A Cat Called Birmingham Read online

  I was able to return calmly to the table, my wife Lorraine still busily explaining that Brum often did this sort of thing and, although the flames were admittedly dramatic, it was really nothing to worry about. The band-aid on my cheek and trickle of blood running from my sleeve may have slightly spoilt the image of cool 007 nonchalance, but there you go.

  Of the two other incidents, one is not worthy of too much detail. He set his long-haired back alight on a candle and had a bowl of water hurled over him. His timing was all out there. It wasn't the first time, nobody was resting, no dinner party was in progress and he was put out within seconds of igniting. More one to impress statistically in the long run than a classic.

  The other was his piece de resistance.

  I watched it happen, and just didn't realise it was happening.

  It was a nice lazy winter's evening. Our gas fire had broken down, giving off evil emissions that the gas board needed to check out. We'd called their emergency number and they were planning to come to us in the spring, which was very helpful.

  For heat, we'd borrowed a friend's old twin-bar electric fire. It didn't look too great but it warmed the room so it was good enough for us. Brum loved this thing. He would sit staring at it, his nose almost touching it, enjoying its direct heat.

  It didn't seem too dangerous to him. It was damn hot where he was sitting, but there were no flames or anything and it didn't look like it would do him any actual harm, maybe just give him a touch of heat stroke or something.

  And so we all sat, myself, Lorraine and Brum's live-in-partner-girl-cat Sammy, all watching TV, and Brum watching the twin bar electric fire.

  Brum was lying as cats do, head about seven inches from the ground, front paws tucked in and protruding in front, back in an upward arch. He was beginning to doze, or 1 think now maybe pass out, in the intense heat and his head kept dropping

  slightly forward and then shooting backwards as he got too hot.

  Finally he nodded off to sleep and his head dropped forward so that the top of his head faced the bars of the fire.

  At least, that's how it looked from where we were sitting. I think his fur must have been actually touching the bars.

  We really weren't paying that much attention. Lorraine had just said 'Can you smell something burning?' when suddenly, with a noise like a great puff of air, Brum's whole head burst into flames.

  It's hard to explain the impact of seeing something like that. You just don't expect a cat's head to do that. It was like he'd been thinking too hard and his brain had just given up and exploded.

  Luckily the bathroom is next to the lounge and there was a full tub of cooling water in there. Brum had gone mad and I just grabbed him, ran full blast into the bathroom and thrust his head under the water.

  He went out with a great hiss of steam. He seemed so stunned that he forgot to attack me for a moment. When he finally did, I was pulling him out of the water, and his struggling merely served to propel him from my arms and straight back into the tub.

  He just stood there, up to his neck in water, steam still rising off his head, in a state of wide-eyed shock.

  Amazingly, there was no real damage to him. His whiskers and eyelashes shrivelled in the heat, and some of those are still shrivelled today, but the rest of his badly singed fur grew back fine.

  The fact that he has managed to catch fire twice since that day proves very much that a fool doesn't learn from his mistakes.

  And I'm not talking about my leaving unattended gas rings three times, okay?

  A Very Brief History of Cats

  'History teaches us that men will behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.'

  Abba Eban

  B rum's had a rough ride as a turn-of-the-millennium-tabby, and I've often wondered if he'd have fared any better had he been born into a different period of history.

  For instance, Egypt 2000 BC would surely have been a better time and birthplace for him than Slough 1990. It's a well-known fact that the ancient Egyptians revered cats as gods (which, as far as I know, isn't the tradition in Slough).

  To be more precise, they believed that gods manifested themselves to them in the image of cats. Therefore they worshipped and pampered them and treated them with absolute devotion. I mean, let's face it, you're not going to risk grabbing God by the scruff of the neck and rubbing his nose in his own urine are you? Not even if He's stained your duvet.

  When a cat died in Egypt, it was embalmed, mummified and given its own tomb. They even had embalmed mice put in there with them for afterlife snacks. The Egyptians' faith was so devout that they once surrendered to an enemy to save the local cats, oblivious to the fact that they themselves risked death or worse by letting the enemy through the gates and into their walled city.

  The canny enemy, aware of the Egyptians' weakness for our furry friends and eager for the Egyptians to let them in and get on with being slaughtered, had begun throwing cats at them over the high wall. This was all too much for the Egyptians and they soon capitulated.

  Had Brum been around in those days, he'd undoubtedly have been one of those hurled over the wall.

  In an era of history where you could not go far wrong being a cat in Egypt, you can absolutely bet your house, car and life on Brum sauntering down that road towards those city gates on

  that particular day wondering what all the noise was about. He would no doubt have had that normal look of surprise on his face as he rocketed into the air, but it beats me why he should have had. Just another life in the life of Brum really.

  The above is most unlikely in all truth, as I just cannot see Brum having been in Ancient Egypt at that time in the first place. He has been dogged with bad luck from birth and so I really don't believe he'd have been born then at all.

  More likely Europe in the Middle Ages, into a good, loving Christian family.

