Matthew Flinders' Cat

by Bryce Courtenay

  The truth was that he seldom remained sober long enough to write an outline and do the required research in the library. His spiral notepads were filled with jottings and promising beginnings, most of which ended abruptly, his neat handwriting slipping into illegibility. Billy set himself high standards and was his harshest critic, so that his red biro, used for crossing out errant sentences, dominated every page.

  Billy’s brief and often blistering missives sent to the Sydney Morning Herald and, as often as not, accepted for publication, were his only reassurance that somewhere deep down inside him there was a writer trying to get out, an essayist with a profound message.

  With the briefcase securely handcuffed to his wrist, Billy continued on his way towards the Quay. He cast his mind back to the moments before the police sergeant had interrupted his conversation with the boy. The lad had thought the cat real and, possibly, that it belonged to Billy. In a funny way he’d been right. Billy would sometimes, usually when he was half-cut, look up at the statue of Trim and wish him good evening and even have a bit of a chat. On other occasions, as the night continued and he became more and more pissed, the conversation with Trim would get quite animated. There were even times, usually when he was reduced to drinking monkey’s blood, that Billy would think he was Baby Grand, the cat in the last photograph in his album, and then he’d happily chat, cat to cat, for several hours. Billy was an unabashed cat lover and, when sober, liked to think that any nation who would honour a cat meant all was not lost. The statue of Trim on the window ledge above his bench was yet another reason why he had no wish to relocate.

  Billy now asked himself what he would have told the boy about Trim had they been able to talk a little longer. How would a young lad such as this one ever come to possess a sense of history and some understanding of who he was and where he had come from? Billy had no illusions about himself, he accepted that his drinking was a choice he’d made himself. He also accepted that he was weak and gutless. Having been given every opportunity to succeed, he had failed miserably. Blaming the dreaded grog he knew was pointless, the reason he was a drunk had little or nothing to do with a genetic weakness. His more or less constant state of inebriation allowed him to pull a curtain over the past and, except for rare moments, he’d managed to build a successful screen.

  But what of the boy? He knew nothing about the kid, though his expression, the look in his eyes, told him enough. Was the lad already among the doomed, destined to serve his time on the streets until he inevitably experimented with his first drugs? He seemed bright enough, alert to what was happening around him. Billy knew that the progression from what is euphemistically known as a ‘recreational’ drug, usually marijuana or ecstasy, to heroin was a fairly short one. Once addicted, a street kid would need to pay for his habit. Being under-age, he would become the perfect bait for paedophiles, which would inevitably lead him to ‘The Wall’ at Darlinghurst, the high outer stone wall that formed part of the old Darlinghurst prison, where young male prostitutes plied their trade. Any kind of rescue after this would be extremely rare.

  What happened to the boy with the skateboard was none of Billy’s business, he couldn’t do anything for him anyway and if he did meet him again, it would probably be to cop the toe of the kid’s runner in his face. Nevertheless, the image of the boy persisted in his mind.

  Billy smiled to himself at the boy mistaking the statue of Trim for a real cat. If Orr hadn’t arrived, the least he could have done was tell the boy to go to the Eye Hospital in Woolloomooloo and have his eyes tested. Then he recalled that the Eye Hospital had moved and the building it had occupied was in the process of being converted into apartments. Its close proximity to the city, the Harbour and the Gardens made it one of the projects favoured by a nationwide developer attempting to gentrify the essentially working-class suburb. The famous Finger Wharf, with its warehouses near the same location, was another project designated as luxury accommodation for wealthy bankers, brokers and media folk. In the end the rich got everything worthwhile while the poor were moved along. With the Olympic Games coming to Sydney in four years, the state government would want the poor tucked away out of sight.

  Instead, he would have had to take the lad to Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street where the police sergeant had suggested he go for his leg. It wasn’t more than a hundred and fifty metres from the library. For a moment Billy imagined himself turning up with the boy, but now doubted that he would have gone. In his day, kids didn’t like being called ‘four eyes’ and it would still be the same. Glasses weren’t tough and such a boy would need to think of himself as tough.

