Two weeks after we moved into our new home Lyndall and Greg came to stay with us.
In accordance with the law of moving cats, Stan had been locked in the house for two weeks solid. To be fair, he’d been a good sport about the whole thing too. In fact, I was telling Lyndall how chipper and surprisingly decent he was the night he busted open his cat flap, leaving both the flap itself and its frame at the bottom of the stairs in our yard.
I suppose there was just no stopping him. And what an awfully hard head he must have.
I immediately got to doing an unconvincing portrayal of not worrying while Stan was out probably shitting his spotty pants, completely lost in the neighbours’ four foot square concrete yard.
After a night of creating hideous visions of some horror getting my mobile number off his shiny red collar and sending me graphic images of Stan being butchered (seriously. All logic fails after a night of drink and the staggering un-logic that is not being able to sleep thereafter) we headed into town to get food. The plan was to supply ourselves with everything we might need so as to avoid any football fans at all. It was the day England played USA, you see.
Lyndall suggested that we take a walk up my back road and look out for a scared, lost cat. I must’ve been stinking of fear (and loss, because I honestly thought my cat’s days we done).
She’d barely said “this looks like one of those depressing Billy Elliot streets” when I saw a cluster of children (eek!) peering into a felled wheelie bin.
I started doing my cat-whistle (yes, I have one. what?) When one of the boys bellowed “What’a youse doin?’”
I nearly double shat. First, because children scare me and second, because he referred to us as “youse” which makes me want to shit singularly.
I thought “nut-up bitch. This is for Stan”
So while Lyndall hung back, I strode forward, all mock-confident announcing “I’m looking for my cat”. Before I knew it, they had clustered around us, babbling about various fluffies of different colours.
I could barely keep tabs of where they illegally pooed and slept (because these were their offerings of knowledge) so I just sort of overran them with “My cat is spotty. Have you seen a spotty cat?!” I think this is when my nerves started to waver. There were so many of them and not all of them were wearing shoes.
Once we had established that the chit-chat was a complete waste of my sodding time, we pushed forward through the broken glass and jigsaw pieces lying in the street. It was then that I realised that my heart was hammering as if I’d been accosted by somebody legitimately scary.
One of the last things a small grubby girl said to me was “There’s a cat that sleeps in our house” followed by “Me mam’s in bed”. I said something like “Isthatso?okbyebye!” and Lyndall laughed muttering “what the fuck”.
The whole experience made me thankful- for a bunch of things. First, that my mother made sure I bathed. Second, that Stan found his way home before a bus ran him down and third, for the ice cream we had waiting for us at home. It saw me through the time when Stan left and turned up again.
fee-yoo! Here he is, not helping at all with the packing:
