by Chris Pascoe
Months after her death my friend was watching television when she suddenly strolled in from the garden, glanced at him and wandered up the stairs, disappearing through the open doorway of the spare room.
He sat frozen for a few moments. The sight of her passing through the lounge had been so commonplace until recently, that he hadn't realised at first he was looking at a ghost. He had only an uneasy sense that something was very wrong. This feeling gave way to shock as realisation hit him RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET the cat that had just climbed the stairs had been dead for some time. He followed slowly up the stairs, his heart beating like a drum, and felt an extreme cold as he approached the spare room.
Bracing himself, he looked into the dimly lit room. It was
completely empty. There was, however, an indentation in the duvet, exactly where she used to sleep.
He told his mother. It turned out she'd seen virtually the same thing a few days earlier, but hadn't wanted to say anything in case it disturbed anyone.
Nothing was seen of her for over a year. The family assumed that she was finally at peace, until they had some friends to stay and put them up in the spare room.
When asked the next morning how they'd slept, they said very well but that the cat had disturbed them in the night getting settled beside their feet. They knew nothing of the incidents a year before and assumed they were talking about a current family cat (there wasn't one!).
Everybody was bursting to tell a story by now, and one chap spoke of his Uncle Harry's dog. She died on a winter's day and was buried in the back garden. Late that night, Uncle Harry sat bolt upright in bed. He'd heard barking out in the garden.
Theirs was a very enclosed garden and nobody else nearby had a dog, and in any case, that bark had sounded very familiar. He looked out of the window but could see nothing, only a fresh blanket of snow on the grass. He assumed the sound must have carried from elsewhere and went back to sleep.
He awoke again at around three in the morning. He heard panting and felt hot breath on his face. He sprung out of bed in panic, but there was nothing there. Restless and uneasy, he went downstairs to make a drink. His kitchen light eerily illuminated the white-covered garden outside the window, and he noticed an animal's footprints in the snow. He turned on the outdoor light and. went to investigate.
The footprints were definitely those of a dog. They led from the fresh grave, now covered is snow, directly to the back door. There were no footprints leading away RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET they just stopped right there, as if the dog had walked clean through the locked door.
In the morning his own footprints were still there, from the door to the grave and back again, but there was no sign of the dog's prints. His wife believes that he'd been sleepwalking but
he claims he was wide awake and remembers it all as clear as a bell.
I've met the uncle featured in this story many times and whilst knowing him to be honest and true, my only reservation is that the alcohol/supernatural manifestation link would have to be strongly considered here.
Skipping back to my mythical Lakeland cat, we have a bit of a legend here in the Chiltern Hills where we live. A black, panther-like cat is said to stalk these hills and is renowned for its sudden appearances and disappearances.
Way back in April 1983, after sightings near the village of Stokenchurch in Bucks, it was taken so seriously that the local police used helicopters, marksmen and search-parties in an attempt to track it down. The phantom nature of its sudden vanishings has also been the subject of paranormal investigations.
Over the years the sightings have dwindled, but there was almost certainly something out there back then. Sheep were savaged and killed (as if sheep didn't already have enough to worry about around here) and large cat-like prints were found. Casts were made of the prints but a species was never established.
Interestingly, I don't know of any sightings since Peanuts moved into its immediate vicinity. I must ask his owners if they ever found a peculiarly large dismembered paw and a long black tail in the office before I knew them. That would explain a lot, especially if the phantom hadn't had time to hide behind a revolving chair.
Cats have long been associated with the supernatural of course, with witchcraft and superstitions and the like. They have managed to give themselves, or we've given them, quite a sinister reputation over the years.
Try as I might I can't look at Brum and think 'sinister'. It just doesn't fit. Would he be more sinister if he came back as a ghost? I wonder . . .
... A dark night. We are sitting at home in the lounge. The wind is blowing and our security light goes on outside. It always used to go on when Brum was still around and jumped onto the
wall RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET before falling ten feet over the other side RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET God rest his soul. We hear a resounding crash. What was that? We go out and take a look. Nothing.
A little later, the security light comes on again, there's another great crash. Nothing's out there. We're perplexed.
The following evening Maya is chattering to herself in the corner. She suddenly swipes at thin air with her new wooden hammer. We hear a thump as if something has fallen heavily to the floor beside her. Very odd. Maya stands and starts viciously kicking at an empty space on the carpet. We hear another sound RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET like something staggering towards the door. Sammy swipes angrily at nothing in the corridor, must have been a fly or something. We hear the cat-flap bang open and shut. The security light comes on and there's an almighty crash. No, I don't think he'd be very frightening really.
Neither do I think he'd come and haunt us anyway. I think he'd have had enough by then, could do with the rest. I can't see Sammy rising from the grave either. She rarely rises from the bed. When that cat sleeps, she really sleeps. I'm not even sure she isn't dead already.
So, I doubt we'll be bothered particularly by either of them from the other side but I can, however, appreciate that Sammy is perfectly sinister enough in life. She has a staring, scowling look about her that helps me understand why people once feared these creatures, and why Brum still does.
