Fiona Looney
That cat we didn’t ask for has a bestest enemy... who wakes me for grub at 5am
There are good reasons why people don’t bring their cats on holidays. Number 1, they’d ruin everything. Number 2, they’d run off. Which, if you’d even a smidgeon of fondness for them, would ruin everything (see number 1, above.) Luckily, cats are far more independent than dogs, so making holiday arrangements for them should be less complicated, less expensive and less stressful. Unless, of course, they happen to have an arch enemy who lives across the road.
To recap: the cat that we didn’t ask for first came to my attention about a year ago when I spotted her fighting with Oscar, the mild-mannered cat across the road. It was funny because the two adversaries look almost identical, and here they were, straddling the wall between our house and our neighbour’s, staring each other down while moving in slow motion and making deeply unpleasant noises. I filmed the encounter, thinking it would make an amusing souvenir, and never imagining it would essentially become the soundtrack to my life. But lo, as regular readers know, The Cat decided to move in with us, which meant that Oscar moved his centre of operations to our front garden and windowsills, the better to continue terrorising his slightly smaller doppelganger.
And up to a point, it was still quite funny, and you’re wondering where holidays comes into this and in a way, they don’t.
But they might have. When all the people living in your house are capable of independent travel, the likelihood is that at some point, the house will be empty overnight. And what would The Cat – who divides her nights between The Youngest’s bed, mine and her mysterious nocturnal missions – do then? It was my mother who reminded me that she and my Dad used to go to Cape Cod for three weeks every summer, leaving our old cat to a neighbour with a supply of Whiskas and an empty house which she accessed through the fly window of my sister’s old bedroom.
We don’t have fly windows, but we do have a small window in our downstairs bathroom which, I reckoned, The Cat could be trained to use. So we showed her the open window, essentially shoved her through it and in a surprisingly short time, she had made it her entry and exit point of choice.
As had her arch enemy. Now, before the bathroom window, Oscar had never come into our house at all. He would sometimes sit on the patio, staring at me from under the table, in the hope that his nemesis might decide to go out and play. And on a couple of occasions, when The Youngest had left her bedroom window open, he had poked his head around the blind to see if The Cat was in situ. But she (The Youngest, not the cat, see numbers 1 and 2 above) went to Lahinch for a week with me and because the people left behind couldn’t be bothered getting up in the night to deal with feline comings and goings, the bathroom window was commissioned and when we came back, we had two cats we didn’t ask for instead of just one.
At this point, you might be expecting me to relate that the two cats have become firm friends and we’re all getting along swimmingly in this unplanned cat house. But no. Oscar’s prime motivation in moving in is to haunt our cat at closer quarters.
If he can’t find her – say, at five or six in the morning when she is usually enjoying a lie-in on my bed – he stands on the landing and miaows loudly until somebody – me – gets up and coaxes him downstairs, where I bribe him with food to leave. Our cat eats very little and Oscar eats a lot, which means I’m now buying twice as much food. I don’t have to feed Oscar, everyone else in the house tells me – and bear in mind he’s well fed and loved by his actual owners across the road – but it’s not them he stares at from under the patio table, or sits patiently beside in the kitchen when Markie’s bowl is empty.
The irony in all of this is that the house hasn’t actually been empty at all. And now that it has become a battleground – I literally run around closing doors to hide one cat from the other – I’m not sure it can be. If we do all go away at the same time, I will need a Plan B. Maybe I’ll ask Oscar’s owner to mind Markie. And maybe – and it would certainly explain why our cat eats so little here – she already is.