The Stourbridgedidge

The Stourbridgedidge

I would have made a serious effort to get to know Bagpuss⸺my kind of cat. Number Ten's Larry and the sly ginger down the chippy, I felt I knew already. As much as you can know a cat, that is, which they say you can't. But for a long time, I wanted nothing to do with Kitten. Other than her knack for driving Wanka Mal nuts, I could see no point in her.

"I'm vegan, so you gotta understand how horrible it is for me."

Wanka Mal was bawling from the landing as the awful whiff of what Kitten had dumped at the foot of the stairs ascended. And let's be clear, I sympathised. There was nothing natural about the smell at all. I don't know what it had eaten, but it had not come from any packet I had opened. I asked Miia what she fed it, and she said it fed itself a lot of the time, so it could have been rat, vole, or quite possibly both. I said,

"From the smell of things, d'you think it might have been eating shit?"

Failing spectacularly to see the funny side, Miia said she thought not.

"It's not that she wouldn't. I am sure she would. She is sometimes not a nice cat. She is old."

She thought that said it all. I would have told her how our father, now in his eighties, did not eat shit, but I hadn't been home for a while, so could not swear to it.

Later that day, I put a piece of ham down for Kitten. Anonymously, of course. I didn't want to get into a formal alliance with the beast nor be setting a precedent, but I felt she deserved a little something for her part in an amusing skit that had taken place at lunchtime. Coming downstairs, making a big play with his crutches, Wanka Mal had swung at Kitten with the left-hand one and fallen on his arse. Miia laughed out loud, which was good to hear because she wasn't doing well, and I was worried about her. I helped Wanka Mal up, then Miia and I had to listen to him pontificating about cats, skiing, Viz magazine and another dozen things he thought he knew best about. Pretty soon, I tuned out and watched Kitten stalking a bird on the lawn. I was on the side of the bird and felt I had nicked a round when it exercised discretion and flew away, leaving the puss with a face like thunder.

Later, I watched Kitten eat the ham from her bowl and said aloud, to no one in particular, that she was a good cat. But I had to turn away when our eyes met because she told me clear as clear, "I am not a good cat, and you will know all about it before we are done."

She ate the ham, stuck her tail in the air, which I took as a gesture of condescension and wandered off without another word. I hoped she was planning to clamber in the driver's side of Wanka Mal's old Citroen and do her thing on the upholstery.

It was a couple of days later when, sitting on the settee watching Top Gear for the first time and wondering why anyone would bother a second time, I was approached by Kitten. She looked malevolent at the best of times, but as she sashayed across the carpet with her eyes fixed on mine, I feared she was the devil in a fancy dress tabby jacket and leggings. I uttered a brief, pointless prayer petitioning the Lord for protection, and the next moment, the cat landed lightly by my side and settled down. I think anyone would forgive me for thinking the creature was making up to me, so when I put out a tentative couple of fingers in a reassuring, inoffensive way, the last thing I expected was to be bitten to the bone and blood everywhere. The cat was gone in a trice before vengeance could be exacted, and I had to go to the quack and get myself jabbed and jabbed again against all the diseases the blasted thing might have been carrying. Miia found it funny until I pointed out that if Kitten was a dog, I could have her put down. Wanka Mal overheard me and said, "So? It's a dangerous animal; you can have it put down anyway," and Miia said, "Shut up, creep," leaving me with nothing to add and the feeling that the cat had scored against Wanka Mal, though at some cost to myself.

I had no time for Wanka Mal. You will have got that already. He was handsome and sporty, hence the broken ankle, and I could see how Miia had got snared, but not why she carried on with him. I need do no more than tell you he kept a digeridoo in the bedroom and carried business cards in the name of Stourbridgedige about him for you to appreciate what I was contending with. The didge alone⸺well, let me tell you, the tediousness of that imbecile drone would boil your piss. The only thing I could see it was good for was shoving up his arse, but Miia told me not to be horrible and, if it ever needed doing, she would do it herself. And she could have, too.

"Why do you put up with him?"

"Oh, shut up, will you? I love him. I know he's a…..can be a jerk, but Mal is my jerk, okay?"

When I learned about Miia's surgery, I was shaken. I was aware, of course, that she had undergone a biopsy six weeks previously, and the tumours were malignant and aggressive. Now she told me, tearfully, they were growing at such a rate the procedure by no means promised a successful outcome. The specialist also worried the disease might have spread into the lymph nodes, and I suppose we both knew what that meant, though we never spoke of it. Instead, we hugged, and I stroked her hair.

