A Cat Called Birmingham

by Chris Pascoe

  I don't know what the matter with Andy was that day, but he was slurring after one drink. As the queues at the bar were massive, it suddenly occurred to Andy that the big four-pint jugs that sports bars often do (so you can get a whole game's worth in at once) would be a better idea than keep struggling to the bar. Leaning over a low balcony beside our seats, he attracted the door-monster's attention by tapping him on the top of his shaven head.

  The monster jumped, slightly startled, and did not look at all amused. I thought he was going to clump Andy one there and then, but instead he stared morosely and waited to hear what he had to say.

  Andy, very pleasantly, asked him if they did jugs in the pub. Only he didn't say that at all. We all heard his slurry voice mispronounce the crucial word. Consequently he asked the already rattled bouncer, 'Do you do drugs in this pub mate?'

  The monster blinked, unsure he could have heard correctly. So did we. Unaware of a problem, Andy continued, 'Only what with the queues, I thought it would be easier if I got some drugs . . . It'd save keep going to the bar.'

  I'd never seen anybody lifted by the throat and dragged over a balcony before. The monster took quite a bit of calming down, but eventually he put Andy down and we watched the game.

  Unbelievably, a few minutes before half time, Andy, who was

  now barely coherent and with a pint sloshing dangerously in his hand, leant over and tapped the doorman on the head again, wanting to know where the gents were.

  As the doorman looked up, he was greeted by a face full of lager from somebody appearing to call him a 'toilet'. Protests of innocence no longer withstanding, we very quickly found ourselves outside on the pavement and looking for another pub. By the time we found one that wasn't heaving full, England had won 2.-0 and another game had started RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET Colombia v. Romania. Both teams normally play in yellow, so Romania were in a second kit. The following exchange of words is worth noting simply to demonstrate exactly how drunk Andy was by this time:

  Andy: Wash game ish thish?

  Barman: Romania and Colombia.

  Andy: Ish it?

  Barman: Yeah, still o-o at the moment.

  Andy: (squinting hard at TV screen) I had no idea thersh wash so many black people in Romania.

  Barman: Er . . . no, no mate. That's Colombia in the yellow.

  Andy: Oh, sorry yesh. Yesh. When are the Romanians playing then?

  And so on. He wisely stopped drinking at this point, but the rot had set in, and the sequence of events as we left the pub ensured that the story of his day would be told whenever his friends gathered, from that day forward and forever.

  A huge group of girls in England warpaint and shirts were on the opposite side of the road as we exited the pub door. Andy, still half drunk and beer-bold, shouted some inane greeting to them and was cheered for his efforts. Raising a hand in the air and heading towards them, he failed to appreciate that he was at the top of a flight of concrete steps.

  He stepped into thin air and tumbled rapidly downwards, stylishly completing a double somersault before landing heavily on his back on the pavement.

  His new friends howled with laughter as he clambered back to his feet, making light of it all, laughing and joking, somehow

  believing that he was still in with a chance. He staggered across the pavement towards the road, limping and clearly in great discomfort.

  Stepping off the high curb, he promptly yelled in pain as his ankle buckled beneath him and he fell into the gutter. The girls opposite were helpless with laughter. A small crowd had now gathered to see what all the fuss was about.

  Now deeply embarrassed, Andy was still trying to make a joke of it all as he staggered up and walked straight in front of a taxi in the middle of the road. The taxi mercifully dealt him a heavy blow, and we desperately hoped that this would deter him from pressing further forward but, spinning on his feet, he amazingly still attempted to make it to the opposite side of the road.

  It was like an heroic charge in a war movie, a fatally wounded Steve McQueen stumbling on towards the enemy bunker, bullet after bullet finding its mark but failing to stop him. I'm quite sure a few bullets wouldn't have stopped Andy either. He'd have sunk to his knees in a pool of blood in front of the first girl he reached, and with his dying breath asked her if she came to this stretch of pavement often and fancied showing him the local nightlife or something.

