The Glaring Page 3

  “Look, Bob… look how powerful and strident the pro-cat lobby and its allies are… The old woman was clearly deranged and by t. gondii, I’d stake my life on it… However, there’s no mention of that in the article because it – the science – got lost in an orgy of political correctness. So, there’s no mention of the parasite and the wider implications of its prevalence in society because all that was lost in the verbal spats between celebrity feminists and animal lovers and the various editors – mostly, but not exclusively male – of the several newspapers… And the fact that there were no post-mortem examinations of the cats, not even a sample of them… or the old woman for that matter, was absolutey scandalous: a loss to science and an opportunity missed for public enlightenment.”

  Bob took his time in replying; he didn’t want to upset his friend, though he did want to put him right, as he saw it.

  “Okay, you are probably right… in these cases, that is; in these cases, Lionel… That is, in these isolated cases which are, mercifully, few and far between and are very extreme instances of someone completely surrounded by cats: living as one with them – as it were – and utterly immersed in their environment, including the pathogenic one… But I say again, Lionel, where’s the panic? These exceptions surely prove the rule… there is no need for you to be so exercised by it all. You need to keep things in proportion, old son… What you’ve told me is very illuminating, but I’m not going to get all paranoid about it and believe that we are all being deliberately kept in the dark.”

  Lionel looked a little sheepish at that, but smiled back at his friend reassuringly. They had their disagreements over some things, but after their time together in hospital, acutely aware – in the words of Bob Dylan – that they were both ‘knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door’ for a while, nothing was going to upset this friendship; it meant too much to both of them.

  Before Bob left, later that day, Lionel assured him that he would investigate the various possibilities in his locality in re day-time or evening classes; he’d look for something useful or enjoyable to get involved in and, with any luck, there’d be some new friends or acquaintances for him to discover too.

  **

  (v)

  He alighted from his car outside the house, another day’s work satisfactorily done and dusted. He stretched himself a little before locking the car door and before taking a step towards his open front gate. Stopping in the gate-way for a second or two, looking up and down the road for no particular reason, he then stepped forward onto his property. As he did so, a very large rat, an old rat by the look of him, simply ambled across the steps right in front of him and disappeared into his neighbour’s adjoining garden!

  He was astonished and, like most people who’ve see a rat, disgusted at the same time – defiled almost. He shook his head in disbelief at the audacity of the thing and mounted the steps to his front door, looking sideways and behind him all the while. That was the first time in his adult life he’d seen a live rat, up close and personal, and so near to human habitation, too – and in broad daylight of all things!

  Why were they so repellent? What was it about them that excited such loathing when water rats (water voles really, like ‘Ratty’ in Wind in the Willows) were so cute? Was it their long, naked tails, perhaps, or their overall shape and that pointed rather than a chubby head? He didn’t know and he didn’t care; he just loathed them.

  In the next few days, talking to neighbours, he became aware of several recent sightings of rats in his immediate locality. Inexplicably, the normally secretive creatures seemed to be emboldened and completely unaware or uncaring of the risks they were taking. Naturally enough, he contacted the relevant department of his local authority. He was convinced that the fortnightly rather than old weekly refuse collections were to blame and people not weighing-down the lids on their bins properly, as he told the council operative on the end of the ‘phone. The latter was professionally non-committal, especially on the fortnightly rate of refuse collection, but she did promise to send an operative around to have a look-see, especially in the passage-way he shared with several neighbours: the place where they all stored their bins.

  He had to wait over a fortnight for a reply though – and he never actually saw anyone from the promised ‘investigation’ either.

  When the letter arrived it was a prime example of a bureaucratic brush-off: the operative had found no trace of rat-runs in the shared passage-way, no nests and no other traces of the animals either. So that was that, regardless of what people had actually seen.

  Singularly, however, the letter arrived on the very same morning that he found at the bottom of his garden, en route to the bins, the partially eaten corpse of a very large rat!

  **

  (vi)

  He’d put it off for a very long time, but common sense told him that, finally, he had to do it. He had to get rid of Ailish’s clothes and shoes. It would take some courage. Ailish had had one major indulgence, she liked clothes. And three wardrobes in different parts of the house were ample testimony to her catholic taste in outfits, suits, hats, dresses, tops and skirts – as well as her penchant for very smart-looking, as well as functional, autumnal and winter coats.

  Secretly, Lionel had been very proud of her dress sense and the fact that she always looked her best and was never slovenly or uncaring about her appearance. However, he still chided Ailish about the expense and the exponential growth of wardrobes and shoe racks whenever he could, and the invidious comparison between her love of clothes and his extremely modest ‘tallboy’ - containing ‘one of the smallest ranges of clothing known to man’, as he liked to boast.

