by A. N. Wilson
‘If you’re taken first, I hope you get fixed up with a decent place,’ he said.
‘Eh?’
‘You know. If someone comes in and takes you before I’m taken,’ he said.
‘Do you think that’s likely to happen?’ I asked.
‘They could take either of us first,’ he said.
‘No, I mean that they will separate us?’
‘Oh, brother,’ he said sadly, ‘hadn’t you realized?’
I have often thought of those words and I have thought of the way in which he then said, so sadly, and, for one so young, so wisely, ‘Do you remember what mother used to say? “A cat is always alone, especially when he is in company.”’
These thoughts made me very sad indeed. In fact they turned me into a complete cry-baby and I nuzzled against my brother for comfort. I was still in this unhappy posture when he nudged me and said, ‘Listen. I think this is it!’
How my stomach turned at the thought that my solitary life was about to begin. I was not ready for it! I was too young! And in spite of what our dear mother used to say, a cat is not always alone. We are, in fact, sociable beasts, and to live in total solitude with only human companionship is a recipe for feline unhappiness.
‘They’re lovely, and no mistake,’ said a kindly old female voice. ‘Wasn’t it lucky my granddaughter saw them? She was passing by your window last night with Bob – he’s her young man. They’re courting, you know. This morning she come to me and said, “Granny, you know how we’s always telling you how you ought to have a cat? Well, there’s two ever such nice ones down the pet shop.” “Not all the way down the High Street,” I said. “However d’ you expect me to get all the way down there with my ankles and getting on and off a bus at my age...”’
I expect that, though so young, you have already noticed that some human beings make noises with their mouths almost all the time. When they sleep their mouths and noses make an ugly grunting noise. And when they are awake they jabber. Granny Harris jabbered but she did so quite pleasantly. The pet shop man found it hard to get a word in between her flow of talk.
‘Well, he’s working, Bob is, that’s Tracy’s intended, I say intended, they aren’t exactly engaged, well people aren’t so much nowadays are they, it’s all different, but you know, regular work, so if they got the money why not enjoy themselves, so they come out and saw a film, and came home afterwards. That’s when they saw the kittens.’
Granny Harris turned and peered at us through the bars.
‘Aren’t you lovely?’ she said.
She had a round, jolly face and very bright blue eyes, white hair tied back in a bun, on top of which a hat was perched, fixed by a hat-pin. She looked a very old-fashioned lady indeed.
‘The black and white one’s gorgeous,’ she said.
My poor brother gave me a ‘look’.
‘But then so’s the tabby. You know I can’t decide.’
‘Difficult, innit? They’re both such darlings,’ said the pet shop man, leering at us. Could he tell, from the looks of absolute disdain with which we answered him, how much we loathed and already despised him?
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t really get either,’ Granny Harris suddenly said. ‘It’s a bit of an extravagance buying a cat, isn’t it? And who knows? People are always trying to find homes for kittens aren’t they, and an awful lot just get given away. Mind you, it isn’t right the way some people treat cats, it’s terrible really the things you read nowadays, what with cruelty to animals, and laboratories, and hunting otters.’
‘I so agree with you, Madam,’ said the shop man in his smarmiest voice. ‘You know, that’s why I think it’s a good thing to charge a small sum of money for a pet. Left to me, I’d give ’em away free – all these lovely animals: the mice over there, the parrot, the fish. But if I give ’em away, am I sure the person really wants the pet, really wants to care for it? Know what I mean?’
‘I think you may be right,’ said Granny Harris.
‘I mean it’s criminal, the way some people treats their pets. And I couldn’t agree with you more. But if they’d had to pay just a little bit for their pet in the first place, they’d think twice about whether they really wanted it.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said Granny Harris.
‘I mean, take yourself, Madam. You’re a very responsible person, a very thoughtful, caring person.’
‘Am I really?’ smiled Granny Harris.
