The Roof War

Before my boyfriend and I moved house, we lived in a flat above our landlady's bungalow.

We were living there when we first got Mouth and Tail, so it was the first home they ever knew. And as everyone knows, a cat's home is his castle.

Tail took her castle-guarding very seriously.

She would spend hours sitting at the window, surveying her domain.

Tail would fight tooth and claw to defend her territory against evil intruders like the postman, the electrician and that odd-smelling bearded chap who came to fix the boiler.

Now, something you need to know about our flat is that it was a loft conversion with dormer windows. The windows looked out onto a low, shallow-sloping roof.

We hadn't really thought about it, but the low roof was fairly easy to climb onto. Especially if you used the tree or the wall by the side of the house.

We remained in blissful ignorance of this fact until one fateful night, when we were woken up by a bloodcurdling yowl.

It was a truly terrifying noise.

I went into the living room fearing the worst. Judging by the sound effects, a full-blown massacre had been taking place around the dining table, and I would surely find bloody corpses strewn across my lovely new Ikea rug.

What I found, instead, was an extremely distressed Tail.

Thinking that somebody must at the very least have stolen her dinner and questioned her parentage, I cast a wary eye around the room for signs of forced entry. But there was nobody there.

Tail seemed to be harbouring particular disdain for the window, so I peered out into the night.

What peered back at me, improbably enough, was a brown tabby face.

For a moment I thought it was Mouth, but this tabby was all too evidently in full possession of his faculties. Looking more closely, he also had bigger black splodges and a general thuggish air about him.

He was the quintessential bully of the feline world. A trespasser, voyeur and marauder of the worst sort.

Before I could counsel him on the errors of his ways, the Striped Bandit had disappeared into the night.

He'd be back, though. They always come back.

And over the weeks that followed, come back he did.

I could tell when Tail had glimpsed him because she had a slightly shell-shocked look. Her fur would be spiky and dishevelled and her whiskers just a teeny bit frazzled.

But the Bandit was sneaky. He waited until we'd gone to work before attacking. We would have to trick him.

The first way we tried to trick him was by sprinkling the contents of Mouth and Tail's litter tray around the windows.

At the time, of course, this seemed perfectly logical and appropriate behaviour. Besides, our tenancy agreement said nothing about the acceptability (or otherwise) of adorning the guttering with faecal matter.

But the Striped Bandit was unfazed by Mouth and Tail's poo. Quite the reverse: he seemed to relish its presence. He made his own generous contributions to the pile, thereby fashioning something of a bizarre shrine to feline excretia.

The next thing we did was try to catch him off guard. We crept home from work early on a Thursday. (On a THURSDAY! we thought, chuckling to ourselves. That'll get the scallywag. He knows we're late home on Thursdays.)

Lo and behold, as we crawled through the undergrowth disguised as shrubs, he was there - sat bold as brass on the roof.

We had sighted our nemesis, and by golly, we were going to vanquish him.

We jumped out and shouted loudly to catch him unawares, but he didn't bat an eyelid. (The neighbours did, though. I think they were a little alarmed by the sight of us dressed as trees and shouting raucously, but it may have been because it was a Thursday.)

"Wait here," my boyfriend said, "I know what to do."

He came back seconds later with a bucket.

"A bucket?" I said.
"A bucket full of water," he winked.
"Oooh," I said.

It was a bit mean, yes. But this cat had no morals. He had terrorised poor Tail for weeks on end, and now he must pay.

My boyfriend raised the bucket and swung it in the Bandit's direction. A great torrent of water shot into the air.

There was no going back now.

I stood there, frozen to the spot. I could see what was about to happen but I was powerless to stop it.

The water did not land on the Striped Bandit.

It did not land on the floor.

My boyfriend had thrown it straight up into the air, and what goes up must come down.

Yes. It landed on us.

There are times in life where you evaluate your actions. You stop and take stock; you learn from your mistakes and you emerge from the experience a wiser person.

This was not one of those times.

My boyfriend and I were standing in our landlady's driveway, utterly drenched, while a gatecrashing tabby sniggered at us from the roof. He knew what he had done. Oh, he knew.

When he had watched us suffer for a while, he turned and walked lazily down the other side of the roof. Taking his time, you understand.

For him, it was a sublime victory.

Oddly enough, we never saw him again. Maybe he had decided we weren't enough of a challenge. Maybe he had found a new family to harass.

Whatever the reason, Tail is a much calmer animal these days. She still gazes out the window, but she's a lot more casual about it. And if we catch her looking too serious, she'll pretend she has some urgent paw-cleaning to attend to.

Paw-cleaning is a serious business.