Дорин Тови - Cats In May

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Cats in May

Grandma once had a cat called Macdonald who was bitten by a mouse. Believe it or not, she used to say, she had seen that cat one day with a mouse which had its teeth firmly fixed in his chin while Macdonald himself – one paw on the mouse’s tail, his head strained upwards like a giraffe and the poor old mouse stretched like elastic in between –

tried desperately to lever it off. As a result of that experience Macdonald had developed a complex about mice. When he caught them he no longer ate them, but laid them out in rows in conspicuous places and gloated over them. Visitors needed jolly strong stomachs to take tea in our house in those days, when more often than not there were half a dozen mice laid out on the rug before their very eyes and a big black cat sitting proudly by the side of them like a pavement artist, but Grandma would never allow them to be taken away from him. It would hurt his subconscious, she said. It was his way of retrieving his pride after the mouse had bitten him. If people didn’t like it, she said, when any of us remonstrated with her, they could do the other thing.

We would soon have been left without any friends at all if it hadn’t so happened that Grandma also had three parrots and that one day Piquita, the Senegal parrot, bit Macdonald on the paw when he was seeing how far he could reach into her cage. Piquita was always biting people. She was the most fiendish bird I have ever come across – and that, considering the number of parrots Grandma kept in her time, all of which bit at the slightest instigation, was saying something. She was small, with a green back, orange stomach, yellow legs and a grey, snake-like head. She had pebble-grey eyes which were 36

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The Reason Why

also cold and snake-like, except when she got annoyed, when they turned bright yellow and went on and off like a Belisha beacon.

You could always tell when Piquita was going to attack by the flashing of her eyes. The trouble was, by that time it was generally too late. Her usual time for attacking was when she was being fed and, with Grandma’s usual inconsistency, while her other parrots all had cages with seed tins that fitted from the outside, Piquita alone had a cage where they hooked on to the inside.

She also, lucky little bird that she was, had a door which instead of opening outwards slid vertically up and down in grooves like a portcullis. Every member of the family, with the exception of Grandma, was trapped at some time or other by that blasted door coming down on their wrist while they were putting in the seed tin, whereupon Piquita, her eyes flashing on and off like neon signs, dived down and bit them solidly in the thumb.

Grandma was as deaf to our complaints about Piquita as she was about Macdonald’s mice. If she bit us, she said, we must have offended her and it served us right. Piquita, she would observe with the air of finality which she always adopted to complaints about her pets, never bit her . The astonishing thing was that she was right. Grandma could do anything with birds, just as she could with animals.

Immediately one of us was bitten, even while we were still hopping round doubled up and sucking our thumbs in anguish, off she would sweep in great concern to comfort Piquita – and there, a couple of seconds later, you would see that horrible bird lying on her back in the bottom of the cage, wings widespread, eyes closed in ecstasy, while 37

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Cats in May

Grandma tickled her on her stubbly little stomach and said what a wicked lot we were to torment her.

What with Macdonald’s mice and Piquita biting life was pretty arduous for us just about then, and it seemed – to everybody except Grandma, anyway – poetic justice when in the end our two crosses cancelled themselves out.

Piquita, as I have said, bit Macdonald one happy afternoon when he put his paw in her cage, and Macdonald, no doubt remembering what Grandma was always saying about his subconscious and the need for him to retrieve his pride, subtly plotted his revenge. The rest of the day he sat licking his paw and glowering darkly at her from under a chair. That night, while we were all in bed, he marched purposefully into the sitting room, knocked her cage off its table, the sliding door which had been our own downfall so often in the past slid smoothly up in its grooves for the last time – and that was the end of Piquita. When we came down next morning we found the cage upset, birdseed all over the floor and Piquita herself laid out regimentally on her back alongside the night’s catch of mice.

Grandma was inconsolable at her death. Right up to the loss of the next of her parrots, which happened a long time afterwards and was another story altogether, she never stopped mourning Piquita and saying how she was the best, most faithful, most loving parrot she had ever had. As for Macdonald, sitting up there so proudly and waiting for her to congratulate him on his night’s haul – he, bewilderment in every line of his fat black face at her sudden change of attitude, got the tanning of his life and never caught a mouse again. Any time after that if he even thought of chasing a fly he would hesitate, look at Grandma, lower his ears and 38

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The Reason Why

slink under the nearest chair. Humans, he said, gazing stonily at us out of his big yellow eyes while we stroked his ears and promised him a consolatory saucer of milk when she wasn’t looking, were Horrid.

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FOUR

Blondin

My grandmother was awfully pleased when Charles and I acquired a squirrel. It just showed how we liked animals, she said. I took after her, as she’d always said I would. Charles… she’d always liked Charles, and to think of his taking this dear little orphan of the woods, comforting it and bringing it up… it just showed how right she’d always been.

Actually Grandma, as usual, was as far from right as she possibly could be. We hadn’t adopted Blondin willingly. We liked animals, yes. But squirrels – as, in those carefree, far-off days, Siamese cats – were hardly our cup of tea. All we had aspired to until then had been three Blue Rex rabbits with which Charles, fired by a book entitled How To Make Money In Your Spare Time , had once dreamed of founding 40

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Blondin

a flourishing rabbit business. The idea was that he would sell the carcasses at tremendous profit to a shop and I – as Charles was continually pointing out, they had magnificent pelts – could have a fur coat. What actually did happen was that six months later, by which time we had a grand total of twenty-seven rabbits and they were costing us a fortune in bran and potatoes, Charles announced that he couldn’t kill them. They were his friends, he said. Particularly the little one with the white foot. Had I noticed, he asked, how that one could actually climb the wire of the hutch door like a monkey when it was opened, and the knowing way it would sit up on the top tier and wait to have its ears scratched?