by Frank Kusy
And in a fit of pique, she picked up the toad, tossed it over the fence, and stormed back into the house.
Sparky stared bemused at the empty piece of grass. ‘That was my toad!’’ he cried piteously. ‘He was my friend, he was, and you’ve just thrown him away!’
Ginger felt bad at framing Sparky, but it had to be done. Not only had he got even with the nasty female ooman – ah, vengeance was sweet – but he had also got rid of that darned toad. He hadn’t liked that toad. Sparky had been getting far too fond of it.
Something else Sparky had been getting far too fond of was chicken roll. The problem had started a few days before, when Joe brought home two packs of the stuff and Madge had used them to teach Sparky a new trick. Bending down slowly, with one slice of chicken roll dangling enticingly from her teeth, she had somehow got the cat to levitate on its back legs – front limbs plastered to its sides like a penguin – and to eat the meat in mid-air.
Since then, Sparky had touched nothing else. He turned his back on even the choicest cat food and preferred to starve rather than eat from his bowl. Joe had tried being patient with him, showing him the empty fridge and telling him that he really must break this nasty habit, but then Sparky had fixed him with such a pitiful stare that he had found himself limping back to Tesco’s to buy more of the stuff.
‘How many slices of chicken roll has he had today?’ Joe had asked Madge, and when she said ‘fifteen’ he’d rolled his eyes and said, ‘that cat has a serious problem.’
Even Ginger was concerned, because now that Sparky had been blamed for his rash attack on Madge, she had closed the fridge door on her ex-favourite pussy and cut him off from his daily ‘fix’ of chicken roll. She didn’t like to do it – it had taken her hours to perfect that wonderful circus trick – but (sigh) he had to learn his lesson.
‘It’s like the Devil’s catnip, that chicken roll!’ marvelled Joe later on. ‘Look, he’s a slave to it! All the signs are there – uncontrollable shivering, restless pacing of the kitchen, and desperate sniffing of the fridge door. I should report you to the RSPCA for hooking him on the stuff!’
‘How was I to know?’ wailed Madge. ‘It’s no mean feat, you know, teaching a cat to eat chicken-roll from your mouth without him scratching your eyes out!’
‘Well, we’ll have to be cruel to be kind. Don’t give him anymore!’
But Sparky without chicken roll was like a cat consigned to Hell. He either faced the wall, staring dismally into the void, or he walked off to sulk in the garden. When all else failed, he sat heavily on Madge’s computer (while she was still using it) and erased a whole day’s work.
It was a long, long week before he came out of his depression. He could not understand why his owners were being so cruel, when he had done nothing to deserve it, and his faith in human-kind sank to zero.
In the end, Ginger couldn’t bear it any longer and came clean. He crept up on Madge, bit her on exactly the same spot as he had before, and then just sat back – eyes closed – to await her retribution.
‘Oh, so it was you, was it?’ Madge shouted at him. ‘I should have known. And all this time we’ve been punishing poor little Sparky!’
‘Don’t be too hard on him, darling,’ said Joe soothingly. ‘Just think – he probably saved Sparky’s life.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Sparky was practically climbing the walls. A few more days and he would have jumped off the roof!’
Madge had to admit he was right, but she wasn’t happy about it. Sparky had been so seriously distressed by his recent experience, he was no longer the same cat. He no longer ran up to greet her when she opened the door, he no longer purred in her arms, he didn’t even wanted to be picked up. He was a pussy in peril.
And so Joe called in a cat counsellor. It was a desperate measure, but it worked. An elderly lady by the name of Edna came around and talked to Sparky for a whole hour. She had no cats of her own – since she lived in a council flat that allowed none – but she did have nineteen toy ones made of rags and wool, and she talked to them all the time. She told Sparky that he was a good boy, that his owners hadn’t meant to make him sad, and that they were deeply sorry. She said that even humans make mistakes, and that they would do anything – short of giving him more chicken roll – to make him happy again.
‘Look,’ she said in the end, ‘they love you more than anything in the world, and if you don’t love them back, they will cry and cry and cry. Besides, who was it who came and found you when you were lost in the woods? Who was it? And where would you be if they hadn’t?’
