My wife hates the cat fountain I bought. She hates the idea of it, and the colour, and the way it gurgles when you plug it in.
“It’s the quietest one they make,” I say.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t have that thing in here,” my wife says.
“I didn’t buy it for you,” I say.
The only member of our household who hates the cat fountain more than my wife does is the cat: it walks a wide, cautious circle around it on its way to the catflap and out to the door of my office shed.
“Miaow,” the cat says.
I know what this means. It means: turn on the kitchen tap so I can drink from it.
“Can I just direct your attention to the new system?” I say to the cat. “You may have noticed an intriguing device on your…”
“Miaow,” the cat says.
“I understand that,” I reply, “but it’s up to all of us to give this new system a chance, because 30 quid is a lot of…”
“Miaow,” the cat says.
I get up, go into the kitchen and turn on the tap.
Even as my wife disparages the cat fountain, she remains inordinately enthusiastic about the expensive rocks I bought to put in the dog’s water bowl to stop its pee burning brown holes into the lawn. I, on the other hand, feel so foolish about this purchase that I hate being reminded of it.
“I think your rocks are really working,” she says.
“Of course they aren’t,” I say. “How could they possibly work?”
“I’ve noticed a real improvement,” my wife says.
“Anything that could actually purify dog piss would also kill the dog,” I say.
Maybe this is what I’d secretly hoped the rocks would do; then I could have blamed the man at the garden centre for letting me buy them.
Two days later, I find the cat fountain unplugged on the back step, slowly filling with rain. Even as I take it back inside the house, I realise that I’m going to lose this battle. I plug in the fountain and return to my desk. A squirrel pauses by the little window above my computer screen to give me a hard stare. Perhaps I erected my shed on top of his buried nuts.
Midweek, the weather suddenly turns warm and the tortoise emerges from his winter hiding place under the oven. After sitting in a square of sunlight on the kitchen floor for a few minutes, he slowly makes his way to the back door, levers his weight over the threshold, tips down the steps and plonks himself in the middle of the lawn, where he contentedly crops the grass. Then, when I have stopped watching, he turns west and devours an entire bed of annuals.
“I’m not having my garden wrecked,” my wife says, locking the tortoise in the sitting room. “I’ve ordered a cage.”
“You can’t cage his spirit,” I say.
“Watch me,” she says.
On Saturday morning, I try to enjoy the good weather by reading the paper on a lawn chair, but the tortoise is looking at me, his head poked between the bars of his new rabbit run.
“He’s furious,” I say.
“I don’t care,” says my wife, who is busy replanting annuals.
I make a brief attempt to entertain the bright side – where there is cage, I think, there is also lawn the dog can’t piss on – but then I look down again. It’s easy to read too much into a tortoise’s expression, but there does seem to be a bottomless resentment in his eyes, as cold and still as one of the Elgin marbles, and conveying the same demand: send me back to Greece where I belong.
On Monday morning, a spring chill returns to the air. As I walk out to my shed, I catch the cat lapping rainwater from the folds of a bin liner – a bin liner that may well contain a cat fountain.
The cat spots me and stops.
“Well, well,” I say.
“Miaow,” the cat says.
“I thought you were some kind of hygiene freak,” I say, “yet here you are, licking water off rubbish.”
“Miaow,” the cat says.
“I’ll write about whatever I please,” I say.
- This article was amended on Saturday 28 April to change the image to a tortoise. It was previously a terrapin.
