Bill Bailey’s Emporium

22 July 2020

Marvellous Pets

 I blame myself, really. When we were kids I used scare my younger brother when we were lying in our bunk beds after the lights were out with tales of animals I'd make up, usually just out of mixes of things I'd seen that day. Spider cats, Hot rod dogs, lone whale sharks, each one moor ludicrous than the last. Mother would come in when his shrieks got so loud they disturbed whatever social event she was hosting, and would berate me for my cruelty.  "Nimuë, I don't know where you get it from. Please can you just not". "What knot" I'd retort, swinging my braids.. Mother would sigh, tuck  us in, and go back downstairs to rejoin and rekindle whatever magic should bought to her gathering, possibly even literally.

I suppose that I should not have been surprised when Dylan followed his idol, David Attenborough, into the study of ecologies. He was always fascinated by the most intricate details of how creatures fitted into their niche, however bizarre. He hunted the depths of the seas and the highest of the high plains, instead of drifting like myself in a somewhat aimless set of failed careers, magician's assistant, royal diarist, even arms dealer for a while, he stayed true to his path.

Many years later, when he had too retire, he moved back to Somerset and a big rambling old farmhouse with stables and run down tennis courts and converted the place to house his menagerie of curious and  the downright weird.

His marvellous pets, he called em.

There were the tuktuk. No, not the three wheel scary taxis so common in India. Named after them. They were the only known three legged animal in the kingdom.

And then there were the monkey spiders. Unlike spider monkeys, which are just very small leggy simians, these were very big, agile, smart, tree-loving arachnids. They were clever and would make snares with their webbing and catch fish, or haul nets full of bananas to places where they could trap other animals, including spider monkeys, for their dinner.

But his favourites were the what he called his death cats

Whenever the death cats were herding. Dylan loved too watch them round up the mice from the old barn loading bay,

Sometimes, one of the cats would make a great arc around the back, much as their larger cousins do. Dylan had discovered these creatures in the deserted towns around  Okuma. He was never sure if they were a natural result of evolution or some strange sport, in part caused by residual radiation from the old disaster. The locals, those he could find, as most people had moved as far away as they could get, certainly told him strange stories. It was said, Dylan would tell me after a few welsh whiskies, that if you ever heard one of the death cats sing, that would be the last thing you would hear before you died.

At the inquest, the driver explained to the coroner how Dylan had walked out into the  road, and clearly not heard the horn at all, and that trying to avoid him, he was blinded by by the headlight reflecting from some wild creatures eyes. Accidental death, was the ruling.

At the wake, I was talking to mother and uncle arthur about how Dylan had never really been the success he should have been. He'd never done that well at college and landing the TV series was largely because of his eccentric old-school manner and plummy voice.  "And after all that time", I sighed "he still believed they were cats, when really they were banshees. He really should have known better".