Single and just purring
AT 72 former Torrens Creek wife hunter and feral cat exterminator Shaunn Ansell is starting to mellow.
He’s got aches and pains in places he didn’t know he had places. Last year his prostate “spat the dummy” and it was off to hospital.
He’s up and about now, fixing motorbikes and restoring cars. Shaunn is living a life of bachelor bliss, having in his eighth decade on the planet decided that he likes his own company. The former bouncer, traveller and bon vivant used to say that all he had to offer a woman was “honesty and a broken body”. Apart from a few more worn-out body parts, nothing much has changed.
He was always on the lookout for a female companion and had a flyer stuck to the front of his Flinders Highway home which said “Wife Wanted: Woman 40plus with chooks wanted”.
Seeing as his door was not being kicked down by 40year-old, chook-owning supermodels, Shaunn cranked up the marketing machine and extended the age to 50, but would look at 60.
He had what he called a few “lunatics” respond but no one with whom he wanted to share his cosy, corrugated iron shack out there on the Flinders Highway.
I called in to see him last month and he told me he had cancelled his hunt for a wife. He reckons he’s too old, too curmudgeonly and too set in his ways. He’d consider a friendship but as for living together, nope, that’s off the books.
There was a time somewhere in his past when he had a wife, but I could never be sure he was all that excited about the arrangement.
“I took her to New Zealand once. Each day I’d spread all the travel brochures on the bed and ask her what she wanted to do and she’d just say ‘whatever you want to do’.’’
When they returned to Australia Shaunn heard her tell some friends that trip was “OK if you don’t mind being dragged around old car museums and that sort of thing’.’’
It was a defining moment in their marriage.
“She’d only ever tell me what she really thought when she had a bellyfull of piss,’’ Shaunn said.
“I’m not being disrespectful to the lady, she’s passed on. But that’s how it was.’’
He’s killed all of the feral cats and any other cats that came anywhere near his house. He was bitten by a big, feral tomcat in 2002.
He went to swipe it from his kitchen bench and it latched on to his thumb. He couldn’t shake it off and had to walk out to his backyard woodpile with the cat still swinging off his thumb. He picked up his axe, put his hand with the cat still attached on the ground and bashed the big tom to death. He ended up in hospital with a thumb so badly infected, doctors thought they would have to amputate his hand.
He recovered but it was war. They say revenge is a dish best served cold. In Shaunn’s handbook for life it reads more like “revenge is a dish full of dead cats”.
One of his greatest pleasures now is sitting in a chair, watching the birds frolic around the water bowl in his yard.
“The cats used to eat all of the birds but not any more,” he said with a contented sigh.
with JOHN ANDERSEN