‘In Barcelona!’ thought Ginger sourly. But even he was impressed by this pretty little speech. And he, more than anyone, wanted the old Sparky back. The new one was downright depressing.
At the end of the hour, Sparky lifted his forlorn head and decided that life was good again. All this time, he had been blaming others when he should have been blaming himself. He knew that his innocence was shot, that he would always have this weakness, but he swore off chicken roll forever. And he forgave those responsible for leading him to it – Joe and Madge – and even Ginger for making him quit.
‘Thank heaven!’ they all rejoiced as Edna finished her trance-like little chat. ‘He’s purring again! Get him his favourite poncho!’
And as Sparky settled back into his warm woolly blanket, and began dribbling contentedly into it, the household breathed a collective sigh of relief. At number 28, Causton Road, all was well once more.
*
Or was it?
Still in the thrall of Edna’s hypnotic drone, Sparky’s paws began to twitch and quiver.
He was falling asleep, and he was starting to dream.
And in this dream he was looking up at the sky, unable to move.
Something bad had happened, and every bone in his body was hurting.
He was lying in the road and – far off in the distance it seemed – some ghostly voice was shouting ‘Alice! Alice!’
‘Who’s Alice?’ he wondered dimly and slowly closed his eyes.
It was an awful dream, more of a nightmare really, and as Sparky’s ‘inner kitten’ kicked in again, he quickly replaced it with dreams of a much more pleasant kind – dreams of his toad.
Chapter 6
The Great Escape
Joe’s leg was getting better. So much so, that he managed to hobble up to the garden shed and retrieve two dusty cat-boxes. The first signs of summer had signalled the first wave of fleas, and both cats were infested with them. Joe knew this because fleas were very partial to Madge, and both her legs were covered in painful bites.
‘You’ve got nothing else to do all day!’ she lectured him. ‘You can at least help me get those cats down to the vets!’
Ginger watched Joe limp back into the house with alarm. He knew a cat box when he saw one, and he knew what generally happened afterwards.
‘Scarper!’’ he alerted a sleepy Sparky. ‘Get out of ‘ere!’
‘What?’ said Sparky with a yawn. ‘I was just dreaming of my toad, and he was telling me all sorts of nice stories!’
‘Blow your toad! They’re takin’ us down the vets!’’
‘What’s a vet?’
‘A vet is some vile ooman wot sticks a cold tube up your bum. I should know, I’ve seen enough of ‘em. And that’s not the worst of it. They’ve got a big needle and shoves it in your neck! I would say it “ain’t ooman”, but it is! They’re the most horrible oomans of all!’
But before they had time to act, Joe had locked them in the back room and dropped them, wildly protesting, into two little cages. Then he swung out into the street, lurching on his bad leg, and took them on a trip to hell. Madge followed on behind, urgently talking to them and telling them what good boys they were.
‘Good boys, my eye!’ Ginger called across to Sparky. ‘She just don’t want a couple of flea-bags in her house! I bloomin’ hate oomans!’
Sparky was terrifie
d. Ginger’s lecture had put the fear of God into him. Six months had passed since his first trip to the vets, when he was just a tiny kitten in need of inoculations, and he had blocked out the event completely. All he knew now was that he was being carried down the road, past screeching cars and lorries, to some kind of torture chamber. And if to confirm this, Joe started singing at him, which sounded like a bagful of cats in pain and sent shivers up and down his spine.
The veterinarian on duty that day was a no-nonsense nurse called Grace, a blonde Australian with a blunt sense of humour.
‘Well, let’s get this little feller out first!’ she gestured at Sparky, ‘He’s so cute, I could just eat him up!’
Sparky crept out of his box with fearful anticipation. Did she really want him for lunch?
No, she had something far worse in mind. Before he had time to blink, she had placed him on a high bench, lifted his perky little tail, and shoved an ice-cold thermometer up his bum.
‘Might as well check him for fever while we’re at it!’ stated Grace cheerfully.
Madge, who was stroking his head to keep him calm, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without warning, a startled Sparky clamped himself onto her ample bosom and tried to climb up it.
