Making the Cat Laugh Read Online Free PDF

grime of household activity with a brisk one-two, reminiscent of the old telly adverts for Flash. Wisshh, woossshh, all done. ‘You make a cup of tea, while I lie full-out on this sofa, preventing it from bucking up and killing somebody.’
    Jobs that can’t be tackled simultaneously stretch out instead in long miserable single file, like prisoners on a chain-gang, and are dealt with on the weary principle of one-damn-thing-after-another. The plodding linear quality is depressing. Sometimes you forget, of course, and glance optimistically at the bin, fleetingly wondering whether someone else has taken out the rubbish. But they usually have not. The cheerful midnight pixie with bucket and mop is a sweet and potent myth, but it is cruelly misleading.
    Looking on the bright side, however, there is great consolation in the knowledge that the Mr Nobody who takes out the bin is also the Mr Nobody who moves things around so that you can’t find them. Take the TV remote control, for example. In my old cohabiting days, how many times did I search frantically among sofa cushions for it, knowing in my heavy heart that it was probably travelling anti-clockwise on the M25 by now, snug in a coat pocket on the back seat of the boyfriend’s car? Living alone, then, it is no wonder you rejoice that things remain precisely where you left them. You feel a great warmthinside on the day you realize that if
you haven’t finished the marmalade, there
is still
some marmalade left.
The only interference I have experienced since living alone was when I emerged from the bath one day to discover the word ‘trhjwqxz’ on my otherwise blank word-processor screen. I gulped, and stood stock still for a minute, feeling the pulse race in my neck. And then I realized that a cat had made a dash across the keyboard.
    I mention all this because last week I left a friend alone in my flat for a couple of hours, and when I came back I realized I could retrace virtually every moment of his stay, just by observing all the things he had moved from their usual places. The loo seat was up. A plate with toast crumbs awaited me on the draining-board, along with a knife tinged with Marmite. A couple of inches of wine had gone from an opened bottle, and a glass with dregs in it was rolling on the living-room floor. A book had been replaced in the wrong position on a shelf, a window opened (and not closed again), the backdoor key hidden so successfully it took me two hours to find it. I moved stealthily around the flat, feeling a bit like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of exotic cigar-ash. ‘He’s been here, too!’ I whispered excitedly. ‘See, he has moved these cassettes!’ Thank goodness I didn’t have a magnifying-glass, or I would have been down on the carpet, observing the pile for footprints.
    I felt proud and irritated in equal measure: proud that I can now (like Holmes himself) detect the tiniest variation in the depth of dust on a pile of Radio Times; irritated for obvious reasons (mainly to do with washing up). But there was something rather macabre about this Do Your Own Forensics activity, and eventually I stopped thinking about it. The idea of living alone is somehow quite closely associated with the idea of dying alone, too; and I didn’t want to think about the giveaway clues packed into my own day-to-day life. ‘We found a half-eaten jar of pickled onions next to the bath. She had fed the cats but not washed the spoon. A little Post-It note wasattached to the bin, with the mysterious words ‘‘I suppose it’s my turn again?’’ written on it in big wobbly capital letters, underlined.’
    If this sounds self-pitying and morbid, it is nevertheless something that single people very often joke about; the collective single mind contains a whole sub-section labelled: ‘What if I died?’ ‘Thanks for the present,’ they say, ‘but what if I died, and somebody found the room stacked to shoulder height with twenty-five years’ worth of
Pet Fish