Worried sick, I could not help bringing to mind childhood trespasses I would have given anything to undo and sibling slights of the kind a brother heaps on a sister, which hurt me in the present far more than they had hurt her in the past. Sadly, there was no further opportunity for amends. Miia, my other half, my darling twin, died three days after being admitted to the hospital, never getting as far as the operating theatre.

I stayed with our father for a few days after the committal, thankful that Wanka Mal had returned to the house we had shared with Miia. Though the property would now belong solely to me, I had not mentioned to him any word about moving out; I hoped I wouldn't have to. It would have been the decent thing for him to have packed his case, picked up the didge and scuttled away. So, of course, he did not. He hung around like an embarrassing rash, and, thinking only of Miia, I let him.

Naturally, it was to the ratbag cat that I turned in my grief, not Wanka Mal, and for Miia's sake, I tried wooing Kitten with soft words and kind actions. But what really turned the tables was the brush. It was a flat, wire brush of the kind that will rip enough fur from a cat in ten minutes to save it from a year of hairballs and from the first time I dabbed it hesitantly on Kitten's side, we were pals. Pretty soon, she was purring away like a Rolls Royce.

I was terribly affected by an incident that occurred a few days after the rapprochement with Kitten. I found a fang on the settee where she often lay while I brushed her. At first, I did not recognise it for what it was. It was like a caveman's needle, long and curved, and it was only when I idly dug it into the flesh of my arm that I twigged; it was one of Kitten's incisors, fallen from her gums. If you ever want to gauge age, the loss of teeth will do, and my heart went out to the puss who would no longer be much in the hunting line and only half the cat she had been in the terror line. I was very glad that Wanka Mal was at work because I burst into tears, and once begun, I cried my eyes out for Miia, Kitten, myself and the brief moment any of us has to make an impression on the careless gods and an indifferent world. I was kinder to Kitten after that, mindful of her age, and perhaps because she no longer had Miia to fuss her, she often came to me in the evening to sit on my lap, asking nothing but giving much.

On the infrequent occasions that Kitten had an accident in the house, I cleared it up as quickly as I could out of respect for Mal because I knew how much, as a vegan, he hated it, and because a pile of shit on the floor is a bit too much for me, too, most of the time. So it was with surprise that I came home one evening after a brief stop at the British Volunteer to find Kitten fast asleep on her sofa, a terrible smell in the air and a humungous dollop of crap at the foot of the stairs. But no Mal weeping and wailing and bitching like a twat over the faux pas of an eighteen-year-old cat. Why not? Pretty soon, I twigged. The place was as silent as stone, yet I had seen the light in Mal's room and had passed his horrible Citroen on the drive. As I scooped up the poop, I pondered, and it came to me suddenly and with certainty that someone was in his room with him, and I said to Kitten, "That Wanka's got a girl up there."

My ire began to grow, and pretty soon, it was festering in just the way the enlightened say is a greater menace to your own health than anyone else's. But if he had forgotten Miia, I had not.

"What a bastard. And in her house, in her room," and staunch Kitten agreed with me a hundred per cent. Just to make sure I was not doing him a terrible injustice⸺well, okay, it wasn't the only reason⸺I took the newspaper I had used to scoop up Kitten's mess and opened it out on the floor directly outside the room Wanka Mal had once shared with Miia to see if it would draw him out. Then I positioned an armchair at the end of the landing, put my feet up, draped a pair of dirty socks and some skanky boxers from the laundry basket over my face to distract from the other smell, and made enough noise for Wanka Mal to know I was there. Proof positive; I heard the bedroom door open once during the night, and a female voice said, "Eeeuurrrggghh." Then the door closed quickly with a bang. I wondered what Wanka Mal had said to his trollop about the situation. There must have been a couple of sore bladders in that room by seven the following morning. The thought made me smile, which was a relief from the misery of late

I could see that Wanka Mal was in a real strop with me. For the next few days, he hobbled around the house, slamming pots and pans down, slamming doors, and making a big show with the crutches, but never saying a word to me directly about the incident. This was undoubtedly the elephant poo in the room, and it didn't help that I could not contain the occasional snigger and was being overtly and excessively friendly towards Kitten. And you will scarcely believe it, but that sagacious cat joined with me until it was clear that it was two against one and that the one was Wanka Mal.

