Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (2 page)

In general love doesn't turn out as expected. That's life. Had I known, that memorable afternoon, of the change about to come over my life in the next few seconds, I doubt if I'd have been indulging in critical reflections on Gustav, I'd have been wallowing in pure nostalgia. Oh yes, I was going to miss my simple-minded friend. Indeed, I was going to find I loved him so much I'd willingly have signed a ten-year contract to be the victim of his petting. For the one thing sure to bring a living creature endowed with reason to his senses is the loss of those comforts he's acquired over the course of time. In short, I didn't know when I was well off.

Before I come to this radical watershed in my life, let me make a few last remarks about the changes that had imperceptibly been made to the paradise described above. For all I was so well off, a sensitive spirit like mine couldn't help being aware of an alteration in the urban climate dating some way back. I'd heard with increasing frequency of burglaries in our part of town, mindless acts of violence even in the posh villa where the respected local dentist lived. Shabbily dressed figures in a sozzled condition, carrying plastic bags, prowled around our comfortable fortresses, knocking on our perfect replicas of original walnut doors and begging. And I hate to think what they did to members of my own kind if they could get their hands on us, there being good reason to suppose that the only how-to manuals they ever read had such tempting titles as
How to Cook Domestic Pets
.

Another nuisance stemmed from the inorganic kingdom. It isn't true that rabbits breed faster than anything else in the world. In point of fecundity, monsters made of steel and plastic overtook rabbits ages ago. By now it was practically impossible to do as you could in the old days - take a pleasant stroll round the neighbourhood, have a nice little dust-up with Bigmouth Tom over the road here, do your bit towards the preservation of ancient monuments there with some environmentally friendly spraying - without constantly running the risk of being suddenly chosen by Fate as an up-to-date radiator mascot for a car, only not on the radiator but lower down.

I was obviously not the only one struck by this decline in the quality of life. Those who caused it had noticed too, and the word 'country', a word full of promise, was being bandied about more and more insistently. Escape from the city, that was the idea. People got all excited by TV cereal ads showing country life in hues of the ripest golden corn as a kind of never-ending picnic with at least eight sunrises a day, ditto sunsets. Even I was slowly falling for such illusions. In my mind's eye, I already saw myself roaming fertile meadows at crack of dawn, sitting on the river bank methodically decimating stocks of some indefinable kind of fish, and washing them down with a huge bowl of milk taken from the cow by Gustav's own hands. There was nothing on my imaginary Disneyland farm but fresh air, fresh eggs from birds which probably nested right on the chimneys of our farmhouse, and eternally fresh young females in a state of nymphomania - no Mickey Mice, though, because eating them made me feel sick even in dreams. I used these fantasies to shield myself from the horror stories that reached me from the wicked city, tales of brothers and sisters there and witty folk who thought it amusing to stick iron bars up their arses.

'Of its very nature, desire means pain: its fulfilment quickly breeds satiety; the goal was only apparent, and possession of it deprives it of its attraction. Desire and need will reappear in a new guise, or if not, then desolation, emptiness and tedium will follow, and to contend with those is as hard as to contend with want.' Well, Schopenhauer was dead wrong about that! Because when my desire to wave goodbye to city life was finally granted, desolation, emptiness and tedium were not what followed at all. Sheer horror, that was what followed, so there! This is the true story of a dream which turned to a nightmare ...

Sleep, which contrary to appearances is of poorer quality in me than in humans,(
1
) had passed like a sultry wind lulling you with pleasant warmth on the one hand, threatening to smother you gently on the other. Muddled thoughts about my little world and the problems that loomed so large in it had disturbed my nap, distilling from it a sour, hung-over and compulsively pessimistic feeling, as sleeping in the day usually does. I felt rested, all the same, and fit to risk a first glance at the waking world. Maybe it would be a good idea to go straight to the fridge now, dig the claws of my left paw into the white rubber seal, walk slowly backwards in order to open the door, and then tuck into a nice fresh stick of Italian salami. The fridge-opening trick can never be explained too often; many of my colleagues will scratch or tear at the door excitedly in their greed, forgetting that the muscle power of a small paw won't work as an Open Sesame on something so firmly shut. Success depends on simply using your claws as a grappling hook, your whole body as a traction engine, and your paw to transfer the tractive power. Oh yes, and don't forget to slam the door shut afterwards.

