"Jeremy G. Byrne - Tizzy's Tail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Byrne Jeremy G)
Tizzy's Tail
Jeremy G Byrne
Sorry, I digress. I was saying that I'm not
naturally a cat lover. There's something about the supercilious look in their
eyes or the haughty loft of their tails that puts my ego on the offensive. Or
maybe it's the way they showcase that surgically perfect dental work when they
yawn. They're just too cool and self-assured for me. Sure, they condescend to
purr endearingly or bat at you with their downy feet, and they manage to arrange
themselves just so as they lie fuzzily in a stray shaft of afternoon
sunlight, but you don't have to look too closely to see the claws. That old
aphorism about who owns who is so true: you can't buy a cat for any price
and you make yourself look stupid trying. Perhaps it's envy, I don't know.
The lease agreement for this place
is about twenty seven pages long, and I think its only unambiguous
section is the one which clearly bans pets. In fact, it goes so far as to
specifically ban dogs, birds (caged or uncaged), all species of rodent,
Australian Native Mammals, insects of any kind, snakes, rabbits and (somewhat
redundantly) hamsters and guinea pigs. It does allow fish (providing they're
confined to a tank) and Mexican Axolotl, but not turtles, hermit crabs or frogs,
and when I asked the estate agent about angora goats, I learned what "withering"
meant. The original document was obviously drafted by a legal firm that charged
by the word. Of course, it also prohibits cats, but Jenny didn't read that bit
when we signed for our new Town House. In fact, she didn't read it very
carefully. Darling Jennifer
didn't share my misapprehensions about combining a young cat and leather
furniture. She shrugged off my carefully reasoned arguments about reeking
sand-trays and the high cost of "Select Choice Ocean-Pink Salmon with Moist
Liver and Calamari Pate", eight-month flea collars and chewable rubber animals.
She knew a cat wouldn't interfere with our social lives or have us
jumping every time the doorbell rang in case it was someone from the Estate
Agency on a lightning raid. So, my better judgement took a back-seat and
we took the plunge. When we
first got Bubastis - that's the cat's proper name . . . It was an ancient
Egyptian temple town, devoted to the Bastet avatar of the Lion Goddess Sekhmet.
She was their Huntress Spirit and Mistress of Hidden Wisdom during the later
dynasties. No, of course I didn't look it up - that's just part of the vast
store of general knowledge I use to stun people at parties like this, and add
spice to boring business lunches. As I was trying to say, when we bought this
descendant of the great Terror of the African Night she was fully seven inches
long, ate nothing but warm milk and drooled copiously on woolly jumpers at every
opportunity. Apparently she's a Himalayan Blue Colourpoint (I kid you not),
which means, as you can see, that she's mostly white, with a grey face, feet and
tail, she cost us far more than she should have, and she owns a coat of hair
that's not only five inches long but shows a closer affinity with the carpets,
Jenny's favourite black cashmere and the mirror in the bathroom than with the
tiny puss herself. Despite the manipulative little creature's six-inch whiskers
curling into three-inch lashes and the unmercifully luculent gaze of her big,
blue eyes, I decided she was to have a serious name. Actually, if the truth be known, she was
Tizzy before she was Bubastis. Jenny named her the minute she saw the darling
little thing dancing madly 'round the room, savaging pot plants and sharpening
her claws on our ankles while her brothers and sisters did little more than
blink and meow timidly when approached. Tizzy, though, is not an acceptable name
for anything, not even a "lovable, playful ball of fluff" like our little feline
friend. (Nor indeed is "Mylovely Grey Lotus Bloom, by Tigereye Rambo out of
Quintescent Snowy Gift", which is the obscene contrivance that graces her
registration papers.) In the end I spent a very long evening in the library
trying to come up with something a tad more sophisticated, before digging up
"Bubastis" in one of those ancient National Geos with all the pictures of the
smiling folks from Arkansas defaced in crayon by one generation and the photos
of African Women torn out by sex-starved adolescents from the next. Oh - I lied
about the general knowledge. Ever
wondered where cats go at night? Long-standing antipathy aside, I've often
thought about what it is they might do when they're not coiled up in their cane
baskets or vomiting hairballs under the bed in the spare room. I once saw a BBC
documentary about foxes in urban England, living their secret lives in basements
and old storm-water drains, birthing their own kittens just out of sight, at the
loose edge of our world, so to speak. But foxes are somehow safer,
doglike perhaps. Knowable. Cats aren't. I think it was H. P. Lovecraft whose
Cats of the Dreamlands spent their nights jumping to the moon. Obviously we know
better than that these days. What self-respecting feline would waste her time
with that airless lump of rock? No, I don't have any idea where they go when the
stars' faint light blinds all other eyes and safer creatures sleep. That's to
say, I didn't. Some cats, I'm
led to believe, are content with their lot. They're fed well, provided with
shelter and left alone to go about their serious feline business
unhindered. Their lives are modestly comfortable, they spend most of their spare
energy purring, and they're happy to unleash any pent-up hunter-fixations on the
occasional rug or doorframe. Our Bubastis, however, was not such a cat. Maybe
she took her name as a personal challenge, like calling a dog "Wolf". I really
don't know. Whatever it was, tiny Tizzy very quickly began to display certain
characteristics I'd imagine are normal in the lion, the tiger, the leopard and
the lynx but which in a ten-week old kitten constitute a severe personality
disorder. During her first Winter
there were nights when Tizzy would vanish completely. At first I'd imagine she
spent her time reconnoitring in the near neighbourhood, but that didn't last. It
was probably the high population density of housecats in the vicinity that led
her to explore further afield, and then she often didn't return until late in
the morning, whereupon she'd collapse in her basket and sleep the day away. Now,
this suited me fine, and it saved on upholsterers fees, but Jenny began
to get annoyed at the attitude that treated our house like a convenient pit-stop
in a grand prix lifestyle. However, by about the early Spring these
nocturnal sojourns had become an almost everyday affair, and Jenny had gotten
used to Tizzy as a quiet young cat who slept peacefully around the house and
only rarely deigned to chase balls of wool or tear strips from your hand in
playful tussles.
