Stray

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘I reckon we’re safer in the house,’ I said.

  ‘Unless other people come to live in the house,’ said my brother.

  ‘Are they likely to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If they did, would we stay?’

  ‘You seem to think I know all the answers to all the questions,’ laughed my brother. ‘I ask you questions I don’t know the answer to myself. It’s just a way of thinking aloud. I reckon we are a damn sight better off here than we would be somewhere else. We know our territory. We are warm and comfortable. With a bit more practice, we’ll be able to feed ourselves properly, by hunting or scavenging.’

  ‘There’s the whole area of dustbins,’ I said, ‘which remains relatively unexplored.’

  ‘And meanwhile,’ said my brother, ‘we have the whole house to ourselves.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon,’ said I.

  ‘What’s that?’

  We were in the back kitchen. Suddenly we both stood stock still. We could hear the front door being opened and the voices of June and Jim, quarrelling as usual.

  ‘How d’ you expect me to remember the cats on top of everything else?’ Jim was saying.

  ‘It was you who egged her on to buy the things.’

  ‘Me? It was you and our Tracy...’

  Jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber.

  When Granny was still with us, we would often, all three of us, have a bit of a laugh about June and Jim and their jabbering voices, their endless quarrelling, their gracelessness. Granny was always too nice to say that she was glad they did not call very often, but she always seemed peaceful and happier when they had gone.

  ‘If you looked after your mother properly it would never have happened.’

  ‘I like that! It was you who was the one...’

  ‘Let’s scarper,’ said my brother.

  We got out through the cat-flap and, by the back door, we sat and listened.

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘Jim, you don’t think there’s burglars, do you? You know when someone’s passed away, they often...’

  ‘Don’t talk daft. What’s there to steal? It’ll be one of the cats in the back kitchen, you go and see.’

  ‘Jim, I don’t want to go and see.’

  ‘Don’t be so daft. There’s nothing’ll hurt you there. Go on, woman.’

  ‘You go, Jim.’

  ‘I’m looking here. You go in the back.’

  ‘You’re as scared as I am, Jim Harbottle.’

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  ‘You are...’

  And so on.

  It would be tedious to rehearse the oafish manner in which the Harbottles set about finding and catching us. You do not want to read about them stumbling out into the backyard and debating whose fault it was that Jim had stood on a rake, whose handle bounced up and hit him on the head. No more do you want to read about June colliding with the dustbin and subsequently explaining that she would never have done so if Jim would just be that bit more careful; nor of Jim saying, for some reason, that he ‘liked that’. Having failed to see us looking down at them from the roof of the shed, they returned to the house and looked for a torch, and then back to the car, where they found one, and then more banging and searching, and whistling and calling. I suppose that we should have been flattered. Probably, by then, however, they had long since ceased to care about whether they found us. The search had become a competition, and the reason that neither would abandon it was they felt certain that when one found me, the other would be made to look a fool. I did not realize this at the time, not knowing June and Jim well. It was mere whim, that after about half an hour of watching them crash about in the dark, I said to my brother, ‘They’d probably be able to open a tin for us.’

  ‘Shall we go and put them out of their misery?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t bear much more of this noise,’ I said.

  And so, we ran to greet Jim and June. How different things would be if we had not done that! Sometimes, late at night, I pace about in the dark among the back gardens of the street where you live, little Grandkitten. And I think of that moment in my life. I hear a human voice calling out into the darkness. ‘Puss, puss, puss!’ Probably in most cases, nothing turns on whether or not a cat heeds the call. But if, on that occasion, we had stayed where we were in the safety of the dark, our lives might have been much happier. And, who knows, my brother might be alive today. It is only because we do not know what fortune holds in store for us that we are able to act at all. Quite unconscious of the significance of our actions, we ran towards Jim and June with no more serious thought in our heads than the idea that Jim might open us a tin of meat.

  ‘See,’ said June, as we approached. ‘I told you whistling was no good.’

