly worried the postman. I had no idea, though, that our local milkman hated him. Our milkman hates Brum. At a time of the morning when even Maya isn’t usually awake, and an hour Lorraine and I hadn’t even seen until Maya occasionally insisted we take a look, Brum is out there actively falling out with milkmen.
‘Why does the milkman hate him?’ I asked, astonished.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Dave, ‘he just keeps saying he hates him. Gets quite upset about it.’
Amazing.
And what’s more, Brum has been rescued from a near-drowning in Dave’s water butt.
In desperately familiar fashion on a bitterly cold February day, he apparently came leaping gazelle-like over Dave’s fence and landed four paws down on an ice-covered water butt. The ice broke with a crack and a splash, and Brum began sinking fast in freezing water.
He’d sunk halfway to the bottom and was blowing bubbles to the icy surface in a silent, surprised miaow before Dave hauled him out by the scruff of the neck, took him inside and towelled him down, all the time receiving viciously grateful lacerations.
All this went on withou
t my having an inkling!
A neighbour saves Brum’s life, by sheer chance happening to come out of his door at the moment he plops into a water butt, and I don’t find out until five months later. Dave deserved a medal, but he ‘didn’t think it worth mentioning!’
A bit worrying that Brum’s biting the neighbours, though. I know he’d bite one only if under considerable provocation and, to Brum, being hauled back from the jaws of death is ‘considerable provocation’, but I try to get on with my neighbours and make it the Golden Rule never to bite them (something I’ve generally been able to stick to).
Being careful not to gnaw on his arm, I eagerly asked Dave whether he’d ever seen Brum catch fire, this being something he used to be so good at. Sadly he hadn’t and seemed surprised at the question, which was odd because he’d seen plenty of things that should have made the notion of a combustible tabby perfectly acceptable.
Among the most amazing of those things, according to my new Brum-incident-oracle, was the day he saw Brum outwitted by a squirrel. Now, this in itself didn’t come as surprising news. Most creatures tend to get the better of him in some way or other, and in any battle of wits Brum is always going to be unarmed. But the next few revelations did surprise me somewhat.
Sammy had been on the scene, and had also been totally duped by this cunning tree-rat. Also, Brum and Sammy appeared to have been hunting the squirrel, together, when the incident occurred. Brum hunting? Brum and Sammy working together to bring down a squirrel? Unbelievable. There had to be a mistake.
Sammy made all the initial moves, stalking the squirrel as Dave watched from his kitchen window. She came within one short pounce of success before Dave banged on his window, alerting the imperilled squirrel to the nightmare about to land on its back.
The shocked squirrel darted towards a clump of trees, just as a familiar tabby face emerged from them.
It was here that I had to disagree with Dave’s suggestion that Brum and Sammy were on a joint mission. I’m pretty certain that at this point Brum would have been just as surprised as the squirrel, but it certainly must have looked every bit like an orchestrated attack. Certainly to the squirrel, who reacted first and was well away before Brum even moved a muscle (that’s more like it), running straight at Sammy and then, just as Sammy thought she had a second chance, launching into the air and landing halfway up the only tree in the middle of Dave’s lawn.