This was meant to be a very short post which I started to write because it started snowing again tonight. But I started to type and like the Lambton worm it grewed and grewed and grewed and this came out instead and all sorts of things which I thought I’d forgot ended up being typed. So it has nothing to do with the title but I can’t be bothered to think of a new one right now and as I haven’t slept for the past two nights I need to go to bed now. In any case if I keep going until we actually get to my Snow Place then we’re going to be here for a while. So here it is, a post that has nothing to do with the title written on no sleep and a glass of red wine (which is a bit of a lethal combination). Should you attempt to read this then I suggest you go get a cup of coffee first….

We had been homeless for nearly two years. The big house was gone, we’d owned it for a year, spent eight months gutting it, rebuilding it, redecorating it and then moved in. We lived there four months, throughout the summer as I seem to recall, until the evening that Dad came home, wandered into the garden, looked back at the house, and realized that this was it. He’d done it. Arrived. Here he could spend the rest of his days. The house hit the market the very next morning.

We knew the drill; we’d done it several, (eight times) before. Our furniture went into storage; our goldfish, (Goldie, Goldy, and Bert) went to stay at my Nan’s. We didn’t miss them much, their gold had started to tarnish by the time we’d knocked the coconuts off and what little was left had turned to gilt by the time we’d walked the damn things home, thin plastic handles straining holes with every step. They, Goldy, Goldie and Bert, didn’t miss us at all and proved it by, (within the month) allowing Grandpa T to teach them tricks.

Our cat Tiger, real name Snow Tiger Terror of the Steppes, proved a little more difficult to place. My Nan, usually a guaranteed soft touch where animals were concerned was convinced that he was the devil incarnate (she just hadn’t quite decided which one) and we, Mum, Herebe and I, had to agree – although privately – that his eyes did glow a strange shade of green whenever he saw her.

Grandma S; who could normally be relied upon to do her Christian duty in matters such as this, flatly refused to have him in her house. He was a lovely looking cat (she said) with those bright green eyes and tufts on his ears and she could quite understand why we were so proud of him. But speaking of ears (she said), Sasha (her dog) was meant to have two of them, not one and half and although the vet had managed to stitch most of it back on, it was just too much worry and expense to go through on a regular basis. In vain did Mum point out that Tiger was just a big softy really, even Herebe and I didn’t quite believe that. In vain did Herebe and I try to explain that as a greyhound/whippet cross with not a few wins under her collar, Sasha should have been quick enough to get out of his way. The fact that she hadn’t, proved that even for a greyhound/whippet cross, she was an incredibly stupid dog and as her ears were much floppier than any self-respecting dog should have anyway you could quite understand Tigers reaction when they were flopping around him. In vain did the three of us suggest that if Tiger was given the run of the garden no-one would ever dare climb over the wall to nobble GrandDad S’s leeks. That might be the case (Said Granddad S) but where in hell was he supposed to put the bodies? Herebe’s suggestion of the leek trench because after all that was where Granddad kept threatening to bury us – along with the rest of his grandchildren – fell on ears as deaf as Sasha’s left.

With nowhere left to turn and time until the move fast running out, Mum did what every child with siblings does in such a situation. She used emotional blackmail on the nearest ones (my godparents). She needn’t have wasted her breath. In the first flush of panic now that Jboy was on wheels (a natty red trike), they leapt at the chance of even temporarily homing our cat, their only reservation being that Mum couldn’t guarantee a more than ninety percent chance of their first born becoming its lunch.

Tiger never made it to my Godparents house. On the day we moved, before we were twenty miles down the road, he’d bitten through the wicker of his basket and escaped. For the next fifty miles, he alternated between crouching viciously behind the brake pedal (used rarely when Dad drove) and launching assaults – via the top of Dads head – on the goldfish, whose tank with its makeshift cardboard breakwaters, was wedged between Herebe and me on the back seat. When the car finally stopped at a junction near to my Godparents, Tiger took off out of the window and was gone. Like so many barbarian chiefs before him, he eschewed the soft belly of a three year old for the freedom of the Steppes, in this case the concrete steps of the outhouse of our ex-almost neighbours, three doors up and on the other side of the back garden to the house we’d lived in four months before.

There he spent the next two years, laying siege to the gates (a dark green back door) of the castle which imprisoned his Queen. That she was a very insipid Queen indeed, (called Susie most definitely without the Q) mattered not one jot to him. Occasionally he’d bring her gifts – half a dead fox, a feebly kicking rabbit or two, on one occasion the mutilated body of another Tom Cat- which he’d lay upon the garden path with a careless aplomb, but mostly he spent his days reclining Genghis like upon a sack, composing poetry in a foreign (and off-key) tongue.

The ex-almost neighbours, it must be said, took it with a very good grace. A far better grace in fact than they’d ever taken to us living three doors down and on the other side of the back gardens from their house. The “Lady of the House” and I use the term in all its drop waisted crimpelened glory, Grandma S’s good friend, when we lived there, it had all been scandalized tones of “They have a drum kit in their dining room, don’t you know (my Grandmas name)?” and “Why was there a lamb in your daughters back garden last weekend?”. Like Grandma S would know. We weren’t that sure. It wasn’t ours. Thank God the night Dad had chased the next door neighbour’s son down the garden path with the samurai sword he’d just made; he’d run him down the front path and not the back. Deserved as it might have been (and it was), we’d never have heard the end of that. But somehow, Tigers lonely vigil had worn through the layers of foundation garments, masticated milk tray and mills and boon romances and found a place – a very small place but a place nonetheless – in her heart.

We knew this because when Mum arrived (three times a day) wielding tins of Whiskas and the odd bit of raw meat, she would open her dark green door, plant her feet firmly upon the white painted well scrubbed step, American tan tights straining over sausaged ankles, and watch him eat. “HE’s not gulping his food down” she would say with a satisfied air, as if the day that Tiger would wield a knife and fork was the day he would be allowed to date her cat. Ha! I’d watched her eat. A Mississippi steamer paddle had more grace.

Tiger paid her little heed. Three times a day he walked to the garden gate, welcomed Mum (who was his pet) with the air of a millionaire showing off his mansion, and then, when dinner was done and the remains of his ears had been scratched and Mum had rearranged his bed to his satisfaction, he walked her home – around the corner to my Grandma’s house – where he would wait at the gate until she was safely in and had waved from the window, before sauntering back to compose another stanza.

That was where we lived. Mum, Herebe and me – at my Grandmas house. When the big house had gone, Dad had moved back to his bed beneath the sea. Living here was a “temporary measure” until we found a home of our own. Our clothes went into bin bags, and we; Mum, Herebe and I moved into the front bedroom, the room with the rose coloured carpets and old-fashioned bunks, the bottom one I shared with mum. Narrow as a plank, hardly big enough for one small child – which I was not- we slept top to toe, me pushed up against the wall with an extra three inches for my head where the bed stood in front of the alcove was. The bunk above was so close that if I sat up straight my hair would catch in the weird patterns of wires and twists and have to be cut free before I could move. When Dad came back – one weekend in every six – Mum and he would sleep around the corner at my Nan’s and in the morning they would pick us up and we’d go off, hunting for a home.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Theories of Relativity, Fear and Loathing, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.