Cats, Scarves and Liars

By Kathryn White

Peppa is just your average Australian young woman, really. 23 years old, widowed and owner of a cat who can speak perfect English. (But no one will believe her about the cat.) Why is she being stalked by one of the customers from her job at the City South Post Office? What secrets does the mysterious Ivory Black know about Peppa and her past? What does he know about the strange murders that are happening all over Adelaide? And was it really necessary for him to steal her boyfriend's scarf?

Cats, Scarves and Liars is a quirky, offbeat tale from a unique Australian writer. You'll laugh, you'll cry you'll discover the meaning of life. (Actually, we lied about that last part.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathryn White
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310496028

Kathryn White

Kathryn White grew up in the Midlands of England and now lives in Wells with her husband. Inspired by her children and grandchildren, she has written more than thirty children's books, almost all of which feature animals as the main characters.

Book preview

Cats, Scarves and Liars

By

Kathryn White

In loving memory of Toffee White

1 October 1999 – 1 July 2013

Cats, Scarves and Liars

By Kathryn White

Smashwords Edition

Language: English (Australian)

Copyright © Kathryn White 2014

Front cover design © Kathryn White 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN-13

This is a work of fiction. All the characters portrayed in this work, excluding those already in the public domain are fictitious. Any resemblance to any real person, living or deceased is coincidental.

All of these events took place some time ago now. To protect the innocent, I have changed the names of many much-loved family members and friends, and I have also changed some of the locations where these events took place. I do not have long to tell my story but I assure you that everything, no matter how unbelievable much of it may seem, is true …

Part 1

It started with a small voice.

‘Ouch.’

Ouch, Peppa wondered as she placed the kettle on the stove. Just last week she had found the vintage, 1970s style stovetop kettle at a market and could not resist handing over the asking price of two dollars (yes, just two dollars, the stallholder had assured her, a true bargain, never to be seen again,) and Peppa had happily been using it to boil water for her morning coffee ever since.

‘Ouch!’

This time, the voice was a little louder.

Peppa looked around the kitchen, half expecting to find that one friend or another had decided to call in unannounced or, worse perhaps, that her mother-in-law had decided to come for a visit. The kitchen appeared to be empty, but for the furniture, appliances, a few empty wine bottles and a black and white cat named Sylvester who was refusing to eat his usual tin of sardines in tomato sauce for breakfast. Secretly, Peppa thought that the name of their cat was disgustingly clichéd, with Sylvester’s namesake being a Looney Tunes character with a penchant for gobbling smart-arsed canaries and all, but Tony had been sold on the idea from the moment that the stray black and white thing had wandered inside their flat. And now that Tony was gone …

Well, she couldn’t go and bloody change the name of her dead husband’s cat now, could she? It wouldn’t be right.

‘Ouch!’

The voice was loud and strong as it echoed through the kitchen. ‘You could be a bit more gentle you know.’

‘I’m … sorry.’

Peppa searched the kitchen a second time. Who the hell was speaking?

And, more to the point, why was she apologising?

‘Just be more careful next time.’

The voice sighed. ‘And while you’re at it, you might like to consider filling me with something, shall we say, a little healthier than tap water.’

Peppa’s first thought was what is so bloody wrong with tap water? Wasn’t the added fluoride supposed to be good for you? Or was it bad for you? Some people thought it was good for your teeth. Other people seemed to think that it was bad. According to them, fluoride could be toxic in mass quantities. Didn’t fluoride contain lead, in very small traces? Or something. Peppa was not entirely sure. She did not take a great deal of notice of what was in the news these days.

Anyway, who the hell was speaking to her about tap water?

Peppa had not filled anything with water this morning.

Well, apart from the kitchen sink.

Actually …

Peppa stared at the pile of dishes that were mounting on the sink. She had not filled the sink with water today. Nor had she filled it yesterday.

Or, for that matter, the day before yesterday.

Responsibility and housework were not exactly Peppa’s top priorities these days.

Peppa had kept herself sane in the months following the hit and run that had killed Tony by focusing on her friends and various responsibilities. She had organised a funeral and a wake that Tony would have been proud of. (His mother, on the other hand, had not been quite so proud. Della Grove’s eyes had become wide and then quite small and disapproving at the sight of a motorcycle driving through the church, and then at the sound of AC/DC’s Long Way to the Top as it echoed through the church hall at the wake.) After the funeral, Peppa had assured everyone that she was doing as best she could under the circumstances. Four weeks after Tony passed away, she returned to work, where she faked smiles for her colleagues and the customers.

