You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough Read online

  YOU CAN TAKE THE CAT OUT OF SLOUGH

  Chris Pascoe

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Chris Pascoe

  A Cat Called Birmingham

  Copyright © 2006 by Chris Pascoe

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK Company

  The right of Chris Pascoe to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 444 72327 4

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 89865 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Lorraine and Maya

  and

  to my mother, who hardly features in this book because she does very little that could be deemed ‘totally stupid’. And to Dad, who does feature in this book.

  Contents

  Introduction – the First Day

  Test Your Cat’s IQ

  The Eagle Has Landed

  Auto-Brumism

  A Break with Brum

  Sammy’s Suicidal Shenanigans

  View from a Kite

  Mrs Chippy & Co.

  The Bovine Tiger

  Dave’s Diary

  More Cats Like Birmingham

  Beggar, Billy, Barmy Spy

  The Mousetrap

  Marinating Rites

  The Most Peculiar Case of the Seaside Village and Its Missing Cats

  Skater Frog

  The Missing Link

  Gazebo!

  Weird Pets

  The Carpet-fitters

  Death Threats

  Epilogue

  Introduction – the First Day

  ‘Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.’

  Elbert Hubbard

  Last summer, I decided to do something monumentally stupid.

  Which isn’t especially strange in itself – I do something fairly idiotic most summers, just rarely with solid intent.

  As stupid ideas go, this was a big one. I decided to stay at home with my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maya and disaster-prone tabby Birmingham, Brum for short. And also with Brum’s rather vicious live-in partner, girl-cat Sammy, whom I intended mainly not to wake. Let biting cats lie.

  Staying at home wasn’t laziness on my part. It was all in the loose name of book research, although I have to admit that I thought that the plan, surprisingly endorsed by my wife Lorraine (with the strong proviso that I finally erect the gazebo I’d left rotting in the garage for three summers), was a dream ticket to half a year down Easy Street. No more between-writing projects and boring supplementary fill-in jobs for me. No more mind-numbing hours in that telephone call centre.

  Just feet-up-at-home time, taking notes and enjoying quality time with Brum and Maya. Why I believed time with Brum would, with all the years of contrary evidence, be quality I’m not at all sure. I’m equally uncertain why I believed that looking after a toddler full time would be an ‘absolute doddle’. I know Maya’s day-nursery carers nicknamed her ‘Duracell’ and suggested she was a little over-boisterous, but why didn’t I take notice of the haunted look in their eyes when they told me those things?

  And, of course, there was a third reason for staying at home. It wasn’t just research and skiving. There was a ‘time running out’ factor.

  I wanted to spend a summer with my mad-toddler daughter and catastrophic cat while I still could – an early summer in Maya’s life, a late one in Brum’s and, as I was soon to discover, a ridiculously embarrassing one in mine.

  Because Maya won’t be a toddler for very long, and I suppose that now Brum’s coming up to fourteen years old, these would have to be classed as his winter years. I actually believe that spring, summer and autumn were all over in the first six months and the rest has been one long nuclear winter, but there you go. In cat years, he’s now a recognised OAF.∗ The usual equation is one human year to seven cat years, which will make Brum ninety-eight this birthday. A few months after that, totally predictably on April Fool’s Day, he will be one hundred years old.

  How on earth has he managed to run up an innings like that? His survival strategy has been simple, straightforward and stupid. From the word go, he took on the persona of a rum-soaked blindfolded man and set off on a hundred-year stroll through a minefield. On he stumbled, crashing from one blast to the next, tabby fur flying here, whiskers and ear-tips blown sky high there, but it’s worked – he’s still with us.

  And somehow he’s managed to retain the scruffy look and exuberantly dangerous energy of a kitten. Sure, he’s showing the odd signs of old age – he will suddenly sigh aloud for no apparent reason, for instance (not sure if this isn’t wind). I also think he may be having ‘senior moments’ (but these differ so marginally from his usual moments that I can’t be certain). He even falls asleep in mid-conversation (Brum, you’re standing on my hand. Brum? Brum?) to awake confused and spluttering. But that’s about it. In every other aspect, he’s just as he was when he was naught but a youngster – perilously idiotic.

  Thinking about it, you could actually have been describing Lorraine’s seventy-something father back there, you really could . . . apart from the ‘exuberantly dangerous kitten’ bit. And Walt’s not one for chasing mice either. Well, not so much since the hip replacement, anyway.

  There is one other giveaway to Brum’s advancing years, and that’s his absolute hatred of new technology. Maya and the microchip have brought an absolute deluge of automated, singing, dancing, interactive toys into his life.

  Brum can’t move a paw without coming face to face with plastic babies explaining that they want a dummy and calling him Mummy, barking metal dogs that run headlong at him, inanimate-looking objects that suddenly ask him what letter ‘cat’ begins with, turtles in shades that call him dude and implore him to ‘climb on and ride surf’ and, worst of all, even the floor itself holds surprises, especially in the form of a keyboard mat.

