Making the Cat Laugh by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online

there are people in the world who consider themselves perfectly eligible for relationships yet whose personal motto is the same as New Hampshire’s: ‘Live Free or Die’. And unfortunately they don’t all wear it on a T-shirt.

    They will sack me when they read this. But how can I keep pretending to be single when I have recently entered a rather serious relationship? Ho hum, another nice job down the drain. Of course, I didn’t mean to get into anything so heavy. In fact, I struggled quite hard against it.
    ‘Don’t you understand?’ I moaned, sinking dramatically to my knees, and hammering my fist on the Axminster. ‘I justcan’t afford to get into this. I mean, literally. I
can’t afford
to get into this.’
    It all started in June, when I took a few days’ holiday at a hotel on the north Norfolk coast, all by myself. I had envisioned a carefree time, joining boat-trip excursions to blustery sand-spit nesting grounds, pedalling my nice bike down poppy-lined B roads, and enjoying solitary meals in the hotel dining room with just a book for company. For of course (ha ha) I thought of it as ‘just a book’, then.
    ‘I’m taking Possession, by A.S. Byatt,’ I breezily informed the cats while I packed (hoping they would be impressed). ‘You know Possession, kitties: big one, really literary, Booker Prizewinner, everybody’s read it already, bit of a mouthful so they say.’ And I slung it in with the socks. None of us guessed what the future would hold – that after six warm days and nights of intimate contact with
Possession,
we would be locked in a tight stranglehold of book-and-woman relationship that would probably last for the rest of my literate life.
    It is peculiar. I feel as though I have been married for forty years to the same book.
Possession
and I are not on the same wavelength, yet somehow I can’t break free, and there is no literary equivalent to Relate.
    Last week, when somebody asked me to a dinner party, I said automatically: ‘Do you mind if I bring my book?’ And they said, er, no, of course not.
    But they didn’t anticipate the change in me. We turned up at 7.30 (Possession and I) and sat quietly in a corner; and then we left together at about 10. ‘Are you sure everything is all right?’ whispered my host in the hall, as he showed us out. And I shrugged and raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if to say: ‘What I have to put up with.’
    I got in the car and put Possession on the passenger seat, and thought back to our early days at the hotel, where my fellow diners often drew attention to my book at meal times.
    I had thought it was funny, then, the way their friendly comments would have sounded frankly presumptuous had I been seated with a bloke instead. How would a chap react, I wondered, if strangers kept leaning over him to say to me, ‘Gosh, that’s a big one,’ and ‘But I can’t say I fancy it myself’?
    Oh, what a Jezebel I used to be, when it came to books. ‘Use ’em up and cast ’em aside’ was my motto, as I notched up conquests on the bedpost, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. I made bibliophile a dirty word. ‘Use it gently, won’t you?’ people said when they lent me books, and I laughed, callously, with a succession of’ Heh!’ noises. Living dangerously, I defied P.J. O’Rourke’s prudent advice that you should always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. Let death surprise me
in flagrante
with the
Jeeves Omnibus,
I cared not.
    And now here I am, stuck in terminal monogamy with
Possession,
a book I shall certainly die in the middle of, because I shall never finish it.
    I keep reading the same bits over and over again, you see, because the story glances off my imagination without sticking. ‘Try skim-reading,’ my friends advise me, but I am not that kind of girl. I weep, I rage, I do the kneeling and hammering thing on the carpet. But the book remains calm and implacable on the coffee table, its nice blue