A Cat Called Birmingham

by Chris Pascoe

  by our totally uncool behaviour, as would be any self-respecting teenager.

  Sammy is the prom queen, elegant, cool and in control, to Brum's bumbling, spotty nerd desperately trying to impress her and always failing miserably.

  If you've ever seen the bit in the movie Something about Mary when the outclassed date arrives at Cameron Diaz's home to take her to the prom, you'll know what I mean. Whilst hoping to provide her family with good first impressions, the hapless suitor instigates a chain of unspeakable self-humiliations, including being dragged to the floor and battered by her mentally impaired brother and needing police and paramedic assistance with his fly zip. That pretty much sums up Brum's role in Sammy's life.

  Cameron Diaz was fairly forgiving and concerned given the circumstances, so she wouldn't be a good representation of Sammy. (Note: rule out Cameron Diaz playing Sammy if book ever becomes film.) Sammy observes Brum's various catastrophes with a cool and unimpressed detachment. She will occasionally wince and flatten her ears, but only during Brum's most extreme and painful moments.

  Despite this disapproval, she seems to quite like him in a reserved kind of way but has no intention of letting him know. She's made it transparently clear that she's tougher than he is and therefore in charge, and that she will not hesitate to use force should he at any time forget his manners. He reluctantly accepts his new housemate. He'd have moved in with the Beast of Bodmin to get off that farm.

  She isn't at all keen on me, however. I also understand that Sammy is in charge, and also mind my manners, but have never really got at all close to her (sometimes, judging by the look on her face I wouldn't want to get close to her).

  Whenever I think we're beginning to become friends, she'll suddenly revert to treating me as a stranger and begin hissing every time I enter a room. The latter makes me feel much like a pantomime bad guy, and I find it a great effort of will not to pace the room, rubbing my chin and scowling evilly at an unseen audience.

  Sammy's reluctance to accept me as non-threatening is not her own fault. Like too many of her contemporaries in the human world, she has problems with trust and phobias about forming relationships, due to the thoughtlessness and in some cases downright cruelty of others.

  She'd like to trust me but, for now at least, that will not be possible, thanks largely to the actions of one person almost a decade ago.

  Sammy was born in Leicestershire (I'm sure I can detect an East Midlands accent in the meow, and come to think of it she also has a fondness for Walkers Crisps). Whilst no doubt being greatly relieved to have been born in the very heartland of a cat-loving country, and over one hundred miles from Slough, she must have wondered what her new owner would be like.

  He was scum.

  (No, no, not me - the first one.)

  Sammy was one of those deeply unlucky cats who ended up being owned by a human being way beneath her on the moral decency and basic intelligence scale. For two years, she was regularly kicked, beaten and locked in confined spaces by a 'man' who fed her and therefore believed he had the right to be as vicious as he pleased with her.

  She was eventually rescued, and became the tenant of Lorraine's niece, Shelly, who did her best to rebuild Sammy's shattered confidence.

  Shelly had taken on quite a handful. Sammy was now a big, hissing, spitting, frightened bundle of paranoia. She was also deeply claustrophobic as a result of her frequent enforced spells in small dark cupboards. The claustrophobia made her destructive. She would panic at the sight of any closed door and frantically try to get through it, destroying carpets and paintwork as she did so. She was a psychologically damaged nightmare, but at last she'd had a stroke of luck.

  Somebody wanted to help her.

  Shelly put up with the damage and the frustration of living with a cat that she could barely get within feet of and slowly but

  surely, Sammy made headway. Unfortunately not quite enough headway by the time Shelly fell pregnant with her first child.

  It broke her heart to have to give up on her, but Sammy was still far too unpredictable to be deemed safe around a baby. Shelly knew that if she couldn't find Sammy a caring home, then she would soon be back to square one.

  Fortunately, Lorraine decided to take up the challenge, took Sammy off Shelly's hands and patiently carried on the good work.

