NO ORDINARY CAT
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I don’t write cat stories. Or read them. I find they’re mostly just a touch twee.
But this was no ordinary cat.
It was 1965. It was a simpler Age.
We were in our first home – tract-built, brick veneer, septic tanks, unmade roads, double-mortgaged. With two small kids and one mechanic’s income, our aspirations were modest. So we got by, as you did back then, raised our own children, didn’t need a 4x4, and hadn’t yet realised that every house must have two bathrooms, multiple phones, and a seven foot plasma TV.
One of the locals’ cats had its annual batch of kittens and their kids were hawking the leftovers around our subdivision. It’s what you did.
Amongst the litter was an ash-grey one, who seemed to have the air of the survivor about him, clambered over his brothers and sisters in the box, looked us in the eye, like he knew what fate had in store for the losers.
We thought he’d be a good companion for Toots, our energetic three-year-old, and his bearing suggested his nine lives were strong in him.
We called him ‘Smokey’. ‘Smoke’ to his friends. He fitted in quickly, took Toots’ manhandling with stoic patience.
1965 was still the time when cats could be cats and came and went at will. Climbed trees. Wandered the back yard. Checked out the neighbourhood’s girl cats. Ate the occasional spoggie or honeyeater without being arrested. Took their chances out in the world.
Smoke lost his first life at about age one, lost it in death-by-embarrassment.
Toots had a doll and a pusher and a collection of doll-baby clothes. One day she decided her doll was short on animation and before Smoke could suss out the situation, she had him by the tail and wrestled into an extremely pink baby dress with bonnet to match, organised him into the pusher, and well tucked down under an extremely cutesy bunny-rug.
As I said, Smoke had an amazing tolerance with kids. No matter how rough the play he never once bit or scratched any of them and godknows he often had just cause, but would gently mew out his discomfort and protest and let the world of kidsplay get on with it. Yep, tolerant. Up to a point.
Toots went past this point when she decided to parade her brand new baby around our quiet cul-de-sac for all the world to admire. You could’ve heard Smoke’s anguish a block away. But like a trooper, he took it on the chin. For about ninety seconds.
When two of Toots’ girl-mates stopped to check out the contents of the pusher, it was finally all too much for Smoke and in a paroxysm of humiliation he threshed off the bunny-rug, then the dress, and made a bolt for it. Last seen disappearing over the adjoining schoolyard fence. Still wearing his pink bonnet.
It was hours before he came home. Mumbling ominously. Tail twitching. Minus one of his lives. We never did know what happened to the bonnet.
He used up his second life in death-by-Alsatian.
Honestly? – it could’ve been any dog, possibly even a Mack truck that he tangled with, but we always reckoned it was The Alsatian.
The Alsatian was a dark beast of a thing, roamed Smoke’s territory at will, and for the first year or so of Smoke’s life he wisely avoided it, but – well, for our money we suspected Smoke’s balls had matured and one day they sorted out the pecking order. But, like I say, it could’ve been anything large and malevolent.
First we knew, Smoke went AWOL for two days. We all began to fret, missing his grey shape and sharp personality patrolling the back yard. But on the third day, Kate heard a faint and plaintive mewing, somewhere nearby, and stood on the ladder, peered over the side fence into the schoolyard.
He was curled up under a diosma bush, a sorry-looking bundle of blood-splotches and matted hair, eyes that looked like they were seeing the edge of The Big Mystery. It was like he’d tried for home, but this was as far as he could make it, nothing left inside to get him either over the fence, or down to the access gate and back.
Kate took around some milk and a little mince-meat, slipped it under his nose. He picked at it, moaned in pain when she tried to move him, so she talked to him a while, agonised over what best to do, but Smoke somehow seemed to want to just lie and let Nature take its course, like he knew he’d acquitted himself well and would allow Fate to be his judge. Stuff like that. Heroic warrior stuff.
For three days Kate tended him under his bush as best she could, the rest of us taking it in turns to check over the fence, make reassuring noises, made sure he knew we hadn’t forsaken him. It was a worrying time.
But early on the fourth morning what was left of him appeared at the back step, looking a little cleaner, a little wiser, and a lot older. Like he’d been through his rites of passage.
He used up his third life in death-by-car-sick. Car-sick and car-crap.
It was Credit Squeeze Time (a quaint political term for Compulsive Economic Working Class Pain For The Greater Good), I lost my job, and the Bank started hovering over our two mortgages. We handed back the car before it was repossessed, but with not a skerrick of equity in it. The dealer only shrugged and suggested maybe I could’ve washed it first. The world had become a cynical and uncertain place.
