Catty by Ian Douglas Robertson

I once dated a girl who was a good friend of Baron Pizza King’s daughter and she told me this sad but enlightening tale.

Once upon a time in the early eighties, there lived a nouveau-riche family in a non-descript suburb of a relatively large town in southern England. The father, commonly known as Baron Pizza King, was slightly taller than Danny De Vito and looked like an Italian mafioso. He had a passion for pizzas, and his mission in life was to share this passion with the rest of the world, and make a lot of money doing so. He was currently negotiating the premises for his third pizza house.

Despite his size, the Baron ruled the roost and would not let the Baroness do anything that could be construed as work. Having a career of her own was out of the question, which upset her greatly, as there was nothing she would have liked more than to dress up in one of the frilly red dresses that the Baron made his waitresses wear. So, she had to resign herself to a life of leisure. In despair, she joined the parish calligraphy class.

Now, the Baron and Baroness had three daughters. The two eldest daughters, Linda and Jane, looked just like their father; with 50% of their body weight in their behind, another 20% hanging from their jowls and the remaining 30% scattered rather untidily over the rest of their body. When they dropped out of secondary education, with one O-Level in Home Economics, they were sent to finishing school in Switzerland to be taught not to speak like their parents and to behave like people who lived in detached houses. However, their year in Switzerland proved to be a complete waste of time and money. “Cor blimey, wiv the dough I’ve forked out on those good-for-nuffin cows o’ dawters of mine, I could’ve put a down payment on Pizza King 3. I fought these places were meant to teach ‘em ‘ow to speak proper,” the Baron pointed out with some rancour.

Nor did the year in Switzerland help them to overcome their psychological problems. Linda, poor dear, was bulimic, which meant she ate nothing one week and stuffed herself the next, but she lost less in the week she didn’t eat than she gained in the week she did, so she was a good five stone overweight. Jane was neither bulimic nor anorexic, merely inclined towards self-delusion. When she beheld herself in the mirror, she saw a vision of pure sex, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna all rolled into one, with the result that she was a little flighty or what the local lads called “an easy lay” or  “an absolute tart”.

Now the interesting thing about this little fairy story is that Baron Pizza King and his delightful Baroness had a third daughter, Catrina, or Catty, as she was called by her sisters. Catty was an absolute stunner, tall and blue-eyed with shining blonde hair. So, naturally, her sisters detested her. Catty too was not without her problems. She thought she was the ugliest, plainest creature alive. Her eyes were too, too …. She couldn’t find the word for it, but they were too something anyway, and her hair was not a nice blonde. It had streaks in it that were almost brown.

How, you may ask, could Baron and Baroness Pizza King have produced such a beautiful daughter? Well, Catty was not the Baron’s daughter at all, but the daughter of the baroness and a man of humble birth, who worked in the local chocolate factory. How did it all happen? Well, the humble worker had artistic aspirations and joined the parish painting classes. However, after a couple of weeks, when he produced a painting entitled ‘Spring’, which made the local river look more like an open sewer in a nuclear winter than a surge of life in spring, his teacher suggested he might turn his hand to calligraphy, which he did, and that is how this unlikely idyll started. And you will be glad to hear he won third prize in the annual Valentine card event, in which he immortalized the words I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY. He failed to win second prize because he drew a HEART instead of writing the word, which would have been all right, if it hadn’t looked so convincingly like a squashed potato.

To cut a long story short, the humble factory worker with no artistic talent and the Baroness Pizza King fell madly in love, and one day after calligraphy class, as he was driving her home to her suburban semi, they made love, rather messily, in the back of his clapped-out Lada. And as he had failed to stock up on condoms, their love bore fruit in the shape of Catty.

Needless to say, when the baron clapped his eyes on the delightful baby, presented to him on the sterilized gloves of the obstetric nurse, he realized that such a beautiful creature could not be his. He had had his suspicions earlier on because, although he tended to get his months confused, he was almost certain they hadn’t made love in the month in question. Doubt remained, however, because Catty neither resembled the postman nor the milkman, who were both of different ethnic origin. His mind did not go to the calligraphy class, as he assumed it was populated by frustrated middle-class ladies, who wore frilly red silk panties and had nothing but leisure in their lives.

