You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough

by Chris Pascoe

  Mentioning this, of course, provides yet more ammunition for those who find my behaviour increasingly odd, but would also seem to prove that while Brum sees mirrors as simple doors, he rejects the notion that they can in any way support life.

  Brum’s window dilemma is much more serious than his mirror-people snubbing. So much so that he once broke a window with his head. The window in question was at my old bachelor flat. Inside the window was my kitchen, outside was a flat roof running up to the window.

  One summer day, Brum came springing from dustbin to fence to flat roof in an amazingly agile way (‘amazingly agile’ had he been born a moose) and didn’t break stride at all upon spotting me at the window and heading straight for me.

  I didn’t register alarm at first. I do seem to remember that in the last moments before impact I wondered why Brum appeared to be rapidly gaining pace. Only as he connected did I realise he had no intention of stopping.

  I still don’t really know how he could have broken the entire window. Granted, he has an extremely hard head, and I realise that a sixteen-pound missile has every chance of breaking windows, but he’s only a cat . . . they’re simply not built for demolition work. He should have hit it and glanced elegantly off sideways. Not hit it full-on with a splintering crash. The window simply disintegrated. I jumped backwards in shock as glass rained down around me. The noise was deafening – glass shattered and smashed everywhere; the room was instantly transformed into a sea of broken shards.

  When the thundering pandemonium subsided, a lone cat stood picturesquely bordered by an empty wooden window frame.

  And the Brum/Dad similarity doesn’t end with window blindness. Throughout his life Brum has had an almost uniquely unfeline ability to knock himself out. Dad’s good at that too.

  He once misheard directions to a toilet and wandered down a long dark corridor in a pub whose name he’s since completely forgotten, probably because of the ridiculously hard blow to the head he was about to receive.

  He reached a heavy oak door, turned the handle and pulled. The last thing he remembers about the incident was a sense of almost superhuman power in his right arm. He wrenched that door right off its hinges and down on to his head with a skull-vibrating crack.

  He could barely believe his own strength, but as they explained to him in the ambulance, the incident owed less to formidable strength than to the fact that the door wasn’t secured in any way and was merely leaning against a brick wall. The paramedics seemed to find this very funny indeed, and were still chortling as they helped him into Casualty. Chortling gave way to hysterics as they attempted three times to explain what had happened to him. He finally had to tell the nurse himself, his two ‘rescuers’ holding their bellies and wiping tears from their cheeks.

  Three weeks later, he did it again, although I really don’t think it was entirely his fault. This time it happened in a cellar Guinness Bar in Soho Square, London. The toilet door had a huge sign warning you to mind the step. Consequently people walked through the door staring down at their feet and failed to notice that the overhead cistern was attached to a sloping, cave-like ceiling and so not overhead at all, but at forehead height just inside the door. He hit that thing so hard he bounced straight back into the pub and landed on his backside. The room roared with laughter and the barman put another chalk mark on the board. He was the fifth that night. Health and Safety was a fun thing before ‘no win, no fee’ lawyers, wasn’t it?

  What set Dad apart from his four predecessors, head and shoulders above them, in fact, was that he did it again two pints later, this time doing the job properly and passing out. He remembers very, very little about the rest of that evening, but I’m told the barman was concerned enough to put him in the recovery position before marking his blackboard. He was quite emotional apparently, never before having achieved six in an evening – a third of the total achieved by just one man. Pure genius!

  Brum doesn’t get out to pubs much, but if he did he’d probably be the best pub knockout artist in the world, and to prove it he added another brain-blanking blow to his own tally during the spring. It wasn’t an elaborate affair. It was as if he realised that, as Brum, he has a job to do . . . and that job is to knock himself senseless. No messing, no thrills – just a case of getting in there and getting the thing done.

  It was route-one stuff. He walked into the living room, tail in the air and full of the joys of the season, eyed our sideboard with sudden resolve, stood up on his hind legs, placed two paws carefully on its surface and . . . head-butted it with all his might.

