Stellar: Kittens

“I don’t have time for this, the taxi’s waiting”, my brother said as he handed over the keys to his apartment. “I’m just not a cat person”, I moaned.  He stopped and gave e a look of feigned reproach.  “It’s not a cat, it’s a …KITTEN!” He said the word kitten through a big stupid moon-face, like some sort of deranged children’s TV presenter, and then started poking me in the side until I cracked a smile.  “Come on!  Everyone loves Spartacus” he reasoned, one shoe already on the footpath.  “How long are you going for?” I said, defeated.  “Ten days.  You can do it.” “It’ll be fun!”, Dara said, waving him off.

Spartacus is my brother’s grey and white striped tuxedo tabby kitten that the good lady Dara and I had agreed to look after.  This wouldn’t be so much of a big deal if

A: I didn’t hate cats

and

B: Dara and I weren’t using the exercise as a mock-run to see if we would make good parents.

You see, a few years ago, Dara found a stray kitten on the road.  It took us only four days to abandon the poor thing to a foster home after having failed to feed it properly.  We also accidentally burnt it a little (note to new pet owners: candles and fur are a dangerous combination).  Anyway, since then we’ve both been sort of terrified of looking after anything that can starve or feel pain.  While the rest of our friends are having babies like there’s a sale on in Mothercare, we’re both a bit freaked out by the weight of responsibility.  So having discussed this over dinner, my opportunistic brother managed to talk us round to keeping his moggy breathing for a week and a half.

The first day, we almost lost him.  Dara opened the front door and Spartacus, as if he had been waiting there all night, leaped out through my legs.  Like a four-legged Indiana Jones he squeezed through the narrowest of gaps to breach the closing main door, earning freedom in the common area of the apartment block.  If you’ve ever played cat and mouse with a real cat, you will understand why cats usually win.  Despite being only 6 weeks old, Spartacus demonstrated an innate skillset of chicanery and elusion that would have been the envy of the Viet Cong.  After 25 sweaty minutes of stretching underneath cars and reaching through filthy hedges, we finally managed to corner him and and brought the squirmy furball upstairs.  Lesson number one: Our catbaby needed to be watched at all times.

Despite the fact that my brother had only left 16 hours ago, the apartment was already like a tsunami shoreline.  Anything that had been vertical was now horizontal.  Anything that could have been upturned, shredded or dispersed now formed a landscape of detritus on the floor.  Each footstep unsettled spores of foam, feathers or scraps of Cushelle that swirled into the air like pollen.  We swept and tidied, Dara changed the food in the bowls and refilled the milk.  Because it is “a boy’s job” (don’t get me started), I was left to deal with the litter tray.  A neon-pink rake hung by a hook above a bed of dusty little rocks.   The smell was revolting.  As I started to comb though the miniature beach picking out solid masses for the bin, Spartacus sat down and surveyed the work with a Cheshire grin.  Lesson number two: We don’t own catbaby, catbaby owns us.

“Playing” with Spartacus is like washing your hands with razor wire.  For some reason, there’s nothing my brother’s cute little kitten likes to do more than to try to rip your bloody skin off.  By day three my upper body could have doubled for James Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ.  The first time he drew blood I was seconds away from giving it a good smack on the nose, but Dara managed to talk me down, instead suggesting non-physical discipline.  On www.cutepicturesofcats.com she found some good parental advice: every time Spartacus bit or scratched we were to clap hands and shout “NO!”  Amazingly, it worked, and after a week the wounds on my hands had healed.  Lesson number three:  There’s a staggering amount of stupid websites out there for catlovers.

My brother comes home tomorrow, we had made ten days without a major incident.  In fact, we literally had Spartacus eating out of our hands.  Last night, I asked Dara how she thought we fared as foster parents.  “He’s alive and we didn’t set him on fire once.  You can’t ask for more than that”.  She’s gonna be a great mom one day, don’t you think?