Matthew Flinders' Cat Read online

  It may be that all cats, given the opportunity, could be taught to do all these things, although the most seasoned seamen aboard would swear that they had never witnessed the likes of Trim Flinders among all the ships’ cats with whom they’d had the pleasure or otherwise to sail.

  Seamen are experts at the business of a seagoing cat’s behaviour. Unlike the average household tabby, which leads a secretive life its owners may only guess at, a ship’s cat has nowhere to hide. A domestic tomcat is fortunate enough to possess his own backyard as well as any other vacant neighbourhood territory he chooses to stake out and fight to maintain. A ship’s cat only has a small area above and below decks to patrol and is almost always in the process of being observed by someone. Trim Flinders, like all ships’ cats, had no secrets from the humans with whom he shared his cloistered life.

  On long tedious voyages, Trim’s feats of derring-do often formed the prime subject of conversation among the crew, his daily exploits invariably recounted with a fair dollop of exaggeration, most of it concerning his hunting skills, his mastery of the art of acrobatics and his extraordinary sagacity. In the minds of Trim’s admirers, this level of practical intelligence was placed well above that of many an admiral of the fleet.

  Billy thought a moment about cats. He had always been passionate about them, and Baby Grand, the cat of his own and later Charlie’s affections, had lived to be almost twenty when he’d died. In the last years of his life, Baby Grand had been in and out of the vet’s so often that Billy had learned a great deal about the anatomy of a cat. In his mind he now explained to the boy why the average domestic cat is remarkable in several respects.

  A cat’s body contains two hundred and thirty bones, twentyfour more than a human skeleton. Its pelvis and shoulders are more loosely attached to its spine than most other fourlegged beasts, which gives it extreme flexibility. Its capacity for great speed over short distances is founded in muscles that seem larger than necessary for so small a frame. Like a monkey, a cat is also equipped with a tail that provides the necessary balance when jumping or landing on a narrow branch or ledge, surface or wall.

  Cats can leap from considerable heights and they do so with their backs arched and all four legs extended, which allows the shock of landing to be spread evenly and so cushion their fall. Their forelegs can turn in almost any direction so they almost never fall awkwardly or sprain a wrist or jar a heel. Their heads can turn nearly 180 degrees so that they can look to the rear without employing their shoulders. They can see well enough during the day, narrowing their pupils against the brightness, as well as exceptionally at night when their pupils expand to utilise all of the available light. Their hearing is acute and a cat can distinguish its master’s footsteps on the pavement several minutes before he arrives home. Unlike most animals, they walk on their toes with the back part of their paw raised. Their paws not only hold things down but may be used to scoop, lift, grip, pat, pummel and punch.

  Trim and his feline family are remarkable athletes, although they are sprinters rather than endurance runners, stalking their prey and then accelerating at high speed to make a kill, like the larger cats in the wild, particularly a cheetah stalking an antelope, which is a picture you see often enough on television.

  The cat’s chest cavity is small and equipped with a compact heart and lungs that tire easily, and after short bursts of high activity require long periods of rest. This narrow chest cavity allows more room for their digestive organs, which are comparatively large, suggesting that before cats discovered the comfort of humans with their meals provided on tap, they didn’t always have things their own way. Large digestive organs allowed the cat to gorge on a kill and then engage in a fairly prolonged period of fasting. Which turned out to be a very useful characteristic for Trim Flinders to possess, as in the course of his ardent and adventurous life, he would endure good times and bad, and had he been born a dog, he might not have survived.

  Billy was approaching Circular Quay and the New Hellas Cafe owned by Con the Greek. Constantine Poleondakis was a fifty-five-year-old widower with two unmarried adult daughters of his own and another three nieces, only one of them married and the youngest in her late teens. Con had assumed responsibility for his sister’s kids when she and her husband had been buried in their bed after a mudslide hit the outskirts of their mountainside village. The mudslide took the half of the farmhouse occupied by her, her husband and the family donkey, while missing the other half where the three girls lay asleep.