  One thing led to another and Billy began to think how he might have told the story of Trim if the boy hadn’t left. Would the boy enjoy a history lesson? Probably not. He’d have to keep things light. How light? He stopped, looking skywards, and watched as the latecomers among the fruit bats continued coming in, wheeling above him, their wings shaped like nomad tents flapping lazily, dark silhouettes against the pale-blue sky.

  Perhaps he could start by telling the boy the story of the fruit bats, how they were the only remaining colony of a rare species now threatened with extinction. He would tell him how they had found refuge in the Botanic Gardens slap-bang in the middle of a large city when tree-felling on the north coast had destroyed their natural habitat. But now the fruit bats were damaging the trees they chose to roost in and it had become a matter of nature versus nature, with the authorities scratching their heads for a solution where both the trees and the fruit bats might be saved. Billy loved trees, but he also cared about the fruit bats and he thought how typically the dilemma was of our own making. Would the boy be interested in or care about the fruit bats or the trees? Probably not.

  Billy continued on his way down to the Quay, thinking now how it was that humans seemed to destroy almost everything they touched in nature. He knew this wasn’t an original thought and whoever had first come up with it, probably Charles Darwin, would soon enough have realised that it was one that had little or no power to change things. Humans, like all creatures, put themselves first. The only difference was that, unlike other species, they had the power to alter the balance of nature, and it was this that made them so dangerous. History was all about greed. Enough is never quite enough.

  Billy had momentarily forgotten about the boy but soon found himself thinking about him again. He told himself that his mind was like a sieve and if he couldn’t get the street brat out of his head, he’d have to think him out of the way. He’d get on with the story about Matthew Flinders and his cat and try to make it sound like a story and not a history lesson. It would have to entertain or, at the very least, amuse the boy. Having told him the story, if only in his head, the child would become less of a distraction.

  He accepted the challenge that this was the age of television, where pictures were the true language and the spoken word was merely the frame that gave them focus. In the cartoon world in which Billy assumed the boy’s vocabulary largely existed, the cat would take on a far more important role than the great navigator himself. The lad had ignored the statue of Matthew Flinders, only glancing at it briefly. His sole interest was in the cat. Trim would tell his story in a way natural to a cat without wanting to alter everything to suit himself the way humans do. It would be history seen from a cat’s point of view.

  Billy started to imagine . . .

  As it turned out, one of the world’s most famous loners, Matthew Flinders, the great navigator who first mapped the coastline of a large and mysterious landmass he would eventually name Australia, was never quite alone, because, you see, he had as his constant companion and fellow explorer a tomcat named Trim.

  Matthew Flinders was a ship’s captain, by nature stubborn, impatient and self-righteous, much preferring his own intelligent company to that of his boorish shipmates. Trim Flinders, his cat, was quite the opposite. He was a ship’s cat and, while capable of being ‘quite the proper gentleman’, h
e possessed in him the spirit of a larrikin and was given to the company of rough men and always happy in boisterous and even drunken company.

  While Matthew Flinders earned their admiration and respect, he was never much liked by the men who sailed under him, but Trim received their unequivocal love. His periods of indifference, common among all cats, were always short and the seamen would hear no ill spoken of him even if sometimes he appeared to take their abounding affection for granted.

  Billy was aware that he was using words that might be too complex for the boy but as this was only an early draft he would correct it later. The thing was to get the sequence down correctly. And so he continued . . .

  The fact that, like most cats, Trim dozed roughly eighteen hours a day seemed to bother none of his admirers. ‘Aye, he does his share o’ graft does that one, never shrinks from a task given,’ the bos’n might remark, pointing to Trim asleep in a patch of warm sunlight atop a water cask. ‘I’ll vouch there’s naught of his kind on the seven seas that could take our Trim on at the ratting trade.’ It was a sentiment they all shared. Trim Flinders was fireproof and could do no wrong.

