#2024MakeAMonster day 6: Teacup

 #2024makeamonster day 6!

Teacup

It was my Grannny taught me to read fortunes in tea-leaves. She liked to look for signs in everything.

It was cosy cuddled up to her; we read the leaves wrapped together in her lucky blanket. She always insisted we do it with the blanket around us; she'd made it herself, some kind of crochet-knit mix that she said wove in good-luck knots for fortune and oysterman's stoppers to keep bad things away and a snuggle hitch for comfort. We'd look at the leaves and she'd point things out.

'That's a sign in the china,' she'd say, pointing. 'Good things coming through there. Could be an 'I' - that'd be a place, or if it's an 'L' then we're looking for a name. Know any nice people beginning with 'L', sweetie? Not like them next door.'

'Them next door' was only one person, in fact: her neighbour Liam, who she insisted was evil.

'Them next door,' she said. 'There's them can't stand others' good luck.'

Liam was a lucky man himself, though. He'd won the lottery a few years ago - not millions and millions, but enough that he could retire early and live doing whatever he wanted, which seemed to be gardening. They both had long, narrow gardens of the kind builders had put in when people grew their own vegetables, and Granny's was a forest: she let brambles grow wild and made jam in the autumn, and took pride in her big stands of nettles that made delicious soup. Her mint grew ragged and wild, and since I was too young to really enjoy black tea she'd dry it in her kitchen, chop it up with her big knife and brew me my own delicious honey-mint tea, and she said those leaves were just as good to read as they were meant for me.

That was Granny's garden - not so much a kitchen garden as a little wilderness where she could find a use for things, and she always said that if a plant wasn't mischievous and it wanted to root in her ground she'd treat it as a guest. It was a playground for her little black cat Puss too; Puss was always up trees and down holes, coming back with ‘a coat full of burrs and a throat full of purrs,’ as Granny liked to say.

But Liam's plants were mischievous, every one; Granny was determined about that.

'Foxgloves!' she'd say. 'Yew hedges! Poisons every one, and all of them prisoners.' Liam favoured the formal-garden kind of arrangement, decorative rows of things like a tiny Versailles.

Liam, on the other hand, complained to the council sometimes that Granny's garden was a disgrace and attracted pests. They didn't do anything about it.

How Granny found out I'm not sure. She said she saw it in the tea-leaves: a black clump in the shape of a man, with a white shape in a crown for authority, and a few other little mysteries around she said she'd explain when I was older. My dad thought the council might just have notified her, but Granny swore they didn't. Liam was pretty tight-faced about it when they said they wouldn’t intervene, though.

A little later, we all had a tragedy: Granny found Puss in her garden with his poor neck torn. I'd cried, but Granny had looked daggers over the fence.

'Some folks,' she said, 'can't stand the joy of others. They'd make the world a prison if they could, and send all who won't stay pent to the hangman.'

I was still teary-eyed, but I didn't want to believe such monstrous things. 'Granny,' I said, 'mightn't it just have been foxes?'

She thought about it, but looked over the fence still fierce. 'He's got the gloves for them,' she said. ‘ Not for a minute would my fox-guests have hurt my Puss. Not without someone to goad them.'

We all felt the loss of Puss, but it told on Granny most of all. She loved to have us round, but now there was a loneliness to her. She'd always been an animal-lover, and without Puss she seemed like part of her was missing.

I couldn't bear it, so I talked to Mum and Dad, and we planned a surprise. We went down to the shelter and we picked out a new cat for Granny: another black one, because Granny said black cats were lucky. He had been an outdoor cat before his owner passed of old age, they said, and was just right for her. I tickled his furry cheek and he purred like a bus-engine, and I knew, more than anything they'd said about him could have told me, that he was right for Granny.

We put him in the carrier and took him to meet his new mistress. We were all joyful, like it was a kind of secret party, but as we came up to her door we saw Liam standing in his front garden - another formal-hedge affair, this one of laurel, which Granny said was poisonous as well. He was sipping a cup of tea, and when he saw us, his face grew hostile.

'Don't tell me,' he said, 'that's another menace to dug up my beds and leave droppings in them.'

'Now mate,' said Dad, 'I'm sure you don't begrudge an old lady her pet.'

Liam looked at us like thunder. 'Well,' he said, 'I just hope it keeps to itself. My garden's not for things uninvited.'

