by Frank Kusy
‘Bad move,’ thought Ginger, and spat and hissed and cursed until he was let down again. Then, without further ado, he retreated backwards to the other end of the kitchen.
‘Nice friends you have, Sparky,’ said a disappointed Joe. ‘And why is he walking backwards?’
‘Please make an effort!’ Sparky whispered across to Ginger. ‘He’s only trying to be friendly!’
‘Yeah right,’ growled back Ginger. ‘Next thing I know, he’ll be blah-blahing at me all day and makin’ me watch bad spaghetti westerns.’
‘Look, you helped me, and I’m trying to help you. It’s only a week, after all, and then you’ll be back in paella-land.’
Ginger sat at the back of the kitchen – fat, scruffy and disgruntled – and only came forward again when Joe reached inside his fridge and produced a bag of fresh prawns.
‘Ow did he know?’ thought Ginger wonderingly. ‘I’m a sucker for fresh prawns! He’s an evil genius, he is! But he’s only gonna give me one - two at best. Then he’s goin’ to put ‘em back in the fridge. How am I gonna get ‘em all?’
Joe didn’t know what hit him. He was just reaching down to tempt Ginger with a shiny pink prawn when a bright orange fireball leapt at his chest, grabbed the whole pack, and shot out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He was eventually located under Joe’s Buddhist altar, gobbling down every single prawn and growling to himself with selfish pleasure.
Fortunately for him, Joe was very superstitious. Had Ginger chosen anywhere else in the house to indulge his gluttony, he would have been out on his ear. But under a Buddhist altar? Little did he know, but Joe was quite crazy. He had long been convinced that Sparky was the reincarnation of his dear departed mother – a loving and good-natured soul who had died shortly before Sparky arrived. And now, by a similar crazy association (which had a lot to do with an overpowering passion for prawns) Joe decided that Ginger must be the reincarnation of his bad-tempered, food-mad, and emotionally damaged step-father Bert. He had never understood how his mother and Bert had lived together, let alone loved each other, but here they were again – he mused – two polar opposites, Sparky and Ginger, who just happened to be best friends.
‘It’s not his fault he’s a mad, greedy piglet,’ Joe told himself. ‘He’s just spent too long in the wild and doesn’t know who he can trust. And if Sparky likes him, well, he can’t be all bad – can he?’
But Joe was wrong. Ginger was all bad. He sat under the Buddhist altar all day, digesting his prawns, and then – simply because he felt like it – he came out and peed on the carpet.
‘You can’t do that!’ said a worried Sparky, as Joe let out a howl of protest. ‘Why don’t you share my litter tray – that’s what all good cats do!’
‘No way,’ retorted Ginger stiffly. ‘I’m not sitting in your poo. And talking of poo, I feel a big ‘un coming on, so he better let me outside – that stoopid ooman of yours – or I’ll be dumpin’ in his slippers.’
Sparky guided Joe to the garden door and uttered a shrill plaintive prrrrrp! It was his way of getting Joe to do anything he wanted. Seconds later, master and baby cat gazed on as Ginger scratched around on the newly-mown lawn round the back and laid a large sausage – as big as the one he had just brought back from Barcelona – right in the middle.
And all the time he was exerting himself, he was staring off into space as though it had nothing at all to do with him.
Sparky was appalled. So was Joe. His nice neat lawn was scratched and pooped on, and he only had minutes to sort it out before his wife returned from work. So he dashed inside, returned with some rubber gloves and a trowel, and furiously removed all evidence of Ginger’s ‘deposit’.
Madge’s key turned in the lock the moment the offending sausage, now safely bagged up and odourless, dropped into Joe’s bin.
‘What kind of a day have you had, darling?’ she enquired casually, and he said, ‘Well, Sparky’s found a new friend!’
‘What kind of new friend?’
‘A big fat orange one. Look, there he is out on the lawn, sniffing your rose bush.’
‘Sniffing it?’ howled Madge. ‘He’s eating it! That’s Dawn, my favourite rose bush, and he’s just chomped down all her blossoms!’
