by Chris Pascoe
A.S.J. Tessimond
I’m always getting told pet ghost stories in the pub these days. Ever since asking for them a while back, they’re thrust upon me whether I like it or not.
The majority are wind-ups. There is a chill in the air as the storyteller sets the scene and then, just as you’re waiting for the shocking finale, they’ll scream ‘MIAOW’ in your ear and you’ll choke on your peanuts.
A really silly story concerning Brandy, the shy tortoiseshell, is a good example of a typical wind-up. Brandy wasn’t just a little shy, she was painfully shy. Unfortunately her owner was a real party animal and filled her house with guests virtually every night. Not only that, she’d dress Brandy up in ribbons and bows, parading her at parties like a show poodle.
Brandy died on a party night, killed while trying, as normal, to hide from a house full of noisy people. She’d hidden under a car in the drive just as its owner was the first to leave. At the moment of Brandy’s demise, her owner had an overwhelming sense that something terrible had happened. She swore she’d seen Brandy’s face in her mind and that Brandy was trying to tell her something. That night, she saw Brandy again, in a harrowing dream. Brandy was dressed in party clothes, walking around on her hind legs in a bizarrely human way. Suddenly Brandy turned and hissed at her, accusing her of ruining her short life and swearing to haunt all future parties at the house for evermore, hiding from every guest that entered her home. The owner woke in a sweat, her ears ringing with Brandy’s last words. And, as unlikely as Brandy’s claim may have seemed, it should be noted that since her death, almost four years ago . . . Brandy’s ghost has never been seen.
You see what I have to contend with.
But every now and then I get a cracker. This was told to me by a girl whose parents owned a huge black cat back in the 1970s. Blackie (names weren’t a challenging thing back then, were they?) had been a bit of a pain around the house, and regularly got on the wrong side of the girl’s father. His worst habit was ripping the father’s suit trousers to shreds. Now, while ripping things up is a fairly normal feline activity, it can get pretty expensive when it’s good-quality work suits which are being destroyed at a rate of one per month. Everybody loved Blackie except the fed-up father, and the fed-up father decided Blackie had to go.
Blackie had been with the family for years and really didn’t want to leave. He was sent to live with a relative on the south coast, which was nice as the family could still see him now and then. Alas, they never did. Within a week of moving he fell seriously ill and a couple of days later he was dead. The really sad thing was that, if the family had known it was coming, he could at least have died in his own home.
But (of course) that wasn’t the end of Blackie’s story. A few weeks later the father was woken by scratching noises. He investigated, finding nothing, but as he turned the light off he saw the silhouette of a cat sitting on the chair at the end of his bed. He hurriedly switched the light back on and stared long and hard at an empty chair. In the morning he’d virtually forgotten the incident – until he pulled on his suit trousers. Both legs hung in tatters, torn to pieces. He’d bought the suit only a day before. Purr-fect feline revenge, I think.
At about the time Blackie was busily destroying suits, other ghostly happenings were occurring in the very next street, although this particular story has a rather different ending. A couple, friends of my parents, in fact, had recently said a sad farewell to their old tabby, who, in keeping with the imaginative naming policy of the era, was called Tabby. Tabby had been ill for some time and was eventually put to sleep a few days before the couple’s summer vacation. They set off for Spain, hoping a couple of weeks in the sun would help lift their spirits, and left the house in charge of a young friend, who, having no property of her own and residing with relatives, eagerly agreed to house-sit and feed the couple’s rabbits, goldfish and tortoise.
The house-sitter was surprised on arrival at the house to find there was also a tabby that needed feeding. She was well aware the couple had just lost a cat, but assumed they must have had two and forgotten to mention the second. She soon located a bowl and a good supply of cat food in a cupboard, so just got on with her job. She couldn’t help noting, though, that the cat had rather erratic behavioural patterns, always appearing nervous and distant, vanishing for long periods, sometimes for two or three days. Some evenings it would sit in a chair and stare at her for hours – never sleeping, just staring. It was all a little unnerving, but the house-sitter assumed that the tabby was just missing its owners and couldn’t get used to a stranger in the house.
