Cats

Oh the bliss of it, the luxury of peace and quiet, of eating what you want when you want and having a few cans of beer with it.  He leaned forward and switched on the fire.  Electric flames flickered and the warm, radiant glow was comforting.

Michael stretched out in his armchair, on his own for the first time for twenty years.  If he’d only known that when Brenda asked to come for a week and stayed twenty years he would have said no.  But, she was Sue’s mother:  she pleaded ill health, poverty, loneliness…what a sob story.  What daughter could withstand that?

Michael picked up the remote, he could choose what he wanted to see and have the sound at a level that didn’t blast his eardrums.

Brenda had had a nice turn of phrase, ‘Oh, don’t you worry about me, I can’t hear it, so I’ll just sit quietly and catch their lips moving.’

So of course it was turned up decibels and gave him a headache.

He popped another can of beer and thought of yesterday, at the crematorium.

There’d only been six other moth eaten old biddies apart from him.  Where was Sue he was asked.  His wife, at the end of her tether had jumped at the chance of a week with a friend.

‘She’s in Italy, on holiday but she’s broken her leg so she won’t be able to come home for a few weeks.  I said to her, there’s nothing she could have done so she might as well stay there and recuperate.’

After a few, well quite a few sherries with sausage rolls and sandwiches at the local pub the old ladies agreed with him. 

They had gone off happy and he had come home to a calm and contented house.  He was thinking of flying off to Rome and having a week with Sue.  It was the end of October but still warm down there.  Perhaps they could drive around and do some sight seeing.

He heard the ping of the microwave and got up to fetch his lasagne.  He even had garlic bread with it.  He smiled grimly.  Brenda had had a way of saying “Ugh, foreign muck” which quite put you off.  Sue hadn’t time to cook two different meals so they had had the traditional meat and two veg, and liver and onions dinners that he grew to hate.

Yes, Brenda had gone, it should have been years ago.

He laid his tray.  The lasagne, nicely browned on top, steamed deliciously.  He snatched a bite of crusty, garlicy buttery bread and munched as he walked through to the lounge.

He nearly dropped the tray.

Slowly, carefully he placed it on the dining table.  ‘What are you doing here?  Where have you come from?’

A large white cat was sitting in his chair, washing its whiskers, basking in the warmth.

Michael walked towards it, arms out, ready to pick it up.  ‘You must have come in the toilet window, you can’t stay here, go on…home.’

It looked at him. ‘I am home.’ speaking in a throaty, purry way with a slight Lancashire accent.

‘My G–, a talking cat,’ he shook his head. ‘No, you don’t live here.’  He opened the window, ‘Come on… out.’ He went to pick it up and it hissed.

‘Come on,’ he cajoled.  ‘Puss, out.’

‘Shut that window Michael, it’s draughty.’

Michael turned pale.  The bloody thing sounded exactly like Brenda.  It would be asking for hot pot next.

‘Look, this is ridiculous.  I must be drunk.  Cat’s don’t talk.’

‘I can, I do.  Now, get me some decent food, none of that foreign rubbish.  Open a tin of salmon.’

‘A tin of salmon?’

‘You heard and no salt and pepper mashed in, cats don’t like seasoning.’

‘This is ridiculous, I want my chair back.’

‘You can have it later.  I’ll sleep on a sheepskin by the fire and sort me out a tray because I certainly can’t go out in this cold wind.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m quite old, but I’ve still got a few years left – as I would have if I had not fallen down stairs last week.’

‘You are Brenda?  Come back to haunt me?’

‘Well, you used to call me an old witch.  Tonight’s the night for witches, it’s Halloween and when I said I wanted to come back here, they were only too pleased to drop me off.’

‘Drop you off?’  Images of taxis and broomsticks flashed through Michael’s brain.

The Pickleswick Coven have a courier service.  I shall live out my full span with you and Sue.’

Michael gazed at the cat.  Thoughts of vets and injections must have showed as ‘she’ said,

‘Don’t even go there.  Now, I’ll have salmon, proper red Canadian and full cream milk.  Now.’

He went into the kitchen and opened a tin, forked out salmon into a cereal bowl and poured milk into a dish.

Carrying it through he realised he’d forgotten to shut the living room window.

‘Oh no.  I don’t believe this.’  There were now four cats. A black one and a small tabby sat in front of the fire warming their paws.  Hastily he shut the window.  A grey and white thing was on the table, eating his lasagne.  He couldn’t touch it now.

‘I can’t feed all of you.’  He peered down suspiciously, ‘Are you real – or fantasies?’

‘Brenda’ was eating her tea.  The others miowed plaintively.  He touched them.  It was fur all right, genuine.

He opened the window again and craftily went to pick up the one eating his dinner.  Quickly it turned and hissed, he caught the smell of meaty breath and a claw raked his hand.

‘Ow.’  Droplets of blood oozed and he sucked it off.

‘These are my guests.’ said Brenda, ‘So welcome them.  The black one is Lizzie English I went to school with, been dead four years now.  The tabby is old Jack Clark, the butcher I had a fling with when I was seventeen.  He died last year.  Really pleased he was to see me and quite understood the need to come back.  Rosie, on the table is Rosie Witherspoon I went to bingo with.  She’s a bit of a whinge but at least she eats anything.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Neither did I when I slipped on that stair carpet.  You loosened the stair rod, didn’t you?  I went straight down those stairs and bang.  Hit my head, out like a light and all day I lay there.  If I’d still been alive when you came home you’ve have been in trouble – wouldn’t you?’

Michael thought of how he’d come home, saw her lying there and climbed over her to run up and put the rod back.  Only then had he phoned an ambulance but of course it was obvious she was well dead.

‘If you’d wanted me out you should have said.  Rosie wanted me to share her flat but I said no, Mike and Sue love having me there.  Now, I was going down that morning to make you a hot pot, a proper traditional Lancashire one.  Jack says he hasn’t had one for years so I suggest you go and make him one.  You don’t want to upset us now, do you?’

‘What’s Sue going to say?’

‘She likes cats, it’s you that is allergic.’