The Amazing Life of Cats (14 page)
‘You don’t love me any more,’ I realised, and made the mistake of saying this aloud. I was too demanding.
He shouted, ‘I just can’t cope with this.’
I slunk off to the other bedroom.
The cat kneaded my lap. ‘Meow, meow,’ she kept going, so I said ‘meow’ to her. She liked conversation.
‘Listen, meower, I’ve got problems of my own. You’re going to have to go. Find your real owner.’
I picked her up and opened the door. She stood in the snow, looked at me and said . . .
‘All right. Just one night.’
I took a photo and put her picture on a sign in the front window of the local newsagent. ‘IS THIS CAT YOURS? URGENTLY LOOKING FOR OWNER.’
Days passed. The cat came and went. At night, she always came back, knocking open the cat flap in the kitchen, tip-tapping up the stairs, meowing to announce herself and then leaping onto my bed. By the third night I was listening for her. David hadn’t called.
A week after my return I could no longer bear his silence. ‘Hi, darling,’ I said to the phone, remembering to smile, hearing the need in my own voice. He’d call it ‘a demand’.
‘Look, I’m up to my ears in things here. I don’t have time. What’s happened about the house? Have you done the repairs from the survey report?’
‘Being done. Andrew is coming over tomorrow to do the bathroom and . . .’
‘Andrew? Oh, yes. I don’t want to know the details. Just get it done and tell me how much it all costs.’
The cat’s owner got in touch. If I wanted the cat, I could have her, he said. Turns out the family had bought a new kitten for the kids and my cat—already I thought of her as mine—was jealous of the newcomer.
I hadn’t had an animal for twenty years. I was always moving on, going somewhere I hoped would be better. But now, I had a house, a garden, a home.
‘Meow,’ she said, every time I looked at her. Most of the time she just wanted a pat. She wanted me to sit down and stay in one place where she could feel me against her. Unlike David.
Andrew fixed the crack in the chimney and double-insulated the attic.
When David rang he wanted to know only how much it cost. He didn’t ask about my university studies.
‘How’s the cat?’
‘It meows a lot. When do you think you’ll be coming to Britain?’
He had a meeting in London in two weeks. ‘But I might not be able to get up to see you,’ he said.
Always I could see the solution. ‘I could come down to London.’
‘Yes. You could. But . . . We’ll see. I’m up to my neck in the divorce.’
‘You would come halfway across the world and not see me?’
I kept the cat locked in for ten days because she was now officially mine. I’d never seen a cat shed tears before. She wouldn’t eat unless I stroked her. Eventually I couldn’t stand seeing her imprisoned and let her out. But she didn’t leave. Not ever again. My house was her home now.
At Easter I left Meow with another student who house-sat while I caught a bus to Oxford to meet David. This was his old stamping ground. He wanted to show me his old college—especially the chapel where he’d married. All my expectations revived. The fritillaries were in bloom in the meadow. Little speckled bells. He was happy showing me his past, but he had to get up early for his meeting. The bloody divorce.
The cat was pleased to see me when I got back. She had a meow, I swear, that sounded like ‘hello’.
In mid-September, when the summer had come to an end and my university course was finished, David finally arrived back in the UK—for good, as they say. Not so good for me. He brought another woman back with him. I no longer had legitimate grounds to remain in the UK.
‘I’ll sell the house,’ I told him when I finally traced him on his mobile phone. ‘But I get to keep any profit I make to take Meow back with me to Australia.’
‘How much will that cost?’
‘A bit over two thousand pounds.’
‘That’s a very big gift you’re suggesting I give you.’
‘It’s not a suggestion.’
‘You mustn’t be sad,’ said the man from the international animal transportation company as he opened the box for Meow. She had to sit in that box all the way to Sydney and then spend a month in confinement before release to that better place.
‘I’ve seen strong army men break down worse than you when they say goodbye to their dogs,’ said the man, patting my arm. ‘You’ll see each other again in Australia.’
We did. She spent Christmas in ‘jail’, alone. I couldn’t visit, poor puss, because I’d flown via Hong Kong to pack up my old life.
But in the New Year, almost a year to the day after we first met in England, she was let out of quarantine and put on another flight to Brisbane. She was hungry for affection when I released her from the box. She sat on my lap and purred all through the drive to the beach house I’d rented.
She lay out on the hot wooden planks of the back verandah pretending to ignore the brush turkeys that raced past going ‘gobbledy-gobbledy’. She out-stared the water dragons. She caught a cicada and examined it. Sometimes she jumped onto my desk and assumed the old position to help me write. At night, she crept under the covers and slept against me.
It
was
‘a better place’.
The end was quick. It was a snake that got her.
I can’t write more.
Jane Camens
When the tea is brought at five o’clock,
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes,
Is suddenly purring there.
At first she pretends, having nothing to do,
She has come in merely to blink by the grate;
But, though tea may be late or the milk may be sour,
She is never late.
And presently her agate eyes,
Take a soft large milky haze,
And her independent casual glance,
Becomes a stiff hard gaze.