A week or so later, I decided to go to my father's house in Leicester to see how he was coping and drop a few flowers off to Miia. Neither Miia nor I had visited very often; the old man was a bit crabby, though I had considerable pity for him following Miia's death as he was having great difficulty coming to terms with it. He had taken to telling anybody who would listen, "No one should have to bury their daughter," and was probably plagiarising a dozen other snippets of cheesy Hollywood dialogue, too.

Before the trip, I compiled a list of things I expected Wanka Mal to do in my absence, such as clean the toilet, hoping his outrage would prompt him to pack his stuff and move. I left minute instructions, too, for the care of Kitten. She was to be brushed for fifteen minutes daily and fed on Kittysnap Tripe Slices in Meaty Gravy or Kittysnap Juicy Liver Pieces, also in meaty gravy. Two sachets daily, one in the morning, one at night. Kitten and I laughed, imagining the daft ponce ladling out the rancid muck with his nose in the air and smelling salts in hand.

On the second day at my father's, I got a call from Des, an old friend of Miia's.

"Can't be serious, mush," he said, "Miia loved smelly old Kitten."

"Miia loved all sorts of things, Buddy, but what are you on about?

"Some freakin' streak of piss on sticks dropped Kitten off in a cat box, said you said to put her down. Well, I weren't having that, so I took the cat anyway and thought I ought to give you a bell."

"You done good, Des," I told him, dropping effortlessly into guvspeak. "Sis would be proud a ya. Favour, yeah? Take care of puss and drop her in tomorrow evening at about seven, will ya? See ya right, mate."

"'Course I will, but what's the game? I'm gonna have to hide it from me dad, yeah. He gets a sniff of a ninety quid needle job languishing on death row, and he will expect to see it through."

Des's father was the vet and, ergo, Kitten's doctor, and, as such, I thought he might have been a little more pro-life than he apparently was. But I suppose ninety quid is ninety quid these days as ever it was, and I let it go.

"It's just a mix-up, mate," I told Des. "The old language barrier. He's Ukranian, staying with us for a while. Dodging the fighting at home. You know Miia, she was always a sucker for a hopeless case. His name's Vanka pronounced Wanka. Yeah, give it a rest already, Des, and try to be a bit grown up about it. Imagine what the poor sod has to go through over here with a name like that. Drop Kitten off to him and tell him it's okay, just a mix-up, and I'll fill him in when I get home."

I made sure to be home by six the following evening, and when Wanka Mal told me Kitten had run away and not been seen for two days, I said nothing. The doorbell rang at seven on the button.

"Get that, would you, Mal?"

He opened the door. Des shoved the cat box at him and said, slowly, with the volume and precision that is necessary for a Brit to communicate with any class of foreigner, "You, Wanker? Here's the cat. Matey's gonna fill ya in."

Wanka Mal turned to me with a puzzled look.

I am not a powerful man, so I was pleased when my right cross brought Wanka Mal to full stretch on the floor with blood on his face.

Then, against my better judgement, I gave him two more days to put his traps together and clear out.

Kitten and I watched him closely over that period. I did not believe he would go without taking revenge on me by doing something audacious to Kitten or me, and Kitten agreed. Since Miia's passing, Kitten's traumatic stay on death row and my decking of Wanka Mal, we had grown very close. So close indeed that while watching Corrie together on the sofa, Kitten whispered to me that we should not hesitate but rather get proactive with the revenge for whatever it was that Wanka Mal was about to do to us. I agreed, and following behind Kitten, I crept up the stairs while he was out. We went into the room he had shared with Miia, and I carefully turned back his bedding. Kitten hunkered down and got busy in the sheets, then I pulled the covers up again, so the bed looked undisturbed, and we were both snorting with laughter when she said,

"Hey, what are you waiting for? Wanka Mal's didge is right there; here is your opportunity."

It was too good a chance to miss, and friends, I have to admit to a shameful deed that ruined that didge's prospects ongoing as a wind instrument.

Perhaps the best part of our pre-emptive revenge came later that evening, however, when Wanka Mal, screaming like a banshee, came flying down the stairs with a couple of carrier bags and the dirty didge over his shoulder and flew out of the door, a terrible stench following close behind him like a hell-hound on his trail.

We laughed, Kitten and I, and blessed if that clever old cat didn't suggest a large Jack, which went down a treat and tempted me to a few more of the same.

"Dearest cat," I whispered. "You once told me you were not nice, but I don't care. I love you all the same."

End