Ginger, hearing the commotion, stopped in his tracks and thought, ‘Whoops. That must be the uvver ooman, the mad female one, and she don’t look too happy.’ So he threw up the rose blossoms, with a series of loud burps, and sat there waiting to be forgiven.
‘He’s not staying with us,’ said Madge with finality. ‘He’s got to go.’
‘But you’re always saying Sparky needs a friend!’ protested Joe. ‘He’s bored, you said, of toy mice and jingly little balls and could do with a proper playmate.’
‘Yes, but not this guy. He’s the spawn of Satan. See the way he’s staring at me? If looks could kill, I’d be dead right now!’
Joe gave an involuntary shudder. He knew that black look. He didn’t know where from exactly, but it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
Before he could say anything however, Sparky leapt to the defence of his new friend. ‘Look,’ he told Ginger urgently, ‘I know that you’re a master world-traveller – whatever “the world” is – but this is my world. So if you want me to come to Barcelona with you, you’re going to have to behave yourself. First rule: roll over on your back and look cute. Second rule: don’t upset my missus. She upsets really easily.’
Ginger gave a low sigh of resignation and rolled unhappily onto his back. He shot the female ooman a look of tired affection, and then licked the naked rose bush in a gesture of belated apology.
‘See, I told you!’ said Joe, secretly relieved. ‘He’s a good cat after all!’
Madge shrugged and went back in the house. ‘It’s your call,’ she warned darkly. ‘But I’m telling you, you’re making a big mistake...’
Later on, as all four of them gathered for evening relaxation in front of the 42-inch flat-screen TV, Sparky sat curled up on Joe’s lap, heating up the fracture in his left leg, and Madge sat next to them, eyeing Ginger who sat bang in front of the screen looking miserable.
‘Hmmm,’ said Madge, ‘I’m trying to watch an educational film about juggling Romanian dwarves, and all that ginger monster wants to do is block my view and stare at me accusingly. What does he want?’
What Ginger wanted was to have his feet massaged. It was the only thing he had found oomans useful for. He waited until Sparky had overheated Joe’s damaged leg and had been transferred to Madge, and then he trotted forward, dumped himself on Joe’s lap, and stuck one of his paws in the air.
‘Good lord!’ exclaimed Joe as he found himself massaging the offered paw. ‘He’s actually purring !’
‘Rather you than me,’ sniffed Madge dismissively. ‘Try touching him anywhere else and he just walks away backwards again.’
‘Did you see him in the bath earlier?’
‘I certainly did. That’s the only other place he seems happy – sticking his head under the tap and sucking in the dribble of water coming out of it. All that time in the wild, he must be used to only drinking from drain-pipes.’
That wasn’t quite the only place he seemed happy, thought Madge as she went to bed. He also liked following her into the toilet and purring under the bowl while she had a wee.
Chapter 3
Bloomin’ Oomans
That night, curled up under Joe’s Buddhist altar, and safe from probing ooman hands, Ginger lay wide awake.
He was suffering from a rare form of cat insomnia which made him afraid to go to sleep. He couldn’t explain it – he hadn’t bothered to either – but ever since he had moved in with Sparky, he was on full alert. All sorts of things were now swirling through his mind: losing Sparky, not making it to Barcelona, being banged up in a dark Victorian cell, dying of an empty tummy, the list just went on.
And it was getting worse. Now, he was convinced he was going blind. But only i
n the left eye, which he could not stop scratching. And who were those sixteen other cats who kept invading his thoughts? He wanted to scratch them too.
Ginger didn’t like it, but with a long night ahead and nothing better to do, his eyes were starting to droop. And suddenly, without realising it, he was back in the land of Nod again, dreaming the dream he had tried to forget. And on this occasion, with crystal clarity, he recalled all eight of his previous lives upon this earth. From the very first one, where he had been worshipped as a (rather fat) god in ancient Egypt, through to his time as an (even fatter) lion in the arenas of Caesar’s Rome, and then to his unfortunate blinding when a witches’ ‘familiar’ in Protestant England. He had been too fat this time to escape the Inquisitors, and all sixteen of them had judged him guilty. His fourth life, he had been drowned at birth, and in the fifth, left to starve as the runt of a litter. Only in his sixth did he recover the use of one eye, though little good it did him, since he was surprised by an eagle on the arid plains of India and eaten alive. His seventh life, he had spent on a pirate ship – a galley-cat with an eye-patch, a wooden leg, and a strange fear of parrots. He had sailed the seven seas, and stolen his weight in gold, but then the rum had claimed him and he was lost overboard.