  But, then, Ailish always had an instant come-back about his excessive (to her mind) expenditure on books and the fact that one whole bedroom was taken up with them (not a bedroom, a study, he would mumble in reply). But there was no animosity in any of this, just sparring between two people long-lived in matrimony and used to each other’s ways – good-natured banter for the most part. Still, it was going to be a thankless task and he was dreading it; a task full of flashes of memory of Ailish in this or that outfit going to the theatre, out to a restaurant or visiting friends and acquaintances.

  He collected a roll of black plastic bin bags from the kitchen and, dragging his feet a little, took himself upstairs to the spare bedroom; he’d start there. He also took his portable radio with him tuned to a classical music station; he needed some company and the solace of beautiful music.

  Taking a deep breath, Lionel opened the double white doors of the first wardrobe to find it absolutely packed with clothes of one sort or another.

  “Bloody hell… and there’s two more of these besides, plus other places… like the airing cupboard” he said out loud, unable to stop himself.

  The radio was playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet softly in the background. The familiar theme slowly impinged upon Lionel’s thoughts doing nothing to improve his temper – the opposite in fact.

  ‘That must be the millionth time they’ve played that in my hearing alone… so that’s probably a quadrillion in total air time,’ he thought, savagely.

  It came to an end, to be superceded by the presenter’s voice waffling on about something or other. Lionel shook his head slightly and addressed the phenomenon on front of him

  ‘I’m not going to take them out one at a time,’ he decided, ‘that would take far too long and it would be too hurtful as well, giving me time to dwell on what she looked like in them, and even recalling an actual occasion, perhaps.’

  He reached in and pulled out a bunch of clothes, as big as he could manage and, turning, he threw them on the bed. The time-consuming thing was taking all the hangers out, but his first haul had filled one plastic bag already and he tore off another bag from the roll.

  He returned to the wardrobe garnering another set of clothes in his arms and, with a little effort - they were heavy after all - he raised them over the rail to pull them out. As he did so, a ginger cat spilled out onto the
floor!

  Lionel screamed and jumped backwards, throwing the heavy armful of clothes over the cat. Nothing happened for a while after that, except that Lionel became aware, in the general stillness, of the pounding of his heart and the fact that he was perspiring freely.

  To the dramatic sounds of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana now playing on the radio – loud timpani and full-throated chorus – Lionel steeled himself to lift the pile of clothes off the cat, which was uncharacteristically silent and immobile, behaving as if it was stunned. With the toe of his right shoe Lionel slowly got under the pile of clothes and gradually began to reveal the inert rump of the cat. Perhaps it was dead!

  But then, with an absolute tsunami of relief engulfing his whole body – Carmina Burana in the background: O fortuna, indeed! – Lionel suddenly realised that it was none other than Ailish’s highly realistic toy cat; the cat that always sat at the end of the spare bed; the one he would pretend to smother or throw about the room when Ailish wasn’t about. He sat down heavily on the bed, actually smiling now at the extraordinary juxtaposition of the arresting music and the appearance of the cat. Bloody thing, scaring him half to death like that! He gave it a hearty kick for good measure.

  *

  A week or so later, back from a shopping expedition, Lionel went upstairs to his bedroom; his feet were hot and sore and he wanted his slippers. Lionel climbed the carpeted stairs wearily, but happily; he did not have to go out shopping again for a couple of days at least.

  He opened the bedroom door and immediately froze in fear. A ginger cat lay curled-up asleep on his bed, in exactly the same pose as the wretched toy so beloved by Ailish!

  For goodness sake, he told himself, it was the toy so beloved by his late lamented wife.

  He was momentarily stunned: one, by the appearance of the cat on his bed and, two – more worryingly – by the highly troubling uncertainty as to how and when it had got there. Was this the onset of dreaded Alzheimer’s? He had absolutely no recollection of putting it there. Was he losing his mind? Why would he, of all people, have brought the detested thing from the spare bedroom and put it there, on his bed? Why on earth would he inflict that on himself? It just didn’t make sense! Was the house under the possession of some malign spirit, perhaps?

  Rational man though he was, Lionel had long harboured a suspicion that this was an unlucky house and that the people in it were all ill-fated: what with Ailish’s infertility, his indifferent health that had cost him the promotion he was so sure he deserved, his premature redundancy and then Ailish’s far too-early demise. He’d even toyed with the idea of asking Ailish’s priest (an occasional dinner guest down the years) if he could intervene in some capacity: bless the place at the very least, or rid it of… of what? Lionel had no idea of what; he’d just felt for a long time that there was some sort of malevolency inhabiting his house… and garden. Just look at his problem with cats even before he found out about t. gondii… And now there was this, of course… and on his bed!

  He took an angry step forward, the bloody thing was going in the bin at the very least or, maybe, he’d even burn it - Ailish’s toy-cat notwithstanding. But, as he reached down to grab it by the neck, the head turned, the eyes opened and Lionel let out a piercing scream.

  Immediately, the cat sprang back along the bed toward the pillows, it arched its back, it hissed and spat furiously at him, and then made as if to spring. But it was too late. In an instant, Lionel was the other side of the hastily slammed bedroom door as the enraged cat thudded into it.

