Blue Cat

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Blue cat was no run of the mill pussy cat. He wasn't of this world, I'm as sure about that as I'm sure of my own name, and I knew it the moment I set eyes on him. It was a Friday afternoon some three years back the first and only time he graced me with his presence, and I was all alone in the house, my missus was at work and our two kids were at school.

I was in the kitchen making a steak and kidney pie for dinner. That in itself was a miracle, I had found the long forgotten pack of mincemeat and a couple of pigs' kidneys at the back of our almost empty freezer. To cut a long story short I had been out of work for a while and we were struggling to make ends meet, we only had a little money until the end of the month when my missus got paid, and that was almost a fortnight away. The meat was a godsend and I didn't care if it was as old as a Siberian mammoth hacked out of the permafrost, because up until that point I was going to cook the last few sausages we had, serve up bangers and mash and worry about tomorrow when it arrived. I had just scraped the stewed meat and thick onion gravy into a pastry lined dish and I was about to drape on the crust, stick a few decorative leaves on the top like my mother used to when I was a child to make our meagre fare look like a fancy feast and pop it into the oven.

It was an uncharacteristically warm day in late spring and the kitchen window was wide open. Behind my back the cat sneaked in and stood on the window sill beneath the fronds of a sprawling Aluminium plant. He was purring his little head off, probably to inform me that he was chuffed to bits about his bloody cheek, and though I registered the low, staccato hum of his purring over the blare of the radio I was only idly pondering its source, I guess I mistook it for the buzz of distant traffic. I turned around because of the racket that Orville, our bull terrier cross, kicked up all of a sudden. And you can stop your sniggering because our kids were responsible for naming the dog, not me.....

The last time I looked at Orville (or Ginger Bollocks as I call him when no one else is around) he was lying in his basket with one eye open waiting for the scraps of uncooked pastry I invariably deposit in his dish when I'm baking, an unlikely delicacy that he particularly savours. He saw the cat before I did, and he was far from impressed - he was screaming blue murder and launching himself into the air repeatedly (and in hindsight rather comically). He was doing his best to to mount the draining board, and though he's an athletic beast he's pretty hefty so he couldn't jump high enough from a standstill and his claws failed to find a grip on the slick stainless steel surface. If my primary motive was to avoid hurting my dear doggie's feelings I'd try to kid you into believing that he reacted that way to warn me about the intruder rather than out of sheer, visceral blood lust, but that would be a lie; Ginger Bollocks hates cats with a vengeance, and it was cold-blooded slaughter he had in mind.

From his lofty perch Blue cat looked impassively at the frenzied dog for a moment before making an apparently suicidal leap towards his murderous jaws. For some reason the yell I tried to let out in the hope of stopping the cat from jumping and/or to stop Orville from crushing our uninvited guest in mid air and shaking the life out of his flimsy carcass lodged just short of my throat, and as ninety odd pounds of solid muscle launched itself into the air towards the falling feline something impossible occurred. I still can't believe what I witnessed, though it's barely more credible than what was to follow. My tale will sound lame in the telling, I'm sure of that, and as it happened very swiftly I'm not sure how accurately I can describe it, but according to my recollection this is what happened.

For a second or so both dog and cat stopped dead in mid-air, just like a video stops when you press the pause button. The cat shimmered like a reflection in a still pond disturbed by ripples when someone hurls in a stone; the wavering image vanished, and in almost the same instant it reappeared sitting on the floor behind the motionless, still airborne dog. When the ghost in charge of invading my formerly predictable reality took its spectral finger off the pause button Orville burst back into motion and completed the last few inches of his upward surge, his powerful jaws snapping shut on thin air, and then he tumbled to the ground, landing nimbly and looking back and forth quizzically, wondering what happened to his sure-fire catch.

Blue cat gently tapped Orville on the tip of his tail with a fore-paw. The dog turned around and looked in disbelief at the impertinent little bugger that had encroached on his sovereign territory. The cat emitted a barely audible hiss, and Orville reacted in a way that excited bull-blooded dogs almost never react, especially when threatened by something much smaller and weaker than themselves – he dropped his ears in submission, tucked his tail between his legs and in slow motion he obediently loped to his basket like a scolded child on its way to the naughty corner. Up to that point the canine gladiator had never shown the slightest fear of man nor beast, but this time he admitted defeat, I could see it in the soulful glare he gave me as he curled up into a ball and apparently went to sleep. I couldn't believe my eyes, I'm telling you, though they have never deceived me before.

If you didn't quite catch my drift Blue cat really was blue, a rich, deep blue like the sky at twilight rather than any shade of grey, a coat colour that's referred to by animal lovers as blue. I deliberately didn't rub in that detail too early in the narrative because I feared you would write me off as a bullshitter and stop reading..... The cat's eyes were a touch paler than his pelt, and I'm no authority on cats but they looked abnormally large to me.

