Postman Pat and The Privatised Cat

‘What’s that you’re whistling granda,’ asked Amy, with her pert little nose in the air and a disdainful look that suggested she already knew—everything . She filled the kitchen with the clean and fresh smell of  Vosine shampoo and Colgate breath.  Giggleing through snorts of laughter she tried to touch her nose with her tongue, which made her teeheeing even worse.

            I chuckled too and put on my soupy voice. ‘I think you know what song it was.’ Reaching over the back of her chair, her legs tucked in at the kitchen table, I began tickling her under the oxters to death, or until she’d at least said she’d give in.

            She tumbled from side to side like a washing machine on the spin, only the brace of my arms keeping her on the chair. Chewing on laughter she spat out: ‘Postman Pat and his black and white cat!’

            ‘What?’ I stopped tickling and she stopped laughing.

            ‘Postman Pat and his black and white cat,’ she said with the serious face that only a five-year-old child, or a newsreader, can bring to such a situation.

            ‘Was it?’

            She nodded, that indeed it was.

            I wasn’t really sure. I hadn’t been thinking. It seemed cruel, destroying her childhood in that way, but I suppose I’d have to explain. ‘Dahling,’ I said, ‘it’s no longer Postman Pat and his black and white cat; it’s Postman Pat and his privatised cat.’

            She shrugged, her petted lips shaped to the moue of nonchalance. ‘There’s no suck thing,’ she said, mixing her words up.

            I nodded that, indeed, there was.

            She leaned forward from the waist, her feet working to tip her towards the edge of the chair. Then she was off, scurrying like a clockwork toy into the living room.

            ‘Dahling,’ I said, a word of caution, a word of warning. ‘You’re breakfast is getting cold.’

            She did what she usually did and ignored me. Her little fingers rooted among the debris of papers and books at the underside of the table near the window. Grabbing onto what she was looking for she left the mess of half-read women’s magazines pages in her wake as she returned to the kitchen. Holding the colourful cardboard pages of the Postman Pat she clambered up on the chair she’d been sitting on and presented me with the prize of the book we’d read almost every day, for what seemed like forever, as evidence. If it was a court case she’d have won, but it wasn’t. It was the Government we were dealing with and they just make things up and called it the law.

            ‘I’m sorry Dahling,’ I said. ‘But Postman Pat no longer has a black and white cat. The cats been given a new lick of paint and although he’s still the same he’s totally different. Jess has been privatised.’

            She shook her head from side to side and her lip stuck out so much I could have perched the breakfast spoon she was meant to be using for eating with on it. I didn’t understand either which made explaining a whole lot easier. She slouched in her chair with her arms folded over her chest. I tried a different tack.

            ‘Dahling, remember when I said witches and wizards don’t really exist.’

            I’d piqued her interest, her watery eyes looking up at me as big as a full moon.

            ‘Well, I was lying. They do exist.’

            She nodded and her little head frowned as she took in this old piece of information that she evidently already knew.

            ‘There was this evil witch called Maggie, but nobody could kill her. Remember when I took you to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? You remember how happy the dwarves were?

            She held her breath and waited for the wickedness to become clear.

            ‘Well the evil witch took away all their spades and shovels and cast a spell on them so that the only thing they could mine was the diamond glint in rich people’s eyes.’

            Her head tucked into her chest as she considered this and her voice piped up out of her long hair. ‘Is she dead?’  

            ‘Yes and no. They burnt her body and spread the ashes in a place where old soldiers walked up and down every day to make sure that she wouldn’t escape. Every day they’d stamp their feet, just to make sure.’

            Amy gripped the bars of the chair, looking up at me, knowing how these stories went. ‘She escaped!’

            I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’ She blinked rapidly taking in this new information. ‘But she’s a son, David, that liked to eat poor people and the more and more poor people that he got fed with the hungrier and hungrier he gets.’

            Amy made a snorting noise through her nose and mouth and she wiped her hair away from her face. She shook her head from side to side to indicate that I’d been lying.

            ‘Is Postman Pat’s cat dead?’ she asked, changing the subject to something less ridiculous.  

            ‘No, don’t be daft. Silly-Billy. He’s just got a new owners. The old owners were very nice and said that when he gets sick with the mange or when he grows old they’ll pay to take care of him. And if the new owners don’t really like him they’ll take him back and pay for the time they wasted on him. The new owners will make him work much harder and feed him nothing but porridge.’

            ‘Cats don’t like porridge,’ piped up Amy.

            ‘It doesn’t matter what a cat likes or doesn’t like,’ I said, ‘only the fattest of cats can have cream.’

            ‘That’s rotten,’ said Amy.

            I picked up a spoon from the table and tapped her on the head with it. ‘Shut up and eat your porridge, so that you can grow up to be big and tall.’