Kat Wright Tic Tocc 5

Kat's Tic tocc 5

What unexpected thing do you discover inside this dusty old copper kettle?

The cat came out of the garage, licking his lips and trailed by a little breeze carrying a swirl of tiny feathers. Oh No! Not another bird. Everything looks the same, rows of of paint cans, cardboard boxes from an abandoned house move project, the project Cabriolet shrouded in old curtains.

Ah... a copper kettle lid lies upside down on the floor and a few more feathers. I look inside the kettle fearfully expecting a ravaged nest. Probably a robin, they're renowned for making picturesque nests in kettles, just as they like to stand on snowy spades for Christmas cards... But no, there's only what looks like a toy mouse inside. Then I jump and nearly drop the kettle. My first instinct is pure survival, I put it back on the shelf and back away to the door. An echoey voice suddenly says,

“Hey, now you're here, can you get me some food?”

I look around, the voice is high pitched with a Donald Duck, cartoon like sound. Only the echoey, metallic ring makes it sound as if it were coming from inside a... kettle.

I take a step nearer. Two beady eyes surface from the rim of the kettle and observe me with friendly tolerance.

“OK, you've seen me now. I've had a bad fright from your pampered pussycat there. He's finished off my foster family, so now I'm in my own.The least you can do is get me something to restore my strength.”

“Are you a cuckoo or something?” I ask idiotically, as if the creature's species were more remarkable than the fact that it was talking to me. In English too. What are the chances of that?

“Or something.” it said, without enlightening me further.

“You dont seem very upset about your foster family? And why didn't he eat you too?”

“It's hard to relate to four blind bags of feathers with bad breath and a female robin with an attitude problem and Tourettes syndrome. I told the cat to GET DOWN very assertively, and it did as it was told. Now, food PLEASE, quickly.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh,a petal from the flowers that grow in the mountains of the moon.No,only joking; a slug of good olive oil'. And some linseeds tomorrow. That should just about do it.”

This went on for three days and the thing grew and grew. In the end it was just perching on top of the kettle as if it were a bar stool. On Friday it asked me for firelighters. It said it liked the taste of parafin!

In the middle of the night I was awoken by a crackling, ominous sound. I leaped out of bed, I've slept badly all week and felt over alert. Not surprising really. I opened the roof window and peered out to the garage, which has a half glazed door I can see from the bedroom. For an instant I thought there was a fire, but the amber, dancing flames in there suddenly died down.The door burst open and an apparition sailed out, flapping huge, glistening wings of gold and scarlet and blue. It flew up to the top of the third oak tree and looked at me for a moment, a cockade of black feathers nodding on it's head.I gasped. It was the most unearthly sight, especially as an enormous half moon was out in the summer sky, which was an almost tropical velvet blue. The eyes were the same, beady, sardonic. Then it flew off, straight towards the moon. It was too much for the cat. With a low growl he ran downstairs and through the cat flap. I had a feeling of de ja vu, watching him surounded by an eddying breeze of feathers. But this time they were red gold, and shone in the moonlight with an inner fire.

In the garage, I put the kettle back on the shelf and replaced the lid. It was not at all the worse for wear. Only ashes remained, of course.