by Chris Pascoe
Nowadays she has an obvious affection for him, but this makes his life no easier. Instead of wanting to smack the living daylights out of him, she now wants to carry him and ride him.
The carrying is a bit of a problem. There is no way on earth
she can lift Brum by his midriff but she tries anyway, stooping and grabbing him around the waist, grunting like an over-strained weightlifter. It looks ridiculous. His back arches up as she exerts maximum effort, but all four feet stay firmly on the ground. He just stands purring with a dumb look on his face as Maya tries from every angle. But she has worked out that she can, in fact, get two legs off the ground by lifting both back paws at once, and that this causes him to move forward in a faltering stumble - a scene that looks uncannily like a baby-cat wheelbarrow racing team about to tumble to the ground.
Her riding him is more of a problem, and here at last, Brum is getting a little piece of revenge for a bad year. When Maya rushes him, hooks both legs over his back and grabs at his neck for support, Brum displays a deftness and agility we had no idea he possessed. He moves like a greased eel and simply slides from beneath her. Maya, leaning forward and suddenly with no support, ends up flat on her face. Indeed, now that she is shakily mobile, many of her dealings with Brum leave her on the deck. It is perhaps little wonder that amongst her first words, alongside mummy, daddy, milk, dummy and nana are Bad Cat, delivered with a wagging finger.
Two recent additions to her vocabulary are get and down. These, when spoken with the favourite word cat (she says cat in the same contemptuous way one might say 'scum') make her longest sentence yet and show just how full-time a job it is, for all three of us, to keep Brum off those damn work surfaces.
Interestingly, she doesn't call Brum's live-in-partner-girl-cat Sammy 'Cat'. Sammy is wise enough to always be in a different room from Maya and watches smugly as Brum constantly blunders into his baby troubles. On the rare occasions that Maya catches sight of the rapidly leaving white blur she usually refers to her as Sammy (or words almost like Sammy anyway). We always call Brum by his name and not Cat, but it is only him who's referred to in this condescending manner.
It leads me to wonder if Maya actually sees the swift, agile and graceful Sammy and the lumbering Brum as the same species.
She may well believe them to be two completely different types of animal. That a very young child should immediately spot the differences between Brum and a cat, leaves me repondering my miacis theory. I've made a note to find a good picture of a miacis and put it next to that of a cat and then ask Maya to tell me which one is a Sammy and which one's Cat. I feel sure that Cat won't be a cat.
Despite Maya's frequent belly flops around Brum, it's still him who's coming off worse overall. Whilst happily piling her toys onto an armchair, she started repeating the word 'hat'. She'd been using the word quite a lot in the previous week and knew its meaning, but when I looked at her pile of toys I saw nothing fitting the description 'hat'. I mentioned that there was no hat on the chair and she became quite angry, pointing at her upturned basket and shouting 'HAT, HAT!'
I laughed patronisingly and told her that it wasn't a hat - it was a basket. She then thumped the basket repeatedly screaming 'HAT, HAT, HAT!' At this point a disgruntled tabby face popped up with the basket on its throbbing head.
I apologised to Maya. The basket was indeed a hat. I'd had absolutely no idea that she had buried him alive in thirty toys. She still beats him up, but now beats him up in a more educational way.
Another new skill she's developed is the ability to throw things. This isn't good news for Brum as not only does he now have to worry when Maya is in range, he has to watch out for airborne objects coming without warning and from distance. This has brought out a kind of blitz mentality in him. I don't mean by that that he's started talking in a 'chin up' jolly cockney accent and listening to Vera Lynne on his crystal set, just simply that he watches the skies in a way that he hasn't needed to since the end of the Sparrow War.
It's not all bad however.
A particularly matey thing that they do like to do together is steal Sammy's food. Maya will spend ages stumbling from kitchen to lounge carrying one cat biscuit at a time, always from Sammy's
bowl, and putting it in front of Brum on the sofa. He will dutifully eat each biscuit while Maya whoops with joy, before trundling off to get another. When Brum isn't around, she takes biscuits from Sammy's bowl, again one at a time, and carefully places them in Brum's.
