The Amazing Life of Cats (18 page)

S
iamese cream-coloured kitten, deep dark velvet paws, nose, ears and tail. Blue eyes, a slight squint and a kink, a kink in her tail and a squint in her eyes, just what pedigree lovers used to despise! So my mother’s cousin Hetty, breeder of noble Siamese cats, not wanting an odd one, gave her to me.

It was a warm summer’s evening. I was ready for bed, newly washed and in my nightdress. It was my birthday; I was seven years old.

‘Close your eyes, darling Tess,’ my mother said. ‘Hold out your hands in a cup shape, close together.’

I wondered what on earth my new toy would look like and I waited in anticipation.

This was my first encounter with Kitty Car, prickly little claws on the softness of my hands and a vision of surprise to the delight of my now open eyes, a lively ball of fluff, she looked at me and hissed and jumped straight out of my hands, to hide. I enticed her from under the sofa with a ball of string, I clutched her, held her close to my chest—she was mine, mine, mine. I knew I would cherish her forever, and I think as cats do she knew that I was hers, hers, hers, and that she would cherish me forever.

This was the start of a volatile, passionate relationship, laden with control issues, fallings-out, cuddles, hissing, spite and a most enduring, endearing special kind of love that lasted nineteen years. Kitty Car became my best friend, my solace in an angry, confused and emotionally tattered home life. She was my confidante, my everything, all that an unhappy child needed. I loved her more than life itself, more than any parent or sister or friend; in many ways she was my reason for being. Oh, how I loved that cat.

She had total control of my sleeping habits, and how I was allowed to lie. She would rest her chin on my cheek and her paws in my hand—she wanted to stay still just like that and she would, given the chance, all night. Being human I liked to turn over, lie on my back or my side, but if I so much as tried to move, I was biffed by an angry tail and hissed at most determinedly in the nearest ear she could find. Failing full control of my movements, she would lie over my neck and set herself up in the same position, head on cheek, paw in hand. I still miss that today—I still miss her today.

She was quite an adventurer, finding her way up to chimneys and rooftops that she could not find her way down from. Brave Tess used to save her from places where others dared not go!

That cat! Once, she disappeared for a week; the whole family was on red alert, searching, but we couldn’t find her. My despair was immense—I couldn’t sleep, concentrate or think. I had lost my best friend and, worst of all, I felt totally responsible for not finding her and letting her suffer starvation and dehydration somewhere in a dark and lonely place.

That cat! She appeared after a week—well, not quite appeared: her faint and distant meows were heard by our next-door neighbour high in the loft of his barn. I think the whole family went around with a ladder. I cannot quite remember. I do know my father climbed the ladder first, but Kitty Car was stuck between two rafters and my father was too big to reach her. Which meant only one thing: yep, I had to go and get her.

The ladder was long and wobbly and the loft was pitch black; I could not see her, only hear her pitiful meows. I stretched my arm out in the dark as far as I could, and I soon felt her, hissing, spitting and clawing at me, full of fear. I grabbed her and yanked her from the rafters. She was as skinny as anything; I held her tight and she started purring loudly. My spirited and courageous cat, she was soon put in front of a bowl of food and water. This last escapade was her final attempt at anything quite so dangerous.

When I was fifteen, I went to Switzerland to train as a chef. My mum said Kitty Car slept on my bed for months after I left; she was quite bereft without me. But, as cats do, she needed warmth and love and was soon to be found sleeping on my mother’s bed. Mum told me, however, that she always knew when I was coming home, because Kitty Car would go back to my room and sleep on the pillow at least six weeks prior to my return home.

By the time she was nineteen she was skinny, wobbly on her feet and had kidney problems, and I knew that she had been suffering with my mother, who had become unable to look after her properly. On one of my visits home I decided to have her put down. The vet came to the house and Kitty Car sat purring on my lap; she knew what was happening, she knew as the injection went in that she was dying and she looked at me with such love and appreciation, I knew she was happy to go. We buried her in the garden under the old-fashioned roses.