  But it wasn't to be. Andy's charge, as it has come to be known, was humiliatingly halted by an enraged taxi driver screaming abuse at him and many people rushing up to see if he needed an ambulance. With all this going on over his shoulder, he still attempted to chat to the now rapidly retreating girls.

  I have often read that doomed charges like those of the Light Brigade and by the Confederate Army at Gettysburg are amongst the most tragically moving and stunningly beautiful sights that it is possible to see.

  I now know that to be true.

  Brummy Jones's Diary

  'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.' Proverb

  The diary of a tabby-something singleton.

  New Year's Resolutions / Will Not

  Smoke (i.e. catch fire).

  Vomit upon more than two fabric surfaces per day.

  Behave clumsily around the house, but instead imagine others are

  watching (and taking notes for book). Get annoyed with the white cat or the baby. Regurgitate more than I eat.

  Allow smaller and more helpless creatures to take liberties. Fall heavily, but instead fall with poise and grace. Die.

  Get very wet, but instead remain dry and elegant. Obsess about the white cat, as pathetic to have crush on cat who

  holds me in contempt and may kill me.

  7 Will

  Not vomit upon more than two fabric surfaces per day.

  Stop smoking.

  Reduce overall mass by around 3'/" by simply distributing excess

  fur around house. Catch a bird, without it turning the tables on me.

  Donate all fur, not properly attached, to the baby for her hidden

  collection. Be more assertive.

  Lie down straight away when I get up in the morning. Form functional relationships with the white cat and the baby. Climb trees twice weekly not merely to look at sparrows. Learn to use cat flap as a door and not just as a window. Stop seeing mice as threatening, but instead recognise them as

  prey.

  An Exceptionally Normal Start

  Tuesday i January

  1st 4.1b (but winter coat), vomited 3 times (but effectively covered 4 chairs), caught fire o times (excellent).

  0500 Got up RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET woke household.

  0502. Went back to bed.

  0800 Got up for breakfast of Duck and Rabbit Jellied

  Catfood (ugh) and Felix Senior Cat Biscuits (v.g.).

  0805 Went to bed.

  1545 Got up, went out and did something totally demented.

  Had bad accident. Very lucky this time.

  1600 Went to bed.

  1755 Jumped onto porch roof to watch out for baby and other two to arrive home in car as required feeding.

  1756 Had bad fall from porch roof. Nobody saw (phew!).

  1758 Baby and other two arrived home. Boy delivering leaflets

  did see and explained in alarmed way about my falling off roof. They talked to him in soothing tones.

  1800 Ran to greet them in drive. The baby clumped me with her plastic mallet (quite hard).

  1805 Ate dinner. Sheba Gold (excellent).

  1810 Went to bed.

  1825 Sheba Gold not so good on way out. Baby evacuated

  and area coated in 'Pet Accident' foam spray. Moved to another bed.

  1830 (Thoughts) If I can stick to my no-smoking policy and keep vomiting down to present levels, the white cat may very well begin seeing me in a different light.

  1910 As 1825.

  1930 As 1910.

  Wednesday 2 January

  0800 Caught fire.

  B
atman in White Ankle Socks

  'Far hence, keep far from me, you grim woman.' Ovid

  When I were just a lad my parents had two cats. Penny, a tortoiseshell, was a nice, friendly, shy sort of cat. She went through life without having any books written about her, kept herself to herself, you know the sort.

  Cindy, her younger housemate, was pure undiluted evil.

  She'd have looked evil too, if it hadn't been for her feet. She was mainly jet black. The bottom half of her face, from just below her nose, was white. And so were all four paws. This made her look for all the world as if she were wearing a black mask and white socks. She looked like Batman. Batman in white ankle socks.

  Cindy was scheming, nasty, vicious and deadly.

  We liked her a lot.

  My father believed she was watching him and that she had some dark agenda all of her own. Now Dad may never have been the sharpest tool in the box, but there did seem to be something odd about her relationship with him at that time.

