by Jan Carson
‘It’s you she’s taking the piss out of Roger, not me or Irene,’ pointed out Bill, relishing the opportunity to make good on a grudge, three years in the grumbling.
‘I’m mocking all of you,’ clarified Soren James Blue, still hidden behind the sofa. ‘You’re all head cases as far as I’m concerned. Chuck me back my smokes. I’m out of here.’
From his vantage point behind the magazine rack Malcolm Orange watched silently as Sorry, still grinning demonically, stood up and strode confidently across the room. Observing her denim-clad butt bobbling earnestly across the shag pile and her black bangs swiping like a set of demented wiper blades, Malcolm Orange found himself once again caught between good sense and the hope of something more exciting. He reached across the rug, hooked the Lucky Strikes from where they’d landed at Roger Heinz’s feet and, like a well-oiled pitch and catch duo, tossed them into her waiting hand. After which, intimidated by his own rebellion, Malcolm Orange backed into the wall and slid slowly upwards until he found himself fully upright and unsure of his next move.
In the centre of the room all hell was circling for a good spot to land. Nose to gristly chin with Roger Heinz, Soren James Blue was lighting up. Mr Heinz – fork in one hand, teaspoon in the other – was hoisting his pants up in preparation for attack. The other men had risen from their various chairs, falling into rank behind their comrade, arms full of domestic missiles: scatter cushions, sugar bowls, hearing aids, old copies of Women and Home. The room was bristling, thick with pre-match apprehension.
Through the fabric of his shirt Malcolm Orange shoved a skeptical finger deep into his side. It disappeared to the knuckle. He checked his wrist. It flared luminous against the electric fire. The world, he was surprisingly relieved to discover, was still a wild and overly possible place. Songs could be stolen. Small boys might disappear without so much as a weekend’s warning. Grown women could, overnight, turn suddenly odd and bilingual. Anything, even a cutlery war, might happen before supper and Malcolm Orange, pre-occupied as he was with his perforations, thrilled with the possibility of a good distraction.
‘What have you got to say for yourself, young lady?’ spat Roger Heinz, stabbing Sorry’s chest with the blunt end of a tea-spoon.
Soren James Blue cocked her weight defiantly on one hip and breathed a long plume of cigarette smoke straight into his face.
‘Your songs are shit,’ she announced, dragging surreptitiously on her cigarette. ‘You’d be doing the world a favor if you just forgot most of them.’
Roger Heinz turned the blotch-speckled color of baloney. Nate Grubbs, unsure whether to hold back or attack, pitched a scatter cushion half-heartedly at Sorry’s face. It missed, crowning Rose Roper smartly so her hairpiece came asunder, sloping gently across her forehead like a clod of beached seaweed. Nate Grubbs was in dire need of a new pair of bifocals.
‘You should think about doing somebody decent,’ announced Soren James Blue, ‘like the Beastie Boys.’ Thereafter she screwed her half-sucked cigarette into Bill and Irene’s living room carpet and, tossing Mr Fluff over her shoulder, exited the chalet via the open front door.
In the corner by the magazine rack, with Irene’s bookcase prodding his ribs judgmentally, Malcolm Orange felt something snakish twist inside his belly. His father, though long since left for Mexico, was lingering still, singing darkly in his head; a selfish, selfish song of instant kicks, bad-news girls and no-regrets thinking. For the first time in eleven years, almost twelve, Malcolm Orange felt himself split down the middle; one half father-born, one sweet, softer half, mother. He allowed himself a quick swipe of the room. ‘Old friends versus excitement?’ he summarized and while his mother’s voice whispered ‘persevere’, Malcolm went with his father, high king of the broad and easy road.
‘Yeah,’ Malcolm Orange found himself agreeing loudly. And though he did not understand his own betrayal and could not explain the strange, exhilarating affinity he felt towards Soren James Blue, when the moment arrived, it took mere seconds to turn his back on eight glorious weeks. ‘Elton John sucks!’ he yelled. ‘We should be doing the Beastly Boys.’
Abandoning Ross to the magazine rack and yet another afternoon in the care of halfwit Irene, Malcolm Orange made after Sorry’s disappearing back. At the door he turned to catch a last glimpse of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. The members appeared frozen in the early afternoon sunlight like a grand-scale experiment in taxidermy. Roger Heinz was purple and prostrate on the living room carpet. Cunningham Holt was removing the marbles from his eye sockets, preparing for a fit of genuine tears and sorrow. Nate Grubbs, canny as they come, was taking the opportunity to tip his instant coffee into the fish tank.
