The Amazing Life of Cats (13 page)

I
’d planned on getting an older cat so that I wouldn’t have the responsibility of caring for it for too long after my children left home, but when I phoned the vet I was strongly encouraged to consider taking ‘Tabby’. Tabby was only eight months old but on death row because she could not tolerate other cats and also vomited occasionally. This meant that she couldn’t cope with shelter conditions and was hardly first choice for those seeking a low-maintenance pet. By the time I rang she’d already used up her time at the vet’s, where she was being accommodated due to a lack of other options. It seemed that if I did not want her then she was out of luck.

A sole parent with two school-age children, one of whom faced particular challenges, I knew all about dysfunction. After a family discussion we decided we’d cope. After all, perhaps her vomiting was just the result of stress.

Tabby had been caught in a cat trap at the rear of a restaurant and her age was a ‘best estimate’—she’d also had kittens, which were not in evidence when she was caught, and had done well to survive a rough start though she was never to grow to a full-sized cat as her growth remained stunted.

When I brought her home the children were very excited, but Tabby was less than thrilled by yet another change of circumstances. My son, then eleven, asked if we could choose a new name for her. Tabby was hardly imaginative and I saw no problem—we lived in Byron Bay and every second person seemed to have changed their name, so why not our new cat?

My son disappeared while my daughter and I surveyed poor Tabby, miserable in her cat basket.

‘I think we should call her Freya,’ my son announced, reappearing suddenly.

‘That’s fine if your sister likes it too,’ I responded. ‘But why did you choose Freya?’

‘Freya is the Old Norse goddess of love and beauty,’ he explained. ‘And today’s Friday, which is “Freya’s day”.’

Freya was not a particularly rewarding pet for the children. She was not used to being petted or cuddled and it took a year for my son to be confident enough to pick her up and hold her. She vomited fairly regularly and the children cleaned up after her without complaint. However, any affection she did show us was greatly valued and her rather prickly personality was accepted as a consequence of her early experiences as well as being perfectly appropriate behaviour for a domestic goddess who did not need to explain herself to us mere mortals.

What I hadn’t foreseen was what a wonderfully useful ‘circuit breaker’ she could be with my two very different children. While they still bickered and fought, Freya was like Switzerland, a neutral territory which could be brought into play to defuse all manner of dramas. While speaking nicely to one’s sibling following an argument might normally be avoided, it was never too difficult to find something charming to comment on about Freya. More often than not the other child would be drawn into the conversation and our domestic goddess was again the centre of attention, arguments forgotten—at least for a while.

So when just eighteen months later she became seriously ill there was no hesitation when the vet said her only hope was to be taken to Brisbane for specialist attention. I explained to the children that there would be no expensive birthday or Christmas gifts for a couple of years but there was no question—they only wanted Freya to have a chance.

Our vet had taken x-rays and discovered the cause of Freya’s vomiting—most unusually, she retained a stricture in her throat (these normally disappear after birth) which had prevented her from being able to easily swallow food. He had never before seen this in an adult cat and she was now in serious danger from the dreadful abscesses that had formed in her throat.

The Brisbane vet was equally astonished and called in university colleagues, some who were on holiday, to see her rare condition. They operated to drain the abscesses and remove the build-up of compacted food in her oesophagus which had distended it and caused such suffering. She survived the operation and I learned how to inject her each day with the antibiotics she needed for her recovery. She was now only allowed soft food as the stricture was still in place.

She surprised us all with her rapid recovery but then, a year later, when she began to exhibit difficulties I was again faced with another expensive and even more difficult operation.

‘No one would blame you if you had her put down,’ said my vet.

But when I asked him what he’d do if she were his cat, he said he’d opt for the operation as she was still young and had the potential for a long life if it succeeded.

Again, I made a rushed trip to Brisbane—forgetting my wallet in the chaos and having to beg a service station manager to let me have the petrol I needed to get my dying cat and distressed son to the hospital where the vets were waiting.

This time things took longer—the doctors elected to remove the stricture this time, and this operation had never been done before with a cat so serious planning was needed. We returned home and the staff did a dress rehearsal using another cat which had already been euthanased (for other reasons) to ensure they all knew how to operate on her the next day.

With the sort of timing that life often has, I was also dealing with the end of my father’s life, and a slow and torturous ending it was for him, just days after Freya’s operation.

Amazingly, Freya survived and within a couple of days was doing acrobatics as usual, although looking very ‘punk’, having lost patches of hair in various spots, particularly down her neck and chest, where she had been shaved before being cut open and then stitched up. When the hair regrew it was apparent that it must have been hard to match up her stripes after shaving—she now has an uneven ‘join’ down her chest.