We bought a tired-ish Holden panel van from the wreckers for not much. Not much was about all we had left by then, but the van still had a lot of life left in it – I mean, geez, it was an FJ Holden, what can I say? - you had to chuck them over a cliff to finish them off.
I was offered a good job, one that came with a house, but it was out in the bush – the DEEP bush - so we found someone to rent our house for just enough to cover the mortgage payments, loaded some sticks of furniture on our mate Giffo’s sheep truck, then put kids, cat, a blanket, and the TV set in the back of the panel van, and headed out. Other than the house, the TV set was the most valuable thing we owned. (It never did work out there, way past the reach of transmitted civilisation. But it made a classy looking side-board).
It was a seven hour drive including stops. It seemed like forever. Lordy lordy you never saw a car-sicker cat. We didn’t realise that cats as well as kids can get car-sick. But Smoke was losing it from both ends. It was not a happy trip. I think we had to burn the blanket in the end.
For the first couple of days we were there he totally lost his land legs, staggered about and puked and shat and gave us SUCH looks. He was not a happy cat. Once more knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door.
But, within a week he’d settled in. More or less. He was a City cat in the Country. He regarded everything with deep suspicion. Stayed close to us and the house. Just knew we intended to run away and leave him in this god-forsaken wilderness, and followed us about like a cocker spaniel. Even when Kate and the kids went around to the Post Office, the Butcher, the Grocer, he stuck to their heels, but only to the very edge of “our” block, where he would sit and wait till they re-appeared, then follow them home again, tail twitching all the way.
But Smoke seemed to finally come good when the mouse plague went through. It sharpened all his cat instincts and brought the wild beast out in him. Did him a world of good. He cleaned up every invader in the house during the very first wave, with a mouse forever under each paw and one in his mouth. He was like a whole new cat. Master of his domain.
But then there was the neighbour’s dog. In Smoke’s domain.
The town’s doctor lived next door, with her share-farmer husband, two small boys, a cat, and a dog. Nice people, good kids, inconsequential cat, long-legged, boof-headed, dim-witted dog. It regularly lumbered over into our back yard to have a dump under the big athol pine. No idea why. Probably because it always had. Saved up about three day’s worth at a time and unloaded it under the tree.
Smoke tolerated the kids and the cat but he hated the dog. No, hated is a bit strong, he resented the dog. Objected to its cavalier attitude regarding Smoke’s personal territory. It set Smoke’s tail twitching. But his past experience with a big dog left him cautious, and any time the dog sauntered over Smoke’d just climb the tree and wait it out. Eyes following its every move. We reckoned it’d only be a matter of time.
But Smoke was to use up his fourth life before that day. Use it up in death-by-influenza.
Cat Flu went through the town. Went through it like a dose of salts. Moggies were falling off the perch at every turn. Then the doctor’s cat next door went down. Down then out. Barely twenty-four hours and all its nine lives were used up in one go.
Then Smoke started to snuffle. And wheeze.
For two days he fought it, belly dragging in the dirt, off his feed, that death-stare thing creeping into his eyes, and it wasn’t long before even he looked like he knew he was done for.
But Kate had other ideas. No cat was dying on her watch. She asked the doctor next door for suggestions but she just pointed out obliquely that her own cat... shrugged resignedly... said there was nothing... even though... all suggesting that she and modern science didn’t have a clue. Except to make him comfortable, do nothing. But Kate isn’t a do-nothing sort of a girl.
Lateral thinking cut in, begged the question – what would I do if it was one of the kids who was badly congested and wouldn’t eat? So she got out the Vicks Vaporub and the Aspros. Made Smoke a bed on the bathroom floor, rubbed his chest thoroughly with Vicks, warmed some milk and crushed half an Aspro into it and spooned it into his poor old slack and spent body. But Smoke – well - he just didn’t care any more.
Kate kept up this regime for about a week, Smoke hanging on by a thread, Toots hovering during every moment of the drama. I’d come in at night, ask – “How’s the patient going?” – but it was always – “No better, no worse...”, or “Still hasn’t had a crap or a leak...”, or “I don’t know if I’m curing him or killing him!”, and both her and Toots would look like they were about to weep from worry.
But Smoke hung on.
Then, about the sixth or seventh day the girls found him dragging himself around the bathroom floor, seemingly desperate to unload a week’s worth.
So they gently carried him outside to the shade of the athol pine, laid him down and stepped back, let him struggle to his feet and through the business of emptying everything he had in him. Which wasn’t much. About a half a pint of milk and godknows how many aspirins. But he at least looked the better for it. More or less.
