The Amazing Life of Cats (11 page)

For those of you who have not been through the rescue centre process, it is not easy. To begin with there are so many animals begging for a home—how do you choose? The kids and I decided to sit down on a bench and just watch the cats for a while; we were all immediately drawn to a beautiful tortoiseshell who was playing with some younger cats, young enough for me to think that they might be her kittens. She was tall and slim, with a very elegant, almost Siamese face, and she was unbelievably friendly, leaving her games to jump on our laps and purr, and then hopping down to start playing again.

While she and the kittens were playing, I noticed another, much smaller kitten, also a tortoiseshell, playing by itself. Taking no notice of the larger cats who were treating it with disdain, it tumbled itself into a tunnel and out again, chased its little tail and generally showed signs of an independence that was endearing in one so young. I thought it was probably not more than six weeks old; as it was a tortoiseshell I wondered if it might be the other cat’s kitten and whether she had deserted it for the larger kittens that were more fun. My daughter picked up the little kitten and held her close, while I tried very hard to persuade myself that I couldn’t possibly take two cats.

We all knew that we wanted the larger cat—there was just no question. I learned that Ghia, as the centre had named her, had been found living under a house in Byron Bay, and that no, they weren’t her kittens, not even the baby look-alike—her own kittens had all found homes, but so far she had not. As for the baby, she had been found abandoned with her brothers and sisters on the side of the road at only a few weeks old—and she was the last one left.

Well, there was no hope for it, was there? It had to be the two. So we set off back home, Ghia registering protests from the cardboard box we had taken with us, and the little one in serious danger of being cuddled to death.

The kitten had no name, so various ideas were toyed with until Anna, my daughter, suggested Tiny; even though I pointed out that the kitten would grow up and get bigger, that was it, there was no dissuading her. Tiny she became and still is, even though she isn’t!

The cats had very different personalities from the start. Tiny was already very eager to please, keen to use the litter tray, and only once or twice mistook my boxes of papers that I’d accidentally left on the floor. She loved to play, but was equally happy hanging out and being cuddled. Ghia, despite her affectionate nature, very quickly got the message across that she was not, under any account, to be locked in. A locked-in Ghia meant disaster on a big scale—it occurred to me that she’d obviously spent her whole life roaming, and that it was probably better to leave the laundry window open at all times so she could come and go, which she did happily enough for quite a few months.

But then the wandering began to get more serious. First it was one night away, then, a few weeks later, two nights. I reverted to locking her in again, but she literally broke the window in her efforts to get out, and so I resigned myself to the fact that she must be free to come and go, whatever it might mean.

What it meant was that one day she went, and did not come back.

We called into houses in the area, put up notices, put an ad in the paper, all to no avail. But then a week or two after Ghia’s disappearance Anna and her dad were driving down the road towards his house when Anna saw Ghia shoot across the road. She rang and told me and I hightailed it up to the house nearest to the spot. The people there told me they had been away for a few days and she may have taken shelter there as they had seen her when they got home; but they were back, and they had dogs, so although I asked them if they would ring if they saw her again, I was pretty sure she would not show up.

And that was the case. My lovely Ghia had disappeared from our lives and the best that I could hope was that she had shown her loving self to another family and been adopted, and not been taken by a predator, or bitten by a snake, or left too long to fend for herself.

A few weeks after her disappearance a neighbour told me that some local people had found a ginger cat and thought it might be mine. In my optimism I decided they didn’t know their tortoiseshell from their ginger and grabbed one of the very smart cat carriers I had bought for Ghia and Tiny. But when I got to the house what I found was a very large, very domesticated male ginger cat. The people whose holiday house he had ended up at were back off to the city later that day, and had no idea what to do with this large gentleman who had walked up their driveway and sat down.

Since I had the carrier I said I would take him to the vet and see if he was microchipped; if not, I would advertise him and put notices up—at least I might be able to reunite Ginger (as he was, of course, immediately named) with his family as I had not been reunited with Ghia.

Unfortunately he was not microchipped, and even more unfortunately I discovered that in Ginger I had another problem child on my hands. Number one, he didn’t take to Tiny, and despite her friendliness he made it perfectly clear to her and us that he expected that she should vacate her family home in favour of him. He was also a cuddle bully. If you were sitting on the sofa, he would leap on top of you, pin you down with a giant paw on each shoulder, and proceed to lick your chin. If you registered a protest, he swiped you with his paw! In addition, he loved to spring surprise attacks on anyone who seemed vulnerable, latching himself ferociously onto your legs, particularly when you were walking back from the shower to the bedroom.

He was also the most fearsome killer I had encountered since the Siamese cats of my childhood, and I was soon reminded why I hadn’t wanted another cat in my life. Attaching a bell to his collar made no difference at all, and I frequently opened my bedroom door in the morning to be greeted by small corpses, mostly (thank goodness) headless rats rather than anything more environmentally sensitive, but enough of them to make a person quite queasy.

What was I to do? The first ad I placed produced no calls. Tiny had meanwhile been sent down the road to live with my ex and the children when they were there; although I missed her being with me, she seemed to have settled in well, but it was not a permanent solution. It was Ginger that needed to go.

The first thing was to teach him manners, and he was such a large cat—more lion than cat in some respects—that I set about it in a rather more abrupt and brutal way than I would normally use: I began to establish clear boundaries. He leapt, I threw him. He scratched, I threw him. If he sat on my lap and swiped, I hit him and threw him. Within about two weeks I had the world’s best behaved cat on my hands.

That was the first problem solved.

I advertised him in lost and found again, and this time the phone rang. It was a young boy. ‘I think it’s my cat,’ he said. He described Ginger and yes, he sounded pretty like the same cat. But I needed to know a little more.

