A Tabby-cat's Tale Read online

  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.

  One day Xulu gave a joyous shriek: ‘Tabby’s wanking!’ What she meant was that, in the absence of a mate and a sex life, Tabby had found some way of pleasuring himself. I followed her to the balcony, where a strange scene met my eyes: he had one hind leg raised high in the air and was reaching down to his crotch and licking the sharp, reddened tip of his penis. Of course, Tabby didn’t have our manual dexterity, so he did it differently from us. From a human, moral standpoint, there was something repugnant about the scene. What should we do? Stop him? Carry on standing there? Or go back inside and get on with our lives, pretending it wasn’t happening? If Tabby had been human, he would have tried to cover himself as soon as he discovered us watching him, especially being the timid creature that he was. However, he wasn’t human, and he carried on with shocking imperturbability, oblivious to our presence, neither hiding it nor putting more energy into his activity. Tabby was no exhibitionist, and this was no erotic performance. His very calmness was disturbing. Still, it was a comfort to know he retained his sex drive. In fact it told us that, underneath that poise, he was still an ordinary cat, just an animal.

  I realized, of course, that although there were many aspects of a cat’s life which were beyond our understanding, we humans were far superior to cats. Tabby may have been inscrutable, concealing a supra-feline soul behind a mask of unutterable feline beauty, but the most he could have been was a human. I began to feel that he must have been a human in a former life, a human whose soul had been condemned to endure the privations of the life of a cat. I imagined it (or him) harbouring suicidal thoughts, but perhaps the cat’s body he inhabited prevented him from putting an end to it all. (Conversely, many people I knew with a human face may have had the soul of a cat, or even of a mouse.) Tabby’s behaviour bore no resemblance to that of a normal cat. On the other hand, if he was really a human and could one day revert to human form, what would he be like? Thoughtful, sensitive, reclusive, timid, pale and handsome . . .

  I told Xulu about all these fantasies, and she said: ‘Aren’t you describing yourself? Apart from the fact you’re not so handsome, of course.’

  ‘The difference is he’s not pale-skinned, he’s black and white,’ Xulu went on. ‘Otherwise you’re spot on. He’s grown to resemble your family! You know the way husbands and wives start to look like each other?’

  This didn’t sound like praise for my family. On the contrary, her comments seemed calculated to be disparaging, sarcastic and disdainful. After all, Tabby was not a normal, healthy and energetic cat, but a weird, unfortunate old
nuisance. Xulu seemed to be hinting that I was a weird eccentric too.

  But I didn’t take her words to heart. In fact, I shared some fellow feeling with Tabby. I often wondered how I would behave if I were in a cat’s body. Probably not much different from Tabby. And how would he behave in a human’s body? Doubtless so similar to me that we would be at loggerheads and unable to live under the same roof. It was a good thing Tabby was a cat and we could live together in harmonious tranquillity. I had no way of knowing how Tabby felt about me, but what I felt towards him was an increasing sympathy.

  These feelings made me decide to take Tabby on a Grand Tour. Of course, there was nothing grand about it when judged by human standards. I put on a mackintosh and gloves and picked Tabby up. By this time, Tabby and I knew each other pretty well and it was possible to hold him, even if he struggled a bit. The mackintosh was both to keep Tabby’s fleas at bay and to stop him from scratching me. Leaving the ground seemed to make Tabby extremely nervous. It was as if he were being launched into space. He dug his claws right through the rubber lining and into my skin. He trembled violently and pissed and shat all over me. Carrying this terrified creature, I advanced into the flat and did a circuit of the room, rocking him gently on my shoulder as if he were an infant. I talked soothingly: ‘This is where your mum and dad used to sleep.’ (I meant my brother and sister-in-law.) ‘And now it’s your uncle and auntie’s bedroom.’ (That meant Xulu and me.) ‘This is your dad’s study, and this is the room your granny used to have.’ (That was my mother.) ‘This is the sitting room, this is the kitchen, and next door is the bathroom.’ Tabby seemed to recognize that I meant him no harm, and he began to calm down. He still had his claws embedded in my clothing, but as he looked around, his eyes expressed a delighted curiosity.

  He seemed to enjoy his Grand Tour, but putting on protective clothing and painstakingly cleaning the flat of all vestiges of his visit was a nuisance and I only did it once every few months. However, Tabby seemed to have acquired a taste for it: even when I had no intention of taking him on a tour, he would leap onto my shoulder or my back and crouch there motionless, and when he did this he was almost impossible to remove. I was usually not dressed for it and, inevitably, the fleas slipped under my defences. Besides, Tabby wasn’t being affectionate, he was just using me as a means of transport. Once I’d realized this, I no longer felt such enthusiasm for the Grand Tour. The odd thing was that, even when we left the balcony door open all day, it never seemed to occur to Tabby to use his own four paws as locomotion and make his own tour. He wanted to do it on my shoulders. It wasn’t that he was too idle to walk; it was that, in his mind, the pleasure of the journey and the means of transport were inextricably linked. So I carried Tabby once more around that desperately familiar flat, spouting all sorts of fantastic nonsense: ‘This is your America . . . This is your Europe . . . This is Latin America . . . Equatorial Guinea . . . This is Singapore . . . These are the Andes . . . This is the South Pole . . .’

