Cat Killer

In the end, it was dad who put us up to it.

The early afternoon sunlight punched in through the dusty windows, casting harsh shadows on Tim’s earnest expression as he said to me, ‘I just don’t think it’d be right, Ollie.’ 

It was about two in the afternoon, and my brother Tim and I were sitting in the sunroom deliberating about what should be done and whether anything should be done at all. We sat tensely on the ugly brown sunroom couch and spoke in quiet voices, so mum and dad in the next room watching Channel Seven wouldn’t hear. With all our talk we made a show of respect for the law, for the dead and for the questionable ethics of revenge, but we were really just scared and wanted to procrastinate any sort of action for as long as we could. I was about to disagree with him, but dad poked his head around the corner and inquired, ‘what wouldn’t be right, boys?’ 

I froze with my mouth open where it was about to say, ‘stop being a lazy old chicken, Tim’ and Tim and I looked up with raised eyebrows.

Dad is the sort of man who’d be the first to jump in the car with a gun were the Channel Seven people to tell him there was a murderer on the loose. He’s got eleven guns, mostly big ones, and reacts like a dog with its ears pricked up whenever he hears anything resembling an opportunity to use his so-called ‘beautiful weapons’. I knew that if I told him what we were up to he’d be all for it, and that if I didn’t divulge anything he’d give us a lecture about father-son trust and make us go on a bonding fishing trip, which I would hate. Besides, Tim and I could use a bit of overriding authoritative fatherly advice to settle what we’d do. 

‘About the cat—’ I began.

‘You’re going to go and shoot the nasty animal, aren’t ya, lads. Ah, what brave sons I have.’

‘Er—not really—well, yes, maybe,’ managed Tim. I realised he was more scared than I was.

That morning—a Saturday—I had woken up to a racket on the back veranda. Our regal, snobbish, beautiful brown-and-white cat, Simon, had got himself into a fight with a green-eyed black cat bigger than him, and they were making awful noises on the back veranda. By the time I grumbled out of bed, got my slippers on and shuffled to the back door to see what the matter was, the two cats’ squabbling had managed to dislodge the shoe rack, a big timber thing, and at the exact moment I opened the door, the corner of the shoe rack fell onto Simon’s head. The black cat jumped backwards at the crunching sound and looked up at me standing in the doorway as Simon’s body slumped into death. I saw in the black cat’s green eyes something feral, a lingering ferocity of the catfight. It wore no collar.

‘Shut up, Tim, you wimp. Yeah, dad. We wanna kill the black cat. Lend us a gun?’

‘Sure, lads. One each. And I’ll drive you to the cemetery, too.’

After the black cat had looked at me it’d run away onto the street. I’d called dad and Tim and we went trawling along the town streets in the Jeep—it’s a little town we live in, so this wasn’t a big job—to see if we could find the culprit’s hideout. We did, eventually: Tim spotted it stalking around the town cemetery. The cemetery is quite a big one for a small town, and is next to the old Anglican church, a mostly unattended monstrosity made of big bluestone slabs.

And so it was decided, thanks to dad’s enthusiasm and encouragement, that Tim and I were to spend the night in the cemetery with two of dad’s guns, some sandwiches made reluctantly by mum and a couple of hefty Dolphin torches. It was our goal to kill the black cat, which by the afternoon we had taken to calling ‘Baddie’—I suppose now that this was an attempt to incriminate the poor black cat so as to justify the violence we were preparing to commit. And I suppose killing Baddie wasn’t quite right, as Tim had said, since the shoe rack was the real killer, not Baddie. Either way, I felt the need to channel my mourning for Simon into killing something and, whether it was right or not, it was decided that Baddie must be killed.

Dinner—some frozen sausage rolls lovingly microwaved by mum—was rushed because we were excited; dad the most, though. Tim had come around to the idea of the mission and was being surprisingly calm about our cat-killing aspirations. I was just keen to get it over with, and I wasn’t too excited about having to spend the night in the cemetery. I figured that if we could shoot Baddie before it got too late, I could ring dad to pick us up and we could avoid the spookiest parts of the night: three to four a.m., the fabled ‘witching hour’. 

‘And boys, I’ll be going to bed early tonight—I’ve got a big day tomorrow. Won’t be able to pick you up. You’ll just have to tough it out,’ Said dad, and winked at us. Tim and I looked at each other. 

Tim and I hopped out of the jeep onto the gravel path outside the cemetery in the dying seven o-clock light, hefting our guns—which I didn’t care to know the name of—and our sandwiches and torches out of the car boot. The sun, low on the horizon, projected lengthening shadows behind a diverse collection of gravestones. Dad drove off calling out the window, ‘Get him, lads!’ And after Tim and I had set down our ‘beautiful weapons’ in the front corner of the cemetery—after all, we didn’t need to be seen by some passer-by, for what we were attempting was quite illegal—we sauntered through aisles of graves in the dying light. Reflecting, our boyish pride was probably the result of an overinflated sense of personal justice. Some of the graves were marked only by a stone inlay, others featured decorative stone statues of angels and cherubs; others still were faded to the point of illegibility. While we waited for Baddie to show up, we roved around the cemetery in a competition to find the oldest headstone—I found one from 1802, beating Tim’s discovery of an 1812. 