Every night for the past five months Peppa had come home to an empty, messy flat with walls that were as red as her hair, and cursed the unfairness of life. They were supposed to grow old together, she and Tony. What the bloody hell were the odds? The only two redheads in their class at primary school, meeting again as adults and marrying? Peppa used to wonder if they were ever to have kids if their children would have red hair too. She would never find out. Oh well. Tony had never wanted kids anyway. According to Tony, having kids meant that you had to start acting like a fully-fledged adult.

Neither Tony nor Peppa were terribly good at acting like adults. When it came down to it, they were both still just kids who drank, who had body piercings and tattoos, who had motorcycle licences and who were considered old enough and sane enough to vote. Sylvester had become the closest thing that they were ever going to have to children. Instead, they had made plans to do other things—Tony was going to have his own business fixing motorcycles, while Peppa would retire from her day job and concentrate on her music, instead of just dragging her guitar around the local pub and club scene, whenever she was lucky enough to get a gig.

‘Be miserable and just ignore me why don’t you?’

A voice interrupted Peppa’s thoughts.

‘Who are you?’

Peppa looked around the kitchen. ‘I know you’re not the sink.’

‘Damn right I’m not a kitchen sink. And I wouldn’t want to be, either. Nasty things, kitchen sinks, always getting filled up with everybody’s dirty dishes. Not that you seem to bother cleaning your dirty dishes terribly often.’ The voice huffed and sighed. ‘Or your dirty laundry …’

‘So you’re a cup then?’

Peppa laughed out loud. The absurdity of it all, she decided, standing here in the middle of her kitchen arguing out loud with a piece of crockery.

Peppa hoped that the neighbours could not hear her.

‘I’m not a cup.’

The voice huffed. ‘You really lack intelligence, you know that?’

‘I don’t know about that.’

Peppa let out a weary sigh. She had well and truly tired of this stupid game. All she wanted was to get on with making her breakfast in peace. ‘But I do know that you’re just some … silly voice that is inside of my head.’

Of course the voice was inside her head. What other explanation could there be? They were right. All of them. Everyone Peppa had ever met from the other kids at her primary school right up to her mother-in-law seemed to think that she was a complete and utter lunatic. Maybe it was the red hair. Maybe it was her piercings and tattoos. Maybe it was her bright, clashing clothes.

Or, maybe, it was the way that she would say something in total seriousness and everybody that was around her would laugh as though she had made a joke. Like the time in primary school when she had asked her teacher what would happen if someone got scared half to death, twice? Or in her high school theology class when she had asked the teacher how come Miriam had suffered a greater punishment than her husband, Aaron, when both had committed the same sin and wasn’t that just the tiniest bit sexist? And, then, there was the first time that Peppa had met her mother-in-law and she had asked how it was possible that Tony could have such a young looking mum, and it had turned out that Tony was born when Della was only fifteen years old …

Della had never allowed her to forget that one, despite the fact that Peppa had only been seven years old at the time. Just as she never allowed Peppa to forget the supposed hardships that she had suffered as a single, teenage mum.

‘You have no idea just how good you have it, Peppa Grove,’ the voice said.

‘You sound like my mother-in-law,’ Peppa said.

‘Well, maybe your mother-in-law is right. You don’t seem to know how good you’ve got it. You’ve got this nice flat to live in and what do you go and do? Paint the all walls red-’

Peppa smiled, remembering the look of surprise on Tony’s face, when he had walked inside the flat after a weekend away to discover that she had painted the walls bright red. Cyclamen, the salesperson from Solver Paints had called it. Peppa had taken a real liking to that particular shade of red and decided there and then that it was her favourite colour of all time.

‘-And leave the place in complete and utter disarray. The dishes on the sink are piling up-’

Tell me something I don’t know, Peppa thought.

‘-And just look at the kitchen table!’

Peppa did as she was told. The kitchen table, she had to admit, was a bit of a disaster area. A stray and empty packet of Tim-tams sat atop of a pile of newspaper horoscopes, beside a few empty (or almost empty) wine bottles. (One of the wine bottles was still half full. It had been that way for a week now.) Peppa was never quite sure that she believed in horoscopes, particularly not cryptic ones that were written by an aging and bald fool whose main purpose seemed to be to encourage his readers to call a premium telephone line to discover the ‘true’ meaning of their horoscope. Regardless, Peppa found herself not only reading her horoscope every day, but also cutting it out of the paper and keeping it. She always intended to look back at her horoscope a day or so later, just to see whether it had come true or not, but most of the time she forgot until weeks afterward. By then the newspaper was usually yellowing and Tony would slip it away into the bin when he thought that Peppa was not looking. Then, she would find them all in the bottom of the bin and …

Well. That was how things used to work anyway, before …

‘All those newspaper clippings, covering the table. Along with that empty biscuit packet, bottles and a disgusting, dirty pair of socks.’

