The Hairy Tails of a Cat Sitter

by C H Hemington

Chapter 9 - Emergencies

  From bite wounds and scratches to pulled muscles and tendons, it’s inevitable that in my line of work the odd medical drama will occur, and that’s just to me. Needless to say, the inquisitive nature of the cat means that they often end up landing themselves in trouble too, and this is certainly true of some of the cats I’ve looked after. I remember turning up at poor old Spratt’s house one day to find him hobbling towards me with one of his front paws well and truly caught up in his collar. Then there was Lucy from whom I’d had to remove the most enormous tick I’d ever seen. Through my handy magnifying glass key-ring I could see its little legs pulsating back and forth against its bulbous body whilst its head was buried under Lucy’s skin enjoying a Bloody Mary.

  Suffice to say, trying to give tablets to my charges was frustrating at best and impossible at worst, and not in the least bit as amusing as the images conjured up by all those ‘Advice on Giving a Cat a Pill’ joke emails that do the rounds from time to time. Putting medication in food also had it hazards, the main one being my memory. Some of the preparations were the type which, when added to the cat’s food, immediately dissolved, and I only had to be distracted for a moment to forget whether I’d put it in or not. I’d then spend ages staring at the contents of the cat bowl, weighing up whether it would be better for the cat to have two lots of medication or none at all. On all of the above occasions, and on others, the fixes were usually quick and no harm was done.

  However, there have been times when I’ve needed to make an executive decision to take a client’s cat to the vet, not one I ever took lightly given that it was rarely undertaken without a right ‘to do’ ensuing. The scene usually played out thus: I would, as discreetly as possible, remove the cat carrier from the garage or under stairs cupboard. The cat would take one look at it and career towards the cat flap, if it had one, or go into hiding under an upstairs bed, if it didn’t. I was always one step ahead of the ‘cat-flap escapees’ and would ensure their personal door to the outside world was locked prior to fetching the carrier. There would then ensue a game of ‘catch the cat’ as it ducked and dived away from me with such agility that I sometimes wondered why I’d decided to take it to the vet in the first place. With the ‘under-bed-hiders’ it was a case of playing the waiting game.

  This would involve me hiding the cat carrier and lulling the cat into a false sense of security by leaving it to its own devices in its own personal ‘under-bed panic room’. This rarely worked and I’d always be the first to crack, attempting to entice it out using any, or usually all, of the following: cat treats (or whatever else happened to be its favourite edible delicacy); knotted shoelaces with feathers on the end; catnip mice/bananas/cigars/rainbows; valerian-stuffed rats; plastic balls that lit up when bounced; scrunched up pieces of paper; elastic bands and laser light toys. If all these failed, the only thing left was a tap on the bum with a broom handle. On one occasion I even had to move the bed, before I realised that simply closing the bedroom doors before getting the carrier out would save an awful lot of time and energy.

  Having eventually caught the cat there would be much hissing and raking of the back legs whilst I carried it to its temporary prison cell, and much digging of its back legs into the ground (front-loaders), or it’s claws into the roof (top loaders), whilst I attempted to get it in. The car journey would either be eerily quiet or punctuated with howling so loud I feared for my eardrums. This would often continue once we’d reached the veterinary practice and throughout our wait for the vet. However, my cat Billy would do neither. Instead he’d cover himself with a towel and try and create a shape underneath that least resembled a cat. On one occasion the vet and I took away the towel to find him standing on his head.

  Unfortunately this was a scene that played out regularly with Mac and Dee’s cat, a scruffy black and white moggie called Catywampus who required weekly vitamin B12 injections. If I was a cat called Catywampus it wouldn’t just be vitamin injections I’d need but anti-depressants. However, as Catywampus was an indoor-only cat I was at least spared the indignity of having to call him in, but hearing his name being announced by a giggling receptionist whilst waiting to see a vet in a crowded waiting room was a humiliation which I believed to be above and beyond the call of duty.

  Catywampus was usually a laid back, placid type of cat who if he’d be a human would no doubt have been a hippie. However, when it came time to take him for his weekly jab he turned into Lucifer’s representative on earth. Dee and Mac would try their best to ensure that I would only need to go to the vet with him once during their holidays by always taking him themselves the day before they departed. However when they went off for their annual fortnight in the sun, it just wasn’t possible to get away with a single jab and the experiences were traumatic enough to guarantee that I would never thereafter commit to a job which required scheduled veterinary visits.

