A Tabby-cat's Tale (4 page)

In time, my brother moved to the south of the country to make some money, and my mother found a new partner and moved in with him. Responsibility for Tabby fell on my shoulders. I had to move back home, otherwise my brother would have had to delay his trip or my mother forego the prospect of domestic happiness in her declining years. In fact, they had procrastinated for some time because of Tabby—they thought that if they waited for him to die, then they could both go their own way. They never imagined that, notwithstanding the tough life Tabby had had, he seemed to be growing younger by the day and showed no signs of old age. An inveterate bachelor, he could enjoy his good health to the full, playing with his tail and grooming himself until the greyed fur returned to its former black and white. He looked like a different cat. My brother and my mother began to worry that, having outlived my sister-in-law, he would outlive them both. They couldn't, in all conscience, abandon him or let him starve to death, but when was it going to end? So I moved back home, and three years after my sister-in-law's death, my brother and mother gained their freedom.

I went to work every day, and in my spare time after work, I looked after Tabby. He had a routine that had been established by my brother and I simply continued it. I kept him out of the flat, so we had no more flea plagues. He lived on the balcony, consuming uncooked fish entrails and emptying his bowels, just as before. There was no need for cinders to cover his turds, I just swept them up. That still left the smell, which I couldn't sweep away, although it was confined to the balcony, of course. We had never glassed in the balcony to make a sun-room; in fact, I left it open to the elements, so that the fresh air blew at least half the smell away. The neighbours kept urging us to enclose the space, as some already had, but they had their own hidden agenda: to stop the smell from spreading to their flats. They were worried the pong would impregnate the clean clothes they hung out to dry on their balconies. There was no escape for those who shared the seventh floor with us, still less for our unlucky downstairs neighbours. They reckoned they could make their own balconies into sun-rooms, to keep out the ubiquitous pong, but in that case, I'd have to pay. The alternative was for me to glass mine in. Since they could enclose theirs, I replied, there was no need for me to enclose mine. I'd only agree to do it if people who already had sun-rooms dismantled them. It was a stand-off. People who had them were hardly going to pull them down, so, naturally, my own balcony remained open to the wind and the rain.

My problem was where to dry my own clothes. However high I strung up the clothes line, it overhung Tabby's domain, and steam from the warm cat turds would eddy up to the clothes. I tried nailing a metal frame to the wall and airing the clothes on that, but their weight pulled the frame down and they stank just the same. I happened to be reading a book which proclaimed that good and bad smells were basically the same, the former being simply a diluted form of the latter. It was just relative. This made perfect sense to me. In the meantime, the clothes that had been dried on my balcony acquired an indefinable smell, one that couldn't quite be described as a stink, though it would be exaggerating to call it a fragrance. I began to find myself surrounded by girls who didn't know that I had a cat; they inhaled my scent as if they were intoxicated. I couldn't, in all honesty, attribute this to my animal magnetism. I preferred to give the credit to Tabby. At least that was how I described it to my girlfriend Xulu, who was frantically jealous of the girls who hovered around and brushed against my clothes.

Xulu didn't want to move in with me. She disliked cats, especially Tabby. She had tried to get into my mother's good books by pretending to care for him, and her failure on that front had mortified her. But faced with this bevy of girls, she hatched a plan: she would ensure that her body became impregnated with the same smell as mine. That would tell the world we were bedmates, and therefore soulmates. If necessary, Xulu could hint that the odour was hers and it had rubbed off on me. This meant, of course, that she had to live with me, sharing the same food, drink and toilet facilities, and the same balcony on which to dry her clothes. I was moved by the sacrifice she was making. In order to absorb Tabby's smell, she took over all aspects of his care—feeding him and, especially, cleaning up after his turds. She accepted even that mucky task without complaint, devoting herself to Tabby just as my sister-in-law used to. However hard we tried, we men could never offer care like this. Such tranquil scenes of domestic harmony could only be created by a woman. Of course Xulu didn't take Tabby in her arms, pick off the fleas or bathe him. But she would get close enough to pick up his scent. If she called his name, ‘Tabby! Puss, puss, puss!', he would sometimes meow in answer. There was mutual understanding in their glances, even if they couldn't be said to love or trust each other. For instance, she never suggested finding him another mate, nor did she take him on outings, to give him a break from the balcony. She didn't knit him little jackets, as my sister-in-law had done, and certainly never tried to persuade me to release him from his prison.

