Stray

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘I only have nostrils for my darling!’ he sighed.

  ‘But do you?’ I persisted. ‘That unmistakable smell is in the air. Somewhere, someone is waiting. I can feel it.’

  ‘You’re welcome to her, old chap,’ he said. ‘Oh, I’m in love, I’m in love, brother. Do you think that she is thinking about me at this minute?’

  I am sorry to say that I laughed at this question. My brother was a more sensitive soul than I. He really was in love. In those days – again, ah! how different I was then – the word love really meant nothing to me. As far as I was concerned, the world was full of beautiful female cats who were simply waiting for my attentions. But though I paid them court, and chased them and sang to them, I never allowed myself to be made unhappy by them.

  So, I set off through the night, swishing my tail and following my nose, and feeling very sure both of myself and of my girl. The white Persian dame lived in a tall detached house and I had already made myself known to her. Even as I approached the house, I let out a loud and highly musical cry of, ‘I’m coming, my own sweet.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’ said a deep-throated male cat out of the darkness. ‘Well, along you come, and I’ll give you what for.’

  Coming from a lighted street into the darkened garden, my sharp eyes were for a moment slow to see his, but then I saw them, gleaming bright green in the shadows.

  ‘I think, Sir,’ I said with the pompous dignity of the very young – young males, at least, few females are pompous – ‘that you must be mistaken. I do not have the pleasure of your acquaintance...’

  ‘’Op it,’ said the throaty voice.

  ‘If you will excuse me,’ said I, ‘I am visiting a young lady who resides in this vicinity.’ And once again I started to sing. I am coming, my own, my sweet.

  I could tell that my song excited considerable admiration, since in more than one house nearby, windows were being thrown open, curtains drawn back, and the stupid human audience were doing their best to appreciate it.

  ‘Is that a cat?’ I heard one ask. ‘I think it’s only a cat.’

  ‘Sounded as though it was in pain.’

  Another voice was saying, ‘I thought for a nasty moment it was a woman being attacked.’ Another was shouting, ‘Belt up, can’t you. Some of us are trying to sleep.’

  Poor coarse creatures, it was the best they could manage by way of musical appreciation. I have always rather prided myself on my singing voice. It was therefore particularly galling that a fellow cat should have come to share the human insensitivity on the point.

  ‘You ‘eard them,’ said the gravelly voice. ‘’Op it. This chick’s mine.’

  I could by now hear my beautiful white Persian princess calling sweetly through the balmy night breeze.

  ‘I’m coming, my own one!’

  ‘No hurry!’ I called back. ‘The joy of waiting is only increased by the knowledge that you will soon be in my paws.’

  ‘Look mate,’ said gravelly voice. ‘Can you take an ’int or can’t you?’

  ‘You heard the lady,’ I said with some dignity. ‘Perhaps you can let her make up her own mind.’

  My rival came out into the moonlight. When I saw him my feelings of total contempt for him were mingled with sensations of pity. He was a very ill-favoured, rather overweight ginger fellow. He was considerably older than I. In fact, he was so old that one could not help feeling that he was a bit past it.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be happier,’ I ventured, ‘curled up on a rug indoors?’

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, with the edginess of a cat who was about to become extremely angry. Curiously enough, I did not notice his rising wrath. I was so much looking forward to meeting my own, my white princess.

  ‘Here I come, darling! I was doing my face!’ she simpered through the shadows.

  ‘It doesn’t need doing,’ I called.

  ‘Look, if you don’t clear off, your face will be done over good and proper. With my claws,’ said the poor old ginger.

  Well, it was understandable that an older, uglier cat should feel such jealousy of a younger and altogether more noble specimen. I also thought that he could be forgiven for being jealous of the tender way in which she called out, ‘Oh dear one, oh dear one!’

  Poor old thing. Fat, jowly face, with bits dribbling from his mouth and eyes. The white parts of his fur rather grey. No effort had been made to keep himself looking nice, and he let off quite a pong. The idea that such a pathetic old wreck should still believe that he had any charms with the ladies was simply laughable.

