A Day in the Life of Murmie McMeouch AKA Prison Break

For those that don’t know or have never met her, here’s a quick prologue.

Murmie McMeouch came into our lives in May 2010.  One dark night after work, Briar, Neil and I drove to the house of a Vet Nurse who rescues and rehabilitates mistreated cats and kittens.  After gaining her approval to become the loving owners of her babies, we were led into the room where they were housed.  There, in the corner of one of the cages, was a tiny wee tabby kitten.  Minding her own business, trying to blend into the background, but still being assaulted and covered in kitty litter by who was to soon become our Little Man.

After Neil stopped hogging her I picked her up, placed her in the palm of my hand and she immediately fell asleep against my chest.   Not a peep out of her.  That sealed her fate and she has been part of our family ever since. 

Picking her name was not as easy as picking her.  We had it narrowed down to about 20 names between the five of us, right up until her first visit to the vet when we were told she had a heart murmur… 

Her surname was far more complicated.  Thinking it would be mean to call her Murmie Messer-McCarthy-Couch we had to compromise on a couple of letters from each family member.  And so Murmie McMeouch was created.

 

The only downside to Murmie seems to be her propensity to all things poo.  Even though toilet trained, the first few days we had her, she pooed in nearly every single corner of our married quarter.  Turns out she was still sick, and thankfully a course of antibiotics soon fixed it.  But not before she pooed on a jig saw puzzle that I was halfway through doing.  And as I drove her back to the Nurse’s house to get her fixed, she pooed all through her carry box.

Having said that, when we decided to move to Australia, there was no question that the cats would be coming with us.  Perhaps Little Man was worried about our finances and that’s why he decided to run away two months before we moved. 

He needn’t have worried – it only cost us $100 less to export Murmie than what it would have to have flown both of them over.  I’m not quite sure how the Pet Exporters worked that one out to be honest;   they’re clearly not as good at maths as I am.

Another thing worth mentioning about Murms is we didn’t hear her meow for the first year.  We believe it was only because of Little Man being so vocal that she decided to give it a go.  Unfortunately, it was a pathetic effort which culminated in us rolling around on the floor laughing at her.  She opened her mouth and made lots of movements, but no noise came out.  It was like watching a really bad Milli Vanilli video.

Murmie was dropped off to the pet exporter a couple of days before we left, and we didn’t see her again until we landed in Australia.  Well, not WHEN we landed in Australia.  She didn’t explode out the side of the cargo hold as we touched down, thank goodness.  But after spending two hours trying to find out where she was, we finally got to pick her up from the Cargo Depot.  We heard her meowing before she even came around the corner, and she made it quite clear from the filthy glares cast our way that she wasn’t at all impressed with the horrid way in which we’d let her be violated.  And yet surprisingly, not one poo in sight.

Throwing guilty glances at each other, Neil and I tried to pretend we were off to a nice farm… 

The rest of the trip and our subsequent betrayal by throwing her in a steel cell is another story.  Today, we’re going to explore her weekends off.

Every weekend that we’re not going away anywhere, we try and break Murms out of prison.  We didn’t set out to be such rule-breakers, it was planted in our mind by the naughty cleaning ladies.  When moaning one day about how much I missed her, one of them asked me “why isn’t she here??”

“Um.. well we asked, but the owner said no”.

“So?”

“Um.. well… I guess I hadn’t really thought I’d get away with it…?”  My voices rises in pitch so I’ve gone from making a statement to asking a question.

“Well we’re not going to tell.  Are you?”

I shake my head like a mute.

“Get her in here.  Bring her home on the weekend, spend some time with her.  Poor thing.  She probably misses you heaps.  Fancy being locked in there all that time”.

I nod my head like a mute.

“We won’t tell.  We love animals; your secret will be safe with us.  But if the owners finds out we didn’t know”.

I stand there like a mute.

“Just let me know when you’ve got her, put your ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door, and I’ll leave all your stuff outside for you”.

And that was that.  So it was decided that Murms was going be broken out of one jail, and become a fugitive in another.  For one who is normally so rigid with rules, Neil was surprisingly open to the idea.  In fact I thought I was going to have to bribe, whinge and moan for days, but as soon as I mentioned it, it was on like Donkey Kong.

All our prisoner transportation trips have been slightly different but this an amalgamated version of the main parts, and they generally go something like this:

·      We arrive at the cattery, and hop out of the car to wait for the owner to let us into the enclosure.  Murms sees us as soon as we step out of the car and starts meowing like she hasn’t been fed for four weeks. 