Is this favouritism? Or is she fattening him up for the kill?
I don't know which it is, but he certainly appreciates his waitress service and self-filling food bowl. So, things are generally improving for Brum on the Maya front, and I think that as Maya gets a little older she will show him the respect that comes with understanding and intelligence.
Or she'll just work out how to saddle him.
Cat on a Bit o' String
'Safe us from our friends.' Proverb
Anew neighbour moved in recently. Considering the impact Brum's tenancy has had on our immediate neighbours, it's not altogether surprising the old one went (probably to a property with its own state-of-the-art glass greenhouse and tabby-air-raid-early-warning-system).
With the new people came a new and interesting cat. Interesting simply for being a 'cat on a bit of string' as Farmer Len would say.
Her name is Poppy and she's a bit of an odd one. She lives completely on her nerves and doesn't get out much (more echoes of our life on the farm). When she does go out she gets totally confused and hopelessly lost and has to be tracked down. Our new neighbour has therefore devised a way to let her out without her wandering too far away.
He keeps her in a cat harness, attached to a long piece of string, attached to a heavy lead weight. It may sound a bit restrictive, but maybe it's for the best. She doesn't seem the brightest candle in the church, bless her, and with a tendency to wander aimlessly and a busy main road just through the trees . . .
Brum is fascinated by her. She's probably closer to his IQ than most other cats but I don't think it's that. Neither do I believe he fancies her. His affections (shunned) seem to be for Sammy alone. No, I think it's her bit of string that fascinates him, the simpleton.
His own one-off excursion excepted, I don't think he's ever seen a cat on a bit of string before. I expect he realises that she can't chase him either. Whether or not the bit of string is the reason for his staring I don't know, but he does spend an incredible amount of time watching her. He will sit on top of his twenty-foot wall and gaze down at her for hours.
Mowing the lawn and watching him one afternoon, it got me to thinking: what would happen to Brum if he had to wear one of those things? The whole range of terrible accidents came into my mind as clear as if I was standing there, watching them happen . . .
(Mist clears) . . . Brum is sitting outside our front door. To his left are the steps down to the road, to his right is the twenty-feet drop to next door's drive. But he can't go all the way down the steps as he is attached to a lead weight via a bit of string attached to a harness. His chief persecutor, the baby Maya, appears muttering and stumbling at the top of the steps, her parents close behind her. Before they can stop her she's run towards him shrieking 'Cat!'
In a flash she's picked up his lead weight and hurled it over the wall. Brum and his humans stand frozen in horror as the string unfurls and starts flying over the wall after it. Brum is suddenly wrenched bodily from the ground and hauled backwards over the wall at incredible speed. There's a huge crash as both he and the lead weight go through a car roof, finishing a job he started two years ago.
Or:
He can't get down the steps, but he can reach the rail fence just the other side of the top step, so he heads for that. He goes under it but can get no further so comes back on the other side of the fence post. He sees a bit of string, just like his, going into next door's garden at exactly the point he went in. Was he being followed?
He carefully follows the string,
round and round the fence post until lassoed to it and totally unable to move, almost garrotting himself as he tightens the bonds in his attempts to pull free.
His humans arrive home and he strains sideways, barely able to move his head to see the one called Chris running up the steps, his face obscured by an armful of shopping.
The one called Chris doesn't see the length of string stretching across the steps, held taut by fence and lead weight. Brum feels the string pull harder as the one called Chris trips over it and
crashes to the floor, groceries flying everywhere. The fence is uprooted and the pressure on Brum's throat eases slightly. He just has time to see Chris shouting loudly at him before the lead weight flying straight at the back of Chris's head connects and sends Chris face first back into his shopping. The baby is laughing.
