RATFACE THE CAT
RATFACE THE CAT
My sister, Penny, lived only a few miles away, through the park, along the main road and across the tracks - but she almost never visited us because we lived in poor neighbourhood and an old house. But today she had no choice, and it was a surprise visit. It was late in May and the blossom was still on the unclipped hawthorn hedge.
“Oh, can I leave my darling Bastet with you just for a short while? She’s so adorable,” her tone implying my answer would automatically be yes, “ and I believe you have a spare room with some old furniture that a cat will not damage.”
“Er?....Stay with us, Penny?” I repeated, trying to gain time to think of reasons to refuse.
“Oh please, I’ve asked you before, James, not to call me Penny. Don’t worry, she will stay in the room and not bother you or your new baby,” sounding as though she was doing me a favour.
“But we already have Billy, is that a problem do you think?”
“No, not from what I see, James. He more or less roams at will in this big rather overgrown garden of yours. He won’t bother Bastet because he will be outside and she’ll be in, you see?” She added in an educational but unmistakably boastful tone, “I’m going on a cruise ...Mediterranean, Roman history and Greek islands, then Egypt, that sort of thing, you know.”
“Er….Penny -lope…what sort of a name is Bastet ? Sounds like she’s a bit of a bastard,” I giggled in a weak attempt at humour. Jen tut-tutted and tried to disguise her laughter.
“James, I couldn’t expect you to know, but it’s only the most famous Egyptian cat-goddess !” I pulled a sheep’s face and shrugged my shoulders in mock seriousness.
The next day Penny brought the animal in the back seat of the car in an expensive-looking brass wire cage. It was a creamy-brown little creature, rather skinny with a narrow face resembling more a rat than a cat.
“This is where she likes to sleep - makes her feel safe, you know.”
My sister tapped her car key on the cage with satisfaction. I turned over in my head how much jailhouse inmates must enjoy feeling safe at night.
“Looks like a Siamese to me,” displaying my limited knowledge of breeds.
“Yes Siamese,” added my wife matter-of-factly.
“Ca. . ca ca...” chimed in our daughter from her mum’s arms.
“No she’s certainly not a Siamese because she’s “pointed”, don’t you know...she’s a Thai...pure bred”. There was something about Penny’s affected accent with its inconsistent Received English vowels which grated on my ears.
It was nonsense such as this vacuous discussion of Siamese/Thai differentiation that allowed my sister to make money from breeding. Penny was certainly not amused by my sarcastic summation of breeding pets for money.
“It’s a bit like like pimping, Jen - hiring out a female for random sex.” Jenny laughed, then hid her smile behind the baby’s head.
Penelope humphed, pretending to not hear, and added, “I would have put her in kennels but the foot-and-mouth is widespread again.”
She insisted on talking sweetly to the cat, like people often talk to small children in falsely high-pitched, overly musical tones. The cat persisted in ignoring her entirely. Penelope produced a silk cushion, a china milk bowl (“Plastic adds an awful taste, you know.”), bags of cat litter, and lists of cat medicines.
“In case she gets her allergies from the dust here.” It was a bigger list than for our baby’s needs.
“Er? How long is your cruise Penny...er Penelope? Few weeks? A month?”
“No, no, no, my dear boy. Such cruises are a false economy. Its only working-class people who buy them to save money, but they learn nothing of the culture. No dear, it’s four months....really get to grips with ancient Egyptian culture, you know.”
She oversaw the installation of the cage, bowl and cushion in the room, after I shoved some piles of papers and boxes to one side. Then she left for Egypt and its history. My mouth still open in amazement and horror, she stepped into the car and was gone. Jen and I looked at each other and then at the cat sitting in the cage. Jen smiled with a twisted face and said, “Well, it’s just another cat, and that sort of thing, don’t you know, James dear boy. . .” and we burst out laughing with the baby calling, “Ca ca ca,” all the way down the stairs.
Trudging up and down stairs with cat litter and milk was a drag, and the Siamese hated the cage so I just let her roam free in the room all day. After a few days I just abandoned the room. Our black cat always ran free all day long in the large overgrown garden and I felt sorry for the Siamese - or rather Thai - watching Billy from her windowsill. So I let her out into the garden too. The black cat ran with a windmill tail always spinning clockwise, seen from behind. Pretty soon we could see them racing after each other, windmilling across the uncut lawn like two small furry buffalo stampeding across the prairie. So she had come to live with me. Never answered to the name ‘Bastet’. I wasn’t gonna stand in earshot of the neighbours shouting what sounded like “Bastard ! Bastard!” for ten minutes.
Well of course cats don’t respond much to their names anyway. She had a rather small, narrow head and, as I said, from some angles looked like a big rat. Despite my wife’s tut-tutting and pretended disapproval, I always called the animal ‘Ratface’ instead of the sister’s pretentious choice of Bastet. The Siamese wore a leather collar with a shiny metal disc full of information, which got her head caught one day in the brambles and the hawthorn hedge. I released it and then removed the collar and tossed it into the cat-room Now she couldn’t even prove her name was anything but Ratface.
She disliked Billy.....who of course was always annoyed because his territory had been invaded by another cat. The Siamese spent a good deal of time fighting with him - but not all the time, because she also managed to get pregnant. Two months later, three kittens, one cream-brown and two black, were born in the hollow of our sofa with the broken spring. I felt privileged that she chose a spot right next to me for safety from the tomcat. Later she moved them up to the room on the rug there. The kittens were given away to neighbours about six weeks later.
