Take Five Girls - or - Will The Real Cat Please Stand Up

The image you see above cost me £6,500. Or about 10 Euros. Or maybe it saved me a fortune. Depends how you want to count it.

Sometime back in the 90s, I was in Antequerra, a very pleasant, not much touristed town in Andalusia. I'd just been made voluntarily redundant after years of trying and I was celebrating my windfall by driving around Spain and Portugal in a hire car for three weeks, on my own.

After two weeks, I'd had enough of moving to a new place every day so I stopped in Antequerra for a while and while I was exploring the back streets I found a shop selling some idiosyncratic and unusual tees. 

I bought several. They were all odd. I never saw any like them again, anywhere. The one I wore the most and for the longest wasn't the one with the five girls. It was this one:

I wore that t-shirt a lot. I'd probably still be wearing it now if Mrs. Bhagpuss hadn't finally told me she couldn't stand it.

I have no idea what Space Motion 570 is supposed to mean, let alone Union Feel The Heat, which is what the very faded yellow-on-white lettering says, in case you can't make it out. I always thought it might have something to do with basketball but chances are it doesn't actually mean anything. (There's a DJ now who goes by Space Motion but I doubt they were even born when I got this shirt.)

Although that was the one I wore the most, it wasn't my favorite. My favorite was the one with the five young women on the front. Unfortunately, that one was just a tad too small for me so I couldn't wear it as much as I'd have liked.

They fascinated me, those women. Who were they? They were obviously all friends. I thought they looked like they were probably about the age to be in college. Maybe they were school-friends who'd left and gone their separate ways and now they were back for the long summer break and catching up. (It's clearly summer where they are, based on how they're dressed.) 

I figured they probably wouldn't all have gone into further education. The one in the beret, though? She definitely had. And the cool one in the middle in the bee-stripe dress and RayBans. Maybe the girl in black and white checks and polka dots was a year or two younger. Just graduated from high school and getting ready to join the others at university. Hearing all the stories about what it was like.

The one in the sensible skirt, carrying the shopping and the one in blue checking out what's in the bag? Maybe they share an apartment. The two that didn't go away to study. Maybe they're working already, doing classes on day release. 

Actually, now I look again, they've all got bags. So maybe they've been on a shopping trip together.

And so on. This is what I found myself doing every time I looked at the shirt. Speculating about who they might be. Making up backstories for them all. Like I'm doing now.

In the end I gave them all names and wrote a short story about the five of them. As I remember, it wasn't a very good story. I don't think I was all that satisfied with it. But I wasn't so down on it I was going to keep it to myself. I published it in the APA.

And then I forgot about it for a quarter of a century until earlier this year, when I dug out all my old fiction and zines and started scanning and digitizing them. It took a lot of digging around in closets and under the bed and up in the loft but eventually I found almost everything I could remember - except that one story. And the T-shirt.

It was frustrating. Not just because there was a piece of my past missing. There are plenty of those. One more isn't going to matter. No, it was frustrating because one of the characters from the story turns up in another sequence of vignettes that I had found. Only now I didn't know who she was.

Late on in my time with the APA I started reviewing a very specific literary sub-genre. No, not a literary genre - a publishers' one. Books that compare themselves to Catcher in the Rye on their covers.

Publishers just love to try to make readers think a book is going to be like something else they've read. They're all scavengers, feeding on the kills of others. If anything ever sells they have no idea why but they're all sure if they copy the cover design they'll be able to sell a bunch more books to readers who clearly can't tell the difference. The same logic prevails with comparisons to other writers and other books.

Since Salinger was at the time my favorite writer and Catcher my favorite novel, two facts that may or may not still be true, I was prone to picking up copies of any books that claimed to be the same or similar. Not because I thought they would be. More to find out the ways in which they weren't.

Some were pretty good all the same and I wanted to share my thoughts on them. But I needed a framework. Because I was even more pretentious then than I am now and I never could just write anything straight.

Which was how I came up with the idea of having Phoebe Caulfield review the books that were supposedly like the one her brother was in, all those years ago. Or Phoebe Maybe, as I've just now realized I should have called her. Who knows if she really was Holden's sister? She never did find out who she was and so far neither have I. Not for sure.

My Phoebe lived in a rambling old house with a walled garden. It was based on the Quaker Meeting House where I used to go on Sundays as a child. It always spooked me out. 

Phoebe lived with ghosts. Her ghosts were other characters I'd written about. Or lived with. I lived with Cathy for years. She was my imaginary friend long after I was too old to have one. My imaginary imaginary friend. I think I was still at University when I last saw her although I wouldn't count on her not coming back some time.

There was Cathy from my past and Rachel and Sally from the proto-novel I was writing at the same time and then there was Cat. Cat was one of the women on the T-shirt. The only one whose name I remember and that only because she lives with Phoebe.

And now I was turning all of this into songs and I needed to know. Who Cat was. Which is how I came to be turning the house upside down, looking for that last, elusive, photocopied zine. And also the damn T-shirt!

So far, I still haven't found the story. I live in hope. It's impossible that I wouldn't have kept it. It's just that the house is full of paper. It could be between anything.

The shirt, though. That I found. Eventually.

But before I finally remembered where it was (In a small compartment tucked away under the lid of a blanket chest made by my great-grandfather, who I never met.) I went looking for it in the racking under the boiler that supplies the heat for the heating system in this house. Or used to.

It was in a cupboard whose doors probably hadn't been opened since the pandemic. The heating system was in place when we moved into this house and that was the best part of thirty years ago. It's never really been touched in all that time.

When I opened those doors to look for the shirt, what I saw was a disaster about to happen. The boiler was rusting away at the base. Bits of the pipework were starting to sag. When you have a house, there are some problems you can kick down the road to Spring or Next Year and some you have to deal with Now. This was one of those.

So we got it done. We have a brand new heating system. It's great and it's guaranteed for seven years with an annual service contract. We're good on that front for a while. It cost £6,500. 

Six grand, ten Euros or a small fortune. It's a good thing I needed to find that T-Shirt when I did. 

Now if I can just find the damn story. I still need to know just who Cat really is.