Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

by Anson Cameron

  Justice became a sort of vengeful auction. A sorrowful thing for me to contemplate, even now. Everyone wanted to punish me to show the town how they felt about what I’d done. To show how shocked they were. Authorities engaged in a bidding war to smite me hardest. My dad confiscated my gun and caned me and grounded me. My mum wouldn’t look at me, but with tears in her eyes and her jaw shaking. At school I was chaperoned everywhere by scowling prefects. When I was allowed out again purple-haired hags huddled in the street as I passed and hunted me along with their eyes and pursed their withered lips and slapped at my bare legs with bouquets of silver beet.

  But the sorriest of all the servitudes put upon me was by Magistrate Caine of the travelling County Court who sat up there, a red face in a grove of wood panels, and called me an emerging lunatic and sentenced me to go and ease the burden of Sally Monteith in her daily grind. To be her slave, more or less, until a future arrived in which she might find vision again via the intercession of a loving God answering her prayers. Every weeknight after school until sundown I became Sally Monteith’s to do with as she pleased.

  Seems to me most women in stories who get their eyes shot out or equivalent misadventures visited upon them turn out to be angels. Being angels it makes the crime worse. Being angels it makes the reader’s sorrow deeper. Only look at that Anne Frank. Well, I shot Sally Monteith’s eye out when she didn’t even have a good one to fall back on, and I’ll tell you … it doesn’t make her an angel. Sally Monteith was a bitch as mean as any ever gathered around a cauldron. Blind or sighted, she was a horror. Dried spit snowballed yellow at her mouth corners. She never covered either her smoky or her shot-out eye, but blinked at you with the one and gaped at you with the other.

  That first day of my servitude I opened the fly-wire door to her house, calling, ‘Mrs Monteith? Mrs Monteith? It’s Doyle Bramhall. The boy from the accident that happened.’ The inside of her house was dark and mostly furnished with smell and nothing much to see but a ghostly slink of cats. Her voice came out of that dark. ‘Buck-toothed heathen killed my Mitchell. But they never shot a lady shopping for groceries, as far as I know.’ That was her thoughts on me. Lower than bucktoothed heathen. Lower than men who buried her husband in a pit with a hundred others.

  She sat me at her kitchen table amid the seven or eight smells she had competing for airspace in that room. ‘First,’ she told me, ‘you collect the droppings. Cat droppings go in the rubbish. Goat droppings go in the rubbish. Mr Smith’s droppings go on the vegetables.’

  ‘Mr Smith?’ I reeled.

  ‘And don’t deposit his droppings holus-bolus. They need to be mashed.’

  I think Sally Monteith had enough vision to see I was about to vomit on her table because she hurried to tell me, ‘Mr Smith is a donkey. After the droppings you’ll bathe whichever cats I find buglesome. Remember, only people who bathe cats without love get scratched. You get scratched I’ll know you done it without love. If you sing to them, it helps keep them calm.’

  From the first she treated me as if I was an item she’d gone out and bought at a shop. Passed her one good eye across the counter like it was legal tender and said, ‘Can I have a boy for this? A boy made pliable with guilt, if you got one of those.’

  Sally Monteith had adopted her house-load of cats to take the place of her husband, which curdled my thoughts on him. What kind of man, I asked myself, could be replaced by a troupe of half-a-hundred strays? A Zulu warrior riding a rhinoceros wouldn’t be enough to replace me in the eyes of my mother if the Japanese killed me. But that’s how it happened. Two days after they told her her husband was got by the Japs, she threw off the consoling arms of her friends and marched out to the animal pound and adopted all its cats. Just accepted her life of romance was over and motherhood was beyond her and fate had decreed she be a mad cat lady, so she better go and load up with the necessaries. Most people admired how she didn’t mope and mourn and instead threw away her lipsticks and her brooches and her hairbrush and her dignity and got on with a new life as a new thing.

  I say I was slave of these cats, but that was only because Sally Monteith had me shampooing them and feeding them and cleaning up their scree of scat. As far as they knew I was their boss. And they had no yearning for a benevolent dictator nor a kindly provider. Me, with my surreptitious hissing and my covert backhanders, would do. They swirled around my feet like river water, purring their regard of my culinary ways, while I fried offal for them. I think they truly loved me, which made me hate them more. For I didn’t want to be a paramour to cats, nor a hero to her five goats who bleated in adoration when I meandered out the back door with my chaff bucket, nor a mentor to Mr Smith who brayed at me like he needed direction. I wanted something higher from life.

