Oh, I certainly spread that ‘Portrait of Tuffy’ about. If anyone was ever going to hang what was left of it on the wall again, they’d have to give it a new name.
They’d have to call it ‘Battle’s End’. And guess who won?
Ellie picked up the frame with all the stringy bits hanging down. ‘Tuffy!’ she scolded as sternly as she could. ‘Look what you’ve done to Mummy’s very first painting! You’ve destroyed it.’
What a tragedy – I don’t think. And if you want my opinion, they won’t be howling with grief down at the Art Gallery, either, when they hear the news. Ellie’s mother might be clever enough to bring a dead car back to life for long enough to drive to her art class and back, but she can’t paint for toffee.
I can paint better than she can with my paws. And next time she leaves one of her nice new expensive blank white canvases about, I might just prove it to her.
Oh, yes. Indeed I might.
4: ‘A riot of beauty’
SO WHITEWASH MY whiskers! I took a short cut over her precious new canvas. I was in a hurry. How was I to know she’d left it for only a minute while she went back in the house to look for her paintbrush?
There it was, lying on the patio, all nice and flat and neat and white and clean and – well, yes – blank.
Ready to go, you could say.
I expect I just wasn’t thinking when I stepped in the tub of blue paint – by mistake – before running over the canvas to the gate.
And anyone could have been clumsy enough to knock over that tub of red paint when they ran back to check out that smell of fish round the dustbins.
How could it be my fault that one of my paws slid in the tub of yellow before I took a swipe at that butterfly? How was I to know I was going to get paint droplets all over?
And you certainly can’t blame me because my tail just happened to flick in the tub of green before I prowled round the ruined canvas a few times, dragging my tail behind me as I worried about the splatters.
Colourful, though. Cheerful. Rather fresh and ‘modern’.
Mrs Famous-Artist-To-Be wasn’t at all pleased. A brand-new canvas! Totally spoiled! Look at this mess! And I was planning to paint a lovely sunset on a lake under a hill of buttercups!’
Ellie stuck up for me. ‘Tuffy wasn’t being bad. He just got to the canvas first.’
I took a look at my handiwork. Ellie was right. Fancy a sunset? I had that giant streak of red. You want a lake? I had a splodge of blue. Buttercups? Plenty of droplets of yellow in that painting. On a hill? No worries. Tons of green.
I gave Our Lady of the Paintbrush a lofty stare. ‘That’s not a mess,’ the look said. ‘That is proper art.’
And Ellie clearly thought so too. She didn’t dare say a word until Mrs Picasso had driven off to her class. (Bang! Rattle! X@%?%$! Phut! Cough!) But then Ellie said to her father, ‘I really like it. Can we hang it on the wall?’
Usually, he’d have more tact. But he’s still mad at her ladyship for not taking useful ‘Fix Your Rubbish Heap Car’ lessons instead of art. And he hates wasting anything, even a hook in a wall. So he picked up the painting and hung it up over the sofa.
Ellie stared at it with her hands clasped in wonder. (You have to hand it to that girl, she may be wet, wet, wet – but she is loyal.)
‘I’m going to call it “A Riot of Beauty”,’ she said.
I turned a critical eye on my first-ever work of art.
Not sure about the ‘Beauty’ bit. But liked the ‘Riot’.
Yes. Liked the ‘Riot’.
5: A droplet of advice
SO MRS Watch-My-Fingers-Weave-Enchantment comes home that afternoon with three manky lumps of dried mud.
(I kid you not. Dried lumps of mud. If they’d been green, you would have thought of them as giant bogeys.)
‘I didn’t have a canvas,’ she explained. (Frosty look at me – I just ignored it.) ‘So I moved on to pottery.’
Pottery?
Potty, more like, if you want the opinion of that talented pussycat who painted ‘A Riot of Beauty’.
I put my paw out to stroke one of the lumps.
Accident! It fell to pieces before it even hit the ground.
‘Tuffy!’ she said. ‘How could you! First you tread paint all over my lovely clean canvas, and now you’ve broken one of my pretty new pots.’
Pretty new pots? Puh-lease. They are not pretty. The mud comes from a primeval swamp. And if you dropped so much as a pin into something that lumpy, you’d never find it again.
She put the other two pots safely up on the shelf. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Not even Tuffy can get up here and knock them off.’
A tiny droplet of advice: don’t ever challenge a cat. It may have been a bit of an effort. (I don’t keep as trim as I should.) But finally – finally – I managed to rise to the occasion and get up on that shelf.
Those pots up there were even worse than the one I’d knocked on to the floor. (By accident.) Talk about ugly! They had lumps hanging off here, and extra lumps sagging off there. One of them even had a kind of wart on its bottom, so every time I gave it a tiny little push, it wobbled horribly.
Uh-oh!
I’d like to tell you that it shattered into a thousand pieces. (That would sound good.) But it was such a lump of old rubbish it only fell into two halves.
Never mind. Be fair to me. At least the thing was gone.
Two down.
And one to go.
6: Little Miss Last Ugly Pot
I WASN’T THE only one in the house to hate those ugly pots enough to want to be rid of all of them. Next morning I strolled into the living room at my usual time to find Ellie’s father sitting on the sofa, right next to my sunny spot.
There was a look in his eye I’d never seen before. For a moment I couldn’t work out what it was, and then I realized he was pleased to see me.
Weird, or what?
He put out a welcoming hand. ‘Come on, pussy. Here, pussy.’
Well, stretch my stripes! ‘Come on, pussy’? The man’s never pined for my company before. Do I recall many a happy hour spent on his lap being gently stroked and petted?
No, I do not.
Clearly he wanted something. I took a quick look round the room and –
Voila! He’d moved Little Miss Last Ugly Pot down to the coffee table. Aha! So that’s what he was hoping for! An action replay of yesterday’s excellent result: one little soft paw out prodding, one quick cry of ‘Whoops!’, and a freshly smashed pot in the rubbish bin.
I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. That was one nasty pot. The world would be a prettier place for being rid of it. If I am scrupulously honest, I think that pot would have looked nicer in bits on the floor than it did as one lump on the table.
And I’m an obliging family pet, always keen to help out when I can.
I stuck my paw out, ready.
Then he made his big mistake.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Good boy!’
Good boy? What does he think I am? A stupid dog?
I gave him the cool slow blink. If he’d had anything but cloth for brains, he would have known what it meant. That blink meant: Excuse me. Which of us is the one who’s trained like a dog? Do I do what you want? No, I do not. Do I come when you call? No. I go my own sweet way. I am a cat.
You, on the other hand, are perfectly well trained. If I am hungry, all I have to do is walk round your legs a few times, half-tripping you, and you open a tin. If I want to go out, I stand by the door and yowl as if I’m about to throw up, and you’re over in a flash to open it.
Who is the one who should be saying, ‘Good boy!’ round here, Buster?
Yes. Not you. Me.
More than one way to make a point, of course. I chose to do it by giving him the runaround. I kept him on tenterhooks, padding up and down the coffee table. (He is such a hypocrite. Usually he’d push me off.) I let my fur graze the pot more closely every time I passed, and every now and again I even stretched out a paw as if to stroke that nasty pottery lump he was so hoping I would break.
I even gave it a little push so it toppled a little.
Almost fell off the side.