Misty the cat - episode one.

What Cheshire cats do....

I’ve decided that I’ll include an occasional feature about Misty our cat in this blog. At some point she may even write her own blog, but she’s still too young to do that at the moment and besides you need to catch up on her story so far. That is a picture of Misty just a few months back when she was a fluffy, wuffy, cutey, kitten. Well, she’s not a kitten any more. At eight months Misty is a fully grown cat with only two settings, shred or kill. Nor is she a she, she’s a he. Despite this we can’t seem to stop calling Misty “she”, which might help explain some of her/his angst. Of course it could be that Misty is just going through those horrible, confused teenage years because at times she acts just like our daughter Holly.

Misty came from our friendly farmer’s farm up the lane in Wales, she’d been dumped along with her two brothers and our friendly farmer had taken them all in, feeding them and looking for homes for the three waifs. My daughter Holly had popped up to see them a few times, probably about thirty-seven over a single weekend, and begged us to go up to the farm and take a look at the tiny creatures for ourselves. At first we refused but eventually, simply to stop the noise of the buzz-saw, we gave in and said that we would take a look but that there was no way we were going to take one of them home as a pet

‘We can look but we can’t have.’ I told her firmly in my sternest most “and I mean it” voice.

I like cats. I always have. Our last cat Tia was with us for nineteen years and then a little over a year ago she slipped away. Tia was a Lilac Burmese and had become very important to usl, so it was very hard when she died. We tried to hang on to her but she became so worn and tired through age that she couldn’t go on and we had to let her go. She just wasn’t Tia anymore. Tia had moved on and was somewhere else. All we had was Tia’s tired old body that struggled to stand and eat. When it was time we all went to the vet with her and held her while the vet gave her the injection. She went to sleep very quickly and we cried for hours. Afterwards we all decided that we were never going to have another cat.

Never. Ever.
(I’ll tell you more about Tia some other time I expect).

And then we saw Misty.

I have to say that Gaynor tried to remind us how hard losing Tia had been and how we’d all agreed that we weren’t going to have another cat as a pet (never ever again). But Holly and I were Misty fans the second we saw her.

The following weekend we brought Misty back home with us from Wales. She wasn’t used to being indoors and once home immediately skittered away and hid under the big beech butchers-block. She hissed at us telling us “get away you big clumsy things that take your fur off and turn into aliens”, and when we tried to reach in and get her out she snarled “feeling lucky punks”? So we left her there with her knitted blanket. After all, it was safe enough. We agreed that we would keep her in the kitchen for a few nights as there was nowhere much for her to hide in the kitchen and the rest of our house had a lot of places where a kitten could hide; maybe even a few that so well hidden that our ghost cat didn’t know about them. (I’ll tell you about the ghost cat another time as well I expect). The kitchen was safe though, everywhere was visible and accessible.

Next morning I got up and went into the kitchen expecting Misty to still be under the butchers-block. I looked under it but Misty wasn’t there. I called her name again and again but there was no sign of her. When Gaynor came down a few minutes later we both searched for her. Then Holly joined in. But even with us all searching we still couldn’t find her. We searched high and low, literally. It’s quite a big kitchen, but not that big. We checked in the cupboards, on top of the units, in the baskets, behind the wine rack, under the block, I even dragged out the eight burner oven (thank God it is on wheels), but there was still no sign of Misty. If Misty had been a ship she’d have been called the Marie Celeste.

Soon it was time for us to leave for work and school so we decided to put down some very tempting tinned red salmon and wait for our vanished cat to get hungry and come out from wherever she was hiding of her own accord. We all agreed she’d be out by the time Gaynor got back from college after lunch, and if the food didn’t tempt her then the need to go to the loo would. Misty had litter trained herself immediately with no accidents, so we knew that she’d come out when she needed to go.

When I arrived home that evening Misty was still missing. Gaynor looked grim and told me that she’d been looking for Misty everywhere and thought that she could feel something stuck down deep behind the radiator…she’d tried to reach it but couldn’t get her arm down far enough…she had managed to poke it gently though…with a stick…it was soft…but silent. I tried reaching whatever it was, but I couldn’t get my arm down far enough either and to tell you the truth I was pretty relieved, I didn’t want to touch it and find a dead Misty; so I used Gaynor’s stick and found that she was right. There was something soft and kitten sized stuck behind the long white radiator and it was really stuck

What were we going to do? If it was Misty we had to get her out even if the worse had happened. There was only one thing for it. We looked in the Yellow Pages and called out…Emergency Plumber Man…no job too small…guaranteed twenty-four-seven…there within the hour…competitive prices…no hidden extras.

Emergency Plumber Man turned out to be a young smiling chappie who arrived ninety minutes later (not within the hour) with a big impressive box that we assumed contained plumbing tools. We told him about Misty and about our concerns for her safety, we told him that we thought she was dead behind the radiator; he smiled and continued to smile as he proceeded to drain the heating system. Once this was complete, and with a huge smile, he started to remove the radiator. We all stood around nervously not wanting to see a dead kitten fall to the floor as he lifted the radiator away from the wall. He looked over to the three of us standing open-mouthed by the sink, he winked and with a smiling grunt he lifted the radiator up and off the brackets as we stopped breathing.

Something grey and fluffy fell from behind the radiator...It was kitten sized...It was fluffy...and it was completely still and lifeless.

We looked through trembling eyelids. Was it Misty?

With a huge sigh of relief we realised that it wasn’t. It was an old cuddly toy rabbit, covered in dust and very shabby, quickly followed by an equally dusty baby’s bib. They must have been stuck down there for at least a dozen years. Typical of Holly! Even as a baby it was easy-come, easy-go.

Misty hadn’t climbed down the back of the radiator after all, she hadn’t met an unfortunate and claustrophobic end, which meant that she was probably still alive somewhere in the kitchen. Phew!

The Plumber beamed as he replaced the radiator and disappeared into the cellar to refill the system. He clanked about for twenty minutes, humming a jaunty tune as he contentedly bled the radiators one by one. It had taken him a little under an hour “not to find our kitten” and he charged us £125 cash for the “less than an hour he spent not finding her”. I paid him and he went on his way whistling a merry tune. I finally understood why he was so smiley. Needless to say we didn’t put him in our book of people to contact in an emergency.

Six hours later, and still in the kitchen wondering where on earth Misty could have gone, we heard a very faint scurrying sound from behind the kickboard at the bottom of the sink unit (the one by Gaynor’s foot in the photograph). I eased myself down onto my hands and knees, pried the kickboard loose, and throwing it to one side (almost smashing a bottle of wine on the wine rack in the process), I dropped my head to the floor and looked in.

And there she was!

Misty was cowering at the back of the space under the unit pressing herself firmly against the wall. I reached in to get her, just managing to grab her before she ran off. She scratched and bit a little (a lot actually), but I didn’t care, I was so relieved to have found her.

On investigation we found that she’d squeezed herself through a small gap beneath the dishwasher. The gap allowed the dishwasher door to open and close freely and was only a couple of inches wide. Kittens it would appear are very elastic. I taped some thick cardboard over the gap with parcel tape, it meant that we couldn’t open the door and couldn’t use the dishwasher, but so what? We had Misty back. For the next hour we fed her lots of kitten food and plenty of kitten milk. After another thirty minutes of cooing and kitten cuddles we tucked Misty safely into her wicker basket on top her pink fluffy cushion, turned off lights, carefully closed the door, and went up to bed secure in the knowledge that Misty wouldn’t be able to get lost in the kitchen again.

How wrong can you be?

To be continued…