We went out very little, apart from my trips to the office and Xulu's to college. Xulu wasn't keen on me hanging around outside, attracting girls who complimented me on my masculine odour. Gradually we closed ourselves off from the outside world. I did the shopping and cooked, Xulu took care of Tabby. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a ménage à trois, although Xulu kept her distance from Tabby, as a step-mother would. It was lucky, really, that we had Tabby. He provided a distraction; otherwise, as a couple, we would have died of boredom. Tabby was the one focus of interest in our otherwise hopeless lives. We learned to observe him quietly. As far as I was concerned, that taught me not only about Tabby and the way he lived, but also about his relationship with Xulu, or rather, Xulu's with him. Did Xulu examine me and Tabby in the same way? If she felt her life to be as meaningless as I did mine, then perhaps she did. Here in our flat, as we each observed Tabby, we often shared our observations and drew conclusions—but there were other bits we didn't share. For instance, our partner's relationship with Tabby. It seemed to belittle that partner, by reducing him or her (in fact, it was really her, i.e., Xulu) to the level of a cat. Of course, putting Tabby on an equal footing with my girlfriend made his status rise commensurately. This was not a nice thing to put into words. If my life hadn't been so unutterably dull, I wouldn't have sunk so low as to amuse myself by comparing my girlfriend to a cat. Around this time, Xulu started making sketches of Tabby. She drew him big and small, sometimes in a complete silhouette, sometimes exaggerating a certain part of him. You could see from her drawings it was a cat, but I'd be hard put to say it was Tabby. She was self-taught and had never taken any drawing lessons, but her sketches were extremely vivid—it was clear she had a natural ability. I was amazed and delighted by her cat drawings, but it worried me that she only ever drew cats. As time went by, she drew more and more, until eventually she was producing several dozen a day, and they leered and smirked at me from every corner. Every time we had an argument, she would scribble a frantic sketch, and every time she ovulated and was afraid of getting pregnant, the sketching reached a peak. Her thoughts and her moods were reflected in her frenzied sketching, and though I knew that, I couldn't see what she was getting at with her cat drawings, which depressed and worried me. It was obvious that Xulu wasn't thinking of honing her cat-sketching skills and making a living from them in the art world. You couldn't fault her for effort, but she was slapdash, drawing on any old bit of paper she could find, which she then just discarded. The backs of used envelopes, the blank pages in books, and the calendar and the tablecloth, everything was covered in Xulu's weird cats. She used any drawing implement that came to hand—ballpoints, marker pens and so on. We had a weird cat living on the balcony while every day the flat filled up with more and more images of cats. There wasn't a nook or cranny that didn't have one. It was driving me mad. When she wasn't drawing cats, Xulu took a chair to the balcony and sat there, deep in thought. She stared, gimlet-eyed, at Tabby, her head no doubt teeming with more feline images. It seemed to me that Xulu herself was growing ever more cat-like: not only was her whole body permanently impregnated with the smell of cat, but her appearance, behaviour and personality was growing stranger by the minute. It was as if she were morphing into Tabby. I wondered if the same was happening to me. I wouldn't have been surprised if, one day, passers-by looked up to see two big cats on the balcony.