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Sadly, this wasn't to last. As
they mature, cats seem to inherit certain abilities we'll never match or
understand. I've reached the conclusion that maybe in her contact with
really old, wise cats, the stripling feline acquires secret knowledge by
osmosis, or perhaps the young cat is attracted by the shiny pearls of
wisdom these venerable animals let drop and accidently swallows them, if
you want a more poetic metaphor. However she was initiated into these
mysteries - perhaps she even discovered them herself - Tizzy began to go
places that you and I could not. Don't ask me how I knew, at first, but I
was sure. Her behaviour, her demeanour, her general outlook on life - I
couldn't put my finger on it but something had obviously changed. I must
admit though, that I didn't really know what was going on until she
started to bring things back.
The first thing Tizzy ever brought back from wherever it was she went at
night was probably a mistake. She was young and inexperienced and hadn't
learnt the difference between a quick snack and a brawl. I'm pretty
certain it was one morning last September when Jenny found her hissing
madly and hopping back and forth, like an albino busby on springs, beside
the rubbish bin outside our back door. At first Jenny thought it was a rat
or a snake the cat had cornered, and she called me out of the shower,
dripping wet and freezing cold, to deal with the emergency. By the time I
got there, Tizzy had decided she wasn't going to let anything scare her
and was spitting and growling quite savagely, obviously working herself up
to a full frontal assault on whatever it was she had bailed up between the
brickwork and the bin. All I had was a straw broom and a modicum of moral
support from Jenny, who was standing on the other side of a window, in the
kitchen, behind the breakfast counter at the time. It turned out that her
position was a lot more sensible than mine, because as I kicked the bin
away something about half Tizzy's size and bright pink sprang forward in a
twelve foot arc and landed on my head. |
The pink thing had
about eleven legs. It was warm like vomit and smelt worse, and it seemed intent
on filling my ears, eyes and nose with various appendages while building a nest
in my hair. I wouldn't like to
repeat the sound I made, but if you can imagine a lot of vowel sounds shouted
very loudly down the wrong end of a Tuba you'd come close. Believe me, it wasn't
a pleasant thing to hear, let alone utter. I was completely incapacitated for a
good ten seconds while this thing struggled around up there, but I finally had
the sense to simply nod my head with a bit of force and the creature plopped to
the paving at my feet. Viewed in the
rosy light of hindsight, it wasn't very horrible after all. In fact,
despite being a nearly iridescent coral pink and covered in a complex tracery of
fine brown lines like an arterial system with delusions of grandeur, weighing in
at about three pounds and having antennae twice the length of its body, it could
have belonged to the grasshopper family without too much entomological upheaval.
However, Tizzy wasn't interested in unusual biological variations not directly
related to flavour or nutritional value, and just as the creature was preparing
to make a break, she pounced. The
huge insect managed to jump clear, moving fast but weirdly, like a Willis
O'Brien stop-motion model from a 30's silent monster flick, but Tizzy wasn't far
behind. In a final, desperate move, the thing fanned out a set of enormous filmy
wings, reared back on its hind legs, and, for the last time in its life,
chirped. The bluff failed, Tizzy lunged, there was a crunching sound that made
me want to unswallow my breakfast and, just as I decided it might be a good idea
to retain the body as evidence for my Committal hearing, Tizzy jumped the fence
and was away. I did, however, find a six-inch antennae on the bricks where she
had dispatched the beast, and I'd have it still if I hadn't lost it later.
For a while after the Big Pink
Grasshopper Incident, which Jenny and I managed to rationalize away as being
within the bounds of possibility given the diversity of the insect world, the
wide-ranging activity of the cat herself and our proximity to a large area of
untamed parkland - you know, total bullshit - Tizzy continued her regular
nightly excursions. Although nothing as spectacular resulted from them, I did
find her playing with a very strange bluish-grey leaf that came from no tree
I've ever seen, and once she came back with a coat-full of bright orange,
spiny caryopses that my rusty university botany couldn't identify with any
grasses in this part of the country (or, if I really have to admit it, with any
grasses on this continent). Then one day, somewhere far, far away, Tizzy
met something that either didn't like her at all or thought it might like her a
lot, in an inconveniently gustatory sense, and she came back soaked in
grume. I don't know to this day
exactly what the goop was. All I know is that it was extremely nasty. There was
no dismissing this stuff as sickly sweet, mildly malodorous or euphemistically
distasteful; it was unutterably horrid, stomach-churningly effluvial and
compulsorily avoidable, to coin a phrase. It smelt like the inside of a horse on
a hot day and probably came from somewhere a lot worse. I mean, if you could
have packaged this stuff right, called it "Galactic Mutant Monster Muck" and
organised a movie tie-in, you could've made a killing in the Nasty Toy
market. Tizzy was drenched from head to foot in it, and what made the situation
just that much more enjoyable for all concerned was the way she woke up
Jenny and I that morning (we leave the window open for her) by jumping on the
bed. If there's anything in this
world more pitiable than a wet cat, especially a long-haired cat like Tizzy,
then I've yet to see it. This gunk had soaked right through to her skin, and
underneath was this sort of sticks-and-rubber creature; really thin and bony.
