by Chris Pascoe
Lorraine, who thankfully saw the wasp and knew my actions to have been clumsy rather than those of a crazy man, helped Maya to her feet, brushed her down and insisted she didn’t retaliate.
It really wasn’t Maya’s day. No more than two minutes later she got headbutted by a goat.∗ Maya spotted the cute kid, which was deemed safe enough to wander among the park’s visitors, and ran towards it waving her newly acquired bag of goat food. The goat spotted the not-so-cute Maya-kid running straight at it, and charged forward to meet her head-on. The resulting collision was much easier on the goat.
Maya keeled over backwards, absolutely poleaxed. For a moment we thought she was out cold. She stared at the sky for a few seconds and then her brows furrowed. But anger, not tears, followed. She bounded to her feet, and ran at the retreating goat – so quickly that my only option was to down her with a rugby tackle.
Onlookers who’d witnessed me clout Maya round the head now watched me bring her crashing to the ground by way of ‘taking her legs out’ in mid-stride. The looks on their faces seemed to convey the general opinion that I needed very urgent psychiatric help.
Any lingering doubts must surely have been dispelled by my behaviour during lunch at the ‘Happy Goat Café’.
As we worked our way in single file through a maze of tightly packed tables, me clutching a trayful of Billy’s Big Bite Burgers and Nanny’s Nifty Nibbles, I completely failed to miss an old lady’s precariously placed chair leg and pitched forward. All that lay between me and an undignified collapse to the floor was an oblivious Maya walking ahead of me. With one hand on my tray I slammed the palm of the other down on Maya’s head. Maya made a valiant attempt to support my weight, immediately crumpling to her knees. But she’d been enough to keep me upright, if not slow my momentum. I quickly splayed my legs, sailed over her and slammed my tray down on the nearest table. Which didn’t please its occupants at all.
Mumbling apologies, I glanced around at the sea of open-mouthed faces that warily watched. I was at it again – downing my daughter for the third time in a matter of hours and then leapfrogging over her head.
I sat down in embarrassed misery as an unfazed Maya began playing her games, holding a cup of milk to my face and repeating, ‘Hello, I’m a cup’ over and over until I finally cracked and smiled at her. Delighted, she shouted, ‘Speak to the cup, Daddy, speak to the cup.’
‘No, play with Mummy, Maya, I’m not . . .’
‘Speak to the cup, Daddy, speak to the cup.’
‘No, Maya, I’m . . .’
‘Speak to the cup, speak to the cup.’
I sighed and gave in.
‘Hello, cup,’ I said.
‘Don’t you talk to me!’ said the cup.
I looked at Lorraine, she looked at me, and we decided we’d best go home and see what Brum had been up to.
The Mousetrap
‘Cats like fighting mice. You get to keep your looks fighting mice.’
Timothy Gardener
‘Do you sell humane mousetraps?’
‘Hee hee!’
I stared uncertainly at the teenage girl serving me in our local DIY store. I’d asked what seemed a sensible question but received only a giggle for an answer.
‘Er, do you sell them, then?’
‘What?’
‘Humane mousetraps.’
‘Hee hee! What’s a human mouse?’
‘No, humane. A humane trap.’
This seemed to really do it. She laughed aloud for a few seconds and then asked, between giggles, ‘For catching humans?!’
I sighed deeply. It was an effort of will to carry on.
‘A humane trap. It catches mice without killing them.’
‘Oh, OK. I’ll show you where the mousetraps are. I think they’re really cruel.’
‘No, these ones aren’t cruel. These ones catch mice alive and . . .’
‘Well, I think they’re cruel anyway.’
We arrived at the appropriate aisle, and the girl, who now considered me to be either a sadistic animal killer or a man who sets traps for humans, pointed at a row of lethal-looking mousetraps. All had the words KILL or POISON emblazoned above pictures of teeth-baring rodents.
‘There you go,’ she said as she left me to it, ‘I think they’re really cruel.’
I went elsewhere and finally found what I was looking for. Lorraine had been very particular about the type of trap I bought. Not that I didn’t agree. No sense in killing the poor little things when you could simply put them outside. On the other hand, neither should there be any need to buy a mousetrap when you have two full-grown cats at home.
