Show Business

Show Business
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 11, 2015

It was raining cats and dogs. My windscreen wipers whined a irksome tune. As I passed the Showgrounds, I spotted a sandwich board. Feline Fanciers Show, it read. Today. 9-4pm

“Come on,” I said to my 5-year-old as we drove through the gates. “We’ve got an hour to kill.”

The cat pavilion was a vast tin shed that smelled strongly of toast and vaguely of tuna. The entrance was fortified with sacks of cat litter, stacked like sandbags along one wall, in case of dog invasion. A small table offered an array of cat show essentials: three knitted berets, four pairs of fingerless gloves and a half a dozen jars of pickled onions.

Inside the hall, a hundred cats were corralled in cages.

“Look mum!” said my daughter excitedly. “They’ve got shiny curtains!” She pointed to the rows of metal crates bespangled with silky drapes and plush padding.

In the first cage, a poufy Persian sprawled across a pink satin pillow. Her tail twitched against a backdrop of matching curtains, the hems studded with rhinestones. A dainty bowl of salmon-shaped biscuits sat alongside her silver tray of kitty litter. She narrowed her eyes at me and yawned. I felt inferior.

“Cage curtains are important for privacy,” said a woman at my elbow. I noticed her windcheater featured a tiger’s head embroidered with gold sequins. She was holding a leopard-print bag filled with knitting. I picked her as a cat lover.

“Cats don’t like to see their competition,” she said knowingly. “And they hate being shown in winter.”

It was as cold as concrete in the cavernous shed.

“If you’re smart,” she w hispered so no-one else could hear, “you match your curtains to the colour of your cat’s eyes. Really sets ‘em off.”

I looked around and saw several cages padded in vivid shades of turquoise and emerald. I admired a Burmese with golden eyes who was trying to tear down his harlequin-striped curtains.

“Are you showing a cat today?” I asked my new friend.

“No,” she laughed. “My show days are over. My Mr Fluff was crowned Grand Premier in 1989. In those days, all I was allowed to put in his cage was a white towel, litter and water. Now they get a boudoir!”

A cat the size of a small lion stared stonily at us from a cage plumped with red velvet.

“I only have four cats now,” she continued. “Marika has diabetes. I have to inject her with insulin twice a day. Lord Louie is a Burmese cross. I named him after Mountbatten. Kismet Hardy is 19 now – he sleeps on top of the microwave.”

She was interrupted by a vile stench. My daughter screwed up her face. “Ewwww” she wailed. “What’s that?”

“Someone needs their bottom changed,” my companion broadcast in a loud voice. The pedigree lion in the red velvet cage stared smugly at me. The stink from his litter tray was making my eyes water.

We moved smartly to the next aisle where a judge was examining a giant puffball on legs.

“Good chin, gorgeous wedge,” announced the judge, but all I could see was snub of muzzle buried in a mound of fur.

“Lovely coat, nice expression,” the judge declared before adding: “This handsome fellow deserves first prize – he showed himself off the minute his toes hit the table.”

A steward in a white coat bundled the winning cat under one arm. Depositing him into the upholstered crate beside me, the steward reached into the neighbouring cage for a new contestant. A hefty grey cat with sky-blue eyes was in no mood to please. He peeled back his rosy lips to reveal a shark-toothed grin and attacked the steward’s arm, snarling and hissing. The steward leapt backwards, slamming the lid. “Bloody Russians,” he muttered. “Ruthless, aren’t they,” I whispered back – just so he knew he had an ally.

He gave me a quizzical look and marched away. Behind me, a Siamese kitten began yowling in a voice as gravelly as a pack-a-day smoker’s.

It was time to leave. My youngster had chosen her favourite cat: a petite Lilac Ragdoll called Bruno. “Took me four hours to dry him,” said his owner as she fluffed his lacy curtains. “He kept attacking the dryer. I got to bed at 2am. By then, there were nine other cats sleeping on my bed!” She giggled self-consciously, before addressing Bruno with a frown: “And who decided to cough during judging, hey? Good time to get a furball, Mister.”

We said goodbye to Bruno and his strange neighbour, a hairless Sphynx called Neil. The rain had stopped and a weak shaft of sun shone through the shed door.

