The Amazing Life of Cats (22 page)

‘Say hello to the nice pussy,’ cooed the owner of a spaniel in the vet’s waiting room. The frail old dog nervously reached forward to sniff Harry’s paws.

‘
Shhhhpittttt
,’ said Harry, right in the dog’s eye, and leapt onto the windowsill, where he sat sulking.

Inside the surgery, the vet said, ‘You hold his front paws while I take his temperature.’ As he inserted the thermometer, a look of horror passed over Harry’s face. What was it with this vet? I got blamed for the injections as well.

We decided to go on holidays and take the animals with us. We only tried it once with Harry. I bought tick tablets for the dog and asked for some for Harry. The vet on this occasion was a locum. ‘A quarter of a tablet for a cat,’ he quoted from the textbook.

‘He’s a big cat.’

‘Well, half a tablet, to be on the safe side.’

‘Actually, he’s massive.’

‘Make that a full tablet,’ said the vet. He also gave us sedatives to dope him with for the trip; they would have worked if Harry hadn’t discovered some leftovers in the kitchen (the pills were meant to be taken on an empty stomach). By the time we left the house, though, the tablets seemed to be working—Harry climbed onto my husband’s white trousers and settled down to sleep.

‘You poor old fella,’ my husband said, trying to remove him, but Harry was wedged behind the steering wheel, his eyes glazed over. The next moment, the big cat lost control of his bowels—my husband’s trousers were now closer to ‘off’ white. We screeched to a halt. I won’t repeat what my husband said, but after a clean-up with some grass growing by the roadside, we continued—in silence.

Harry, however, was not finished. He next sidled up to the dog and piddled all over her; not content with that he then somehow managed to deposit the partly digested leftovers on my feet. My husband got out of the car, his jaw clenched. It took three weeks for the car to stop smelling like a vet ambulance.

Once again, however, Harry had a lovely time relaxing in the sun, and the trip back was comparatively uneventful. It was a unanimous decision, however, never to take him on holiday again. The next time we went away, we asked a friend to mind the house and Harry. Easy: problem solved, I thought, so when we got back we were surprised to hear her say, ‘You didn’t warn me about Harry.’

‘Warn you?’

‘Yes, he kept coming into the bedroom early in the morning and getting, well, amorous.’

If Harry was blushing under his dark grey stripes, it didn’t show.

From then on, we felt we could only leave him with relatives. During our next weekend away, he stayed with my sister. ‘Did he behave himself?’ I asked when we got back.

‘Yes, he was fine.’ Then there was a pause. ‘Well, it was my fault, really.’

‘Oh no! What did he do?’

‘I didn’t get his kitty litter set up in time.’

‘Don’t tell me . . .’

‘Yes, my mushroom farm.’

But people always forgave him and everyone seemed to like him. Even my mother-in-law, an ailurophobe from way back, took a liking to Harry. Whenever she came to lunch, he would sneak into the room, stand on his hind paws and feel along the edge of the table for possible snacks. The sight of a dark grey paw tapping the edge of the table always had her in hysterics. He used the same technique after fishing trips, too, when the catch was being cleaned.

Then there was the time he won first prize for biggest cat at the school pet show. It was touch and go for a while—the nearest competition was pretty big—but I kept telling the kids, ‘Don’t worry, that’s just fluff.’ When the judge’s decision seemed to be swinging in favour of the rival I demanded, ‘Try picking them both up!’ He did, one in each arm: Harry won paws down
and
he got to eat first prize on the way home in the car.

When we moved into a house with a spiral staircase, he was desperate to go down it but couldn’t figure out how, as the treads weren’t as wide as normal stairs. ‘Come on, boy, you can do it,’ the kids told him. So Harry took a deep breath, launched himself off the top step and bounced down like a giant mozzarella.

All this time, he and the dog tolerated each other, more or less. It wasn’t generally what you’d call a close relationship, but come winter they would snuggle up together to keep warm. Harry wasn’t one to run, so he refused to be chased; the dog eventually gave up, except for the times when other dogs came to visit, whereupon pack mentality took over. There’d be a lot of barking, with Harry bailed up in a corner looking totally bored till the dogs shrugged and gave up.

There was a time, before we had the dog, when we moved from Canberra to Sydney; we were living in a unit in Manly with our landlady living downstairs. She, like my husband, was not a cat lover, and only reluctantly agreed to let Harry live there, warning us, ‘He won’t survive my dogs.’ But we knew better.

It was a long drive from Canberra back then and so the trip ended up taking longer than expected. The laws on containing animals in vehicles weren’t as strict in those days, and you try making a right-hand turn with a ten-kilo tabby sulking under the foot pedals. And who wants to drive on a major highway with a stoned tabby staring at you in the rear-vision mirror? Sure, we could have put him in a cat box, if we’d had one big enough.

