That Sunday friends of ours, Jayne and Leah, came visiting and brought with them their new pet, Moppet, a five-month old Labrador pup.   Thinking Timbo was outside and finding Moppet a bit of a pest, running all round our feet, we put the puppy out in the corridor and shut the lounge room door.   A minute or so later there was the sound of hellish shrieking coming from the hallway.

“That bloody dog!” I said, getting up quickly, thinking that Moppet was teasing poor Timbo.

I opened the door, stepped into the corridor and was almost skittled as the dog came racing down the hallway with our cat in hot pursuit.   Probably Moppet had seen Timbo lying in a corner, or curled up on the telephone stool (one of his favourite places) and had gone across to make friends with the big, furry lump.   But whatever the truth was, Timbo was feeling too sick and miserable to want to make friends with anyone and had obviously decided that if he could not stop his own agony, at least he would feel better if he could pass some of the pain off onto someone else.

Fortunately for Moppet I reached down fast enough to scoop the puppy up just in the nick of time, otherwise Timbo probably would have killed him.

Finally Monday came, however, so I could take Timbo down to the vet.   Unfortunately we have no car, so I had to carry Timbo all the way down Barkly Street — more than a half an hour’s walk.

Because the day was overcast, I made the mistake of wearing a thick, woollen jumper.   So carrying Timbo, with his internal combustion going like a blast furnace, I soon found my arms and chest itchy from prickly heat.

To make matters worse, Barkly Street is a main road with heavy transport zooming past continually, and Timbo had always been afraid of traffic.   For a while he just did his best to bury his head in my arms.   But after a while he started to yow-ow-owl at the top of his lungs, making people turn and stare at us.

“Mummy!   Mummy!” called a little girl in a fruit shop that we went past.   “What’s that nasty man doing to that poor pussycat?”

Finally we arrived at the veterinary surgery, and when the reception girl asked, “What can we do for your cat, sir?” I felt like saying, “You can ring his bloody neck!”   Instead I explained that he had an appointment to get his teeth fixed.

A few hours later I returned to the surgery to collect Timbo, dreading the expected repeat performance on the way home.   However, when I got to the reception desk, there was Timbo grinning like an idiot, with a smirk that put Alice’s Cheshire Cat to shame.   He was so zonked out on local-anaesthetic, that he had a broad “cheesy” grin all the way home and not only didn’t object to the street noises, but didn’t seem to even be aware that he was being carried.

I was half expecting the same little girl to say, “Mummy!   Mummy!   Look at that grinning pussycat!”   But, of course, she was long gone when we went past the fruit shop.

As you know by now, Timbo could be a bit of a devil at times.   But then he had his origins in mischief.   One day a friend of ours, Charlene, had been in her back yard hanging washing out on the line, when to her surprise a mother cat strolled into the yard, followed by an almost perfectly straight line of six or seven tiny kittens, using the yard as a short cut to the next property.   The furry procession passed within a few centimetres of Charlene, who leant down and scooped up the cutest kitten, allowing the mother cat and her remaining offspring to continue along on their merry way.

That purloined pussycat grew up to be Timbo’s mother, Lizbeth, so possibly his mischievous nature stemmed from the way his mum had been acquired.

THE END