And God was she ugly! She looked like a cross between E.T. on a really rough
morning and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It took literally hours in a bath full of
industrial-strength soap powder to get it out of her fur, and of course she
loved every minute of it, poor little bugger. It was only after we'd set Jenny
up in front of the heater with a hair-drier and I'd gone back upstairs to wash
the disgusting residue off the bath that I discovered the whole business
actually had a positive aspect. What I thought were flecks of brown dirt on the
bottom of the bath turned out to be fleas - dozens of them, stone dead. Tizzy
was flea-free for weeks. Jen was not
very happy about the whole business. I was prepared to accept it as one of the
little, unexplained mysteries of life, but she seemed to consider it a personal
attack by the cat on our domestic stability. We had to get rid of the eiderdown
off our bed - there was no way it would smell any better than slightly dead and
the cat-sized, pinky-brown stain ignored my most determined application of
Preen, White King, Caustic Soda and battery acid. (I tried the last two out of
curiosity; the acid actually changed the stain to pale blue, but didn't do the
quilt much good.) Jenny liked that quilt, she was fond of the leather couch
Tizzy favoured as a scratching block, she enjoyed her peace and quiet and she
didn't have any time at all for bizarre mystery that stepped down from the
Silver Screen and came blundering and crashing into Real Life. Luckily for the
furry perpetrator of this catalogue of unpleasantries, things did settle down a
bit. Apart from vomiting up something resembling hairy black pudding on the
kitchen bench one particularly bleary-brained Saturday morning (my brain, not
hers), Tizzy was comparatively quiet over the next month or two. I mean, she
even slept inside once or twice. I haven't mentioned Tizzy's musical bent,
have I? You might have noticed that she sort of warms up with a little chorus of
meows in a major key of her choice before she jumps or runs anywhere, and
she makes a sound like someone abusing a piano-accordian when she lands. Well,
one night during this quiet period I was woken by some nasty cat noises from
outside the bedroom window. I'm a lighter sleeper than Jen - I snore, so she has
to sleep deeply - and I crawled out of bed as quietly as I could, because it
sounded to me like someone was repeatedly bashing a cat against the wall of our
carport. Trying to stick my arm
through the inside-out sleeve of the bathrobe I use as a dressing gown and pull
on some underwear in case things got nasty, while simultaneously hurrying down
the stairs, listening for the noise outside and being as quiet as possible
myself so as not to wake Jenny up, ended with me on my back at the bottom of the
stairs, my bathrobe ripped from neck to waist and Jennifer very much awake. By
this time I was less than amused myself. I spent a good minute or two fumbling
at the front door lock in the dark before flicking on the hall light in
exasperation, which left me as blind as a mole and about as effective, and
finally tearing open the front door to peer into the night. Picture this: Tizzy, all alone and totally
absorbed in herself, springing high into the air, and I mean six or seven feet,
at a bright shaft of moonlight streaming through a hole in the carport roof.
Every time she took off she'd squeak, and every time she landed she'd squeal.
And she was purring like a steam train the whole time. I couldn't be
angry - she looked so cute - but believe me, I tried very hard at the time.
Anyway, to get back to the story,
Tizzy's caution lasted a couple of months, but wanderlust got the better of her
at last, as I strongly suspected it would. One afternoon last November Jenny had
something really vile to show me when I got back from work. She'd beaten me home
and had been in an uncommonly moderate mood, but by the time I arrived she was
very upset and angry. Actually, I'd spent about three quarters of an hour and
half a roll of packing tape cleaning long white cat-hairs off my suit coat
before an important meeting earlier in the day, so I wasn't feeling particularly
partial to feline foolishness either. Nevertheless, at the bottom of Tizzy's
basket in the laundry, nestled between her slightly ragged yellow fluffy
elephant and the cane, was a Thing. It was sort of a lumpy, rather rubbery,
greyish-brown, flaccid kind of a thing, somewhere in size between large frog and
a small hamster, and it had obviously once belonged quite intimately to
something. Anatomically, even. James Thurber's "The Thirteen Clocks" has this
wonderful creature called the Todal which looks like a blob of glup and is
composed entirely of lip, and after I'd spent a few minutes staring stupidly at
the appalling thing in the basket, I suddenly had this vision of a group of cats
(what do you call that? a pride? a pack? No . . . That's it! A clowder!), a
clowder of head-strong felines, led by Tizzy the Huntress, bringing down a
fleeing bull Todal and tearing it to pieces on some high, snow-swept slope of
Mount Karakal overlooking the Lamastry of Shangri-La, or on a wide, grassy plain
beside the River Alph which flows past the ruins of the pleasure dome of Xanadu.
And she'd saved the juiciest bit for later. That was really too much for Jenny.
After Tizzy had shown such promise, to have her slip right back to her wicked,
wicked ways was such a terrible let-down for Jen that she made it clear she
never wanted anything to do with the cat again. I've since forgiven her because
she was going through a rough patch with her family and was quite depressed, but
at the time it seemed grossly unfair to lumber me with the damn cat when she
certainly hadn't been my choice of pet in the first place. It was getting
on for early Summer by this time and Jen and I were going out separately more
often than we had for quite a while. This wasn't just because we shared the high
anxiety of living with the feline equivalent of Indiana Jones on Speed, although
that didn't help. I think we'd reached that difficult point in our relationship
when we realised that we were pretty much committed to one another for a long
stretch and we'd have to come up with a better excuse than "the rent's cheaper
by half, she likes my cooking and I can only pick the difference between a
washing machine and a microwave three times in four". A couple of other things
had come up at the time that really made us think about where we were headed,
and I believe the realization that you're about to lose the freedom of
irresponsible youth is always a bit unsettling. Jenny's problems had really been
coming thick and fast and she seemed to need a lot of time by herself. It was on
one of those emotionally chilly evenings, when the temperature was in the high
thirties and Jenny had decided to catch a movie on her lonesome, that Tizzy
finally went altogether too far. As
I say, it was hot that night. Not that the heat was actively oppressive
or anything, it just seemed to wrap itself around the house and me, like I was
living in a sock. It must have been some time after eleven, and I was indulging
in an ice-cold shower before a sleepless lie-down for the few hours till dawn.