“Can we get a toy?” begged my daughter, pointing to a collection of crocheted cat rattles for 50-cents each.

“Not today, honey,” I said. “But I could be talked into buying some pickled onions.”

In a cat flap

In a cat flap
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 8, 2013

I’ve always been a cat person. I don’t like to admit it because cat people are snooty and aloof and picky about their food. Dog people, on the other hand, are irrepressibly gleeful and outdoorsy and are always excited to see you.

I have tried to become a dog person, because dog people are universally liked. They don’t know meanness or envy or discontent. But it’s their dogs I don’t like: dogs who press their wet noses, like cold liver, into my crotch. Dogs with big teeth and drippy tongues who clumsily paw at me in greeting (and not in the nice way my husband does it). Or dogs with stumpy legs who’ve tuned their bark into a shrill yap-yap-yap that makes me wince.I see dog people in clumps at the park in the evenings and feel jealous. I catch a drift of their doggy conversations as I dig holes in the sandpit and fetch balls for my children: “What a lovely shiny coat! What do you feed her?” I hear one fellow say to a cocker spaniel owner. (I try to avoid shiny coats – they add three kilos). “What breed is he?” asks another. I want to yell out: “I’d like to see your pedigree, you mongrel!” but I have too much breeding.

Dog people live their lives on display. They’re always promenading around our park looking relaxed and contented as this frazzled mother herds her children across the oval to the school gate. On the way home, I feel obliged to stop and coo over the neighbourhood’s Tibetan spaniel the way I gush over babies in prams.

I like to laugh at dogs hanging out of car windows as much as the next person. I just don’t want to drive with one barking at nothing in my ear as I try to change lanes on the freeway. For me, getting a dog would be like taking on another child, and I’m still trying to train the three I’ve got. A cat is all I have time for. Cat owners don’t meet in the park every evening. They have no such camaraderie. They think being labelled a social recluse is a compliment.

So the kids and I troop off to the Cat’s Refuge Home – half a dozen sheds full of deserted moggies. It’s quiet and clean and all the pussycats are curled up in their cages napping, or being aloof and arrogant – knowing they’re too beautiful to be homeless for long. I ask the sour-puss attendant if the kids and I can go in and pat them: “You’ll need to gown up first.” Like (incompetent) surgeons we try to sterilise our hands with pink pump-action goop, wrapped in our crunchy plastic aprons. The kids are competing to make the most noise by crackling their gowns. The attendant frowns at us, then stalks out of the shed. We four are left alone with a clowder of cats.  

And then we spot Alfie. He is the smallest and pounciest of a litter of abandoned kittens, a piebald mop of fluff. Above his little white mouth is a two-finger black moustache just like Hitler’s.

I immediately feel sorry for him – how could the kitty gene pool be so unkind? I pick him up and give him a cuddle. I I tell him that it was Charlie Chaplin who first sported the toothbrush moustache in 1914, well before Hitler. Alfie breaks into a tiny purr.

Then smallest child trips over her scrubs, and Alfie – startled – wriggles free from my arms and performs a forward somersault in the pike position before landing lightly on the ground. We all agree he’s talented enough to come home with us.

At the counter, I buy a $150 kitten, $64 worth of kitty litter and $40 worth of vet-recommended biscuits. Sourpuss attendant, all smiles now, says Alfie will also need an identity chip fitted under his skin in case he gets lost. I book him in for next week: “If I bring my 3-year-old along, can you fit one in her as well?”  

Now we are a family of five plus a cat. Alfie is loved by everyone in the house which is just as well, because within a week I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with his kitty litter scattered like gravel all over the laundry floor.

And the pet shop – who knew? There are two-storey cat houses with carpet on the mezzanine. There is a $140 four-post cat scratcher made of seagrass. And there are cat jumpers (small and medium – tough luck if you’re a fat cat). Collars can have diamonds or sequins, or scary-looking studs (for bikies’ cats).

I went there to find a cheap cane basket for Alfie to sleep in, but all the cat beds on display had Posturepedic mattresses and (fake) fur doonas. With no cane baskets in sight, I choose the cheapest bed in the shop: black igloo-style with white paws stamped all over it. I was embarrassed walking back to the car with my $50 pet igloo but a couple I passed gave me a wink and a smile. They must have been dog owners.