  The keyboard mat is one of Maya’s favourite toys. A ten-by-six sheet of plastic, it has piano keys down the middle and pictures of all manner of musical instruments around the sides. Each piano key plays a note when stepped upon and each musical instrument provides a short, loud tune.

  When Brum first blundered on to this modern marvel, we were treated to the sight of a startled cat jumping two feet in the air to the beat of a bass drum, only to land to a trumpet fanfare and take off again, before racing up and down, round and round, without ever having the sense to leave the mat, and consequently thrashing out a fairly accurate piano rendition of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’, complete with spiky-eared pogo dancing.

  It’s impossible to judge how long Brum has left in him. I’ve never once, during his entire life, given him more than a couple of weeks. Maximum. And I got a taster of life without Brum early this year when he decided to get suddenly, and very seriously, ill.

  One moment he seemed perfectly OK, though vomiting a little more enthusiastically than usual, the next he got sick in remarkably dramatic style. No half-measures with this lad – he simply walked into the room, eyes blazing a shockin
g yellow, looked at us in what appeared to be total surprise and fell over sideways. He then lay on the floor making Tommy Cooper magic act guffaws and grunts, and seemed to pass out. Having total confidence in Brum’s uncanny ability to survive absolutely anything and everything, I fully expected him to get up, bow and leave the room. He didn’t. It suddenly occurred to me that it was round about time he dropped dead.

  Which, it so happens, he’d almost done. He was rushed to the vet’s where Commissioner Herbert∗ grudgingly admitted there might still be a chance for him. But, he advised, the cost would be high and his survival chances slim. Brum had some terrible liver complaint, he was jaundiced and getting weaker by the hour. But this was our Brum. You can’t write him off over a thing like money, even if the final cost was near on seven hundred pounds (tabby bastard).

  He spent three days on a drip, being pumped with all sorts of drugs and antibiotics, and at no time during the first two days did I think I’d be seeing him again. It suddenly hit me what life would be like without him. When I’d stopped grinning, I thought of the downside.

  I realised that when Brum goes, there will be a void in my life that no other cat could possibly fill, because he isn’t just a cat, or even just a clumsy, half-evolved creature vaguely resembling a cat. He’s a good friend. Brum has been with me for almost a decade and a half. He’s seen and survived every phase of my adult life – from sad singleton, through various doomed relationships and total humiliation during a year’s stay on a farm, to my lifesaving move into a house containing Lorraine and the snarling Sammy. Just when he thought things were finally settling down, along came the recklessly unpredictable Maya.

  I began thinking maudlin thoughts, glancing at his food bowl and wishing I’d given him more of his prized tinned tuna and processed ham, staring at our living-room curtains and imagining never again seeing his pointy-eared silhouette fall off the outside wall.

  But, of course, the little git came back, didn’t he. Grinning like a lunatic, purring and demanding food, totally blasé about the fact he’d just cost us a small fortune.

  Which got me to thinking, I’ve hardly had an easy ride with him, have I?

  A quick rundown of Brum’s manifold history of disasters – regular fur fires averaging one case of self-induced inferno every two years, the riding and damaging of moving cars (as Maya’s talking turtle would say, ‘You have serious thrill issues, dude’), destruction of neighbourhood property while being beaten up by small birds, serial room wreckage and much, much more – suggests just how bad a ride it’s been. And come to mention it – my life on the farm was only a total humiliation because he made it so. I didn’t sit in a puddle of diluted cow’s muck on a winter morning because it seemed like a splendid idea (that’s a spring activity). No, it was because he sent me sprawling and he put me there – just as he’s put me in most of the shit I’ve ever been in!

  And age hasn’t diminished Brum’s scope for catastrophe either, as you’ll discover in the pages of this book. If anything, I think he’s trying to up the tempo.

  No, we’re definitely as bad as each other, he and I. But I have to admit that Brum’s near-death episode, as much as anything else, pushed me into my monumentally thick decision to take Maya out of nursery and pack in the day job.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, things didn’t start well.

  I awoke at 6.30 a.m. on that first day in late spring to the sound of Lorraine’s alarm clock. I smiled a happy smile, knowing that its harsh beeping no longer applied to me. Then the gentle, hundred-decibel cries of ‘MUMMY, DADDY, IS IT MORNING YET?’ drowned out the alarm clock. That noise applied to me.

  The moment Lorraine’s car pulled out of the drive, I hit a major stumbling block. I had absolutely no idea what to do with Maya. It was a toddler, it was awake, and it was looking at me.

  And then she was off: 0–60 in two seconds. Fifty events got under way instantaneously. Being male and therefore physically incapable of multi-tasking, I was immediately out of my depth. She’s a concentration time bomb, you see. She has to be doing something new within five minutes of starting something new or she blows. Not wanting to blow the house up (and after a morning of Maya it looked very much as though the house had suffered a seriously explosive moment), and also noting that Brum wasn’t entirely happy with our lingering presence, I decided to take her to the playground, where she could destroy some council property rather than mine.