  Shaken and very disturbed, Lionel left the animal scratching madly on the other side of the door and tottered downstairs to make himself a restorative cup of tea. He would only be able to go back in there if he was fully kitted-out in some anti-cat gear and armed with an air-gun or a weighted net of his own fashioning, maybe. And that wouldn’t and couldn’t be for a good while yet, obviously. Until then, his bedroom was strictly out of bounds, and being defiled no doubt even as he shakily put the tea-bag in his mug and switched on the kettle. He shuddered. Until such time as he could dislodge the thing, he’d have to share his house with one of ‘them’ – and that made him feel physically sick.

  But how did it get in? He put his mug down hastily and, in a rush, checked all the doors and windows on the ground floor. He ran upstairs – leaving his bedroom well alone – and checked all the other rooms as well. Nothing. There were no other breaches, nothing even slightly ajar (he always did that when he went out, even though it meant the house was incredibly stuffy on his return).

  ‘I must have left the sash window open in my bedroom, just enough for the bugger to get in. It must have jumped – incredibly – from the top of the kitchen roof onto the bedroom window sill. Suppose other cats get in, could they contrive, collectively, to turn the handle on the bedroom door? No, don’t be ridiculous, that would be impossible, surely!’

  But Lionel was bothered enough by that seemingly impossible prospect that he went to get his tool-kit from the top of the cellar. Opening the cellar door in trepidation, nervous now that other cats might have pushed-in the wrought-iron grille underneath the front steps or dug their way in somehow, he took out some nails and then fussily discarded them for screws. Rummaging around further in his tins, he soon discarded the screws for two large screw hooks and armed with these and a length of some thick cord he went back upstairs.

  He listened. The animal was quiet now. Perhaps it had gone! However, he wasn’t prepared yet – mentally as well as physically – to check that out. He knew what he had to do, and that was to embed the strong brass screw-hook in the door jam and tie the door knob to it very firmly. He did it twice to be absolutely sure.

  Retiring to the kitchen after repeatedly checking his handiwork, even to the extent of turning the door knob and trying to open the door, though it did not move a fraction, Lionel sank down into a comfortable chair and resumed his, by now, tepid cup of tea.

  Getting rid of that cat was now a priority. He dreaded to think of the mess it was making up there in the bedroom – urinating and defecating all over the place, scratching the paint off the door, the paper off the wall, knocking over some of Ailish’s ornaments and so forth. It was a violation.

  From time to time he would pick up one of Ailish’s atomisers and spray her favourite perfume (his too) around the room, to remind him of her presence – though he kept that to himself, of course. But with that cat up there now he doubted that he’d ever sleep in their bedroom again (always their bedroom). For even after he’d removed the offensive ginger felid, and vigorously scrubbed the carpet, say, with disinfectant, that damn parasite was probably still capable of hanging around for ages, according to the scientific literature. And the thought of sharing his sleeping arrangements with a parasite as robust and as ‘clever’ as t. gondii disturbed him greatly.

  “There must be more than one way to skin a cat,” he declared out loud, digging his teaspoon angrily into the wooden kitchen table.

  **

  (vii)

  After the ginger cat episode (or ginger cats, to be more precise), Lionel decided that he’d had enough of all things feline. Ailish’s toy cat soon went the same way as her clothes, etc., straight round to the nearest charity shop (of which there were far too many in his town). Metaphorically, he also turned his back on his garden and let it go, more or less, where it will. Ailish would have disapproved, he knew, but he wanted no more reminders of his (lost) battles with the local cats and all his attempts to control or at least modify their behaviour. The black metal facsimiles with their glassy eyes were already rusting away in the far corner of the garden, where they’d been ignominiously consigned.

  Coincidentally, predations on the garden birdlife seemed to have dropped away somewhat of late; the cat population appearing to give Lionel’s property a wider berth than was usual. But the absurdity of this paradox (less effort = fewer cats) was more or less lost on Lionel who, by now, could not really care one way or another. There was no rhyme or reason for this ch
ange in their behaviour as far as he could discern, but he grabbed the opportunity it afforded him to get his life back on an even keel.

  He made some enquiries on-line and by telephone, he took the opportunity to talk to some neighbours who he knew were really into it and, finally, he took the plunge and joined some groups belonging to the so-called University of the Third Age. He soon got stuck into his various choices: a Calligraphy group meeting in the local technical college (though Lionel found it a bit cliquey and a little intimidating seeing how advanced everyone else was); he left it soon after, even though the people in it had been perfectly welcoming; a Beginner’s Italian group in the local library (forcing himself, against the grain, to return to his former place of employment) and a Cookery class in a local community hall (which did not advertise itself as such, but was mainly composed of widowers like himself who’d left most of the cooking to their deceased wives). And, despite some early reservations due to his social awkwardness, he actually began to enjoy himself.