  It was in the Middle Ages that the Christian Church decided that cats were a pagan symbol and condemned them. The persecution of cats became commonplace and cats were actually burnt alive in village squares to celebrate the festival of Saint John. I don't recall that Saint John was especially noted for his dislike of small furry animals, but someone must have thought he'd approve. This all got a bit out of hand and by the early fifteenth century, cats were almost extinct in Europe.

  Either out of revenge for their appalling treatment, or simply because they were dead, cats stopped killing rats for us and very soon millions of us were dead also, as bubonic plague spread through Europe like wildfire.

  So did people then stop killing cats and side with them against the plague-carrying rats? No. They blamed the cats (and the dogs) for spreading the plague, and stepped up the cull.

  It was a long time later that people stopped blaming cats for everything. For centuries they were believed to be witches in cat disguise (if you've ever seen an am-dram production of Puss-ln-Boots you will know how unlikely it is they could have pulled this off) and it was believed that all sorts of terrible things happened because of their presence. They were not, therefore, all that welcome guests at the fireside of an evening. More likely in it.

  This would have been more like Brum's time and place. Although I wonder if he may have been even more likely to have been born before history began.

  Around 50 million years ago, there lived a creature known as a miacis. The miacis is generally believed to have been the predecessor of the modern-day cat. It had none of the agility and finesse of a cat of today, and neither was it blessed with much in the way of intelligence.

  I strongly believe that Brum may be a miacis.

  And, even if he is not a genetic throwback (and this would have to be proven to me), I believe he would have fitted in well amongst these creatures, even excelling in miacis society, for we must assume that fifty million years of evolution would have given him at least a slight edge.

  And it wouldn't have been that bad a time for him to have lived. The dinosaurs were a distant memory, so he would have had none of
the problems normally associated with Tyrannosaurs and Velociraptors. And unbelievably there were even dafter groups than the miacis around to feed on. I believe that Brum would have chosen this time for himself, away from the stresses of twenty-first-century life.

  And when he arrives there by one-way time travel, I'm sure he'll look around for a cosy house to live in with a nice warm fire. He will then discover that there are no houses and that nobody has yet invented fire. Panicking, he'll look round for somebody to complain to and find that humans aren't around yet either and that processed ham and tinned tuna won't be available for another eighteen and a quarter billion days.

  Dejectedly, he will settle down to wait.

  Down on the Farm

  'A wit with dunces and a dunce with wits.' Alexander Pope

  A year of Brum's life was spent on a farm. This was an interesting period because humiliation wise, it was I rather than he who excelled.

  I'm not saying that he shone as a farm cat, because he absolutely didn't. What I am saying is that his life merely maintained a kind of embarrassment equilibrium. As he sailed evenly along, maintaining his disastrous course, he was able to watch me fall from somewhere above him where we all of us live, and disappear with a mighty splash into the murky depths below.

  This was also a tricky period in our lives. We'd recently dumped the bachelor flat and moved in with a young lady, the new love of my life. It was only a matter of weeks before she realised 'life' meant life, no longer considered us 'keepers' and was actively keeping clear. Our accommodation gone with her, I rented an old farmhouse while considering our next move.

  The farmhouse was old, but the farm was a working one. The farmer and his family lived in a modern bungalow at the other end of the yard. It was primarily a dairy farm, with cattle sheds not far from our back door. There was also a chicken coop from which eggs were sold directly to the public, in that old-fashioned and trusting 'leave your money in the dish' way that wouldn't have worked at our previous address - eggs, money and dish would have vanished down the street in no time. Even the chickens and coop would've probably been towed away, resprayed and sold to a bald bloke with tattoos and a goatee.

  The farmer himself was a nice chap, and spoke with a Bucks country twang, which is a lazy, drawling dialect. Lazy, in that we simply can't be bothered to finish our words and fail to see the point in putting t's in the middle of them, drawling because there's

  no need to get words out quickly in the countryside. He had a dry and merciless wit, as I would find out to my cost.

  The most noticeable thing about him however was his size. He was a man mountain, a great bearded shuffling colossus. What was even more startling was the size of his twelve-year-old son. He was already as tall as me (a little under six feet) and built like ... er ... well, a farmer's son really.

  If I found this pair slightly intimidating, Brum must have sincerely believed I'd taken him to live in the land of the giants. He'd spent his entire life to that point in a fairly built-up area. There were no fields or parks in his immediate vicinity and so the largest animal he'd ever seen would have been a dog. When he slipped out of the door and headed for the cattle sheds during that first week, then, he had a shock waiting for him that is almost unimaginable.

  To us, it would have been like opening your door and finding a herd of Diplodocus grazing on the lawn. I don't know what he would have expected to find in those sheds, but it certainly couldn't have been anything akin to the group of mooing monsters awaiting him.

  I hadn't actually intended him to go outside for another week. Cats are famous for their homing instincts and I wanted him settled in before letting him loose in a new area. And so while Brum was making his terrifying discovery of life on a larger scale, I was stood at the door shaking a box of cat biscuits, as you do.

  He came out of that barn like a bat out of hell and bowled into my legs at such speed that he took my legs with him and left my torso where it was. As he streaked into the house I pitched forward onto the muddy ground. Predictably the farmer and his son chose that moment to wander around the corner.