  Surrounded by females at home, Con’s first real contact with a male his own age each day was when Billy appeared at half-past six every morning, just as Con had completed cleaning and testing his precious cappuccino machine. It was a task he would never willingly leave to one of the girls, as the New Hellas Cafe enjoyed a citywide reputation for the quality of its coffee. By seven o’clock in the morning, the queue of commuters looking for their first caffeine fix would be twenty metres long.

  Con greeted each one in turn with the same words, ‘In the world, the best, no questions, put down your glass, fair dinkums, myte!’ Con was convinced that it was his peculiar downward pressure on the cappuccino handle that made the entire difference to the taste of his coffee. It had become a ritual, perhaps even a superstition, that the first coffee he pulled each morning to test the machine would be set aside for his good friend Billy O’Shannessy.

  ‘Good morning, Con,’ Billy called, approaching the counter at the entrance of Wharf Two. He was feeling considerably better for having composed a good part of the essay on Trim, promising himself that this time he’d get it down successfully on paper.

  ‘Gidday, myte!’ Con called back, ‘How’s tricks?’ Con spoke with a strong Greek accent but was desperate to sound like an Australian. He also added an unnecessary s to most of the slang he used, for example, ‘fair dinkum’ became ‘fair dinkums’. He now pointed to the styrofoam cup fitted with a plastic lid that sat at one end of the counter. ‘The coffee I got it ready already, myte. Perfect, best in the worlds.’ Billy saw that half a loaf of bread in a plastic bag rested to one side of the coffee container, and on the other side, on a paper napkin, Con had placed a finger bun with pink-iced topping. ‘Today, you eat something, hey, Billy. It’s no good not to eat for the stomach, myte.’

  ‘Did you send off those migrant papers to Canberra?’ Billy asked.

  ‘For sure, myte.’ Con grinned happily, ‘Soon I be having a new young wife, eh? Very sexy, young Greek girl. Very lovely, I think. Not like Arse-stri-lian lazy bitch.’

  Billy laughed, ‘Con, the photograph your cousin sent wasn’t all that clear, it was in black and white and looked as though it might have been taken a fair while back. You sure she’s only twenty-seven?’

  ‘No worries, myte. No colour photograph on that island. She’s a name Sophia, beautiful, I’m tellin’ you. That’s for sure, fair dinkums, cross me heart, myte, spit on the devil.’

  Billy grinned, ‘I hope you’re right.’ The slightly outof-focus photo of the young woman, Sophia, looked as if it had been taken on a box-brownie camera and the dress she was wearing appeared very much like one his first date had worn back in the early sixties. Still, Con’s people were peasants. He supposed things didn’t change all that much on an outlying Greek island.

  Billy couldn’t help wondering to himself why, with his five women, all of them working in the cafe, Con could possibly want another woman around to look after him. Con was of an age where paying a visit to a lady happy to accommodate him for a small return would have been more sensible than sharing his cot with a randy peasant girl who might prove much too much for him. But Billy kept this opinion to himself. Greeks, on the whole, seemed to enjoy being married. A client once explained to him that marriage allowed them to misbehave in safety as Greek couples almost never divorced. The client, a Greek himself, went on to say that a Greek male was far more likely to make an accommodation with a lady once he was married than he ev
er would while single.

  Con couldn’t write in English so Billy had helped him complete the forms to sponsor a migrant girl as well as acted as his referee, signing himself ‘W. D’Arcy O’Shannessy, LLB, QC’.

  Did the street boy even have a female in his life who cared about him? Probably not. If he was a street kid, he’d have left home because of domestic violence from both parents. Where there was a mother present who wasn’t an addict, the kids usually stayed on. It was different with a father, where drunkenness often led to violence and sexual abuse.

  Billy had barely completed the thought when he felt a sharp, agonising pain behind his eyes, so much so that he visibly winced and was forced to his knees, his eyes tightly closed. The last time he’d had a boy to worry about he’d . . .

  The pain in his head increased in intensity until it blocked his thought. Holding his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, Billy squeezed hard until the pain in his head started to go.