Or it could be a positive thing:
He can't go down the steps, so he jumps onto the wall. His accuracy, as usual, is abysmal. Clearing the wall by over two feet, he plummets towards the ground, when, TWANG, he is abruptly stopped in midair, secured to the top by the lead weight. He has become the first self-propelled feline bungee jumper. His people aren't home for another two hours so he is left dangling idly in the breeze until a helpful neighbour alerts the RSPCA to the terrible thing the people at number twenty are doing to their cat.
On our return home we are arrested and ask that the monkey incident and the unfortunate episode with the wallabies be taken into consideration (the positive bit was that he wasn't killed).
Oh, and the bit about monkey cruelty and wallaby problems -it's a fantasy scenario, remember, although I would like to point out here that I don't fantasise about beating up monkeys . . . often.
The Shadow Cat
'Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.'
Helen Keller
I once saw the shadow of a large cat, but there was no cat. This was particularly worrying at the time, as I was on holiday in the Lake District and reading a book on the folklore and ghosts of the area. This book told of a mythical large, shadowy, black cat whose appearance was an omen of death. Cheery little bit of holiday reading, but then the dark and threatening mountains of the Lake District are a cheery place to go for your summer holidays.
What really annoyed me was that I was going up a mountain the next day, and an ancient portent of doom suddenly appearing to me was not a confidence booster. I survived the mountain, although it was touch and go in the fog up there for a while, but just what was this thing?
As with many mythical creatures and phantoms, it seems to have been conjured by the consumption of a large quantity of alcohol. The fact that I'd had far too many pints of 'Oatmeal Stout' and had read about the creature only two nights previously, I admit could slightly have impaired my judgement. It could also be argued that my reliable witness credibility rating would be a little below zero.
The press would really jump on 'MAN SEES SHADOW OF CAT
AFTER HEAVY DRINKING SESSION - BELIEVES IT TO BE MYTHICAL BEAST FROM BOOK HE'S READING' wouldn't they? Probably not.
What keeps this story alive, however, is that I was with three other people, two of whom were also ratted and also saw it. The other was sober and didn't but that doesn't matter (much). What matters is that the others who did see it hadn't read the book and knew nothing about the creature.
It was the shadow of a cat moving along the grass at the edge of a dark field alongside us to our left. All lighting came from buildings to our right. We saw the shadow for, a good few minutes, the unmistakable outline of a cat. It looked big and looked to be walking with us. Only it definitely wasn't. Try as we might, we could see no cat, just its shadow. And then it was gone.
The reason I mention all this is that I have always liked a good ghost story, and I must admit that I find the ones involving animals (or echoes of giggling children) the spookiest. This subject is particularly relevant as Brum's brother Lester's ghost is believed to have appeared to my niece Emily shortly after his death. Lester was a lovely cat. He belonged to my sister, Sarah, and is the reason that Brum got his name.
All Sarah's cats have been named after places she's visited, hence Paris and Camber. When she named Brum's brother Lester (Leicester) I felt Brum should also be named after a Midlands city, just as a mickey take. So you could say I was taking the piss when I named him Birmingham. He certainly thinks so. Thus the tradition of place names in Brum's family continued, and carries on to this day. Sarah has just named her latest cat Leon, named after Leigh-on-Sea believe it or not.
Sarah was heavily pregnant with Emily when Lester was knocked down by a car outside their home. They buried him in his favourite spot in the garden and gave him a little plaque with the inscription:
Here he lies Amongst the flowers And only counts The sunny hours For him dull days Just don't exist . The brazen-faced old optimist
It was all very sad. He was young when he died and my sister had few photos of him, certainly none on display.
When Emily was about two and a half years old, Sarah mentioned Lester in passing. Emily overheard and said that she really liked Lester. Sarah told her that she hadn't known him. Emily protested that she had, and proceeded to give an uncannily accurate description of his fairly unusual looks.
Sarah's not fond of mysteries and always finds them a little unsettling. She wanted to get to the bottom of this one and probed for more answers. Thinking that Emily must have seen a photo somehow, she pressed for detail as to where exactly he'd been when she saw him.