It only took a second for Malcolm Orange to quit the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs but the marbles stayed with him all afternoon, clinking like a guilty cockcrow every time he fell silent.
– Chapter Eight –
Mr Fluff
During the Fall of Soren’s fifth year – the very same year in which her parents stopped talking during meals and her father began colluding with a Scandinavian dental hygienist and Sorry, incapable of verbalizing the mounting anxiety, vomited her first banana sandwich on to Mrs Blue’s brand-new bedroom carpet – Mr Fluff moved into the refrigerator. Mr Fluff had not intended to move into the refrigerator. Neither had the Blues set out to acquire a cat. The Blues were not pet people. They were scientific in nature and felt that animals that could not, according to the boundaries of Western taste, be used for consumption, transportation or clothing were an unjustifiable luxury.
Magda Blue did not permit animals of any kind in her house. Once, as a small girl, she had found a lost kitten on the way home from kindergarten. ‘Snoopy’, as Magda had fixed to call him, relieved himself twice; once in each of her father’s outdoor shoes. Consequently, Magda’s father had drowned him in an empty catering-sized mayonnaise tub. After the drowning young Magda was shocked to discover just how little cat existed under all that sodden fur. ‘It’s no different from a rat, when the fur’s gone,’ she mused and fought the urge to borrow her mother’s hairdryer for a pre-funeral blow dry. Two days later coyotes gave the kitten an untimely resurrection, leaving his tiny severed skull on the front porch step. A bloodied third of Snoopy was once more consigned to the trash. Burial number two seemed to satisfy the gods and Snoopy was duly forgotten. However, the experience taught Magda a valuable lesson: animals did not belong indoors.
The Blues kept the kind of angular, well-windowed house where all clutter – toilet paper and kitchen utensils included – was carefully closeted behind flush doors. They favored beige, marl and dove gray in all matters aesthetic. Consequently, a cat – particularly an obnoxiously fluffy, whirlwind of a cat like Mr Fluff – was something of an anathema. The Blues had not planned on accumulating children or pets. Soren James had been the product of an unfortunate menstrual miscalculation, a scientific slip Dr Blue held against his wife for the remainder of their marriage and mentioned repeatedly during the divorce proceedings. Mr Fluff had become theirs through a process of accidental osmosis.
Dr and Mrs Blue detested the cat in equal measure. Magda Blue took to leaving the doors of the house wide open in the unfulfilled hope that Mr Fluff might escape and be annihilated by a passing car. Trip Blue was ill-disposed to animals of any kind. As a small child he had once offered next door’s horse a single Life Saver, pinched between his baby fingers. The resulting tug of war had left him with a permanent set of teeth marks around the base of his right thumb and the deeply held belief that all animals, equine or otherwise, were nothing but trouble. Trip Blue, tortured by the cat’s presence, left saucers of rat poison-laced coffee creamer at strategic points around the house. Mr Fluff was too canny to partake. When she discovered the creamer plot, Magda Blue turned forty shades of furious. She feared for the well-being of Soren James, who was lately prone to downing all manner of inappropriate substances as an aid to her nightly purges. Magda Blue, freshly disgusted
by her husband, instigated a sex embargo which would drive them both, at breakneck pace, towards the divorce courts.
Mr Fluff was nine animal years old when she first moved into the refrigerator.
Previous to the Blues her life had been a spastic series of starts, stops and localized abandonments. Shipped from coal shed, to shelter, to suburban duplex with little hope of a permanent address, she soon contracted a feline strain of post-traumatic stress disorder. The anxiety left her incapable of emitting even a low-level purr, suffering from sporadic bouts of constipation and insistent upon sleeping curled around permanent fixtures, tail grasped firmly in teeth like a fuzzy orange bicycle lock. The better part of Mr Fluff’s tail was soon gnawed hairless, giving the distinct and troubling impression that a toilet brush had been inserted into her backside. Much as her human owners insisted, she could not bring herself to sleep in a shop-bought cat box. Cat boxes, Mr Fluff figured, could be shifted at the owner’s whim. Mr Fluff required something more solid. She had neither love nor trust for the adult Blues and found Soren James alternately affectionate and pinchly mean. However, the cool permanence she discovered amidst the refrigerated condiments and margarine tubs kept Mr Fluff resident with the Blues for almost a decade.