  ‘You orright, myte? Maybe to eat somethings, eh?’ Con asked, peering over the edge of the counter, looking concerned.

  ‘Yeah, fine, right as rain,’ Billy replied, taking a deep breath while slowly straightening up, ‘Touch of the collywobbles.’

  ‘I make you sanwitch, eggs, bacons, lettuce, beetroots, pineapples, what-a-ever-you-wants, my fren.’

  ‘No thanks, Con, this bun’ll do me nicely.’ Billy took the pink bun, placed it in the plastic bag with the yesterday-bread and then into his briefcase. Taking up his coffee, he turned to Con. ‘Thanks, mate, as always I’m truly grateful.’

  Con smiled, his head to one side, ‘It’s a my pleasures, myte.’

  Billy smiled back and added as an afterthought, ‘For the bun as well.’

  Con nodded. ‘Hey, Billy, what’s a mean this words collywobbles?’

  ‘It means you’re a bit dizzy, a bit crook, but then you quickly come good again.’

  ‘Right as rains?’

  ‘Yeah, right as rains.’ Billy turned away from his friend and walked along the Quay to his usual spot in the sun. It was the first time since he’d wakened to the sound of Arthur and Martha quarrelling that he’d been able to pursue his normal routine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Billy made himself comfortable on a bench alongside the Quay and prepared himself for the day to come. He sipped slowly on the container of coffee, still hot and strong, and immediately felt a little better. Coffee was the civilised side of his addictive personality, one of the things that kept him anchored. Well, if not anchored, it allowed him not to drift too far from his mooring. He had discovered that with a caffeine fix laced with six sachets of sugar, he could stave off the need to be waiting for the doors to open at the early-opening pub in Woolloomooloo.

  The story of Trim had succeeded in driving the boy from his head. He absent-mindedly peeled the bright-pink icing off the finger bun, set the bun aside for ammunition, and ate the sticky mess, further satisfying his sugar craving.

  Gulls gathered expectantly at his feet, their beady eyes fixed on the bread. Billy removed several slices from the plastic wrapper and set them beside the bun. He placed his coffee down and waited a few moments until a dozen more gulls had landed before he rose from the bench. The birds scattered anxiously on either side of him as he stepped towards the water’s edge. Removing the remainder of the bread from the wrapper, he hurled it into the air. A frantic squawking was followed by an eruption of spray as birds and bread met the surface of the Harbour together. In less than a minute, not a morsel remained and the small polite waves had returned to slap against the granite wall of the Quay.

  Billy rather liked seagulls. They were the coastal garbage collectors, cleaning up the waterfront and the beaches. The silver gull was Australia’s most ubiquitous seabird and a natural part of the environment. He saw them in every way as true Australians, loud, aggressive, lacking in subtlety, highly competitive and devoted to cricket, even turning up at the SCG for Sheffield Shield games.

  However, Billy’s love of birds was by no means all-encompassing. There was one avian species he considered his mortal enemy. This was the presence, in ever-increasing numbers, of Indian mynah birds, Acridotheres tristis, which had replaced the sparrows, pigeons and gulls as the city’s most potent pavement polluters.

  He regarded the mynah bird as a foreign invader which had infiltrated the country and multiplied while nobody was looking. The black and tan, beady-eyed, sharp-pointed, yellow-beaked birds strutted about on spindly curry-coloured legs wherever there was a chance of a free feed, and drove him to distraction. They would gather, in what he preferred to think of as street gangs, on the steps of the State Library where lunchtime workers sitting in the sun would throw them crusts from their sandwiches. Billy’s pleas to all and sundry not to feed ‘the bloody pestilence’ went unheeded.

  Most of Sydney’s urban population could scarcely tell a kookaburra from a sparrow. These airborne shit factories were simply more of the same to them.

