Chapter 26 - Cats and compromise.
In my search for a way to keep the wildlife safe when the cats came to Nundub, I came across a giveaway ad for a collapsible steel mesh cage measuring 2.4 x 1.2 x 1.2m. I couldn’t believe my luck! The lady, whose name I can’t remember, but let’s call her Dolores, was giving the cage away for free because her cat had recently died, and she wanted all reminders of him out of her life. We talked for a bit about how attached one gets to our pets, then I asked her if she was sure she didn’t want to get another cat (already investing in her emotional journey after one minute on the phone). Dolly said ‘Yes, I’m sure’ in a sad and final way which compelled me to offer her some money for the cage. ‘No,’ she said, no less sadly and gave me her address which was right near Smash’s work. I rang Smash and asked him if he could pick it up on his way home from work and he agreed, in the distracted way he does when he is busy and not really listening to what I’m saying. At 4.30PM I sent him a text reminder of what he’d agreed to and Dolly’s address. He sent back an eye-rolling emoji and the words, ‘It’s peak hour.’
After some back and forth discussion about how we were leaving first thing in the morning and how invaluably handy the cage would be for the cats, he begrudgingly agreed to pick it up and and I got back to packing.
Smash was very late getting home, and when he arrived, I could tell by the sound of the tyres on the gravel driveway that things had not gone well. Turned out, Dolly lived in a small apartment block with no lift. The cage had originally been assembled on her balcony by her husband who had run off, she revealed, taking his toolkit with him. No cat, no partner – just Dolly and the cage and a balcony sliding door too small to get the cage through. Each panel of the cage was connected by small metal clasps that needed to be opened.
‘Didn’t she have scissors or something?’ I asked.
‘She had nothing.’
Smash had disassembled it, getting each wire clasp open without tools incurring myriad cuts and twisted bits of skin with Dol standing too close behind him making ‘stthhhh’ noises whenever one of his digits got pinched.
‘Did you get cranky?’ I asked. He certainly would’ve if I’d been hovering over him.
Smash said no, it would’ve been mean. She’d seemed fragile, and her apartment had had a bleak, hopeless vibe to it. Every time he’d so much as frowned, she’d winced.
I winced in commiseration, followed him to the beer fridge and asked what happened next.
He’d finally unclipped the wire mesh panels to the point where the cage could be folded into layers with the whole bundle measuring .2 x 1.2 x 2.4m, then he’d tried to carry it on his own down the steps, but it was very heavy, and also, kept falling apart.
‘Didn’t she have any gaffer tape?’
‘She had nothing!’
Then Dolores offered to help and took one end, but the cage continued to keep opening, concertina style and in her attempts to close it up as quickly as possible, she managed to catch Smash’s fingers in it every single time. By the time they got to the ground floor, she was on the verge of tears for inflicting so much pain on him.
‘It was excruciating,’ he said.
I offered to get some Band-Aids, but turned out, he was referring Dol’s distress, not his injuries. ‘So depressing.’
‘I’ll send her a thank you card.’
‘Oh yes, that’ll fix everything,’ Smash said, now feeling quite comfortable about being mean.
I thanked him for all his trouble and explained how handy it would be, to have the cats safely in the cage, and when we got down to Nundub the following weekend, we unloaded the cage, with work gloves, being careful to not pinch our fingers, then put it together using cable ties instead of the steel clips, for pain free future disassembling. Then we put it up against the open sliding door with the cage gate opening into the extension, so the cats could experience the great outdoors without harming the wildlife, and installed a splintery log for scratching, a litter box, water, some dried food and a perch, for elevated viewing.
‘Perfect!’ I said. ‘Where are the cats?
Mabel and Borry, perfectly happy on the bed.
Boris and Mabel were tired after their long drive from Brisbane to Nundub. Boris is very vocal and likes to tell you where and how he is at all times. He’d miaowed all the way down in the car, even when he was washing, thereby combining his two great loves, but arriving quite exhausted. Mabel rarely miaows, and when she does it’s just a two-note high squeak, but she is a Fraidy Cat, so she was worn out from having her orange eyes wide open in a perfect circle throughout the entire drive. We’d let them loose in the shed with all the doors closed apart from the one connected to the cage. Schultzy had rushed over to say hello, sniffed their arses, tried to entice them into play with a few polar bear thumps on the floor near which they’d ignored. Goose hadn’t acknowledged them and to this day, I don’t think she even knew they were there for the weekend. After giving Schultzy the brushoff, the cats had done a perimeter check, got spooked by a few hundred invisible things, then headed for the bed which is where they were now. I scooped them up before they got too comfortable and introduced them to the cat cage. Unfortunately, even after all our preparations, neither of them showed even a glimmer of interest in going outside; they turned their backs on the cage and headed straight back to the bed.