By nine o’clock it was dark and cold. Tim and I leant against a gravestone—woman called Gertrude something—eating our sandwiches. We were hungry, cold and bored; the cat hadn’t shown up yet. The sandwiches were vegemite with lots of butter. Nice white bread, fresh and soft. Tim was halfway through chewing an ambitious mouthful when he tensed beside me, pointed, and said ‘mmpf.’ It was the cat. Its dark shape was winding between two headstones about ten metres away. I stuffed my half-eaten sandwich into its plastic bag and went to grab my gun, but my hand searched around in the dirt and found nothing: we’d left our guns in the front corner of the cemetery. ‘Bugger,’ I muttered heatedly.

‘Mmpff,’ said Tim again and, swallowing another mouthful of vegemite and butter, he crawled out from behind the grave towards the guns. ‘Wait here—keep an eye on him. Getting the guns,’ he whispered loudly as he went.

He returned in minutes. The cat was still there, stalking through the gravestone aisles. Silently, Tim handed me my gun, both our eyes trained on the black shape. Guns raised. Tim shot first and missed. The cat leapt into the air like in a cartoon, legs splayed out, and then dashed off—I aimed quickly and shot at it while it ran. The crack rang into the air as the black shape stopped, wavered on its feet, and slumped sideways. ‘Yes!’ Said Tim. ‘You got him!’ The moment between shooting it and getting to it stretched out into something slow. It seemed we would never get to the cat only ten metres away; my legs felt heavy and lethargic and I could hear myself breathing as if I was running beside myself outside my body. 

The cat lay lifeless on the sparse, short grass in a row of stone inlay graves. Tim and I stood awkwardly over it. ‘Your kill,’ said Tim. Neither of us had ever shot a cat before, only the odd rabbit, and never something as big as a deer or kangaroo; we were nervous. ‘Shine the light on it.’ I clicked the on button on the big torch. The harsh spotlight illuminated the black fur at the back of its head clumped together with fresh blood. Clean. A head shot. Good. The cat was slightly fatter than Baddie on the back veranda that morning. It had blue eyes. And around its neck was a red collar. ‘Shit. Tim, this isn’t Baddie.’ 

‘Hell, Ollie, you’ve killed the bloody wrong cat! You bloody idiot! What’re we gonna do now?’

I reached down and turned over the little red identification tag hanging from the collar. Morrie, it read. 0409 876 443. ‘We’ve gotta call the number,’ I said. 

‘No way.’

‘Yes way.’

‘You do it then. You killed the bloody thing.’

‘No! I can’t!’ 

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ said Tim. We were too afraid to call the number and admit what we’d done. We decided to leave the cat exactly as it was. I turned off the torch; I didn’t want to see it anymore. ‘Cat killer,’ muttered Tim.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Cat killer,’ he spat, loudly and more confident this time. 

‘Say that again, wouldja?’ I growled. He did.

‘You’re a fuckin’ cat killer, Ollie. You’re a murderer! You murdered a poor innocent kitty!’ Tim was flared up. We both were. It was the adrenaline, the shock of having killed Morrie, the defamiliarisation that the darkness and the death had wedged between brothers. ‘You killed a cat! You murdered a cat! You’re disgusting, Ollie! I can’t bloody believe it!’ In the darkness I stooped down and roughly hefted up Morrie in two hands. He was a heavy cat, probably overfed. The blood on the back of his neck touched on my chest and left a dark spot on my t-shirt that looked like a bullet wound. I threw him at Tim, who was barely a step away, with all the force of my anger. Morrie slapped into Tim’s stomach hard. He let out a loud ‘Gah!’ and fell backwards into the grass, Morrie on top of him, knocking his head on one of the stone inlays that peppered the ground. Silence. 

‘Tim?’ I hesitated. ‘Tim?’ 

I switched on the torch. Tim on the ground, Morrie sprawled over him with one leg on his still face; Tim’s open eyes staring up at me. ‘Oh fuck, fuck, I’ve killed my brother, I’ve bloody killed my brother, shit! Shit!’ I was crying by now; I don’t know if the tears had started when Tim was taunting me or when I saw him tangled on the ground with the dead cat. I crouched down to see if Tim’s head was bleeding. It was, but only a little. Only a little. But in another of those tremendous and horrific slow moments, Tim returned to consciousness, threw Morrie off him, grabbed his gun from beside him, stood up, and pointed the gun between my eyes. All this was lit up harshly by the torchlight, making it look like an amateur horror film. ‘Tim—no—’ He looked at me grimly, then something in his eyes, still and wild in the torchlight, changed—and in one movement he moved the gun and shot straight over my shoulder. ‘Fuck! Tim! You nearly fucking killed me! Are you off your rocker or what?!’ I could feel the tears cold on my face, my entire body burning with blood and adrenaline and the shock excitement of the possibility of death. 

‘Got him,’ Tim said simply.

Turning around, aiming the torch at the ground, I saw a shape. A cat. A dead cat. ‘It better bloody be the right one this time.’ My voice shook. And it was. Baddie: green eyes, leaner figure than Morrie, a sort of murderous aura. Actually, there was a murderous aura around everything that night. ‘Good,’ I said, and Tim and I looked at each other.

 Tim had a bruised head, but that was all; he got away lucky, unlike Morrie. They found his body along with Baddie’s the Sunday morning after the dreadful night. Tim and I had scurried home like scared rabbits in the morning. Dad had just laughed at our tired, shaken expressions and manner, and grinned when we told him we’d got Baddie. We put the beautiful weapons back in their case.