  At night I used to imagine her husband coming home from the war. There had been a mistake. An army bungle. He was scrawny and sad, having spent these last years wandering lost in a jungle, but here he was … alive, and sickened by her oily hair and her cats. He would rather be replaced by a town mayor or a Brownlow Medallist than cats. It would be, he thought, a better reflection of his worth. So he set about them tooth and nail, kicking them in long punts over the fences and hedges, cracking at the goats with a stockwhip, stampeding Mr Smith into distant countryside.

  But there was no army bungle. Mitchell Monteith was shot by the Japanese which turned Sally Monteith into a cat-lady, and I was turned into her slave by shooting her.

  It was one day in December, about two months after my enslavement began, that Sally Monteith uncorked my greatest indignity. I’d done my usual jobs. I’d put the shat of the cats into the rubbish and crumbled the shite of Mr Smith over her tomatoes and I’d bathed three cats Sally Monteith said were buglesome, during which, despite feigning love, I was badly scratched. Then I’d brushed the coat of a white goat called Wattsy as it nibbled the cuff of my shorts. And I had supposed with these tasks I was living the veriest depth of humiliation. But was not. For I was about to be cast as Poet Laureate to her slinking posse. And if you thought it a hard and unreasonable task for a boy to marshal the stool of fifty cats, I avow it is harder still to be their bard, to wrack your brain and give of your heart and have blathersome mewlings and fights and fornications break out amid your finest sonnets.

  As I said, I had done my jobs and was ready to go home. But from deep in her favourite armchair in her dark living room Sally Monteith clapped her hands at me and said, ‘Home? Oh … I don’t think so. The butter factory whistle just blew. You got half-an-hour yet. Time for an ode. Cats are soothed by odes.’

  ‘Oats?’ I asked.

  ‘Odes, Dale. Love poems. I composed odes myself before you shot me. It was their favourite thing. But since that day … not a one. My well of creativity is dry. Not an ode or a sonnet or even a limerick will come, though I’ve sat up many nights with a fountain pen at the ready.’ Sally Monteith stared at me through the smoke of her surviving eye. ‘You killed my inner poet, Dale. Shot it dead. And they loved my odes, my cats.’

  ‘But, Mrs Monteith, read them the old poems you wrote before I shot your inner poet.’

  She got angry at this. ‘Do you like the same thing read to you again and again, do you, Dale? I suppose you watch repeats on TV every night, do you, Dale?’

  ‘I don’t think everyone has an inner poet, Mrs Monteith. I’m pretty sure I don’t. I never had any sign of him.’

  ‘No inner poet, eh,’ she said as if to herself, just musing. ‘Well, I haven’t any use for a lad with no inner poet. I better tell that nice Magistrate Caine he’s paroled a boy to me that’s more hindrance than comfort, and his leniency was misguided and a juvenile detention centre might be the thing after all.’

  She saw me nodding, and she knew I had accepted the post and was a cat poet henceforth. ‘They like rhyming couplets.’ She waggled a finger at me. ‘None of your blank verse. Blank verse is worse than no poems at all to cats.’

  I don’t know if Sally Monteith really thought her cats liked poems or
if she made me a cat poet as the worst indignity she could imagine. The lad seems to be coping with cat shit. What about cat poems? Let’s see if cat poems crush his soul. But, either way, now I was composing love poems for cats. And they didn’t come easy. They had to rhyme, and I had to stay up nights under the blankets with a torch to get them to rhyme. And I soon found there were only so many compliments you could offer to cats before your well ran dry. Which made me suspect Sally Monteith’s well hadn’t run dry because I shot her, but was already dry from trying to write poems to cats who had no admirable traits or proud history. Like trying to write poems for Hitler or sing a song for the devil, writing poems for cats.