  After about two and a half years, five years on from her early traumas, Sammy trusted Lorraine enough to settle on her lap of an evening. Seven years, maybe half her life, had been wasted in suffering and recovery.

  It was about this time that Lorraine and I advanced beyond the 'Dancing Party WWF Smackdown' stages of our relationship, and before long, Brum and I were moving in. Lorraine might not have warned us about Sammy, but she'd no doubt warmed Sammy about me. The last thing Sammy wanted was a bloke in her house.

  Despite my best efforts since moving in, Sammy still believes all men to be bastards, and although I resent being classed a bastard by any person, human or feline, who hasn't got to know me well enough to establish that I am indeed a bastard, who can blame her after a start in life like that?

  One thing she will have learnt from myself and Brum's arrival, however, is that not all males are frightening, cold and fearsome. It must have been a heck of a relief when she realised what she'd ended up with.

  If she'd somehow known that day, that we were coming to stay, her bitter experiences would have warned her to expect Freddy Kruger and Hannibal Lector as the front door creaked open. She'd have held her breath as she stared from the hallway in mortal terror.

  And, as the mist from the street swirled in the half-light of the open doorway . . . Laurel and Hardy walked into her life.

  That's Not Flying

  'Be courageous! Be as brave

  as your fathers before you.

  Have faith! Go forward.'

  Thomas A. Edison

  Many people simply do not appreciate the level of skill and (lack of) concentration that go into falling. To quote the famous cowboy Woody, 'That's not flying, that's falling with style.'

  Which is not exactly relevant here of course, because, unlike the plastic astronaut to whom Woody referred, Brum has never claimed to be flying, but I do like the line and feel that 'falling with style' is very much Brum's forte.

  Falling with style, as opposed to simply falling, involves accuracy and timing.

  Style is ensuring that your head connects with any hard or jagged lumps of wood or metal on the way down.

  Style is making sure that any ground-based item that can be broken as a result of your fall is hit with maximum force and destroyed beyond all recognition.

  Style is first checking that you have an audience. Does a cat that falls in the woods when nobody is around make a sound? I would think so, yes . . . definitely, but, where was I going with this, ah yes, but if nobody is around does the fall then get recorded and published ensuring total humiliation for the said cat? No! It does not.

  And finally, style is making the fall's repercussions look so ridiculously unlikely as to achieve comic status. It is not enough to merely fall over, you need to claw at and take something with you as you go, preferably attached to something else which in turn is attached to something large and unstable, like myself, thus seeing to it that seconds after you land, you are followed to ground by most of the room's contents and occupants.

  Which brings us nicely to a fall executed with such style that

  all of the above criteria were achieved during a drop of only five feet.

  Last Christmas, things were a little busier than usual in our household, mainly on account of Lorraine and I having acted with indecent haste once living together. Consequently Maya, a sixteen-month-old baby girl and twenty-one pounds of crazed adrenalin, saw to it that we spent more energy than we ever dreamed we had in her entertainment, and also saw to it that we had absolutely none of the energy we might otherwise have had by keeping us up all night, thus meaning that we had less energy than we'd ever had and were much more energetic than we'd
ever been, if you see what I'm saying. Neither do I.

  Anyway, against this backdrop of good-humoured chaos and total exhaustion, I finally got around to putting up the Christmas decorations a day before it wouldn't have been worth doing at all.

  Having hung the streamers, the cards and the outside lights, I'd put together our artificial tree and started wrapping lights around it. I always wonder about the ritual of Christmas trees. For a start they're a pagan symbol predating Christ and believed to have something to do with celebrating the 'Spirits of the Wood'. The widespread use of artificial trees means that in many cases wood isn't involved. In summary then, they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas or the Christian Church, half of us use plastic ones anyway, and not knowing of any 'Spirits of Plastic' traditions the whole point is somewhat lost. I apologise if I have offended any spirits of plastic who may be reading this.