You'd have expected the shower to have drowned the sounds, but after all those
months I guess I was somehow tuned in. I turned the water off to be sure I'd
heard what I thought I had, and as the pipes gurgled it away Tizzy's meow came
again. You get to know when a cat wants your attention. Whether it's to be let
outside, to be allowed to eat the rest of the biscuit you thought you were
sharing, to have her head rubbed behind the ears or just to remind you that
she's there, there's no mistaking that insistent sound. With a cat it's never
"whenever you're ready" or even "could you hurry it up a bit". No! It's
"yesterday, Bozo" and "it'll go very rough on the curtains and the carpet if you
keep me waiting again". So of course, I had no choice if I wanted to stay
friendly with the neighbours, because she wasn't going to shut up until I
obeyed. Damn cat was always ruining my showers. Despite myself though, I must admit something
made me feel it'd be different this time. Tizzy had been gone since the previous
morning and even Jenny, though she'd never have admitted it, had started to
worry. The house felt very empty and most of the lights were off downstairs. I
remember the shadows seemed darker than normal, the street sounds were sort of
distant and muted and the night felt kind of heavy and old. I'd just reached the
back door when I realised that there was something wrong with the cat's cry.
What I'd mistaken from a storey up and three rooms away as an indignant demand
now seemed, from the other side of a thin, wooden door, more like a fearful
pleading. Just then, just as I began
to unlock the door, there came a sound I'll never forget. I suppose it was
natural enough for the caller to bang on the door when I was slow in answering,
but the sound itself was definitely not normal. I'd never heard anything like it
before, but it sounded for all the world like somebody knocking on my door with
a squid. Why I didn't stop then, I can't tell you. It's not that I regret it
now, but I sure as Hell did then.
Never try to build a Cephalopod without the manual - I've seen the result. When
I opened the door it was lurking in the shadows right in front of me. Now, I've
also seen people in silly rubber suits - wonderful latex creations that cost
tens of thousands, take hours to put on and longer to remove and make actors
look just exactly like actors in silly rubber suits. Some of them were
even vaguely convincing, in their way. But I know one when I see one, and I
wasn't seeing one then. Not that what I was seeing wasn't silly, mind you - it
just wasn't a rubber suit. It had
the features you might expect in your typical Horrible Fish Monster; a surfeit
of scaly protuberances, a plethora of pseudopodia and myriad other anatomical
irrelevancies, none of which seemed to occupy even vaguely sensible positions,
at least at first. As I stared, however, a certain fearful symmetry emerged,
centred around a pair of great, gibbous eyes. It was like Jaques Cousteau and
Georges Braque had collaborated on construction but couldn't afford to finish,
and it smelt like Moby Dick was buried in it. Don't misunderstand - I'm only
being flippant in retrospect: at the time I was paralysed. I think if it had spoken, I would have carked
it on the spot, but apparently vocal apparatus exceeded the budget. Its big,
round eyes spoke volumes though: disdain, impatience and something I recognised
instantly - a strong dislike of cats. It was only when she cried that pitiful
cry again that I even noticed Tizzy. The pelagic Picasso had her in a
manipulative appendage, dangling by the end of her tail. Wherever she'd been this time, it had been
near some kind of ocean. I could see the salt on her fur and practically smell
the fish on her breath (had it not been for Mister Black Lagoon). No doubt she'd
been having a great time, but now she wasn't. I stood there for a moment, caught
between a mild sense of responsibility for the errant pussycat and a desperate
concern for my sanity, bodily integrity and digestion. Unfortunately, I'll never
know what I would have done, because the only one of the three of us who
seemed at least modestly unperturbed chose that moment to act. The distance between us was a good twelve or
thirteen feet - I imagine our piscine interloper had retreated from the door
after its knocking - but from somewhere in its bulbous body the tentacular
extension holding the cat found the mass and muscle to bridge that gap. Tizzy
was dangled in front of my face for a second pregnant with unlanguaged
imprecation, then dropped. I can't really blame her for the claws, but I've
still got the scratches to prove that my reflexes were up to the challenge, and
I caught her at waist height. While Tizzy lay there in my arms, stiff as a board
and grafted to my stomach, the creature fixed me with a gaze that left me with
no doubt that I was lucky to see the idiot cat back at all and that if it
ever caught her back wherever it had come from again, its altruistic spirit of
goodwill could be severely strained. Then, having made its point, the creature
turned away into the warm shadows and vanished. I can't imagine what mystic bridge my visitor
used to cross back to the Twilight Zone - I wasn't about to follow it to find
out. Besides, Tizzy was shivering, probably more from shock than from cold, and
I needed to sit down a lot. Once I'd surgically separated her from my midriff,
the cat was not much worse for wear. Her tail was sort of burnt and she had a
few cuts on her nose, but she lay down in her basket and went straight to sleep,
the little swine. I, on the other hand, had to sit up for three and a half hours
watching Rock-and-Wrestling with all the lights turned on until Jenny got back
from her movie.
Tizzy doesn't roam much any more. Jenny thinks it's because we've had her
spayed. I've never actually told her what happened that night and I'd appreciate
it if you didn't tell her either - she has doubts about my sanity already. I
think the mysteries of the beyond places still call to our Tizzy, but her little
pointy ears are deaf - not that she's totally cowed by her experience, just a
bit wiser for it. As you've noticed,
her tail never grew back. We've always told people I shut her tail in the door
(why it has to be me, I don't know), and Jenny's sure it was ringworm. I think
it gives her a rather exotic, leonine sort of look, don't you? Anyway, apart
from her peregrinacious urge and that half-inch ring of fur, she seems to have
lost only one thing out of the whole business. You're supposed to keep a cat's
diet as varied as possible, but that's just a bit difficult with our Tizzy now.
You see, since that night she's been absolutely petrified at the merest
whiff of fish.
Originally appeared pp07-18, Eidolon Issue 02, August 1990.
