by Deb Hunt
I’d been giving the house a decent clean before I moved out and the flimsy bedroom curtain kept getting sucked into the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner, so I did what anyone would have done. I looped the curtain over a floor lamp. What I didn’t appreciate was that the lamp faced upwards, exposing the halogen bulb. Halogen bulbs get very hot. Exceptionally hot. I went downstairs to mop the floors and forgot about the curtain until I smelt smoke. I raced back up to the bedroom and found a sheet of flame about to set fire to the window. I acted swiftly and decisively. First I tried beating the flames out with my shoe but that sent burning embers flying around the room, setting off smaller fires on the expensive-looking rug. So I raced downstairs, grabbed the bucket of water I’d been using to mop the floors, ran back up and threw it at the window, then stamped on the burning embers to limit the scorch marks. It’s fair to say it left a bit of a mess.
Like my life really.
*
So there I was, installed in a large house overlooking the beach in one of the most desirable suburbs of Sydney, pouring over six pages of closely typed notes on how to look after two cats and a dog. It was a dream house, I was lucky beyond words and I should have been grateful – I was grateful – but it felt unexpectedly lonely to step into someone else’s life and pick up on their daily routine, surrounded by family photographs and mementos of important events that mattered to other people, not to me. I missed CC. A mood of despondency settled like mist hovering on the Yorkshire moors in winter.
I turned to the animals, hoping for solace. Casper, the terrier-type with a shaggy pale coat and black button nose, was an elderly good-natured sloth. He ignored a lead shaken enthusiastically in front of his face, closed his eyes at the word ‘walkies’ and wasn’t remotely interested in chasing a ball. Open a packet of biscuits and it was another story. When that happened, Casper was instantly by my side, tail wagging, tongue lolling out of his mouth. Without the prospect of food Casper was content to slump on my lap, snoring loudly. I liked Casper.
Itsy Bitsy was something else. A coal black Siamese shadow of uncertainty, she hugged the walls and avoided all contact, slinking behind the sofa, mistrusting any attempts at friendship. She would take some coaxing. Then there was Tania, the pink Persian Princess with baby blue eyes who looked like she had recently climbed out of bed and was disappointed to find no one willing to comb her hair. The world was fortunate to be graced with Princess Tania’s presence.
On the first night, I encouraged Casper into the laundry with soothing words of welcome. According to the notes, he was meant to sleep in the laundry with Itsy Bitsy. I thought it seemed odd to shut a cat and dog into a small room together for several hours each night, but that’s what the notes said so that’s what I did. I was taking my responsibilities seriously. Casper eventually succumbed to a treat left in his basket but Itsy Bitsy looked at me as if to say, ‘The laundry? I don’t think so.’ She stalked away, tail swishing, her body language suggesting this was the first she had ever heard of sleeping in the laundry and she wasn’t best pleased with the idea. I double-checked the notes. Itsy Bitsy must be shut into the laundry each night with Casper. He was already there, lying docile in his bed next to the washing machine, so I soothed and stroked the Siamese in an effort to allay her fears. ‘There, there, little kitty, it’s all right Itsy Bitsy, time for bed.’ She bit me.
I wrenched my hand out of her mouth, mopped up the blood, dabbed tea-tree oil onto my swelling finger (well, it worked in Bali) and tried again, this time coaxing her into the laundry with morsels of fresh meat, dangled just out of reach. The smell of raw flesh did the trick and the vicious beast was soon locked up for the night. Sorry, Itsy Bitsy was soon safely ensconced in her cosy bed in the laundry.
That just left the Queen of the Fairies. According to the notes, Tania was allowed to go anywhere; she had the run of the house, any time of the day or night, which included sleeping on the owners’ bed. Not under my watch, it didn’t. I checked that the various litter trays were clean and accessible, positioned one immediately outside the bedroom door and left her to roam.
