Miss Pettifellar’s Cat.
Many years ago I left home. Having nowhere else to go, I worked and begged my way to the big city. I thought I was in control, but in truth I was falling. I didn’t stop falling until I arrived at Miss Pettifellar’s house. It was neither at the end of the street nor the beginning. It was completely and, seemingly innocently, located at an entirely arbitrary point. And yet, it was central to everything. In fact, I believe it may have been built there long before any of the neighbouring houses and the city risen up around it.
Miss Pettifellar didn’t meet me at the door but it was ajar. I followed her voice, all grumbling and unwelcoming, through the passageway and down to the lounge. Where she sat, in an ancient cushioned chair with spindly wooden features, her broken foot raised up on an old pouf and wool from her knitting cascading down the sides of her long dress.
“We shan’t have any Hoovering, young lady,” she said “can’t you use a broom?”
“I have to vacuum, it says right here…” I held out the piece of paper detailing my responsibilities, which she instantly dismissed.
“Not wearing my glasses, dear. Hoovering upsets the cat, don’t you know?”
She gestured toward one of the cabinets, upon which a black and mangy looking cat lulled in, what seemed to be, the only ray of natural light in the house. The cat looked at me and rolled over, exposing a large white patch on its chest. I had to vacuum, however, it was my job. I explained all this to the old woman and she begrudgingly acceded.
“Pretty silly job, girl. Hoovering where no Hoovering needs be committed, don’t you know? It’s in that cupboard, over there.”
She was right, after all, the carpet was clean. In fact, the whole house was immaculate. Yes, it was cluttered, with what seemed like more than one lifetime’s worth of collectables, but it was clean. I wondered how it was that an elderly woman, with a broken foot and a hospital appointed cleaner could keep the house so clean.
The following week the cat met me at the door with a low growl and raced back to the spot in the ray of sunlight. Miss Pettifellar had retained her grumpiness and only smiled, in a toothless and menacing kind of way, when she saw me walk to the cupboard for the vacuum cleaner.
“Must have been an accident,” she said as I held the cut power cord in my hand. “No, don’t put it back, push it like that, girl.”
“But, it doesn’t work,” I insisted.
She looked at me, daring me to refuse, until, finally, my nerve broke and I began pushing the lifeless contraption across the floor. As I did so, she returned to her knitting, tapping away in amused cheerfulness.
Of course, I had other jobs to perform, as well. Dusting, wiping, washing, and so forth. All the usual things a girl in my position could be expected to do. The impotent vacuum, however, became the strangest ritual I performed in that old house, with the old woman and the old cat. If, at first, I had seen the chore’s execution a humiliation, and conducted it with anger and loathing, as the weeks wore on I began to view it with the same amusement as my host.
In time, knowing her plaster cast would soon be removed, she found an old walking cane in amongst the clutter. It was, she told me, made from the wood of an old sailing ship.
“I was on that ship,” she said. “The Tartar. We were shipwrecked and marooned and not all of us made it, given the hunger, don’t you know? But I made sure Captain Peck had plenty to eat and it was him that made this cane, and gave it to me.”
She sat, week after week, rubbing oils into the old cane till the whole house smelt of camphor, turpentine and linseed. Her eyes would water with the noxious vapour as she methodically massaged life into the dry old wood. Such was the overpowering essence of the oils and spirits, I could smell it leaching from my pours long after I left the house and other clients would remark on my strange odour.
“Do you have any family, Miss Pettifellar?” I asked one day, noting the many photos, framed and placed as though in random along the walls.
“Probably, I wasn’t always alone, don’t you know? There were many of us once…” she replied, her voice drifting away as she stared blankly toward me. “I have a habit of outliving people,” she said by way of explanation.
So the weeks went by, each visit as unsettling as the one before. Each week the cat would stare at me, and the old lady would grumble and groan and rant, and I would push the silent vacuum around. She seemed always ready to belittle me for some small error. I could make the tea one way and be praised, but follow the same procedure the next visit and have it handed back with disgust. If I took advice on some method of housekeeping, and replicated it directly, she would insist that I had messed it up entirely. Then deny she had advised as I remembered at all.
“You never married?”
She squirmed in her seat, and the cat growled, and she shouted at the cat, and the cat rolled over.
“In a manner of speaking, I suppose. I have been married many times.”
I asked how long she had the cat.
“Oh, cats come and cats go. There always seems to be a new cat ready to take over as another one leaves. I lose track. Best not to get too familiar with cats, don’t you know? They guard the gates to the other world and eat souls, when they can.”
So, if we were both prisoners of our circumstances, and if we both resented each other’s company for those two hours each week, nonetheless there came to be something of an accord between us. Don’t get me wrong, she would still call me a ‘silly bloody girl’ for even the smallest errors, and slowly shake her head disparagingly at me from time to time. But, when my roster was complete and I would make us both a pot of tea to drink, per her instructions, and we talked in front of the gas heater, well, I came to crave those conversations.
