Free The Burying Beetle by Ann Kelley Page B

something disgusting on my shoe. Cats open their mouths as if to say Ugh when they smell something they don’t like – I read that and then I noticed it’s absolutely true. He’s so funny – he started sneezing violently.
    I can’t see or smell anything on the shoe.
    Rambo has eyes like gold marbles – you can see the round ball-ness of them, the pupils thin vertical pillars of unfathomable black. His eyes remind me of lava lamps. He’s a very beautiful short-haired tabby with longer fur in his ears and long spurs on his front paws and he stretches out like a lion. He has black paw-pads unlike the other two cats, who’re black and white and who have pink paw-pads, except they’re rather soiled and grubby. I remember Charlie’s kitten paw-pads before she ever went outside and dirtied them – like unripe raspberries.
    I do love cats. I’m so glad we have sullen, stealthy, silent, elegant pussy-cats whose only sound is a deep purring, and not stupid dogs who want adoration all the time and go love me, love me, love me, yap yap woof with their eyes and tongues, and fall over themselves, and thump their tails on the furniture, and you have to clean up after them when they poo. Cats bury their shit.
    Mum always says lavatory, not toilet. But once when we were in Spain with friends of theirs they had a discussion about the word for going to the loo, and she insisted she only used the word lavatory, and then Daddy called out to her later and she shouted back, ‘I’m on the bog!’ We all fell about laughing. She was furious.
    There’s a big book here called Roget’s Thesaurus . I thought it might be about prehistoric animals. But it’s better than that. All about words. Cool.
    I hear a new bird song – not a song, an anxious shout – dit dit, da da, dit dit dit – like an urgent Morse Code message. SOS. Find bins, take off glasses, look in direction of sound of bird. Poodlebums and buggering Nora – can’t see a thing. It’s more difficult than it looks, this bird-watching, bird-identification lark (not a deliberate pun). Grandpop used to make the most awful puns. He thought he was being very amusing and we had to laugh each time he did it. Grandma said we shouldn’t encourage him. She never did.
    I have written a poem about Charlie, called ‘A Cat is a Poem’.
    A Cat is a Poem
    My black and white cat is a poem
    Purring, leaning to my arm,
    Butting her head on mine,
    Her arsehole a pursed mouth,
    Her antennae in touch with my head,
    Her pink toes stretch in ecstasy,
    Her fur smells of leaf mould, bonfires,
    Damp sphagnum moss, and green tea.
    I don’t actually know what green tea smells like but I needed a word to rhyme with leaf and ecstasy. It can’t be very good because it was too easy. Mind you, I did have to use the dictionary a lot for the difficult words, like sphagnum and ecstasy and antennae.
    I have the feeling that even simple poems are difficult to get right. And am I allowed to use arsehole in a poem? There’s a book here by a poet who uses fuck in a poem, so it must be OK. They fuck you up, your mum and dad . His words, not mine.
    The more I read, the more I realise how little I know, and the more I want to learn it all, or as much as I have time for. It’s quite exciting, really, knowing you are probably going to die before you grow old. It means there is no time to waste.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    THE BLUE HANG - GLIDER is back, and it’s hanging right over the spot where the peregrine falcons have their nest. I’ve looked through the binoculars but I can see no sign of the birds at the nest, or in the sky. I can’t see the nest from here anyway. I have to go onto the coast path to see it. The man is wearing goggles and a black and orange wetsuit sort of thing. He’s looking down. He’s trying to hover like a kestrel. These binoculars are brilliant. They make me feel as if I am there with him, hanging over the edge of the cliff. But he’s much too close to the peregrine nest. They must be