So at last he had glimpsed his eighth, and most recent, lifetime – in the seedy cut-throat backstreets of Dickens’s London.
And oh dear, it wasn’t rum that had ruined things this time – or even Rafe or Rufus.
It was Ralph.
Yes, he finally had the name.
And as the dream progressed, as this past life melded into the present one, Ralph was no longer legging it to the cop-shop to grass him up.
Ralph was in fact no longer a small kitten, but a long hippyish ooman - complete with a tattered old head scarf, a pair of thick round glasses, and a busted left leg.
Worst of all, he was little Sparky’s ooman and Ginger could not take his revenge. He wanted to (oh, did he want to) but even as he yawned and slowly awoke, he knew that would be stupid. He was this close to gaining Sparky’s trust – his meal ticket to Barcelona – and too much was at stake to rock the boat just yet.
Ginger looked around. This particular dream he remembered quite clearly, but nobody else could suspect.
*
In the next room, by a strange coincidence, Joe was having a dream of his own.
Unable to move, he was looking up at the dark pines.
He had been lost for days and his leg was hurting.
Something was chasing him – something large and orange.
A wood-mouse scurried past, but he was too weak to chase it.
As darkness fell, he knew he would never see home again and closed his eyes for the very last time.
Not long after, a fox came along and took advantage of a dead cat for a free meal.
But Ralph wasn’t dead for long.
He was coming back.
And not as a cat.
*
Joe awoke with a start. Who was Ralph? And what was he was running away from? Most mysterious of all, why did he have one name in mind as he departed this world? Alice.
Joe put a lot of store by dreams. He had a ‘Dictionary for Dreamers’ which he had borrowed from a university bookshop 20 years before and never returned. He had meant to, he really had, but he had never got round to it.
He looked up ‘cats’ and then ‘fox’ and then ‘lost in woods’, but came away none the wiser. All the book suggested was that he had a mysterious fear of foxes. Either that, or he had once been a cat – in a previous existence – and he hadn’t liked it.
But it was not just dreams that fascinated Joe. He saw meaning in everything. In the buses he kept missing (bad bus karma), in the pointless life he was leading (bad reincarnation karma), and in the cats he kept losing and finding (bad and good cat karma).
He even saw meaning in the leg he had just broken. It was fate’s way of telling him not to work anymore, he believed, and to spend his whole day on a futon watching endless re-runs of Star Trek. In fact, until Sparky came along, he had lost all interest in life.
And now there was Ginger – the cat who obviously hated him, but who gave up his feet each evening for a massage. As soon as he had seen Ginger’s ‘black’ look, he had stopped waiting to die. He felt pretty sure that Ginger would have ‘helped’ him along. There was something familiar about Ginger – very familiar – and though he had given him the benefit of the doubt earlier, his dream had changed everything.
Now, he did not trust him one inch.
*
Someone else who did not trust Ginger one inch was Madge, who had just returned from an aerobics class.
In her mind, Ginger was evil, pure evil. And Madge gave the benefit of the doubt to no-one. She only ever saw things in black and white, and was fond of shouting: ‘Shut that door!’ and ‘close that window!’ at total strangers.
When things were particularly black, to Joe’s amusement, she lapsed into hysterics. The smallest things triggered her off – mainly loud noises and salivating people. Loud, salivating people were the most annoying of all.
‘I was changing in the gym earlier,’ she informed him, ‘and these girls were going thwack! thwack! as they kept slamming the door, and they were chewing gum at the same time, which really got on my nerves. But what really got on my nerves was the girl at reception, who kept announcing over the tannoy: “We’re closing now...the gym’s closing in 10 minutes now...the gym’s closing in 5 minutes now...the facilities are closing in 2 minutes now... it was like a blasted countdown! I felt like saying to her: “Someone needs to get home really urgently, don’t they? I mean, we’re not in a military school, are we? It’s exactly what my father subjected me to – time pressure. I hate it!’