  However, there were also occasions when trips to see the vet were completely unpredictable. Smarty was a very sweet and affectionate little cat with smoky grey fur and vivid green eyes. His owners Raj and Mandy described him as being one brick short of a full load, and it was true, he wasn’t the brightest of cats, despite his name. He was also particularly clumsy and the combination of these two traits spelled disaster. If I was his owners I’d have been tempted to keep him indoors during holidays, but Raj and Mandy felt that the benefits to Smarty of being given the freedom to enjoy the world outside the back door outweighed the risks, a point of view I could also understand. However, it did mean that I usually approached every visit feeling a tad anxious.

  One cold winter’s morning when Raj and Mandy were taking their customary winter break in Barbados, I arrived at their home feeling reasonably confident that Smarty would be tucked up on his self-heating pet pad by the radiator in the kitchen, as he had been on my previous visits that week. So when I saw the empty bed I panicked. Grabbing the carton of fishy treats that he loved so much I headed towards the door that led to the hall, ready to check out all the nooks and crannies in the house that I believed him capable of squeezing into but which he mightn’t be able to get out of. However before I’d even reached the doorway something stopped me in my tracks. It was a little voice inside my head telling me to look outside first. I tried to tell myself that I was over-reacting and that Smarty would probably trot in at any second wearing his usual expression of sweet gormlessness, but as I opened the back door I couldn’t help but feel my stomach churn with dread. The spots of blood which led from a brick wall on one side of the patio to the shed on the other confirmed to me that something awful had happened. Following the trail of blood I found Smarty hiding in the gap between the fence and the shed, shivering with cold, and possibly shock. There was blood coming from his mouth and I needed to get him out quickly, but how? The gap was far too small for me to get into and any attempts to reach in and pull him out would only cause the poor little chap further distress and potentially further injury.

  I decided that the safest option would be to try and lure Smarty out. So making sure I left the back door wide open I rushed indoors, grabbed a saucer of cod that Raj and Mandy had left in the fridge for him and began to heat it up in the microwave. As I waited for the ‘ping’ another sound, coming from somewhere behind me attracted my attention. I looked around to see Smarty limping into the kitchen leaving spots of blood in his wake. Checking him over from where I stood, I could see that there was something about his face that didn’t seem quite right, so perhaps offering him food, even food as soft as flaked cod, wasn’t a good idea. As calmly as I possibly could I closed the back door, got Smarty’s cat carrier from the hall cupboard and put his self-heating pet pad in it. I then sat by him for a few seconds before carefully picking him up and placing him in the carrier. There was no fuss, no struggle, just a strange closed-mouth miaow from the back of his throat.

  “It’s likely that he’s fractured his jaw,” the vet said. “Palpation under anaesthetic will confirm this, and we’ll need to
x-ray him to see if there are any other broken bones.” Given Smarty’s propensity for getting into scrapes I knew Raj and Mandy had very sensibly taken out pet insurance and so I had no qualms in immediately agreeing to any investigations and subsequent treatment that he would need. I also made another decision, and that was to not tell Raj and Mandy what had happened, not yet anyway. If I imparted the news at this stage, it would likely worry them out of their wits, and they’d be heading home on the first plane. I wanted to wait until I was in a position to give them a confirmed diagnosis and positive treatment plan. So Smarty was taken into hospital and made comfortable ahead of his anaesthesia, and I was advised to go home, with the promise that I’d receive a call as soon as there were any updates on his condition.