  Why would anybody, or any-cat, do something as moronic as that? Who, in their right mind, would walk into a room and simply head-butt a sideboard? He toppled backwards with his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, out for the count and with a serious headache on the way.

  Job done.

  An uncanny kinship is emerging, wouldn’t you agree? Even stranger is the link between two incidents that occurred in the very same month. What are the chances of a seventy-year-old man and a cat being involved in separate accidents involving ensnarement and heavy blows to the genitals within two weeks of each other?

  Not high, are they?

  Particularly low in Brum’s case, when you consider he’s been neutered. But Brum wouldn’t let a little thing like a lack of testicles hinder a decent disaster opportunity. Oh no! Not when he can render the blow to mine!

  I’d loaded my car with boxes, paperwork and a toddler, and begun rolling back down my drive as I fiddled with my seat belt, when I caught sight of an unexpected tabby face in my rear-view mirror. Especially unexpected as it was inside the car, peering at the back of my head from the parcel shelf. He’d obviously jumped into the car at some point during loading. There was no way that furry little sod was coming out in the car with me. A whole range of vomit-related crash incidents flashed through my mind as I put my foot on the brake and opened my door.

  I now realise that Brum was as eager to avoid a road trip with me as I was with him. The moment the door opened, he bounded from parcel shelf to rear seat to front-seat headrest to lap within the blink of the eye. A heavy moving lump with claws dropping where it hurts from three feet is not nice. Not nice at all. Things suddenly happened very quickly.

  First, my whole body cramped up in excruciating pain; second, my foot abruptly left the brake; third, the car began rolling backwards with its door wide open; fourth, an escaping tabby launched a bid for freedom only to become entangled in my seat belt on his way to the tarmac; and lastly, the screaming tabby was dragged eight foot down the drive on his back by the runaway car.

  Clutching my groin and choking back tears (something I often do), I finally managed to wrench the handbrake on. Ignoring Maya’s jeers and laughter, I stumbled from the car and on to my knees to release a severely shocked Brum.

  At this point I noticed Lorraine watching from an upstairs window. ‘Nipping out to drop Maya at my mum’s and run a few errands,’ I’d said. Why then, ten minutes later, was the car skewered almost sideways across the drive, its driver doubled over holding his crotch and a wide-eyed cat lying prostrate on the floor? Lorraine gave a bemused shake of her head and disappeared from view.

  You may well be wondering how Dad could possibly have matched this – but he did. The only difference was that Brum got trapped because of a serious blow to the genitals, whereas Dad got a serious blow to the genitals because he got trapped. This most painful of mishaps involved a crowd surge on a stadium staircase. A frantic wave of people ploughed upstairs on either side of a central handrail, but not Dad. No, he cleverly went for the gap in the middle. He was promptly driven straight on to the handrail.

  As Mum and friends were carried onwards and upwards in the tide of bodies, they could only look back in wonder at Dad’s horrified and pain-racked face as he remained motionless at the foot of the stairs, his privates pinned to a cold metal bar by the weight of a thousand people.

  Finally – one last, striking likeness. Brum and Dad,
being of pensionable age, like to use their vast wealth of knowledge and experience to embarrass the younger members of their family. This is the way of pensioners.

  Although Brum’s behaviour one July morning was anything but that expected of a senior citizen. I awoke soon after dawn to the screams and howls of combat. Stumbling half asleep to the window I strained to see through the misty glaze of my contact-lens-deprived eyes. There, on the opposite side of the road, was Brum. He was in a cat fight, and Brum can’t fight. As if to emphasise this, his little black opponent suddenly launched forward and sent Brum sprawling whiskers over tail on to his back. A brief skirmish ensued, in which Brum struggled to finish second, and then the screeching, screaming stand-off resumed, with Brum’s fur looking rather more dishevelled than it had done moments before. It was clear I was going to have to get him out of this before he got himself killed or, worse, cost me another seven hundred in vet’s bills. I raced through the front door and down to the road. Brum’s foe spotted me and swiftly departed. Who wouldn’t? If a fourteen-stone man in boxer shorts came running at you down a deserted street at 5 a.m., you’d run too.