  ‘What d’ you mean, no good. They’ve come, haven’t they?’

  ‘When I called, they came.’

  ‘I like that! It was my whistle that did it.’

  This ding-dong quarrel, in which Jim was always trying to get the better of June, and June was always claiming that she had got the better of Jim, went on, as far as we were concerned, for the next year or so. For Jim and June, having taken us into Granny’s kitchen and fed us with some tinned food, bundled us into a blanket, and took us home to live with them.

  chapter eight

  Jim and June had a much bigger, more ‘comfortable’ house than Granny Harris. ‘Comfortable’, I mean, by the standards of the human race. We both found it unpleasantly hot, particularly in the winter months when there were radiators on in every room. Each window had not one, but two panes of glass. If you were in Granny Harris’s kitchen and you wanted to go out into the yard, she would just open the window and let you out. But in Jim and June’s kitchen, you could not open the window. Granny Harris washed her few dishes by dipping them in hot soapy water in her sink. But June and Jim washed their dishes by putting them in a cupboard which roared and churned and shuddered. It was a horrible noise.

  The noise was one of the worst things about that house. It never seemed to stop, and there was not a room in the house where some noise was not going on. When Jim and June sat on the well, they switched on a whirring electric fan. When they were in bed, they played the box of voices continually. Downstairs in the room they called the lounge, there was a coloured screen showing a constant display of idiot human behaviour: men kicking balls into nets (Jim loved this). Men driving engines of murder. Women with their arms in soap suds which they said were as soft as their faces. And with the pictures, a constant stream of noise. In Tracy’s bedroom upstairs, which had a strangely sweet smell that somehow got up your nose, the box of voices, quite a small one, played loud pulsating music which scared us silly. While she listened to it, Tracy (whom we quite liked) would bob up and down and dance in rhythm to the horrible noises.

  And in addition to all these artificial noises, the people made noises with their mouths all day long. They were of very uncertain temper. You could never be sure whether they were going to be all cooing and soppy, or unaccountably angry. They seemed to be cross with each other most of the time. If Jim went out to the side of the house on a Sunday morning to polish the engine of murder, June would come and rail at him for not having put up some shelves in the spare room. If Jim was getting dressed in the morning, he seemed unable to do so without opening the warm cupboard in the room where they washed, and shouting that he could not see any socks or shirts or pants. I do not understand this business of clothes and the importance they attach to them; but I must say they look very peculiar without them – hardly any fur at all, except in scrubs and patches. Just extensions of pink bare flesh like a poor creature that has been half-skinned.

  I have mentioned the noise. But the worst thing of all was the simple fact that we were prisoners there. There was no cat-flap in the back door. On some evenings, June was the aggressor.

 
‘When are you going to put a cat-flap in the door?’ she would ask. ‘Honestly, Jim Harbottle, you are the laziest —’

  ‘I’m tired. I’ve had a very tiring day at the office. I —’

  ‘Tired! You’re lazy. And you drink too much. That’s your second can of beer. I’ve been watching you.’

  On other evenings Jim took the initiative.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Mr Jones down the road,’ he said with a confident smile. ‘He says that ever since they put in that cat-flap they’ve had all the strays in the neighbourhood coming into their kitchen. See!’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘See why I don’t like your idea of a cat-flap?’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea. It was your idea to put one in mum’s house.’

  ‘She was getting elderly. She couldn’t get up and let cats out every time they wanted to go...’

  This was the trouble. We could not come and go as we pleased. We were prisoners, and entirely subservient to Jim and June’s trivial routines and whims. At first, I thought that the frustration might actually kill my brother. For the first few times when we were shut up in June’s kitchen with all its whirring machinery, he paced up and down all night, cursing her and her stupid ways. He was still very much missing his girlfriend whom we had been forced to abandon when we left Granny Harris’s house. Poor chap. I did not know what he was suffering then, because I did not yet understand what it was to suffer from a great love. I tried to laugh him out of it, and to imply that there were other fish in the sea.