They brought him back to his bed and Kate fixed him up some warm mince gruel and he managed to get most of that down, then half a bowl of water, but turned his nose up at her Mickey Finn-ed milk like he’d worked out what was in it. And actually got onto his feet, mainly because she was reaching for the Vicks jar. It was then that we knew he was on the mend. But it’d be a fortnight before he stopped smelling like a petro-chemical factory.
The doctor was impressed with Kate’s nursing (“You did WHAT?!”) but we suspect that the word went out on the town’s tom-toms because Smoke wasn’t the only cat in town that had a distinctive pong of camphor and hydrocarbons for a while.
It was another month or so before Smoke looked like his old self. Sitting up in the athol pine. Tail twitching. Watching next door’s dog do a dump.
It was one of the days that our mate Giffo and his sheep-truck were visiting. Just before lunch. Giffo always seemed to be passing through town just before lunch. But he was a mate. Always an extra plate for a mate.
Giffo was asthmatic, and quite badly so, in fact just about allergic to most of the 20th century, had been all his life. But he was especially allergic to cats, and more than once when he was a kid, as a consequence of coming too near one, he’d finish up in hospital on a respirator and had his mum and dad on the edge.
So - understandably - Giffo grew up with a built-in hatred of all cats. They were the enemy. “The only good cat is the one splattered on the radiator” was his motto, one carried proudly on his truck window and across the bull bars, and woe-betide any cat that strayed into his property. But, being respectful and a mate, he’d never say anything about Smoke, just kept his distance, took a couple of drags on his puffer before going in the house.
Anyway, we were out in the back yard, beers in hand, chatting about everything and nothing as you do, killing time till the roast was ready, neighbour’s boys leaning on the fence wire talking with our two. Next door’s dog shambled past them, pulled up under our tree, hunched into his turd-dumping stance. Bore down. A picture of total concentration.
Suddenly a blur of splotchy grey dropped down from nowhere, gave a blood-curdling...
rrrrowWWWWWWWWWLLL!!
...and all hell broke loose!
Smoke landed square on the dog's back with all four legs at full stretch, eyes wide, heckles up and talons out, and sunk every one of them in to the hilt like he was drilling for blood. The dog cut off in mid drop, let out an absolute howl of terror and set off on several fast laps around the tree with Smoke well and truly attached, dog making a noise somewhere between a banshee and a fire siren. Terrified out of its peanut brain. Spectators slack-mouthed and speechless.
Smoke finally jumped back up onto his branch, nonchalantly watched the dog do several more laps before realising that the crisis was over, then cut loose for the safety of home, hurdling the fence with no style at all, taking the youngest boy with it to the ground and trampling all over him in its mad scramble to be somewhere else. Both boys started yelling and disappeared after their dog.
Giffo took a long breath. Shook his head slowly.
“Strewth, that’s no ordinary cat, eh!"
From Giffo this was rare praise. Smoke acknowledged it with an offhand blink. For a second or two Kate and I were suitably dumb-founded, then everyone had a good laugh.
“Yep, no ordinary cat...”, one of us said. With some pride.
< >
When our one year contract in the bush was up we went back to our bit of suburbia, found work, took up where we left off, and Smoke became a city cat again. More or less. I say more or less because in our year away in the wilds he seemed to have become more – more – what? – outgoing? Like, older and wiser. Bolder. Which just may have been his undoing.
About eighteen months after we returned, Smoke went missing for a few days, which still wasn’t like him, as older or wiser or bolder as he may have been, he still knew where his home was and who his people were. We began to fret.
Our son found him, one morning, going to school, up outside the milk processing plant.
The factory was a leftover from our outer suburb’s earlier days as small-holdings of farm-and-cow country. The big tankers were still rolling in and out at ungodly hours of the morning, but that and the eternal clanks and rumbles of their machinery was now disturbing the bungalow-ed life of the good rate-paying residents of our sub-division, so its days were numbered.
We have no idea why Smoke would’ve been up there, but we like to think he was contemplating a milk heist. Casing the joint. But it’d be a week before we even knew his fate, as the sight of poor old Smoke’s truck-flattened body in the middle of the road had – understandably - traumatised our son, but one day when Toots was busy elsewhere he just blurted it out, wrestling tears. And never spoke of it again for some thirty years.
To our shame, we never went up there and collected Smoke’s remains. I know we should’ve – I should’ve – gone and, well – scraped him up and brought him home, buried him with honours in the back yard.
But, it was just too much to get our heads around, and there was no way we could’ve explained it to Toots. So we never went back up that street ever again, none of us, but sort of let Nature take him back, in her own time. And what can I say - there seemed to be something sort of – heroic – even poetic - about Smoke’s end. We like to think he would’ve approved of that.
© T. R. Edmonds 2020
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>