Copyright © Jeremy G Byrne, 1990. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
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Tizzy's Tail
Jeremy G Byrne
Sorry, I digress. I was saying that I'm not
naturally a cat lover. There's something about the supercilious look in their
eyes or the haughty loft of their tails that puts my ego on the offensive. Or
maybe it's the way they showcase that surgically perfect dental work when they
yawn. They're just too cool and self-assured for me. Sure, they condescend to
purr endearingly or bat at you with their downy feet, and they manage to arrange
themselves just so as they lie fuzzily in a stray shaft of afternoon
sunlight, but you don't have to look too closely to see the claws. That old
aphorism about who owns who is so true: you can't buy a cat for any price
and you make yourself look stupid trying. Perhaps it's envy, I don't know.
The lease agreement for this place
is about twenty seven pages long, and I think its only unambiguous
section is the one which clearly bans pets. In fact, it goes so far as to
specifically ban dogs, birds (caged or uncaged), all species of rodent,
Australian Native Mammals, insects of any kind, snakes, rabbits and (somewhat
redundantly) hamsters and guinea pigs. It does allow fish (providing they're
confined to a tank) and Mexican Axolotl, but not turtles, hermit crabs or frogs,
and when I asked the estate agent about angora goats, I learned what "withering"
meant. The original document was obviously drafted by a legal firm that charged
by the word. Of course, it also prohibits cats, but Jenny didn't read that bit
when we signed for our new Town House. In fact, she didn't read it very
carefully. Darling Jennifer
didn't share my misapprehensions about combining a young cat and leather
furniture. She shrugged off my carefully reasoned arguments about reeking
sand-trays and the high cost of "Select Choice Ocean-Pink Salmon with Moist
Liver and Calamari Pate", eight-month flea collars and chewable rubber animals.
She knew a cat wouldn't interfere with our social lives or have us
jumping every time the doorbell rang in case it was someone from the Estate
Agency on a lightning raid. So, my better judgement took a back-seat and
we took the plunge. When we
first got Bubastis - that's the cat's proper name . . . It was an ancient
Egyptian temple town, devoted to the Bastet avatar of the Lion Goddess Sekhmet.
She was their Huntress Spirit and Mistress of Hidden Wisdom during the later
dynasties. No, of course I didn't look it up - that's just part of the vast
store of general knowledge I use to stun people at parties like this, and add
spice to boring business lunches. As I was trying to say, when we bought this
descendant of the great Terror of the African Night she was fully seven inches
long, ate nothing but warm milk and drooled copiously on woolly jumpers at every
opportunity. Apparently she's a Himalayan Blue Colourpoint (I kid you not),
which means, as you can see, that she's mostly white, with a grey face, feet and
tail, she cost us far more than she should have, and she owns a coat of hair
that's not only five inches long but shows a closer affinity with the carpets,
Jenny's favourite black cashmere and the mirror in the bathroom than with the
tiny puss herself. Despite the manipulative little creature's six-inch whiskers
curling into three-inch lashes and the unmercifully luculent gaze of her big,
blue eyes, I decided she was to have a serious name. Actually, if the truth be known, she was
Tizzy before she was Bubastis. Jenny named her the minute she saw the darling
little thing dancing madly 'round the room, savaging pot plants and sharpening
her claws on our ankles while her brothers and sisters did little more than
blink and meow timidly when approached. Tizzy, though, is not an acceptable name
for anything, not even a "lovable, playful ball of fluff" like our little feline
friend. (Nor indeed is "Mylovely Grey Lotus Bloom, by Tigereye Rambo out of
Quintescent Snowy Gift", which is the obscene contrivance that graces her
registration papers.) In the end I spent a very long evening in the library
trying to come up with something a tad more sophisticated, before digging up
"Bubastis" in one of those ancient National Geos with all the pictures of the
smiling folks from Arkansas defaced in crayon by one generation and the photos
of African Women torn out by sex-starved adolescents from the next. Oh - I lied
about the general knowledge. Ever
wondered where cats go at night? Long-standing antipathy aside, I've often
thought about what it is they might do when they're not coiled up in their cane
baskets or vomiting hairballs under the bed in the spare room. I once saw a BBC
documentary about foxes in urban England, living their secret lives in basements
and old storm-water drains, birthing their own kittens just out of sight, at the
loose edge of our world, so to speak. But foxes are somehow safer,
doglike perhaps. Knowable. Cats aren't. I think it was H. P. Lovecraft whose
Cats of the Dreamlands spent their nights jumping to the moon. Obviously we know
better than that these days. What self-respecting feline would waste her time
with that airless lump of rock? No, I don't have any idea where they go when the
stars' faint light blinds all other eyes and safer creatures sleep. That's to
say, I didn't. Some cats, I'm
led to believe, are content with their lot. They're fed well, provided with
shelter and left alone to go about their serious feline business
unhindered. Their lives are modestly comfortable, they spend most of their spare
energy purring, and they're happy to unleash any pent-up hunter-fixations on the
occasional rug or doorframe. Our Bubastis, however, was not such a cat. Maybe
she took her name as a personal challenge, like calling a dog "Wolf". I really
don't know. Whatever it was, tiny Tizzy very quickly began to display certain
characteristics I'd imagine are normal in the lion, the tiger, the leopard and
the lynx but which in a ten-week old kitten constitute a severe personality
disorder. During her first Winter
there were nights when Tizzy would vanish completely. At first I'd imagine she
spent her time reconnoitring in the near neighbourhood, but that didn't last. It
was probably the high population density of housecats in the vicinity that led
her to explore further afield, and then she often didn't return until late in
the morning, whereupon she'd collapse in her basket and sleep the day away. Now,
this suited me fine, and it saved on upholsterers fees, but Jenny began
to get annoyed at the attitude that treated our house like a convenient pit-stop
in a grand prix lifestyle. However, by about the early Spring these
nocturnal sojourns had become an almost everyday affair, and Jenny had gotten
used to Tizzy as a quiet young cat who slept peacefully around the house and
only rarely deigned to chase balls of wool or tear strips from your hand in
playful tussles.
