Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (18 page)

‘No inner poet, eh,' she said as if to herself, just musing. ‘Well, I haven't any use for a lad with no inner poet. I better tell that nice Magistrate Caine he's paroled a boy to me that's more hindrance than comfort, and his leniency was misguided and a juvenile detention centre might be the thing after all.'

She saw me nodding, and she knew I had accepted the post and was a cat poet henceforth. ‘They like rhyming couplets.' She waggled a finger at me. ‘None of your blank verse. Blank verse is worse than no poems at all to cats.'

I don't know if Sally Monteith really thought her cats liked poems or if she made me a cat poet as the worst indignity she could imagine.
The lad seems to be coping with cat shit. What about cat poems? Let's see if cat poems crush his soul.
But, either way, now I was composing love poems for cats. And they didn't come easy. They had to rhyme, and I had to stay up nights under the blankets with a torch to get them to rhyme. And I soon found there were only so many compliments you could offer to cats before your well ran dry. Which made me suspect Sally Monteith's well hadn't run dry because I shot her, but was already dry from trying to write poems to cats who had no admirable traits or proud history. Like trying to write poems for Hitler or sing a song for the devil, writing poems for cats.

Still, I had enough pride to want to write the best poems I could, though I doubted the cats even knew the difference between good poetry or ramblings such as a drunkard might spill on startled lawn bowlers. At first my poems painted cats in a golden light and applauded their conniptions. Sally Monteith had insisted I mentioned their intelligence and athleticism and their mystical insights. So I started by thinking up little stories of how they'd outwitted lawyers and leapt over burning cars and predicted winners at the trots by tapping their paws on her teapot the correct number of times.

To my surprise Sally Monteith liked the poems. We'd sit in her dark living room and I'd read them to her and to whatever cats had strolled inside to sniff the maturing tannins of their urine on her rugs. She'd snatch a
cat from the darkness and begin to stroke it viciously, listening with her head laid over so the ear attached to the shot-out eye was uppermost. At recital's end she'd tell me it was inspired, the work of a Gifted Inner Poet, and she said it was one of the seven wonders that such a Gifted Inner Poet could survive in such an irksome and dull boy. I took that as a compliment. She had a clock that ticked on the mantelpiece and I listened hard to those ticks when she was offering up compliments on my poetry. Because those ticks were virtually the only thing in the room that wasn't cat poems or cat smells or hatred of me.

I usually threw my poems away after their recital. But one day I read her a poem she liked so much she said, ‘Give it to me here.' She held her hand out and when I placed it slowly in her palm she shoved it into the pocket of her apron because, she told me, it showed cats in a selfless light they should be showed in.

Next day she took that poem, Cat Poem #8, down Wyndham Street to the old red brick post office and had the postmaster read it out to the idling housewives who hung about this place, and who sniggered, I suppose, before passing false compliments.

This was a time before poker machines and Ms Oprah Winfrey, so women were idle in a different way then than they are now. They would gather for the paltriest festivity. Cat Poem #8 was a hit among this scurvy crew and Sally Monteith, flushed with success and a missionary zeal to convert these women to the wonders of cats, promised them more. She told them she had got herself
a font of odes. She told them Dale Bramhall was full up to pussy's bow with odes.

She began to take a poem of mine to the post office every day, and the gaggle of women gathered and grew to hear the postmaster read them. He was a curly-haired showman and wit and enjoyed the spotlight, waiting for hush and frowning at the noise of airbrakes on the street outside before he would begin his recital of the cat poems of Doyle Bramhall. When he had silence he would flourish my latest work and announce, ‘Hear ye, hear ye … the latest despatch from the Keats of Cats.' The town's ladies tried to keep straight faces as he read. Tried to stifle their laughter and tried not to meet each other's eyes as he paused and rushed through the verse. They laughed behind Sally Monteith's back, but to her face they frowned and nodded at the odes, feigning an appreciation, like lotto winners listening to a string quartet. Sally Monteith believed they admired the poems and the cats within them. She thought she was building cat lovers there in that post office. She didn't know my poems were no more than comedy to that crowd.

