by Chris Pascoe
Somewhere between in and out, up and down, back and forth, I’d managed to switch the power back on and forgotten to switch it off. Therefore, as I confidently grabbed a live wire between finger and thumb I received a nasty electric shock, which was something I’d become fairly used to during my electrical apprenticeship and so no massive problem. However, I don’t know if you know, but a secondary electric shock is much worse than an initial one. Touch somebody who’s got 240 volts coursing through their body and you’re in big trouble.
And so it was that I acted as super-conductor for my super-tabby. An eagerly sniffing feline nose connected with my arm at precisely the wrong moment and was suddenly airborne, along with its owner. Brum must have thought the world had gone crazy again.
He brushes his face against his owner’s arm and suddenly there’re sparks, explosions and he’s hurtling backwards into a fence at ninety miles an hour.
He hit that fence so hard that three fence panels smashed in half and he rebounded back two feet into the drive. Somehow he just got back up, every charged hair standing on end, and walked back towards me as if nothing had happened.
He reached me, sniffed my arm again (which must be about the most stupid thing it would be possible to do in the circumstances), seemed deliriously happy that the arm in question hadn’t served him another star-bursting hammer-blow to the face, and settled down, purring.
For reasons now obvious, Lorraine stopped me messing with ‘practical things’ and, despite my still being keen to fit our new carpet, felt much safer paying somebody else to do it.
As she pointed out – there’s still every chance my electrics will burn the house down and so it’s important that no badly fitted carpets bunch up against doors and restrict fire-brigade access. ‘Jack of all trades, master of my own demise,’ she called me, and then chuckled to herself for nearly half an hour (ha bloody ha). We’re making her odd, Brum and I. She never used to be like this.
My cause faltering in the face of Lorraine’s ‘wit’, I was finally silenced forever by a raised hand and the mouthed word ‘gazebo’. I flinched, glanced at the mangled and ripped wreckage that still lay bundled in a corner of the patio, and rang the carpet-fitters.
Had I known the entertainment they would provide, however, I’d have willingly paid double. In fact, the cabaret started before they even arrived. Our fitting contract stipulated that ‘the customer should completely empty the room and remove any existing carpet’. Probably a better wording would have been: ‘the customer and his toddler should work against one another and completely fail to empty the room or remove any existing carpet and cat’ (forgive me for saying ‘cat’ rather than ‘cats’ here, but Sammy doesn’t involve herself in matters of the workforce).
Owing to this contractual wording oversight, I totally underestimated the time it would take to empty a room, which was mainly why I started the task thirty minutes before the carpet-fitters were due to arrive. The house very quickly descended into chaos. While Sammy slept soundly in the farthest room, I knocked pictures from walls and chipped paint from doors as I slowly but steadily piled the contents of the lounge in the kitchen. Brum took up his normal ‘loud activity’ pose – standing right in the middle of the action with his hair on end, a mixture of astonishment and panic in his eyes.
Not once did he think to move. Not once did it cross his mind to go to another, safer, room. Consequently I spent the best part of half an hour stepping on him, tripping over him, dropping things on his head and accidentally booting him across the room. If I tried to move him aside with a gentle push he fell over sideways.
As I marched back and forth with items, so too did Maya. It took me quite a while to realise she was moving items in the opposite direction, refilling the living room as fast as I emptied it. With these two lending their assistance, it was quite a relief to reach the final item – the three-seater sofa.
After I’d raised my end and watched Maya grunt for a few moments at hers without anything much happening, I tipped the sofa up on its end, so that one arm rested on the floor and the other almost touched the ceiling. At this point I noticed a gaping hole in the fabric on its underside, and a sharp spring poking out. Great – a new sofa required∗ too. It took me a few minutes to bend the spring back inside and trap it against other dodgy springs, and then I was ready to go. My aim was to walk the sofa on its end, shuffling it as I went, towards the door, and then tip it through.