The two cats were out all day, but came in at nights. In those days I used to play the violin for relaxation in the evening. The two cats hated me playing ...as did Jen. They all three left the room in a hurry whenever I picked it up out of its machine-gun case and tuned it up.
“I’ll just pop in the kitchen for a minute to check the soup, Jim,” accompanied her rising from the chair.
Yet, if I left the case open with the instrument exposed and went to another room, Ratface would often be heard testing the strings with a claw...plink plonk. As soon as I returned she would scatter out of sight. It reminded me of crime movies where the assault-victim, with a shudder, thumbs the blade on a murder knife when it’s been placed in the police evidence box at the trial.
When we had guests for dinner Jen liked to provide them something different, something spicy. She would often buy a whole big kolbasa sausage from the deli. She never ever bought salami - too spicy - but this Russian quasi-salami had rather less fat. One day Ratface stole the whole big kolbasa out of the large cupboard near the floor. She ran a safe distance into the garden, dragging it, and then proceeded to eat chunks of it just beyond range of water arcs from my garden hose, and when she judged my aim with old shoes to be erratic enough. She would sit chewing kolbasa, carefully watching and calculating the trajectory of each dilapidated shoe coming through the sky.
A lock appeared on the cupboard door next day. With our ramped-up security in the kitchen, and denied regular supplies of kolbasa (now stored in the fridge), she turned to chicken. Two days later she stole a whole frozen chicken which was thawing in the sink. We found a tell-tale trail of water on floor - and the double teethmarks on the abandoned carcass showed she had literally bitten off more than she could chew. It had proved just too big to get into her narrow-headed rat mouth.
There was never any real food peace between us. To avoid shoe-Armageddon, we had to lock up all the food and sometimes her too at night. Billy wandered the house, but Ratface was shut in the cat-room. We reached a state of armed truce or simply a prolonged pause in hostilities, like after Panmunjom in Korea. I decided I would always speak to her sharply, and when I barked, “Hey, Ratface” she learned to look up quickly and warily, waiting for the shoes. However, even though she often angered me, she was a natural comic.
Somewhere in her past she had become a drug addict. She chewed old cigarettes. Penelope was always a heavy smoker and the cat had developed a taste for butt-ends and chewed them happily, like a cowboy with his cheek-wad. We could provide no cigarettes - no smoking around baby - so the cat developed withdrawal symptoms from tobacco. Sometimes she would howl at length without any obvious reason. But if she found the occasional butt-end in the undergrowth of the garden and could chew contentedly all evening, there would be no howling.
In many ways she was like a spoiled little child, obviously jealous of the baby. If the baby were not in the stroller, Ratface could often be found be sleeping there. Otherwise, if she could get hold of the baby’s dummy she would take it away into a corner and and suck constantly. If barked at, or chased, or shoed, she would run with it in her mouth out of shoe range. And like all spoiled children she was an experienced manipulator. When we had guests for dinner in the evening she would sneak around the feet under the table, eating dropped pieces of black bread so that the guests would take pity on her and drop her slices of kolbasa. She rubbed against all legs in turn to warm up the audience, and every soft-hearted guest would murmur in sing-song, “Oh, poor little Siamese. . . . she loves a bite of sausage. . . so cute. . .” This mantra accompanied her devouring a dozen slices of kolbasa.
She’d learned at my sister’s house to interpret human activities. If Jen was cooking and tapped shells of eggs on the table, Ratface heard it as a ”signal” to come downstairs and eat liquid eggs from the shells. If she got no egg satisfaction that way she also knew how to open a fridge door with her claws, gaining access to eggs - and also kolbasa or chicken on a good day of course. We had to put a chair against the fridge door.
The Saturday came in late September when we delivered Bastet to my sister’s house. We heard more-than-sufficient detail about Greek and Egyptian culture, and how splendid were the pianoforte (with affected Italiano pronunciation) recitals in Milano (in inconsistent Italiano). She made us stay to one of her posh brunches, constantly referring to the cat as ‘Bastet’ and it ignoring her as always. Penny left the room to get more cake. Just for a laugh, I called sharply in a low voice “hey, Ratface” and the cat came to attention immediately, looking around guilty-like to check if she’d dropped a half-eaten cigarette or the baby’s dummy. Neither Bastet nor we made any reference to the kittens. It was our little secret.
As we drove home with the baby calling ”cat cat “ from her safety seat, we sort of missed Ratface a little. She had been an amusing companion we could read like a book. At home, the cat-room instantly reverted to being just a lifeless junk room.
On Monday Penny phoned, “Oh James, my dear adorable Bastet has gone completely missing. I don’t know where to look. It’s so unlike her to leave her expensive brass cage.”
She was in tears and and I commiserated. But I couldn’t help feeling that Ratface was probably happy searching in the bins outside the deli for kolbasa, or getting high on butt-ends. The next day I was awakened from my afternoon nap by a scratching at the back door. It was the Siamese - the Thai. I opened the door, and she came straight in, smelling of tobacco. Jen gave her some kolbasa and she settled down to sleep immediately in the hollow of our sofa. She was tired and had obviously been on the run for some days. She had missed us too, and had come looking.
Penny’s adoration of ‘Bastet’ wilted in a few days. She phoned a week later, “ Oh James, I just wanted to say that I was so miserable about losing Bastet, I just had to go out and get a replacement Thai. Of course the business has to go on, you know.”
.....................................................2 277 words.................................
Comments