Stray

by A. N. Wilson

  The people, by the way, called the budgerigar Henry, and it was a fashion of address which we, as a mark of disrespect, took to adopting.

  ‘Henry, Henry, Henry,’ we squeaked mockingly, pawing the cage.

  How he squeaked back! Doubtless in his own silly language he was saying that we were bullies and cads.

  ‘They think they love him,’ said my brother. ‘But what a strange way of showing your love to a fellow creature, by locking him up in a cage. Now I imagine that a budgerigar, however awful we may find poor Henry, would really be better off leading its tedious existence in a tree.’

  We jumped down from the shelf and settled ourselves in a snug spot behind the sofa, where the sun shone down very hotly and where it was a delight to sit, particularly since someone had drawn back the double-glazing and opened a window so that the warm air which fell upon us was fresh and natural, wholly unlike the heat of a radiator.

  ‘I believe,’ said I, ‘that budgerigars come from far, far away.’ And with these words, ‘far, far away’, in my mind I must have drifted off into a deep sleep. I was thinking, too, of the Major’s words, ‘take to the road’, and I think perhaps in that deep sleep of mine I first began to dream of a free life and a roving life, in which we depended upon no human master, no bondage or centrally-heated prison house. Did I say that I first began to dream? What nonsense! This dream had been with me from the beginning. It was the dream from which I awoke in my mother’s paws. But from that day, it was one which began to focus. In my dreams I began to visualize an actual road, a straight road, moonlit and leading across flat country. At the end of it there was some blessed goal which I could not discern, but the approach made my heart ache not with weariness or oppression, but a sort of joy. I cannot really describe it. It was a feeling that the further out of my way I seemed to go, the closer I was drawing to my home.

  Very different thoughts were forced upon us when we woke. The sleep must have been deep indeed, because much appeared to have transpired during our time of dreaming. Outside the window there was an enormous red engine of murder, to which had been attached a huge ladder and a coil of hose pipes. It was being manned by a group of curious creatures who were half-snail, half-human. That is, although they had human bodies, their heads were encased not in fur but in hard shells, bright yellow in colour. There was a lot of shouting going on. A crowd of people had assembled in the garden. June stood in the midst of them wailing and chewing a handkerchief.

  ‘Dear little Henry,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s such a friendly little budgie!’

  Jumping onto the back of the sofa and looking out of the open lounge window, we could survey the scene from a better vantage point. The ladder from the red engine had a sort of basket or crow’s nest at the top of it. It was directed to a telegraph wire in the Harbottle’s garden. One of the yellow-shells was standing in the crow’s nest, while on the wire, hopping from foot to foot and twittering with excitement, was Henry.

  Down below June was still crying.

  ‘I didn’t know that the window was open. I just let him out of his cage for a little fly around the room and he... he...’ It was too much for her. Tears made it impossible to finish the sentence.

  ‘He flew up there. Look!’ said a neighbour.

  ‘And to think!’ murmured my brother to me. ‘He was flying round this room while we sat behind the sofa asleep! We’ll never have such an opportunity again.’

  The thought made us doubly angry with Henry.

  The yellow-shelled man in the crow’s nest was being moved by the men below so that he was almost within reach of Henry. An inch nearer... and another inch, and he could merely stretch out and grab the little budgerigar in his paw. But just as yellow-shell reached out to grab Henry, the little bird flapped its wings and flew! First it settled on top of a telegraph pole. The crowd below gasped, as if the whole episode were being put on for their entertainment. The yellow-shells shouted to one another, and the sort of ladder-affair was moved, with the man still in it at the top, so that it was quite near the spot where Henry was perched. But then Henry flew off a second time, and this time he settled in the branches of a tree.