Now Brum I can understand. Brum’s the closest thing to an animal rights activist/vegetarian in the feline world. He won’t hurt a fly. Flies hurt him. Sometimes badly. He’s probably only a meat-eater because he can’t read the ingredients on cat-food tins. Mind you, if, in his capacity as ‘cat’, he could read, it’d be out with the cat food and in with a life of smoked salmon, caviar and full-cream milk for the both of us. But Sammy? We’ve already established Sammy’s normal-killer-cat status, and yet she does nothing. Outside the house, the mouse is her enemy, and more often than not her half-digested enemy. Inside – no interest at all. Not a flicker.
She no doubt started the problem in the first place – probably dragging a few mice in and forgetting to finish them off after a fun cuff-and-torture session. And Lorraine doesn’t help matters by failing to encourage her. If Sammy shows so much as an iota of interest in the utility (mouse) room, Lorraine hauls her off to the lounge. In fact she won’t even let Sammy sleep in the room, lest she kill mice in her sleep.
I set our humane trap with Brum by my side. It was a clever little thing (the trap, not Brum). The mice entered by a tunnel containing a weighted seesaw. Once inside, the seesaw flipped back and the exit closed. Not only was the trap humane, it offered refreshments. The captured mouse could eat its cheese bait while awaiting release.
Brum couldn’t leave it alone. The smell of cheese had him totally captivated. He spent half his time sniffing the trap with a look of happy contentment on his face. The presence of a big fluffy tabby at the trap’s entrance wasn’t going to promote rapid mouse capture.
Eventually we caught one. Whether the mouse slipped under Brum to reach its objective I don’t know, but during the night the trap became occupied. Brum peered at the box and a pair of beady black eyes peered back. I picked up the trap and flicked the catch to take a closer look.
Why don’t I ever read instruction books? Why didn’t I see the huge footnote, ‘HOLD TRAP AWAY FROM YOU WHEN RELEASING CATCH’?
The door swung open and a flying mouse hit me between the eyes. I dropped the trap in panic. Four unexpected bonus mice scurried out. Brum squealed in alarm and backed into a corner. For a brief, amazing moment, Brum was cornered by four tiny mice, one of whom stood on its hind legs and studied him.
Then they were gone; pattering over an unopened gazebo box marked PRIORITY, and back into the dark gaps beneath our cupboards. Brum stared in horror at the space the standing mouse had occupied. He remained staring for quite some time.
The following day Maya decided to assist. She could do no worse than Brum and me, so I allowed her to scatter cheese on the utility-room floor and stand holding our laundry basket in patient expectation.
Within two minutes, she came running into the living room screaming, ‘I GOT ONE, DADDY, I GOT ONE, DADDY!’
I followed my ecstatic daughter through the house, with Sammy following close behind to see what all the fuss was about. I reached the utility room and found the laundry basket upside down on the floor. I knelt down and looked inside. A pair of big green eyes stared back at me.
She’d caught Brum.
The biggest rodent in the house sat happily munching cheese in his toddler-made cat-trap, while his small cousins carried on their mousing business unhindered. This was typical. I suddenly felt the urge to sit under a nice safe basket myself.
My mind was
made up. I’d go and see the girl in the DIY store. Maybe she could offer me a discount on a human trap.
Marinating Rites
‘You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom.’
Henrik Ibsen
On a scorcher of an August Sunday, I sat on the patio and watched Maya splashing happily in her paddling pool. I’d dearly liked to have joined her in that sparkling cool water but, bearing in mind Maya’s aforementioned attitude to ‘paddling pool sharing’, I’d rather have got in with a great white shark.
So while Maya enjoyed exclusive bathing rights, I sat perspiring in a deckchair, chatting (quarrelling) with her and watching red kites in the distance. Lorraine had nipped indoors to make a phone call and the cats were both sleeping – Sammy next to a bedroom fan and Brum flat out on the baking-hot garden wall above my head. There was that still-air gentle noise about the day, the chirp of insects, the song of birds, the buzz of distant planes and the snoring of a sparked-out tabby.