  I didn’t go home, at least not to my home. I returned to Smarty’s house to see if I could figure out what might have happened. Back in Raj and Mandy’s garden I walked across the patio to where the trail of blood started, at the bottom of the brick wall which formed part of the boundary on the left hand side of the garden. As I did so I slipped on a patch of ice on the tiles beneath my feet, and it was only by grabbing hold of a large wooden bench next to me that I was able to prevent a potentially nasty and almost certainly painful fall. As soon as I regained my composure and was able to think clearly I wondered if perhaps the icy conditions mightn’t have also been a feature of Smarty’s accident. The brick wall was about six feet high and on one or two occasions I’d seen Smarty teetering precariously along it like a high-rise tightrope walker. Next to the wall stood a wrought iron bistro table and chair set, presumably which he used as a launch pad to get up to the top of the wall. Despite my earlier near-miss, I clambered onto one of the chairs and felt the top of the wall’s surface. There was no doubting it was icy up there, and given the pattern of the blood droplets, I concluded he must have attempted a jump onto the wall, lost his grip on the ice and come tumbling down again, possibly hitting his jaw on his way down either on the wall, the table or on the ground, after all Smarty was a cat that was never going to be able to land on this feet. Satisfied with my detective work I went home and after a four hour nerve-wracking wait, I finally received a phone call from the vet.

  “It was as I thought” the vet began authoritatively. “Smarty has broken his lower jaw in the middle of his chin. We’ve wired the two halves of the mandible back together and this will need to be kept in place for approximately one month. He’ll then have to come back in to have the wire removed.” He went on to tell me that the x-ray revealed no other broken bones, although he suspected some form of muscle or ligament tear to one of his hind paws, which would account for the limp I’d seen. They were going to keep him in for a couple of days so they could feed him intravenously to give his mouth time to heal, then once he’d started eating voluntarily he’d be allowed home. As the vet was speaking I was furiously scribbling notes for Raj and Mandy, if they were anything like me, they’d want as many details as possible. Fortunately they were due back two days later so if nothing else, Smarty had managed to time his accident quite well.

  I could hardly wait to see him but was told not to return for at least an hour which would give him time come round from the anaesthetic. Exactly sixty one minutes later I was back at the vets where a very young and enthusiastic veterinary nurse took me to see Smarty. I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting to see, but it certainly wasn’t a wire sticking out through the bottom of Smarty’s chin. “Don’t worry!” the nurse said as if reading my mind “It’s completely normal for it to be there.”

  I could generally deal with pee, poo, blood and gore but seeing a wire protruding from Smarty’s face definitely brought out the squeamishness in me. Nevertheless, I supposed it was just as well I’d seen it as I could then pre-prepare Raj and Mandy.

  Smarty looked up at me and immediately started purring. Despite what he’d been through, this accident-prone little cat still wanted to show that he was pleased to see me.

  As I suspected, Raj and Mandy’s immediate reaction was to curtail their holiday and return home straight away. However, I eventually managed to persuade them that there was no need for them to spend a fortune on changing their flights; at this stage Smarty was in good hands, was going to recover and there was nothing they could do until he came out of hospital, by which time they’d be back home anyway. I reassured them that I’d visit him twice a day until they got home and that I’d update them after each visit. It had been a difficult phone call, much more so for Raj and Mandy, and I imagined they’d need a few Rum Punches to get over the shock.

  Six weeks later, I visited Raj, Mandy and Smarty at home. The wire had been removed from Smarty’s jaw and he was back to his sweet uncoordinated, clumsy little self. Raj and Mandy continued to allow him outside, but only when they were at home to supervise his outings, and confirmed that when they next went away he was not to be allowed out under any circumstances.

  “Our nerves couldn’t stand it” Mandy said. Then grabbing me by the elbow whispered, “we were so upset after you first rang us to tell us what had happened, that we ended up on the Rum Punches and got completely plastered!”

  Thankfully, accidents like the one that happened to Smarty have been rare amongst my cat clientele, but there was one other incident of note for which I was wholly to blame, and accordingly paid the consequences.

  It was early one October evening, the light was fading and I’d just left my part-time job as a veterinary receptionist. Although I loved my cat-sitting work I didn’t earn enough money from it to be able to retain it as my only means of income, so I found myself taking on various part-time roles that I could work around my cat-sitting duties and which would supplement my earnings. At that particular time I was holding down four jobs concurrently and needless to say, this took its toll on me.

  On the day in question I’d been up early so I could fit in my morning cat-sitting rounds before a six hour shift at the vets, which was to be followed by a single cat-sitting visit, and then back home to answer emails and enquiries relating to my other jobs. As I got into my car outside the veterinary practice I felt decidedly jaded, but the thought of forty-five minutes with a big snuggle monster of a cat that lived nearby perked me up. It was only a ten minute journey from the vets to the house where Monica lived, a rotund tabby who loved nothing more than leaving rabbits heads for me to clean up, followed by a long session on my lap from where she was able to overwhelm me with her rabbit breath.