  It is a curious fact to record. When he was locked up in his cage tweeting at us in the house, my brother and I felt nothing but contempt for Henry. But when we saw the crowd of people, and the oafish yellow-shells all trying to catch one little bird, our sympathies shifted. We longed for him to be able to escape, to fly far, far away, to escape and do the budgie equivalent of taking to the road. At last, he was a free creature. And the crowd who were all staring at him, and oo-ing and ah-ing every time he flew away had no claim upon him.

  Go little bird! Be free!

  These, truly, were the sentiments of both of us. And I record them because some people might not believe them in the light of what happened subsequently.

  While Henry was lost among the boughs of the leafy sycamore, Jim Harbottle returned, carrying his little case, as he did each evening around six o’clock. He looked considerably alarmed by the sight of the red engines parked outside his house, and by all the people, and by June crying, and by the yellow-shells.

  ‘Jim Harbottle, Gas Board,’ he said, shaking the paw of one of the yellow-shells.

  ‘Good evening, but we don’t need the gas board,’ said the yellow-shell. And then a surprising thing happened. Yellow-shell took off his shell and underneath you saw that he was just another man in uniform.

  ‘No,’ said Jim, ‘I work for the Gas Board. Regional Area Manager.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said the man in uniform. ‘But we don’t need the Gas Board.’

  ‘I assure you,’ said Jim with some dignity, ‘that you do. Without the Gas Board, where would this country – I might even ask, this world – be? Gas is a dangerous source of energy unless used efficiently, and effectively, and safely. That is why you need the Gas Board. That is why the Gas Board needs Area Managers. Without them, there would be explosions and calamities all over —’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the man in uniform. ‘But there’s no gas leak.’

  ‘And no fire?’ asked Jim.

  ‘No fire.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Jim, ‘but when the Area Manager of the Gas Board returns home and sees fire engines parked outside his house, he not unnaturally assumes that there has been a fire or... a gas leak.’

  And then June came forward sniffing and crying. ‘Oh, Jim, he’s up the tree!’

  ‘What is? A cat?’ asked Jim. ‘You called the fire brigade at great expense to the local rate payer just because a cat is up a tree? Let it stay there!’

  ‘Never really took to cats,’ he told the fireman. ‘Dogs, yes, I am a dog man. But not cats. We only took these two cats out of the kindness of our hearts after my mother-in-law passed away.’

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘He’d never have got out if you hadn’t left the window open in the lounge,’ said June.

  ‘Me? I like that! Me leave a window open?’

  ‘You can’t deny it, Jim Harbottle. It was not me who opened the window of the lounge.’

  ‘It gets stuffy in there. Anyway, even if I did, it’s hardly my fault if a cat goes up a tree.’

  ‘It isn’t a cat up the tree,’ said June. ‘It’s Henry. Our beautiful budgie...’ And at this she began to cry again.

  Evidently Jim, who had never really taken to the likes of us, was very devoted to budgies, or perhaps simply, any stick, even the twig on which Henry was perched, was good enough to beat his wife with.

  ‘You let the budgie out!’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone with me, Jim Harbottle!’

  ‘You opened the budgie’s cage and let it out and then you have the cheek to tell me that I left a window open.’

  ‘The bird still seems to be in the tree, sir,’ said the fireman, looking up towards Henry who was free and happy in the branches.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Jim importantly. ‘So he is. It is very kind of you – er, officer – to have
put the resources of the Fire Service at our disposal on this particular occasion.’

  ‘It’s hard to see what we can do, sir, really,’ said the fireman. ‘If the budgie wants to be up in the tree, there is not very much we can do about it.’

  Jim looked at him with the look of a man who believed that the Gas Board would have been able to do something, even if the Fire Brigade were to fail.

  So eventually, the ladder was lowered, and the men (they were all men, it turned out) got into the fire engines, and they drove away, and the crowd dispersed. All that evening, Jim and June quarrelled and railed at each other, while they switched on and off the various machines in their house. Tracy returned for supper, to find her parents standing in the garden trying to lure Henry down from the tree with a dish of seeds. But he wouldn’t come. After the meal, Tracy said she was going out with her friend Bob, and she left her parents to their wrangling.

