How I found perfect happiness

The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I spent six days here. Every day the owner would go to London leaving me alone with two rare and valuable prick-eared, six-toed house cats called Tio and Luna.

The only instructions I was under concerned these low-slung, vividly marked cats. Under no circumstances were they allowed outside except on a lead. I was to be especially careful not to let them slip out between my feet when I opened the front door. A well-rehearsed system of ‘air lock’ door opening and shutting, if punctiliously observed, rendered the possibility nigh on impossible. Every window must be kept shut, including upstairs windows, to prevent a break for freedom over the rooves and down one of the iron drainpipes.

The pair certainly looked athletically capable of such a feat, having Scottish wildcat and some sort of lynx near-ancestry and that extra climbing toe. However they appeared resigned to their palatial prison, even content. There was an electric water fountain in the kitchen, which their refined sensibility preferred to still water in a bowl. Scattered about the patterned wood-block floors were various toys, lures, puzzles and scratching posts to occupy their minds. Toys and puzzles could never replace murder and torture for a pastime, and these cats partially sated their bloodlust by indefatigably stalking, killing and eating any flying insect that was foolish enough to make its presence felt, no matter how small or inoffensive. A paltry kind of sport, one would think, for highly bred killing machines, and I for one would have liked to have seen with what lightning reflexes or sadistic aplomb they would have handled something more worth their while, such as a rash or insouciant mouse.