  While Billy was aware that the European sparrows were also interlopers, they’d come out with the First Fleet and had earned their migrant status. Pigeons, as an early source of food to both convict and free settler, had also earned their tenure. Not so the mynahs. They were, pound for pound, the greatest defecators on the planet, producing more shit than a gannet four times their size. The grey-tinged-withwhite splat they left everywhere clung like superglue to the caps of the Corinthian and Doric columns of several notable buildings. It could be seen on the moulded ledges and decorative stonework of the State Library, the Art Gallery, the Queen Victoria Building, the old Commonwealth Bank building and the GPO in Martin Place, to name but a few.

  Moreover, unlike the sparrows and the pigeons, the Indian mynahs had systematically eliminated all of the smaller species of native bird life which were attracted to the grevillea nectar and the wildflower seeds found in the Botanic Gardens. As an amateur naturalist, this was of major concern to Billy. The smaller birds, the Bluetit, Rose Robin, Red-capped Robin, White-winged Triller, Rufous Whistler and Willie Wagtail, as well as several other smaller species common to the Gardens, had disappeared, the mynah birds having destroyed their eggs or taken their fledglings while still in the nest.

  To Billy this was an act of war, a foreign invader systematically murdering the indigenous population as the first white settlers had done. This time somebody had to fight back. He accepted single-handedly the task of exterminating the tyranny from the steps and pavement outside the State Library, the part of the city he cherished the most.

  When Billy had finished his coffee, he rinsed out the container and set to work. He removed the packet of rat poison and a pair of transparent latex gloves from the cardboard dispenser and carefully pulled them on. Then he commenced to mould a single poison pellet into a tiny ball of well-kneaded dough and dropped it into the container. He continued until he had fifty or so tiny rounded morsels, the required number for the day’s Operation Mynah Bird. He replaced the plastic top of the coffee container and put it in his briefcase along with the rat poison, peeled off the gloves and deposited them in a nearby rubbish bin. It was time for a pleasant morning stroll through the Botanic Gardens he so dearly loved and then on to his assignation with the Flag Hotel inWoolloomooloo.

  The Flag was already busy by the time he arrived around nine-thirty. The patrons at this time of the day were mostly shift workers from the Garden Island dry dock, retired waterside workers who lived in housing-commission homes in the immediate neighbourhood, or the homeless drunks who lived in the Domain, the open parkland surrounding the Botanic Gardens.

  The proprietor of the Flag Hotel was a large, beefy man in his early fifties named Samuel Snatchall who, before he retired prematurely and bought the pub, had been a notorious standover man for the Painters & Dockers Union. Known by one and all as Sam Snatch, his union career had involved several well-publicised court appearances, all of them involving the charge
of causing grievous bodily harm. Sam’s greatest claim to fame was that he had never been convicted, which was in itself, a great many people felt, a serious indictment of the legal system of New South Wales.

  Sam Snatch didn’t much care for his description as a one-time standover man, but he happily described his previous occupation as ‘an attitude adjuster in the union cause’. It was his way of reminding his customers that he wouldn’t stand for any nonsense.

  The Flag had always been a hotel for dock workers and, prior to being owned by Sam Snatch, its proprietor for a short period had been George Smiggins, the undefeated welterweight champion of the world. Smiggins soon grew weary of the drunks who wanted to brag to their mates on the docks that they’d taken a poke at the ex-world champion and he retaliated by banning dock workers from the pub. This proved to be a fatal mistake as they constituted the major part of his clientele. Sam Snatch came along and made Smiggins an offer, an amount just about sufficient to cover George’s outstanding debts to the brewery. Even so, the price of the pub would have been well outside the range of a minor union official like Sam Snatch.

  Claiming he’d won $250,000 in the NSW State Lottery, Snatch came up with the scratch. With this, taken together with his superannuation payout and, he claimed, a second mortgage on his home, Snatch raised the money to buy the pub. Nobody believed him, nor could anyone recall any such windfall in the Snatch family, unless he had found a way of borrowing money on government-owned property. Until fairly recently, he’d lived in a three-bedroom housing-commission flat in South Sydney with a rent of sixty dollars a week. All of this was said well out of earshot, even at fifty metres, since Sam wasn’t the sort of bloke you questioned too closely if you wished to remain with the sum of your working parts intact.