  The journey took me along a fast stretch of main road, off which was a partially obscured right hand turn into a narrow country lane, which led to Monica’s house. In an effort to keep myself alert I’d turned the radio up and was singing along to Tony Christie’s ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’. The dusky light was fast turning into darkness as I strained my eyes to locate my right hand turn. Helpfully, a car coming fast in the opposite direction briefly lit up the turning with its headlights.

  “Thank you very much” I said in appreciation whilst indicating right and starting to turn. “... way to Amarillo, every night I’ve been hugging my pi.....”

  The noise was deafening as something smashed into the passenger door of my little car and threw it off the road, up onto a grassy bank and into a patch of nettles. At the moment of impact I felt a heavy punch in my chest and a sharp pain in my back. As the car came to a stop my only thought was that it was about to burst into flames, so I unclipped my seat belt, opened my door and crawled out, ending up on my hands and knees.

  Within moments I was surrounded by people all talking about me as if I was lying unconscious on the ground, instead of obviously conscious and in an undignified ‘all fours’ position. Eventually somebody asked me if I was alright. I thought this a bit of a silly question under the circumstances, but understood the concerned intent of its asker and by way of reply managed a quick nod. Then, all those people who’d previously been talking about me started talking at me.

  “It’s shocking this road; I saw another accident just
last week”

  “I thought I heard something about the Council lowering the speed limit”

  “My Gilbert got knocked off his bicycle on this very road!”

  “Anybody know how the other driver is?”

  Hearing this last question sent my mind into a spin. Up until that point I’d rather selfishly been focussing on whether or not I’d been injured, and not about what had actually happened, let alone the involvement of another person. A kindly lady then got down next to me and told me what she’d witnessed. She’d heard the crash from the playground opposite where an outdoor event had been taking place. “Which is why there are so many people here,” she said. I guess I’d been lucky as that stretch of road is normally deserted in the evenings. “I came straight over and it looks like another car has gone into the side of yours whilst you were turning.”

  How could that have happened? I thought. I’d checked the road as I’d made the turn and didn’t see anything, unless the car’s driver hadn’t switched their headlights on? After all, some people didn’t until it was fully dark. “Don’t worry, the other driver is fine, not a scratch on her” the woman said. Although it was a huge relief to hear that news, I still couldn’t believe how I could have turned into the path of a fast moving car without seeing it.

  With these thoughts swimming around my head, I suddenly remembered Monica, the poor cat would be wondering where I’d got to. “Could you possibly find my mobile phone and call my husband Elliott to let him know what’s happened?” I asked the woman weakly. By then I’d started to feel very cold; inside the car with the heating turned up I’d been cosy and warm and there’d been no need for a coat, so being outside I now felt freezing and was visibly shivering.

  “We need to get her on her back” a voice abruptly shouted above the hubbub. I felt myself being rolled onto my side, and then onto my back. “Be careful now” the knowledgeable sounding voice said, “I want one of you supporting her neck, and two more supporting one leg each. I don’t want her moving.”

  It was then a that the face of a blonde and wavy-haired Adonis appeared above me, and shamefully all I could think of was that I must look a right state. “My name’s Henry” he said, in a silky toned, well spoken voice, “I’m an orthopaedic surgeon. Please lie as still as you can, an ambulance is on its way.” What were the chances that an orthopaedic surgeon would just happen to be driving past within moments of me having a nasty car crash? Judging by his looks, Henry was clearly heaven sent and at that moment I wondered if I hadn’t in fact passed over and was being guided on my way by this wonderful angel.

  “I think she’s delirious,” I heard Henry say; “she keeps going on about angels.”

  Within what seemed like a matter of minutes, I could make out the sound of an ambulance siren and thought how typical it was that they should come so quickly. I was quite comfortable staring up into Henry’s face from underneath the blanket he’d fetched from his car for me. “Make sure I get the blanket back” he said clinically to the two paramedics as they arrived and started going through their preliminary checks, “it’s the one I like to keep in my car.” The fact that Henry now appeared to be more bothered about his blanket than he was about me brought my little reverie to an abrupt end. The paramedics and two of the bystanders then carefully lifted me onto what I later found out was a ‘vacuum mattress’, but at the time felt like an instrument of torture. As I was about to be placed inside the ambulance I saw Elliott appear through the small crowd, his face so ashen I felt that we should swap places.