Someone once told me that you have a pet so you can learn about death. Having a pet also help you to learn about imperfections and challenges, about family, about not giving up, about trying everything possible and sometimes—as with Freya—succeeding. We were already dealing with these issues before Freya arrived but she bonded and encouraged us in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

Now, eight years on, Freya continues to be a domestic goddess, although for the past eighteen months she has lived with my ex-husband in the manner to which she has become accustomed. (He was already a fan but she recently won his further admiration by waking him to let him know that the washing machine was flooding the laundry floor.) When my children left home I took the opportunity to backpack around Asia and then move to Sydney for better work opportunities. I miss Freya every day, but she is safe and happy where she is and having her in Sydney is not possible, although I continue to pay her bills.

And my son tells me that the world’s oldest cat lived to be thirty-six, so he’s planning on having Freya move in with him once he owns a house. She turns ten tomorrow, so there may be plenty more years yet.

Fay Knight

One cat just leads to another.

Ernest Hemingway

‘Eddie’

B
lack Manx, white markings on belly, no tail. Six years old. Red collar with tags. Overweight. Miaows all day/night demanding attention. Won’t stay off counter tops. Eats directly from unattended plates, knocks glasses/bottles/vases onto the floor. Various expensive ailments. Doesn’t do tricks or anything interesting. Will give this cat to whoever returns my car keys, lost here last Friday.

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S
he leaned against my hand for the injections. She cringed only once, when the tag went in at the back of her neck. ‘Such a good, brave cat,’ said the vet, massaging the tag into her flesh.

‘You’ll be in a better place soon, Meow,’ I assured her.

That was late November. The English winter was setting in again.

She had come to me the previous January. I’d flown back to Britain from Hong Kong after a horrible New Year with David, my ‘partner’, ‘lover’, ‘unofficial fiancé’. I thought of him as all these things, but over the holiday it became clear that he was no longer wed to any of these descriptions. Who else was David? He was ‘The Englishman who bought a house in my name and let me live in it rent-free’. He visited from time to time. I guess what you’d call me is more obvious— to you, but not to me at the time. He said he’d be joining me when he found a job back in the UK that paid as much as he was earning in Hong Kong. Call me a sucker.

The taxi pulled up outside the house. Snow lay thick on the pathway. I still wasn’t used to the dark afternoons, or the cold of Britain. Snow was slippery. I dragged my suitcase gingerly to the front door.

On the doorstep, a grey and white cat meowed.

‘Go away,’ I said. David hated cats. I turned the key in the lock. ‘You heard me.’

‘Meow,’ said the cat, looking straight at me in a beseeching way. I knew how it felt. I’d felt like that through most of New Year in Hong Kong.

‘Are you lost?’

I pushed open the door and the cat dashed in. It meowed again. I left the suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen. The people who’d looked after the house had left milk.

‘Meow,’ insisted the cat as I poured some milk and then placed the saucer on the floor.

The cat only sniffed it and said ‘meow’ again. It wanted something
else
.

‘Maybe there’s some tuna.’ There was. ‘Eat that.’

She ate a little when I stroked her. It wasn’t food she was after.

David had been strange for the whole ten days in Hong Kong. He was irritated that I was last off the plane when I arrived at the airport. On my second day, when I gave in to smoking a few cigarettes with a friend, he said, ‘Well, I certainly don’t want to be with a smoker.’

When we’d first met he said he liked that I sometimes smoked. Women who smoked were less inhibited, he said, then.

The cat jumped on the sofa where I sat to take off my boots. It tried to get on my lap. I pushed it away.

‘I don’t want you getting attached. Okay?’ She wasn’t starving and her coat was healthy. She belonged to someone.

David ‘belonged’ to someone else too, though ‘only in law’, he claimed, before he bought the house. We were moving from Hong Kong to England together so that after the divorce he could rebuild his relationships with his daughters. A good man, I thought. I’d gone ahead of him to start a university course that gave me legitimacy to be in Britain until he was free to marry me.

The cat jumped on the sofa again and gave a demanding meow.

‘All right. Sit with me. And calm down.’

Calm down. That’s what David was always saying. ‘You’re too emotional.’

Too emotional, and I sometimes smoked, and I wanted him to talk to me. All points against me.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I just can’t deal with you at the moment. I can’t cope. I’m getting a divorce, changing jobs, and relocating back to Britain. Do you know these are the most stressful things a person can go through? Apart from death. I can’t deal with your demands.’

‘I just want to . . . talk to you.’

He pushed me away in the bed on the first night of the holiday, and we hadn’t seen each other for three months. He wasn’t sleeping, he said. On the third night he suggested I sleep in another room.