Smash scratched his eyebrow.
‘Don’t worry. They’ll get used to it,’ I said.
I picked Mabel up and tried to force her into the cage. She braced herself against the opening, claws latched onto the wire like steel clasps. I tried to unlatch her claws but she countered with an impressive tumble roll that she’d obviously been practicing in secret, saving up all her energy for this one moment. Then she shook herself and stomped off to the bed. I tried with Borry – he’s much more chilled and at least allowed me to put him inside, but as soon as I closed the gate he started miaowing.
‘He’ll get used to it,’ I said. But he didn’t; he miaowed and miaowed, getting increasingly loud and plaintive until none of us could stand it and Henry accused us of cat cruelty.
I opened the cat cage gate and Borry jumped out, flicked his tail and headed off to join Mabel.
‘Well at least we didn’t have to pay for the stupid cage,’ I said.
Smash looked shifty.
‘You paid her, didn’t you?’
‘I gave her $50. It seemed too mean to just take it. It was the only thing she had left.’
(We really have to stop getting drawn into all these Gumtree sellers’ lives.)
We left the cats in the shed and closed the door between it and the extension, then shoved the ‘handy’ cat cage out of the doorway For the next few days it managed to get in the way of every single task we undertook, so we ended up pushing it over and shoving it behind the tanks - out of sight, out of mind.
Meanwhile, the boys got to work on the plumbing and I stayed with the cats and wrote. Through the corrugated iron wall, I listened in on their conversation, their jokes, their comradely banter about what was wrong with the world and how they would fix it. They worked well together and there were no arguments, which was quite something, given they are both expert know-it-alls who hate being told what to do. The Father’s Day bubble controlled the environment, even when Henry got a large chunk of concrete stuck in the outlet drain and kept pushing it further and further in while Smash stood over him shouting, ‘Just grab it’, as if Henry would be trying to do something else.
At the end of the day I went in to inspect the bathroom and tried very hard not to ask what they’d actually done. There’d been so much banging, clanging of tools on concrete, drilling, hammering. No sign of the bath; all I could see were some copper pipes on the wall, one of which had a kink in it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Smash shook his head and turned to Henry. ‘I told you she’d notice.’
Then Henry started pacifying, smoothing the situation out, as he does, telling me it would be fine, not a big deal, water would still go through it. He frowned at me. Don’t you dare spoil Father’s Day.
I complied, and when Jackson came over for Father’s Day dinner, Henry stood in front of the kink while showing off the work he and Smash had done.
Not one to go overboard with praise, (unless melted cheese is involved) Jackson gave the bathroom, or what he could see of it, the once over and said, ‘Hmpff’. If he’d spotted the kink, he would’ve zoomed in on it – not with malice, just curiousity. What’s going on there? Then he would want to fix it. The problem with kinked copper, we found out, is it can’t be fixed and if you try, the metal weakens and cracks. Rather than go down that track and possibly ruin Father’s Day, we all moved away from the bathroom to the living room, where cauliflower cheese was melting in the Weber. It was a happy occasion; the boys made him feel loved.
Over the next few days, we applied the waterproofing sealer and painted the floor. We kept going in the bathroom, looking at it, but it seemed neither of us wanted to take the next step or admit that plumbing is closer to rocket science than we’d thought. Then there was the tiling - there’s a knack to getting the tiles all the same height, it was a big area, much bigger than a splashback and the tiles would have to be laid before the bath or taps went in.
With our towels between our legs, we went crawling back to the outdoor shower, which wasn’t so bad, we agreed. There was plenty of hot water in the hose, and we could always buy an extra length to add to it, lay it out on the concrete to heat up for even longer showers. Then Smash found a shower rose that he’d kept for thirty years and attached it to the end of the hose so the water came out in a gentle spray instead of a chest piercing javelin.
‘What about the wind?’ I asked. Have you got a piece of ply or something we could use as a windbreak?’
‘Oh, you mean like a piece of ply I’ve hoarded for years?’
‘Yes.’
Improving the outdoor shower started off in a resolute way. We told ourselves we weren’t defeated by the bathroom, just being adaptable, patient. ‘Making do’ was mentioned. We chose the most sheltered spot we could find near the tanks, which just happened to be where the cat cage was still lying. While manhandling it out of the way, I jokingly mentioned how it was the same size as a shower cubicle, which is how it came to be that we are now showering in a cat cage wrapped in a tarp. Yes, it’s a bodgeyed up bathroom, and yes, climbing in and out of a cage is a bit weird, but it’s heavenly having a hot shower out of the wind and the cat perch is perfect for putting the soap on.