I could possibly have borne the degradation of composing odes for her cats if it had been a secret degradation. In our town many people nursed a secret degradation. I cite Mr Vincent's inability to urinate on his hydrangeas in the morning without coaxing his penis for five minutes like he was trying to recapture a runaway kelpie, ‘Come on, boy. That's it. Come on.' I cite Mary Scott leaving chicken pies on her front veranda to be picked
up at midnight by a man whose heart she broke in the fifties and who lived down by the river, broken-hearted, but not off his tucker.

There was secret indignity everywhere in our town. But Sally Monteith took my cat poetry public. Friends of my parents started to call me
a little character
. They called Sally Monteith
a character
. So calling me a
little character
meant they thought I'd become a smaller catlunatic of the same sort as her.

I was by now totally ruined as a boy. I had been a marksman. A popular, gun-toting figure. Now I was as disarmed as a Japanese, and had no friend brave enough to be seen with me. At the school swimming sports I was meowed up at by five hundred students while balancing on my toes on the three-metre board in my Speedos about to perform a reverse dive in the pike position. I flopped into the water like a princess into a moat and stayed under, in the silence, as long as I could.

How do you redeem yourself from being a cat poet? How do you get back what status you ever had so people don't meow and hiss at you even when you're a Wise Man in a cotton-wool beard in a nativity play?

Well, here again it appears to me that when women get killed prematurely in stories they're usually blue-eyed angels with an inner glow like a chandelier. But you know Sally Monteith wasn't one of those. Only one smoky eye and no inner glow. And, anyway, I didn't
mean to kill her. I never even suspected a poem was weapon enough to kill an old bitch. But it turned out it was. Cat Poem #64 Revised was, anyway.

On a Thursday late in February, sitting in her dark living room, I read to Sally Monteith Cat Poem #64. It went like this:

She clapped her hands and said it was short but sweet and she approved of the idea that cats could harmonise like a heavenly host. She said it had always struck her they sounded like cherubim, and she was glad I could hear it, too. I had a good ear. And she said she thought our postmaster could really make that last couplet ring off the high ceiling of the P.O. and spellbind the listeners. ‘“If only cats could sing …”' she said, while looking
out the window at some better world. Then she held out her hand for Cat Poem #64.

But I gave her Cat Poem #64 Revised. Which was a different poem and not so kindly to cats. It was an ambush and a sabotage. And as she tucked it into her apron I felt breathless, knowing I was free. Knowing I would never again be inhaling cat fumes in this house after tomorrow's recital. Because I would be sacked as cat laureate. There would be an outrage at the P.O. and Sally's literary crew would rise up against me and my humiliations would be ended.

And things ran nearly according to plan, apart from Sally being killed. Apparently at first the postmaster protested. Apparently he said, ‘Mrs Monteith, I don't think this sort of thing warrants a public airing. This is of a different … oeuvre, Mrs Monteith.' The crowd bristled and their ears pricked up. Something unfit for the public? Read it loud.

‘Oh, hogwash. Go ahead and read it out, or I'll get someone else to read it,' Sally Monteith told that postmaster. ‘I think the choir idea is an accurate idea … sensitive.' The idling ladies started to shout at him. ‘Oh, a critic now, are you?'

‘Come on.'

‘Get on with it.'

‘Give it to me. I'll read it.'

The postmaster didn't want to lose his position as public orator, nor did he want to appear squeamish or censorial. So he took a deep breath and read.

It was a good poem, I thought. In an earthy, no-holds-barred manner it spelt out the vagaries and troubles of pet ownership and it even granted a donkey the ability
to compose an elegy, which is a thing I thought Sally Monteith might regard with some wonder and delight. But Sally Monteith spared not a moment to let the full drama of that ode marinate her soul before caroming out the post office door onto High Street jabbering like a misunderstood Italian. People with no left eye shouldn't dart onto High Street trusting to the Lord in February when that road is a shooting gallery of pear trucks barrelling east from the orchards of Ardmona to the Shepparton Preserving Company. It is proven annually by drunks and strays that the Lord concedes right-of-way to the pears. So of Sally Monteith I say no more. She is gone under a hundred tons of canning-quality Williams pears and her literary salon is dissolved – snuck away to games of bridge and rounds of golf.

Many people played their part in Sally Monteith's death. Mine was, in the end, thought to be small, excusable. People could see I had written the poem not so much to kill her as to escape her. To get myself sacked as her cat-poet. Even, I think, they were a bit ashamed. I was a lad, after all, and what the hell was everyone thinking letting me play cat-poet to some mad old witch?