To Be A Cat

Toilet Trouble

GAVIN HAD BEEN home for five minutes, and for three of those minutes he had been standing on Barney’s tail.

Barney had hidden in the bathroom. Trouble was, Gavin always needed the toilet when he came home from school, and he’d managed to shut the door before Barney could escape.

And now the boy was sitting on the toilet, trousers around his ankles, and the sole of his left shoe (more of a boot) was pressing hard enough into Barney’s tail bone to cause the kind of pain that makes you think fondly of being crushed on a rugby pitch.

‘Ow,’ Barney was saying. (The one word that is the same in both cat and human.)

‘Sorry?’ Gavin was saying as he laughed. ‘What’s the matter, Maurice?’

Please get off my tail.

‘No idea what you’re talking about.’

Yes you do, you evil psycho. Please. It hurts.

And Gavin stared down into Maurice’s face. ‘You look different. Wimpier. You look like …’ He shook his head, as if dismissing a silly thought. ‘Anyway, what were you doing at the bus stop this morning? I don’t want my cat following me to school. Makes me look soft. And I don’t like looking soft. Because I’m Gavin. And Gavin’s the Greek word for rock.’ (It’s not, by the way, Gavin was just an idiot.) ‘And that’s what I am. I am a big rock.’

I could think of some other words, wailed Barney.

‘So, don’t do it again, fur-face, or you’re dead,’ continued Gavin. ‘Understand me? D. E. D. Dead.’

D. E. A. D., actually, said Barney.

Gavin didn’t know he was being taunted by his cat, but pressed harder on his tail anyway, just for fun. So it was a sweet relief when the doorbell rang downstairs and the pressure lifted.

‘Who’s that?’ wondered Gavin aloud as he tore off a very long sheet of toilet paper.

Then: ‘Gavin! Gavin?! Could you get that? I’m on my exercise bike.’

‘Yuh,’ said Gavin, in caveman.

Gavin finished up and went downstairs, and Barney sped after him, close to his heels. Gavin opened the door. ‘Hello,’ said a man selling cloths and feather dusters. ‘Could I speak to the home owner, young man?’

Barney never heard Gavin’s reply. He was out. And he was running. Because he knew he couldn’t waste a second.