Making the Cat Laugh (7 page)

WOMAN
: Doctor Fiegelman? Thank God you’re there. It’s happening again.

DR FIEGELMAN
(
on phone):
Go on.

WOMAN
(with strangled cry
): It’s Bob Dylan, doctor. He wants to buy the house.

DR F:
Mein Gott,
this is serious. Are you sitting down?

WOMAN
: No.

DR F:
I think you should sit down.

The woman miserably slides down the wall until she is sitting on the floor.

WOMAN
(
whispering
): Done it.

DR F:
Good. Now, taking your time, what exactly is it that makes you think Bob Dylan wants to buy your house in Crouch End?

WOMAN:
The fact that he is currently upstairs with an estate agent investigating the airing cupboard!

DR F:
I see. And when did this start?

WOMAN:
The minute I opened the door.

DR F:
Mm.

WOMAN:
You’ve got to help me, doctor.

DR F:
And I shall. But I thought we finished with all this after Al Pacino bought that old cooker-hood you advertised in Loot?

WOMAN
(
faintly
): So did I.

DR F:
I mean, Elizabeth Taylor never turned up for the hairdrier, did she?

WOMAN:
No. Not after we worked on it for two months, five days a week, at £75 a go.

DR F:
And you realized, in the end, that it wasn’t Warren Beatty who bought the pram?

WOMAN:
It was – um, David Essex?

DR F:
That’s right. Not Warren Beatty, but David Essex. That’s very good. You’ve been doing the breathing exercises?

WOMAN:
Every day.

DR F:
And how big is this Bob Dylan?

WOMAN:
Quite small.

DR F:
Thank God for that, at any rate.

Suddenly the door opens, and
BOB DYLAN
enters the room, carrying a tape-measure and wearing a puzzled expression. The
WOMAN
whispers hoarsely into the phone, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and hangs up. She scrambles to her feet, looking guilty
.

WOMAN
(
nervously
): Ha ha.

DYLAN
smiles politely, strolls to the french window, looks at the view, shrugs, mumbles something appreciative, and exits. The
WOMAN
points wordlessly at his departing back, and then faints on the hearth-rug. Black-out, curtain.

Scene: The same, an hour later.
MAN
with briefcase, evidently returning from work, enters to find wife lying insensate on the best Persian. Thinking quickly, he hurls his briefcase at her recumbent form, and it bounces off her head.

MAN:
Darling, speak to me!

WOMAN
(
rubbing her bonce, indicating the briefcase
): Why did you do that?

MAN:
I didn’t have a glass of water.

WOMAN:
I see.

MAN:
Why are you on the carpet? Not another of your delusions, poppet?

The
WOMAN
nods, reluctantly.

MAN
(
sympathetically
): Not Michael Jackson offering to spay the cat again?

WOMAN:
No. Bob Dylan, wanting to buy the house, for £310,000.

The
MAN
whistles through his teeth.

MAN:
£310,000? Well that’s something. Good heavens, £310,000, it might almost cover the therapy. I mean, what did we get for the cooker-hood?

WOMAN:
Five pounds. But –

MAN:
I think we should go for it.

The doorbell rings.
The
MAN
prepares to answer it. He re-enters, dumbfounded, with
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
at
his
side.

MISS TAYLOR
(
for it is she):
Sorry I’m late, I’ve come to collect the hairdrier.

As the curtain falls, the
WOMAN
collapses into her husband’s arms, and
ROBERT DE NIRO
enters whistling with a bucket and ladder, asking to use the tap. End.

The front-page headline of last Thursday’s
East London Advertiser
was rather alarming, especially for the sort of neurotic pet-owner who periodically grabs her cat by the shoulders and searches its furry, inscrutable face, saying with a choked voice, ‘You’ve got to tell me something. If I died, would you eat me?’

‘DEAD MAN “EATEN” IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR’
screamed the headline, thereby putting an end to all speculation. Of course I hoped it was a sensational joke – along the lines of the
Weekly World News:
‘Bat With Human Face Found (He’s Smart As A Whip, Says Expert)’ – but I knew in my heart it was serious. Evidently, this poor chap in Shadwell died of a heart attack, and in the ensuing week his thirty cats – starving hungry, but with no money for Whiskas, and anyway congenitally hopeless with a tin-opener – perpetrated the gruesome cat horror which involved him being ‘eaten’. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Apparently he loved those cats. He thought they loved him back. So far as I could see, the only positive aspect to the story was that he was ‘eaten’ only in inverted commas.

I don’t usually see the
East London Advertiser,
but a kind friend sent me the cutting, thinking I ought to know. Possibly she recalled that my latest effort to tighten the bond with my own cats entails entertaining them each morning with spirited impersonations of the animals they are about to eat, which suddenly smacks of insane recklessness, given the Shadwell experience. ‘Now, what have we got here?’ I say excitedly, examining the tin. They give me a weary ironical look that says, ‘Go on, surprise us.’ ‘Rabbit!’ I raise the tin-opener, and their ears prick up, so I put it down again and they scan the ceiling for flies. ‘A rabbit goes like this,’ I say, assuming the goofy-teeth thing, and waggling my hands on top of my head,
in semblance of floppy ears. They look at each other in despair. ‘How’s she going to do liver, that’s what I’d like to know?’