The sounds of tearing flesh and wailing cat were hard to separate.
‘Busy little feller, ain’t he?’ grunted Grace carelessly. ‘I guess I shoulda cut his claws first!’
‘You think so?’ howled Madge as blood ran down her chest. ‘I look like the victim of a slasher movie!’
‘It’s not that bad, darling!’ said Joe, desperately dabbing her with antiseptic ointment. ‘The worst is over!’
But it wasn’t. With Sparky safely jabbed and tabbed and stuck back in his box, it was Ginger’s turn.
‘Well, he’s a big ‘un!’ announced Grace with some surprise. ‘How the heck did you get him in that tiny cage?’
What she should have asked was how they were going to get Ginger out of the cage. They tried everything – pleading, cajoling, even tempting him with tasty treats, but he remained defiant at the back of the box. Grace unwisely put her hands inside to pull him out but he just hissed at her and bit two of her fingers.
‘Ow, you crazy, fat toe-rag!’ she shrieked, and lifted the box high in the air to shake him out. But he wasn’t coming. He clung to the side grid like a trapeze artist, swinging heavily back and forth, and he only let go to bounce off the inspection bench. Then he hid behind the weighing scales, swearing like a mad thing.
‘I don’t want a botty probe!’ he spat hysterically at them. ‘If you come any closer, I’m going next door and taking a puppy hostage!’
In the end, of course, he had to succumb. Three large pairs of ooman hands approaching him from different directions left him trussed up in a towelled strait-jacket, with a worming tablet shoved down his throat and something much colder plunged up his nether regions.
‘Cor!’ he announced miserably as they were taken back home again. ‘My bum don’t half hurt. What about yours?’
Sparky did not answer. He had just had the shock of his young life, and did not want to talk about it ever again.
Things went quiet for a while after that.
As spring turned into summer, Sparky and Ginger spent most of their time in the garden, which they had now divided into two strips of territory. Sparky, growing bolder by the day, now controlled the front half of the lawn – where he could bat away small flies, moths and minor flying things – while Ginger took pole position on the top of the garden shed and chased away squirrels, rats and interloping cats. It was a good arrangement, one which required Sparky to kill absolutely nothing and Ginger to indulge his blood-lust to the full. On occasion, because he knew he was supposed to, he brought in a dead rodent or two, which Joe or Madge routinely bagged up and put in the bin. On other occasions, he dragged in something bigger – an annoying pigeon perhaps – just to show he could go the extra mile.
Madge was particularly happy about the pigeons. She had a long-standing feud with Ahmed at number 27, who fancied himself as a latter-day Francis of Assisi. Ever since he’d lost his wife a few years before, he had begun feeding things, particularly birds. He had started his Franciscan mission by feeding the swans down by the Thames – in full view of the sign saying “Do Not Feed the Birds”. When chastised by the council, he had moved closer to home and begun feeding the pigeons under the nearby railway bridge, but the council hadn’t liked this either. They received so many complaints from pooped-on passers-by that they slapped an anti-social behaviour order on him. Since then, he had restricted his Mary Poppins activities to the confines of his own back garden. Every day, squadrons of seagulls, crows, and other fluttering birdlife would now descend on his extension roof – where he flung handfuls of dried bread and biscuits – and their loud piercing shrieks drove poor Madge crazy.
‘It’s like a scene from The Birds!’ she complained bitterly. ‘There’s so many of them now, they’ve started crashing into my window while I’m trying to read. Why can’t he feed them at the bottom of the garden instead of the top?’
The answer was simple. Ahmed had learnt that Ginger lived at the bottom of the garden.
So had all the pigeons, none of whom dared land there anymore.
‘Allah say all creature are one,’ declared Ahmed stubbornly. ‘And all creature need the food!’
‘Well, why don’t you feed our cat?’ reasoned Joe, pointing at winsome little Sparky. ‘I’ve just been on the internet and Muhammed was apparently so fond of cats that he cut off his own sleeve rather than disturb one of them.’
But Ahmed wasn’t interested. All he knew was that his beloved flying friends were being slaughtered on a daily basis.