‘You haven’t just picked up the first cat that came along. You’ve thought it through, you’ve talked it over with your family – with whom you obviously enjoy a very good relationship...’
None of this was exactly true. Tracy had promised that she would do some shopping for her grandmother, and that she would deliver it that morning. Instead she had rung Granny Harris to say that she wouldn’t be doing it after all, why didn’t the old woman go into town herself? The exercise would do her good and while she did her shopping, she could look in the pet shop window and see those sweet little kittens.
But as the pet man spoke it seemed to Granny Harris as if everything he said was true and she wanted it to be true. And her purely impulsive decision to have a look at the kittens truly felt as if it had come about as a result of hard thinking and a warm, friendly discussion with all her family.
‘A cat’s company,’ she said. ‘That’s what I think. Aren’t you beautiful?’ she said to me.
‘Oh, there’s no question about it,’ said the pet man. ‘Left to myself, I’d keep these little chaps myself. I would really.’
I prayed to all the Gods that he was lying.
‘It would be quite safe to have a cat with a budgie, would you say?’ asked Granny Harris.
‘A budgie?’
‘Yes. It’s a green budgie,’ she said, as though the colour could affect the issue one way or another.
‘Funnily enough,’ said the man, ‘I’ve known a lot of customers who’ve had a budgie and a cat or the other way around and they’ve often been very good friends. You get cat owners coming back for new budgies – oh, very frequently.’
‘New budgies?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Well, any age you like,’ he said. ‘What I mean is, there won’t be any trouble. None whatsoever. In fact, it’ll enhance your budgie’s life. Blue was it?’
‘Green. He can’t speak, but he can chirrup. He got out of his cage once and flew right up onto the telegraph wires. Mind you,’ she said, staring at us intently, ‘it’s difficult to know which one...’
‘It all depends really,’ said the pet man, ‘on how much you were thinking of spending.’
‘I’m only on the pension,’ said Granny shrewdly.
‘Well, the cat’s the cheapest thing you could buy – for the money,’ emphasized the shop man, as though some people perhaps bought things with some other convertible commodity – teeth, beads, potatoes. ‘I mean it’s an investment.’
For you and me, Grandkitten, who have never had money and who have always taken what we needed but never more than we needed, the human attitude to possessions and riches will always be mysterious. If you go up into the middle of the town you will find whole houses devoted to nothing but money – saving it, borrowing it, hoarding it up and taking it out in little bits, lending it. They queue up in these houses – which they call banks and building societies – day after day. They go in and mutter about money to the priests of the cult and pay their dues so that they can borrow or lend more of it. On either side of the banks and building societies are the shops and everything that you can see in their windows – all the clothes and the tinned food and the journeys to places in the sun, all the carpets and sofas and fur trimmings and miniature paper chimneys – are paid for with the borrowed money which the priests have given to the people from the Bank-Temples. And that is why the shop man was offering us for sale, like slaves. The highest praise which he could heap upon us was to say that we were an ‘investment’, which is what they call the offerings they make to the bank-priests
from their own hoards.
‘Dear me,’ said Granny Harris, ‘I have only got a pension.’
‘Now these cats here might look to you like any ordinary moggy,’ he said, staring at me contemptuously, ‘and any ordinary black and white. But in point of fact, they is pedigree. Rare breeds, these. They cost me all of a fiver each and by the time I reckon how much it’s cost me to feed them, keep them – they’ve been fed on nothing but the best meat, dear —’
‘Well, I just wanted an ordinary cat,’ said Granny, ‘nothing expensive, nothing pedigree.’
‘That’s just what I was going to say,’ said the shop man. ‘Though they are in fact highly pedigree, the nice thing about these two is that they aren’t in the least difficult. If you bought one of these you’d in fact be buying a pedigree, but getting what is a very nice, reassuring pedigree cat.’
‘How much? I couldn’t pay five pounds,’ she said.
‘There’s others would,’ said the man.