Her stories were rich with colour and morals and adventure. Interesting characters and people she once knew. She seemed, to me, to be a repository of all the histories and all the gossip of a thousand endless years. As though everything that happened had to pass through this old house on its way out. Back then, when my actual life was so stricken of colour and joy, yes, I came to value my time in that house each week. Perhaps I even began to see her as a friend. For, although she was always quick to labour on my failings, she would also, in her calmer moments, offer advice and counsel. Other clients would either ignore me or fawn over me, with this old lady, it felt like a relationship.
She met me in the narrow entrance to the kitchen, one day, trapping me against the wall. She was still so unsteady on her feet. Miss Pettifellar looked me up and down.
“You really are a very pretty girl, don’t you know?” she said. “I should eat you up and take all your youth and beauty for myself.”
She pushed up against me and I felt the roundness of her body against my own slight frame, the hardness of the curved handle of the walking stick pushing into my leg. Then she slid past me and resumed her seat.
A little later, while I was dusting or following after some other pointless task, she spoke up loudly.
“They used to do that, don’t you know? The Androphagi. Every spring, the old women would find a young virgin and eat her. You could lose 20 years, or more, that way. Not to mention taking all of their power for yourself. Of course, they were entirely wrong, didn’t have to be a virgin. But try telling them that.”
One day I noticed the cat deliberately move from its position in the sunlight. It stepped a few paces, stretched long and luxuriantly and reclined a little way from its usual spot. The cat looked at me. Beckoning me? So, I picked up the faded little cushion, all covered in cat fur, and determined to take the opportunity to actually clean something.
Miss Pettifellar turned in her seat, and the three of us all stared at the spot where the cushion had been.
“So, she’s found it, then,” said the old woman. “What do you think she’ll do now, hey? Do you think it will be so easy?”
“Easy?” I replied.
“There’s more to that than it seems, don’t you know?”
I was afraid to touch it. It seemed to glisten in the sunlight, shiny and lumpy and impossible. I had never seen anything quite so beautiful.
“A man gave me that, dear,” she said, reaching with her cane and poking me in the hip. “And now, you think a little girl will take it away from me? Haven’t I always treated you well, silly girl? Now look, you’re thinking of dashing my skull in with that vase. You’re thinking of taking the nugget and leaving me here to die. An old, crippled, woman, lying here in a puddle of her own blood, her head caved in. Shameful.”
She tossed and turned in her seat, swinging that well-oiled cane around, with me just out of reach. I would never steal from her, I insisted. She simply raised one eyebrow at me in disbelief.
*****
As I lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, my boyfriend beside me still, spent and sweaty, my mind refused to let go of that glittering piece of metal. It tormented me even for a week. With every old woman’s house I cleaned, there, in the back of my mind was the same object. Every old man who lecherously told me dirty jokes, every foul tasting blow job when my boyfriend came home, every bill under the door, every memory of home. They all reminded me of the same thing.
Until, eventually, it overwhelmed me.
What good was it to her? When it could do so much for me? How selfish and arrogant this old woman truly was, to make a bed for a cat where I could have my life remade. To me, it was as remarkable as a doorway to a better existence. To her, it gathered cat fur and dust. And she dared to say she had treated me well? She dared? When it was I who had the power, all along.
*****
The cane was broken in two.
The cat greedily pulling at the throat of the bloated, lifeless body. Lapping at the blood that pooled and congealed around its paws. It hissed and growled at me, afraid I might choose to deprive it of its meal.
“You’ve waited a long time for this,” I said, as I stepped over Miss Pettifellar.
The nugget was round and smooth. I caressed it in my hands and rubbed along its axis. Gold is greedy, taking all the weight for itself. For its size, it is always surprisingly heavy. I opened my bag and removed a bottle of cleaning spray to make room and carefully lowered it into place.
The cat rushed its eating. As it pulled, the old woman’s head rolled back and forth across the floorboard. Like a marionette shaking its head, the cat pulling the strings.
“No?” I replied. “Would you prefer me to leave it here for the lawyers and the officials? For you? Oh, you can’t tell me what to do now, old woman.”
She just kept shaking her head. Her mouth dropped open, as though about to add voice to the silent remonstrations. But no sound came out, only a thin trickle of bloodied spit.
I promised to call the police, later, when I had recovered from the shock.
“Of finding you here, Miss Pettifellar. Like this. Any girl would run from the horror, wouldn’t they?”
Still she shook her head.
So I left them there. Walked out of that anonymous little house, somewhere along a nondescript street. It wasn’t even hard. Now I was the centre of the universe and things would align to me.
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Awarded A grade 2017 Creative Writing La Trobe University.
Cross-posted from the official Christopher David Blog https://ift.tt/2Ew8asi