Things went very well. With a huge grunt I messed up totally, sending it toppling straight back down into the space it originally occupied, and which now unfortunately had been taken up by a curiously sniffing Brum. All I could do was clasp my hands to my head as it fell, expecting Brum’s familiar shriek of hurt surprise at any moment.
It never came. I thought I’d squashed him. I dropped to my knees and lifted the edge of the chair. Either he was as flat as a pancake, or he’d gone.
How on earth had he got out in time? He needed to have moved like a turbo-charged cheetah. Brum can’t move like that. And not only had he avoided the sofa, he’d somehow darted past Maya before she’d had time to mount him and ride him ‘rodeo’ down the hall. Impossible.
I shrugged and whipped the sofa end up to the ceiling again. There was a loud dull thud and now the Brum shriek. I jumped in surprise and looked all around the sofa. No Brum. Baffled, I dropped it back down. There was another shriek. I stared at the sofa and glanced around the room, but there was absolutely no sign of him. Realisation began slowly to dawn. It dawned with an element of ‘surely not’. Could he really be inside the sofa?
Then I heard loud scratching, and the scratching had an echo. I looked at the sofa again. No doubt about it – the noise was coming from inside. I quickly flung one end high into the air again, a rather reckless action which brought forth another crash and shriek. I studied the exposed underside of the sofa and the huge gaping hole adjacent to my face. I poked my face into the hole. From six feet below, in the inky blackness of the sofa’s hollow base, came a deeply irritated miaow.
I couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t got out of the way at all. Of course he hadn’t. He simply stood still and watched the sofa land on him. By sheer chance, the hole came down exactly where he stood and swallowed him. Brum, being Brum, accepted his new surroundings instantly and without question, and set off to explore the sudden dark cave, continuing until blindly thumping into its opposite end. Then the cave shot into the air and sent him crashing from one end to the other.
Typically, at this moment, with the carpet still down, the sofa on its end and Brum trapped inside, the doorbell rang. The carpet-fitters had arrived – an old chap and a lad of about seventeen.
They marched in and looked at the almost cleared room while I busily explained that my cat was stuck inside the sofa. I had the distinct impression that they weren’t listening to a word I was saying. I’m not sure they even noticed I was speaking. Without breaking stride and with one abrupt push, the older man sent the sofa crashing back to the floor. Then they grabbed an end each and marched back towards the door. They didn’t get far.
A bedraggled-looking cat dropped from the sofa’s underside like a stone, providing an unexpected hurdle to the young lad whose legs were taken clean from under him. The lad stumbled forward, pushing his boss to the floor and slamming the sofa down on his chest. Brum, for good measure, jumped on to the sofa and began washing.
Judging by the boss’s expression, the lad was in big trouble. A great deal of silent animosity followed as the pair resumed their room clearance, dumping the sofa in the hall and completely ignoring the blissfully content cat on its middle cushion. As they began ripping up the old carpet, it occurred to me that they hadn’t said a single word. Not to me, not to each other, not to Brum or Maya. I asked whether they wanted a drink The old chap shook his head, the lad nodded, the old chap glared at the lad and the lad shook his head. Not a word. Skilful stuff.
They soon shot back outside and appeared moments later with the new carpet, m
arching on into the living room without stopping. I was about to speak when they slammed the door in my face. A few seconds later the door swung open, Maya hurried out and it slammed behind her.
For the next fifteen minutes there was a great deal of crashing, banging, shuffling and grunting. I didn’t know quite what to do with myself. I paced up and down the hall for a while, as if they were delivering a baby rather than fitting a carpet. Maya followed me up and down, attached to my shirt-tail. Twenty minutes later came the first spoken word, and it was a fine one.
‘BOLLOCKS!’
Followed swiftly by ‘SHIT!’
Then the soaring finale: ‘SOD IT! BOLLOCKS! BUGGER’S UNDER IT, BUGGER’S UNDER IT!’