  I’ve always thought that playgrounds are great. It’s somewhere Maya can get really excited and burn off some of that crazed energy of hers, and I can stare blankly into the middle distance. But the playground turned out to be the very reason things got off to a seriously bad start. First Maya ran off and I had to chase her all over the place, always three feet behind, always panting like an over-excited spaniel. Then she hurtled up a plank on to a slide-cum-assault-course, going over rather than around the toddlers already on it.

  A particularly stern-looking couple whose offspring had just been squashed gave me a ‘control your child’ look, and I called out to Maya to do various things alien to her (wait your turn, be nice, don’t jump on people’s legs).

  After about five minutes of constantly coaching Maya in etiquette, I seemed to gain the approval and respect of the stern-faced couple. But then, as Maya reached the top for the umpteenth time, she turned left and not right. Right was a slide, left appeared to be a sheer drop to the floor, and I suddenly realised that a vital couple of planks were missing. She was almost certainly about to drop seven feet to the ground. I lurched forward, shouting words such as BLAHHH and GNNNNERRR by way of explanation as I trampled over Stern Woman’s feet and sent Stern Man sprawling backwards into a litter bin. They were impressed, I could tell.

  Maya, bless her, merely glanced over the edge before I could get anywhere near her, turned and slid serenely down the slide, rendering my actions utterly incomprehensible. The stern-faced couple now looked a whole lot sterner and more than a little surprised. I was about to explain and apologise but Maya was now running off at Mach 1 and I had to go with her. You do apparently. As I legged it into the distance, I think I left them in no doubt as to where Maya gets her ways.

  It wasn’t a great outing for me. No more than twenty minutes later, already embarrassed enough for one day, a case of mistaken identity should have seen police officers rushing to the scene and making an instant arrest on the grounds of harassment. Luckily, the lady I harassed didn’t send for them. As usual, I was the architect of my own downfall.

  Shortly after Maya and I left the playground and zigzagged through mud puddles to the nearby banks of the River Thames armed with bread to throw at ducks’ heads, I spotted an old friend of mine named Dulcie.

  Dulcie works in a lingerie store. We go back a long way, decades in fact, and have a mocking, knockabout sort of relationship. So, assuming she was taking the scenic route to work and aiming a little risqué innuendo at her profession, I grinned broadly and called, ‘ALRIGHT THERE? OFF TO SHIFT SOME PANTS, ARE YOU?’

  Only it wasn’t Dulcie. With hindsight, I should perhaps have waited until the woman got a little closer and had been one hundred per cent positively identified before making a remark so totally borderline. ‘Off to shift some pants’ is not your average way of greeting a total stranger in the park. She stopped sharply, glared at me and assertively dared me to repeat my remark. I stammered an uncomfortable apology, trying to explain what I’d meant and making things much worse with my mumbled comments about lingerie. I finally shut up, frowned and pushed Maya in front of me to show that I was a family sort of bloke and couldn’t possibly have meant anything dodgy. And also to absorb any body blows.

  The woman glared once more for good measure, looked pityingly at Maya and marched off down the footpath. I let out an audible ‘phew’ and she stopped dead in her tracks. I made absolutely sure I didn’t breathe again until she was out of earshot.

  Once again, I was left pondering the total unfairness of life. How dare Dulcie be the spitting imag
e of this woman. Dulcie was in big trouble next time I saw her. Evil little clone.

  All in all, then, quite a day to set the ball rolling. Harassment and assault. Not bad. The only really remarkable thing about the day was that Brum didn’t catch fire. But there were still four or five months to go.

  If I learnt nothing from my first ever day in full-time toddler-minding, and I certainly did learn nothing, I at least acquired an instant respect for all those looking after children everywhere, including Brum, who’s still a babysitter at heart, running to Maya’s side whenever she cries, despite the obvious dangers.

  Childcare and tabby-watching proved ridiculously exhausting from day one, and life is just so much simpler and safer in a nice, safe office environment.

  But, in the name of research, I’d made my decision. No safety for me. The foreseeable future lay with Brum and Maya, so safety wouldn’t come into it.

  I never had any doubt that the scope for disaster with all three of us at home was limitless. I just needed to keep taking those notes because without the disasters there’s no material. So, convinced I had the right team in place, I sat back and waited with high expectations and, predictably, everything went completely wrong.

  Perfect.

  Test Your Cat’s IQ

  ‘The man is a wit and a half, but refuses to employ more than a third of it. The maths speaks for itself.’

  Stephen Pusey

  Ioften trawl the Internet for cat-related sites. I am not telling you this simply to reaffirm my ‘saddo’ status, but to bring to light a current trend for testing your cat’s intelligence levels. There are now an absolute deluge of ‘Cat IQ Tests’ available on the Web, and so I thought I’d try a few on Brum. I suppose I could have guessed that the results would be less than encouraging, but the masochist in me insisted I give him a chance. To say I was ‘asking for it’ is an understatement.