Such was the spirit of Kitty Car, I still dream about her, and see her dashing past me. I thought no cat could ever take her place or come close in character to her—that is, until I met Kaba, my black cat, but that is another story.

Tessa Baker

Cats are not impure; they keep watch
about us.

The Prophet Muhammad

Part Cat, Part Dog,
Part Noodle-head

M
y flatmate Peter and I learned three things the day we took our recently adopted tortoiseshell stray, Starvin’ Marvin, to the vet: Starvin’ Marvin was actually female; she wasn’t desexed; and she was expecting. In our defence, neither of us had really owned a cat before, so we were both uninitiated when it came to the world of felines. Until now.

A month later, Marvin gave birth to her kittens in our laundry cupboard, serenaded by my brother on guitar while a group of us watched in awe. It was one of the best and also one of the most repulsive things I’ve ever witnessed. Into this world came Fuzzbucket (a crazy fuzzball with hypnotic eyes), Tippy (tortoiseshell with a white tip on her tail), Pippy (the black and white shorthair runt), and, because it rhymed, Zippy (another black and white shorthair, and the only boy). At first you could hold them in the palm of your hand; in a matter of weeks they were learning to walk, tails straight up, heads slightly too large for their bodies. Then it wasn’t long before they were amusing us with random ambushes or having all-in brawls.

Too soon, they were four weeks old and it was time for them to be given away. We lined up owners for three of them, but little Pippy—the adorable shy thing that she was—would stay with me.

The night before Zippy was to be given away, the kittens slept piled on an armchair in the lounge room as usual. In the middle of the night Marvin leapt off my bed, waking me up, and I heard a commotion out in the lounge room. I followed Marvin out, switched on the light—no kittens in sight, and blood on the floor.

I screamed.

Peter ran out of his bedroom and we managed to find three of them hiding, then tracked bloody paw prints back to my bedroom where Zippy must have wandered while we were searching. He was in a bad way. Peter took him up the road to the vet, where Zippy was operated on immediately. The vet’s diagnosis: a bloody big tomcat got in through our cat flap and attacked the male of the litter, as tomcats apparently do, grabbing him around the neck with his teeth.

Zippy almost didn’t make it. He was in intensive care for a week. I cried when we visited him—this tiny, badly injured kitten in a big glass box.

I was a university student in Wollongong and Peter was unemployed but we scraped together several hundred bucks to pay the vet for saving poor Zippy. We took him home, but there was no way we could give him away now—he was in no shape, looking as he did like he’d been through the wars. We started calling him Ned after the Vietnam vet character from
South Park
, because of the neck wounds he’d sustained. And even though he recovered, for a while afterwards he had an eye problem and walked diagonally. How could we give away a poor thing like that? So a few months later when I decided to move out of our wonderful falling-down house, I took Ned, as he’d become known, with Pip and me, and Marvin stayed with Peter.

At some point after we moved into our new share house, Ned, who was a bit wacky since the attack and had developed some peculiar mannerisms, became known as Neddy Noodle-head, and eventually just plain Noodle. Seriously, he was a cat trapped in a dog’s body— it’s the only way to explain it. He forgot to wash his face after he ate; in fact, he was generally a bit remiss with hygiene for a while there. He ran around the house like a mad eejit, destroying everything in sight and basically getting into mischief. Some mornings I woke up to a weird ripping sound, looked over the side of the bed and there was Noodle, hanging upside down from the mattress, clawing my sheets without a care in the world. He once stuck his face in a candle and ended up with whiskers singed in the shape of a Dali moustache.

Noodle got stuck on the roof of the flat across the road and a Canadian student had to climb a tree to get him down; he brought home pigeons almost as big as he was. One day he came home with a broken foot and had to wear a cast for weeks. The saddest yet funniest thing: Noodle clomping down the hallway on his peg leg. He kept pulling off the cast, of course, to my dismay. We became well acquainted with the vet during that time. Noodle was utterly exasperating—and bloody expensive.