|
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Sadly, this wasn't to last. As
they mature, cats seem to inherit certain abilities we'll never match or
understand. I've reached the conclusion that maybe in her contact with
really old, wise cats, the stripling feline acquires secret knowledge by
osmosis, or perhaps the young cat is attracted by the shiny pearls of
wisdom these venerable animals let drop and accidently swallows them, if
you want a more poetic metaphor. However she was initiated into these
mysteries - perhaps she even discovered them herself - Tizzy began to go
places that you and I could not. Don't ask me how I knew, at first, but I
was sure. Her behaviour, her demeanour, her general outlook on life - I
couldn't put my finger on it but something had obviously changed. I must
admit though, that I didn't really know what was going on until she
started to bring things back.
The first thing Tizzy ever brought back from wherever it was she went at
night was probably a mistake. She was young and inexperienced and hadn't
learnt the difference between a quick snack and a brawl. I'm pretty
certain it was one morning last September when Jenny found her hissing
madly and hopping back and forth, like an albino busby on springs, beside
the rubbish bin outside our back door. At first Jenny thought it was a rat
or a snake the cat had cornered, and she called me out of the shower,
dripping wet and freezing cold, to deal with the emergency. By the time I
got there, Tizzy had decided she wasn't going to let anything scare her
and was spitting and growling quite savagely, obviously working herself up
to a full frontal assault on whatever it was she had bailed up between the
brickwork and the bin. All I had was a straw broom and a modicum of moral
support from Jenny, who was standing on the other side of a window, in the
kitchen, behind the breakfast counter at the time. It turned out that her
position was a lot more sensible than mine, because as I kicked the bin
away something about half Tizzy's size and bright pink sprang forward in a
twelve foot arc and landed on my head. |
The pink thing had
about eleven legs. It was warm like vomit and smelt worse, and it seemed intent
on filling my ears, eyes and nose with various appendages while building a nest
in my hair. I wouldn't like to
repeat the sound I made, but if you can imagine a lot of vowel sounds shouted
very loudly down the wrong end of a Tuba you'd come close. Believe me, it wasn't
a pleasant thing to hear, let alone utter. I was completely incapacitated for a
good ten seconds while this thing struggled around up there, but I finally had
the sense to simply nod my head with a bit of force and the creature plopped to
the paving at my feet. Viewed in the
rosy light of hindsight, it wasn't very horrible after all. In fact,
despite being a nearly iridescent coral pink and covered in a complex tracery of
fine brown lines like an arterial system with delusions of grandeur, weighing in
at about three pounds and having antennae twice the length of its body, it could
have belonged to the grasshopper family without too much entomological upheaval.
However, Tizzy wasn't interested in unusual biological variations not directly
related to flavour or nutritional value, and just as the creature was preparing
to make a break, she pounced. The
huge insect managed to jump clear, moving fast but weirdly, like a Willis
O'Brien stop-motion model from a 30's silent monster flick, but Tizzy wasn't far
behind. In a final, desperate move, the thing fanned out a set of enormous filmy
wings, reared back on its hind legs, and, for the last time in its life,
chirped. The bluff failed, Tizzy lunged, there was a crunching sound that made
me want to unswallow my breakfast and, just as I decided it might be a good idea
to retain the body as evidence for my Committal hearing, Tizzy jumped the fence
and was away. I did, however, find a six-inch antennae on the bricks where she
had dispatched the beast, and I'd have it still if I hadn't lost it later.
For a while after the Big Pink
Grasshopper Incident, which Jenny and I managed to rationalize away as being
within the bounds of possibility given the diversity of the insect world, the
wide-ranging activity of the cat herself and our proximity to a large area of
untamed parkland - you know, total bullshit - Tizzy continued her regular
nightly excursions. Although nothing as spectacular resulted from them, I did
find her playing with a very strange bluish-grey leaf that came from no tree
I've ever seen, and once she came back with a coat-full of bright orange,
spiny caryopses that my rusty university botany couldn't identify with any
grasses in this part of the country (or, if I really have to admit it, with any
grasses on this continent). Then one day, somewhere far, far away, Tizzy
met something that either didn't like her at all or thought it might like her a
lot, in an inconveniently gustatory sense, and she came back soaked in
grume. I don't know to this day
exactly what the goop was. All I know is that it was extremely nasty. There was
no dismissing this stuff as sickly sweet, mildly malodorous or euphemistically
distasteful; it was unutterably horrid, stomach-churningly effluvial and
compulsorily avoidable, to coin a phrase. It smelt like the inside of a horse on
a hot day and probably came from somewhere a lot worse. I mean, if you could
have packaged this stuff right, called it "Galactic Mutant Monster Muck" and
organised a movie tie-in, you could've made a killing in the Nasty Toy
market. Tizzy was drenched from head to foot in it, and what made the situation
just that much more enjoyable for all concerned was the way she woke up
Jenny and I that morning (we leave the window open for her) by jumping on the
bed. If there's anything in this
world more pitiable than a wet cat, especially a long-haired cat like Tizzy,
then I've yet to see it. This gunk had soaked right through to her skin, and
underneath was this sort of sticks-and-rubber creature; really thin and bony.
