Энн Файн: The Killer Cat Strikes Back

Pottery?

Potty, more like, if you want the opinion of that talented pussycat who painted ‘A Riot of Beauty’.

I put my paw out to stroke one of the lumps.

Accident! It fell to pieces before it even hit the ground.

‘Tuffy!’ she said. ‘How could you! First you tread paint all over my lovely clean canvas, and now you’ve broken one of my pretty new pots.’

Pretty new pots? Puh-lease. They are not pretty. The mud comes from a primeval swamp. And if you dropped so much as a pin into something that lumpy, you’d never find it again.

She put the other two pots safely up on the shelf. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Not even Tuffy can get up here and knock them off.’

A tiny droplet of advice: don’t ever challenge a cat. It may have been a bit of an effort. (I don’t keep as trim as I should.) But finally – finally – I managed to rise to the occasion and get up on that shelf.

Those pots up there were even worse than the one I’d knocked on to the floor. (By accident.) Talk about ugly! They had lumps hanging off here, and extra lumps sagging off there. One of them even had a kind of wart on its bottom, so every time I gave it a tiny little push, it wobbled horribly.

Uh-oh!

I’d like to tell you that it shattered into a thousand pieces. (That would sound good.) But it was such a lump of old rubbish it only fell into two halves.

Never mind. Be fair to me. At least the thing was gone.

Two down.

And one to go.

6: Little Miss Last Ugly Pot

I WASN’T THE only one in the house to hate those ugly pots enough to want to be rid of all of them. Next morning I strolled into the living room at my usual time to find Ellie’s father sitting on the sofa, right next to my sunny spot.

There was a look in his eye I’d never seen before. For a moment I couldn’t work out what it was, and then I realized he was pleased to see me.

Weird, or what?

He put out a welcoming hand. ‘Come on, pussy. Here, pussy.’

Well, stretch my stripes! ‘Come on, pussy’? The man’s never pined for my company before. Do I recall many a happy hour spent on his lap being gently stroked and petted?

No, I do not.

Clearly he wanted something. I took a quick look round the room and –

Voila! He’d moved Little Miss Last Ugly Pot down to the coffee table. Aha! So that’s what he was hoping for! An action replay of yesterday’s excellent result: one little soft paw out prodding, one quick cry of ‘Whoops!’, and a freshly smashed pot in the rubbish bin.

I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. That was one nasty pot. The world would be a prettier place for being rid of it. If I am scrupulously honest, I think that pot would have looked nicer in bits on the floor than it did as one lump on the table.

And I’m an obliging family pet, always keen to help out when I can.

I stuck my paw out, ready.

Then he made his big mistake.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Good boy!’

Good boy? What does he think I am? A stupid dog?

I gave him the cool slow blink. If he’d had anything but cloth for brains, he would have known what it meant. That blink meant: Excuse me. Which of us is the one who’s trained like a dog? Do I do what you want? No, I do not. Do I come when you call? No. I go my own sweet way. I am a cat.

You, on the other hand, are perfectly well trained. If I am hungry, all I have to do is walk round your legs a few times, half-tripping you, and you open a tin. If I want to go out, I stand by the door and yowl as if I’m about to throw up, and you’re over in a flash to open it.

Who is the one who should be saying, ‘Good boy!’ round here, Buster?

Yes. Not you. Me.

More than one way to make a point, of course. I chose to do it by giving him the runaround. I kept him on tenterhooks, padding up and down the coffee table. (He is such a hypocrite. Usually he’d push me off.) I let my fur graze the pot more closely every time I passed, and every now and again I even stretched out a paw as if to stroke that nasty pottery lump he was so hoping I would break.

I even gave it a little push so it toppled a little.

Almost fell off the side.

Almost.

Not quite.

‘Come on,’ he urged me. ‘You can do it. You’re a clumsy enough cat.’

Clumsy, eh? So things were getting nasty. I could have told him: not a thing gets smashed by me in this house unless I choose to smash it. Call us cats clever. Call us cunning. Call us caterwauling.

But never call us clumsy.

And then he really blew it. He changed tack.

‘Come on,’ he wheedled. ‘Smash it for me. Please. Sweet pussy. Sweet, sweet pussy.’

How dare he! What a nerve! Can you believe this man? Five years we’ve lived together, and he calls me ‘sweet’.

It is an insult.

I felt like scratching him, I really did. Instead, I took revenge. I made my eyes go huge, and sent my fur up on end. I did my Just-Seen-a-Ghost-in-the-Doorway’ act. (It’s very good.) And then, to put the icing on the cake, I shot backwards along the coffee table at about a hundred miles an hour until I’d knocked the pretty china dish he loves so much off at the other end, shattering it to pieces and spilling all the coins he keeps in there on to the floor.

He was still chasing money round the room when the doorbell rang.

Mr Harris from next door. And, as usual, he was selling raffle tickets.

‘Sorry,’ said Ellie’s father as he always did. ‘Unfortunately, just at this moment I happen to be out of spare change.’

Mr Harris looked at the money spilling out of Ellie’s father’s cupped hands.

‘All that will do,’ he said. ‘All that will buy at least one ticket. And it’s a really good prize – especially for your family. It’s a brand-new car.’

(Clearly we cats are not the only ones round here who are fed up with coughing for an hour or two each time anyone in my family sets off on a car trip.)