‘Talisker!’ My voice didn’t know whether to register annoyance at being disturbed, relief that it was just the cat and not anything more sinister, or wonder at how he’d managed to open the door by himself. It sounded a confused mish-mash of all three to my ears – I had no idea how it sounded to his.
The cat strutted across the tiled floor, tail high in the air, purring loudly as if to say ‘Look! Did you see me? Did you see how clever I was? Get out of the bath and close the door and I’ll do an encore and amaze you again with my dexterity. Go on!’
‘How did you do that?’ I asked him as he hopped effortlessly onto the edge of the tub. ‘How did you open that door, young man?’
He just purred some more and smiled at me as if he was some incredibly popular, talented, and famous film star and I was a chat show host, and he’d taken time out from his fabulous career to come and let me interview him. I could almost hear him saying ‘Ask me anything you like, Beth. Any question at all.’ So I did.
‘Talisker, do you know how naughty it is to open a bathroom door and wander in while somebody is having a bath?’ He looked completely unabashed – I might as well have been asking Lindsay Lohan if she knew that excessive drinking and drug taking were bad for you. ‘Particularly if it is a person of the opposite sex,’ I told him in a sterner voice, although I wasn’t quite sure how I was planning on taking this line of debate where two different species were involved. Although as Talisker was unlikely to actually ask me that, it didn’t really matter.
He dipped a paw into the bath water, put it up to his face, and started licking it.
‘Excuse me! This is my bath water,’ I told him. ‘And I can’t imagine it tastes all that nice with the chemicals it’s probably got in it.’ It seemed I was wrong, because he dipped the same paw right back in the water and did exactly the same thing again. ‘Are you planning on doing all four paws?’ I asked. ‘Because I don’t mind the front two too much, but if you start dangling your back legs in my bath water then one of us is getting out of here very quickly.’
He gave me a look that said, ‘Fair enough, it’s a deal – front paws only’. And he switched his weight to the first paw and started dipping the second one.
Without lifting my shoulders out of the water, I picked up the cup and saucer before he knocked them off the edge, drained the cup, and put them on the other corner. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you went back into the bedroom? I’m not getting out of here with you staring at me.’
He seemed to give the matter a moment’s thought before deciding I was right. He then jumped gracefully down with the same economy of movement as he’d used jumping up and strutted towards the door, turning to give me a goodbye meow just before he passed through it.
Wondering if I would ever again be able to have an undisturbed bath in a house with an animal in it, I turned on the hot tap, switched it over to the shower setting, and started to rinse the conditioner out of my hair. How had he done that?
I might have been eager to do something different with my weekend for once, but it seemed to me that I’d had more than enough entertainment for one day. What with seasickness in the Solent, belligerent Bella the fractious feline, a sudden monsoon on my walk home, and a cat named after a whisky trying to drink my bath water, all I wanted now was to get into my pyjamas and have a quiet evening in front of the TV. No more dramas for me today, thank you.