This weekend, I stayed inside the car to wait for the owner to come out so as to not tease Murms… until the owner’s mother came outside to see what I was up to.

“Are you OK?”

I ignore her, hoping she’ll go away.

“Excuse me, are you OK?  Can I help you?”

I smile and wave at her, hoping to deter her.  And send her packing.

“Are you here to pick up a cat?”

Realising I can’t get rid of this old biddy, I open the car door, hop out, and whisper over the roof “It’s OK, I’m just waiting for Gina”

“What love?  Sorry, I can’t hear you”

Whispering louder while giving her the thumbs up and a smile so huge my cheeks hurt, I say “it’s OK don’t worry!”

“I still can’t hear you!  I’m very sorry dear but I’m hard of hearing!”

Rolling my eyes so hard they nearly spotted my spinal cord, I got out of the car.

“IT’S OK THANKS, I’M WAITING FOR GINA.  I’VE COME TO PICK UP MY CAT BUT I DIDN’T WANT HER TO HEAR ME UNTIL I WAS ABLE TO GET HER OUT OF HER CAGE”

“Meeeeooooooooooooooow…..”

·     After entering the enclosure, we get her cage down from the top of her cell, and open her wee door with the intention of giving her lots of cuddles before violating her even further by shoving her in a smaller cage.  I thought cats were meant to be clever, but she still doesn’t seem to have made the connection, or mapped her neural pathways like this:

Bored => Bored => Boring => Car => Mum’s voice => Mum’s face => Cage => Car Ride => Endless love and hugs and laptops to sit on for ages

Most of the time, however, Gina beats us into her cell and unceremoniously grabs her and gets her into her cage before we’ve even seen where she is.  We put her in the car, warn her that she has five minutes to get all her meowing out of the way, and head back to the motel.  She usually meows all the way back and ignores Neil’s peace-offering finger poked thru the bars, but last weekend when I got her on my own she spent the entire trip with her face mashed against my finger against the side of the cage.

·    When we are just around the corner from the motel, we have a carrier-change.  Similar to a carriage-change on a train but with a little less pollution. 

We carried her into the motel once in her cat carrier – which has holes all over it and a transparent front.  This is not ideal when you’re trying to be all illicit and secret-like.  Even less so when the culprit inside is meowing her ass off.  So we decided from the second trip that we’d put her in a suitcase.

Now before all you animal lovers go calling the SPCA and start throwing rotten fruit at us, it’s not THAT bad.  It’s a wide but small carry-on suitcase that we carry on its side so it’s perfectly big enough for her.  And possibly because it’s dark, she stays completely quiet.

OK, seeing this in print makes it sound far worse than it actually is.

When we get her into our room and unzip the side, she’s normally sitting there licking her paws quite happily.

Two weeks ago I was over in New Zealand for the weekend so Neil had to perpetrate the break-out on his own.  I had the carry-on with me so he had to come up with Plan B, and I think his many years in the Air Force have armed him with an adaptability found in only the best.  However, after several attempts at putting Murmie in his laptop bag even he had to admit defeat.  When he got to the part in the story about “I had her head and most of her legs in, but she just wasn’t having it, man it was hard…” I had a large sip of my wine and put the phone down.

This is the laptop bag.

·       Once inside, and I’m sure not because of the suitcase ordeal, she tends to go a little nuts for a bit.  By this, I mean lying on her side on the carpet and dragging herself across the floor with her claws, while simultaneously spinning herself around.  Her carpet trail looks a little like this:

After about ten minutes of this she’s ready for food.

·    She lives on dry food in the cattery, so when she comes to stay we spoil her with some Whiskas meat sachets.  Uncertainty at whether she’d like them quickly turned to alarm when I read the back of the pack and saw that most cats should have two a day on average.  She was on her 11^th sachet and it was only Sunday morning. We were no better than the Chawner Family.  I was feeding her my love.  “I’d better stop this” I thought as I opened the 12^th sachet for her.  “Next weekend.”

·      We’ve experimented with several types of litter trays, none quite so disastrously as the cardboard tray-clay litter combination.  Remembering that we live in a motel room, and that we can’t make it obvious we’re harbouring a fugitive, we decided against buying a plastic tray.  “We’ll use cardboard” we figure.  “It’ll be easier to clean up and we can just throw it away”.