‘Is there? You can get cats free. I could put up a card, like I said, and get a kitten free. I could go down the Animal Sanctuary and get one. Just that you’re nearer, and you’ve got the cats. Shame, though,’ she said, making a pleasant face. ‘I’ve quite taken a fancy to him.’ And she made a cooing gesture towards my brother and, gathering herself together, she waddled out of the shop, dragging along her basket on wheels behind her.
‘Wait!’ said the pet shop man. ‘Please wait, Madam.’
‘Good day to you, Sir,’ said Granny, purposefully, and made her way off down the High Street.
‘Pedigree!’ yelled the parrot.
‘Yeah,’ said the man, ‘well how was I to know. I thought she’d be a sucker.’
‘I think she was going to take me on my own,’ said my brother. ‘It was a lucky escape.’
There were several enquiries after us in the course of the morning but each customer shook his or her head when they heard that we cost five pounds each. All made the same response. You could pick up an ordinary moggy (that was me!) for nothing, so why waste a fiver on ‘it’?
At dinner time, the pet shop man locked his shop, and returned, an hour later, smelling strongly of a mixture of beer, whisky, cheese and pickles.
‘At this rate, I’m going to have you on my hands for ever,’ he said crossly. ‘And I tell you straight my friends,’ – at this he brought his shiny, malodorous face close to the bars – ‘if you haven’t been sold by tomorrow, I’m going to drown you!’
This did not do much for the spirits of either my brother or myself, as we got through another twelve hours in the window. We ate a few more platefuls of biscuits. We watched a few more silly children buy a few more mice. We watched as more people stared at us through the glass of the window. And once more, when he had locked up the shop and departed for home, with the maledictions of the parrot echoing behind him, we spent our lonely night in confinement.
You are a young cat and you have never been locked up. You probably can’t imagine what it is like to be locked up for hours and hours. I notice how frisky you get when your people have shut you in the kitchen for the night. But that is a large room with curtains to swing from, butter to lick and china on the dresser to wobble and play with. Above all, you have space to run about. But it was not so with us. We were two young kittens with all the friskiness and energy which you have now. And for two whole days we had been shut up in a space about the size of the top of your kitchen table. It increased our dejection.
Moreover, we were both very young and we believed everything which was said to us. The threat that, if we were not sold soon, we would be drowned, was very real to us. We were too tired and too sad and too young to know what we would be missing if indeed we were killed tomorrow. So far, life had been at first intensely delightful and then almost as acutely miserable. Memories of the delights were fading; it would have been good to bring the misery to an end. And yet there was something within me which resisted the idea of death and I knew that if that man tried to lay his filthy hands on me and kill me, I would not go to my death unresisting. Lying there, with my head on my brother’s shoulder, I plotted how I would sink my teeth into the man’s hand, or scratch his face. Vain ambitions! He could have wrung my neck with the smallest twist.
It was raining the next day when we woke. I can remember the bad temper of the shop man when he arrived and fumbled with the keys. We got quite sprayed with rainwater as he shook out his mackintosh and cloth cap and cursed the English climate.
‘Early closing today,’ he said to us unpleasantly. ‘And I warn you. If you haven’t been sold by dinner time...’ and he made dramatic gestures by putting both his hands round his neck and pretending to strangle himself. I could tell that he was extremely discomfited to be found in the middle of this display by Granny Harris who rattled at that moment on the glass of the door with her umbrella.
‘Are you open?’ she said.
‘Not till nine,’ replied the man.
‘It’s five to nine now, and you are there and I am here, so will you please open up this shop?’ she said.
And realizing that she was a potential customer, he let her in once more.
‘I went home and didn’t sleep a wink all night just for thinking about him,’ she said.
‘The moggy?’
‘The black and white!’ she said. ‘I’ve been worried, in spite of all you said yourself, about having a cat with a budgie. I asked my neighbour if she’d ever heard that a cat gets on well with a budgie and she said she’d never heard such sales talk. Ask him, she says, how a budgie gets on with a cat!’