  Anyway, I will now attempt to explain the layout of our lounge so that you may understand exactly how this Brum disaster took place.

  The tree stood in the middle of the window. To its right was a heavy oak coffee table and Brum asleep on top of a stepladder which I'd used to put up the streamers. Beneath him, trailing across the coffee table and up over an armchair, ran the much too stretched light lead, plugged in for testing purposes and awaiting a much needed extension cable.

  To the left of the tree stood me, arranging the lights around the Christmas tree. It was about 6.30 p.m. and the curtains were drawn.

  Enter stage right, baby Maya running at full pelt with a push-along plastic breakdown truck. The concept of slowing down as she neared fixed or stationary objects had either not yet occurred or maybe just didn't appeal and her truck steamrollered into Brum's stepladder with massive force.

  Her mother Lorraine, following the runaway baby, screamed as she watched the ladder wobble and teeter on the brink of crashing into the window.

  Brum, with his spookily uncatlike poise and balance, simply rolled over the edge and only seemed to react at all when already hurtling down through the air. At this point he managed to grab the curtain with a desperately flailing claw. The wall fixings on the rail were poor, very poor.

  Thus it was that as Brum grabbed the curtain, both rail and curtain ripped out from the wall and Brum dropped backwards off of them as they fell with him. He first smashed into the side of the coffee table with his head and then toppled sideways, wrenching the light lead from its socket and blowing the main fuse, but not before swinging around the tight wire like an Olympic gymnast and landing on all four feet.

  What style!

  As the lights went out and a curtain descended upon myself and the tree, the wire I held jerked forward with Brum's impact on its other end, hauling my already off-balance self face first into the Christmas tree. I crashed to the floor hugging the tree passionately to my chest and turning the air blue with my cries.

  As I looked around the devastated room and then at my stock-still stunned daughter, I noted that Brum had fixed her with the same accusatory glare as myself and we were at one in our momentary loathing.

  Suddenly, Lorraine started laughing and so too did Maya. Brum stared at me with his 'Oh my God!' ears back, frightened-rabbit

  look, the piercing shrieks of laughter harsh and misplaced amidst the carnage.

  I thought so too. My stumbling attempts to stand and my protestations only heightened our audience's sense of hilarity and I found myself staring at Brum with much the same expression as his own.

  Now, whilst this fall lacked nothing in destructivity - what it did lack was height.

  Until recently, his highest fall had been from the living-room window of my old flat. This was a bizarre fall and I have absolutely no idea what happened to cause it. I was replacing the glass panel on my front door, about fifteen feet below the said window, and vaguely aware of Brum watching from above. One moment he was up there, the next there was a long shriek, getting closer and closer like an incoming missile and then he was standing beside me.

  He began running in small circles, head down, before finally leaping over my car and hurtling up the garden and out of sight at top speed. I have no idea why. My theory is that a wasp stung him at the window and he lost his footing. I base this on his crazy behaviour upon landing, but it might have been the impact of landing that bothered him so. Or just that he's crazy.

  We shall never know, but it was his height record at the time, so impressive for that reason if no other.

  One fall, however, surpasses all others. It scores a ten for style, it was from his now record height of twenty feet and his landing was one of the most dangerously stunning and funny sights I have ever seen in my life. He deserved an award for this one, not a garage bill (which is all we got).

  I know I'm building it up a bit but he really did break the mould with this. To add to its appeal, this was one he did all by himself. The Christmas fall could be put down to a piece of rotten luck on his part, but for this, he had nobody but himself to blame.

  I admit I was just feet from him when he did it, and just possibly may have distracted him enough to have caused him to momentarily lose his footing and balance, but he's a cat for

  goodness sake, nothing short of a hard push should have displaced him from that wall and most cats would be too fast and agile to have fallen even when pushed, if you were ever quick enough to push them.

