Дорин Тови - The New Boy_INSIDES.indd

Estimates had varied as to the time it would take them to become friendly… from four days to a fortnight to Miss Wellington’s determined forecast of Never. They first met on a Monday morning. It was in fact exactly two days later, on Wednesday morning, that Seeley clambered determinedly up the stairs and into our bedroom where, having exhausted all other methods of shaking him off, 55

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Sheba lay in the one place he hadn’t yet followed her to

– on our bed, in the nest of sweaters. He’d got as far as the landing the previous day and we’d hurriedly nipped him away again. This time, however, we let him get on with it.

Over the ramparts of sweaters he tumbled, greeting Sheba with squeals of rapturous delight. So that was where she was… Gosh, it was nice in here… Wasn’t she clever, to have found such a super place to sit in?

Sheba’s ears were so flat she looked like a grey hound and our hands hovered ready to snatch the intrepid one to safety if she lashed out at him. What could she do with someone loving her as much as that, however? Seeley, with one flop of his fat little body, threw himself on the bottle beside her and licked her face, his eyes ecstatically closed. Sheba, her ears still flat, sat stiff as a ramrod while he did it and then, after a moment or two and obviously very much against her will, licked him grudgingly, very self-consciously, in return.

And that was that. When I went up to check on them five minutes later he was asleep against her side while she – you could see the peace in her eyes – lay contentedly, with her head stretched out on another cat’s flanks, for the first time in more than a month.

She didn’t cry for Solomon after that. She was too busy keeping an eye on Seeley. It wasn’t that she particularly liked him, mind you. She had accepted him, as she couldn’t find Solomon, as one of her own kind who she could be with and watch as he moved around; who would introduce familiar cat noises into this suddenly wrongly-quiet household; who would do something to lessen the loneliness within her. Obviously, too, she tolerated him because he was a kitten. There wasn’t any question of her 56

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doting on him, however. What she was busy coping with was Seeley’s devotion to her .

His greatest ambition, it seemed, was to be Just Like His Friend Sheba. If she walked anywhere, he trotted enthusiastically alongside her. If she sat down, he sat down too. If she drank from her water-bowl, he rushed to have a drink himself. If she curled up on the hearthrug, so did he.

That was all very well, but when it came to following her to her earthbox, sitting bang in front of it and watching, while she performed, with an expression of rapt admiration on his face, it really was too much. Gosh, wasn’t she Clever, said Seeley, his eyes as round as an owl’s. Couldn’t she have any privacy Anywhere? demanded Sheba, stepping stiff-legged and offended from the box.

We were a bit suspicious about his insistence on sharing her food with her, too. Given separate dishes he would gobble away at his like a steam shovel, shouting encouragingly as he ate that he was Coming, he wouldn’t be a Minute.

He would keep looking over at her longingly. He would run halfway to join her and then, pulled by the thought of what he’d left behind, rush back to his own dish again.

Eventually – overcome, ostensibly, by his desire to be with her – he would leave his own plate and join her at hers. He would then, with his head thrust under her unprotest ing nose, proceed to clear that at an even faster speed before returning, jet propelled, to finish his own.

In the end, yell though he might about he Loved Her and wanted to share his All with her, we had to feed them separately. Sheba in the kitchen, where she ate placidly, slowly and with a good many squawked asides to Charles 57

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(she always ate better when Charles was there); Seeley in the passage outside, where he whipped through his share as if he hadn’t been fed for a month – after which there would be a noticeable silence which meant he was trying to look under the door. To make sure Sheba was there, he said when I caught him at it. To gauge the chances of Sheba leaving any was more like it in my opinion.

He ate fast. He drank fast – in such large quantities I worried, having such things still very much on my mind, about his kidneys, till Charles said there couldn’t be much wrong with them at Seeley’s age and it was undoubtedly all the shouting he did that made him thirsty. And he moved fast.

Not only horizontally but vertically, so that often, without even realising he was in the room, the first thing I knew about it he was galloping up me like a squirrel.

Like Solomon, however, he couldn’t climb for toffee.

One initial bound and he was invariably left frantically swinging from something – in my case usually hooked well and truly to the seat of my pants. With Charles, who was taller, he only got as far as his knees. Charles’s yells at such times were quite unearthly. When, in fact, on Seeley’s second day with us, Charles came hobbling into the bathroom holding his knee and asking for the sticking plas ter I was really quite impatient with him.

Shouting like that, I said. Making all that fuss. Because a tiny little kitten had climbed his leg. ‘You’d shout too,’

said Charles ‘if you didn’t have anything on under your trousers.’ And sure enough, under the single thickness of his trouser leg, poor old Charles’s knee-cap was bleeding streams.

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Poor Charles, he just couldn’t win. He was sitting one night in an armchair reading, with Sheba on his knee.

Seeley had been with us for about a week by this time and Sheba was slightly off her food. A bit overpowered by the boisterous Seeley, we’d decided; we must give her extra attention to boost her morale. Extra attention included coaxing her appetite, of course. So there was I, with Seeley banished tempor arily to the kitchen, feeding Sheba with bits of pig’s heart on Charles’s knee. She ate a bit; fumbled a bit; ate a bit more. By the time she’d finished Seeley was howling blue murder at being locked in the kitchen, I was fishing bits of pig’s heart from where they’d fallen down the side of the chair, and Charles was complaining loudly about his trousers. What he put up with for these damned cats, he said. His knees torn to ribbons, threads pulled on all of his clothes, and now pig’s heart juice all over his trousers…

I’d soon take care of that, I said, fetching a cloth and a bowl of water from the kitchen and briskly setting to work on his trousers. It was all right, of course, until the dampness penetrated. It was a November night, the water from the tap was very cold and the moment it got through to Charles he nearly hit the ceiling. Goshdammit, he said.

What was I trying to do ? Freeze him solid? Even Seeley stopped shouting and listened, out in the kitchen.

The next thing that happened was that Sheba lost her voice. It followed her loss of appetite and we couldn’t understand it. One day she was talking away confidingly to us in her usual cracked soprano – about we three were Friends, weren’t we?… she was allowed out on her Own, wasn’t she?… little kittens were very Silly, weren’t they?…

and Charles and I agreeing with every word – and the next, 59

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all that came out when she opened her mouth was a tiny, hard-to-get-out squeak.