I Hate Cats, Apparently

For one brief, beautiful moment, I genuinely believe I’m going to sleep peacefully tonight. An adorable little delusion, as it happens. Mat’s away in Leeds for the night, which means blissful freedom from the usual nocturnal horrors. No snoring vibrating through the mattress like a walrus with sleep apnoea. No wandering hands emerging from the darkness for some “let’s get it on.” No unsettling sleep talking in what sounds suspiciously like fluent demon Latin. Just peace. Silence. A whole bed to myself. I stretch out like an exhausted starfish washed ashore and sigh into the pillow. Perfect. Or it would be… if the bedroom didn’t currently resemble Hell’s waiting room. The heat is unreal. A thick, oppressive, swampy heat that sticks to your skin like clingfilm and whispers, “you will never know comfort again.” I throw every window open and collapse dramatically onto the bed, limbs hanging outside the duvet despite every instinct screaming against it. I normally sleep completely cocooned. Full burrito mode. Tightly wrapped from neck to toe with only a tiny breathing hole exposed for emergency air supply. Because ever since childhood, I’ve had this irrational fear that if any limb hangs over the bed or pokes out from beneath the duvet, a psycho killer will break in during the night and chop it off. I blame horror films. Far too many horror films. An irresponsible amount, frankly. But tonight? It’s too hot for survival instincts. If the murderer wants my leg, frankly, he can have it. I’m overheating. I’m one degree away from being served up with a straw and a little umbrella. Before bed, I lock Pickle downstairs in the living room. Both doors firmly shut. Secure. Contained. No possibility of escape. Which is necessary because the furry little psychopath slept all afternoon and has chosen the exact moment my head touches the pillow to resurrect himself from the dead. Not just awake either. Oh no. Possessed. One of those crackhead kitten moods where his pupils consume his entire face and he sprints sideways for absolutely no reason, like he’s being propelled by gale-force winds up his backside. I did feel slightly guilty locking him downstairs. Slightly. But allowing him upstairs would be catastrophic. I know this. The house knows this. Even the walls seem tense about it. So I lie there sweating into the mattress, slowly fusing with the fitted sheet while the fan in the corner pushes around hot air with all the effectiveness of an asthmatic pensioner blowing through a straw… …and then I hear it. Tiny feet. Rapid-fire. The unmistakable sound of chaos approaching at speed. I sit bolt upright. Pickle launches across the floor like a furry thunderbolt of mischief. “What the—” Impossible. I KNOW I shut both doors. Both. I distinctly remember checking them with a suspicious handle-rattle before bed. Yet here he is. Staring at me with those enormous manic eyes. Pure unfiltered: “Mother. We ride at dawn.” “Pickle,” I call out. He immediately dives under the bed. Of course he does. What follows is twenty minutes of me crawling around on all fours in tropical conditions trying to drag a demon cat out from beneath accumulated dust bunnies and at least three hair ties I thought had vanished into another dimension. “Come here, you little bastard.” His paw appears briefly beneath the bedframe. Tiny. Fluffy. Utterly mocking me. Then vanishes again. At one point I’m face-down on the carpet, sweating so aggressively I’m pretty sure my body is trying to leave via osmosis. Eventually I manage to grab him. “Naughty Pickle,” I mutter, hauling him downstairs under one arm while he wriggles like he’s auditioning for escape artist of the year. I place him firmly back inside the living room. Shut both doors. Test them. Actually TEST them. Twice. “There,” I say. “No escaping now.” Back upstairs. Back into bed. Back into the sweaty fabric-lined tomb I now call home. I have barely lowered my head onto the pillow when— THUNDERING FOOTSTEPS. Pickle comes bombing back into the room at approximately seventy miles an hour and launches directly onto my stomach with all four paws. I nearly astral project. “JESUS CHRIST.” The cat blinks at me. Not a single fuck given. Read the room, mate. Mumma needs sleep. Instead, I spend the next half hour chasing him around the bedroom while my soul detaches from my body and briefly considers relocating. At one point he scales the curtains and nearly launches himself out the open window. “Oh absolutely not.” I slam the windows shut. Oh, blood marvellous. Now there’s no ventilation whatsoever. I’m going to be found tomorrow morning fused to the mattress like a microwaved lasagne, one hand still clutching a cat toy in despair. Eventually, I catch Pickle again and march him downstairs for what feels like the seventeenth prison