Battlelines were drawn the next morning when I opened the bedroom door and found a stinking swirl of cat shit sinking into what looked like a horribly expensive floor runner. The litter trays Tania could have used, including the one I considerately placed right outside the bedroom door, were untouched. I stepped over the stinking pile, opened the laundry door and Itsy Bitsy shot past, leaving behind the acrid smell of cat piss mixed with old wool and wet dog. Casper was lying in his bed, no doubt waiting patiently for the sound of a packet to be opened, and I knelt down to sniff his coat. The stench had me scrabbling to my feet. At some point during that long night Itsy Bitsy must have peed on Casper and he and his bedding now stank of cat piss. When he did finally rouse himself, Casper reacted to this indignity by trotting into the lounge room and crapping on another expensive carpet. I reached for the disinfectant. It was a mistake to turn my back because while I was cleaning up the mess, Tania sneaked into the bedroom, peed on the mat in the ensuite bathroom and squatted beside the litter tray – not in it – to deposit another evil-smelling mess on the tiled floor. She skipped away as I approached, innocent of all wrongdoing.
The house was like a war zone, with stink bombs the main weapon. If I’d dragged a doggy bin into the corridor and upended it there would have been less mess, and at least then the shit would have been in those neat little plastic bags. I tried not to panic and spent the day frantically washing the dog, hosing down the laundry, spot-cleaning the carpet, swabbing the floors and disinfecting dog blankets. Itsy Bitsy was sprawled on the floor in the lounge room, watching me from a distance. She stared malevolently through the narrowest slit in one eye, a splinter of black running down the centre of her green iris like a dribble of blood.
As the day wore on I brushed Casper, combed Tania, avoided Itsy Bitsy, emptied all the litter trays, fed the cats, failed to coax Casper into taking the walk he was meant to have every day and shuddered at the thought of the amount of excrement three animals might deposit on the owners’ expensive carpets over the next two months. I also discovered Princess Tania had a delicate stomach. Judging by the size of the fur ball she coughed up that afternoon I assumed she must have been saving it for weeks. Wrong. She could part her miniature teeth, give a delicate cough and produce a slimy fur ball at will. It was her party piece, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat (although in her case the rabbit was slippery with mucus and smelt of undigested cat food). Given the amount of hair Princess had, and her propensity to groom herself in a desultory sort of way like a sulky teenager checking for split ends, I had a feeling there would be a lot of fur balls.
I made a mental note to buy rubber gloves and more disinfectant the next time I went shopping.
I woke up on Monday morning and consoled myself with the thought that I had free lodging for the next two months as well as a tranquil spot in which to write the bestselling novel Metro Mike had spoken about (although admittedly he had never actually used the words ‘bestseller’ – or even ‘novel’ come to that – which means he could have been talking about marketing brochures). I’d been trying to write a book for a couple of years, scribbling notes about the life of a courageous woman in her mid-sixties who overcame huge obstacles to create a new life for herself in France. Her determination to follow her dream had been a source of constant inspiration for me. I lay in that sweet spot between sleep and wakefulness and let my mind wander back to the last time we had met.
The dream-like state I drifted into was interrupted, not by the alarm clock, but by the reason Miriam and Jack went away for two months. At seven o’clock on the dot the building next door exploded into life. The terrifying screeching sound gathered pace and volume until there was a veritable Dickensian symphony of wrenching, grasping, creaking, scratching, grinding, hammering, sawing and sanding rage that shattered the peace and quiet of my secluded house-sit haven.
; Legions of sparkies, brickies, carpenters, tilers and labourers had descended and they all seemed to be at work simultaneously. They had to shout to make themselves heard above the constant thump of music (played at high volume so they could hear it above the shouting) and when the floor sander, jigsaw and jackhammer joined in they were forced to shout all the louder. The thudding bassline that accompanied the music was a machine that slammed outdoor pavers into place and the treble was a concrete saw. Not surprisingly, there was no one living in the half-finished house emerging out of the ground on the adjacent plot – a house I had failed to notice and which the owners had failed to mention during the interview (which, now I remember, took place on a Sunday), so the builders had free reign to make as much noise as they liked.