Wherever and whenever Brum sleeps, he really sleeps. It’s a known fact that cats come back to full alertness faster than any other creature∗ but there’s no ‘alert cat half-awake awareness’ about Brum. His lights go well and truly out. And so, there’s an element of danger when Brum nods off atop a high wall . . .
I’d just taken a sip of ice-cool Coke, and Maya was busily performing the apparently essential task of filling an armada of floating plastic teacups from a giant plastic teapot. Above her head, Brum yawned, stretched, rolled over on to his back, carried on rolling and rolled off the wall.
Coke fizzed down my nostrils as I watched in horror. Brum dropped through the air like a brick – that daft contented smile of sleep still on his face, his eyes tight shut and legs outstretched. His eyes shot open a millisecond before he hit the water with tremendous force, causing a huge tidal wave to sweep mercilessly across the pool and smash down on an unsuspecting Maya.
Teacups flew into the air in an explosion of water, plastic saucers splashed over the sides, a rubber duck completed an aerial somersault before bumping down on Maya’s soaked head.
Seconds after initial impact, the real shock waves began. A wide-eyed tabby surfaced in panic, only to have his head bob up into an overturned transparent bucket. Maya finished rubbing water from her eyes and the first thing she saw was Brum, not only in her pool yet again, but brazenly leering at her through scuffed perspex. She was on him in a microsecond, beating his plastic helmet with her tiny fists.
Through Coca-Cola tears I watched Maya attempt to haul the bucket from Brum’s head, only for its handle to catch firmly under his chin. As Brum tried to wade in the opposite direction, Maya pulled harder still, causing the trapped handle to drop down and loop around Brum’s neck. She gave one last, mighty tug, dragging Brum up and backwards by the throat. The bucket’s handle suddenly snapped free and a half-throttled cat splashed heavily back into the water.
Finally finding my voice, I bellowed out to Maya to stop killing Brum, loudly reminding her that we must never hit cats or blokes with tattoos.
Lorraine had been gone only ten minutes, and yet returned to a previously harmonious scene to find Brum standing, drenched and unmoving, half in and half out of the paddling pool, and me stumbling forward to hold back a screaming Maya, absolutely beside herself with rage and still trying to smack him with her bucket.
Maya ran to Lorraine as if rescued, and Brum and I stood there, him in the water, me beside him, both looking at each other in silence and wondering how we could best have handled things differently.
‘Why’s Brum in the pool?’ asked Lorraine calmly. ‘You know how Maya feels about that pool.’
I certainly did. And Brum did too. He’d been beaten and garrotted for Maya’s views.
But toddlers’ opinions can change suddenly and dramatically, and Maya now started whooping with joy, pointing and singing, ‘Brum’s having a bath, Brum’s having a bath!’ He looked up at her despairingly and then, as if Maya’s taunts had reminded him that he was standing in a paddling pool, he slowly struggled out.
Something must have lodged in that little head of hers, because a week later, on an equally hot Sunday, she gave Brum another bath. A pretty nasty bath really, in a jar of rancid pickled-onion vinegar. Difficult for a cat to climb into? He didn’t have to. Maya emptied the entire contents of the jar over the unsuspecting Brum as he sat waiting for his lunch.
I think he’d probably have fancied something more along the lines of a nice piece of roast chicken or a smoked salmon fillet, maybe a shoulder of lamb, but certainly not half a litre of foul-smelling vinegar (or for that matter the sloppy-jelly tinned cat food he was about to get).
When a shocked Brum evaded legs and grabbing hands to escape through the open back door without his paws touching the ground, I wondered whether he’d even considered the consequences of basking in hot sunshine while basted from head to paw in vinegar. It was the long-suffering Dave who first sniffed the air and realised something wasn’t right.
Dave was having a barbecue, and the rancid stench of deep-frying pickling fluids and wet cat fur didn’t do much for his guests’ appetites. He could barely believe that the cat lying on his lawn, over twenty feet away, could possibly have been responsible for the pungent odour enveloping his patio. But he forced himself to believe it, immediately and without question, simply because the cat was Brum. Dave kindly passed the offending article over the hedge, at arm’s length, and suggested he might need sorting out. Whether he meant this in practical terms, or was demanding Brum be beaten up, I don’t know.