transfer of the evening. Both doors closed. Firmly. This time I stand there glaring at them like a high-security prison guard on the brink of a breakdown. “There is physically no way out now,” I whisper. I head back upstairs. Five seconds later I hear not one set of cat footsteps… …but two. Stampeding. Monkey bursts into the bedroom chasing Pickle, who has apparently transcended into pure euphoric chaos now that his brother finally wants to play. The room erupts instantly into whiskered mayhem. Cats bouncing off furniture. Tiny claws skittering across laminate. Something crashes downstairs. Possibly something valuable. Probably civilisation itself. Maxi appears in the doorway carrying Monkey under one arm while Monkey yowls like he’s being deported. Pickle uses the distraction to dart between my legs and vanish under the bed again. At this point, even swearing feels like too much effort. Eventually we get both cats downstairs once more. Doors closed. Again. And then… I see it. Monkey strolls calmly over to the living room door. He stops. Looks back at me. Actually LOOKS BACK. And I swear there’s intelligence behind those eyes. The kind of look a supervillain gives moments before something irreversible happens. Then the crafty bastard rises onto his hind legs, places both paws against the handle, and pushes. The door swings open. Pickle explodes out like a furry cork fired directly from Hell. I just stand there in silence. Sleep deprived. Sweating. Broken. This isn’t a house anymore. It’s a hostage negotiation. And the cats are winning. It becomes Groundhog Day after that. Cats thundering up the stairs. Me dragging them back down again. Doors opening. Heat intensifying. Reality deteriorating. At some point I genuinely lose track of whether Pickle is physically in the room or whether I’ve developed a stress-induced hallucination. “Fine,” I whisper into the darkness. “Destroy yourselves.” The cats continue chasing each other across my body like tiny demonic horses. And somehow… despite all this… I finally drift into sleep. Just for a moment. A fragile pocket of unconsciousness. And immediately my brain rewards me with the most deranged dream of the evening. In the dream, Mat sends me a video message. New favourite song, the caption says. I press play. The video is black and white. Deeply artistic. Almost violently pretentious. The kind of aesthetic that thinks it’s saying something important, even if it isn’t. A woman sits beneath a huge oak tree strumming a guitar. Wind threading softly through her hair. Misty countryside in the background. And she looks exactly like me. Well. Me, if I were Irish. Which is especially irritating because every time I go abroad, somebody inevitably asks, “You Irish?” No. No I’m not. I’m a quarter Scottish, actually. But dream logic doesn’t care about heritage. So Fake Irish Me begins singing this haunting folk ballad titled: I Hate Cats. Not dislike. Not mildly irritated by. No. This woman despises cats with the intensity of someone who lost a husband in The Great Feline Incident of 1847. Pure venom. Utter hostility. “May every cat step barefoot on a Lego brick…” Gentle strumming. “May their midnight sprints end in fatality…” Soft melancholy violin. “If I owned a boat… I’d send them out to sea.” The woman stares directly into the camera with dead haunted eyes. “And if they are blessed with many lives, may none of them be kind.” By this point, I’m crying laughing. Actually howling. That dangerous overtired laughter where your brain feels slippery. Then my phone buzzes in the dream. Mat. Did you like the song? I type back immediately: No, I bloody hate it… Pause. Somewhere in the real world, a cat crashes into something that sounds suspiciously like a lampshade. …but she’s kinda got a point. Morning eventually seeps into the room in thin strips of grey light, leaking through the curtains like the world cautiously checking whether I survived the night. I wake in a puddle of sweat so large I briefly wonder whether I died overnight and liquefied. And beside me… sleeping peacefully… curled like furry angels in a Renaissance painting… are Pickle and Monkey. Still. Silent. Content. Tiny paws twitching in dreams. Pickle lets out the softest sleepy sigh imaginable. The betrayal almost finishes me off. These creatures. These sleep-destroying agents of insomnia. These tiny furry terrorists. And despite everything… despite the chaos… despite the heat… despite the hallucination-level Irish anti-cat folk music… I pull them closer anyway. Pickle immediately starts purring. Monkey looks mildly pissed off. And I realise, with deep resignation, that this is simply who I am now. A woman emotionally manipulated by creatures that lick their own arseholes yet somehow still believe they’re in charge. Honestly? I’d probably die for them.