Let us hasten to the crunchline of the story. Linda and Jane, who loved the Pet Shop Boys, and in fact any boys they could get their hands on, were both madly in love with a little shit called Harold, who also lived in a semi and whose father was negotiating premises for his fourth supermarket. Now, Harold was having a super fancy-dress party, at which he was going to dress up as Sid Vicious, which was not very difficult because he always dressed like Sid Vicious, and he invited all the girls from the neighbourhood and all the boys who were uglier than he was, which weren’t many. Of course, Linda and Jane were invited, not because he was interested in either of them. In fact, as he had said to a friend, in jest, of course, he was surprised their parents hadn’t had them put down at birth, which was rather unkind, but he was going through a difficult adolescence and trying to be like Sid Vicious, so he must be forgiven. No, Harold’s only motive for inviting Linda and Jane was to get his randy little hands on Catty, who had 20% of her body weight on her chest and a fraction of a percent in her head.

The night of the party came and Sid was showing off his stereo equipment and his ability to imitate Sid Vicious in order to impress Catty, with the result that he was impressing Linda and Jane tremendously; so much so that Jane swore that if he so much as laid a finger on her, she’d take off her frilly red silk panties for him there and then, and Linda made a vow to stop eating for a whole month, if he would only turn his sallow spotty face in her direction.  As for Catty, she just quietly pined away for her darling Harold. His green spiky hair was making butterflies flutter in her flat, model’s stomach, but she could not believe for an instant that Harold could possibly be interested in her. She imagined that he was madly in love with one of her beautiful sisters in their sexy little mini-skirts and perfectly dyed blonde hair.

At midnight, Catty could stand it no more. Harold had ignored her all evening. So, she decided to go home and cry her incredibly attractive sea-blue eyes out. In fact, she could not even bring herself to say goodbye to her host, who was wiggling his hips in an incredibly sexy way to the sound of the New Kids on the Block.

When Harold realized that Catty was no longer admiring his incredibly impressive dancing, he was heart-broken. He felt like grabbing Linda or Jane and doing it with them there and then in an incredibly brutal and sadistic fashion, just to spite Catty. The party was ruined for him. Even his green spikes seemed to wilt and the testosterone drain from his incredibly sexy body.        

Finally, all the guests left, except Jane, who generously offered to take off her frilly red silk panties for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. All he wanted to do was listen to Sid being vicious and fantasize about Catty’s nipples.

Well, all fairy stories have a happy end, and so does this one. Harold became so good at doing Sid Vicious imitations that he convinced himself he was a brilliant actor and signed up at one of the second rate drama schools. Linda started a wonderfully fulfilling relationship with the milkman’s son, whose life’s ambition was to open an ice-cream parlour in Clacton-on-Sea. Jane had numerous relationships and finally burnt herself out on the son of Baron Pizza Italia, with whom she had five roly-poly bambini, all of whom were the spitting image of Baron Pizza King.

The Baron continues to negotiate for new premises and is now on his seventh pizza house. The Baroness still goes to calligraphy classes, as does the humble factory worker, and she finds the experience as wonderfully fulfilling as ever. The clapped-out Lada is still going strong and is likely to reach the third millennium.

Catty? Well, she became a nun, which didn’t surprise anyone. The Baroness said she had always known Catty was a saint. Harold had suspected all the time she was butch, and her sisters were glad to see the back of her. The Baron? Well, he loved Catty dearly, and as by now he had convinced himself that she was the mirror image of his great-great-grandmother on his father’s side, her decision to enter holy orders came to him like a punch in the solar plexus, which completely knocked the wind out of negotiations for his eighth pizza house.

But life goes on, and the nouveau and getting richer lower middle class family who live in the relatively large town in England are getting older and no wiser. Catty, however, is still as beautiful as ever and, despairingly fancied by the Mother Superior, and lives in blissful oblivion of the fact that she could have been a top model or a sex object for over-sexed adolescents like Harold to fantasize over. She sometimes gets a little frustrated, but she always has her Hail Marys and rosary beads to fall back on.

Ian Douglas Robertson

Image: Slices of pizza loaded with lots of good stuff from Pixabay.com