Emily's answer sent shivers down her spine: 'He came into your tummy when I was in there Mummy.'
Sarah wishes she hadn't asked, but I think it was quite a nice thing for him to have done. I reckon the accident had just that minute happened and he nipped in to say hello before he left. And that's just as likely absolute nonsense.
Emily seemed very receptive to this sort of thing as a child. A week or two later she upset her mum again. Sarah was in the kitchen when Emily called from the living room to tell her that 'the white-haired lady with one eye' was with her again. Sarah's blood froze at the words and she didn't know what to expect as she rushed into the room. Emily was happily pointing to a point just below the ceiling in the corner of the room, claiming that the lady was very nice and often visited her.
If someone was really up there, it was almost certainly my grandmother, Emily's great-grandmother. She lost an eye very near the end of her life and died when Emily was only four months old.
On my sister's last visit to see her in hospital, the doctors refused to let Emily onto the ward as my gran, and many other patients, had chest infections. My gran had dearly wanted to see her little great-granddaughter that day and cried when she realised she wouldn't be allowed to. She never did see Emily again. She died three days later.
My gran was a strong-willed woman, however, and wasn't about to let a minor inconvenience like her own death stop her
seeing her great-granddaughter. It sounds very much as though she got her way in the end. She usually did!
I believe Emily to be a fairly reliable witness but her mother, bless her, is not. If others hadn't heard these two stories from Emily herself, I'd have doubted their authenticity.
When it comes to the paranormal, Sarah is one of those who is wary and mistrustful of her own shadow. Her most incredible claim was that a cat she had many years ago could talk. She claimed that, late at night, he would pine for his old owner and call out his name. He would also ask to be let out. Not just by scratching at the door, you understand. No, he used to walk up to Sarah and actually ask, in perfect English, to be let out.
Allegedly.
Now at this point you would think that my sister was a nutter, wouldn't you? You will even more so in a moment.
Let's take both of these claims and look at them closely.
Firstly, the cat crying out for his ex-owner late at night. Sarah wasn't sure if his ex-owner's name was the name he called. She just assumed it must be.
&nb
sp; And the name he called? Malcolm.
Malcolm. What does that sound like? Malcolm ... ah yes -Meow.
Meow-colm, Meow-colm.
Probably just meowing then, rather than lamenting the long lost Malcolm. The fact he was part Siamese (the cat - not Malcolm) would explain the odd twang to the sound.
And of his flawless grasp of the English language? What words did he use? The exact words were 'Let me out.' Couldn't make it clearer than that. Bright cat.
Again though, I'm detecting a flaw here. Let-me-out, Let-me-out.
Let-meow, let-meow? Hmm.
And did he always go out after asking? Not always, no.
My sister is a lovely girl, but sometimes . . .
I was talking about the Lester/Emily story down the pub one
night, and it prompted a few other ghostly pet stories which I rather liked.
The first is apparently true, but the teller had heard or read about it somewhere and had no idea where. A young lady's cat died and was cremated. She lived alone and had been very sorry to have had to have him put down due to ill health. One night, a few weeks after his death, she sat in her lounge and heard a wailing from outside. It sounded uncannily like her own cat's cry and the noise chilled her to the bone. She looked out of the window but could see nothing. She noted an odd echo-like quality to the wailing, as if it came from a distant, empty room. The following night, she heard the sound again and, although frightened, she walked out into the dark garden, but could see no sign of any cats. Strangely, the sound seemed to be coming from back in the house rather than the garden. She went inside and listened. Again the wailing had an echo, that feeling of an empty room. It seemed to be coming from above. And then, with a chill, she remembered that her cat's ashes were in a tin box in the room directly above her . . . Woooooo!
This story was told to me first hand. Many years ago, my friend's family cat died of old age. She'd been a homely cat in her later years and spent much of her time sleeping in a spare bedroom at the top of the stairs.