  He claimed that he could sense her staring at him, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. We thought he was being paranoid at first.

  We'd be sitting at dinner and he would say that he just knew she was somewhere, watching his every move. There'd be no sign of her and we'd laugh at him. And then eventually one of us would spot a small black and white face peering out from a clump of shrubs at the end of the garden. She would be staring straight at Dad through the patio doors. It could send a bit of a shiver down the spine.

  Once he was lying and relaxing in the bath with the door

  locked. Eyes shut, music on, singing and humming, he opened his eyes to grab the shampoo . . . and almost had a heart attack.

  There, sitting on the toilet cistern and grinning straight at him was Cindy. The room had definitely been empty when he'd closed his eyes.

  At this point he must have truly believed his own tongue in cheek theories about her (I hope they were tongue in cheek).

  A little detective work revealed how she had performed this little piece of magic. In the bedroom next door to the bathroom, the net curtains were hanging out through the fanlight. She'd climbed from the bedroom window, walked along the roof to the bathroom window, and squeezed in through that fanlight. The fact that she later began climbing into every bedroom on our terraced block in this manner proved our theory.

  So that was how she'd done it, all that needed answering now was why.

  Surely seeing my father in the bath was an experience most people would have gone out of their way to avoid. The post-traumatic stress counselling alone would have made this a financially ruinous idea. But Cindy actually risked life and limb just to be there, on that cistern, when he opened his eyes.

  I have my own theories about why she did it. In many ways I agree with my father. She did indeed have her own reasons for watching him. But I don't think it was down to some dark and evil masterplan.

  I think it was a very feline thing she was doing. She knew it wound him up, plagued him and unsettled him so she had to do it.

  That's what cats do. They will usually sleep where they know you don't want them to, on a newly changed white sheet or on your face. They will always manage to get into the rooms they are expressly forbidden to go into. They will always seek to sit on the lap of the person who doesn't like cats. They seem to sense when something is wrong and then automatically do it.

  And so, as unsettling as her behaviour may have seemed, she was just being a cat. However, I am not totally sure that what

  she did to me when I was about eighteen was either natural or normal. Better explain that, sounds vaguely disturbing.

  She executed what I believe to have been a pre-meditated, cold and calculating attack on me at a time when I was virtually unable to defend myself. She left me for dead, bleeding and unconscious in an alleyway.

  Pretty heavy stuff, huh?

  I will start from the beginning.

  From when I was about ten years old, Cindy was a part of my life. I was a fairly normal sort of lad at that age, i.e. horrible.

  Most of my games were war games. When Action Man was captured he was hung, as a warning to other Action Men. Little plastic soldiers went down in a hail of elastic bands, stones and water bombs. No quarter was requested and none given. Subbuteo players were summarily executed by toy machine-gun firing squad for losing a home league game to the kid next door.

  In summary I was a wicked, nasty little boy, rejoicing in gore and carnage. Normal. One good thing was that I felt no animosity towards my cats, and was not usually cruel to any living creature. One bad thing was that what a ten- or eleven-year-old boy thinks isn't cruel, can actually be quite cruel.

  And so it was that Penny tried out an Action Man parachute from my mum's bedroom window, whilst Cindy was taken three miles from home on a pushbike to see whether she got home before another boy's cat who'd suffered exactly the same fate.

  In my mind such things weren't cruel. Cats land on their feet, don't they? And as double security, Penny was wearing a parachute. As treble security, she was aimed at the fishpond. So all angles had been covered. The fact that the parachute didn't open and she hit the water with quite considerable force was . . . regrettable. She was fine though, and her second jump was far more successful (she missed the fishpond).

  And in Cindy's case, cats can find their way home, can't they?

  I thought she'd be home by teatime. Mistakes had been made however. Difficult to memorise a route from inside a zipped-up Watford Football Club sportsbag. When she hadn't come home

  a few days later, I searched her drop-off zone thoroughly, but with no luck.