Do cats see ghosts? They look as if they do. In fact Brum's whole style is based on someone who's just seen a ghost. Cats do seem to see things we don't though. What about the way cats stare at nothing, suddenly. We all stare at nothing now and then, but why would anybody find nothing so interesting that they should feel the need to stare at it suddenly?
Unless, it's not nothing.
My own opinion is that they don't see ghosts. I don't think they're staring at anything in a startled way, they're listening in a startled way. They're only staring because they're concentrating on a noise they heard and we couldn't.
They may well sense a spirit's presence, but that's a different matter. Animals are often credited with a sixth sense and this may well be true, but Brum hasn't got the hang of the senses he has. I don't think he'd have space for another one.
If you take anything at all from this chapter, it should be this:
If, one dark night as you're walking home alone through the
woods, you see the disembodied black shadow of a huge cat
in the moonlight, keeping pace with your every step, stalking
you . . . you're probably pissed.
The Hall of Fame
'Greatness knows itself.' Shakespeare
Our washing/utility room is decorated in the style of a very small pub. We have (un) skilfully masked tumble dryers and the like to blend in to the country pub image we're trying to achieve. We've got a Sweaty Betty's Old Ale hand pump (a discontinued black, strong, syrupy beer that should have carried a government health warning. You were once limited to three pints of it at our local, which was a totally pointless rule as anybody who'd downed three pints of the stuff could no more make it to the bar for a fourth than they could get into the ambulance on their own), a pub sign, foreign currency all over the walls (obligatory), beer mats, the works.
It's a tiny pub that looks uncannily like a utilit
y room, but it's pretty cosy and fits nicely with my beer-worshipping ideals.
At one end of this 'pub' we have a rogues' gallery of cats, consisting of small framed photos of various cats who, for one reason or other have earned the right to be there.
Brum is up there of course, caught mid-yawn so he appears to be laughing raucously at the camera. Brum's hard-as-nails live-in-partner-girl-cat Sammy is obviously there too. But others are there for reasons other than the extremely localised fame they've achieved simply through living with us.
Bagpuss, for instance, has his picture on the wall. Bagpuss is Sammy's mentor. Sammy possibly sleeps longer than even Bagpuss, but they definitely have one thing in common. When Sammy wakes up, all her friends wake up. She achieves this similarity by thundering up and down our wooden floored hall in the middle of the night like a herd of charging rhinos. She wakes Maya and Maya lets us know she's awake. We seldom then sit discussing objects that Maya has found and establishing what they might be,
however, and if Charlie Mouse were to turn up and start singing songs about it all, then Sammy would tear him to pieces and eat him without hesitation (if she got to him before I did).
A not so well known picture in the Hall of Fame is a magazine cutting of a cat who made his name in the courier industry. Having said that, the Hall of Infamy or the Chamber of Horrors would be a better home for any image of this lad.
His moment came while I was in the business and successfully guiding our own courier company to near disaster. The story was quite a famous one. He was the cat who brought down an entire national courier network.
The network was a hundred-company franchise, overseen by one man in Manchester who acted as the 'hub'. The member companies all pumped their information to a modem he kept in his attic. The information was then made available for all other members of the franchise to take the work relating to their own area. This was before the days of easy internet access and quite a brilliant and innovative system.
The man in Manchester was making a fortune. He didn't even have to do anything, except correct the odd glitch in the system, glitches that were usually minor and very, very rare. He was eventually so sure of the smooth running of his system that he took a two-week holiday abroad, leaving his modem safely running in the attic and his cat being fed by a neighbour. Unfortunately the cat got into the attic which had been left a little too easily accessible, stood on a button and . . . switched off the modem.
One hundred courier companies stared at blank screens.
No one could get hold of the man in Manchester. He believed himself to be contactable on a phone in his holiday home, but unbeknown to him, its ringer was switched off.
The system remained down for twelve days, by which time half of the franchisees had gone bankrupt and the other half had joined other systems.
The man in Manchester was ruined, and so were about fifty courier companies all baying for blood and taking legal action.
What a quality cat that must have been. This happened about
ten years ago and I wonder if he's still around today. One suspects that he would have been lucky to have still been around nine years ago. How could you deal with a cat that had lost you your fortune and put you in court?
'Here Tiddles, biscuits, biscuits, bastard, bastard, BASTARD!'
The Hall of Fame wouldn't be complete without a few family photos. Penny and Batman are commemorated here (Batman could also so easily have been in the Chamber of Horrors, her screeching wax effigy depicted leaping at a helpless drunk in a dimly lit alleyway) as are Brum's parents Paris and Camber - if you cross your eyes when you look at them and merge the two cats into one, you actually get a very good likeness of the lad himself. Another little insight into the strangeness of my ways there, hanging around in pretend pubs pulling cross-eyed faces at pictures of deceased cats.
An old cat of Lorraine's, Cat-Cat, has a slot waiting for her, when Lorraine can find a picture. I'm told in warmth of nature, she was a lot like Brum, but thankfully for her, the similarity ended there. Brum's brother Lester will also have a place, and my sister is getting us a photo of him. I would hope Lester himself doesn't turn up with it. One weird cat is enough for any household, without his invisible brother moving in.