  “It’s just a precautionary measure” one of the paramedics told him, “you can follow us in your car if you like.” As I saw Elliott nod silently back at them, my thoughts turned once again to Monica. “FEED THE CAT!” I mouthed at him as I disappeared into the ambulance and the doors closed behind me.

  The journey to hospital was more painful than anything I’d experienced thus far that evening. I felt as if my body had been placed inside a metal vice, with every square inch of my skin gripped so tightly that I wondered if this was some kind of penance to make up for my earlier sinful thoughts about Henry. A paramedic friend later told me that it was in fact a specialist piece of equipment used on patients suspected of having back, neck or pelvic injuries, to keep them immobile during transportation.

  “It’s firstly moulded around the patient and then a pump sucks the air out of it so that it becomes completely rigid,” he told me. It was certainly rigid, and so was I. By then the adrenaline had worn off and I was feeling awful. In true hospital drama style I imagined the paramedic sitting by me suddenly shouting to his colleague, “put your foot down, her stats are falling through the floor!”

  The journey seemed to take forever, but finally we arrived at the Hospital and my vacuum mattress ordeal came to an end, as I was finally released from its clutches and transferred onto a hospital bed. However, I was still wearing an uncomfortably hard neck collar and before I knew it my head was being taped to the bed as an additional measure to counter my mobility. How I would have loved to have been able to put my fingers in my ears to muffle the sound of the man continually burping and farting in the next bay. It was like some terrible torture and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Fortunately it wasn’t that long before Elliott arrived and diverted my attention away from Mr Burpy-Farty.

  “Sorting that cat out was a nightmare!” he said.

  Hmm, that wasn’t exactly the first thing I had expected him to say. I couldn’t even shake my head in disapproval, so made do with rolling my eyes heavenwards. He then remembered that his wife, although not fatally injured had clearly been through a bit of an ordeal, and came over and held my hand. At that moment a doctor appeared through the curtains brandishing a large pair of scissors.

  “I hope your clothes weren’t too expensive!” he laughed, explaining that they would have to be cut off so that I could be x-rayed. As he began to cut through them I must admit I failed to see the funny side of it, and wondered if our home contents insurance would cover me for their loss. After a few minutes it became clear that he wasn’t getting very far. “Exactly how many layers are you wearing?” he asked. I’ve always felt the cold and wearing a multitude of layers isn’t unusual, even in the warmer months.

  “Five,” I replied watching him try to work out how I could have five layers on when I wasn’t even wearing a coat. Nevertheless, he had to call for reinforcements and it wasn’t too long before him and his team of clothes-cutters completed the task and sent me off for my x-rays, leaving Elliot alone in the cubicle frustrated, or so I imagined, that he was going to have to wait to give me the details of the ‘nightmare’ he’d suffered at my hands.

  Thankfully the x-rays showed that I was still intact, and apart from a nasty case of whiplash and some bruising I was ok. I was given some painkillers and told I could go home. Feeling nauseous and wobbly and wearing Elliott’s coat to cover my modesty, I left the hospital. During the journey home Elliott was at last able to regale me with his tale about what had happened after I’d been removed from the scene. The impact of the crash had activated all the airbags in my car and it was probably that which had caused the punching sensation in my chest. Another unfortunate by-product of the impact was that all my keys, including the keys to Monica’s house, had somehow ended up individually scattered in the road. “So I had to go crawling around in the dark to find them,” Elliott said. “Then when I got to the house and tried to get in the key didn’t even work.”

  The house in question was up a long, narrow and very bumpy unmade and unlit road, at the end of which were a small cluster of three houses. Elliott knew that I always kept paper files for each of my cat-sitting clients, and that each time I started a set of visits I would put the relevant file in my cat sitting bag which I kept in my car. The file contained all the instructions needed to look after the cat as well as details about the home. “Turns out I was trying to get into the wrong house,” he continued.