  There was still a problem, however. I wanted Brum inside before his sparring partner returned, but an absolutely livid, spitting, growling, panicked and wound-up Brum still wanted to fight. The said fourteen-stoner in boxers was his only visible target. I made a grab for him but he was too quick – swiping at my hands, falling back on to his hind legs and performing something that looked remarkably like a feline version of the haka. It was quite clear he’d gone temporarily insane. As I warily watched my snarling adversary, the stupidity of the situation hit me – I’d replaced Brum’s enemy and now stood fighting with a cat in the street in the early hours of the morning.

  I tried clapping my hands in an attempt to drive Brum towards the house, but he was having none of it. He was spoiling for a tear-up and a few claps weren’t going to stop him. He bared his teeth. Things were getting serious. I decided the conflict would have to be quick and clinical – I was going for the scruff of his neck and a back leg simultaneously. This technique annoys rather than hurts, and totally immobilises him (don’t ask how I first found that out). The key to my success lay in accuracy. I needed to get a grip on him in one swoop or I was going to end up a bloody mess. I crouched low and readied myself to pounce. Brum growled, his ears flattened back and his fur on end.

  ‘OI, TARZAN!’ came a sudden shout from nowhere. ‘WHAT’S GOING ON OUT THERE? WHAT THE **** DO YOU THINK YOU’RE PLAYING AT? KEEP THE BLOODY NOISE DOWN!’

  Both Brum and I looked up in time to see a neighbour’s curtain twitch back into place. Tarzan – an excellent if embarrassing analogy given my situation. The man had been treated to the bizarre spectacle of a half-naked man and an enraged cat warily circling one another in the middle of the road. Or jungle clearing. That cat had done it to me again – yet another act of bewildering oddness carried out by the man at number twenty-five. Brum suddenly broke from the fight and ran towards the house. At that very moment, the milkman trundled around the corner in his float.

  He blinked twice as he spotted me in the half-light of dawn. Something in my general appearance seemed to upset him. He accelerated past without stopping, all the time trying not to look at me and nervously rubbing his legs. I adjusted my pants and walked solemnly to my door.

  Dad’s ‘humiliating the youngsters’ parity with Brum on this one is spot-on.

  Dad was in a furniture shop entertaining two luckless granddaughters. As a good grandfather, he feels it only right and proper that he should behave like a complete moron for his grandchildren’s pleasure, and on this occasion was pretending that a wardrobe was a lift and that he was the lift attendant.

  Climbing inside, he chuckled ‘Going up’ at them and closed the door. His granddaughters looked at one another and sidled away to watch from a distance, thoroughly embarrassed by it all. They were immediately replaced by a shop assistant and an elderly couple, who ambled over to admire the wardrobe.

  The wardrobe doors suddenly sprang open to a shout of ‘FOURTH FLOOR!’ and the shocking sight of a manically waving man inside. The couple clutched at their hearts. Dad’s surprise was on a par with theirs.

  Three horrified senior citizens stared at each other aghast for a few breathless moments before Dad regained his senses and went for the ‘sensible’ option, darting past them and legging it for freedom, closely tailed by an angry shop assistant, who honestly believed Dad had jumped out of a wardrobe at two unsuspecting fellow pensioners through sheer malice. Two red-faced little girls melted silently into the background.

  My dad is getting on a bit now, of course, and a bit old for all these shenanigans, so I’m doing my best to take the baton and carry on the worthy work.

  Early promise has blossomed into thirty-something veteran brilliance and I find that every day, in every way, I’m getting worse and worse. I’ll soon be there.

  Gazebo!