  ‘But not in this kitchen,’ he observed drily. ‘And when were we last fed?’

  That was another thing. June usually fed us, but she did not always remember to do so. And when she forgot, she would say that it was not always her job to feed us, and why didn’t Jim take his turn at feeding us for a change. Sometimes we would go for twenty-four hours without being fed properly. It was just as well that Jim had told us about the cat-flap down the road at Mrs Jones. Often when we ignominiously went to tell June that we ‘wanted to go out’ (How would you feel if you had to announce each time your bladder needed emptying?) we would scamper off to Mrs Jones’s house. I sometimes feel twinges of guilt about the dear old cat who lived there. Mrs Jones would put out some delicious meals for him: mashed tuna, chopped fresh lights, heart or liver. He was a spoilt old thing whom she called Major. He was a stately black cat full of years.

  ‘Major! Major!’ she would call. ‘Dindins, Major!’

  Quick as a flash, we would go through the cat-door, wolf the delectable meal which she had put down for him, and run out into his garden. It was there, I remember, that I really developed my taste for lights. Then you would hear Mrs Jones’s voice again.

  ‘I don’t know what you are mewing for, after that lovely dindins. No, no. You’ll get fat if I give you any more.’

  And poor old Major would come toddling out to talk to us in the garden.

  ‘Old woman’s getting forgetful. Thinks she’s fed me when she hasn’t. Not that I mind. You eat less as you get older. Sometimes, she gives me these great big helpings and I can hardly start them. At least she keeps off the tinned muck.’

  ‘Ours doesn’t,’ said my brother. ‘It’s nothing but tinned muck – when she remembers.’

  ‘No, she does me very well,’ said the Major with a yawn. ‘Couldn’t do with tinned muck.’

  ‘Does she play the box of voices all the time, like ours?’ asked my brother.

  ‘The dear old Beeb?’ asked the Major, bafflingly. He always called the box of voices the Beeb, for some reason which I do not to this day understand. ‘I expect she does. To tell the truth, old boy, I’m getting just a bit deaf, so I don’t always notice. Wouldn’t mind if she did. It’s children I can’t stand.’

  ‘There are no young children in our house,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, are there?’ said the Major. ‘Bad luck.’ But as soon as he had said this, he fell asleep.

  For ever afterwards, the Major had it in his head that we lived in a house infested with young children. If you passed him on a garden wall, he would murmur, ‘Good day to ye. How are those damned kids?’ And any advice you might want to ask him, as an older and wiser cat, would always be given from the viewpoint that we had a lot of kids to contend with.

  One morning, after we had just stolen a particularly generous helping of mashed tuna from the Major’s dish (Mrs Jones: ‘I mashed it up nicely to help you to chew, so I don’t know what you are mewing about.’), we sat with him on the teak bench by his minder’s rose garden and asked his advice about the budgerigar.

  ‘They got it for the kids, I expect,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It belonged to Granny Harris originally. Then they took it because Granny was afraid we would kill it. But as it turned out, we are sharing a house with the wretched thing after all.’

  ‘It really annoys me,’ said my brother.

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ said the Major. ‘I’d be annoyed if I had to share a house with a lot of kids. Enough to make a chap take to the road.’

  It was on the Major’s lips that I first heard this expression, ‘take to the road’, and from the beginning it had romance for me. It is a curious fact that my brother and I both stayed with Jim and June. Neither of us liked it there. Instinct, you would have thought, would have made us set off. But it was only when I heard the phrase ‘take to the road’ that the full possibility of escape occurred to me. Oh, I had been corrupted by my years as the ‘pet’ of Granny Harris. I had begun to believe that human beings were necessary to my existence. I had begun to regard Jim and June (only begun, mind) as essential to my survival. Where else would the food come from? The answer, as my brain and eyes told me, was all around. But that was not how it felt at the time. But sometimes a single word is enough to change our lives. Something, even as the Major said, ‘take to the road’, stirred within me. I knew that it described my own predicament and adventure; the destiny I was to follow. But it was just a casual remark in the middle of our conversation about the budgerigar.

