Footbig And The Sad Saga Of Charlie Grapes

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

“Footbig?” I'm sure he would grumble if he could talk.
“Too right - unfortunately such is my name, and I blame it all
on a certain would-be comedian not a million miles away.”
His name should have been Bigfoot,
but my wife, bless her cotton socks, is slightly dyslexic
and when she made that memorable boo-boo
the name stuck indelibly with mental Super-glue,
because it tickled me. So Footbig it is.

We wouldn't have kept Footbig because we already had two cats,
a boy and a girl, brother and sister
that we bought for fifteen quid each some two years back
from an Indian family on the spur of the moment
because our kids, being kids, insisted on having a cat each.
I realised as soon as I clapped eyes on the fluffy black and white bundles
that they were far too young to leave their mother,
but I also knew that I had to have them.
“I'm an animal man,” I told myself. “I can rear them, no problem,
and they'll probably make more homely adults,
what with having them so young.”

I spent the next fortnight hand feeding my new wards
with warm milk and finely mashed meat
because the people we had them from, out of ignorance rather than malice
had fed the delicate babes on dry cat food, unsoaked.
I knew that for a fact because I gradually massaged
several fairly intact pieces from their bowels,
and I had to rub their little bottoms with a moistened finger
to ease the crap out of their systems.
And then there was Ringworm to deal with.
Washing cats with fungicidal shampoo, even young kittens,
every day for a couple of weeks
is a risky business, and my hands and forearms
were a network of minuscule scratches.
“Never mind, my cuddly darling babes,” I crooned in a high-pitched voice,
bleeding copiously. “Don't fret, because daddy will always look after you.”
No doubt that sounded ridiculous, coming from a rugged,
supposedly rock hard middle aged man, but so be it.
As it turned out, though, I was a bloody liar,
because I couldn't look after my babies twenty four seven.

Woody and Jessie, the kids called the kittens,
after the main characters in Toy Story,
but I knew those names wouldn't stick.
I generally come up with ridiculous names for animals,
but they're always appropriate.....

The she cat has very delicate features
and she could easily be mistaken for a pedigree Oriental,
so I started calling her my kissy-faced Geisha girl.
As she matured she took an unhealthy interest in my sweaty armpits,
so I christened her Japanese Armpit Cat.
Later still she grew equally fond of womens' armpits,
at which point she became Japanese Lesbian Armpit Cat,
or JLAC for short, and we all call her that now almost without fail.
I love JLAC's mournful mewing, it's music to my ears.
Right now she's feeding another litter of titty-kitties,
six of the little nuisances, greys and whites and a couple of blacks
fathered by a huge, flea-bitten, pure white stray cat
that I've covertly fed at the bottom of the garden for months.
They're beautiful, but I'm getting her neutered when she's done
because I think she's had more than enough of motherhood.

Initially I called the tomcat, JLAC's brother, Charlie Greybollocks
because his knacker-sack had a distinctly grey tinge,
but as he grew his moniker changed to Charlie Grapes
because his balls were as big as bloody grapes.
Sadly, Charlie is no longer with us. We lost him last Christmas,
and though I've always considered myself primarily a dog man
I've never mourned the passing of an animal so deeply.
See, I struggled to type the word 'death,'
or 'murder,' as my daughter still insists on calling it,
although she knows it really upsets me.
This is crazy, my eyes are swimming in tears.
So much for being a big, butch bloke
who ain't scared of no one, of nothing.
Who am I trying to kid?
Rosie, my daughter, made some black and yellow murder scene tape
that she erected around the site of Charlie Grapes' demise.
I was devastated and furious at the same time,
but she was hurting too, which is obviously why she did that.

The death of Charlie Grapes was all down to human error,
and when I've dried my eyes I'll take you through it.....

We have two dogs. Moonpie, the bitch is perfectly trustworthy,
but the dog, Monkey, was a six month old nut-job
and he should never have had an opportunity to be alone with the cats.
He's thirteen months old now, and though he's fine while I have a wary eye on him
I still don't trust him as far as I could throw him -
and as he's built like a brick shit-house that wouldn't be very far.
Monkey has a steel crate in the living room, and my fourteen year old son
let him out onto the back yard while I was at work
because he thought he was doing me a favour.
The cats were in the house, one on the upstairs landing snoring her head off
and the other on the sofa in the living room enjoying a blissful if short-lived kip.
My boy neglected to bolt the back door when he left the house,
and the rest is history.

When I got home I was looking forward
to a cup of coffee and a cuddle with Charlie and JLAC
before I cooked the dinner.
To my horror, both dogs were in the house.
Monkey was grinning like a loon, Moonpie was looking terribly guilty,
the Christmas tree was on the floor and Charlie Grapes
was as dead as dead can be.
There wasn't a single mark on him, so I guess he died from shock.
I don't think for a moment that Monkey intended to kill the cat.
In his mind he was just playing, but his idea of play
is way too rough for most dogs, never mind
a delicately boned pussy cat.
My daughter hates that dog with a vengeance now,
but it really wasn't his fault, I don't blame him -
his mistake, like many mistakes
was borne out of ignorance rather than malice -
and neither do I blame Isaac, my son.
It was an oversight, a silly blunder, nothing more and nothing less.

A couple of weeks before the Grapey cat shuffled violently off this mortal coil
we posted a video of him on YouTube. Check it out, folks, it's still there.
Does anyone remember the theme song from the Robin Hood TV programme
from the late sixties, or maybe the early seventies?
It's a family tradition to sing that song with aptly altered lyrics
to our assorted animal friends,
and usually but by no means invariably some of the words
are borrowed from Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch.
We cajole non-human family members into dancing our dance
because we find it amusing, I guess.
The animals don't seem to mind the humiliation,
in my mind it makes them feel part of the family.
“Charlie Grapes, Charlie Grapes, riding through the glen,
Charlie Grapes, Charlie Grapes with his band of men,
steals from the poor, gives to the rich!
Silly bitch, Charlie Grapes, Charlie Grapes
diddle-dum diddle-dum diddle-dum diddle-dum-dum-dum.”

Footbig is JLAC's kitten, and he's about eight months old.
He's very similar in appearance to his uncle Charles,
and he's the first animal we've ever had who hasn't been forced
to dance our silly dance and sing our assorted goofy songs in spirit at least.
I just can't bring myself to play the game.....
Maybe in the back of my mind I believe that history is bound to repeat itself;
maybe I'm secretly convinced that inadvertently
someone's going to drop an irreversibly lethal bollock
and poor, daft Footbig, who loves everyone to bits
and thinks that our dogs are his best buddies
is going to end up as dead as Charlie Grapes.
I don't want to curse him, heaven forbid. I don't want him to end up
riding through the same spectral glen as poor Charlie.
I love Footbig very much, but apart from getting rid of Monkey,
whom I also love, I don't know what to do for the best.