A Tabby-cat's Tale (3 page)

Once Xulu realized that the marriage wasn't going to happen, she stopped picking fleas off of Tabby. In fact, whenever she came around, she openly held her nose and refused to touch our crockery, sit in our chairs or stand in our living room, and, insofar as it was possible, she avoided touching any of the surfaces. Ideally, she would have liked to be suspended in mid-air. With the air of someone who was braving a tiger's lair, she would repeat: ‘Oh my god, it stinks! It stinks!'

We lived seven floors up, on the top floor, and had access to the roof for the entire block, via a step-ladder that went through a skylight in the corridor ceiling. There was a huge water tank up there—it supplied all the flats from the fifth floor upwards—and a sprinkling of TV aerials, nothing more. It was a substantial space, and completely deserted. It also commanded an incomparable view of the city's imposing skyline, right up to the Jinling Hotel and the Yangtse Bridge in the hazy distance. There was always a stiff breeze on the roof, but at least the air was fresh and you could take deep breaths.

There was a time when the residents used to go up to the roof to cool off after hot summer days, but then access was forbidden—they were worried the children might lose their footing and fall off. An exception was made for National Day, however, when entire families would troop up there to see the fireworks. People kept using it anyway, to view a lunar eclipse or watch comets; our roof became quite an observatory, it was even equipped with a long-range telescope that someone had lugged up there. In the end, it proved too popular, and someone put their foot through the insulating slabs. The roof started letting rain and snow in to the flats, and the observatory was closed once and for all.

Nevertheless, my brother slipped a backhander to the caretaker and got himself a key. Then he sneaked Tabby up there. He provided the cat with an old quilt to sleep on, and the roof became the cat's domain. The concrete insulating slabs kept the sun off of him—he lived in the space between the slabs and the asphalt roof underneath, in the greatest of comfort. According to my brother, Tabby enjoyed the largest per capita footprint in the whole of Nanjing, since the whole roof, an area which covered four entire flats, as well as the corridor, now belonged solely to him. It was vast compared to the nooks and crannies in which he had taken refuge during the time when he lived with us.

Every day, my brother took up food and fresh water, calling ‘Tabby! Tabby!' until the cat gave an answering meow from some deep cavity between the concrete insulating slabs and the asphalt roof. Then my brother, reassured, would put the food down and come back downstairs. So it went on, day after day. Sometimes I would accompany my brother to see Tabby. Of course, he never showed his face. There were a few signs, but even they were somewhat doubtful—bits of dirty cat fur or a desiccated turd, for example. It was very different from the time he had spent in the flat, when his existence was in absolutely no doubt. The flea bites proved it. But the fleas had disappeared when Tabby moved out. We had a collective drive to clean every corner, and keep it clean, so there was nowhere for them to hide. The smell of cat pee grew fainter too, until it was gone completely. Adjusting to a clean-smelling environment so suddenly was difficult, and I thought if I went up to the roof I could smell that familiar pong again, but I was disappointed. Although Tabby's turds and pee were everywhere, and my brother no longer bothered with cinders, the fresh breeze and the occasional violent storm rendered them completely odourless. The fleas survived in this harsh environment by retreating into Tabby's tangled fur. In fact, that was the only place they could live; Tabby never bothered with washing, and on him, they lived and bred until they reached saturation point. Biological warfare was confined to fleas and cat—no humans were involved.

My brother regularly replenished the saucers with fresh food and clean water and took them back up again. After a while, he stopped calling for the cat. The state of the food saucer told him if Tabby was hale and hearty: untouched food meant either that he was ill or that he was being picky about his dinner—my brother had to decide which. If the former, then he would take extra care to prepare something that would whet the patient's appetite, and cautiously mix in some powdered antibiotics. But he then discovered that if Tabby left his food, it wasn't because he was ill; on the contrary, he was healthier than ever. It was because, now that he was an outdoor cat, he had taken against cooked food. Once my brother had come to this conclusion, he found that his work load lightened considerably. No more daily cooking chores (and no more pongy food smells wafting through the flat). All he had to do was deliver the raw fish heads.

Our building was in the shape of an H that had been turned on its side, with south- and north-facing horizontals, on the left-hand end of which we had our flat. There were two families on each floor of the horizontals, while the vertical consisted of linking corridors. The corridors were short, so that our balcony was no more than a couple of metres from the back window of the corresponding flat on the upper horizontal. In summer, our neighbor's air-conditioning blew hot air right into our flat, and when Tabby took up residence on our balcony (as I will come to later), the pong wafted over to them and they had to keep their window shut.