  Despite being constantly indulged, Trim remained a working cat and it was this work ethic that earned the crew’s constant admiration. He was an intrepid hunter and more than earned his reputation as the scourge of the mice and rats which had the temerity to sneak on board at a foreign port of call or, alternatively, the extreme misfortune of being born at sea. Trim saw to it that they had a very short life expectancy.

  While some mice did manage to remain safely hidden in the deepest, darkest holes and crevices the ship could provide, the rats were seldom fortunate enough to find a safe place to live. Trim was a patient and merciless hunter of the genus Rattus, his otherwise generous nature showing them no mercy. Should he come upon a rat’s droppings or sniff its urine, he would remain concealed in the area for as long as two days and nights without taking food or water until the miscreant rodent was driven by hunger from its hiding place and straight into the deadly claws and mighty jaws of the great seagoing hunter.

  Trim didn’t always keep his prey and was known to be very generous on occasions. Matthew Flinders could count on finding a dead rat laid neatly on the decking beside his bunk after one of Trim’s prolonged stake-outs. He was reminding his master that he always delivered and was prepared to do his share of the work while at the same time contributing to the ship’s larder.

  Although Trim was prepared to accept the occasional handout from the cook, he would seldom partake of a seaman’s vittles. Trim ate at the officers’ table, always being the first to meals. He neither meowed nor made a fuss but expected to partake of the fare on an equal footing with the other officers. Nor did he hang around the chair legs, brushing against the officers’ boots and begging for scraps as might any other cat. Instead, he began each meal with his paws together and his tail neatly curled, sitting upright upon the table directly to the left of his master.

  By tradition, though no one could remember when it had originally come about, the first forkful off the master’s plate belonged to Trim. Matthew Flinders would solemnly cut a morsel of meat to the required size and hold it out on the end of his fork. Trim, with a great delicacy of technique and good manners, would then remove it from the tines, never touching the fork. He would remain seated and proceed to masticate, cleaning his paws and licking his chops. Moving left, in imitation of the port decanter, which would make the same journey at the conclusion of the meal, he would then seat himself to the left of the first officer and wait to receive a similar offering at the end of his fork. This process was repeated around the table until Trim found himself once again seated beside the ship’s captain, though this time to the right. Nor was he a glutton. Having completed the round and in the process received a square meal, Trim would never embark on a second helping, no matter how tasty the mutton or salted beef. Trim thought himself an equal in any man’s company and felt no need to be grateful for this repast. He was sufficiently arrogant to know that he could fend for himself and catch his own grub. He refused to be under an obligation to anyone for his vittles.

  Billy was again conscious that a word like ‘vittles’ was probably beyond the boy but he was beginning to enjoy the story he was telling and was loath to stop for corrections.

  A larrikin among the seamen and a gentleman among the officers was Trim Flinders, a cat admired and respected by all and about whom the opinion was often enough expressed by both officers and crew that he would have made an ideal ship’s captain had he not had the misfortune of being born a cat.

  In any case, Trim did not perceive his feline nature as a misfortune, nor was it likely to prohibit the vocation of ship’s master, which he regarded as his right, and he behaved accordingly. He ran the ship with an iron paw, and many an errant seagull, thinking it might perch on the ship’s rail or stroll along the deck on the lookout for a free feed, soon departed with a loud flapping and shrill squawking in a cloud of floating pin feathers.

  It was Trim’s custom to inspect the ship thrice each day. In the morning after breakfast, at precisely seven bells, he would inspect the hammocks to see that they were piped up and the between decks washed and swept. He kept to his master’s instructions that the Investigator was consecrated to science, where slovenly methods and careless observation were the great enemy. At noon and again after the evening meal, he would patrol the main deck to ensure that the ropes were belayed and coiled fair and the sails trimmed to perfection with no possible afterthought of lifts, braces and backstays.