I found the quietest spot in the house and sat down to concentrate on writing copy for the next Flying Doctor newsletter. Casper fell asleep at my feet, snoring like a drunken Falstaff. So much for the peaceful stint in Santorini.
When I couldn’t stand the noise any longer I walked the streets of Coogee with Casper, trying to shake off my bad mood. Every second car seemed to be a 4WD or an SUV, most of them with stickers in the back proclaiming there was a baby on board. Were they boasting to make the rest of us who didn’t have children feel inadequate? Were they telling other drivers to take extra care, so if I was driving behind one of those yummy mummies (that’s if I had a car, fat chance) I would see that sign and think, ‘Ah yes, I’d better not crash into that car, there’s a baby on board; I’ll crash into someone else instead.’ Maybe the sign was meant to face the other way, to remind the driver not to leave the baby in the car or to remember to go back and get it from the supermarket.
Baby on board. Bun in the oven. Up the duff. The signs irritated me beyond belief and I wanted to shout at the smug-looking drivers. ‘I was fertile and fecund once too, you know!’
If ever I was, it was a long time ago. There was no point regretting what might have been; I hadn’t been mature enough to handle relationships so what hope would I have had as a mother? The thought that I could probably add CC to the list of failed relationships made me jam my hands into my pockets and dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands to stop the tears that could so easily have fallen. I trudged back to the house, dragging the recalcitrant Casper behind me.
Noise levels dropped at lunchtime and the radio jingles were interspersed with snatches of conversation.
‘Haven’t seen Mick around for a while.’
‘Nah, he’s taken a couple weeks off. His missus just had a baby.’
‘Good man.’
‘Yeah but she’s got a problem with her utopian tubes. They reckon she’s suffering from post-natal dementia.’
Poor woman. Fertile and fecund she may have been but utopian dementia beckoned.
*
My nephew Tom arrived from England, for what would probably be his one and only visit to Australia. Instead of the exciting Sydney experience he was hoping for, he found himself sharing a house with three incontinent animals and an irascible aunt who was growing more like Itsy Bitsy by the day. From a long-term single to head of a household of five souls, it felt like I was trying on family life for size, seeing how it fitted. I wasn’t sure it did.
And CC still hadn’t called.
By the end of the second week Casper wouldn’t stop scratching. Tom rolled him over to see if his skin was inflamed and we found a large lump. Cancer? A boil? A tick? I checked the closely typed pages of notes and learnt ticks could kill dogs. They’re often found in the nature strip at the end of the street. Hang on, though, that was where they told me Casper liked to walk (on the rare occasions he could be persuaded to go for a walk). Half an hour before the vet closed for the night, we were waiting anxiously to be seen, the snorting, scratching Casper lying at my feet.
‘Fleas,’ the vet said. ‘This animal has fleas, and a bad case of them too.’
‘There are cats in the house,’ I said. ‘Will they have fleas too?’
The vet laughed. ‘That’s probably where he got them from,’ he said.
We went back to the house to check and it was true: the cats were riddled with microscopic black specks that leapt into the air as soon as they were exposed.
We treated Crapper, Witchy and the Pissy Princess (sorry, Casper, Itsy Bitsy and Tania) for fleas and a frenzy of washing followed. Ever since Tania’s tantrum on the first night, she had slept on the bed (the nightly consequence of shutting her out was too gruesome) so everything had to be flung in the wash: doonas, doona covers, pillows, pillowcases, clothes, dog blankets, cat beds. Only when the washing line was full of flapping sheets did I think to google, ‘how to rid a house of fleas’. Washing wouldn’t kill them, apparently. Several cans of flea spray later I read the warning on the side of the can: ‘May cause an allergic reaction.’ The round of washing started again.