Before the trip was over, Harry suddenly realised it was past his dinnertime. He liked to eat promptly at four pm. Time wore on and he began to get stroppy. Very stroppy. The food was in a box in the back of the car but I couldn’t remember which box. By seven pm he had reached boiling point and I put him on the floor with the fan on to cool him down. By the time we arrived at our destination and opened the door, Harry sort of trickled out, a shadow of his former self.

The next day, however, he was bright and perky, ready to meet the landlady’s terriers. ‘Cat!’ they yelped and charged up the steps. There was much barking, yapping and growling as they raced round and round while Harry sat quietly on a chair watching them. He didn’t even bother to hiss, he merely glared and they stowed their tails between their legs and headed back down the stairs, never to trouble him again.

Harry soon discovered an aviary full of finches and canaries under the landing. Halfway down the stairs became his favourite place to sit, especially before dinner. He’d lie with his head dangling upside down over the edge, bird-watching. This helped stimulate his salivary glands and activate his gastric juices, and it sure scared the hell out of the canaries!

There was a seawater pool in the garden and in hot weather Harry would go swimming. Not by choice. It had to be over forty degrees before I would venture in, by which time Harry was usually ready to expire. So I would wait until there were no dogs around, carry him downstairs and pop him in at one end of the pool. Then I’d rush back and dive in the other end, to meet him. Harry would cat paddle all the way and I’d hoist him out; then, with a look of unspeakable fury, he’d go straight over to the sand under the rocks and dig himself a hole, and show what he thought of me. But eventually he would cool down enough to forgive me.

His tastes in food varied considerably. He was passionately fond of fish but also loved spaghetti, rockmelon seeds and Christmas cake, and on one occasion, at a child’s birthday party, he discovered and ate a whole plate of chocolate crackles.

Even when ill, he never lost his appetite. Once, when he’d hurt his front paw and it was so swollen he could barely walk, he still somehow managed to make it over to the fridge and stick his claws into a chicken carcass. There he stood, with one paw too sore to stand on and the other wearing a chicken, wondering how on earth he was going to make it back to bed.

By the time we moved back to Canberra, Harry had
almost
become used to car travel. He still let out the odd howl when there was a lull in the traffic, and once, at a set of traffic lights, he stared cross-eyed at a semitrailer driver, who looked as if he might lose control of his truck.

During a trip to Goulburn, I sent the kids off to find a tap to give Harry a drink of water. Back they came saying, ‘There’s a fine for turning on taps, because of the drought.’ So I sent them to buy a carton of milk instead. Back they came again. ‘They didn’t have plain and we didn’t think he’d like strawberry, so we bought him chocolate.’ He drank the lot.

One of Harry’s ways of showing affection was to headbutt us. He’d sit on my desk and butt me on the forehead, or throw himself against my legs when he was hungry. But as he got older and a tad senile, he took to headbutting us through the banisters, which often left him dazed if he missed.

Senility also explained the Last Mouse. Harry had stopped catching mice by this stage and we’d been tactfully not mentioning them any more. Then one night we heard him mumbling outside the back door, his mouth full:
‘Mmmph, Mmmph, mmmpphh, MMMPPHHH!’
We rushed outside. ‘Harry! How clever!’ His chest expanded, he glowed with pride and opened his mouth to grin while the mouse shot up the passionfruit vine and escaped. We had to go inside because we couldn’t bear to see the hurt look on his face as he stared after it sadly.

I once referred to him in a letter to an old neighbour, who wrote back: ‘I was so pleased you mentioned Harry. He was the only other cat our two ever tolerated. We often came home to find all three of them curled up together in front of the heater. No other cats were ever allowed through their cat door.’

Harry was sixteen when he died. We buried him at the bottom of the garden and planted a red poinsettia over him which grew into a large tree. I also had his portrait painted on a black T-shirt—and yes, it was a BIG T-shirt.

Vashti Farrer

Acknowledgements

T
hree books in three years!
The Amazing Life of Cats
follows the theme started in
The Infinite Magic of Horses
and continued in
The Wonderful World of Dogs
.

Such an output would not be possible without, of course, the amazing flood of stories that have poured in for each collection, and thank you to all the writers for their wonderful contributions.

I am blessed to be working with the Inspired Living team at Allen & Unwin. My heartfelt thanks once more to my publisher, Maggie Hamilton, for her continued support and wisdom in all areas of life; to Jo Lyons for her help, expertise and support—and in this book for the moving and funny story,
Part Cat, Part Dog, Part Noodle-head
. To work with an editor of the calibre and skill of Clara Finlay has also been a joy and has enhanced the stories greatly.

Thank you to all of those who have supplied photographs for the books.

One dollar from every book sold will go to Pets for Life Animal Shelter Inc. at Billinudgel—for more information, visit:
www.petsforlifeanimalshelter.org
.