‘Well then,’ said the man, ‘I don’t know your neighbour but I do think I can speak with the voice of experience and, if I may say so, authority...’
‘But I stayed awake all night thinking of his sad face.’
‘The budgie’s?’
‘No, no, that beautiful black and white creature in the window, with his big white boots and I thought to myself, he’ll see me out and he’ll be a good companion to me in my old age and if I can’t keep a budgie’s cage locked against Bootsie, I don’t deserve a cat or budgie.’
‘Bootsie, you call him?’
‘That’s what he’s called,’ said Granny, staring sentimentally at my brother.
My brother and I exchanged glances of consternation. It had never occurred to either of us that a human being could have the arrogance to call us by a name – still less such a silly name as Bootsie. But in this claim on my brother, we realized a much worse thing. She really was going to buy him and we were about to be parted for ever.
‘Well, old boy,’ said my brother, ‘it looks as though we’re going to have to say goodbye.’
‘She seems decent,’ I said, ‘better than...’ We did not have a name for the pet shop man but my brother knew whom I meant.
‘Much,’ he said. ‘I just hope you find a decent person soon. You needn’t worry. He won’t...’
‘Kill me? What makes you so sure?’
‘He’ll want the money.’ My brother had apprehended more of human nature than I had.
‘But I’m only a moggy,’ I said. ‘And they can get cats like me without paying any money. I think I’m for it.’
Granny Harris was saying, ‘What would an old body like me be wanting with all the equipment? A cat basket? What’s wrong with the basket I’ve got here, a basket on wheels if ever a basket was? Rubber bones is it now? And what’s that? Cat chocolates!’
Evidently the man was trying to persuade her that in order to look after my brother properly, she needed to spend five or ten pounds on useless junk in his pet shop.
We had missed the earlier part of the conversation, so evidently, she had agreed to buy my brother. But then the shop man said sharply, ‘Please yourself. I tell you what I’m going to do, and it isn’t something I’d do for everyone. For an extra couple of quid I’ll throw in the moggy.’
‘But I don’t want two cats.’
‘Two cats is easier than one,’ said the m
an. ‘They make company for themselves. It isn’t kind having just the one.’
‘It’s the black and white I want and it’s the black and white I’ll take,’ said Granny Harris, who was evidently finding the man’s attempt to charm as irksome as we did.
‘One pound extra,’ said the man. ‘And if you don’t like him after a week, you can bring him back.’
‘And what makes you so interested to get rid of him, I should like to know?’ said Granny. ‘What was all that yesterday about his being pedigree and an expensive breed? No, you keep your moggy and I’ll buy my black and white.’
The man opened the cage and reached into the window for my brother, who was snatched up before I had the chance to say goodbye to him. With very little ceremony, I saw him being dumped into Granny’s basket. It was the sort of basket with a top which strapped down with buckles. I stood on my hind legs and called out to him.
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’
‘Oh,’ said Granny. ‘Just look at that cat!’
‘I’ll never forget you,’ I called. ‘And who knows, we might meet again.’
‘Goodbye!’ my brother called from the basket.
‘Ah!’ said Granny. ‘They’re mewing for each other.’ And then she poked the shop man with the handle of her umbrella and said, ‘Bother you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t train them to do it. I’ll give you a pound for the moggy.’
‘Done,’ said the man.
‘I don’t really want him,’ said Granny Harris.
But within five minutes, I was next to my brother once again, feeling his grateful heart pounding against my own, as in the darkness of Granny Harris’s shopping basket, we bounced and trundled along the High Street towards the bus stop, at that moment two of the happiest cats in the world.
chapter five
My brother and I lived together with Mrs Harris for about two years as human beings measure the passage of our Mother-of-Night. And if you ask me how I know it is easy to tell you. When we went to live with Granny Harris there were a few daffodils sprouting in the yard by her back door. And then they faded and disappeared. And then they reappeared a year later and faded and went. It was when they reappeared a second time that our life began to change.