When the couple arrived home they were shocked to see Tabby’s old food bowl back in use and an open tin of cat food in the fridge. A note, left by the house-sitter, filled them in on all the gossip they’d missed, thanked them for the use of their house and, in a startling footnote, mocked them for forgetting to mention there was a cat to feed.
They immediately phoned the house-sitter, as you would, and asked the basic but burning question, ‘What cat!’
The house-sitter gave a chillingly accurate description of Tabby. It was difficult to gauge who was more shaken – the couple who’d just been informed that their deceased cat had returned from the grave, or the poor house-sitter, who suddenly realised she’d spent two weeks sharing a house with a ghost.
The story could have ended there, and Tabby would’ve forever been remembered as the cat that had risen from the dead. But that night came one final twist. As the couple settled down to watch TV, they heard the cat-flap spring open. They looked at one another in alarm and hurried to the kitchen. There, standing in the middle of the room, was Tabby. Or at least a tabby. Not their Tabby.
Not a ghostly visitation at all, but a neighbourhood chancer who happened to wander through an inviting cat-flap at just the right moment, finding a young girl who immediately prepared him a meal and made him a welcome guest for two whole weeks!
Much more ghostly than this is the story of the recurring white cat. This goes way back to the 1950s and is pretty weird. The white cat in question was named – wait for it – Whitey . . . no, not really – the cat’s name was Billy.
Billy belonged to a member of the fire service and his owner tended to move from town to town, station to station, on a regular basis. Billy lived for only three years, long enough to move home twice. Shortly after arriving at his third home, he was hit by a car and died. Around a year later, the fireman moved on again. He’d been in his new home a week when a stray white cat appeared on the doorstep. The fireman took him in, just as he had Billy. They were friends for only a short while. This cat too was killed in a road accident.
It was two years before the fireman relocated again, and waiting on his doorstep at his new house was a stray white cat. The fireman was beginning to find things strange. The cats were all different but all of them, Billy included, had come to him when he’d moved to a new home. All had behaved in roughly the same manner, had the same habits and, sadly, all died in the same way. The third, like Billy and his successor, was killed by a car.
The fireman moved again, almost expecting a white cat to join him. No white cat appeared and the fireman felt a pang of remorse – maybe it was finally over. It wasn’t. Six months later a stray white cat came to the door. It was the absolute spitting image of Billy, now dead for over seven years. The fireman named him Billy, swearing that he really was Billy and telling friends that he’d recognise him anywhere. An old black-and-white photo proved there was indeed an uncanny resemblance. This Billy survived, and seemed to have learnt from old mistakes. He was terrified of cars, and never once set foot beyond his owner’s drive.
Strange, that one.
So would this one be, if it didn’t involve my sister, Sarah. I reported in Brum’s first book that Sarah’s daughter, in her young days, had an uncanny perceptiveness about ghostly goings-on. She claimed, at two years old, to have been visited by a cat who died before she was born, giving an accurate description of the cat in question. Th
e cat was Brum’s brother, Lester, and the reason I bring the subject back up is that Lester is claimed to have visited recently.
Sarah has only one cat these days, a wild little white-and-marmalade named Leon (Leigh-on-Sea). Leon now possesses a clever habit of getting stuck in very high places and has become a popular figure with Beaconsfield Fire Brigade. Way, way up an extremely tall tree at dusk one evening, he began his usual ‘I’m stuck’ wailing.
Sarah sighed a sigh of repetitive resignation and took up position at the bottom of the tree, beginning her ‘coaxing down’ routine (biscuit-box-rattling and screaming abuse). After five minutes she noticed Leon wasn’t alone. Sitting next to him, too far away to see clearly in the failing light, was a small silver-grey tabby. Sarah squinted and strained to see. Being a rational, clear-thinking type of girl, Sarah instantly assumed the tabby to be Brum’s long-dead brother and gasped in disbelief. Well, not disbelief, but belief actually – total belief in anything and everything. She rushed inside to find binoculars. By the time she returned, the light had virtually gone and all she could make out was the rough shape of the two cats, high above her. One began to make its way tentatively down, half skipping, half falling from branch to branch.