Mr Fluff had arrived quite by chance at the Blues’ front door on the Monday morning directly preceding Thanksgiving. Prior to Thanksgiving she had lived, for most of a human year, with Pete and Miranda, who occupied the house at the end of the Blues’ cul-de-sac. Pete was a computer programmer and left the house, smartly suited, at ten minutes to seven each morning. Miranda was a freelance editor and claimed to work from home. Mr Fluff soon came to realize that working from home was the human term for semi-permanent hibernation. At ten minutes to five each afternoon Miranda swapped her pajamas for proper clothes in anticipation of Pete’s return. Most evenings, feigning exhaustion, she was back in her flannels before the six o’clock news had ended. She rarely ventured further than the end of the cul-de-sac and ate cereal, from the same unwashed bowl, for every meal. The stench of Miranda’s unhappiness was so thick Mr Fluff could taste it, fouling on her tongue, each time she gave herself a good licking.
When both Pete and Miranda were simultaneously home, breathing and being and conversing in the same room, the apartment felt like a paper lantern, voluminous and light and inflating with each casual exchange. Minus Pete, the apartment was a coffin. Mr Fluff could barely breathe. Under pressure her bowels went whole fortnights without movement. Miranda pillowed her with affection, constantly cooing, constantly stroking; inventing odd, childish derivations of Mr Fluff’s name: Flufflet, Fluffy McFluff, Fluffle Duffles. Mr Fluff felt like a toothpaste tube, pummeled for the final, hesitating drops.
Pete and Miranda could not have children. Or rather, they could have had children if they’d set their minds on it. However, the doctors insisted that these children would almost certainly turn out funny. Something about Pete’s blood did not mix right with Miranda’s. All this was explained to Mr Fluff, with patronizing sincerity, during her first few days at the apartment. Mr Fluff was a cat and found the situation extremely odd, having previously assumed that children – like kittens – could be selected free of charge from some sort of children shelter. Furthermore, she was surprised to hear that Pete and Miranda’s blood would not mix right, for the rest of them fitted together perfectly and with irritating frequency; hands, necks, tongues and naked parts locking together at every opportunity like a set of squirming, Siamese octopuses. The sound they made together was repulsive.
Mr Fluff, the cat was told, had been Pete’s idea: a stopgap to take the edge off the loneliness until a permanent solution could be agreed upon. The rest of the story was revealed to her in whispered, claustrophobic installments, crushed into Miranda’s lap or bundled under the duvet whilst Pete was busy programming computers downtown. Miranda, Mr Fluff was informed, had always been the household’s purchaser. Having done such a stellar job on the spare bedroom, the weekly grocery cull and the honeymoon in Antigua, she had also been given free reign over the purchasing of a pseudo-child. Secretly, fearing this might be the closest they came to acquiring an actual baby of their own, Miranda resented the freedom Pete had so readily awarded her. Just to spite him she’d picked a particularly luminous ginger cat, for she knew his penchant for tortoiseshells.
Mr Fluff had been savvy enough to note this caustic mix of spite and insecurity the moment Miranda arrived at her holding pen.
‘That one’s a girl,’ the guy at the cat place had announced, jabbing a finger through the wire mesh to point out Mr Fluff, curl-locked round a concrete pillar.
‘Shit,’ Miranda had replied, shoving both hands nervously into her blazer pockets. The sleeve of her pajama shirt was just visible, protruding from the cuff. ‘I really wanted a boy cat. A boy cat is what I came for. Any color’s fine except tortoiseshell. My husband can’t stand tortoiseshell cats. Odd, huh?’
‘Fricking crazy!’ the cat guy had replied with heavy sarcasm. Mr Fluff had been resident at the cat place long enough to recognize a Type A cat lady when she saw one. Like the cat guy, she had her suspicions that Miranda, with her nervous secretary clothes and her enormous tree-frog eyes, was claiming ownership of an imaginary husband. Most cat ladies were chronically single.