I'd also have put up a picture of my favourite fictional cat of all time, from the Tom Holt comic fantasy novel Flying Dutch, but this would mean cutting up the book cover, so I won't. This cat was not only harder than Peanuts, Sammy and a couple of tigers rolled into one, he was hundreds of years old, smelt to high heaven and was immortal, doomed to sail the seas for eternity with the rest of the crew of the Flying Dutchman. He was probably the vilest cat in any book I've ever read, but also the funniest. Last but not least of those deserving a place, are a couple of extraordinary world-record-breaking felines.
Brum may have an incredible tenacity for hanging on to his precarious existence, but I somehow doubt he'll live to break the world age record currently held by a tabby named Ma, who lived to the age of 35, or if you use the old seven years cat/human year
conversion - 245! Even then, after 245 years, she wasn't intending
to go anywhere. She was finally put to sleep.
It must've been the only way of stopping her. •
Finally, one space will forever stay empty in honour of a cat
imaginatively named 'Pussycat' who earned his own place in the
Guinness Book of Records when, in 1965, surpassing all others
in the great fall stakes, he 'slipped and fell 120 feet from the
balcony of an eleventh floor flat, and survived'.
'Slipped and fell 120 feet.' Style personified. There's one even
Brum could have learnt a thing or two from.
Pet Passports
'To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.' Sir James Jeans
Brum hasn't applied for one of those Pet Passports as yet. Whether that's because he's just never fancied going abroad for his holidays, or because he's a cat and therefore has no awareness of passports, holidays, abroad or even of applications, I don't know.
He's only ever had UK holidays and all were enforced. One was in a cattery for a long weekend. It was a luxury cattery, with spacious accommodation, en-suite litter room, three-course meals and live cabaret.
The cabaret consisted of a series of hamster runs set up in front of the cats' pens so that they had something to look at. However pleasant you try to make it all, it was still three days in a wire cage being tortured by small furry creatures agonisingly out of reach.
When we arrived to collect him, he saw us and began screaming at us, possibly abusively, as we entered the garden. He was absolutely distraught. The warden told us he had been thoroughly miserable the whole time. We felt as guilty as hell. He complained all the way home and, I think as an act of protest, was sick on the bed the moment we got in.
The cattery was good, and most of the cats looked thoroughly content, but it just wasn't for him. It was decided to never put him through anything like that again, and he has stayed at my parents' for his (our) holidays ever since.
The thought of him taking an imaginary package tour is quite amusing, however. I wonder which destinations would be right for him.
One of my favourites has always been Greece, but I'm not sure he'd like it there one bit. For a start the accommodation. There
isn't any. While some people own cats in Greece, the majority of them live rough and scavenge for their food around bins and restaurants (the cats, not the Greeks).
They are generally a skinny and mangy looking lot, and again it's the cats I'm referring to. I think he'd either starve to death or be murdered by the mean looking locals. Local cats of course RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET bloody hell, I just can't seem to talk about, or to, Greeks for five seconds without accidentally insulting them or their families. What is it with me? I've never seemed to get on too well with them as it is, without suggesting, in print, that they're a nation of dustbin raiding cat murderers.
; I don't know why I don't get on with them, they just don't seem to like me. Something in my manner upsets Greeks. Nowhere else in Europe do I have this problem, just in Greece. If I'd been a diplomat during the Classical Era and sent to negotiate peace and trade with Athens, I'd have immediately outraged my welcoming hosts and instigated a trade embargo followed by all-out war. So, to the people of Greece: sorry, okay, for whatever it is I do. But I'm sure you will agree that many of you do have dodgy moustaches, and that's not nice is it? And Retsina should only be used to store gherkins in. That's all.
Greece is off the list then. No accommodation, little chance of food (especially now).
How about America? Nice and civilised. They love cats out there. I even know people in Texas who would have him over to stay for a few weeks (a sign of madness). But would Brum survive a few weeks in Texas?
The people would be good to him. He'd have plenty of food. I know from bitter-sweet experience that a Texas 'starter' is enough to feed an average family of four for a week.
It's the wildlife in Texas that would finish him. Everything in Texas wants to 'get' you. The reptiles, insects, even the plants. They have a particularly nasty stinging insect called the fire ant, which originally came from Mexico. It was once demonstrated to me just how fast these things are. My friend poked a long stick into a fire ant mound and let go almost immediately.
The ants were at the top of the stick, in huge numbers, before it hit the ground.
They are excessively aggressive and were attempting to attack. They clamp onto their victim with their jaws and then sting them repeatedly, and the sting is nasty. I was stung by one once and the effect was very much like having a naked flame held millimetres below your skin for far too long. Having a number of fire ants sting you at once almost certainly explains the origins of Hillbilly dancing.
Their mounds are now on most Texan lawns, and they are extremely dangerous to cats and dogs. From the example of the stick demonstration, I can clearly imagine how horrific it would be for a pet to be a little too curious around a mound, and I just know Brum would be stretching out on one within seconds. But, if the old saying 'no sense, no feeling' were true, he'd probably stay on it all day. I can easily visualise him sitting there, hind leg continually scratching at his ears, head in the air, wondering why he's feeling a little itchy.