  ‘Heroes have an infinite capacity for stupidity. Thus are legends born.’

  Anonymous

  Today was the day!

  As Autumn arrived I decided it was finally time to address the gazebo issue. This four-by-three-metre opened-sided tent had been intended to keep our patio in shade throughout the hot summer months, thus protecting Maya and Brum from sunburn. It would now be unlikely to protect them from much more than gently falling leaves, but it was still going up. The gazebo had now become far more than a gazebo. It had become a major bone of contention, and its erection would be a vital weapon in the ‘war on nagging’.

  As with most self-construction flat-pack items, the assembly instructions were an exercise in disinformation. I truly believe these pamphlets are written by ex-KGB agents who can’t quite click out of ‘deceive and disorientate’ mode. Having broken their code with Sammy’s Enigma machine and sat Maya down for an episode of JoJo the Clown (should I need any big-top construction tips later), I set about connecting a series of interlocking metal poles. Slowly a huge skeletal framework formed about me. Or fell about me mainly. The poles were all slightly too short. Every time I connected one, another fell out three metres behind me. Brum sat on the garden wall throughout, gazing down at me, ears pinned back in annoyance at each falling pole’s metallic clang.

  Finally, although aware that the precariously connected poles were not exactly rock solid, I hauled a large fitted cover over the bars. Having shrouded myself three times, it eventually slipped into place and, at last, I stood proudly inspecting the new white roof above my head. I stopped for a moment and smiled at the twitchy-eared silhouette of my tabby friend as he washed atop his wall, clearly visible through the thin fabric covering. All that remained now was to properly secure that covering to the poles.

  My smile broadened as I thought about all the gazebo-conversation-free nights ahead. And then my smile turned to a grimace. The silhouette was doing something it really didn’t want to be doing. Its backside was raised and wiggling, its nose pointed straight towards me. Grimace turned to total dismay. The stupid idiot was about to leap down on to the white surface that had suddenly appeared before him. Why hadn’t I thought of this possibility? Stretched tight over the bars, it looked to Brum like a perfectly solid, new and exciting roof. Brum’s elongated jump preparation routine gave me a little time, but not enough.

  As I lurched across the patio yelling ‘STOPPPPPPP!’ everything seemed to go into slo-mo. I raised a helpless hand to the sky as the shadow of an airborne cat drifted across the white canvas above me. The feline shadow loomed larger and landing-paws stretched forward – and then the world went pear shaped. The unsecured roof caved in about my ears, poles clattered around my feet and a gazebo-cloaked loony-cat smacked into my face.

  All this seemed to annoy Brum. I found myself embroiled in a fist fight with a three-by-four-metre white sheet as we both fought to free ourselves (and give each other a couple of slaps in the process). Amid all the chaos I heard Maya screaming something about JoJo having been real
ly naughty with some custard, but I had little time to think about that as ripping sounds now joined the general cacophony of clanging poles, miaowing cat and swearing gazebo builder. A claw dug into my right shoulder – he was through. My wild and pained left-hand lunge sent my screeching attacker flying.

  Suddenly everything was still. Maya mumbled something and was gone – this sort of thing being entirely normal in her recent experience. It will be difficult in later years to explain that everything she learnt as a child about how parents and cats should behave was based on the study of seriously abnormal role models.

  I sat in absolute dejection beneath my sheet, my gazebo palace collapsed about me. There was a scratching noise and a corner lifted. A scruffy tabby face appeared and looked at me. I stared back for a few moments and smiled, despite myself. With a bit of determined straining and squirming, Brum forced his way fully inside our makeshift tent and made his way towards me, a look of worried concern on his face. Now I began laughing. He pushed onward through folds of fabric, climbed on to my lap and began purring.

  And that was that. A man and cat at peace with one another again, beneath a three-by-four-metre white sheet amid the ruins of an almost-gazebo.

  Weird Pets

  ‘Cats, no less liquid than their shadows.’