  Smothered in mud, I stumbled to my feet, only to completely lose my footing on the slippery surface and slap down onto my backside into a puddle that must have been a foot deep.

  The farmer raised a hand in greeting as they strolled towards me. Neither he nor Michael, his son, showed any signs of concern or amusement at my predicament.

  'Mornin',' he boomed, 'I glad I see yer, I wuz wantin' a word.'

  For reasons I have never been able to fathom - probably the fact that he totally ignored my situation RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET I too behaved as if sitting in a puddle of cold water in a T-shirt and shorts was something that I did every January morning.

  He and Michael were now directly over me, making standing difficult. I would've had to either shuffle backwards on my hands or pull myself up on their coat sleeves. As neither option seemed to offer any more dignity than sitting in the puddle, I was at a total loss what to do or say next.

  "Member, if you wan' fresh eggs,' he continued, 'they're in tha' lil shed o'er there every mornin'. Jus' leave six'y pence for six in the lil dish if you wan' 'em.'

  I mumbled something about that being great and how you couldn't beat freshly laid eggs, which he thought was a great pun, however unintended. He then proceeded to spend the next couple of minutes telling me how best to poach them.

  As the pair of them finally continued on their way, he stopped and looked back thoughtfully. 'I dunno wha' you're doing by the way, but there's a lot of muck in tha' there mud, an' I shouldn't think it's too healthy to be playin' in.'

  Before I could answer, they were gone. I was gobsmacked. I couldn't believe that I had allowed myself to participate in a straight-faced, run of the mill conversation while sitting in a brown puddle of God-knows-what.

  I truly believed at that point that I had just suffered the worst embarrassment of my life. If this was so, however, it would have to beat off a close contender for top spot only a few months later.

  We settled in okay. Brum was happy enough indoors, but wouldn't venture more than a few feet from the back door. He spent many hours sitting on a table at the window, staring worriedly at the sheds across the yard, expecting trouble.

  I had a large white van at the time. As it was used for business purposes it had to look clean and presentable at all times. I therefore had to wash it in the yard every weekend. Around a month into our stay, Brum decided that van washing time would

  be a good time to explore a little further, me being close by to fell like a tree if anything went wrong. I watched him vanish into thick bushes behind the van and pretty much forgot about him.

  Len, the farmer, had set me up a hosepipe from the barns for my weekly wash, and just as 1 directed the hose's high-powered jet at the top of the van, a tabby face suddenly peered over its lip before dramatically disappearing in a huge explosion of water. 1 heard a scream and then a tremendous crash over in the bushes as the sudden ferocious torrent sent him clean off the van's roof. With an air of resignation born of repetition, 1 went to look for him expecting the worst. Finding no signs of any drenched tabby landing sites, I gave him up for dead (again). I found him sitting like a drowned rat on the sofa a little later.

  That was the final straw as far as he was concerned. Add to that the huge farm moggy, who brought us fresh killed mice and rats daily, leering at him through the window every morning, the startlingly loud heating system and the yard telephone bell that served as an eighty decibel alarm clock two or three times a day RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET and Brum had just about had enough of farm life. He didn't go out at all from that day on.

  Even indoor life took a turn for the worse when I invited a few friends round for an afternoon of back-to-back televised football games and back-to-back pizzas. It turned out one of my guests was terrified of cats. A big bloke, not scared of many things, but with some strange aversion to Brum and his kind.

  Brum didn't know this, and this chap di
dn't know about Brum. So when Brum unexpectedly landed on his lap halfway through the second half of Manchester City's latest epic fight for survival, it was quite a moment of truth for both of them.

  Brum must have been propelled at least four feet in the air and his surprised and loudly yelling victim wasn't far behind him. To make matters worse, the ball hit the back of the wrong net at precisely that moment and a room full of stridently incensed men were suddenly jumping up and down and jeering. From relative serenity, the room had become a cauldron of noise and bitter emotion just as Brum had been hurled bodily across the room.

  He must have believed at this point that the world had gone totally mad. Mountain sized beasts in his garden and a house full of thunderous noise and angry insanity, seemingly triggered by his simply entering the room. He retreated into a shell, from which my mother made it her responsibility to rescue him.

  My being suddenly single, my mother was busy making sure I was okay, bless her, and so Brum was just another victim to be saved on the same trip. Two for the price of one. She felt his salvation lay in 'getting out more', as did mine.

  It was due to this conviction that she unwittingly set me up for total humiliation.

  She bought us a cat lead.

  This thing was a type of harness that went around the cat's neck and under his midriff. Once in place, you then dragged the motionless cat along the ground. It was with a definite sense of foreboding that I checked the coast was clear on that dark night and dragged Brum into the yard. We'd gone only a few feet when he abruptly jumped onto the top of an old eight-feet-high oil container, almost dislocating my shoulder.

  I knew the metal on top was rusted and deteriorating badly. My immediate concern was that he may fall through into the drum, this being the sort of thing he would normally do. I also knew that if I let him loose with a lead round his neck he would undoubtedly hang himself.

  And so it was that I came to be standing with one arm held high above my head, desperately grasping a lead that disappeared over the top of an oil container when Farmer Len and son arrived in the yard.