  I finally told my mother, who took what I'd done very well, putting it down to youthful exuberance. When I was able to sit on the saddle of my pushbike again and Mum had decided not to apply for a care order, I was sent pedalling off with the sportsbag now full of 'LOST CAT' leaflets and sellotape.

  When the "phone call finally came from a couple who'd managed to corner her and lock her in their shed, she'd been missing for two weeks. She was skinny, dirty, wild-eyed and damn near feral. My mum was so relieved that she forgave me. My sister had far too many issues with me to bother forgiving me for just one, and my dad had never held it against me anyway, taking on a relaxed air about the whole thing and sitting beside windows again. Penny was furious she was back, but not with me.

  So that only left Batman, and she would never, ever forgive me.

  I was never really her friend in the years following that episode. An incident with one of those aforementioned water bombs did little to get me back in her good books. Neither did an almost nasty accident involving a length of string, two eggs, a fishing net and a small explosive device. For her part, she became understandably vicious towards me. I would have to take all sorts of precautions, such as always shutting the lavatory door. I lost count of the times that Cindy rushed in there, whilst I was 'busy' and bit me hard on the foot or ankle. She would then leave as fast as she'd arrived, with me totally immobilised and unable to give chase. Not unless I wanted to pay the carpet cleaning costs anyway.

  I wonder if this toilet terrorism gave her the idea that guerrilla warfare was her ticket to victory. To get in there when my defences (and my trousers) were down, strike, and get the hell out. If she could take her water closet warmongering into the field, she had a chance . . .

  By the time I was eighteen, Barbie was infinitely more interesting than Action Man. I don't mean I played with Barbies or

  hung Barbie as a warning to other Barbies or anything, I just i

  thought they were better to look at, that's all.

  Apart from women, the other great interest in my life was beer which I loved like a brother. Beer made all sorts of weird and wonderful things happen, beer made you charming, hilarious and cool, albeit only to yourself and your equally bladdered drinking buddies.

  Whilst I pursued the new loves of my life, my little arch enemy, Batman, was watching and waiting. Whether she noticed my inability af
ter midnight to open the front gate or avoid ploughing through my father's flowerbeds, I don't know. Neither do I know whether she realised that there was a pattern to my late-night antics and that I was 100% more likely to walk straight through next door's hedge on a Saturday night than on any other night of the week.

  If she did know then it would explain why she chose the early hours of that warm Sunday morning to try to kill me.

  I have only vague memories of her attack. I'd had one hell of a night and staggered up our path at what must have been about 3.30 in the morning. We had an open alleyway down the side of our house, bordered by a brick wall on one side and our neighbour's shed on the other. As I zigzagged from brick to wood, unbeknown to me, Cindy lay in wait on top of the shed.

  Without warning I was attacked from above. A screeching object landed on my head and sunk its claws into my scalp and forehead. I stumbled forward thrashing at thin air, finally colliding with a metal dustbin which for some reason I decided to take with me for a few yards before crashing to the hard concrete pavement, sending empty milk bottles flying into the air. Batman only jumped clear as I hit the ground.

  Head on the floor, I remember watching her legging it up the back lawn. I don't remember anything after that.

  My mother had heard a great commotion outside in the night, but great commotions had become an accepted norm. When she found me at 8 a.m. I was surrounded by broken glass and the contents of the dustbin, which I seemed to be cuddling. My face

  was streaked with blood and my knees and hands were bleeding. We didn't know if the food in which my head was resting had come from the bin or me. My right elbow was so badly bruised I could barely straighten my arm for a week. Whether Cindy had returned to defecate on me or if what was on my back was simply from a binned litter tray we shall never know. Fair enough, I say.

  Crackpot Theories

  'Hats off gentlemen, a genius!' Robert Schumann

  I've always been fascinated by the concept of a fully evolved domestic cat civilisation. It took around sixty million years for a strain of the very basic miacis to evolve into the sophisticated felis lybica, or African wildcat, from which all of our domestic cats descend. So where will cats be in another sixty million years, or another two hundred million years?