As it reached the lower branches, Sarah could see it was Leon. She looked up high again. The other cat was gone. She looked and looked, but no other cat became visible.
As a ghost story, the incident can obviously be discounted owing to the anything-goes spiritual credibility of its only witness, but I still believe Lester appeared to the crazy witness’s daughter and wonder whether, spiritual sensitivity often running in families, Maya might possess the trait. Early signs, however, are that like me she has a complete lack of facility (unlike me, only when it comes to the world of spirits).
Not only does she not seem to perceive any ‘presences’ at all, she steadfastly refuses to accept the existence of Santa Claus and laughs out loud at any mention of monsters, ghosts and tooth fairies.
Even when we left a particularly harrowing computer game, involving the blowing to pieces of corpses and zombies, on the screen (as all good parents do), she merrily danced back into the living room yelling, ‘THE HOUSE . . . OF THE DEAD’ in deeply disturbing tones.
No, it’s only the dinosaurs which worry her, and they, after all, did actually exist. Being too young to appreciate that sixty-five million years is a long time to have been dead, she just won’t accept that the dinosaurs’ extinction is a definite conclusion. She feels we’ve made a mistake on that one. But if Maya has no special qualities in making contact with the spirit world, she’s certainly managed to emulate her father in making contact with the world of the weird. In her choice of pets, that is.
She’s just acquired two goldfish (in a frenzy of Nemo-mania) who are particularly weird but, having spent her whole time on earth with Brum, she probably expected nothing less. Brum wasn’t my first pet, of course. And not the first weird one either. Oh no. When I was very young I had a hamster called Carling, named for my father’s use of a pub ashtray as a water bowl.
Carling looked OK, but he was as mad as a lorry. Why else would he spend all day every day standing beside his exercise wheel, turning it with one paw? Not in his exercise wheel, exercising, but just idly flicking the wheel round and round, round and round, all day long, every waking hour.
Did he somehow believe that the wheel had to be turned, and that he’d found a ‘minimum effort, maximum gain’ method of hamstering? Did he perhaps think that his turning the wheel provided the world with electricity? And then, one day, he got even weirder. He lost his front left leg. How do you lose your leg? One day he had it, the next it was gone. He wasn’t bleeding or anything, he was just one leg short. Even Brum hasn’t achieved anything on that level . . . yet. I’ve little doubt that he will. I’m quite sure that some day he’ll hop home with an appendage or two unaccountably missing. It didn’t seem to bother Carling in the slightest, but one effect of his dramatic limb loss was that he was no longer able to turn the wheel.
With no interest in running inside it, the wheel remained still for the rest of his days, which just so happened to be the very same days of the 1970s when the country became plagued with constant electrical power cuts. You now know why those cuts occurred. Absolutely nothing to do with trade unions, everything to do with a small rodent named after a plastic ashtray.
Maya’s new goldfish are hopefully not destined to bring Britain’s national grid down, but they are a little odd. Or at least, I think they are. I’m not exactly sure what fish are meant to do so I have no idea whether staring at a big gormless tabby face all day long is normal behaviour. But that’s what they do. I always thought fish lived in a little world of their own, predominantly ignoring the world beyond their tank, but Bob and Dad (Maya’s choice of fish names – Bob is a good one as that’s what he does all day, but Dad? Lorraine thinks maybe she recognises something in that gormless open-mouthed look) seem to have built up an instant rapport with Brum. They all stare at each other for hours, as if communicating on a telekinetic level. Either that, or all three of them are as thick as two short planks and can’t think of anything better to do.
Back to ghosts and, leaving the most ridiculous until last, for sheer spooky stupidity this one has to come top. If this snippet of a story is true, as the teller swears it is, then it’s proof indeed that reckless incompetence goes on long after the last breath is drawn. Brum will be very at home in the afterlife.