There was clearly something wrong with the way we were leading our lives. I wondered if Tabby had put a spell on us. He looked so young, and I had never seen a more handsome cat. The markings on his face gave him an aloof beauty, and it was this, rather than pure boredom, which absorbed our attention. We would spend hours at a time on the balcony, forgetting to eat or go to work. And when we went back into the flat, we inevitably found our gaze drawn back to the wooden balcony door. Eventually, we started leaving it open. Our bedroom had a window which faced the balcony too, through which we sometimes observed him. We would have liked to knock down the outside wall, whose bricks and concrete blocked our view of the wondrous Tabby, and install a glass screen instead. Bringing Tabby indoors to live with us was not an option. Apart from the fleas, he would have found some hiding-place or other and been lost to view. The balcony was clearly the best solution—he had a fixed home there and nowhere to hide, and we could see him whenever we wanted. We wanted to see him more and more, to the extent that we considered moving ourselves onto the balcony and living with him. We already spent every spare moment there, and now we liked working there too. Xulu used to take out a chair to rest her homework on and a small plastic stool to sit on, as if she were a primary school student. I would make fun of her, but in no time at all I was out there too, in the same attitude, bent over the paper I arranged on a chair, writing my new novella. Xulu filled her exercise book with cat drawings, and my novel gradually evolved into a story called ‘A Tabby-cat's Tale.' As time went by, we found it convenient to move other stuff out there: thermos, biscuit tin, ashtray. Later still, we brought out an extension cable, and every evening the balcony was lit up as bright as day with a 100W bulb. By the time we had the TV and the speakers there too, the balcony had acquired a whole new lease of life. This drove Tabby back into his shelter. He no longer sunned himself at our side. In fact, most of the time he was in the shelter, refusing to come out. With Tabby hidden from view, there was no reason to be on the balcony; in fact, we felt as if we had nothing left to live for. Tabby's determination to keep us at arm's length only increased his allure. He was a cat that walked alone, he didn't need our caresses. Out of respect, we gave in and silently withdrew ourselves and everything, even the light bulb, from the balcony, returning it to its original state. All that was left was an old cat turd. Henceforth, we treated the area as virgin territory and protected it as such. Sometimes we swept up his excrement, sometimes we didn't. We no longer made casual use of the balcony. Our clothes were dried inside the flat instead. We kept the door open all day, however, and the cat smell poured into the room, giving our clothes the necessary pungent whiff. Tabby began to make an appearance again, even staying out of his shelter when he was napping. Lying stretched out among turds in varying stages of desiccation, he seemed perfectly at ease.

We watched Tabby day and night through the wide-open door or the bedroom window, but it was beneath his dignity for him to cast a glance in our direction. He had no objection to us staring, however; and once, he even leapt onto the windowsill and crouched with his back to us, motionless, as if to give us a better view. There he sat, alert and bolt upright, his front paws vertical, his back legs folded under him, motionless as a statue. He seemed completely focussed, although we didn't know on what—he was facing the balcony railings, with the empty space below, and we couldn't see his gaze from our angle. He seemed to be looking at the void. He couldn't have been watching the teeming city streets; they were constantly in motion, but his head didn't move. We worried that this was a prelude to his leaping over the railings and dashing himself to death on the pavement below. I wouldn't have been surprised. I held my breath and put my finger to my lips, to warn Xulu not to make any sudden movements. We were well aware that we were no match for his agility and speed, however determined we were to save him. Besides, he was much nearer the railings than we were. All we could do was wait patiently. Tabby did this a couple of times, but he never did leap to his death. Finally, we realized that Tabby had no intention of committing suicide. He was simply deep in contemplation.

It occurred to me that it would be easy for him to lose his footing on the balcony. The railings were designed with humans in mind and were about waist-high. A cat might easily slip through the space between the railings, but Tabby had lived all these years and nothing like that had ever happened to him. He seemed to have an accurate understanding of height (or depth). He knew it would be fatal to jump from the seventh floor, unlike jumping up and down from the windowsill.

We tried to rid ourselves of the spell Tabby had cast on us by seeing the worst, most ridiculous side of him. For instance, the way he tried to cover his pee and turds. In the early days, the cinders my brother used to go out and get for Tabby enabled him to satisfy this need, by lightly scraping them over the excrement. Sometimes, when the cinders were sodden from his pee, Tabby would refuse to do his business until my brother replaced them with dry ones. The balcony no longer had any cinders, but Tabby still kept scratching, his claws grating on the hard concrete. It was quite ridiculous. He would prowl around, repeatedly performing the same ritual, until in his imagination the excrement was covered, even though it was right in front of his eyes. The scraping-over motions had to be performed, and that was all there was to it. Realizing that Tabby retained this ancient instinct eased our minds. All the evidence showed he was still a cat, not some strange creature in cat's clothing.