There was a great deal more crashing, thumping and shuffling. The door opened. Brum hurtled out with his tail between his legs and ran for all he was worth. The door slammed behind him.
I hadn’t even realised he was in there. Was he the ‘bugger under it’?
I knocked on the door. The thumping and shuffling stopped abruptly. There was silence for a full minute and then it all started again. Bump, shuffle, crash, thump. They never replied.
On about the half-hour mark, there was a sudden burst of bewildering conversation.
‘Civil War,’ said the old one.
‘What?’ said the lad.
‘American Civil War.’
‘What American civil war?’
‘What? What American civil war? The American Civil War. The flipping American one.’
And that was it. Not another word, just crashes and thumps.
Ten minutes later, they marched back out. I said, ‘Are you done?’ but they were gone. By the time I got to the front door, they were getting back in their van.
‘Excuse me,’ I shouted. I had to know a couple of things.
The lad looked up at me.
‘What happened with the cat? What did the cat do?’
The lad looked stunned. He climbed quickly into the van and the van sped off.
I felt as if I’d been subjected to a hit-and-run carpet-fitting raid. It was as if they’d been in an unoccupied house. They seemed scarcely to perceive my existence at all.
I walked back inside. Brum and Maya had wandered into the lounge to inspect the carpet, and both were rolling around on it. I smiled at the daft tabby lying on his back, his front paws straight up in the air as if he’d just been shot.
I’ll never know exactly what happened, but I can pretty much assume they must have dumped the new carpet straight on top of him and started fitting it. The only surprise is that they didn’t fit it around him and leave a cat-shaped lump in the middle of the floor.
There’s something else I’d really like to know too – what on earth was the American Civil War bit about? Nothing in that room could’ve prompted the sudden, seemingly out-of-the-blue comment ‘Civil War’.
All I can do with that one is put forward my theory, and here it is:
The carpet-fitters, working towards a huge bonus, have somehow learnt to bend space-time. This was the reason my presence was largely superficial to them. I was like a dull groan in the background.∗ As they buzzed back and forth through time, they were moving at impossible speeds that made me appear to be merely a stationary object.
At some moment, their temporal-shifting carpet-fitting techniques went awry, and the old boy felt the need to comment that they were passing through the American Civil War. Once the lad had clarified exactly which American civil war his boss was referring to, he made the necessary adjustments and brought them away from the thunder of cannon and shrieking rebel yells – and back into twenty-first-century High Wycombe.
It was shortly after postulating this theory that I realised staying at home with Maya and Brum was, without doubt, driving me insane.
Death Threats
‘Diplomacy is to do and say,
The nastiest thing
In the nicest way.’
Isaac Goldberg
Possibly the nicest promise Maya has ever made to Brum could in some ways be perceived as an extremely unnerving threat.
Delivered with a broad smile, head cocked to one side in disarming, loving friendship, stroking the edgy-looking Brum’s head, ‘I won’t kill you, Brummy’ could be taken in a number of ways.
First and foremost, it could be taken purely at face value. From this we’d ascertain one thing and one thing only – that Maya won’t kill Brum. Which is good. She was merely reassuring him of the fact. What is perhaps more worrying is why. It’s not the sort of thing you say to someone, is it?
I don’t go up to people at work, put my hand on their shoulder and soothingly assure them I have no intention of killing them. If I did, I’m sure the last thing they’d take away from the exchange would be that I was safe to be around. For a start, they’d be seriously worrying why the thought was in my head in the first place. Second, having never, before that moment, suspected that I might want to kill them, they’d have to seriously re-examine my attitude towards them. Their only conclusion would have to be that I’d seriously considered the option.
When I actually do some work, I work with market researchers. Therefore, yes, I admit I would have to seriously consider the option of killing my colleagues.
So, the second reason for Maya’s warm gesture may have been a dark one. She’d been harbouring murderous thoughts and felt the need to reassure herself rather than her tabby. By the worried look on Brum’s face, this reason may well have occurred to him. If this is the true reason for her comment, at least it shows that she’s fighting the urge and so very unlikely to carry it out. The third and worst reason, and the one I believe most likely, is that it’s all a poker bluff, and she’s going to kill him.
