knowingwhentoleave

[knowingwhentoleave]

Cat Story

It's Tuesday morning and my grandmother is telling me a story I'm not sure I want to hear.

'A cat has died in the garden.' She tells she, almost immediately after I pick up the phone. She sure knows how to hook an audience, does Primrose.

'Oh no!' I assume it's one of our cats. As you would.

'No no.' continues my grandmother. 'It was somebody else's cat.'

The plot thickens.

'Somebody else's cat died in your garden?' I say, trying to make some sense out of all this.

'Yes. He was called Merlin.'

'Well how did he die?'

'I don't know Florence! It wasn't my cat!'

I find out that Merlin had died in my grandparents garden whilst the junior members of my family - brother, sister, cousins etc - had been playing something innocent and wholesome like cricket. Whats worse, he had died a mysterious death with something coming out of his mouth. Why he'd made the pilgrimage to their garden I don't know, but it had implicated our family in ways they were not comfortable with. Nobody wants blood (or cat sick) on their hands, after all.

My grandfather buried Merlin, and left a small pot on his grave with his collar in it, should the owner want proof of his sad end. The owner did. Merlin was big bucks and the grieving family were offering £250 for his safe return. Only Merlin was dead, under my grandmother's chrysanthemums.

‘I’m afraid your cat is dead’ said my grandfather to the man who had posted the leaflet. His response, my grandmother would later tell me, was ‘strange’. I have yet to understand what this meant, but in any case he did ask for the collar. I’m not sure at this point whether everything had become a bit like a cat mafia thriller, with age old cat-gangland traditions being adhered to. I suppose it would give proof that the cat was Merlin, and not some other cat. My grandmother hoped desperately the man didn’t think they were trying to extort money for the anonymous dead cat. That would be terrible. Of course when my grandfather went to take the collar from the grave-pot, the collar was gone. My grandmother despaired.

They didn't hear from Merlin’s original owners again, which is probably for the best. They will probably be remembered in a rather a strange light as the couple who offered them the collar of their supposedly dead cat, and then couldn’t produce it, which is a very odd way to be remembered. That would have been the end of it all if it hadn’t been for the resurrection of Merlin, three and a half weeks later, on a similarly sunny afternoon when the young ones were in the garden again. It was my brother who noticed the disturbance around Merlin’s grave.

‘That bit where I think you buried the cat is all dug up’ my brother told my grandmother

‘TOM!’

My grandfather put the earth back in the hole and covered Merlin’s grave with a pile of rocks which it seems too obvious to point out must have been uncannily like a scene ‘The Sword in The Stone’. He went back upstairs to play online poker and left them in the garden, my brother and grandmother pulling out the trampoline for them all to bounce on. It’s important to mention that there is a lot of laughter on these days, when the sun is shining through the high dappled trees and the breeze my grandmother would often say is ‘like Australia’ drifting the scent of flowers over the garden, which is what makes what happened next so grotesque.

My cousin Thom bounces on the trampoline almost directly into the sky, laughing joyfully at the sheer wonder of life. Somewhere below him my brother's shouts of dismay can be heard. As he jumped, below him under the trampoline, lay the dismembered body of Merlin, three weeks buried, freshly exhumed. The cat they had all seen die that day in the garden. Of course, it was disgusting. My uncle and cousin start to gag. My grandmother told me on the phone that Merlin was, by this point ‘half hair, half guts’. I nearly choked on my tea.

You’d think that the children, now at best confused but at worst traumatised by this bizarre semi-celestial saga of death and yet more death would be put off from further involvement. On the contrary. The final nail in Merlin’s coffin was that once scooped onto a spade, Merlin was ceremoniously carried by my uncle (who I think had decided enough was enough) the 500 yards to the local park, followed, incredibly, by an all-singing all-dancing troupe made up of my siblings and cousins.

That’s right. In a merry twist of fate, Merlin, whose spiritual background would have presumably been rooted in Pagan traditions, or at least some kind of pseudo-Christian theology, was given the kind of send-off saved for the most honoured practitioners of black magic. Like a zulu king, followed by dancing feral children drunk on the heady musk of a death celebration (or perhaps too much fanta), his guts on display to the midday sun, Merlin was shot into the afterlife as a flare, like Hunter S. Thompson sticking two fingers up at life.

And that was that. It was just a good job Merlin’s original owners didn’t see the death parade that afternoon. I have a feeling they could think of a better way to spend £250.

#cats #short prose #family #death

[knowingwhentoleave]

Sugarloaf

I got up almost before the sun rose to pick up shit bushweed from a questionable friend of a friend who we’d met a night earlier. I’m in Rio de Janeiro. I am an addict, five years away from getting sober and Brazil is intense. It had become almost too much for me, a Carnival of high octane, blurry, alcohol infused never ending roller coasters. 'Blockos' started at eight, sometimes seven am, with beer being poured down our necks and very little food other than the occasional dough ball. I could hardly take it. The night previous I had marched with the crowds to the official parade with my friends before having a kind of panic attack and running, half drunk and terrified of nothing back to the apartment to make ill-judged Skype call to an ex. I wanted home: I wanted England, where the beer and mood were room temperature. I was burning up.

I'd been under the impression that weed would be falling from the trees in Brazil. My friend told me in Jamaica a guy sold her some in a bin bag - yes bin bag for about 40p. I wondered what part of that story she exaggerated. Nobody could be bothered to get weed. I found this lazy. The fact I needed it drove me on the following mission which I almost immediately regretted, wondering if it was really worth nearly driving yourself to the point of stressful insanity in order to chill out a bit. This country was like heaven and hell, one extreme to the other. It seemed to fit that bill that in order to relax I'd need to near on give myself a nervous breakdown.