  Still, I had enough pride to want to write the best poems I could, though I doubted the cats even knew the difference between good poetry or ramblings such as a drunkard might spill on startled lawn bowlers. At first my poems painted cats in a golden light and applauded their conniptions. Sally Monteith had insisted I mentioned their intelligence and athleticism and their mystical insights. So I started by thinking up little stories of how they’d outwitted lawyers and leapt over burning cars and predicted winners at the trots by tapping their paws on her teapot the correct number of times.

  To my surprise Sally Monteith liked the poems. We’d sit in her dark living room and I’d read them to her and to whatever cats had strolled inside to sniff the maturing tannins of their urine on her rugs. She’d snatch a cat from the darkness and begin to stroke it viciously, listening with her head laid over so the ear attached to the shot-out eye was uppermost. At recital’s end she’d tell me it was inspired, the work of a Gifted Inner Poet, and she said it was one of the seven wonders that such a Gifted Inner Poet could survive in such an irksome and dull boy. I took that as a compliment. She had a clock that ticked on the mantelpiece and I listened hard to those ticks when she was offering up compliments on my poetry. Because those ticks were virtually the only thing in the room that wasn’t cat poems or cat smells or hatred of me.

  I usually threw my poems away after their recital. But one day I read her a poem she liked so much she said, ‘Give it to me here.’ She held her hand out and when I placed it slowly in her palm she shoved it into the pocket of her apron because, she told me, it showed cats in a selfless light they should be showed in.

  Next day she took that poem, Cat Poem #8, down Wyndham Street to the old red brick post office and had the postmaster read it out to the idling housewives who hung about this place, and who sniggered, I suppose, before passing false compliments.

  This was a time before poker machines and Ms Oprah Winfrey, so women were idle in a different way then than they are now. They would gather for the paltriest festivity. Cat Poem #8 was a hit among this scurvy crew and Sally Monteith, flushed with success and a missionary zeal to convert these women to the wonders of cats, promised them more. She told them she had got herself a font of odes. She told them Dale Bramhall was full up to pussy’s bow with odes.

  She began to take a poem of mine to the post office every day, and the gaggle of women gathered and grew to hear the postmaster read them. He was a curly-haired showman and wit and enjoyed the spotlight, waiting for hush and frowning at the noise of airbrakes on the street outside before he would begin his recital of the cat poems of Doyle Bramhall. When he had silence he would flourish my latest work and announce, ‘Hear ye, hear ye … the latest despatch from the Keats of Cats.’ The town’s ladies tried to keep straight faces as he read. Tried to stifle their laughter and tried not to meet each other’s eyes as he paused and rushed through the verse. They laughed behind Sally Monteith’s back, but to her face they frowned and nodded at the odes, feigning an appreciation, like lotto winners listening to a string quartet. Sally Monteith believed they admired the poems and the cats within them. She thought she was building cat lovers there in that post office. She didn’t know my poems were no more than comedy to that crowd.

  I could possibly have borne the degradation of composing odes for her cats if it had been a secret degradation. In our town many people nursed a secret degradation. I cite Mr Vincent’s inability to urinate on his hydrangeas in the morning without coaxing his penis for five minutes like he was trying to recapture a runaway kelpie, ‘Come on, boy. That’s it. Come on.’ I cite Mary Scott leaving chicken pies on her front veranda to be picked up at midnight by a man whose heart she broke in the fifties and who lived down by the river, broken-hearted, but not off his tucker.

  There was secret indignity everywhere in our town. But Sally Monteith took my cat poetry public. Friends of my parents started to call me a little character. They called Sally Monteith a character. So calling me a little character meant they thought I’d become a smaller catlunatic of the same sort as her.

  I was by now totally ruined as a boy. I had been a marksman. A popular, gun-toting figure. Now I was as disarmed as a Japanese, and had no friend brave enough to be seen with me. At the school swimming sports I was meowed up at by five hundred students while balancing on my toes on the three-metre board in my Speedos about to perform a reverse dive in the pike position. I flopped into the water like a princess into a moat and stayed under, in the silence, as long as I could.

  How do you redeem yourself from being a cat poet? How do you get back what status you ever had so people don’t meow and hiss at you even when you’re a Wise Man in a cotton-wool beard in a nativity play?

