A Tabby-cat's Tale by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911420781
Publisher: Canelo Books
Published: 2017-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Tabby had to move again, this time at the neighbours’ insistence.

They said they were worried that Tabby’s pee and crap might get into the tank on the roof and pollute the water supply. The tank had a concrete slab for a lid—it was so heavy that it took two people to lift it—but who could guarantee that there weren’t cracks in the cistern, or elsewhere? Tabby might have peed in the cracks, and besides, the concrete lid was extremely porous—if Tabby continually peed on the lid, it might seep through into the tank. And that was without taking the persistent whiff of urine into account. It might easily waft into the tank and give the water an odd taste. From the fifth floor upwards, every household, apart from ours, noticed the strange taste at the same time. The day they all went up onto the roof and saw desiccated turds and fish bones littered around was the last straw. They drew a sample of water from the water tank and sent it off for analysis, in the firm expectation that the results would go against my brother. But they were inconclusive—the lab had insufficient data about the composition of cat urine. The neighbours then complained that their flats were leaking and that it was my brother’s fault—that he, in his comings and goings on the roof, had damaged the insulating slabs. (Fortunately for Tabby, they didn’t accuse him of damaging the slabs—not even a leopard or a Tabby from the northeast of China had a tread that heavy.) They were quite capable of fabricating evidence—they knew the insulating slabs had been damaged by families who were watching fireworks or comets, long before my brother started going up there to feed Tabby. The building caretakers pronounced peremptory judgement: my brother’s footprints, taken together with the yellow rainwater stains in the residents’ ceilings, proved that my brother was to blame—he must move the cat. My mother was furious at the injustice of the decision and tried to dispute it, but my brother simply buttoned his lips and denied Tabby’s existence. ‘Who says I’m keeping a cat up there?’ he said. ‘Find it and show me.’ Of course, by this juncture Tabby had taken refuge deep underneath the insulating slabs. My brother had perfect confidence in Tabby’s ability to stay hidden and was prepared to shamelessly deny his existence, despite the secondary evidence provided by the cat turds and fish heads. The neighbours knew my brother was lying but couldn’t expose him. There were those who demanded that the insulation be stripped off. This was absolutely not what they wanted, they warned my brother, they needed the insulation to prevent leaks in the roof, but they were willing to destroy it in order to expose my brother’s deviousness. What was to be done? My brother wasn’t a bad man. He was just annoyed at the neighbours, which was why he had denied Tabby’s existence. What did they mean by dragging the management into it? Besides, they had all ganged up against our family, against a poor little cat.

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