‘Time pressure?’
‘Yes,’ Madge muttered darkly. ‘All this makes me very aggressive!’
Joe briefly considered, and then put aside his kebab – which he was just about to salivate over.
‘Look!’ he beamed proudly. ‘I’m not breathing!’
*
Later on that morning, Joe and Ginger confronted each other on the landing.
Ginger sat high up on a pile of freshly-ironed laundry, and as he squinted owlishly at Joe through his good right eye, his ooman nemesis – half-blinded by a recent laser operation - squinted owlishly back at him through his left. Rocked by recent revelations, these two would never see eye to eye again.
And as they heard Madge calling up ‘Lunch!’ from the kitchen, and the lengthy Mexican stand-off was finally broken, the partially-sighted pair were thinking the same thing: ‘I know who you are, but do you know that I know?’
The big difference was, Joe only thought he knew.
Ginger was positive.
Chapter 4
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Ginger
The next day, after months of rain and dreary skies, the sun shone brightly and spring finally arrived. Madge flung open both garden doors and swarms of insect wildlife promptly invaded the breakfast room.
‘Oh look, there’s an ant-nest right by your feet!’ she told Joe happily, and a cool breeze ushered in a large, inquisitive bee. Along with a couple of lost beetles and a cloud of newly-born flies. Sparky’s eyes flitted back and forth, nervously surveying both the bee and the vast expanse of sprawling lawn full of creepy-crawly things. He waited until Joe began poking a gigantic spider with a stick, and then he fled upstairs to hide.
Where was Ginger, he wondered? He had last seen him in the kitchen, scouring the floor for stray prawns. And why wasn’t he out in the garden, when it was such an obvious field-day for crunchy little bugs and insects?
The truth of it was, Ginger had repeated Sparky’s trick and got himself lost. He had wandered out the front door behind Joe, as the ever-restless ooman nipped out to check his van battery, and them – since nobody had actually seen him vacate the house – he had been locked out and found himself abandoned in a
street full of roaring cars and traffic.
‘Ginger’s gone,’ said Joe three hours later. ‘I can’t find him anywhere...’
‘Good riddance too,’ mumbled Madge, nursing a big angry scratch on the back of her ankle. ‘That nutter came at me out of nowhere this morning, and tore a lump out of my leg!’
‘He must have thought it was mine,’ suggested Joe. ‘He hates me.’
‘Yes well, I chased him downstairs with one of your crutches, and poked at him with it under your bed.’
‘You did what?’
‘I have to hand it to the old grump,’ said Madge with a hint of admiration. ‘He didn’t show any fear at all – just batted away at the end of the crutch with both front paws and began fighting it.’
‘Well, that explains it,’ said Joe. ‘No wonder he’s gone!’
‘And he’s not coming back,’ concluded Madge. ‘He eats his weight in food, he takes up half the futon, he even gets his ruddy toes massaged. And what does he give back? Nothing! He’s so spiky and unresponsive, unlike our sweet little Sparky who follows us everywhere. I’m glad he’s gone. He was a real downer.’
As night drew in, and Madge retired to bed, she had occasion to eat her words. There was a strange little tip-tapping sound above her head, suggestive of a small animal running back and forth, and she couldn’t go to sleep.
‘Where’s Sparky?’ she demanded crossly, getting out of bed and summoning Joe to her side. ‘Here, hold this ladder, I’m going to shove him up into the attic and let him kill whatever’s up there!’
Sparky was urgently prrrrp-ing by the front door, waiting for his humans to go out and look for Ginger, when he was rudely plucked into the air and thrust into a cold dark loft. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he knew he was not alone. There was something up there with him – something small and just as scared as he was.
‘Hello!’ he called out in the gloom. ‘My name’s Sparky – what’s yours?’
A thin, concerned squeak echoed back from the farthest corner of the attic. It was Mister Rat, a sneaky little baby one, and although he didn’t understand cat-speak he knew from the friendly tone that it wasn’t dangerous. So he came out of his hidey-hole – very slowly, with a nasty glint in his yellow eyes – and presented himself.