  If you push a cat, not that I often do, they somehow seem to ooze around your hand like some kind of shape-shifting entity. It's difficult to get any sort of purchase on them at all. I'm making this sound very much like I do go around pushing cats over, so I'll approach it from a different angle. Try stroking a cat (that's better) that doesn't want to be stroked, somehow without their seeming to move you can't get more than a light touch on their back. Their body squirms away from your hand and you can hardly touch them at all. I don't think that Brum knows how to do this, incidentally. Either that or he just doesn't want to. He likes being stroked. He's like some big dopey dog in this respect. Far from edging away from a stranger's stroke, Brum actually headbutts their hand and pushes forcefully into it in his eagerness. His intensity can be quite unnerving for some people, especially when added to his tendency to bare his teeth while he's behaving in this manner.

  The overall image is of a manically grinning psychopath. Many withdraw their hand with rather more haste than would be deemed necessary when considering the lack of threat a big fluffy tabby poses to their wellbeing.

  Even if you did manage to push a cat with enough force to send it tumbling off a twenty-feet wall (there I go again), what are the chances of it not managing to grab the top of the wall and scramble back up your arm, over your head and away before your arm (now bloody) has been withdrawn from the initial push?

  Admittedly, without a push to send Brum over the wall, there was no arm to scramble up, but as I said originally, a cat should never have fallen without the push anyway. Hmmm, I somehow feel I've come full circle here and achieved nothing but start a rumour that I push cats off walls. So back to the fall itself.

  We live in a town of hills, and we live halfway up one. Consequently our back garden rises fifteen feet above our back

  door, and our front door is about twenty feet above the street. The street then drops into woods and plummets sharply to the main road below. We therefore have to climb twenty-two steep steps from the street, which makes us extremely popular with postmen and delivery people. Also the fact that our rear garden wall is now inclining thirty degrees towards our house makes you wonder about landslides. As a local builder inspecting the dodgy wall remarked, 'If you build your house on the side of a ruddy mountain, what do you expect?'

  To us, though, the steps and the possibility of our garden wall joining us in the lounge one evening are a minor inconvenience when offset against the excellent view across the fields the elevated position affords us.

  At the top of these steps we have a path that runs across the front of our house to the door. The path sto
ps at a low wall beside the door, and it is at this point that we have our steepest drop, twenty feet straight down onto our neighbour's concrete drive.

  It goes without saying that this most dangerous point is where Brum chooses to spend his sunshine hours. He will laze along this wall for hours. The fact he can also keep his eye on us through the lounge window from this vantage point adds to its appeal and seems to please him immensely, judging by the stupid great self-satisfied grin on his face as he beams in at us.

  But it doesn't please us. We know him too well. The sight of him lounging inches from the edge of a potentially fatal drop are slightly unnerving to say the least, especially as he's twice fallen off the other end of the wall, which mercifully peters down to an eight-feet drop onto nice soft bushes and grass.

  One of his lower falls was a double fall and well worth mentioning. As we half watched him from the sofa basking on the wall in warm sunshine, he simply stretched luxuriantly, rolled onto his back with his legs in the air, and disappeared. It was one of those moments when you just sit staring and wonder if you actually saw what you saw. We waited a few moments for him to reappear, staring at the empty wall.

  He did so seconds later. Having run back up the steps, looking

  pretty dishevelled but trying to act cool, he launched himself back up towards the wall. And missed. He went over it like a champion show jumper gracefully clearing a fence. A run, a leap, legs outstretched, and he was gone again, crashing eight feet back down into the bushes.

  Moron.

  And talking of morons, it also brings to mind an accident of my own at eighteen years of age on a 'lads' weekend' in Great Yarmouth. The purpose of the trip had been to drink ourselves silly, behave like imbeciles and pull women. Since the first two activities pretty much ruled out any chance of achieving the third, we had plenty of drinking time.

  And, after drinking for much of the day, the six of us returned to our campsite and decided a midnight swim in the sea would be a great (imbecilic) idea. Racing down to the beach in pitch darkness, we all stopped at a wall.