I get to 'Thiago' at the foot of a mountain in a banged up fiesta. I wait for about twelve minutes in the beating heat before this. It's seven am, and nobody knows I’ve left the apartment. The objective is simple. The location is approximate. The car has a hole in the roof.

Inside, I thank God for the presence of a seatbelt and make great use of it. The fact this precaution took me by hold on the way up is laughable, considering the way down, but onwards.

Thiago laughs and jokes and we communicate a little in broken English/Portuguese. As we drive into the favela he waves at various people and I begin to feel like the token 'gringa' we've been labelled as since we touched down in Rio; suddenly self conscious of my sun bleached hair and prawn-like 'tan'.

The house is like my teens, with 15 year old boy type Bob Marley posters. He likes the Beatles, so that's something. I carve my grandfather's Liverpudlian-tinged dulcet tones. I want to go to a pub. I want to go to a cornershop and buy a milky way and have a cup of tea. I wonder why the hell I'm travelling anyway if I'm so adverse to other cultures. My phone rings, and it's my travelling buddy, furious that I've upped and left before she's even woken up.

'We're supposed to be going to Sugarloaf Mountain.'

'No, I know, I just didn't think this was going to take quite this long..' I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen, and the realisation that I'm in a favela on my own starts to creep in. Isn't that what they tell you not to do?

'For fuck sake' she says.

'I'm coming!' I try to protest.

'I'm going on my own. What are you doing up there?!'

'Getting weed.'

She sighs angrily and puts down the phone. I look at Thiago and his smiling friend who has joined us. I stand out glaringly in the so-laid-back-we're-almost-falling-over atmosphere as I twitch in the corner, wondering how THE FUCK I'm going to get down that hill.

Ten minutes later, I'm having a bartering match with Thiago in the street over whether or not he can kiss me, whether or not I have a boyfriend, and whether or not this matters. In Brazil apparently, it does not. It's taken me twenty minutes and one bursting into tears episode to try and explain to him that I need to go, that my friend is waiting, that no she will not understand if I 'stay up here a little while and relax.'

'Tranquilo' he tells me, again and again and again.

'I can't calm down. I need to go.'

'Ok baby.' he finally concedes, before taking me part of the way down the hill and then trying to come on to me beside a truck full of rotten fruit.

'It's carnival!' he says. 'You can kiss another boy!'

I don't have the patience at this point to explain I'm a lesbian, so I tell him I have a boyfriend I am very much in love with. He looks at me confused, as if I've just told him a nursery rhyme in Japanese.

'I'm sorry' I lie. 'I just really need to go to Sugarloaf Mountain.'

The next five minutes are unbearably awkward as we wait for one of the moped guys to take me down the hill. The street is dusty and by now boiling hot, and beside us two moped guys are having an argument, sitting on their bikes tired after a night of driving people around. I pray that they'll take me, but they carry on arguing until one of them gets pissed off and they both ride away, my ticket to freedom disappearing in the jigsaw metropolis of shanty houses, the hum of the bike slowly fading into the distance. The fruit truck turns around and drives off. Thiago sits on the pavement, bored. He probably wanted to leave but stayed out of some kind of civic duty knowing that I'd be plucked from the street in my fragile state and doomed to live out my life as a cocktail gringa slave, serving beer to horny men with sweat covered shirts and ill fitting hats.  I look out over the view, a paramount view of a city so alive it was almost breathing sex. It looked like Peter Pan's never land, a locked little paradise cove I couldn't get out of, green, ripe, turned on and now beginning to wake for another day of partying.

Eventually an older guy with longish hair and an air of desperation arrives. I embrace him when he says he'll take me. We begin riding down the hill, and with a sudden shock my skin blisters itself to the side of the moped. The pain is a small price to pay for my liberty though, and I grimace the remaining distance until we reach reality again - cars, shops, traffic lights, bricks.

We stop. I climb back home through the aftermath of a carnival and pass the same broken down lamppost I’ve seen an hour earlier. Policeman stand around it, some of them drinking from coffee cups, staring at the sky.

When I get home my friend's already gone to sugarloaf mountain. Later I hear it was really nice. The weed was shit.

#brazil #sugarloaf #mountain #travel #weed

[knowingwhentoleave]

The Glut

‘I started a blog. That’s better than nothing. I went for a run and I stared a blog.’

‘Is it? Better than nothing?’ 

‘I should think it is, yes.’ 

‘We’re suffering a glut, aren’t we. A glut of creativity. Everyone’s got a blog, a YouTube channel, a cookery show. It’s just too much.’

‘Maybe I’m not doing it for everyone else, maybe I’m doing it for myself.’

‘Even if you are, it’s still adding to the glut.’

‘For my mental health.’

‘For your mental health?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus.’

‘What?’

‘Well we’re really in trouble then, if the only reason people create stuff is cause they’re going mad, and they need help. We’re all just screaming into the well, aren’t we?’

‘Maybe we are.’

‘Do you not see what I mean?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Could you try?’

Why should I? You don’t want to listen to me, or read my blog, or take into account the mental health crisis, why should I listen to you?’

‘I’m trying to show you the bigger picture.’

‘You can shove the bigger picture up your arse, quite frankly.’

‘Well that was inspired.’

‘Thank you.’

You should put that on your blog.’

‘I will.’

#coronavirus #quarantine #writing #flash fiction #blog #blogger #creativity #boredom #modern life #rubbish