  You can imagine, then, how amazed I was when the white Persian princess came into sight. She scampered down a patch of lawn, looking more radiantly lovely in the moonlight than any cat I had ever seen. And then up some creeper and along a wall to the rooftop where I awaited her.

  ‘Here I am!’ she called ecstatically. ‘All yours, my darling!’

  And then she ran, quite firmly and quite deliberately, right up to the smelly old ginger tom and licked his face.

  ‘I think,’ I said, as good-humouredly as I could manage, ‘that there has been some mistake...’

  ‘Oh,’ said the beautiful white princess turning round, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said with great self-satisfaction, ‘it is I, my own dear love.’

  The Princess lifted a soft paw and gently stroked the side of the ugly ginger’s head.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, in what I now began to see was a rather annoying, mincing tone of voice, ‘this silly little cat has been bothering me all week.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my darlin’,’ said ginger. ‘I’ll soon sort ’im out.’

  ‘Darling, would you? It would be so kind. He comes and bothers me all the time. And he wails these truly frightful songs!’

  ‘Princess!’ I exclaimed in dismay. ‘My own!’

  But before the words were out of my mouth, old ginger had biffed me on the side of the head and almost knocked me off the shed roof.

  ‘You!’ I shouted. I couldn’t think of what else to say. I just went on saying, ‘You, you, you!’ Determined to have my revenge, I flung myself at old ginger, but he dodged me, and I went flying into the creeper.

  It might have been possible to retrieve some dignity from this situation, even to pretend that I had meant to go and burrow among the leaves for some purpose, had it not been for Princess’s high tinny laughter. (Had I ever thought highly of this silly piece of fluff? Surely not.)

  ‘Now, mate. Got the ’int?’ asked ginger rudely.

  And Princess, nauseatingly, was cooing. ‘Oooh! You’re so brave and strong,’ to the great oaf.

  I was not going to stand for this. Throwing all caution to the winds, I flew at ginger’s silly, smelly old face and managed to scratch him quite badly. But he was a skilled fighter, and I – at that stage – was not. The pain stung him into a perfectly timed riposte. Screaming with rage, we both clung to one another, biffing, scratching and shouting. The white princess, the bitch, stood by, encouraging the old fool to fight me. She was flattered to have two cats squabbling over her, and she was enjoying the contest as much as human beings enjoy watching that idiot electrical box with the coloured pictures on its screen.

  Windows in houses were thrown wide open now, and human beings were adding their voices to our cries. ‘Shurrup!’ ‘Blooming cats!’ and so on.

  I really did not deserve to win that fight. My footwork was clumsy, I was hitting all over the place. I had not thought out my tactics. But our great Mother-of-Night who shone down from the glowing summer sky was on my side. Ginger had winded me quite badly, and stung me with innumerable scratches. He was by now so furiously angry that he would, I think, have killed me if he could. And since he had reached this devastating stage of the contest, he instinctively stood back to admire his work, as we would stand back and look at a wounded mouse before moving in to the kill. And that was my moment of inspiration. I still had enough strength to lift a paw and punch him really hard in the face. And for the fi
rst time in that fight, I struck a blow which was properly aimed, and well-timed. He staggered from the blow and slipped. I think his feet were on some leaves on top of the shed roof. Anyhow, his hold slipped and he actually fell off the roof. Now at the bottom of the shed, there was a water butt. And I can tell you that there have been few more satisfying sounds to my ears than the sound of that fat old body sploshing into the barrel of cold water. Then, from the White Princess, what shrieks! And after a little silence, what splutterings from ginger, ‘I’ll get you! You — young — hooligan! I’ll get you, if it is the last thing I do!’

  But he never did get me. I did not stay to be got. And while he was shaking himself dry and saying he would get even with me, I sloped off through the shadows of the back gardens. My brother was not there in our own coal shed when I got home, I did not see him till the next morning when he was very sleepy.