By week three I was a bag of nerves. Close scrutiny of the notes revealed nothing about fleas or flea treatment but it did reveal that Tania was on no account to go out unaccompanied. What is it about words underlined in bold print? The thick black type is meant to make you sit up and take notice but that’s the bit I always skip. Tom had been retrieving Tania for the past week, thinking she’d escaped, whereas I had simply been letting her out, unaccompanied. I was suddenly terrified she would go missing. But how are you meant to accompany a cat that can leap tall fences, squeeze under gates, run faster than an Olympic sprinter and disappear in the time it takes to trip over a fur ball?
I compromised and accompanied Tania as far as the patio, then I watched her disappear, hoping she would come back. There was no point keeping the doors and windows shut because according to the notes, Itsy Bitsy had to be allowed out, whenever she wanted. That was normally via the laundry door and she couldn’t possibly come back in the same way (something to do with not retracing her steps – some secret Witchy black cat business no doubt), so each time she was let out she would walk to the other side of the house and bang on the screen door to be let back in. She performed that exact manoeuvre at least a dozen times every day, and a dozen times a day I got up to let her in.
One day I got tired of the whole business so I let her bang on the screen door for a while without responding. Before long there was a different noise. I got up to check and there was the silhouette of Itsy Bitsy, halfway up the screen door, legs splayed out like a cartoon cat, claws gripping the mesh like a lizard. Having successfully scaled the screen door, she was trying to push the handle with her front paw to open it, which was an extremely clever trick and made me even more convinced she was a witch.
My stress levels rose to match the decibels being produced next door.
The evidence of fleas led to Tania’s renewed banishment from the bedroom and once again the Persian Princess exacted the usual punishment, refusing to use any of her litter trays. What is it about cat shit? Unlike dog shit, which seems designed to be easily disposed of, the mess cats excrete has a different consistency, especially when deposited on a shag-pile carpet. I scraped up the mess, spot cleaned the carpet and covered the entire corridor in newspaper. That worked until I went out one morning and forgot to close the bedroom door. Not only did Tania sleep on the bed while I was gone – the long strands of Persian Princess hair were unmistakeable – she also peed on it. There were four perfectly clean litter trays scattered about the house and Tania left a stinking yellow stain of such magnitude that it soaked right through the doona as well as the top and bottom sheets. CC would have been horrified. He would have booted the cat out of the bedroom and then sent the owners an email suggesting their cat had met with a mysterious accident, and we would have had a good laugh about it. But CC wasn’t there. In all likelihood he was courting someone else by now. Courting. What an old-fashioned word. I had never used that word about a lover or a boyfriend before but looking back, I realised that’s what it had been. I had been courted by CC, and I missed him. I
pulled the bedding off and jammed it into the washing machine.
The final straw was when funny, fat lazybones Casper, the friendly companion whose tiny head and warm body were designed to rest comfortably on a lap like a stuffed pyjama case, decided he’d had enough of being dragged outside for a walk and took to crapping behind the sofa. The whole house was beginning to resemble a giant toilet.
Tom decided to go back to England and I couldn’t blame him. For a young lad in his early twenties he was surprisingly mature. He didn’t get too worked up about life and he knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want. He certainly didn’t want to be living with his aunt in an oversized toilet, that’s for sure.
chapter twenty-two
Something about the light filtering through the vertical blinds made me want to stay in bed. In England I could wake up and know instantly if snow had fallen outside; it was something about the translucency, a kind of hushed, expectant silence and a thicker than normal atmosphere. Pulling back the curtains on a snowy morning would reveal a blanket of white covering the ground, fullness pressing against the windows. This morning here in Sydney the light wasn’t white. It was orange.
I got out of bed and lifted the blinds. A thick haze of orange fog hung in the streets. The sun looked like the circle on a Japanese flag. An eerie orange glow pervaded the whole house and my first thought was bushfire, but there was no smell of burning, besides which late September wasn’t bushfire season. I fed the animals, cleaned up the nightly mess and switched on the radio.
‘Those with asthma and heart conditions are being warned to stay indoors. Flights in and out of Sydney airport have been cancelled and all ferries have stopped running.’