  They were much too busy quarrelling to think of feeding us. By the time darkness fell, we were both ravenous, but when we went into the lounge to drop a gentle hint, to the effect that a little supper would be most welcome, Jim shouted rudely, ‘Oh stop your caterwauling,’ and hit me really very hard on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. I cursed him, and went to claw the floor by the back door, hoping at least that I might be let out. My brother came too, and eventually, June remembered that we had not, as she put it, ‘spent a penny’, and let us out into the darkness of the night. I scampered down to the Major’s house. In his kitchen the old boy was snoozing by the warm Aga. Under the sink was a bowl of chicken breasts which he had hardly touched. I made short work of that before Mrs Jones came in and shooed me out, shouting, ‘Go back and eat your own food. Honestly, those Harbottle cats seem permanently hungry.’

  For my nightly lavatory activities, I managed to find a neat little patch among Jim’s favourite petunias, and then I scampered in through the back door where June was calling, ‘Come on puss, puss, puss.’

  There was no harm in June, she was just an idiot. The same could not be said for Jim. I think he was rather enjoying her distress at the loss of the budgie.

  ‘No point in shouting for Henry,’ he called.

  ‘I was just getting the cats in. More than you ever do.’

  ‘I should think that budgie’s done for,’ said Jim. ‘What a stupid thing to do, to let it out of its cage.’

  ‘Here comes Bootsie!’ said June, trying to rise above Jim’s taunts.

  And from the shadows of the garden, my brother came running. He was carrying something in his jaws, something bright green, feathery, and lifeless.

  ‘Now what have you got there?’ asked June.

  And when the thing was dropped at her feet, she let out a squeal of horror and grief. My brother looked at me, and licked his lips with a little bit of embarrassment. ‘Just couldn’t resist,’ he murmured.

  chapter nine

  Things were never quite the same again after my brother had killed Henry. Jim and June, who were opposed to one another in all areas of life, became united in their loathing of us. The feeding became even less regular, and the outbursts of rage against us now came from both of them. I got used to avoiding Jim’s foot. If he passed me in the hall or on the landing, he would kick me. June was little better, and often, when putting down a bowl of food for us, would smack us on the back of the head when we began to eat. Our only ally in the household was Tracy, and soon she left to live with her boyfriend Bob. Jim made a tremendous fuss about this, but I could not blame Tracy. When he was not being rude to his wife or attacking us, he was forever shouting at the girl because he did not like her hair, or her clothes, or the way she had decorated her room. No wonder she left, but when she left, she left us to their mercy. One day, while we were hiding from them under the bed in Tracy’s room – now, so still and quiet – my brother said calmly, ‘I’m not sure that I can endure this for very much longer.’

  ‘Nor can I.’

  ‘It seems so pointless to be living like this,’ he said. ‘Do you know why I killed that budgerigar? I did not realize it at the time. But looking back, I see that it is months since you and I got any decent hunting.’

  ‘It is months since we just led a normal feline existence, not constantly bothered by that pair,’ I said.

  ‘Have you heard the latest?’ asked my brother.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jim’s talking about getting a dog. Alsatian. June asked him how he thinks an Alsatian would get on with us and he said, “I wouldn’t mind if it bit their heads off.” He’s not a very nice man, isn’t Jim.’

  ‘We couldn’t live here with a dog,’ I said.

  ‘What I can’t make out is why Jim and June want one. A dog will be much more “trouble” than we are. A dog is dangerous. A dog has no control over its bladder or bowels. They’ll have to spend months training it not to make messes in the lounge. And yet this is what they want. Really...’

  ‘They are extraordinary.’

  We said it in chorus, and the old catch-phrase brought a little comfort. After we had sat together in silence for a little space, I said, ‘Are you serious about getting away?’

  ‘Almost enough to make a cat take to the road,’ said my brother in his (quite good) imitation of the Major’s voice.

