A Tom and Jerry-style Catastrophe

Except in this episode, Tom is in fact a spayed Queen (Speckle) and Jerry a timid cat called Anushka, with the heart and demeanor of a mouse.  

A true story of what happened when, after the tragic death of a beloved pet, a well-meaning owner resolved to comfort the grief stricken companion cat by adopting a new friend for her. Tom and Jerry meets High Noon crossed with Star Wars, Speckle morphed into Darth Vader and timorous Anushka revealed she was a nervous C3PO.  

Speckle's anxiously furrowed brow pulls her pricked ears forward as she stares out of the window, sunlight  glossing her tortoiseshell coat of many colours. She heaves a deep sigh. Where, oh where, is Egg?

She'd noticed her human was deeply distressed some time ago, round about the last time Egg had been seen.  That was, well, six weeks in human time which would make it about...extending her claws to double her body abacus, she calculated 6 x 7 and eventually reached a number. Forty two weeks. Why, that's almost a year in cat terms.

Egg - pudgy and grey  with an attitude overloaded with superciliousity, snub nose pointedly raised high - would never stay away from the food bowl or her comfy Yak hair throw for this long. 

Something wasn't right. Deciding to check the kitchen cupboards for the millionth time, Speckle jumps from the desk in her habitually awkward manner, four paws landing heavily on the floor.

Meanwhile, crouched on the arm of the easy chair in the Pro Life cattery, Anushka looks up warily as the room darkens.  The light behind the human filling the doorway outlining a solid, featureless shape.  What now, she thinks. 

Without warning, she's  trapped in a nightmare. Her world shrinks to a cardboard box, engine noise, strange smells and unfamiliar sounds.  From somewhere, a sing-song voice chatters non-stop until finally the motion and noise cease and for a minute, the world is silent and still. Lurching as the box tilts and bounces abruptly, things change again.

Light, space, food, water.  Then, from behind a door blasts Hoover-like snuffling, which becomes a sinister hiss.  Terrified, Anushka darts beneath the bed and crouches there, trembling.  As the hours pass, her eyes begin to swell and water, her body wracks with sneezes.  She's dying.  No, she's dead and this is cat purgatory.   How did this happen?

"What the devil?" Speckle growls, on the other side of the door. Foreign cat.  On my turf.  No. No no no no no.  

And so begins 3 months of yowling, howling, hissing, spitting, clawing, plaintive cries, tail biting and nose slicing, resulting in  a blood feud and enmity worthy of a Sicilian vendetta.  From two furry licorice allsort cats whose lives began in animal shelters, unwanted.

Just five years ago Speckle was swept up and dropped into a strange home, yet now, Queen of All She Surveys, she viciously defends her home. Could it be true - females who scale the ladder of success stiletto (or claw) the hands on the rungs below?  How disappointing! 

Slight progress has been made however - Anushka emerges from under the bed at meal times and at night, when she knows Speckle is shut out of the bedroom. 

Free of her self imprisonment, she chases insects, disembowels her soft toy ball, hunts down and annihilates the mats. She's even been heard to purr on occasion and has a fine turn of phrase, scolding the human in a high pitched whiney yowl if dinner and breakfast are late.

When the opportunity presents, Speckle slips into the room and lies on her side, paw plaintively stretched under the bed, the odd pathetic "miu" sliding from her lips as she begs the intruder to come closer and feel the fury of her unsheathed talons. 

Earsplitting shrieks, maddened chases through the house and intense loathing is subsiding - malevolence has dialed down a tad.

Speckle is beginning to understand that this chick is not leaving.  Which is not for want of trying by the humans - the cat carrier has come out several times and miraculously, the sight of it produces a happy, loving, purry little furry Anushka, winding herself around a human and showing off how at home she is.

It was difficult to explain to Him Outdoors that the tough Tom cat he'd suggested to replace Egg had been superceded a nerdy, allergy prone reticent little girl who'd even been treated by an animal spiritualist (she found a huge ball of grief in her chest) to little avail, but he soon fell for those enormous eyes too, and bailed on 'return' duty.

With an instinct to be envied by any fortune teller, particularly at those moments it was decided "Ok, this is it, today she goes back", which seemed to bring a different cat out to play - confident, delightful Anushka even before the carrier was hauled down from the shelf.

Irresistible.  Clearly, she's decided that this is her home and she's not to be returned to sender like some wrongly addressed parcel.

So life continues, the cats live past each other with occasional bitter interludes and the humans are yet again slaves to their pets.  

Sigh.