IT was four o’clock in the morning when I set out to collect Deidre. Four o’clock is not my favourite hour but, if you have to travel on a public holiday, it is not a bad idea to get going early. At least, this was how we had reasoned.
I began regret the decision from the moment that the alarm clock buzzed in my ear. I put my nose out, experimentally, from under the blankets. I could have sworn that the end of it froze. Groping in the dark for the clock, I knocked over a glass of water on the bedside table. That certainly wasn’t frozen. Half the contents sloshed onto the bed and the other half landed neatly in my bedroom slippers. Stifling my curses, I struggled into my clothes.
Once I was up and dressed, things began to look slightly better and I was sure that a cup of hot coffee would enable me to face anything. I had, however, bargained without the cat!
I had been padding around the place, as silently as I could, for fear of waking the rest of the household. There was actually very little to do, as I had packed most things the night before, checking all my lists very carefully and making sure not to forget the tent poles or the can opener. All that remained was to transfer the perishables from the fridge to the cold box, which was now reposing on the kitchen table, half-filled with loose ice from the local liquor store.
There was barely a click as I opened the fridge door, but the cat heard it and appeared, yowling, from nowhere. A quick cuff round the ear only served to increase the wailing; a saucer of milk earned me a claw in the ankle. There was no cat food handy, so, in desperation, I gave her a sausage. She stalked it for a while, then decided she was approaching from the wrong direction and stalked it from the other side. Then she pounced, worried the thing until she was sure that it was dead and devoured it as if she had not been fed for a week.
Meanwhile, I was packing bacon, cheese, butter and the rest of the sausages into the cold box. Or, to be more precise, I was attempting to float these commodities on a sea of half-molten ice. So much for the manufacturer’s claims that these boxes would keep ice for a week! I could hardly go and ask for my money back at four o’clock on Good Friday morning, so I just had to make the best of it.
All this time I was blissfully unaware that Shu-shu was advancing towards me. In a matter of seconds, the scene dissolved into a bedlam of flying fur, coffee, iced water and sausages. The coffee landed on my feet and the water on the floor. The cat landed on the sausages and promptly turned turtle in the rapidly melting ice. At this point, Geoff appeared – half-asleep – and asked a silly question. Before I could open my mouth to reply, the silly answer emerged from the cold box, in the form of a sadly bedraggled cat, which fled, howling, into the night.
Grabbing my provisions and muttering my apologies, I also fled.
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