Then she stamps her claws or lifts her ears,
Or twists her tail and begins to stir,
Till suddenly all her lithe body becomes,
One breathing trembling purr.
The children eat and wriggle and laugh;
The two old ladies stroke their silk:
But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.
The white saucer like some full moon descends,
At last from the clouds of the table above;
She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
Transfigured with love.
She nestles over the shining rim,
Buries her chin in the creamy sea;
Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw
Is doubled under each bending knee.
A long dim ecstasy holds her life;
Her world is an infinite shapeless white,
Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,
Then she sinks back into the night.
Draws and dips her body to heap,
Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,
Lies defeated and buried deep,
Three or four hours unconscious there.
Harold Munro
The reason cats climb is so that they
can look down on almost every
other animal . . . it’s also the reason
they hate birds.
K.C. Buffington
I
t has been said that the horse serves humanity, assisting in the development of civilisations. They have shown true beauty and inspirational courage—as have our dogs. Dogs are our protectors, loving companions who give us their paw in lifelong friendship.
For me our friendly felines may be best described as a mystical link to an unfolding world. I feel cats are the mystics who possess the special quality of interpreting ethereal messages (often to their own advantage!) in the same manner as human seers, sages and shamans. They are so finely tuned into receiving and sending messages. I knew a cat that used me to find her rightful place in life. Her name was Lula, and this is her story.
The animals that graced our lives when we moved to Willoughby in Sydney were our dog, Tina Turner, and our cats Honky Tonk and Tamla Motown (Mowey), both beautiful tortoiseshell girls. Honky Tonk by this time was a grand old age, and one fine sunny day while lying in her favourite place in the garden she quietly passed away—a lady right to the end. Eddie, my partner at the time, found her and came to the back door to break the news; being a sensitive musician he had tears streaming down his face. She was given a beautiful burial in the garden and that night our family huddled together on the lounge consoling each other.
A few months later, a friend and I stopped to buy petrol in Regent Street, Chippendale, and as we were leaving in the pouring rain we heard meows of distress coming from the back of the ice machine. It was a cat, obviously lost, crying out in hunger. We bought milk and a pie from the garage, found a container to pour the milk into and pushed the food towards the inside of the machine. As we did so we saw a little chocolate-brown face appearing from the darkness; she headed straight to the food and milk, lapping and eating in turn. Believing puss would be found by his person or find his own way home, we decided to leave him to finish our offerings and drove off to our luncheon.
The next morning as light broke it was still pouring with rain. I was in the middle of describing to Eddie the plight of this little puss when I noticed he had retrieved the car keys and was already searching for a suitable receptacle for the rescue.
So, armed with a cardboard box and an old blanket we drove over the Harbour Bridge. We had two containers for food and water, some portions of what Tina and Mowey loved to eat, with some of Eddie’s roast chicken (I’m a vegetarian) and the pièce de résistance—a small tin of red salmon. But as we drove past Central Station towards Regent Street a thought crossed my mind. Gloves, I thought, might come in handy when gently trying to pry the young frightened feline out of his or her refuge.
We arrived at the service station with our umbrella, cardboard box, blanket and all the trappings—to the great interest of the service station attendant looking suspiciously out of his window behind the register. We made our way to the back of the ice machine with our offerings of friendship, squatted down under the cover of an umbrella and cooed softly, ‘Pusssss.’ We peered into the dark depths of the ice machine mechanics, again calling, ‘Puss cat, puss cat.’ We were in trepidation, not knowing what to wish for this little creature: whether it would be there to welcome its rescuers or would have had the good fortune to be found by its rightful owner.
Just as I was drawing another deep breath, out sprang the little one in a single leap, firmly attaching both front paws around my neck. Eddie and I looked directly into each other’s eyes while the kitten strongly vocalised its misfortune. I carefully stroked the little head and attempted to remove it and place it in the box, but under no circumstances was the little thing going to let go of the grip around my neck. All the way home it clung to me in the same position, occasionally resting its head to the side of my face.
By the time we arrived home I had managed to find out we had a beautiful little boy cat on our hands. I carried him to the garden shed, where I had prepared his bed for the night, carefully placed him on an old blanket, and stroked him until he settled enough to have something to eat and drink. It was Sunday—the next day I would take him to our kind lady vet for a check-up as I felt it would be unfair to our little Mowey to expose her to a feline nasty. Both Mowey and Tina Turner were nosing around the shed door in the rain, keen to have a peek. They both knew something was afoot and were desperately attempting to find out who or what was getting all this attention.
The attempt at segregation did not last long. I could not leave him alone in the shed, as each time I closed the door to leave his mournful meows brought me back. Up to the house we went, his paws clinging around my neck as I sat down on the couch for a while. Tina and Mowey greeted him gently and he finally let go of me long enough to meet his new family. From my experience, introducing animals can be a real hit or miss situation. Luckily, this meeting was blessed with kindness and love. Tina Turner softly wagged her tail while gently snuffling the new arrival, and little Mowey nosed him and stroked him with her whole body, softly purring until the three settled together.