Snooker the cat gave us a scare on Saturday morning. I was lying, deep in the dreamless, when my beloved husband appeared by the bed, not with the Saturday morning tea and toast (Marmite and marmalade – noooo, not all mixed up, separately of course!) but with the injunction to Get Up! The Cat’s Acting Strangely.
Poor old Snooker was indeed acting strangely. She was walking round in a circle, for all the world as if someone had nailed her right-hand paw to the floor, with her neck all twisted. Hum. So it was off to the vets and an anxious wait. Now partly the anxiety was caused by the idea of old fur-face having injured herself and – I must admit – partly from the idea of the Vet’s bill. These animals can’t half cost, you know, and Snooker, who turned up as a stray, cost a few hundred quid in the first month or so. Gulp. So it was with some relief when the vet said there was nothing to worry about. Really? I asked, looking at our circular cat. Yep, nothing much. It’s a balance problem. It happens in older animals. Like a stroke? Nothing so dramatic. It’s a Latin name known to vets which means your cat’s gone wobbly and is going round in circles. Gosh. I’ll just give her this anti-inflammatory injection and you should see an improvement. And he did (brave man) and it worked. A day’s dozing, followed by being tempted to eat (tuna and chicken) and one cat, right as rain, able to walk in a straight line, emerged once more.
Now, apart from the brief moment of grief at the sight of the Gordon-Smith finances being dipped into by yet another ruddy animal, what’s the point of the story? Nothing much, unless your cat gets a fit of the circles, you might find it reassuring. It just happened, that’s all. And that’s the difference between fiction and real life.
In real life, stuff comes along, starts, muddles, finishes and doesn’t really amount to much. A story, although it can seem like real life, isn’t like this. If a Poor Old Woman in the middle of the woods scams lunch off the Seventh Son, it’s not because she’s hungry and there’s not a MacDonalds for miles, it’s because she’s testing his fitness to rescue a Princess or recover a Great Jewel or a Magic Lamp or what-have-you. If Hercule Poirot announces a case is the most baffling of his career, we know it’s a wind-up. Hastings might not get it but Hercule will. If Frodo’s asked to drop a magic ring into Mount Doom, somehow or other Frodo will do it.
The stuff on the way’s important too. In A Fete Worse Than Death Jack comes across an old friend, Bingo Romer-Stuart. I needed a way for Jack to get hold of records at the War Office and so I dreamed up Bingo, a Brigadier, who works at the War Office, threw him enough back-story (about two lines, I think) to make him a credible old friend, and there we were. Bingo, in fact. I could have added a page or so about Bingo – he was quite clear in my mind – but the reader would have signed off out of sheer boredom long before I’d finished. Everything in the story has to add to the story.
Oh, and the cat’s fine too.
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