  ‘How did you get on last night?’ he asked in the middle of a yawn.

  ‘Oh, not so bad,’ said I.

  chapter seven

  One morning about mid summer, I woke up on my accustomed perch in the coal shed to see that it was fully daylight. I suppose I overslept because I had been on the prowl for most of the night, and taken refuge in the coal hole because I liked it there. I had already started to prefer sleeping outside human dwellings, instinct perhaps preparing me for the course that my life was going to take. Who can tell? My brother, poor thing, never really liked sleeping rough, as he called it, and preferred to be curled up in an armchair, or on the bed with one of these human beings. Of course, I have slept on beds where they have been sleeping, but it is a devil of a job. They disturb a cat with their infernal snoring and their tossing and turning, and their getting up in the middle of the night to sit on the well.

  Anyway, I awoke on a glorious, bright day in June, to hear my brother’s voice calling out to me. He sounded excited, but also distressed. Something was obviously up.

  ‘What is it? I’m in here!’ I called, through the hole in the coal shed wall.

  ‘Come out! Come at once. Something’s happened!’ he called.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  I crawled through the side of the shed, on to the roof, and down into the little yard, taking care to avoid the rattling dustbin lid which woke the neighbours, and called down on my head one night not merely cursings and imprecations, but also a bucket of cold water.

  ‘Come and see,’ said my brother.

  ‘Don’t be mysterious,’ said I. ‘If something’s happened, tell me.’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want you to see. Come on.’

  He looked both excited and frightened. It was a look which sometimes came into his face before a fight. Then he turned and trotted towards the back door and through the cat-flap. I followed him, through the kitchen and up the narrow staircase, towards Granny’s bedroom.

  ‘It’s in here,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well, it’s sort of her, and yet it isn’t her. You’ll see what I mean. What do you make of it?’

  He jumped on to Granny’s bed, and I followed him, purring automatically as I always did when jumping up to greet her, and kneading the bedding with my claws. I could not imagine what my brother was making such a fuss about, or why he was referring to Granny’s sleeping body as ‘it’ rather than ‘her’. But then I saw.

  For a start, its eyes were still open, and yet they were no longer the eyes of Granny Harris. And for another thing, she was motionless. Quite still. There was no breath in her, no motion, and no colour. She lay there as stiff as a board.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  I did not think anything. I knew that the best human friend I was ever going to have had been taken away from me, and that this thing had been left in her place. It was a mockery of her, and of us. It did not even look particularly like her. By now, in the normal course of things, Granny would have been calling out, ‘Good morning, my darling,’ and sitting up against her pillows, and stroking us. And after a bit of play, she would say, ‘Can’t stay in bed all day,’ and she would heave herself off the side of the bed, and waddle off to sit on the well. And then she would go to the kitchen, and give us some food, and boil up the kettle to make herself some tea, and we would all go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed while the box of voices spoke. But today the box of voices was silent, just as Granny was silent, and although neither my brother nor I knew what had happened, we both knew that our lives had for ever changed.

  Since – oh since! How many times, too many times, have I seen this silence, this stillness, this stiffness, this nothingness come upon living creatures, creatures, very often whom I have loved? And you will see it too. And no more than I, will you be able to understand it or know what it is, but it is the great enemy, which we all resist, even though we know from experience that there are worse enemies, like pain and degradation and disease.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said my brother.

  ‘Me too,’ said I.

  But I was still staring with fascination at the thing. I went right up to its face and touched it with my paw, unable to believe the change which had taken place during the night.

  ‘Is there any food which we can get at in the kitchen?’ asked my brother.

  ‘Let’s go and look.’

  In the larder, there were the remains of an old chicken carcass, which we took from the shelf. I am afraid we smashed the plate as we did so, but who was there now to mind? (Little did we guess!) There was not much meat on the bird, and we ate what there was in no time. There was probably milk kept shut in the cold white house, but neither of us could open it, nor get at the bottles there, any more than we could open the closed tins of meat with which Granny Harris would normally have fed us.