So I opened my eyes.

I saw a face, right in front of my nose. Sometimes sleep has a nasty way of making you believe you've woken up while in fact you're still in the imaginary world of dreamland. That's what I thought had happened now. Because what I saw didn't belong in the world of my own experience, or in a world of which I wanted to have any experience either. I am often accused of comparing people with colourful figures of pop culture, particularly film stars, thereby giving a distorted and ultimately inaccurate idea of the person I'm describing. OK, I promise to mend my ways - but let me make one last reference to Hollywood, because this time it really does hit the nail on the head. The face of the woman leaning over me, some thirty centimetres away, was a replica of the actress Joan Crawford's. Her eyebrows were thick black arcs like the diva's, looming menacingly over eyelashes lengthened to infinity with mascara and eyes the size of ping-pong balls. Her angular chin was obviously designed in a heavy machinery engineering workshop, but the focal point of her whole face was her mouth, painted fire-engine red. The lip pencil had made her lips almost twice their real size, giving her the look of a jet bomber with a fearsome shark's mouth painted on the nose by bored soldiers. The only difference between her and the film star was her hair, which was definitely greying, but like the original model's it was set as if in concrete by tornadoes of hair-spray.

She wasn't looking at me, she was sort of glittering at me, and I felt as if her cold grey eyes were blasting me with a thousand lightning flashes. With an expression of condescension, even distaste, as if wondering what to do about me, she observed my incredulous reactions the way a cheetah observes an antelope calf wedged tight among rocks. It gradually dawned on me that this grotesque stranger, who could easily have featured as a goddess screeching for revenge in some ancient opera, was perfectly real. And with prophetic certainty, I knew at once that she was going to shake the very foundations of my own future reality. The good old times were over. Here came the bad.

Where was Gustav? What had happened? Who in hell was this monstrous nicotine-stained mouth surrounded by a small quantity of woman and apparently drenched in some unspeakable Arabian perfume for old ladies? Was she a witch hypnotising me with a view to skinning me later, to make herself a smart forties-style hat? While all these impressions plunged me into wild confusion, making the hairs on my back rise and my whiskers vibrate, she shook her head slightly and disapprovingly, and delivered herself of the fateful words:

'He's moulting!'

That was it. The signal. It confirmed - if I needed any confirmation - all my fears and forebodings about this snaky character. It was like the shadow of the approaching priest falling on the poor sod in the condemned cell. However, it was no use staying there frozen rigid in a state of shock and desperation; I had to nip this in the bud and add a little something extra to the enemy's first impressions of me. It was true, your old friend Francis
was
moulting a bit. But that was as nothing to the spectacular hair loss she was about to sustain.

Functioning like a steel catapult, my powerful hind legs launched me off the sofa and right into her face. She acted as if she'd been struck by a cannon ball and staggered back, screeching. I'd expected the skin of her face to come off in flakes, considering its owner's age, but I was extremely surprised, and delighted, to find that the claws of both my forepaws sank into her as easily as if they'd been the prongs of a large chrome fork, raising her shrill screams by several satisfying decibels. Then she was kind enough to tip her head back too, so now I was standing four-square on her face, in a position to start on the real plastic surgery.

However, my adversary knew a thing or two as well. Whether in panic reaction, or because she'd learnt the grips as part of her training to be an all-in mud wrestler, she instantly grabbed me by both flanks, squeezed my ribs together and tried to squash the life out of me. But I slipped nimbly out of her fingers, got tangled up in her sticky coiffure, hissing, and shredded it like a cotton gin gone crazy. As the blood began to flow, I saw Gustav out of the corner of one eye. He was standing in the doorway, in imminent danger of a choking fit, waving his arms helplessly in the air. His flushed face, his eyes wide with terror and the silent scream issuing from his mouth really got on my wick. Apparently his alarm wasn't for me at all. Good heavens above, it wasn't as if I was remodeling his dear old mother's head!