‘Don’t you have any boy cats?’ Miranda had continued, unaware her character was under scrutiny. ‘I had such a lovely boy cat when I was a child. Call me sentimental but I’d really hoped for another boy cat. Ideally I’d like an orange cat, you know, to resemble Mr Fluff. I was going to name him after my old cat.’
‘Sorry ma’am, it’s Christmas next week. There was a rush on boy cats. People only want the males nowadays. They don’t want the hassle of worrying about kittens. We only have this one orange cat left and I’m pretty sure it’s a girl.’ The cat guy had, without warning, uncurled Mr Fluff claw by frantic claw, turning her upside down just to verify the gender. Mr Fluff had been mortified.
‘Never mind. I’ll take the girl cat anyway. I’ll just pretend it’s a boy.’
‘Hi,’ she’d said as she Magic Markered the cat’s name on to her collar. ‘I’m your new mommy. Your name’s Mr Fluff now. You’re a boy cat.’ And, with little consideration for personal preference, the cat previously answering to Rosie became known as Mr Fluff and found herself resigned to a lifetime of gender confusion.
As her first human year with Pete and Miranda progressed, it became increasingly clear that Miranda was more than a little unbalanced. By April she’d taken to dressing Mr Fluff in a powder-blue onesie and pushing her round the neighborhood in a second-hand stroller. Each morning she bathed the cat in a plastic baby bath, taking great pains to massage her ginger fur with a generous dollop of Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears shampoo. On several occasions Mr Fluff found herself force-fed pureed swede from a suspicious-looking glass jar. At first she’d responded with thrashing pawfuls of unsheathed claw. Later, she grew resigned to the fact that a full-grown human being, even a meager specimen like Miranda, would always win in a war with a domestic cat.
All Miranda’s deviant behavior took place between the hours of seven and five, while Pete was safely closeted away, crunching numbers in his office cube. On evenings and weekends she appropriated a nervous kind of normalcy. And if Pete grew suspicious when he discovered the baby stroller stashed behind the golf clubs in his garage, if he wondered about the sickly smell of shampoo emanating from his cat, or noticed Miranda rocking Mr Fluff gently in a manner better suited to a newborn, he said nothing, for he was secretly delighted to find himself thirty-seven and not yet lumbered with a child.
In August Pete and Miranda began to think about moving. California had only ever been a temporary solution. Warm air, Miranda’s grandmother had insisted, would do Pete’s psoriasis the world of good. After six years of Californian living, Pete’s psoriasis still looked like raw baloney. Miranda could no longer bear the thin, hairdryer heat. In September, swayed by an uncommonly cool spell, they cha
nged their minds about moving. In October, Pete showed Miranda a picture of Vermont which he’d clipped from an in-flight travel magazine. ‘Look at this darling,’ he’d said, pointing out the fields, and the clapboard houses, the trees flaming menstrual red and orange. ‘Isn’t it the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen? It’s cold there for six month of the year, sometimes eight.’
In late November they moved to Kansas.
As soon as the For Sale sign appeared in the front yard Miranda started thinking about Mr Fluff. Not the current, asexual Mr Fluff but rather the original, well-fluffed cat of her earliest memory. It had been over twenty years since Miranda had last seen this Mr Fluff and she had not yet forgiven Massachusetts the loss. The original Mr Fluff, Boston-based and vitriolic, had not belonged to young Miranda. An elderly neighbor owned the cat and each morning pitched him out just before breakfast, keeping the back door barred until interfering neighbors or the animal welfare people insisted Mr Fluff be readmitted. Miranda’s parents had adopted a similar stance on children and so Mr Fluff and Miranda often found themselves stoic on the sidewalk, spitting and shivering and occasionally embracing, fur on frozen flesh, for an extra ounce of body heat.
Without warning, one week shy of Miranda’s tenth birthday, Mr Fluff’s elderly owner had upped and moved to be with a daughter in Sacramento. Mr Fluff had been dragged across the continent on an old-fashioned whim. The elderly neighbor, having lived through the Great Depression, several minor depressions and at least one world war, was of the belief that all possessions, even unwanted cats, were worth holding on to. In the future, he explained to his Sacramento daughter, he might be able to sell the cat for tobacco money, or swap it for livestock, or, if the Republican prophets were proven correct, eat it with French fries when America went to hell in a Democratic handbasket.