The first weekend she was with us, I grabbed a cardboard tray from the supermarket, and a bag of clay litter.  In hindsight, a tray the size of an exercise book probably WAS a bit of a challenge, but she didn’t need to rise to it quite so enthusiastically.  I spend the weekend sweeping – and by sweeping I mean using tissues on my hands and knees – litter from the entire floor of our bathroom and herding it back in the direction of the tray.  The tray which, by nature of joining wet stuff with clay, had turned into an oversized-unkilned baking dish which looked like some rudimentary pottery project done by an ADHD 6 year old.

The following weekend I made sure I grabbed a much larger tray, along with “flushable, clumping” litter.  I even splashed out and got one of those little scoops with the holes to make the job less unpleasant and save my non-manual-labour hands.  This was going to be a breeze compared to last week!

Flushable and clumping my ass.

Well, technically, it DID clump.  In the bottom of our toilet. 

Wondering how much plumbers might charge in Richmond, on a Sunday, for fixing an entire motel sewer system, I tried to keep the cursing to a minimum to not alarm Murms as I poked and swished and prodded the bottom of our toilet; at the same time hoping the cleaners directly underneath us in the laundry didn’t think I was coming down with some kind of virus as I flushed the toilet for the ninth time in a row.

This weekend I threw caution to the wind and got a plastic tray.  A very large one.  I think it’s one of those trays designed to go under your car when you do an oil change and stuff.  Best of all, it only cost me $2 from the bargain place down an alley way out the back of the shops.  I also got some litter, and a soft pet bed to appease my guilt when dropping her back to the cattery.

I think she must have sensed my guilt and decided to play the poo card to see if she could get away with it.

I was woken at about 0200hrs by a very loud noise, and thought the C-17 must have just taken off from the RAAF Base.  Either that or a racing car had just started up.  Hearing nothing more I put it down to sleep deprivation and dozed off again.  When I got up the next day I found the culprit.  When I say “found” I guess I mean she was sitting on my chest looking all cute and patting me on the face with her paws to wake me up.  Yawning, I wandered into our Dishwasher-Bathroom-Beauty-Salon area to put the jug on, and when I turned around to walk out I thought I was in a scene from Psycho.

But replace blood with poos.

I was stunned that such a little thing could make that much by-product (I guess the 11 sachets didn’t help…) AND get it that high up the wall.

I was also a little stunned that Neil didn’t see it when getting ready for work that morning.  In fact, stunnery turned to suspicion very quickly and I decided the payoff from this task was me being taken out to dinner that night.  And not to McDonalds.

Figuring it wasn’t going anywhere in a great hurry, I made my coffee and sat down to work out how I was going to deal with this.  In my room the only products I have useful for cleaning are:

a)        Dishwashing liquid

b)       Tissues

c)        Toilet paper

d)       Chux cloths

e)        Mini soaps

f)         Shampoo

It wasn’t an easy task.

When Neil got home he listened in fascinated horror, which then turned to hilarity, when I told him about cleaning it up (25 minutes with dishwater and a scouring pad that I managed to get hold of) and when I showed him how high up the wall it went, he went and got a tape measure.  Always the Engineer.

But even I have to admit to being impressed when we calculated the highest splash got to 82cm.

After the grand engineering measurements, I started cleaning up more litter that seemed to have spread its way around the entire suburb of Richmond, and Murms decided this would be an opportune time to come and use the litter tray.  So while I’m cleaning, she’s uncleaning; but not with the accuracy I’ve come to expect.  She stands in the tray alright, but her poo falls outside the tray.  Right on the floor in front of me.

I’m not exactly sure why but I found this hilarious and had trouble telling Neil because I was breathing in gasps.  That’s not wise when you’re seated directly over a pile of poos. 

As horrified as he was for me, I noticed that he stayed on the bed rather than help extract me from this situation.  That’s gone into the memory bank for later, I decide, as I Google “expensive restaurants in Richmond NSW”.

·    Being subtle, I’ve discovered, is not one of Murmie’s strengths.  When she’s here with us, I spend the majority of my time chasing her around our room keeping her off our window sills.  If I’m on the bed with her, she’ll snuggle up.  By “snuggle up” what I really mean is “sit on my laptop”.  It took me four hours just to log into Facebook the other day.

When she’s not trying her hardest to parade on the window sill, which faces the entire motel complex, she stands at our door meowing at the sliver of light coming underneath.  And when she’s not doing that, she likes to stand in the bathroom and meow at her food sachets through the cupboard door.  And when she’s bored with all three, she likes to chase imaginary predator-victims around on our carpet – although this one normally only happens at 2am . 