I now have a confession to make. At one point I decided two cats was too much—Noodle’s a nutty character but he was also a handful. And my then boyfriend was looking for a cat. I rationalised it: two cats was a lot of money for a student, especially when one cat required the services of a vet on a semi-regular basis. Plus Noodle hadn’t been part of the plan. Pip was the one I had originally chosen (cute, petite, quiet as a mouse, pristine, loved a good tummy-rub and wouldn’t bite your arm off or tear your house apart and hardly ever needed medical attention, good old Pip). If Noodle hadn’t been attacked, he would have been given away as a kitten anyway. So I gave Noodle to my boyfriend.

So foolish! I’m not sure of much in this topsy-turvy world and I sure as hell didn’t believe in destiny, so I was yet to realise that this cat and I were meant to be together.

My boyfriend and I, however, were not. We broke up shortly afterwards. I was really sad to say goodbye—to both of them—but I thought it was for the best.

Six months passed, and I finally graduated. I ran into my ex at graduation and he told me the distressing news that Noodle had gone missing not long after our break-up, at the same time that a very strange neighbour moved away. Conclusion? Noodle had been catnapped! A small search party consisting of Peter and my brother was launched, following a smattering of clues. No joy. No Noodle. That was that.

Another six months passed. One day the phone rang—it was the RSPCA. Did I have a domestic shorthaired black and white cat? I sure do and she’s right here, I said as I looked at Pip.

So who’s this Noodle we’ve got here then?

Noodle! The magic of microchipping reunited us. I went to the RSPCA and my happiness waned as they brought out a cage containing a skinny, mangy, black and white cat. He had a hole in his neck from a burst abscess, a dead tick hanging off him, and he was howling. Noodle looked like hell. As feral as he looked, I bailed him out and took him to the vet. Noodle was hostile. The vet took one look at him and tried to inject him with antibiotics. Noodle wasn’t fond of that idea. With a snarl he whipped around, pulled the syringe out with his teeth and threw it across the room. The vet and I jumped back, our eyes meeting in a shared
What the?!
expression.

Noodle calmed down and, despite my misgivings, I triumphantly brought him home. Thankfully he didn’t eat Pip for breakfast as I feared he would; instead they fell into a grudging tolerance of one another. And after a little while, once Noodle recovered and got used to us again, life went on as if he’d never left.

I hadn’t learned anything though. The next year I tried to move to Sydney without him. Noodle stowed away in the moving truck. Once moved in, he befriended our neighbours. ‘There’s Noodle!’ I heard people say as I stood on the street, calling him in for dinner.
What am I, chopped liver?
I thought. Noodle went AWOL a lot, and got into many fights. Once, he went missing for five days and I tracked him down to a groovy couple’s house along the road, where they’d been feeding him for a while and calling him, of all things, Dennis. He’d totally conned them. They explained to me that they would’ve adopted him but they were going overseas. Er, except that he’s my cat. I gave them a look, pointed out his name and my number on his tag, and whisked him away in disgust. Dennis!

After a year in the city I moved back down the coast so I could save money to go overseas. Noodle stayed with my sister Kate for the year I was gone. When I came back, I moved in a couple of streets away from Kate; when I got the cats back, Noodle persisted in venturing over to Kate’s pretty much every day. Only problem was, he never found his way back and Kate had to either drop him off or I had to pick him up. I suspected he was after the car rides—in the front passenger seat, front paws on the dash, face almost pressed up against the windscreen. He was definitely a dog.

I think he’s finally mellowing out a bit. We’ve spent the past few years back in the big smoke and last year some bad things happened, but some good things happened too. When my lovely stepdad died, the cats temporarily moved in with Mum down in dairy farm country, where they all kept each other company. Noodle immediately made himself at home, climbing up the inside of the screened-in porch, drinking out of the sink, abseiling down the curtains with his claws, helping himself to momentarily unattended cheese or, better yet, chocolate slice.