  ‘It twitters at you all the time,’ said my brother. ‘I shouldn’t think it would taste very good, but sometimes I’d just like to sink my teeth in it to shut it up.’

  ‘I bit a kid once,’ said the Major. ‘Let off one hell of a hullabaloo, yelling and wailing the way they do.’

  ‘It isn’t a kid,’ I said loudly. ‘It’s a budgerigar.’

  ‘No need to shout, old boy. Budgerigars are a different matter. Silly little fellas.’ He smiled almost tolerantly. ‘Did I ever tell you the story of how I once chased a parrot?’

  He had often told us the story of how he chased the parrot. It had got out of its cage and the Major had chased it to the top of a cupboard. Then a person had come into the room, and caught the parrot and put it back into its cage. It was not exactly an interesting story.

  ‘You see,’ said the Major, warming to his theme, ‘the stupid creature had got out of its cage...’

  ‘Jim would be furious if you killed the budgie,’ I said.

  ‘Jim is furious anyway,’ said my brother.

  ‘So is June,’ I said. ‘Well, nice talking to you, Major, we must be off.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear the end of the story, old boy? You see,’ he laughed to himself, ‘it had flown up to the top of this cupboard...’

  He was still telling the story to himself when we got up to go.

  For most of that day – although it was a beautiful, hot sunny day, when we could have been sunning ourselves in the garden – we were cooped up in the house. Jim took his little briefcase from the hall and went out to work. June went round the house with the annoying roaring-machine which she rubbed up and down on the carpets. The only good thing about this particular bit of machinery was that it had a long string-affair attached to the hole in the wall and if you were bored stiff (as we were for most of the time) it made a good game to ‘hunt the machine’ as it roared over the rugs and floor, and to chase the string affair as if it were a sn
ake.

  It was no substitute for the Hunt, but there was a certain degree of simple pleasure to be derived from stalking the roaring-machine and pulling at its snake. My brother and I took it in turns to yank the snake or prowl after the machine.

  ‘Can’t you play elsewhere?’ was cross June’s comment on our sport. ‘How can I hoover with you two under my feet all the while? I could murder that Jim for bringing you back here. You’ve been nothing but trouble ever since you came.’

  Sometimes, as she pushed the machine about the house, she would chunter for as long as half an hour about how angry she was with us, angry with Jim, angry with Tracy, angry with just about everyone. It is a curious fact, but you seldom meet a human being who exactly likes another human being. They do not mix well. In this, I am told, they resemble the moles.

  Anyway, on this occasion, June shut us out of the bedroom where we were so happily playing, and we went downstairs to the lounge to talk to and about the budgie.

  My brother was quite right. It was, in truth, a dreary little bird. It sat for most of the day on a perch, staring at itself in a tiny circular looking-glass. Sometimes it ate seed, and sometimes, when the seed had nourished it, the inevitable waste product came out at the other end and dropped on to the floor of its cage. Otherwise it made the occasional flap flap, tweet tweet. Probably the sensible thing to do would have been to ignore it, but I couldn’t, and nor could my brother. We were fascinated by schemes of how we might get it out of its cage and tear the boring little thing limb from limb.

  ‘Just look at it,’ said my brother. ‘Sitting there.’

  ‘They spend a good deal more time looking at that budgie than they do at us,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally,’ said my brother with sarcasm. ‘Do you think that if we jumped hard enough, we could knock the cage off its shelf?’

  ‘That would be fun,’ I said. ‘But could we get the thing out of its cage if we did so?’

  We jumped up to the shelf where the cage was located, and made very savage faces at the little thing. I have heard tell of cats frightening small birds to death. Not much sport in that, I should have thought. No, to get any pleasure out of a bird, there must be a chase. And my brother and I both realized there would be no particular fun in just getting the wretched budgie out of its cage.