The Chequerboard Cat

The buses never ran on time in Lenchworth. Nobody even bothered with them any more, not since that wiry, bespectacled basket-case of a man took over their management. 

It wasn’t his fault - he would say - that his chequerboard-coloured cat had claimed his favourite easy chair as its own, and rigged the gramophone to announce each hour of the day with ear-splitting military anthems, and draped itself in lavish jewellery, and generally established martial law in the household.

The creature’s coat was a genuine chequerboard design, somehow acquired on its night errands the day before it turned authoritarian. Its movements were like athletic clockwork, as if the reflexes and grace of a prize gymnast had found their way into a rare timepiece.

Its eyes were nothing special: green orbs sliced by jet-black pupils.  But behind them lay a soul which knew and wanted so much more than it had yesterday.

There had been no warning of this sudden change in character.  The previous day, the cat had been a skittish tabby by the name of Murphy, and the only wonder it inspired was at the diverse ballistic talents shared by all felines.

The fact that it never came home with a torn body and broken pride was explained away as there being no other animals in the area it could fight with.  Indeed, it had never suffered a scratch in its known lifetime.

The morning the cat changed was never fully understood; it’s never easy to remember exact events when all hell breaks loose.  The tall man who brought the creature meat each day after overseeing the buses had left the house and could not be found anywhere local. His wife had flown into a panic and would not go outside.  Children would make wagers on which hour of the day her screams would be heard.

An unlikely tale was doing the rounds.  The man who brought the milk each morning to that strange house had coaxed some words from the lady, perhaps aided by familiarity. Apparently the cat had calmly padded into her room and asked her where the jewellery was kept, while noisily working a wad of chewing gum in its mouth.  She had darted out and hid behind the shower curtain. 

Frozen still, she could only listen to the sounds coming from her room: the adolescent grumbling the cat somehow managed, the zipping exclamation of a gold chain being snatched by needle teeth through a scant gap in the drawers, the precise skittering and obscene chuckling as it surveyed itself in the dressing table mirror.

This apparent theft is perhaps less criminal when we learn that the dressing table did not belong to the lady, but was an heirloom from that despotic moggy’s deceased mother, Gertrude II.

Back to the buses.  They did not run because the supercat - self-dubbed King Kolin - insisted that all public transport be axed and their funding diverted to Kolin’s swiss-roll house.  The cat had demanded a mansion built from sponge treats and it would rule from its topmost reaches, its jewellery flashing in the sun.