  Your timescale as a young cat is very short: as mine was. You don’t think more than a few hours ahead. This is a good thing in one way – it stops you worrying. But in other ways, it makes life much more agitating. Now, if I were in that position today, with Granny lying silent and stiff upstairs, I would know that something, sometime would happen. Someone would bring food, or I could go out and find food somewhere else. Something would happen. But neither my brother nor I could understand this. Now that the situation had changed, we assumed that it had changed for ever. And that house, which had been such a very good home to us, for about two years, had suddenly become a place of nightmare. It was like a cruel practical joke. We knew that there was food to be found, but we could not get at it. It was all locked up – in the cold white house, in tins, in cupboards. And we did not even try to see that the situation would not be like this forever. Such a thought was beyond us. When we had finished the chicken, we were still ravenously hungry, and it made us panic. We raced around the house, knocking things everywhere. A lamp went and was smashed to pieces on the parlour floor. Cups flew off the kitchen dresser. And the bedroom table in the room where it lay was soon reduced to a chaos. The necklaces and brooches and little pots of cream which stood there were all sent flying.

  We did not know what we were doing. We were in a sort of mad state. I’ve been in it since on a number of occasions. If you’ve ever been like it, you’ll know what I mean. You don’t think. You don’t want to destroy things, though destroy things you certainly do. You just want to run round and round and get rid of the excitement, the devilry, whatever it is, by hyperactivity. It happens to me less now than it did, thanks be to our Mother-of-Night.

  After about an hour of it, my brother said, ‘This is no use. We’ll have to go and hunt.’

  ‘We’ll starve else,’ said I.

  It wasn’t a bad morning’s hunt. At the bottom of the yard there was a family of mice, and I got two of them. My brother got a pigeon from a nearby garage roof, which he was kind enough to share with me. In all our many hunting expeditions together, we never fought over food. The pigeon was delicious, moist, warm and red: the only way to eat a bird, in my view. How your human can cook it in an oven and even cove
r it with pastry (!) is beyond me.

  The advantage of our short-sightedness (in time terms) is that my brother and I had decided immediately that this was the way we were going to live for the rest of our lives; and so we did not keep returning to the house expecting someone to open tins for us. We caught, or stole, our next three or four meals. This was just as well, because Granny Harris was all alone in that house, getting stiffer and paler and (I fear) smellier, for four whole days. I suppose that if she had been one of those people who are visited each day by a milkman, this would not have been so. But she only had milk delivered twice a week, and anything she needed beyond this was collected from the corner shop. It was the milkman who discovered her. And the funny thing is, that when my brother and I realized that we were not the only ones to know about Granny, we felt guilty.

  ‘That’s torn it now,’ I said.

  ‘I reckon we should hide,’ said my brother.

  And hide we did from the moment that the milkman came round the back of the house and said there was something up because Granny had not answered the door or left her milk money.

  From the shed at the end of the garden we watched the whole sorry business. We watched the milkman ringing and ringing. Then we heard him call Granny’s name through the letter box. He went back to his van and talked to a neighbour. Then, the two of them came and tried to force open the kitchen window. They failed. Then they smashed it and opened it, and one of them climbed in.

  ‘As we feared,’ said one, coming to open the door for the other.

  And then, there was the ambulance and a police car, and they came to carry what had been Granny away in a sort of black bag, and the window was boarded up, and the doors locked, and the house made fast, and we were left alone. That took all day somehow, and it was only at nightfall that we began to feel we had the place to ourselves.

  After a light evening supper (we had burst into a kitchen some doors up and stolen the Whiskas from the plate of a pampered little kitten owned by a young architect and his wife, and rounded it off with a sparrow from the architect’s garden) we had returned to Granny’s kitchen and were discussing what to do next.