Peppa stared at the socks. She had taken them off when she arrived home from work last night and had forgotten to transfer them to the laundry basket. Not that she had a laundry as such. The laundry basket was simply a white plastic bucket that she had bought from K-Mart and that sat inside the bathroom until she or Tony could be bothered taking it to the shared laundry that was on the bottom floor of their block of flats. Or the Eucalyptus Garden Apartments as the Real Estate Agent had insisted the three storey cement slabs that had been arranged in a semi-circle and surrounded by rickety wood fence and a little bit of native shrubbery was called.

‘You’ve got this lovely flat and you just mistreat it. Oh, you’re an ungrateful little child. Oh, you’re an ungrateful little girl. Oh … Ooooh … Ooooooooooooooh!’

The voice began to squeal, the noise barely audible over the sound of the stovetop kettle, which had finally come to the boil. Peppa flicked the dial on the electric stove and then removed the still-whistling lid from the kettle. She poured the boiling water into her last clean mug (perhaps she would have to wash the dishes sometime today after all,) and added a little milk to her coffee before stirring.

‘Finally.’

There was a sigh as Peppa placed the kettle back on the stove.

‘How would you like it if someone filled you with water and then tried to set fire to your belly at least twice a day?’

‘What?’

Peppa frowned. What was that ridiculous voice talking about now?

‘People do mistreat their kettles …’

Mistreat their kettles? Peppa stared at the stove. Oh. This was really bad. Not only was she hearing voices in her head, but she was also imagining, yet again, that the belonged to an inanimate object.

‘Maybe I should just check myself in to the bloody funny farm and be done with it,’ she muttered.

‘Maybe you should.’

A black and white cat climbed up on the bench beside the stove. A surprisingly human sounding chuckle escaped his mouth as he stared at Peppa. ‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘Imagining that a kettle could talk. What are you going to dream up next?’

* * *

Peppa left her cup of coffee behind in the kitchen and hightailed it as quickly as she could into the shower. Perhaps a splash of cold water would do her good. Maybe I’m not quite awake yet and I’m dreaming, she decided as she tore off her pyjamas and tossed both them and her underpants onto an already messy pile of wet towels and clothing by the bathroom door.

That must be it, she decided as she flicked on the tap. A spray of cold water hit her skin which was soon followed by a spray of hot water. The pipes hissed and the temperature finally settled on warm.

I was just … dreaming or something. Cats don’t bloody talk. And they don’t try to trick you into thinking that it is the kettle that is speaking. It was just a dream. Just a very odd dream …

‘Fucking ridiculous,’ Peppa told herself as she walked to the bedroom. Tony had always hated it when she swore. He said it sounded like she had her mouth in the gutter and that it didn’t suit her. These days she swore all the more just to spite Tony. Serve him right for dying, the prick.

‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Fuck, piss, shit, cunt.’

Naked (after all what was the point of dressing to walk from the bathroom to your bedroom when you lived alone,) Peppa rolled open her wardrobe door and pulled out her last clean and ironed Australia Post uniform. The uniform was a sensible red and white striped blouse that came complete with a small Australia Post insignia on the right hand side and a knee length grey skirt that had a cute little frill at the back. The blouse and skirt were each long enough to cover the majority of her tattoos. A series of red roses covered one of her inner thighs and on her right shoulder was a black cat. Along the length of her left arm was a series of butterflies, each one a bit bigger and a bit more colourful than the last. Peppa loved her tattoos. She regarded her body as a kind of canvas and each tattoo as a special, individual work of art that she had chosen to decorate herself with. Several silver rings and bars through her body completed the look. She wore a silver and diamond stud in her belly button, a silver stud in her tongue and her ears were covered with a number of rings. She had considered getting two studs in her lip just because the look seemed kind of different and interesting but Tony had talked her out of it. ‘They just look like frickin’ vampire fangs.’ (Tony never used to swear in front of her because he considered it wrong to use vulgar language in front of a lady. Substitute swear words like frickin’ were as colourful as his vocabulary ever got.) ‘Besides Peppa, everyone has them at the moment. You don’t want to look like you’re just trying to be hardcore just like everyone else …’

It was all right for Tony. He never had to try to be anything. Tony was just … Tony. And everyone was cool with that.

Peppa selected her underwear with care (she wondered what the customers at the City South Post Office would think of her tattoos, or the fact that as far as underwear went, she always opted for a push up bra and matching g-string, usually in as bright a colour as she could find,) and a pair of staid, black tinted pantyhose. After making sure that most of her piercings and all of her tattoos were safely concealed she pulled her hair back with a neat, black Alice band and zipped up her shoes, a pair of flat-heeled Doc Marten branded boots that stopped midway before the knee. Peppa found her glasses (she never bothered to wear them around the house,) and, as it was