A cat called Jasper

Ron’s neighbour asked whether he would look after their old cat overnight so that he and his wife could go to Queenstown for the funeral of a close relative. Ron would have preferred to have a quiet night, because the day before he’d badly twisted his ankle when foolishly demonstrating to his six-year-old niece how to execute a cartwheel on a wet lawn.
‘We’d take him with us,’ his neighbour said, ‘but you know what Jasper’s like.’
Yeah, Ron knew the cat all right. Very depressing, it was. Old Jasper was about as ugly a cat you’d ever see. He was incontinent, almost bald and as far as Ron was concerned about five years past his use-by date.
The only thing that made him stand out from the crowd of decrepit felines was his tail, a glorification that had somehow dodged the hair-destroying pestilence. His tail was quite splendid actually; it reminded Ron of a black feather duster.
The subliminal message Ron got from his neighbour’s request was that it was better for the cat to crap in his house rather than in their car.
Against his better judgement, Ron finally acquiesced. Ron was the sort of bloke who acquiesced quite a bit. His ex-partner Jane left him because of that trait. She had put it down to a physiological condition that he had inherited from his parents, a backbone that was made of rubber. ‘All three of you would bend before a temperate breeze,’ she said on that last day as she slammed the door behind her.
And it was the same lack of fortitude in Ron’s essential being that he’d also said yes that morning to his dubious pal Jacko who rang him and offered to come around and stay the night. ‘I heard you’d busted your ankle,’ Jacko said, ‘I thought you might like a bit of company. I could bring around a few stubbies and a pack of cards and cheer you up.’
That particular scenario was as unwanted as looking after the cat. Jacko was well known to hit the grog more than somewhat and the last time he stayed he ruined Ron’s best pair of fitted sheets when he passed out while smoking a fag in the spare room bed.
That would have been the time to disassociate Jacko from his circle of friends and the same went with Jasper’s owners who often called on him to borrow this or that without any reciprocality. He chastised himself for not saying a very definite no in both cases. He should have, but he didn’t.
Ron admitted it to himself that Jane was probably right; it was a matter of his innate softness, as always it was easier for him to say yes than to say no. Saying it quite cheerily on the surface but deep down there was mostly a great deal of nervous apprehension.

Jasper and Jacko arrived about the same time. Jacko carrying his sleeping bag, a dozen stubbies of beer and a pack of cards, and the cat arriving in a wicker basket along with his four tins of special dietary food, his silver bowl, three bottles of coloured pills and a vet‘s chart on how to dispense them.
With final farewells that would have done justice to a favoured cherub rather than a scraggy, balding moggy well on its way to a heavenly cattery, his neighbours drove away still shouting orders out the window of their car on how to make dear old Jasper happy and comfortable.
Bloody hell, Ron told Jacko, ‘I’m going to be a day/night nurse for a bald-backed, incontinent cat.’
‘No mate, no worries,’ Jacko said. ‘I’ll put old Jasper in the laundry with the back door open a crack. I’ll leave enough for him to eat and drink and he’ll be able to stagger in and out at will, and then I’ll come back and cook you the beast meal you’ve had since Jane left you.’
It all sounded so fine and dandy, so why was it that deep down Ron felt that niggling sense of foreboding once again? But then, his demeanour was somewhat ameliorated later that evening when Jacko had stir-fried a reasonable meal and catered most dutifully to Jasper’s wants and needs. Ron was happy enough to drink a couple of stubbies and play poker till midnight when he gave in to his aching ankle and went to bed. But not before he had established a heartfelt promise from Jacko not to smoke inside the house and to check out the cat before he retired.
‘No worries,’ Jacko assured him, ‘I’ll clean out his crapping dish fasten the door and let him out first thing in the morning.’

Ron found it hard to go to sleep that night, what with his throbbing ankle and residual doubts, and when he did finally drift off in the early hours, not surprising his dreams were very erratic, at one time almost pleasant, and then slipping into a nightmare with crippled cats crawling and scratching around his bedroom floor, meowing plaintively.
Then it was Jacko’s turn to come charging into his dream. Drunk as the hooniest of hoons, car horn blaring, he was chasing decomposing, cat-like obscenities out on the road in his dilapidated jalopy - shouting hysterically as he mowed them down one after the other.
Ron woke abruptly, the sounds still echoing in his head. It was two in the morning and he could hear Jacko bumping around out the back and muttering to himself. Something was wrong. In rising panic Ron lumbered out of bed, slid into his slippers and hobbled into his living room where he found Jacko standing irresolutely by the laundry door with the very limp and bedraggled body of Jasper in his arms.
Jacko thrust the corpse forward and tried to explain what had happened. ‘I was a bit pissed mate, I must have not closed the door properly. I woke up when I heard a car horn blaring and tyres skidding. I rushed out into the road and there was this guy standing in front of his car staring down at Jasper in disbelief. It was like he’d just knocked down the devil incarnate. He told me he was heading home after a wild night out and came across this apparition that looked like a giant black maggot with a feather duster stuck up his bum crawling across the road. He said he thought it was one of his deliriums and tried to drive right through it. He was surprised when he felt the bump of a solid body.’
Ron stared at the ghastly, sagging corpse in Jacko’s arms; it seemed even in death that the cat emitted some kind of evil miasma. He felt completely drained of any caring for anyone or thing. He was acting like an automaton in his strident insistence that he and Jacko spend the next hour blundering around in the dark with a spade, looking for a soft patch of soil in the garden to bury the cat and be rid of it forever.
It was only when it was finally done that they both staggered back to bed. Jacko in the spare room fighting off a brain-destroying hangover and Ron, wide awake, constructing in his mind what he was going to say to his neighbours on their return. But not without some satisfaction that he had at least buried their obscenity for them.
He went off to sleep finally with his mind so shut down that no dream good or bad would have dared to enter his subconscious. When he woke at nine the following morning he was pleasantly surprised to find that through some unexplained miracle, his ankle had stopped its painful throbbing. He even convinced himself that the combination of events of the previous night had done something good for both that miserable old cat and for humanity in general.
As a matter of fact you could say he felt good – until that was his tranquil mood was shattered by Jacko’s terrible howl from the spare room. He hobbled in to see what was wrong. Jacko stood at the window staring out. He was pointing a trembling finger at something in the garden and gibbering incoherently.
Ron followed his gaze and there it was, the residual horror of the night before - the exposed tail of Jasper, upright and brushy, waving frantically back and forth.
‘Bloody hell,’ Jacko groaned, ‘we buried the poor bugger alive.’

Of course, Jasper couldn’t really have still been alive. How would it be possible? On closer inspection it turned out that the phenomenon was caused by a trick of the morning wind blowing old Jasper’s carelessly exposed tail back and forth. And, though only a temporarily confusion in two men’s minds who had suffered a very bad night, it should be said that such a spectre was so symbolically powerful, so extravagantly bizarre, it could well have turned a man’s mind – or two men’s minds if it came to that.
In Jacko’s case, having confronted the full consequences of the demon drink he decided there and then to give up the grog. No way did he ever want to chance such a mind-bending experience ever again.
And as for Ron, well, from that time on he refused all offers to give, to give in, or lend, or do, or help anyone, no matter who asked and how much supplication was applied, or urgently the proposition couched, he would definitely, absolutely, intractably refuse.
You could say, after that night, whereas Jacko turned into a bit of a wowser, Ron turned from being a real soft touch into a real hard bastard.