And God was she ugly! She looked like a cross between E.T. on a really rough
morning and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It took literally hours in a bath full of
industrial-strength soap powder to get it out of her fur, and of course she
loved every minute of it, poor little bugger. It was only after we'd set Jenny
up in front of the heater with a hair-drier and I'd gone back upstairs to wash
the disgusting residue off the bath that I discovered the whole business
actually had a positive aspect. What I thought were flecks of brown dirt on the
bottom of the bath turned out to be fleas - dozens of them, stone dead. Tizzy
was flea-free for weeks. Jen was not
very happy about the whole business. I was prepared to accept it as one of the
little, unexplained mysteries of life, but she seemed to consider it a personal
attack by the cat on our domestic stability. We had to get rid of the eiderdown
off our bed - there was no way it would smell any better than slightly dead and
the cat-sized, pinky-brown stain ignored my most determined application of
Preen, White King, Caustic Soda and battery acid. (I tried the last two out of
curiosity; the acid actually changed the stain to pale blue, but didn't do the
quilt much good.) Jenny liked that quilt, she was fond of the leather couch
Tizzy favoured as a scratching block, she enjoyed her peace and quiet and she
didn't have any time at all for bizarre mystery that stepped down from the
Silver Screen and came blundering and crashing into Real Life. Luckily for the
furry perpetrator of this catalogue of unpleasantries, things did settle down a
bit. Apart from vomiting up something resembling hairy black pudding on the
kitchen bench one particularly bleary-brained Saturday morning (my brain, not
hers), Tizzy was comparatively quiet over the next month or two. I mean, she
even slept inside once or twice. I haven't mentioned Tizzy's musical bent,
have I? You might have noticed that she sort of warms up with a little chorus of
meows in a major key of her choice before she jumps or runs anywhere, and
she makes a sound like someone abusing a piano-accordian when she lands. Well,
one night during this quiet period I was woken by some nasty cat noises from
outside the bedroom window. I'm a lighter sleeper than Jen - I snore, so she has
to sleep deeply - and I crawled out of bed as quietly as I could, because it
sounded to me like someone was repeatedly bashing a cat against the wall of our
carport. Trying to stick my arm
through the inside-out sleeve of the bathrobe I use as a dressing gown and pull
on some underwear in case things got nasty, while simultaneously hurrying down
the stairs, listening for the noise outside and being as quiet as possible
myself so as not to wake Jenny up, ended with me on my back at the bottom of the
stairs, my bathrobe ripped from neck to waist and Jennifer very much awake. By
this time I was less than amused myself. I spent a good minute or two fumbling
at the front door lock in the dark before flicking on the hall light in
exasperation, which left me as blind as a mole and about as effective, and
finally tearing open the front door to peer into the night. Picture this: Tizzy, all alone and totally
absorbed in herself, springing high into the air, and I mean six or seven feet,
at a bright shaft of moonlight streaming through a hole in the carport roof.
Every time she took off she'd squeak, and every time she landed she'd squeal.
And she was purring like a steam train the whole time. I couldn't be
angry - she looked so cute - but believe me, I tried very hard at the time.
Anyway, to get back to the story,
Tizzy's caution lasted a couple of months, but wanderlust got the better of her
at last, as I strongly suspected it would. One afternoon last November Jenny had
something really vile to show me when I got back from work. She'd beaten me home
and had been in an uncommonly moderate mood, but by the time I arrived she was
very upset and angry. Actually, I'd spent about three quarters of an hour and
half a roll of packing tape cleaning long white cat-hairs off my suit coat
before an important meeting earlier in the day, so I wasn't feeling particularly
partial to feline foolishness either. Nevertheless, at the bottom of Tizzy's
basket in the laundry, nestled between her slightly ragged yellow fluffy
elephant and the cane, was a Thing. It was sort of a lumpy, rather rubbery,
greyish-brown, flaccid kind of a thing, somewhere in size between large frog and
a small hamster, and it had obviously once belonged quite intimately to
something. Anatomically, even. James Thurber's "The Thirteen Clocks" has this
wonderful creature called the Todal which looks like a blob of glup and is
composed entirely of lip, and after I'd spent a few minutes staring stupidly at
the appalling thing in the basket, I suddenly had this vision of a group of cats
(what do you call that? a pride? a pack? No . . . That's it! A clowder!), a
clowder of head-strong felines, led by Tizzy the Huntress, bringing down a
fleeing bull Todal and tearing it to pieces on some high, snow-swept slope of
Mount Karakal overlooking the Lamastry of Shangri-La, or on a wide, grassy plain
beside the River Alph which flows past the ruins of the pleasure dome of Xanadu.
And she'd saved the juiciest bit for later. That was really too much for Jenny.
After Tizzy had shown such promise, to have her slip right back to her wicked,
wicked ways was such a terrible let-down for Jen that she made it clear she
never wanted anything to do with the cat again. I've since forgiven her because
she was going through a rough patch with her family and was quite depressed, but
at the time it seemed grossly unfair to lumber me with the damn cat when she
certainly hadn't been my choice of pet in the first place. It was getting
on for early Summer by this time and Jen and I were going out separately more
often than we had for quite a while. This wasn't just because we shared the high
anxiety of living with the feline equivalent of Indiana Jones on Speed, although
that didn't help. I think we'd reached that difficult point in our relationship
when we realised that we were pretty much committed to one another for a long
stretch and we'd have to come up with a better excuse than "the rent's cheaper
by half, she likes my cooking and I can only pick the difference between a
washing machine and a microwave three times in four". A couple of other things
had come up at the time that really made us think about where we were headed,
and I believe the realization that you're about to lose the freedom of
irresponsible youth is always a bit unsettling. Jenny's problems had really been
coming thick and fast and she seemed to need a lot of time by herself. It was on
one of those emotionally chilly evenings, when the temperature was in the high
thirties and Jenny had decided to catch a movie on her lonesome, that Tizzy
finally went altogether too far. As
I say, it was hot that night. Not that the heat was actively oppressive
or anything, it just seemed to wrap itself around the house and me, like I was
living in a sock. It must have been some time after eleven, and I was indulging
in an ice-cold shower before a sleepless lie-down for the few hours till dawn.
