Thomasina. Paul Gallico

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Ruadh did vary this most uncomfortable and humiliating position sometimes by placing me across her shoulders like a fur piece where I could rest and even be admired by people who sometimes said it was difficult to tell which was Mary Ruadh’s hair and which was me. I didn’t mind that. Or she would carry me upside down in both arms, like a little baby. I hated that.

      If you ask me why I put up with it, I cannot tell you, since my philosophy of life is quite simple. When you find yourself in a situation where unpleasant things, or things you don’t like, occur more frequently than pleasant ones – walk out.

      Well, there were other things too, which I wasn’t going to mention, but as long as I am on the subject, I might as well. There was the being made to sit on a chair sometimes at tea with a napkin around my neck and pretend I was a person, or rather, Mary Ruadh pretended. This got me a few caraway seed cakes of which I happened to be fond and a couple of laps of milk out of a saucer, but it didn’t make up for the indignity.

      When I had kittens they took them away from me and drowned them.

      At night I was forced to sleep at the foot of her bed. Nor could I go away to my favourite chair after she fell asleep for if she woke up and I was not there she would call for me and sob most heart-breakingly. Sometimes during the night, even when I was there, she would wake up and begin to cry softly in the darkness and murmur, “Mummy – Mummy!” for it seems she remembered her too. Then she would reach down in the darkness and wake me up and hold me to her so hard with her face buried in my flank that I could hardly breathe, and you know how we hate to be held.

      She would then cry – “Oh, Thomasina, Thomasina, I love you. Don’t ever leave me.” After a little she would become more quiet and I would wash her face a little and lick the salt tears from her cheeks, which made her laugh and giggle and say – “Thomasina – you tickle,” and soon she would go to sleep again.

      And I stayed on. Believe me, if it had been a little boy I should not have done so, thank you very much. I should soon enough have run away and not come back, taken to the woods, or found someone else in town to live with, for I am perfectly capable of looking after Thomasina. Though I may look delicate, I am most resilient, have a hardy constitution and can stand almost anything. Once a boy on a bicycle ran over me. Mrs McKenzie came running out of the house screaming that I was killed and Mary Ruadh cried and carried on so that it took an hour afterwards to calm her and all that happened was that the boy fell off his bicycle and hurt himself and I got up and walked away.

      Well, and then there was Mr MacDhui himself and there is plenty I could tell you about him, and none of it favourable. An animal doctor who didn’t like animals – there’s a good one. A bit too quick with the chloroform rag when people brought their sick pets to his surgery, was what they said. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t want him treating me. Mr MacDhui was jealous of me because his daughter loved me so much, and he hated me. But what was even worse, he ignored me. Mr High-and-mighty-around-the-house. Nose in the air; whiskers bristling all the time. And the medicine smell of him. Ugh! It was the same one that came out of the hospital when you went past. When he returned home at night and bent down to kiss Mary Ruadh, his huge, bristly red face with the medicine and pipe smell would come right close to mine, since Mary Ruadh would be carrying me, and it made me feel sick.

      Naturally, I annoyed him all I could, calling attention to myself by washing in front of him, taking care to be on his chair when I knew he would be wanting it, lying in doorways where he would be likely to trip over me, rubbing up against his legs and ankles, leaving hairs on his best clothes whenever I could find them and jumping up on his lap when he sat down to read the paper and making smells of my own. He did not dare to be rough with me when Mary Ruadh was in the room and so he would just pretend I was not there and then get up suddenly to go for some tobacco and dump me off his knees.

      Add up all of these things and you might almost say it amounted to sufficient cause for me to move out. Yet I stayed on and was not too unhappy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, but if the truth be known, I was rather fond of the child.

      I think it could have been because, in some ways, girl children and cats are not un-alike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.

      If you have ever lived with a girl child, you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they are capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands or prohibitions. These same traits seem to annoy you in us as well. For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to do than you can compel us to love you. We have this in common, Mary Ruadh and I.

      Thus I did many strange things I should not have believed myself capable of doing. When Mary Ruadh went to school – this adventure of mine took place during the summer holidays – I suffered her to carry me all the way there, and to be pawed or fussed over by the other children until the bell rang and she went inside, when I was free to run home and look after my business.

      But, believe it or not, when it came time for her to come home in the afternoon I would be sitting up on the gate-post with my tail curled round my legs, watching for her. True, it was also a fine vantage point from which to spit on the minister’s pug dog when it went by, but nevertheless, there I was. The neighbours used to say you could always tell what time of day it was by the MacDhui cat getting up on to the gate-post to watch for her wee mistress.

      I, Thomasina, waiting on a gate-post for a somewhat grubby, red-haired and not even specially beautiful child, can you imagine?

      Sometimes I wondered whether there was not another bond between us: we were each to the other something to cling to when the sun goes down and nightfall brings on fear and loneliness.

      Loneliness is comforted by the closeness and touch of fur to fur, skin to skin – or skin to fur. Sometimes when I awoke at night after a bad dream, I would listen to the regular breathing of Mary Ruadh and feel the slight rise and fall of the bed-clothes about her. Then I would no longer be afraid and would go back to sleep again.

      I have mentioned that Mary Ruadh was not an especially beautiful child, which perhaps was not polite, since she thought that I was certainly the most beautiful cat in the world, but I meant especially beautiful in the unusual sense. She was a rather ordinary-looking little girl except for her eyes, which told you of some special quality in her, or about her when you looked into them. Often I was not able to do so for long. Their colour was a bright blue, a most intense blue, but sometimes when she was thinking thoughts I could not understand or even guess, they turned as dark as the loch on a stormy day.

      For the rest, you wouldn’t call her much to look at, with her uptilted nose and freckled face and a long lower lip that usually stuck out, while her eyebrows and lashes were so light you could hardly see them. She wore her ginger-red hair in two braids tied with green or blue ribbon. Her legs were quite long and she liked to stick her stomach out.

      But there was something else pleasant about Mary Ruadh; she smelled good. Mrs McKenzie kept her washed and ironed when she was at home and she always smelled of lavender, for Mrs McKenzie kept lavender bags in with her clothes and underthings.

      It seemed as if Mrs McKenzie was forever washing and ironing and starching and scenting her clothes, because it was the only way she was allowed to show how much she cared for Mary Ruadh. Mrs McKenzie was a thin woman who talked and sang through her nose. She would have mothered Mary Ruadh the way we will frequently look after somebody else’s kitten as though it were our own, but Mr MacDhui was jealous and feared that Mary Ruadh would come to love her too much if she were allowed to cuddle her. СКАЧАТЬ