My brother then found a way of using the unusual design of the block to supply Tabby without having to carry his food upstairs. He stood on the balcony and whirled two plastic bags (one with food, the other with water) around his head, hurling them through the air so that they landed on the roof of the flat opposite with a splat. Tabby was quite capable of tearing the bags open himself. If the water bag burst on impact, Tabby simply licked every drop of water from the wet concrete slabs. To start with, my brother was worried that the water might be soaked up by the concrete, but gradually the slabs became saturated and a small puddle formed in a dip. If my brother aimed for the dip, he found that he could to fill it with no difficulty at all, by means of, at most, three bags. At the height of summer the water rapidly evaporated, so he filled the bags with ice cubes. They would cool Tabby down and he could drink his fill as they melted.

My brother was painstaking in his efforts to satisfy every aspect of Tabby's needs. Still, he felt guilty, mainly because he was spending much less time with the cat than he had before. It had all become so incredibly easy. Tabby could even remind my brother when it was dinner-time; he would walk to the edge of the roof, peer over at our balcony, and meow. He was obviously expressing a desire for company, which pleased us, but it saddened us too—he must have been dreadfully lonely. When we heard the voice of our old friend, we looked up at him through eyes that were bleary with tears. Tabby had once had clear black and white markings. Now he was grey all over, a dirty, slovenly, murky grey—partly perhaps because he was getting old, partly because he never washed and had no human or other cat to tend to his fur.

My brother slung the food on to the roof every day. His face was expressionless, as if this were a job like any other. It had to be done skilfully and accurately, but he wasn't greatly interested in it. To anyone else, however, it looked bizarre; in fact, it had a magnetic draw. By this time, I'd moved out of the family flat, but I used to come home especially to watch the spectacle of my brother feeding Tabby. It gave me a feeling of exhilaration to watch, and I told other people too. Xulu, as my girlfriend, had the pleasure of being the next to see it, and she was followed by other friends of mine, who dropped by on one pretext or another—to borrow a book or because their work brought them into the area. Still others just had our word to go on, if they couldn't make a personal visit. Eventually, the fact that my brother's cat was peculiar was no longer a matter for comment, but the peculiar methods he used to feed it were. His movements had such grace, such flair, imagination and feeling, and how effective they were! My brother, meanwhile, was oblivious to the effect his behaviour was having on people.

Every now and then, my brother would climb on to the roof to pick up the plastic bags. Occasionally Tabby would make an appearance, no longer the shy cat he had once been, no doubt because he saw his master so infrequently. When my brother threw the food up from the balcony, Tabby would come right to the edge of the roof to watch us, and as night fell and we switched our lights on, he could see into the flat if we didn't draw the curtains. Did he look? Every day? Did deep feelings stir in that feline heart as the night drew on and day finally dawned in the east?

One day I went up with my brother and Tabby came over to us. My brother put the food down and reached out to stroke him all the way down his back, bringing away soft, fine, dusty grey fur which slipped from his fingers like soap bubbles. I watched the balls of fur rolling far away over the roof. As my brother smoothed the cat's fur, we talked. Our conversation had nothing to do with Tabby, and my brother didn't even look at him, he just rubbed the fingers of his right hand together from time to time, to rid them of the fur that stuck to them, and then went back to his stroking. Tabby was intent on gulping down his dinner, his neck craned over the saucer. Gradually the sun sank in the west and the golden rays of dusk touched our faces, before they too disappeared and darkness fell. My brother was talking about some mutual friend who'd given up her job for love and moved from the northeast to Nanjing, where she'd had a son. Now the son was grown up and in the first year of university, and his parents had divorced. The woman had gone back to the northeast on her own. It was a sad story, I agreed, and I kept nodding as he told it. But what did it have to do with Tabby? Nothing. None of these things had anything to do with each other: Tabby's dinner and his autumnal moult, my brother's news and his rhythmic strokes, my earnest attention . . . and yet they were melded together. Each element of the scene impinged on and balanced the others. And in turn, they were all of a piece with the evening light that bathed the rooftop.

Tabby had to move again, this time at the neighbours' insistence.

