“Acetone?”“Yes. For the cat,” came the reply, and slowly memory started to drift back. A table spread for a barbecue. An animal-loving friend. Me relating the sad saga of Tui, one of my enormous brood of cats, who had stopped eating and then compounded his problems by wandering outside and coming home again with glue caking half his body. Inevitably, this being the countryside, as he had walked back a collection of small twigs, feathers and tiny pebbles had attached themselves to the glue. So now not only was he skeletally thin, but he also looked like some sort of crazy abstract artwork. Rarely can an animal have seemed more pathetic.
My first thought had been hot water, then cold, but neither had made the slightest impression on the glue. The vet suggested alcohol as a solvent, but our local pharmacy stocked no such thing, not even for medicinal purposes. I’d just started to explain how I’d managed to cut most of the glue out of his tail when the door flew open again and in waltzed my friend Dore, a world music DJ with anything but music on his mind. “How’s Nico?” he demanded without so much as a hello.
“Nico?” This was the name of my summer house-sitter, but how Dore would have known that I couldn’t imagine.
“Yes. The cat? The acetone?”
Ahhh. “Well, actually the cat is called Tui…” I began before breaking off when the door opened yet again and in flew a man I’d have sworn I’d never clapped eyes on before.
“How did you manage with the acetone?” he asked. Then: “What? What?” as everyone else in the room burst out laughing.
Now that everyone was sitting comfortably I actually had a chance to supply a progress update. No, I hadn’t tried the acetone yet, although I had dug out some acetone-impregnated pads that I used for removing nail polish. The problem was that I now needed someone to help by holding onto the cat while I attempted to scrub him clean.
At this point the carpet-shop owner returned and attention switched to the serious business of commerce. As I sneaked away to indulge myself with a slice of cake I couldn’t help but smile at the contrast between the response of these particular Californians to the ill health of a cat they’d never seen owned by a woman who was a stranger to most of them and that of most of my Göremeli friends who found it hard enough to understand why I would allow the animal inside the house in the first place, let alone waste so much mental energy on trying to sort out its health problems.
In case you’re wondering, I never did apply the acetone, preferring to let nature eradicate the glue in its own good time. Now if only hepsiburada.com would just deliver the 67 tins of cat food I ordered a week ago…
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