  “Yes but the name of the ho
use was in the file,” I said in exasperation.

  “I couldn’t see any of the house names so had to take pot luck,” he said. Unless there’d been no one in at the other residences I couldn’t imagine how a tall shadowy figure, fumbling in the dark with a door lock, wouldn’t have triggered a call to the police and a charge of attempted breaking and entering, but to my relief he went on to tell me that he’d eventually got the right house and had attended to Monica, although I very much doubted he would have gone near any rabbit’s head.

  Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night, my neck was killing me and my mind was in overdrive. Elliott had told me that my car was a complete write-off and had been towed away. This was disastrous, not only did I have twice daily visits to Monica to continue for the next week, but I was supposed to be starting a new cat-sitting job the following morning. In pain and completely overwhelmed I burst into tears.

  “You know when I was telling you about having to find the keys in the road and going to the wrong house...” I heard Elliott say in the darkness, “...it might have been a bit clumsily handled, but I was just trying to distract you.” Bless his heart, he’d obviously been mulling this over and on hearing my tears decided he was the cause. I reassured him that it was more a case of not knowing how I was going to meet my immediate cat-sitting commitments. “Don’t worry huns, I’ll do it,” he said.

  This announcement took me so much by surprise, that had I not already been lying down, I would surely have needed some form of support for my legs. However, as much as I loved Elliot for this grand gesture, caring for the cats was my responsibility and I wasn’t about to abdicate it; but that didn’t mean to say that he couldn’t be my chauffeur, especially as it was a Saturday morning and he had no work to go to. So at 7am, we both got up and Elliott took me to do my morning rounds. I was a bit shaky, but got the job done.

  “WHAT???!!” my panic-stricken Dad shrieked down the phone when I called him later that morning to break the news. He’d always been a bit of a worrier and even though I was plainly still alive and talking to him, I spent the next ten minutes with the phone several inches from my ear whilst he hammered home the ramifications of turning right across a busy road. In fact, any right hand turn was out of bounds as far as he was concerned, after all, this was a man who would drive for an extra twenty minutes just to avoid having to make any right hand turn. It took an awful lot of reassurance before I was able to convince him that other than being a bit battered, bruised and tearful, I really was ok.

  Asides from letting him and mum know what had happened, there was another reason why I’d called. My parents had two cars, one of which was reasonably new and the other was as old and beaten up as I felt. In other words, I was on the scrounge, and it didn’t take long for Dad to realise this. “Yes, help yourself to the Renault,” he said referring to the older of the two cars, before adding “I assume you’ve got fully comprehensive insurance?”

  So after my ear battering, Elliott drove me up to my mum and dad’s house where I would no doubt receive another. However, I was wrong. When I arrived, what greeted me instead was the sight of a rather tearful dad being comforted by a marginally less tearful mum.

  “He just burst into tears after he put the phone down” mum said, holding onto me with a vice-like grip. It was only my sharp intake of breath that made her realise she was doing my bruises no good and she let go. I then went over to dad and simply took hold of his hand. He just nodded, filling the air with a silent melancholy.

  “Bloody hell!” Elliot’s distant expletive cut through the atmosphere, bringing dad out of his temporary gloom and sending him hotfooting it outside, with mum and I in pursuit.

  “Have you seen the rust on this?” Elliot said pointing at the underside of the Renault where, during an external inspection, he’d spotted some spots of flaky-brown corrosion.

  “It’s just one or two patches,” dad said rather huffily, “it’s perfectly safe.” I was pretty sure that given dad’s reaction to my accident, he wasn’t about to allow me to drive off in a death trap, so I took the keys, said goodbye to mum and dad, and with only a slight bit of trepidation, got behind the wheel and drove home.

  Later that afternoon I set out in the Renault to visit a new set of cats, and Elliot had insisted on coming with me so he could see for himself that the car was fit for purpose.

  “Wow, this really is a bit of a throw-back” he chuckled, looking at the velveteen-covered seats.”

  “It’s not the styling I mind, it’s the lack of power-steering,” I said with a grimace as I heaved the car around a corner. “Well, you’d better grow some muscles!” Elliot now seemed to be finding the whole replacement car thing rather amusing, that is, until the engine suddenly cut out.