Blue cat paced up and down on the kitchen floor, rubbing his lean body against my legs and emitting a chorus of the most pitiful mewing I've ever heard. “You're hungry, aren't you?” I heard myself saying in the baby voice I unconsciously set aside for animals and small children, the words helping to shatter my disbelief. “Here, have some kidney. There isn't much, but you're welcome to a bit.” I blew on a chunk of steaming flesh from the pie dish and dropped it on the tiles. The cat wolfed it down as if he hadn't eaten for days, looking up expectantly for more. “Hang about,” I said, opening the fridge, pulling out a half-empty tin of cheap dog food and spooning a little into Orville's bowl. “This'll have to do, I'm afraid, puss. We don't stock cat food in this establishment, and right now we haven't got much of anything to offer a hungry traveller. I'm sure Ginger Bollocks won't mind you borrowing his dish and eating a little of his supper.....” Orville opened one eye, he looked at the cat and then at me in what I interpreted as an accusing manner and went back to sleep, or at least pretended to. “Where did you come from, Tiddles?” I said as the cat filled his belly, half expecting an answer. “You're not just a common or garden moggy that some daft bastard has dyed blue, are you? No, you're something else.” I scratched the animal's ears as he ate and purred at the same time.

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A little while later I treated myself to a cup of tea while I was waiting for the dinner to cook. There wasn't much milk left and I had to make sure there was enough for the rest of the day, bearing in mind that I had also poured out a little for my new friend, but I like my tea so strong you can stand a spoon up in it, so it didn't matter.

Blue cat briefly toured the living room, and though Orville's icy glances told me that he wasn't at all happy he didn't budge from his basket. Eventually the cat jumped up and sat on my lap, washing his greasy face with his paws, and now and then he looked at me with his huge eyes. I must admit that I've never been very fond of cats; I don't like the way they look at you, I've always thought they stare into your soul, that they're somehow privy to your deepest, darkest secrets (and if you don't have any dark secrets they look at you accusingly anyway), but when Blue cat's eyes met mine I was filled with a curious sense of calm. For the last few weeks I had constantly been fretting about money, worrying about how we could possibly manage over the following months, about when (or if) I would find another job, what with the recession biting hard, but when that pussy cat looked into my eyes all of my worries seemed to melt away.

“You have to apply for the job with Jaguar that you were looking at the other day,” a little voice said in my head. “You were worried about the distance you would have to travel, you were worried that you wouldn't get it because it's a big change from what you were doing before, but you need to stop worrying because it's slowly destroying you. You need to apply for that job, because there lies your destiny, maybe, there lies a reasonably rosy future. Pull your socks up, my friend, and do as I ask! I'm not playing games. Meanwhile I can give you a little something to bide you by. It's not much, but it's enough.”

Blue cat coughed and spewed up a huge hairball in my lap before I had a chance to lift him to the floor. “Thanks a bunch, buddy,” I muttered. “Is that how you repay folk for their kindness? That's all I need.”

“Yes,” the voice in my head said, “it's all you need.” The cat pawed at the brownish sludge on the leg of my jeans, and I realised that something within it glistened more brightly than mere mucous. Gingerly I poked at that something with the tip of my finger, teased it out of its slimy coating and lifted it up to the light. It was a chunk of inky blue glass that the cat had inadvertently swallowed, that was my first thought, but as I rubbed the filth from the object's surface I realised that it was a precious stone, a multifaceted oval about the size of the last joint of my thumb, and it shone like a girl's (or in this case a boy's) best friend.

“Naah,” I said. “I've read about fishermen gutting their catch and finding a gold Rolex or a sparkling diamond ring, but I've never had a stroke of luck like that in my life. There's no way that your little present is anything of any value, Blue cat, there's no way in the world.....”

“There is a way,” the voice said. “Trust me, my friend, there's always a way.” Blue cat jumped down to the floor and trotted off into the kitchen. He gave Orville one last baleful glare, leaped up onto the kitchen unit and disappeared through the window, never to be seen again.

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My cousin runs a jewellery shop in town just a short walk from our house. She was he only trustworthy person I could think of to show my treasure to, and less than an hour later I was sitting in the back room of her shop while she scrutinised the stone through an eyeglass.

“It is a diamond,” Valerie said, and though that was the conclusion I had been hoping for my heart sank, because it wasn't really mine. “It's not the best stone I've ever seen, mind, but it's pretty good and it's a highly unusual shade of blue, so I reckon it's worth a few bob – exactly how much remains to be seen. Tell me about the cat again.” I told Val about my visitor vomiting up the stone, but I missed out the details of Blue cat's unlikely coloured coat. “If you tell the truth about how you came across this stone some bastard might crawl out of the woodwork and claim it as lost property,” Val continued, “so if I were you I'd say your mother gave it to you when you were a child and you always took it to be a worthless chunk of glass from a piece of costume jewellery until I happened to see it. I'm going to an auction in London on Monday, if you want you can come along and we'll try to sell it.”

Blue cat's unexpected gift sold to a Middle Eastern buyer for a cool twenty two grand. Val had an inkling that it would go for considerably more, and she refused to take a single penny from me because she knew I was down on my luck. I felt a little upset having to sell the stone, but it helped us through a really difficult period. Oh, and in case you were wondering I applied for the position with Jaguar but I failed to get the job – I guess even faery cats can't be right about everything. I did find a job a few months later with a small family run business a short distance away from home, mind; we were soon financially secure once more, and at long last I could sleep at night.