  It was Trim’s custom to perform a small concert to benefit the men after the evening inspection. For this entertainment he would choose a cockroach. There was always some fool cockroach which neglected to look twice over its varnished shoulders before venturing from its dark cracks and crannies onto a moonlit deck. Trim would pounce upon it and play with it in much the same way a boy might perform tricks with a football on the front lawn. He would juggle the cockroach with his paws while standing upright, throw it high into the air and catch it in his mouth, flick it left or right a dozen times in a blur of pawmanship or send it skating several yards across the deck. Whereupon the dazed and disoriented cockroach, thinking it had made good its escape, would attempt to scurry away. Watching it out of the corner of his eye, apparently bored with the cat-and-roach game, Trim would allow it to think it had escaped his beady eye. Then, with a sudden electrifying burst of speed, he would perform a series of paw springs and somersaults and come to land with his front paw neatly pinning the hapless insect to the deck.

  The seamen, taking the evening breeze while smoking a tobacco pipe, would applaud loudly and consider themselves greatly privileged to be members of the audience in this one-cat show. Later, swinging in their hammocks in the darkness of the fo’c’sle, they would regale their shipmates with a blow-by-blow description of the evening’s performance where the mighty Trim Flinders got the better of Speedy Gonzales, the dastardly Mexican cockroach.

  While cockroaches and seagulls might be considered amusing to Trim, not so rats and mice. Trim ran a strictly rodent-free regime, retaining only a few rats and a handful of mice for purposes which will be explained at a later time. Those small whiskered creatures who formed the vermin community and, by virtue of cunning and good luck, managed to survive, lived for the day the ship would reach dry land. It was an accepted part of the ship’s lore that when the vessel commanded by Captain Trim Flinders came into port, any rats and mice that had somehow survived the voyage would pack their bags in the dead of night and tiptoe across the deck down the gangplank to seek a berth on another ship under the command of a less ferocious cat.

  If Trim was in a playful mood, which was quite often, he’d jump over a sailor’s extended arm or perform all manner of tricks taught to him as a kitten. He could do somersaults and backflips, fly through a small hoop held high above a sailor’s head, climb up anything, cling to a fiercely flapping s
ail in a breeze that would rip the canvas from a seaman’s grasp, and balance majestically on a most precarious perch or atop a mast that swung through thirty degrees in a stiff ocean breeze.

  There was one trick in which every man on board hoped he might at some time participate. Perhaps not really a trick, for in Trim’s mind it was clearly not intended to amuse or entertain. It was a manoeuvre entirely of Trim’s own invention and it only ever took place if the ship was entering a harbour preparatory to docking or putting down anchor.

  With not so much as a by your leave, Trim would leap onto the back of a sailor’s neck. His front paws, claws sheathed, would grip about the seaman’s forehead while his rear end placed itself squarely at the base of the sailor’s neck, which was flanked on either side by the hind legs to form a furry black collar, with their white tips forming a snowy clasp over the sailor’s Adam’s apple.

  With his ears fully foxed, and his head held well above that of his human perch, Trim would observe the approaching landfall or quay and immediately commence to issue a series of meowing instructions. With his tail flicking to indicate port or starboard, Trim Flinders guided the ship to a safe berthing or anchorage.

  The crew agreed among themselves that Trim Flinders was a very practical seaman. They would point out that he could as easily have found a sufficiently convenient lookout amongst the rigging but that this would have prohibited them from hearing his instructions or observing his tail. Like any good ship’s master, he preferred to remain among the men. This, they insisted, was an indication that he thought of himself as one of the crew, albeit always their superior.

  Bringing the ship alongside was clearly a procedure Trim was convinced could not be achieved without his personal supervision. His frequent meowing and tailed instructions would persist until the vessel was safely moored and the gangplank about to be lowered. At this point, with a rope secured to a bollard on shore, he would leap from the shoulders of his moving platform and make a dash for the foredeck where he would hop onto the ship’s rail and immediately place a front paw on one of the ship’s hawsers. With the grace and confidence of a seasoned tightrope-walker, he’d run along the rope spanning the gap between ship and shore so as to be the first to put a foot on dry land.