  Fortunately it happened just after turning into what appeared to be a relatively quiet suburban street, and before I’d had a chance to start accelerating. This meant I was able to let the car to roll to a standstill without mishap. I was shaken and Elliot was furious.

  “I knew this was a bloody death trap!” he fumed.

  However, before he was able to continue his rantings, he was interrupted by a sharp knock at the window. Turning our heads towards the ‘knocker’ we saw an angry looking senior citizen mouthing something at us. As Elliot wound the window down we caught the end of his sentence.

  “... no right to park here!” he squawked. It was only then that we realised we’d come to a halt directly in front of what we assumed was his drive.

  “I’m fed up with inconsiderate buggers blocking me in!” he continued.

  Whilst I was relieved the cut-out hadn’t happened on a busy road, I really wasn’t in the mood for a telling-off from ‘Mr Angry of Sevenoaks’, and neither so it seemed was Elliot.

  “Well, excuse me!” he said sarcastically, getting out of the car and drawing himself up to his full 6’ 2” height. I saw the senior citizen visibly shrink in his carpet slippers and immediately felt very sorry for him. He may have been a bit of a busy-body but he wasn’t to know how inappropriate his comments had been. However, far from being frightened, the pensioner, with what must have been a sudden rush of blood to the head, kicked Elliot in the shin.

  “I’ve had enough of it!” he said. In an effort to diffuse the situation I sounded the horn, which turned out to be a very feeble affair, but which nevertheless stopped Elliot and Mr Angry from engaging in all-out war. They both turned to look at me.

  “We’ve just broken down!” I explained. I was sure that the engine cut-out had been terminal, so by way of proof, I turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared into life. Elliot quickly hopped back into the car with his good leg and I drove off, leaving Mr Angry standing on the curb, a smug look of victory plastered all over his face.

  A couple of minutes later we arrived without further incident outside the house of my new cat clients, Smashey and Nicey, a pair of fluffy black and white brothers, who were, it turned out, both smashing and nice. So whilst I attended to them, Elliot poked around underneath the bonnet of the car, looking like he knew what he was doing, when I knew he really didn’t.

  “Can’t see anything obvious” he said when I emerged from the house, before going on to suggest that he drive the car to Monica’s house.

  Fortunately for my rather squeamish husband, Monica had left no trace of rabbit head, at least not inside the house, but as she saw Elliot sit down, she instead decided to make the most of Elliot’s large lap and jumped straight onto it.

  “OMG, what’s that revolting smell?” he asked her, whilst she looked up at him sweetly. It seemed she had caught something after all, which on this occasion had made her rather ‘windy’.

  When we eventually arrived home the answer phone was flashing.

  “Err, Kat?” It was the unmistakeable, albeit somewhat hesitant, voice of my dad. “I forgot to tell you that the Renault has a habit of cutting out if you don’t let it warm up enough when you first start it.”

  I
t was all I could do to stop Elliot from picking up the phone, calling my dad back and giving him a verbal ‘what for’, not that he had a habit of getting into confrontations with pensioners. I pleaded with him never to mention what had happened with the Renault; my first accident had left mum and dad traumatised enough, without making dad think he’d almost caused a second.

  That evening Elliot and I allowed ourselves a couple of stiff drinks before taking our respective bruised shin and bruised body to bed.

  During the week that followed I was able to carry out my cat-sitting obligations without further mishap, even if it did mean getting up half an hour early to ensure the Renault's engine was well and truly ‘warmed-up.’ Meanwhile, I’d been liaising with various people from the police and from my car insurance company, and to my astonishment it took only eight days from the date of the accident for a cheque to arrive on my doormat. I had to tell my dad, he’d spent his whole working life in the insurance industry and would no doubt be pleased to hear that it was continuing efficiently without him.

  “Just let me know if there’s any shortfall between what you got on the insurance and what you’re going to buy, and I’ll make it up” he said, before adding “I don’t want you driving around in something unreliable.” I resisted the urge to point out the irony of his statement and simply thanked him for his generous gesture.

  Two weeks later I was driving around in a shiny new Fiat 500, complete with a personalised registration that ended in ‘CAT’, courtesy of my mum and dad. Well, it was the least they could do to make up for spelling my name with a K.