Cat People by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

5. Mumsie and “The Terrible Twins”

After Chutney, we never looked back, or, to be more exact, we never looked for cats. They, on the contrary, looked for us. It wasn’t a question of finding a cat, cats simply appeared, “out of the woodwork,” as the saying goes, and it was more a question of trying to decide which ones should be invited in. A preliminary test period was usually called for, which in some cases was protracted.

Margaret didn’t take her time making her mind up about Hooligan, however. “Hooligan,” she remembers, “was abandoned with two other cats in a house just up the road from us. The tenants moved out overnight in a bitter February, leaving doors swinging open. Along with a young woman who was working for us then, I went up to take a look inside, and found one room with several empty cans of cat food. Immediately, two cats appeared, and a third stayed crying outside. We managed to get hold of the two, but never the third. I kept the two of them in our barn laundry room with food and water for several days without letting them out. ‘Hooligan,’ as we called her, was jet black with lime green eyes, everything I would not choose, other things being equal, in a cat, so long-haired that to this day she often takes on a spiky look, like that of a punk rocker. She walked in a most peculiar manner, and had endless stomach problems. Her companion was a short-haired black-and-white female, for whom we found a wonderful home with Michael’s assistant, Rebecca. Hooligan, once alone, made the trip to the vet for her blood tests and shots, lived for years in the laundry room, where floorboard heating was installed for her benefit in the winter, and a flap door so she could come and go as she pleased. She lived on a special diet—expensive, naturally—and eventually her digestive system settled down. She loved to be groomed, which was good, as she was always a mess, drooled continually when you made a fuss of her, and seldom strayed far from home. Then one summer, about half a dozen years after she first came here, she came to the front door of the house, and I let her in. ‘Just to cool her jets,’ I told Michael—it was a brutally hot and humid summer. She walked around, upstairs and downstairs, tried one of the litter boxes, drank a little water, decided that she liked air-conditioning, and settled onto one of the good dining-room chairs. She has never left since, except for an occasional stroll around the garden in good weather.”

Hooligan fit in surprisingly well, partly because she looked exactly like a black fur pillow when she was curled up on a piece of furniture, partly because she wasn’t aggressive as cats go, unless directly attacked, partly because given her coloring, she was practically invisible except in broad daylight. With her waddling gait and her curious hair—the spiky tufts

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