The teller had a cat who liked to climb aerials. His death was crazy. He climbed to the very top of a rooftop radio mast, bending it over with his weight. It bent so far over that its tip almost reached back down to the roof. The cat spotted this as a convenient place to dismount and stretched two paws on to the tiles. The removal of over half his body weight twanged the aerial upright at breakneck speed, catapulting the cat into the air by his hind legs, off the roof and straight into the road. A passing driver, probably not expecting a cat to fall from the sky, careered off the road and hit a tree.
The cat was dead on the scene. The car driver survived. The spooky thing is that, ever since, the road has suffered from epidemics of unexplainable TV and radio interference. Could it be that this moronic cat, not content with killing himself in a vain bid to silence Terry Wogan, was still up there, hanging off antennae and blocking the airwaves? No doubt in my mind. Or my sister’s.
There’s one last eerie footnote to all this. My grandfather was still in the fire service during the 1950s, despite not enjoying the 1940s one little bit (a bit heavy on the old aerial push-biking opportunities), and it is from him that we heard the story of Billy, the recurring white cat.
In fact, my grandfather knew the final Billy very well. So well, in fact, that he took him in when his owner tragically died on duty in 1959.
The records grow dim here and my grandparents are no longer around to ask, but just who, exactly, was the white cat named Billy I clearly recall them owning in the late 1980s . . . ?
The Carpet-fitters
‘He that is down need fear no fall.’
John Bunyan
With one freestyle-vomiting champion cat, one hunter-killer moggy and one food-chucking toddler, we tend to get through carpets. The carpet-fitters were coming again.
Really and truly, I should be fitting our carpets myself. I trained as a carpet-fitter upon leaving school, something that turned out to be a pretty bad career choice in all truth. During sixteen years of practical schooling, I proved beyond doubt that I was totally incapable of cutting anything in a straight line. It mattered not a jot whether I was trying to cut paper, wood, metal, fabric or simply a dashing figure, everything meandered off in wildly ridiculous arcs (especially the dashing figure). This sort of thing isn’t a good trait in a carpet-fitter.
Fortunately, once actively training to be something I didn’t have any hope of ever being, I very rarely managed to get my Stanley-knife blade anywhere near expensive rolls of carpet – its only real function being the dail
y slashing of my hands and knees. Similarly, my hammer’s purpose appeared to be securing my fingers to lengths of multi-nailed gripper rod.
My long-suffering and often blood-splattered boss finally managed to persuade me to leave by refusing to pay me any more money and suggesting I took up an apprenticeship with a local electrician. Looking back, I do wonder whether he was trying to get rid of me in more ways than one. Surely a lad who somehow managed to turn carpet-fitting into a highly dangerous activity would without doubt kill himself when dealing with high-voltage electricity? I think he wanted to make absolutely certain I’d never work for him again. Not even as a favour.
Knowing my track record and the danger I represented, an electrician still took me on. I believe this was less a case of him giving me a second chance, and more a case of him being a lunatic.
I wasn’t an electrician for long. By the time I met Brum, I’d thankfully said goodbye to all that, sacked for my dismal job-to-explosion ratio. My next job involved smashing holes in walls. It was a job I proved exceptional at and still do well to this day, albeit unintentionally. But I still like to tinker in the trades, still like to ruin the odd carpet, ignite the odd appliance. One particular tinkering jumps immediately to mind . . . It was a bright spring morning, and I awoke with a strong urge to fit an outdoor socket – as you do. I had all the right equipment, all the right tools and a sketchy idea of what I was supposed to do.
Brum watched∗ my tinkering with the air of a devout fan. He sat on my car bonnet in the drive, yawning as if cheering as I ran back and forth from house to drive, wire trailing everywhere. He observed every single move I made, his eyes following me for the best part of an hour, not wanting to miss a thing. He looked delighted the whole time, his face set in a big happy smile, and when I reached the finale – the wiring in of the socket itself – he wandered over to offer his congratulations.