WMD

I got a fright when I heard something banging against the window and a pair of eyes looking in at me. While most folk are asleep, I write on my laptop at the kitchen table looking out into the less than starry night, but I tend towards more looking outside than writing onscreen. I was overly familiar with the other cluster of other houses crowding in on me with their sloping roofs and gardens the size of ornamental pocket watches, but with more garden furniture. Sometimes in the early hours a light spotlighted one of the bedrooms upstairs across from our house, or a kitchen light downstairs went on, and I work out which of the neighbours is an insomniac like me. Our kitchens weren’t that high up, easy enough for a cat to stroll along the garden fence and jump onto the window sill and stare in at me. I listened to its meowing with the ear of a writer, not writing, just sitting, ostensibly working and trying to figure out if the children’s book sound we teach our kids is how it actually sounds, or if it can be transcribed differently as something recognisable, but less clichéd that the reader would recognise as the cat’s unique calling sound, a bit like birdcall, but only for cats. Then I chided myself. It was a cat for fuck sake just get on with the story. Fling it some stuff about howling winds and rain and hurry up and let it into the kitchen so the reader can relax and not think the storyteller is a wordweasly nutter and  look elsewhere for their amusement.

It was an ordinary looking cat, dark coloured, with a banded tail to help it balance, stepping daintily over the window sill and into the room as if it was doing you a favour. It slinked down and sat on the kitchen table in front of me and waited, purring, if that’s was the right word, looking and not looking at me, until I moved my fat ass and went poking about the fridge to get it something to eat. I stuck some slices of chicken roll and added a few sardines as an added treat. Dunking the mixture into a soup plate, I tempted the cat over to the sink with it. The cat leaned across the dish, its whiskers almost touching it, sniffing, before it consented to eat. I made myself a bit of toast and cup of tea.  The cat seemed cute curled up blinking and falling asleep on the soft-seated fabric of the kitchen seat across from my computer. I christened the cat Satan.

Territorial animals, cats don’t care what you call them. All Satan wanted me to do was open the kitchen window when he meowed and feed him. I didn’t mind a bit of feline company. Sometimes I fell asleep over the keyboard, tapping away over another story that made no sense and went nowhere and nobody ever read and fewer still believed was true. Cats also sometimes bring little gifts.

Satan’s first gift was a field mouse. You know the Rabbie Burn’s type. Wee cowrin’ timorous beastie. It still had a bit of life in it. I chastised Satan, opened the back door and set our little mouse friend free and shut the door over. Satan trailed behind me and I blocked its path with my legs. It jumped from the floor onto the table, to chair, to window sill and disappeared out into the wet night.

Satan’s next gift was a large egg. It sat on the padded seat and nursed it with its paws, blinking, looking over at me and yawning. I’d been working on a thriller that was less than thrilling, the kind of story that had more twist and turns than a door handle, or the The Da Vinci Code, and just about as believable and it had sent me to sleep too. Satan seemed quite happy for me to take the egg from it, in a way that he’d been less than happy to take the mouse from it. I held it in my left hand peering down at it and trying to work out what kind of egg it was and how a cat could get it and itself in a partially shut over window. I put the egg down on the table beside me and googled what type of egg it was. The answer I came up with was it was a goose egg. I lived quite near the canal, but it still left lots of questions unanswered. I googled: strange things that cats have brought home.

There were lots of pictures and videos of bemused owners and mice, rats and outlandish things like snakes and lizards. Then it got slightly surreal with pictures of headlights, car parts, and one guy had a picture of a water buffalo in his living room. Americans were crazy like that. There was no limit to Google's craziness.

‘Right,’ I said to Satan, when he purred and looked over at me. ‘I’ll cut you a deal, bring me the head of Donald J Trump.’ I edged past the cat and opened the window a little wider to let it out into the night.  

The cat yawned and tucked its paw on top of one another as if praying and went back to sleep.

The next night I awoke with a start, hunched over my keyboard and whiffed the coppery smell of blood. Writers always awake with a start, it gives us something apparently interesting to say without being very interesting and adds to the word count and blood was always coppery smelling. The kitchen window was open wide, the blinds flapping in the wind and the cat was sitting purring on top of a human body. You’re probably thinking this was where I went a bit daft, but writers have an advantage here as they’re already daft and work towards appearing on the normal-daft- enough spectrum to fit in.  