Granny kissed me and said she'd love the cat all the more for it being my idea, and when she opened up the carrier and looked inside she glowed like I hadn't seen since Puss died and said, 'Why darling, isn't he just perfect?' And the new cat trotted out like he'd known her all his life, dabbed his nose against hers in a little kiss, and settled right in.

Granny made him a collar herself, a kind of macrame thing with knots for protection. She said she couldn't bear to lose another cat so soon.

Funny thing - Liam had another lottery win. It was in the local paper. It was a scratchcard this time, not a regular ticket. Two hundred thousand, he won.

He didn't look happy about it, though. Granny's new cat, Sooty, was exploring his garden and couldn't be stopped. Sooty was quite the hunter, it turned out, but for some reason it wasn't Granny's garden he liked to hunt in. I swear one time I saw him sitting across from a sparrow, the little brown bird hopping about in a way you'd think would drive a cat crazy, and Sooty was just watching. When the sparrow dipped its head to pick something from the ground, Sooty dipped his head too like he was bowing back.

But he liked to hunt in Liam's garden. Or perhaps in the neighbourhood gardens as well. Most of the neighbours thought he was a good thing because he had a passion for rats: birds didn't interest him, it seemed, but if ever a rat was to be had Sooty was after it, and he'd kill it before it had the chance to sneak into anyone's home. So with everyone but Liam Sooty was popular - but it was always Liam's patio where Sooty left the rats, and Liam hated him.

'If you can't keep that filthy beast out of my garden,' I heard him tell Granny over the fence, 'my garden will have something to say to that filthy beast.'

Dad thought I must have misheard, or else Liam might be getting eccentric, not having to work for his living as he did. But I saw him planting lily after lily, and I knew Granny said there was nothing so poisonous to cats.

When I told Granny about it, she thought for a very long moment.

'There's those can't bear others' blessings,' she said. 'Greedy. But I suppose there's one good thing about the greedy - they take what they can get.'

I didn't know what she meant. But she asked me to fetch a teacup - one of the plainer ones with a big flat base.

'Now,' she said, and she took out a metal nail file, 'let's see what we can do.'

I had no idea why she was scraping away. 'Wouldn't it make it hard to read the leaves if you do that?' I asked. 'They'd all fall in the scrapes.'

'Wouldn't they just?' she said, and she smiled at me warm as a candle.

Her neighbour across the way, Mrs Toser, was one of this nice patient people that gets along with everyone. The next time I visited she told me she thought Granny had been very sensible trying to make peace with Liam: she'd invited him over and asked Mrs Toser there too as a kind of mediator, and said to him that she knew Sooty was troubling him and his garden and she knew his garden was his strength, and perhaps they could come to some arrangement. She'd be only too happy to dispose of the rats herself, for example.

Mrs Toser was disappointed that Liam had been so uncooperative and had only said that if Granny didn't keep Sooty out then she'd know about it. But everyone she respected Granny for trying, Mrs Toser said.

'Which cups did she serve you both?' I asked, and Mrs Toser looked a bit surprised and said she was sorry but she didn't remember.

I went in to visit Granny, and asked if I could stay the night so we could have her special raspberry pancakes for breakfast - it was raspberry season and her garden was bristling with it. She looked quite sorry and said, 'I'd love to, darling, but maybe not tonight. This weekend, I promise. We'll have a lovely weekend together.'

So I didn't see the storm. I mean, it rained that night, and I heard a few thunderclaps, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Our street was fine, and went I walked round to Granny's the next day everyone else's house was all right too. A few bin lids blown loose, but nothing worse.

It was only Liam's garden that had caught the real weather. Out front his laurels were blown flat - and went I went in and looked through her upstairs window, I could see his whole formal arrangement, with its yews and its box and its belladonna, had been smashed to pieces by the wind.

'Oh dear,' I said to Granny. 'He'll be very upset about that.'

'Let him,' Granny said with satisfaction. 'He can't do anything about it.'

And do you know, she was right? Next thing we knew Liam's luck ran out. It turned out he'd been messing around on his taxes for all that lottery money. He was going to have to put his house up for sale, he owed them so much in fines. One day we even saw bailiffs coming round.

He was out shouting at them in what used to be his front garden, and when Granny and I came to the door to see what was the fuss, he turned to her.

'You wait!' he shouted. 'I'll pay you out for this! Just you wait!'

'You want we should take him inside, Missus?' the bailiff asked Granny. 'You don't want him shouting at your little girl.'

'Oh, that's all right,' Granny said, putting her arm around my shoulders. 'Storm in a teacup, really.'