I get a bit of Cabin Fever when she’s here, so try to pop out for quick trips.  I can’t be gone too long and risk an exhibition, so if I can’t get it in my supermarket basket within two minutes of walking through the door, I’m not buying it.  Being that there’s always a chocolate display right behind the checkouts, this might explain the mysterious 2kg that appeared at my medical this morning.

We went out for dinner one night, with mixed emotions.  Neil assured me no one would hear her;  there’d be no fire; nor would Richmond suddenly have to be evacuated while we were out.  He did make sure though that we turned out all the lights, so if she DID make her way to the window sill, no one would see her.  Only when we got back home did we realise they’d put a new light on the stairwell right beside our window and you could see the thermal backing of our curtains clear as day.  Only if she had a neon collar would she be more obvious.

When we have her we also put our “Do Not Disturb” sign out, and the ladies leave all our supplies on the chair outside.  This didn’t stop the Duty Manager from knocking on our door last Sunday.

I look at Neil, he looks at Murmie, Murmie looks at me, I look at the door, Neil looks at me.  Now, call me practical, but I’m thinking that the easiest thing here is for Neil to take her into the bathroom and shut the door. 

Not Neil.  Neil decides that the easiest thing to do would be to grab Murms, hop under the blankets, and shove her under there as well.  I can’t believe she didn’t meow.  I make lots of noise when he does that with me.

I answer the door, leaving it open just a crack like psychotic killers do on B-grade horror movies.

“Hi, sorry to disturb you, I know you’ve got your sign up, but we’ve got a problem.  From down in the laundry”.

DAMMIT!  Her litter box activities clearly didn’t go unheard.  The laundry is directly underneath us and there’s someone in there most hours of the day.

“Oh, um, yes… oh, sure, yep I understand… uh….”

“So, a fuse has blown, and we think it’s taken out all your power”

“Oh, POWER!  Oh, of COURSE, power, haha!  Yes, yes, our power!”

“Err, so if you wouldn’t mind… can I come in and check your lights, TV and microwave?”

I stare at him blankly through my 2-inch gap.

“Or, you could check it yourself if you’d prefer….?” he says, starting to look a little wary.

“Oh, hahaha” I flutter my hand at him, “no problems!  It’s just because Neil is sitting on the bed in his underwear, hahaha laugh-laugh-laugh-freak-out…” 

Technically, I wasn’t lying.

·       When it’s time to drop Murms home, she’s a little more switched on than when we pick her up.  As soon as we get her cage out and put it on the bed, I can almost see her contemplating faking an illness.

When I was away in Auckland, Neil text to say that he’d popped her in the cage, and when they started driving, she nonchalantly dismissed his peace-offering finger all the way back to her prison. 

I laughed.  But I shouldn’t have.

Last weekend, I got her cage out as normal, and glanced over at her guiltily.  So guiltily in fact that I put some food in there and some extra padding for her to sit on.  I think she was on to my plan when I started talking in an abnormally high-pitched voice.  Grabbing her before she could hide under a bed, I tried to get her in the cage.  That’s really, really hard when she splays out all four legs and I only have two hands.  And one of them is holding her and the other is holding the cage open.

·     When we finally get her in her cage for the trip back, we wait for the meowing to start.  Lately however it’s the silent treatment she imposes on us instead, which is far worse than any amount of meowing.

When I take her on my own, I put her up the front with me, buckling her in so that the open end of her cage is facing me.  Just to, you know, make her ignoring of me far more effective.

I drive with my finger jammed so far into her cage that if I braked suddenly, I’d be one of those ACC victims that little children point at when you’re reaching for your latte or putting money in a collection bucket.  I certainly wouldn’t have been making money teaching sign language.

·      When we take her back into her cell, we put her cage on the floor and open it while we’re standing in there, and give her lots of pats and cuddles before we leave.  This week, she raced out of her cage, up her little ramp to the top level of her cell, and sat in the corner.  Facing the wall.  “Oh MURMS!” I saying, holding back my tears.  “Let Mummy pat you goodbye!”  I lean over to pat her, and she moves further into the corner where I can’t reach her.

I decide it’s probably best to go before things get emotional and one of us says something we’ll regret.  I jump in my car, and as I reverse out of the park, I glance back for one more look at her before leaving to assure myself she’s OK. 

I may have been imagining things, but I’m sure she flipped me the paw.