The Day I was Savaged

When my boyfriend and I moved house last year, we took the opportunity to buy lots of new matching furniture.

It was awesome. We bought tables and chairs and drawers and a new bed and loads of shelves, all in the same colour. We were in New Furniture Heaven.

One of the things we bought was a big 4x4 set of box shelves.

We put them next to the bed, so I could use them to store my clothes.

I had great plans. I could organise my clothes by colour, style, label, fabric, sleeve length... The possibilities were endless.

However, until I could find time to unpack my clothes and sort them into categories, the shelves stood empty beside the bed.

Naturally, the cats assumed we had bought them an elaborate new fortress, and made it their business to sit gloatingly in the lower rows of boxes. Tail, who is a master of jumping and has a sense of balance to rival a trapeze artist, even managed to conquer the third row of boxes.

Now, something you need to know about Mouth is that he has no concept of 'up'.

Once an object has vanished from his line of sight, it is gone for good and will never be seen again.

This works well for Tail, because if she ever wants a bit of time to herself, she need only climb onto the table.

Tail is very good at getting down from high places, so we don't worry about her.

It never occurred to us that Mouth might accidentally stumble upon a high place.

One night while we were asleep, he must have somehow found his way into a fourth-row box. I have no idea how he did it, but I think Tail may have had something to do with it. She had a guilty smirk on her face all day.

At first, Mouth was excited about being in the top row of the box shelves. He doesn't understand how height works so he thought he was enormous.

However, we weren't awake to see him, and the novelty soon began to wear off.

After a while, terror set in.

Unfortunately, my boyfriend and I are heavy sleepers. We're also used to the random miaows and howls that the moggies make at night, so we remained oblivious to Mouth's peril.

Mouth's panic grew. He was scared of getting down, but he was scared of the up more.

There was only one thing for it.

I was lying in bed about five feet below him when it happened. I was fast asleep, but if I had chanced to open an eye at that point, this is what I would have seen.

For a cat who seldom leaves the ground, Mouth had judged his leap well. He landed safely on the bouncy softness of the bed.

He also landed on the bouncy softness of my face.

I was in the middle of a dream at the time. I can't remember what I was dreaming about, but suddenly the dream took a violent turn and my fellow dream-people started attacking my chin.

It was most disconcerting.

After a moment or two, I realised that the attack was not dream-based and that I had, in fact, been air-bombed by a vertically challenged tabby.

Having lived with Mouth for a few years, I wasn't as shocked by this as you might think, so despite the wetness I could feel on my chin (drool or nose juice, I thought sagely), I went back to sleep.

I was woken in the morning by my boyfriend's screams.

"WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE?" he yelled, rather unflatteringly in my opinion.

I tried to remember.

"Oh, Mouth fell off the shelves in the night," I said dismissively.

"DO YOU NEED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL?" my boyfriend squawked.

"Er, no?" I said. But I decided I'd better have a peek in the mirror.

OK, there was a fair amount of blood.

Hardly life-threatening, I told myself. All part and parcel of the rewarding Mouth-owning experience.

I went into the bathroom to wash the blood off.

Once my boyfriend had stopped hyperventilating and I'd cleaned my face, it wasn't nearly so bad.

There was a definite scratch, though, which took a lot of explaining to people at work.

"Why do you love cats so much when they savage you?" they said.

They didn't seem to appreciate that my injury was due to Mouth's incompetence at life, rather than any malicious feline intent.

The only really annoying thing was that our office ID photos were taken that week, so I look like a serial killer in my picture.

Thankfully, the resolution isn't great, so you can only tell if you look really hard.

I filled the box shelves with clothes sharpish, though. Mouth is a hazard to himself.