And if I need to discover a motive, it’s staring me in the face right now. In fact Brum is staring me in the face right now, and that’s enough motive for anyone, but also – Maya is mad.
And it’s not just Maya. All toddlers are mad. They run around in circles making blabbering noises, seem to be stoned and drunk the whole time and find excitement in every little thing (Maya actually cheers if you turn a torch on). They are totally off their trolleys, all of them, but Maya has also recently displayed some rather macabre personality traits that send shivers down my spine and which Brum should take very careful note of.
I think the first sign was when I found Homer Simpson’s head missing. My talking Homer alarm clock has been beside the bed for years and I only ever look at it when it tells me it’s time to get up. On this particular morning I responded to the shout of ‘BUT I GOT UP YESTERDAY!’ by, as usual, attempting to punch Homer in the face, only to find his face inexplicably missing.
When Maya wandered into the bedroom, clutching her Winnie-the-Pooh handbag, she looked a picture of butter-wouldn’t-melt innocence. When I asked her whether she knew anything about my headless alarm clock, she smiled, unzipped her bag and pulled out Homer’s head. Still smiling, a little manically, she said that she wanted to keep it in her bag . . . always and for ever. Where on earth did she get the idea to do a thing like that? Somebody carrying a decapitated head around in their handbag is surely the sort of thing you’d read about in a James Herbert or a Stephen King, not in Bob the Builder and the Frozen Duck Pond.
A day or two later, I caught her trying to shove Brum into the tumble dryer. Now I was getting really worried. My theory was gaining momentum.
As if the headless Homer business wasn’t enough, she then displayed incredible violence towards Bill the Flowerpot Man. When I found him, it was too late. He lay in Maya’s potty and, after what had happened to him, the only thing he’d be seeing would be the inside of a body . . . er, bin bag. The one coherent thing that toy ever said was ‘WEED’. How ironic.
I had a long chat with Maya about this, for the obvious reason that you don’t put toys in your potty. Maya may be noisy and criminally insane, but she is obedient. That’s why Bill’s best mate Ben met his own near-identical fate in the toilet. There’s a differe
nce between the potty and the toilet, you know.
And then, as if to emphasise the thought processes going on in her mind, the first question she asked me when I picked her up from a toddler friend’s birthday party was, ‘If you’re dead, you’re in the ground, eh, Daddy?’
Chilling. And it was obviously something she’d been dealing with at the party. Is that the sort of subject that comes up when you throw a bunch of toddlers into the same room? Do they talk about burials all day long? Are they all plotting to murder their cats? Or is it more an innocent case of the infinite-monkeys theory – put enough monkeys in front of typewriters for an infinite length of time and eventually, inevitably, they will write the complete works of Shakespeare? In other words, could it be that toddlers talk so much non-stop nonsense that they’re just bound to get around to murder eventually?
Because of all this, I became increasingly suspicious of her. She could sense my unease, and became equally suspicious of me. Every time I moved, her little eyes followed me like a hawk’s. Every time I left the room, she demanded to know what I was doing. Because I didn’t want this to be the prevailing atmosphere between us, I put the subject out of my mind. But then I heard her on the phone, asking Gandalf Stick for ‘monies’. When he refused, probably because he was one hundred miles away and wasn’t about to wire her bank account, she said, ‘Then I huff, and I puff, and I blow your house down!’
Her first protection racket. Surely the message to be taken from the story of the three pigs is one of hard work and good materials, not one of extorting money from elderly people through threats of damage to property.
I continued to push suspicions of her tendencies to the back of my mind, but then she started making seriously derisory comments about Brum. He’d always been her favourite, so where did this come from:
‘Mummy, Sammy’s very pretty, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, Maya, she is. Do you think Brum’s pretty too?’