‘Now you’ve done it,’ I said to Satan, waving a finger at the cat. ‘You’ve brought me the body of Pontius Pilot. Stick to wee beasties I advised him.’

I’d already googled it and with the roman-type clothes he was wearing and as my first teacher, Mrs Boyle wrote in my report card, ‘an overactive imagination’ it was quite easy to establish who the corpse was while leaving enough doubt for another story to emerge. The problem of how to get rid of the body was more difficult as he wouldn’t fit through the window. Apart from Mrs McGrath’s kitchen light across the way nobody else seemed to be up. I opened the back door and went out and opened the back gate, which squealed in the damp weather, locking it into place with a brick. I’ve a tendency to collect things I’ll never use. My reason being I might need this in the future to dump the body of Pontius Pilot in the ditch.

I felt bad about this.  I support the recycling efforts of our Council, but like everybody else if there was slope with a fence at the bottom on it dividing the railway’s property from public property filled with random junk such as old tellys, car wheels, plastic tanks from a loft, and two or three metal trollies rusting among trees and numerous bushes then it seemed stupid not to use local resources. The body of Pontius Pilot was simply something old added to something new. I wasn’t overly worried about forensics, the guy had been dead for over 2000 years and I didn’t imagine he would be on any databases that didn’t stretch back to the Roman calendar.  

Cats, like humans, were creature of habit. The next body he brought me was still alive. I quickly established it was John the Baptist, because he was a wee skinny Jewish looking guy with cheeks of flint and a mouthful of locusts. He was that type that I’d have thought would have made short work of Satan, but he had the upper hand, although he didn’t have hands but paws, sitting on his gory chest. John the Baptist’s deep dark eyes sucked me in and spat me back out again as unworthy (I stole that bit from the mixed up mumblings of a Jeffrey Archer novel) and his last spoken words were translated by Corinna on my computer from the Aramaic ‘I go to prepare a path.’  I reasoned he was talking about the back ditch. I wheeled him down and dumped him beside PP.

The Virgin Mary presented a different kind of problem. She wasn’t dead but chooking Satan under the chin and he was curled up contentedly next to her leg, purring. I recognised her from the statue which we had in St Stephen’s Primary school strategically positioned on the inshot on the first-floor landing to key an eye on you coming up and going down the stairs. She hadn’t aged a bit.

‘How did Satan capture you?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were in heaven.’

‘It wiz my day aff,’ she said.

‘You talk funny,’ I said, frowning.

‘I don’t talk funny at all. I speak the same dialect of the people to whom I appear. There’s no point me speakin’ Teuchter to an old Etonian like David Cameron, is there? You'd need to have a couple of pebbles in your mouth or the devi'l's spawn wouldnae understand yeh.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I just thought you’d be different.’

‘You think I’ve put a bit of weight around the hips?’ She looked down at her midriff and floated up through the ceiling like a prayer, laughing. Her parting words were, ‘You’ve got a Madonna complex, pal. Live with it.’

‘Whit about all my writing?’ I shouted after her, ‘will that last for posterity?’

The heavens opened and she shouted down, ‘Nah, you kiddin’, pal, get real.’

I looked across at Satan and you don’t need to google things to know that cats and Satan don’t have a sense of humour, but it seemed like the cat was laughing at me. I pushed my chair back and rushed towards the cat and picked it up. I expected it to struggle, to claw and bite, but it bent its body into a furry purse with ears and let me carry it towards the window and fling it outside. ‘Be gone, Satan,’ I shouted after it.

Cats never listen to you. Two nights later I was sitting editing a story so dull I thought it had been written by Donald Trump’s speechwriter and I fell asleep. Yep, you’ve guessed it, Satan had cut a deal with the Trump team and I was employed as his speechwriter. I had used up every anodyne cliché from the cliché bowl, but beggars can’t be choosers. I’d been woken with a thump.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, not because I was using profane language just for the sake of it, but because Jesus Christ nailed to lumps of wood in the shape of a crucifix was lying face down on my tiled floor. The cat was sitting daintily beside a sink filled with pots and pans and dirty dishes looking down at the Messiah’s squirming body. The cats head turned and looked at me, as if to say, what are you going to do with that one?

‘Water,’ Jesus groaned.

I jumped up from my chair, stepping over the true cross and His tortured body, and ran the cold water tap for a few seconds so the water was cold enough. My hand dived into the dishes and I fished out a cup and made polite conversation, ‘I wiz talkin’ to yer mother the other night there. She wiz lookin’ awful well for her age.’