We’re still talking about life in England, by the way, in case I’m giving a Mediterranean feel by mentioning so many sunny days in one summer. Where we live, as in most of the country, more often than not it’s either raining or about to rain, and when it rains Brum acts more or less the same way he does in thirty-degree sunshine. He stays out in the open and gets soaked. The only difference is he stands up in rain and lies down in sunshine, which may point to a genetic kinship with cattle, who are also known to lie or sit depending on the prevalent weather systems. There is a possibility, then, that Maya spotted something in those lions that the scientific community has been missing for years.
Whether that’s nonsense or not,∗ Brum is definitely an all-weather cat. He’ll just go outside and get roasted, saturated, frozen or blown to bits – he doesn’t care which as long as he’s out there, facing whatever nature can throw at him; fighting the elements and losing every time. But he does care, passionately, about Maya’s fondness for marinating him, and would prefer she didn’t. The vinegar was followed by drenchings in milk, bubble bath, orange juice and, worst of all, apple juice. I don’t know what they put in cartons of apple juice (probably apple juice) but it reeks something awful – a sort of ammonia-like smell, not unlike cat pee in fact. I’m sure anybody who met him that day would have instantly assumed he’d pissed himself.
Maya’s marinating habit may simply be a case of carrying forward a family tradition, which brings me to someone who hasn’t been mentioned all that much so far – chiefly because, like Sammy, he never actually does anything – Lorraine’s father, Maya’s Granddad Walt, or Gandalf Stick as Maya renamed him (he has a walking stick, he’s a proper granddad, or Gandalf. He even has a tweed flat cap, white moustache and spectacles – he’s the real deal).
Gandalf will very readily attest to our family marinating rites, because although he doesn’t ever do anything, he seems to very often be on the receiving end of our doings.
It’s become a bit of a family joke that whenever he goes out, one of us seems to spill a drink over him. Myself particularly. As he’s Lorraine’s dad, I show him all the reverence and respect required from a son-in-law, and I do this by regularly sloshing hot coffee down his trousers or throwing beer over his shirt. I don’t know why, I just can’t seem not to. He’s like a drinks magnet.
This is an example of a typical Gandalf Stick week. Perhaps not entirely typical, becau
se he doesn’t always subject himself to staying with us for the week, but a typical week with us at least.
On his first evening with us, we took him to a local pub. Within seconds of my sitting down and fielding a few gazebo timescale queries, I changed the subject abruptly by lurching across the table for a menu and punching a full pint of cider into Gandalf’s lap. Gandalf reacted positively, jerking forward and sloshing his own pint into his face. Lorraine and Maya found this hilarious, of course, particularly when, frothy beer dripping from his moustache, he complained that cider was seeping into his socks.
To make matters worse, when he set off to clean himself up in the toilets, Maya alerted the entire pub to his predicament by yelling, ‘HAVE YOU WET YOURSELF, GANDALF?’ which didn’t please him at all. Every face in the room instantly turned and stared in shock at his dripping-wet trousers.
I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the apples, but cider can smell a bit like urine as well, can’t it? Many of the pub regulars certainly gave the impression that they thought so.
You should never laugh out loud at something a toddler says if you don’t want them to repeat it. Toddlers don’t understand the concept of an old joke. If it’s told once and it got a laugh, it should get a laugh every time it’s told.∗
Therefore, Maya’s catchphrase for the week became ‘Have you wet yourself, Gandalf’. Always delivered at high volume, always in a crowded place, always instigating startled glances and muffled chuckles. The poor old bloke couldn’t go anywhere without all and sundry believing him to be incontinent, particularly as he usually had a big wet patch on his trousers. In a tearoom, I did the honours by chucking lemonade at him; over the course of a five-mile car journey Maya doused the usual area with orange juice every twenty-five yards or so (by way of celebrating each and every one of our town’s hundred-odd speed bumps) and even Brum got in on the act, falling asleep on his lap and drooling copiously down his inside leg.