(Incidentally, sorry to interrupt the flow, but for anyone thinking of adopting this pleasurable and essentially harmless daily routine, here are some tips. First, it is hard to imitate salmon unless you have a fairly high ceiling, for the leaping upstream. Kidneys and liver are indeed virtually impossible to impersonate, and should therefore be eliminated at the shopping-trolley stage. For high-class meals involving crab, one needs an energetic sideways scuttle, so clear all furniture first. The turkey impression comes to life splendidly if you can be bothered to tie empty red balloons to the sides of your head. Beef, lamb and duck are a doddle, obviously. And finally, a word of warning: if you find yourself trying to impersonate a chunk
per se,
you may have let things get out of hand.)

Anyway, in my initial alarm at this story, I kept thinking of that famous scene in Charlie Chaplin: the snow-bound cabin, the two companions ravenous, and the fat man with the heavy eye-liner hallucinating that the little fellow is a chicken. How ghastly to think this is happening in my own home – and not just when I am selflessly attempting to enliven mealtimes with a spot of one-sided Old MacDonald charades. When they watch me trotting to the shed, those cats just see a huge tin of Whiskas on legs. When I’m asleep, they see a huge tin of Whiskas, with legs, lying on its side.

But the interesting thing about the Shadwell story was the line, ‘The RSPCA had been called in, to destroy the cats.’ What? Destroyed? Why on earth would you do that? Suddenly all my sympathies swung the other way. These cats should be counselled for post-traumatic stress. It is a well-observed fact that
in extremis
human beings will cannibalize each other; and we don’t generally hand the bewildered survivors to a humane vet afterwards. These cats needed food, there was nothing depraved about it. Imagine you were locked in a Kellogg’s
warehouse, and helped yourself to a few Rice Krispies to keep yourself alive. At the end of the week, the police burst in, and you say, ‘Thank God you’ve come, there’s not a drop of milk in this place, can you believe that?’ But they survey the scene – snap, crackle and pop all over the place – and shrink back, screaming.
‘CEREALS “EATEN” IN GRUESOME VEGETARIAN HORROR’
runs the headline in next week’s paper, and you are peremptorily taken out and shot.

I have been toying with an idea for a short story. It’s a variation on the film
Thelma and Louise,
in which a third, previously overlooked woman character (let’s call her Abigail) gets a phone call from Louise. ‘Git yer bags, honey, me and Thelma we’re headin’ fer the mountens.’ ‘Count me in,’ yells the feisty Abigail as the soundtrack swells with up-beat jive. She paints her lips, grabs a sweater, pulls on her cowgirl boots, swings through the door and then stops on the porch. Damn. The music ceases abruptly. She puts down her bag and kicks it. Damn again. What has she been thinking of? How can she go? How can she possibly go on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure with Louise and Thelma today –
when she’s already started defrosting a chicken?

I intend to call the story ‘The Road More Travelled’, because I feel the majority of women will identify with Abigail the chicken lady. My sorrowful contention, in fact, is that butter it how you will, we are most of us chicken ladies – rationalizing inaction, inventing pathetic reasons not to do things. Why didn’t the chicken lady cross the road? Because she’d just done her toenails, of course. For every Thelma and Louise accelerating a big green Thunderbird into thin air above the Grand Canyon there are at least a million of us pressing our noses to
wet wintry windscreens, deciding we can’t possibly take a five-minute detour on the way back from Ikea. ‘Got to get home!’ Why? ‘It’s bins night.’

The trouble with escape, I suppose, is that it must be dramatic and once-and-for-all; anything else is just holidays. For my own part, I have nothing particularly onerous at home to escape from – only newspaper deadlines, a neglected novel, an
EastEnders
addiction, and a punishing schedule of cats’ tea-times – yet I seem to battle constantly against powerful flight fantasies. I don’t mean drooling over economy fares to Delhi, either. I mean that regularly I drive in circles at Brighton’s orbital roundabouts, defying the lure of the home exit, and torturing myself with such exotic alternatives as ‘Worthing’ and ‘Shoreham’.

Yes, yes, make the break! Turn those wheels, baby! But then I glance at the clock on the dashboard and change my mind. Drat, half-past two, it will be dark in a couple of hours. If you’re going to run away from home, it’s better to hit the road first thing in the morning with a little bag of Marmite sandwiches and a banana. So I take the Brighton turn-off with a familiar mixture of self-loathing and relief, and head back by the usual route. (
Today’s unconvincing reason for not escaping: no banana.)

I hope I’m not talking to myself here, by the way. Perhaps some readers never entertain the ‘Ordinary Woman Completely Disappears’ fantasy; never dream of wearing dark glasses at night and crashing through road-blocks on the A27 at Chichester. But surely every woman turns down small adventures in favour of urgent ironing; says ‘Can’t’ when she really means something else. Perhaps we draw the line so quickly on outlandish opportunities because we fear otherwise it may not get drawn at all. Thelma and Louise discover what they’re capable of once they’re free, and it’s pretty alarming.

But back at my short story, I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what happens to Abigail the chicken lady. In the movie,
when Thelma and Louise drive at night through Monument Valley, you get that spooky old Marianne Faithfull song ‘The Eyes of Lucy Jordan’ about the woman who went bonkers because she always stayed home. ‘At the age of 37 / She realized she’d never / Drive through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair.’ I have an idea that Abigail has no such regrets. She just continues to defrost the chicken, cooks it, suffers salmonella poisoning and dies – expiring just at the point when Thelma and Louise fly into their ravine. It’s a bit harsh, perhaps. But as
Thelma and Louise
showed, sometimes you have to be fairly dramatic to make a point.