  ‘So that phrase stuck with you, too?’

  ‘Oh, brother,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to rove the world and simply be ourselves; to eat when we wanted, and how we wanted. On warm nights, to be out, hunting or lovemaking. To be free!’

  If only we had acted on impulse! If only, then and there, we had decided to run away from Jim and June and to take to the road. But my brother was a cautious cat, who believed where possible in planning any big course of action. He took to having long conversations with the Major about our plans, and the Major insisted upon the importance of reconnaissance.

  ‘Must have a recce,’ said the old cat, warming to his theme. ‘Most important. Now when I was a young cat, I used to know the whole of this area; not just to the end of the road, but far beyond. My advice to you both is to head out in that direction. Follow the path across the open field and you will come to the banks of a river. Always a good spot for immediate food supplies. If you’re lucky you’ll get a duck. There will be water-rats, field mice...’

  But the next day, after a bit of recce, my brother returned. The Major’s open field was now covered with houses.

  ‘Of course. Not been there for some time, old boy. Don’t get about as often as I did.’

  Nevertheless, he had persuaded us of one important idea and that was, for the first few weeks of our life on the road, we should try to avoid human beings as much as possible, and their houses and roads. He told us – what I now know to be true – that when you go on the road, there is a danger of being pursued. They will put up advertisements in local shop windows, and ring up the police and the yellow-shells. There were other dangers on the road, too, about which the Major was vague. I know them better now! But I still think if we had only set out then, together, all might have been well. A day never passes in my solitude without my thinking of my brother, or missing his companionship. But almost more than his loss, I regret the manner of his loss. It makes me so very angry. It was all such a waste of life and opportunity.

  My brother was always much more inclined than I was (at that period) to keep his ear to the ground, and to be aware of what the human beings were intending. It was he who got wind of the fact that Jim and June were going away to another town called Spain, which they had read about in one of the pieces of paper which I had scratched with my claws. It was a hot place, and Jim and June had the ambition to change their poor furless flesh from the colour of uncooked sausages to the colour of dog-messes. My brother said that it was going to cost them a considerable amount of money to do this. How he knew, I do not know. Once it became more or less certain that they were indeed going away (and once he explained it all to me, I remembered that they had been away the previous year to bathe – if you ple
ase – in grease, as if there wasn’t enough of it in the bottles on June’s bedroom table) our plans began to be formed. We would allow them to go away, and hope that they would do so having forgotten to shut us up in the house. If not, we would have to escape from the house on the first occasion when someone came in to feed us. Then we would run three or four streets away, keeping only to back gardens and avoiding main roads, and find our way into some sort of park which my brother had discovered on his recces. It makes me sad to talk of the plans now. What actually happened was so pathetically different.

  June and Jim set off for Spain all right.

  Getting their things packed in a suitcase, getting the suitcase down the stairs, running up and down stairs in search of a lost passport which was not lost at all, just in Jim’s other jacket, debating whether it was June’s fault or Jim’s that the passport was in this jacket, and whose fault it had been on that holiday, three years ago, when they had left without their travellers’ cheques, took quite a bit of time.

  ‘Have you locked the back door?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Put out food for Bootsie and Fluffie?’

  ‘You said you’d do that.’

  ‘Oh, you are hopeless.’

  It was while she was spooning some muck into a saucer for us that the front doorbell rang, and a man said he was a taxi.

  ‘Goodbye, Bootsie! Goodbye, Fluffie!’ called June in a very silly voice indeed.

  ‘Come on, d’ you want us to miss the aeroplane?’ Jim was asking her.

  ‘I do hope Tracy and Bob remember to feed the cats.’

  ‘Well, they will if you remembered to tell them.’

  ‘Course I remembered. More than you have ever done. Honestly, Jim, I’ve had to do everything: cancel the milk, cancel the bread, ring up the police to tell them we’re going away.’