‘This is your cat also?’ he said accusingly, stabbing a gnarled finger towards Ginger.
‘No,’ lied Madge glibly, ‘he just likes it up there. Though if you keep feeding those damn birds by my window, I can adopt him and bring him down here. After all, he is a “living creature” and he “need the food” too.’
Ahmed didn’t like her logic, but he couldn’t dispute it. With great reluctance, he put the bird-crumbs away.
But Madge was not quite done with him yet. Ahmed’s best friend was his ‘lady fox’ who lived round the back of Wickes’ hardware store down the road. A couple of nights later, around 11pm, Madge saw him sneak off in his battered old sandals (and one of his weird furry hats) to feed her. He was gingerly holding a plate with human food on it, and she confronted him, saying, ‘We don’t want you feeding that fox, because we have a baby cat and it might come around and eat it.’ Well, Ahmed didn’t like that at all. ‘You no want good neighbour relations?’ he shouted and stormed off.
Five minutes later, realising that he might have overstepped the mark, he returned to bang insistently on her front door. When Madge eventually opened it, he shoved a plate of one cut-up banana in her face and said, ‘Banana! Good ! Sweet !’ And then, ‘I am very interested in children! You make some, I look after them!’ Which roughly translated as: ‘If you have kids of your own, you wouldn’t fuss so much over that ruddy cat!’
*
Madge was becoming concerned.
Of late, ever since Ginger had arrived, Joe had been exhibiting the strangest behaviour. Not only had he begun twirling the ends of his moustache into the semblance of whiskers (and pawing his face with wet fingers), but he had let his nails grow to feral proportions and was experimentally raking the futon with them. Most disturbing of all, he had started uttering cat-like grunts of pleasure when presented with his food, and was often to be found lurking by the fridge, waiting for treats.
Before Joe went too far and started using Sparky’s litter tray, Madge took action. It was now the end of May, and she turned his attention to planning his annual birthday holiday. Every year, in June, she took him somewhere different in Europe – Budapest, Vienna, Gdansk, Prague – just to get away from sweltering Surrey. Okay, it was swelt
ering everywhere else in June, but at least the hotels had air-conditioning.
‘What about Barcelona?’ she suggested out of the blue, and Ginger’s ears instantly pricked up. It was one of the few ooman words he knew well, and he was overcome by his old wanderlust.
‘Barcelona?’ he thought disbelievingly. ‘Did I hear her right?’
‘Barcelona?’ yawned Joe without much interest. ‘What’s there then?’
‘Well, there’s a wonderful mixture of culture and beautiful architecture – like the Gaudi museum – and loads of interesting street-life, with cafes and bars. You’ll love it!’
‘Will I? Well, okay then, I’ll check out hotels on the net. Do they have air-conditioning?’
‘Of course they do!’
‘Because you remember that time we went to Seville in June. It was fifty degrees in the shade, and even my sunglasses were melting.’
‘That was interior Spain,’ argued Madge convincingly. ‘Barcelona is on the coast, with lots of breezy sea air. And besides, I’ve always wanted to go there.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll get on it right away...’
But then Joe paused and thought.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What about the cats? We could have farmed out Sparky to the vets for a week or two, but they’ll never take Ginger. Not after what he did.’
‘How’s about a cat’s holiday home?’ suggested Madge. ‘I’ve heard of a real good one in Faversham. I think it’s called Katz Castle.’
Ginger had also heard of Katz Castle, but the very mention of these two words made his heart sink. His original owner, a ghastly child who had only wanted a cat for Christmas and not even for the New Year, had abandoned him there years before and left him to rot. It had been months before his next owners – the die-hard vegetarians – had turned up, and by that time his faith in human nature was crushed. He had in fact become so mean and vicious that he had begun terrorising all the other cats and had been relegated to an isolation cell. He well remembered the cruel owner of the ‘holiday home’, Annie, who had warned the vegetarians that he was ‘still not ready to be presented.’ And then the supreme effort of will he’d had to make to convince them, with fake purring and rubbing of noses, that he was a reformed cat, worthy of a new home. He would have done anything, by this point, to get out of that hellhole.