They said they were worried that Tabby's pee and crap might get into the tank on the roof and pollute the water supply. The tank had a concrete slab for a lid—it was so heavy that it took two people to lift it—but who could guarantee that there weren't cracks in the cistern, or elsewhere? Tabby might have peed in the cracks, and besides, the concrete lid was extremely porous—if Tabby continually peed on the lid, it might seep through into the tank. And that was without taking the persistent whiff of urine into account. It might easily waft into the tank and give the water an odd taste. From the fifth floor upwards, every household, apart from ours, noticed the strange taste at the same time. The day they all went up onto the roof and saw desiccated turds and fish bones littered around was the last straw. They drew a sample of water from the water tank and sent it off for analysis, in the firm expectation that the results would go against my brother. But they were inconclusive—the lab had insufficient data about the composition of cat urine. The neighbours then complained that their flats were leaking and that it was my brother's fault—that he, in his comings and goings on the roof, had damaged the insulating slabs. (Fortunately for Tabby, they didn't accuse him of damaging the slabs—not even a leopard or a Tabby from the northeast of China had a tread that heavy.) They were quite capable of fabricating evidence—they knew the insulating slabs had been damaged by families who were watching fireworks or comets, long before my brother started going up there to feed Tabby. The building caretakers pronounced peremptory judgement: my brother's footprints, taken together with the yellow rainwater stains in the residents' ceilings, proved that my brother was to blame—he must move the cat. My mother was furious at the injustice of the decision and tried to dispute it, but my brother simply buttoned his lips and denied Tabby's existence. ‘Who says I'm keeping a cat up there?' he said. ‘Find it and show me.' Of course, by this juncture Tabby had taken refuge deep underneath the insulating slabs. My brother had perfect confidence in Tabby's ability to stay hidden and was prepared to shamelessly deny his existence, despite the secondary evidence provided by the cat turds and fish heads. The neighbours knew my brother was lying but couldn't expose him. There were those who demanded that the insulation be stripped off. This was absolutely not what they wanted, they warned my brother, they needed the insulation to prevent leaks in the roof, but they were willing to destroy it in order to expose my brother's deviousness. What was to be done? My brother wasn't a bad man. He was just annoyed at the neighbours, which was why he had denied Tabby's existence. What did they mean by dragging the management into it? Besides, they had all ganged up against our family, against a poor little cat. The more my brother thought, the angrier he got. Still, neighbours were neighbours, and the matter couldn't be allowed to fester. My brother resolved the dilemma for everyone: he acknowledged that Tabby was living under the insulating slabs, but he added honestly: ‘I have no way of getting the cat out and catching it.' He demonstrated this by calling for Tabby in front of the neighbours. They all joined in: ‘Puss puss puss! Puss puss puss!' The most hostile and argumentative of people suddenly adopted the gentlest and sweetest of tones. But all in vain. There wasn't a peep out of Tabby; some of the neighbours even began to doubt the cat's existence themselves. Everyone began treating each other with such courtesy, it seemed incredible they hadn't resolved matters like this from the start! The neighbours, now appeased, felt awkward at having bothered a helpless orphan kitty; my brother calmed down and felt bad that he had given his neighbours cause for alarm. ‘You all go down,' he said. ‘I'll tempt him out. He's a timid creature, he's never seen such a ruckus before.' They told him: ‘There's no hurry. If you can't get him out now, keep him here. What does another year or 18 months matter?'

Winter was closing in, and there was a cold north wind blowing. In the heat of the arguments, no one had felt the drop in temperature, but now they all hunched up inside their coat collars and made their way down the step-ladder. My brother and I stayed to call Tabby, but when he didn't respond, we climbed down to the corridor too.

There was a violent snowstorm that night. The next morning, worried neighbours knocked at the door. Wouldn't Tabby freeze to death in this cold weather? They sounded perfectly sincere. This wasn't just another way of trapping the cat and bringing him down. My brother, however, was happy to reassure them that Tabby had moved down before the storm began and was living on our balcony. And he led them through the flat—not to admire the snow-scape but to point out to them a crudely-knocked-together shelter of a peculiar shape . . . Tabby's new home.

The shelter, in the northeast corner of the balcony, was made of broken bricks and roofed over with bits of lino and plastic sheeting. On its south side was an opening about the size of a book. My brother had only needed to build two walls, since the north side was our flat and the east side was the solidly-built balcony wall. The cracks in the walls had been stuffed with wood chips and bits of white polystyrene—anything my brother could get his hands on. All the neighbours saw was a perfectly neat and clean cat shelter. They couldn't see the cat who, naturally, was closeted inside. They bent and peered in through the door. Before they were able to make anything out, they heard a noise—Tabby's warning hiss—and this enabled them to pass judgment. Tabby really was in there and no longer roaming around on the roof. And so a cease-fire was declared between our family and the neighbours.

Tabby's movements were severely curtailed on the balcony. In fact, as long as we kept the door to the balcony shut, we could keep the flat clean. As time passed Tabby got used to it, and even if the balcony door was left open, he wouldn't put as much as a paw inside the room. Our three-bedroom, one-sitting-room home had become alien territory, its drawers and under-bed spaces no longer the refuges they had once been. Under threat, his only place of safety was the cat shelter on the balcony. Besides the cat shelter, the rest of the rectangular space was bare, my mother's plants having been grazed by Tabby, and then fumigated by his BO. All that remained to remind us of the once splendid display of flowers was a stack of flowerpots with a few lumps of dried mud inside. There was nothing to entertain Tabby. He couldn't come into the flat. If he got sick of his shelter and the balcony, he could only leap up onto the railings and drop to his death below.