You'd have expected the shower to have drowned the sounds, but after all those
months I guess I was somehow tuned in. I turned the water off to be sure I'd
heard what I thought I had, and as the pipes gurgled it away Tizzy's meow came
again. You get to know when a cat wants your attention. Whether it's to be let
outside, to be allowed to eat the rest of the biscuit you thought you were
sharing, to have her head rubbed behind the ears or just to remind you that
she's there, there's no mistaking that insistent sound. With a cat it's never
"whenever you're ready" or even "could you hurry it up a bit". No! It's
"yesterday, Bozo" and "it'll go very rough on the curtains and the carpet if you
keep me waiting again". So of course, I had no choice if I wanted to stay
friendly with the neighbours, because she wasn't going to shut up until I
obeyed. Damn cat was always ruining my showers. Despite myself though, I must admit something
made me feel it'd be different this time. Tizzy had been gone since the previous
morning and even Jenny, though she'd never have admitted it, had started to
worry. The house felt very empty and most of the lights were off downstairs. I
remember the shadows seemed darker than normal, the street sounds were sort of
distant and muted and the night felt kind of heavy and old. I'd just reached the
back door when I realised that there was something wrong with the cat's cry.
What I'd mistaken from a storey up and three rooms away as an indignant demand
now seemed, from the other side of a thin, wooden door, more like a fearful
pleading. Just then, just as I began
to unlock the door, there came a sound I'll never forget. I suppose it was
natural enough for the caller to bang on the door when I was slow in answering,
but the sound itself was definitely not normal. I'd never heard anything like it
before, but it sounded for all the world like somebody knocking on my door with
a squid. Why I didn't stop then, I can't tell you. It's not that I regret it
now, but I sure as Hell did then.
Never try to build a Cephalopod without the manual - I've seen the result. When
I opened the door it was lurking in the shadows right in front of me. Now, I've
also seen people in silly rubber suits - wonderful latex creations that cost
tens of thousands, take hours to put on and longer to remove and make actors
look just exactly like actors in silly rubber suits. Some of them were
even vaguely convincing, in their way. But I know one when I see one, and I
wasn't seeing one then. Not that what I was seeing wasn't silly, mind you - it
just wasn't a rubber suit. It had
the features you might expect in your typical Horrible Fish Monster; a surfeit
of scaly protuberances, a plethora of pseudopodia and myriad other anatomical
irrelevancies, none of which seemed to occupy even vaguely sensible positions,
at least at first. As I stared, however, a certain fearful symmetry emerged,
centred around a pair of great, gibbous eyes. It was like Jaques Cousteau and
Georges Braque had collaborated on construction but couldn't afford to finish,
and it smelt like Moby Dick was buried in it. Don't misunderstand - I'm only
being flippant in retrospect: at the time I was paralysed. I think if it had spoken, I would have carked
it on the spot, but apparently vocal apparatus exceeded the budget. Its big,
round eyes spoke volumes though: disdain, impatience and something I recognised
instantly - a strong dislike of cats. It was only when she cried that pitiful
cry again that I even noticed Tizzy. The pelagic Picasso had her in a
manipulative appendage, dangling by the end of her tail. Wherever she'd been this time, it had been
near some kind of ocean. I could see the salt on her fur and practically smell
the fish on her breath (had it not been for Mister Black Lagoon). No doubt she'd
been having a great time, but now she wasn't. I stood there for a moment, caught
between a mild sense of responsibility for the errant pussycat and a desperate
concern for my sanity, bodily integrity and digestion. Unfortunately, I'll never
know what I would have done, because the only one of the three of us who
seemed at least modestly unperturbed chose that moment to act. The distance between us was a good twelve or
thirteen feet - I imagine our piscine interloper had retreated from the door
after its knocking - but from somewhere in its bulbous body the tentacular
extension holding the cat found the mass and muscle to bridge that gap. Tizzy
was dangled in front of my face for a second pregnant with unlanguaged
imprecation, then dropped. I can't really blame her for the claws, but I've
still got the scratches to prove that my reflexes were up to the challenge, and
I caught her at waist height. While Tizzy lay there in my arms, stiff as a board
and grafted to my stomach, the creature fixed me with a gaze that left me with
no doubt that I was lucky to see the idiot cat back at all and that if it
ever caught her back wherever it had come from again, its altruistic spirit of
goodwill could be severely strained. Then, having made its point, the creature
turned away into the warm shadows and vanished. I can't imagine what mystic bridge my visitor
used to cross back to the Twilight Zone - I wasn't about to follow it to find
out. Besides, Tizzy was shivering, probably more from shock than from cold, and
I needed to sit down a lot. Once I'd surgically separated her from my midriff,
the cat was not much worse for wear. Her tail was sort of burnt and she had a
few cuts on her nose, but she lay down in her basket and went straight to sleep,
the little swine. I, on the other hand, had to sit up for three and a half hours
watching Rock-and-Wrestling with all the lights turned on until Jenny got back
from her movie.
Tizzy doesn't roam much any more. Jenny thinks it's because we've had her
spayed. I've never actually told her what happened that night and I'd appreciate
it if you didn't tell her either - she has doubts about my sanity already. I
think the mysteries of the beyond places still call to our Tizzy, but her little
pointy ears are deaf - not that she's totally cowed by her experience, just a
bit wiser for it. As you've noticed,
her tail never grew back. We've always told people I shut her tail in the door
(why it has to be me, I don't know), and Jenny's sure it was ringworm. I think
it gives her a rather exotic, leonine sort of look, don't you? Anyway, apart
from her peregrinacious urge and that half-inch ring of fur, she seems to have
lost only one thing out of the whole business. You're supposed to keep a cat's
diet as varied as possible, but that's just a bit difficult with our Tizzy now.
You see, since that night she's been absolutely petrified at the merest
whiff of fish.
Originally appeared pp07-18, Eidolon Issue 02, August 1990.
Copyright © Jeremy G Byrne, 1990. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
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