‘Did he sometimes attack you?’ I asked.

‘Not me so much as my little sister,’ he said.

Aha, I thought. We talked about some of Ginger’s less pleasant habits, and he laughed and said that even though Ginger (who had another name that I’ve since forgotten) could be difficult, he loved him. I asked him why he was home from school and he said he wasn’t well, and had been flicking through the paper because he was bored, and I suggested that when his parents got home later that they should call me.

For some reason I didn’t take his number. The parents didn’t call back.

So that cleared up the mystery. Ginger had been dumped by either Mum or Dad, unwilling to wage war against the cat, and that explained his presence in our road.

Now that Ginger was a much more sociable cat (despite the continuing presence of headless rats in the house), the next thing to do was to actively try to find him a home, and so I advertised him in the newspaper as free to a good home. I pointed out his ratting qualities, his affectionate nature and his need for discipline and hoped for the best.

I couldn’t believe the response: the phone basically rang off the hook with people wanting him, but all were pipped to the post by the woman who called me first thing in the morning.

Her initial words were music to my ears. ‘Is he really a good ratter?’ she asked.

‘Unbelievable,’ I replied.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘because we’re inundated.’

I pointed out that due to his need for rather a large amount of cuddling he wasn’t exactly an outdoor cat, and she was unfazed, as she was by everything I said, including the warning that he had been prone to the odd rampant attack on us.

‘Oh,’ she said cheerfully, ‘I’ll just beat him up if he tries that with us.’

Excellent
, I thought.

She was married with two children, they lived in the country on a five-acre block and she could get there within the hour.

And in that strange way that cats seem to know when they are going to a good home, Ginger was absolutely happy to get into the cat cage, and didn’t make his distinctive yowling sound once. I rang a few times after that to check that Ginger was behaving himself; to my knowledge, he lives there still.

I was delighted to go and get my Tiny back, and she is now a not-very-tiny four-year-old who is the absolute delight of my family’s collective lives. The easiest, friendliest, sweetest cat I’ve ever owned, and—fortunately for the wildlife—without doubt the worst hunter I’ve ever known.

Candida Baker

There are many intelligent species in the
universe. They are all owned by cats.

Anonymous

Bags, Bowls and Butcher
Paper—The
Gattara
Way

Vocabulary

Gatto
or
gatta
: Italian for ‘cat’

Gattara
: a woman who cares for stray cats. Masculine form,
gattaro

I
saw my first
gattara
in the outer ring of the Colosseum at dusk. It was 1969, and it was the first evening of my first full day in Italy. Jetlagged, happily lost and in awe, my friend and I were blundering towards the Forum when we turned aside on an impulse to walk the perimeter of the Colosseum. That’s when we noticed them: several old ladies in black clothes and sensible shoes, walking separately through gathering shadows under the ancient columns, all carrying twine-handled shopping bags. You could tell they weren’t tourists. One white-haired woman turned and glanced at us, then put down her bag near the wall. Out of the bag came a nest of plastic bowls and several parcels wrapped in brown paper, which she opened and spread on the stones, paying us no further heed. The parcels held raw meat in bite-sized pieces, chicken wings saved from broth, and leftover pasta gilded with sauce.

Then came the cats, trotting briskly out of the shadows, leaping lithely down from cubbyholes in the broken wall, or creeping closer and watching warily. The old woman set out the bowls, rattled them full of
croccantini
—crunchy dry food—and then stood back. First the big-headed toms moved in. Twitchy, scarred and vigilant, they ate hungrily and hurriedly, but there was plenty for all so no need for snarling. Then the other cats came, some timidly, some cautiously, some with a clear sense of entitlement. When the bowls and papers were all licked clean she gathered them up, stuffed them back in her bag and walked away smiling, without a backward glance at the scattered, sated cats left licking their whiskers. As my friend and I walked on round the amphitheatre we admired variations on that ritual performed by different players. We were impressed. It seemed so selfless, so simple, almost professional, clearly a vocation.

‘I swear,’ I said to my companion, ‘someday I’ll come back here and do that!’

Thirty years passed before I fulfilled my vow to the Colosseum cats—but by then they had been carted off to new official cat refuges. With just one night in Rome, I prowled the perimeter alone at dusk seeing not a single
gattara
and only a couple of contented tabbies— housecats on their evening
passeggiata
, or stroll—who merely sniffed at my offering of little mouthfuls of duck and hare. I’d nearly given up when a very pregnant tortoiseshell appeared from nowhere and gobbled down the lot. I left a pile of
croccantini
behind, and wished her well.

A
gattara
is not just one who likes cats, or who loves a cat or two of her own, but someone dedicated to helping homeless, wandering or freelance felines. Taking a cigarette break from cleaning litter boxes for her spotless home’s eleven cats, a third-generation
gattara
smilingly told me her family’s motto: ‘
Sempre in Servizio alla Razza Felina
.’ ‘Always in Service to the Feline Race.’ I adopted the saying as my own.

Every time my then-husband and I visited Italy we noticed plates and opened parcels in ruins, behind gates to abandoned gardens, on alleyway doorsteps, and outside coffee bars. We were sitting at a scenic table outside a coffee bar in Spoleto when we looked down to see a handsome young grey and black tiger looking up at us. His gorgeous green eyes assessed us calmly, then drifted to my
cornetto con crema
(a croissant filled with pastry cream, an earlier addiction of mine which thank heaven is now in remission, as I can’t afford cafés and cat food both). I broke off a bit, and he ate it eagerly. Our waiter was leaning against the wall outside the door, smoking, watching the scene, and we asked if this was the bar cat.