  Well, here again it appears to me that when women get killed prematurely in stories they’re usually blue-eyed angels with an inner glow like a chandelier. But you know Sally Monteith wasn’t one of those. Only one smoky eye and no inner glow. And, anyway, I didn’t mean to kill her. I never even suspected a poem was weapon enough to kill an old bitch. But it turned out it was. Cat Poem #64 Revised was, anyway.

  On a Thursday late in February, sitting in her dark living room, I read to Sally Monteith Cat Poem #64. It went like this:

  CAT POEM #64.

  How you feelin’, felines

  In the dawn light’s golden hue?

  Do you pine for daytime recline

  Curled in Miss Sally’s shoe?

  Do you hunt the rat in dreams,

  While you snore on Sally’s bed?

  And would you like I bathed you sparkling

  In that pink bath in her shed?

  Perhaps I’ll cook you salmon bagels,

  Then we’ll choose a cat for king.

  Oh, what a choir of angels

  If only cats could sing.

  She clapped her hands and said it was short but sweet and she approved of the idea that cats could harmonise like a heavenly host. She said it had always struck her they sounded like cherubim, and she was glad I could hear it, too. I had a good ear. And she said she thought our postmaster could really make that last couplet ring off the high ceiling of the P.O. and spellbind the listeners. ‘“If only cats could sing …”’ she said, while looking out the window at some better world. Then she held out her hand for Cat Poem #64.

  But I gave her Cat Poem #64 Revised. Which was a different poem and not so kindly to cats. It was an ambush and a sabotage. And as she tucked it into her apron I felt breathless, knowing I was free. Knowing I would never again be inhaling cat fumes in this house after tomorrow’s recital. Because I would be sacked as cat laureate. There would be an outrage at the P.O. and Sally’s literary crew would rise up against me and my humiliations would be ended.

  And things ran nearly according to plan, apart from Sally being killed. Apparently at first the postmaster protested. Apparently he said, ‘Mrs Monteith, I don’t think this sort of thing warrants a public airing. This is of a different … oeuvre, Mrs Monteith.’ The crowd bristled and their ears pricked up. Something unfit for the public? Read it loud.

  ‘Oh, hogwash. Go ahead and read it out, or I’ll get someone else to read it,’ Sally Monteith told that postmaster. ‘I think the choir idea is an accurate idea … sensitive.’ The idling ladies started to shout at him. ‘Oh, a critic now, are you?’

  ‘Come on.�
��

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Give it to me. I’ll read it.’

  The postmaster didn’t want to lose his position as public orator, nor did he want to appear squeamish or censorial. So he took a deep breath and read.

  CAT POEM #64 REVISED.

  How you feelin’, felines

  Now that Sally’s gone a shopping?

  I bet you pine to curl a turdly

  In her shoe to have her hopping.

  I’ll bet you snigger cat-sniggers,

  While you spray upon her bed.

  Well, how’d you like I disembowel you

  With that sickle in her shed?

  Or perhaps I’ll lop your tails

  Or get a match and singe your rings.

  It’s a good thing you dumb arseholes

  Can’t tell Sally M a thing.

  She’ll be down at the old P.O.

  With her literary set

  Guffawing at my epics

  While I petrol-soak her pets.

  And the stench those literati wince at

  Will be the singe of shampooed fur

  As the poet turned redeemer puts Redheads to her curs.

  And the braying that she hears

  Will be an elegy from Smith

  As her moggies turn from real ones

  Into blackened cats of myth.

  It was a good poem, I thought. In an earthy, no-holds-barred manner it spelt out the vagaries and troubles of pet ownership and it even granted a donkey the ability to compose an elegy, which is a thing I thought Sally Monteith might regard with some wonder and delight. But Sally Monteith spared not a moment to let the full drama of that ode marinate her soul before caroming out the post office door onto High Street jabbering like a misunderstood Italian. People with no left eye shouldn’t dart onto High Street trusting to the Lord in February when that road is a shooting gallery of pear trucks barrelling east from the orchards of Ardmona to the Shepparton Preserving Company. It is proven annually by drunks and strays that the Lord concedes right-of-way to the pears. So of Sally Monteith I say no more. She is gone under a hundred tons of canning-quality Williams pears and her literary salon is dissolved – snuck away to games of bridge and rounds of golf.