Cat pee can bring down the house

Buster Keaton's mansion when built in 1926. Photo supplied.
Buster Keaton's mansion when built in 1926. Photo supplied.
In the mansion-construction one-upmanship that swept through Beverly Hills in the early 20th century, each famous actor trying to appear the richest and best, there was arguably none finer, none more outrageous, than Buster Keaton's 10,000sq ft Mediterranean palazzo.

Keaton's palace had more bathrooms than pavement pebbles. Famous actors being famous actors, failed relationships and diminishing cash flow soon followed, and subsequent owners of the Keaton home included Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant and James and Pamela Mason.

Then came Portland Mason, the precocious daughter, who was specifically raised to be precocious, given cigarettes at 3 and her first mink coat at 6. We want Portland to do whatever she wants, said her parents, witless hippies ahead of their time.

Portland filled the mansion with cats, as her parents had done before her. When it came time for Portland too to sell, the realtors said the only marketable aspect remaining was the dust. The mansion, they said, was unsaleable. The smell of the cats could disintegrate aluminium.

Those of us who have owned a cat with what sophisticated veterinary surgeons fond of impenetrable medical terms call Only Goes Inside, will know that even a forest fire does not do as much damage to a house as an incontinent cat. You don't just have to pull up the carpet, the wood below may be even worse.

Sodden. The Masons had dozens of cats, and they brought them up as they brought up their daughter, not with tobacco and mink but with the mere wave of the hand to pee wherever you want.

It is for this reason we no longer own a cat. We loved the late lamented Motorhead but she peed herself rigid. And here's the thing - children love cats. And dogs. And we as grandparents preparing for the arrival from Chicago of our two grandchildren on October 4, will be expected to have three de rigeurs: boxes of ice-cream-on-sticks in the freezer, chocolate in the fridge, and a domestic pet.

What to do?

Well, fortune has smiled out of nowhere. A few months ago a black cat appeared at our front door like a lost Jehovah's Witness. I saw it there as I walked up the drive and when I made one of those beguiling human cat noises that cats understand instantly, it ran for its ducking life. But I began to see it more often, sometimes on the chair by the door, or lurking close by when I sat there musing of the evils of fracking. Don't feed it, said my wife.

I fed it blue cheese and shaved ham, because we were a tad overstocked in that department that day. And while the cat would never take this fine food from my hand, it certainly moved closer and closer to the pile I left on the path. So I stayed with blue cheese - Casteollo naturally - and ham; I know how fussy cats can be. And gradually it became almost friendly. And yet on other days, it stayed metres distant and looked terrified.

The black cat is bi-polar, I announced at dinner one night.

Have you been feeding it, my wife rasped. What do you take me for, I replied.

Weeks passed. I still hadn't fashioned a close enough relationship with the cat to present to the Chicago grandchildren. I never knew how the cat was going to behave.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting outside telling a friend about the cat as it roared off down the drive. There are two of them, she said, indicating the one I had been talking about, and pointing under the car with her other hand. I looked under the car.

Second cat, black, making that whining cat noise that says where's the ham.

By September we will have a visiting cat for each grandchild. I will call the paranoid-schizoid one Garbo, scared of people, private, and the other one Roy, quiet, modest, comes out of himself eventually, loves blue cheese. And we won't have to pull up all our carpet.

- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

 

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