The witch did the only thing she could in this chaotic situation: she fell backwards with a gurgling cry for help, demanding the police, the fire brigade, and a decision by the UN Security Council in favour of military intervention. Myself, I was so confused I simply wanted to do a runner and cool down a bit. So I let go of the lady, who had theatrically fainted away at what, when you stopped to think of it, was a suspiciously convenient moment, and raced for the underpass formed by my traumatised companion's legs planted on the floor wide apart. All I had to do after that was turn sharp left at the doorway into the corridor, and then I could get out of the flat through the front door. I hoped it was open.

We're probably the best accelerators in the world. In proportion to body size and weight, even the smartest Ferrari can't compete. So I got off to a flying start which made everything moving around me seem to be in extremely slow motion. But flashes of inspiration are known to move even faster than we do. And during the millisecond it took me to reach Gustav's legs, a couple of revealing snapshots from the very recent past flashed into my mind. The scales fell from my eyes ...

The witch wasn't Gustav's mother. Nor was she the judge of the Claw of the Year contest come to present me with a cup. Memories, memories, memories ... Hadn't my poor lonely friend come home from the wine bar in the next street at a most unchristian time of night a few weeks ago, all boozed up, warbling a slushy waltz to himself at inconsiderately loud volume and of course horribly out of tune - and guess what, hadn't he been reeking of some heavy, nauseating perfume? He seldom went to the wine bar at all in the usual way, and when he did he was always back before midnight, because drinking on your own is no fun. This time, moreover, he'd strutted round the whole flat in a very odd way, sort of impassioned and prancing about in imitation of a prima ballerina. In view of his tubby figure, this performance had me rolling in the aisles. Before he collapsed into bed and fell asleep babbling blissfully, like a baby doped with morphine, he undressed in the manner of a megalomaniac baron, puffing out his chest and flinging his shirt, his trousers and even his underwear all round the room (his underpants landed on the plaster cast of Nefertiti). I put this conduct down to the demon drink, although Gustav had never sunk to quite this level before.

And over the next few weeks, hadn't he spent hours sitting in his study with a faraway look in his eyes, writing letters on hand-made paper to the accompaniment of great yearning sighs? I should have asked myself who those letters were to. Because after putting them in their envelopes he licked the gummed strip as worshipfully as if he were trying to breathe life into them. And there'd been phone calls, oh yes! But as usual I'd been careful not to listen, since his infuriating habit of uttering meaningless exclamations of 'Really?' and 'You don't say!' the whole time during phone calls brought me to the brink of murder. All the same, my suspicions should have been aroused by the fact that during some of these conversations his voice performed acrobatics which changed his usual growl into a ridiculously soppy, velvety tone, while he dwelt ominously on words like 'you' and 'we'. And to crown my ignorance, I should mention the most striking change of all: Gustav's brand-new wardrobe. I'd mistakenly ascribed this to his advancing senility, which I first noticed coming on in 1985. Sometimes it was a canary-yellow summer suit, sometimes silk shirts with full sleeves - in themselves, of course, the last word in bad taste, but omitting to notice these clues was striking evidence of the failure of my famous analytical capacities.

Well, we really were up the creek now! The old fool was in love! And not content with that, he was even letting this tart desecrate the temple of what had once seemed our eternal partnership! Jealous, me? Not a bit of it! At that bleak moment, however, I realised that things would never be the same between us again.

Gustav made a desperate effort to catch me as I slipped past through his legs. It can't have been a serious attempt, since his gigantic paunch, guaranteed to act as a lifebelt and keep him above water in any shipwreck, made him incapable of swift reactions. The thought: 'I've done it!' shot through my head before I turned the corner and kept right on going - kept right on going, sad to say, for ever and ever.