  7

  Then one day, Tabby vomited all over the balcony and refused his food. He was a sad sight: he retched, his belly convulsed, but all he could bring up was a few drops of yellow bile. We had no idea what to do. The only medicine we’d ever given him was some crushed antibiotic pills in his food, but since he wasn’t eating, the only way was to force them down. I put on the mackintosh, went out on the balcony and caught Tabby. In the teeth of stiff resistance, Xulu opened his jaws and we got the medicine down his throat, but even this was no guarantee of success. As soon as we let him go, he threw up violently. And when I say, ‘threw up violently’, I don’t mean he brought up more than normal. On the contrary, the only product was the powdered pill and the spoonful of liquid in which they had been dissolved. It was the act of vomiting which was violent. Tabby convulsed, in a sort of mechanical rhythm, as if he was a clockwork vomiting cat. But the only result was a token amount of green bile which trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  We really felt that we should take him to the animal hospital, but then again, perhaps we were making a fuss about nothing. After all, Tabby was just a cat. Of course, we wouldn’t have hesitated to leap into action if a human being had been critically ill; an emergency ambulance to speed the patient there to the accompaniment of sirens and flashing lights wouldn’t have been too much. As we wavered, Tabby’s breathing weakened to the point where we felt that it was too late to take him to the hospital, that there was nothing more to be done. Tabby lay curled up inside the cat shelter. When we bent down to look at him, all we could see was a pair of tightly-shut eyes. But he wasn’t dead yet. We could tell because he was trembling all over. We reached in to stroke him, as he lay there listlessly, no longer worried that he might scratch us. The stroking calmed him and the trembling stopped, or perhaps grew fainter and was absorbed by our hands. Tabby seemed to like being stroked, and he meowed feebly to let us know. If we removed our hands, he gave a hoarse croak, to tell us he needed our warm touch. We put our hands back and he gave another meow, to say he felt it and it was just right. Xulu and I took turns stroking him, feeling his body gradually lose its warmth under our hands, and his meows grew feebler, until finally he just opened his mouth and made no sound.

  Xulu said: ‘Cats only live between eight and ten years. Tabby was at least eight this year.’ But could we be certain he had died of old age? If we had taken him to the hospital, might he have recovered? He didn’t look like an old cat. I knew what an old cat looked like, from the ones I saw in the village as a child, lying on the top of the stoves absorbing the warmth, or sunning themselves on the roofs. They lay quite still, whiskers erect; usually, they were hugely fat. None of them were nervously alert like Tabby or had his slender figure or his beauty. Tabby never looked old. His uncommon youthfulness was certainly a mystery, perhaps it had something to do with this constant, tense, vigilance?

  In order to ease his passing, we did something we hadn’t done for years, and carried him into the bedroom. At that point, I became ill myself and took to my bed. Tabby lay beside my bed in a cardboard box which Xulu had lined with some bits of cotton wadding. She bustled happily back and forth caring for both of us. I looked down at the floor. Occasionally, Tabby awoke from his doze, looked at me and gave an automatic meow. We were fellow sufferers, and even though I only had a common cold, I too felt I was not long for this world. I felt we were both ill from the same thing. Surely, as the medicine took effect on me, Tabby would take a turn for the better too. In the bedside lamp light, I talked to him: ‘Tabby, Tabby . . .’ In his box, he was trembling again. I dozed off. When I opened my eyes, it was to see Xulu putting down a saucer of fish soup for Tabby.

  Around midnight, I got up to go to the toilet. The room was pitch dark, but I heard a strange sound. It was Tabby wheezing. I put on the light and saw his head was shaking and there was bloody foam at the corner of his mouth. It was a terrible sight. I wanted to reach out and comfort him, but I didn’t want to have to go and wash my hands. As I hesitated, kneeling on the bed, Tabby suddenly leapt from his box and landed on my back. That gave me a fright. Who would have thought that a dying cat could leap like that? Instinctively, I hunched my shoulders and tried to shake him off, but his claws were stuck fast in my pyjamas. Finally he dropped to the floor with a thud and lay there, his face turned to one side. His front and back legs twitched, but he was too weak to raise himself and get back into the box, and the twitching only had the effect of moving him around on the floor. He overturned the saucer with his hind leg and died, lying there in a puddle of cooling fish broth.

  The noises woke Xulu, and she opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ I turned off the light and got under the covers again.

  I began to imagine that I had brought Tabby’s fleas into bed with me, and that they carried some virulent disease. I dozed fitfully. I had gotten back into bed without washing. I was dreaming that the fleas had passed from my body to Xulu’s, and I felt very guilty.
I held her tight under the covers. Xulu grunted: ‘What’s up with you? What’s up with Tabby?’ I whispered gently in her ear: ‘Nothing, nothing at all. We’ll talk tomorrow.’ And we slept.

  When we woke the next morning, I pronounced Tabby dead. Xulu of course had a good cry. Tabby lay as before, head to one side, front and back legs stretched out. The saucer was tilted at an angle, but there were only a few drops of broth on the floor, most having been soaked up in Tabby’s fur. The blood at the corner of his mouth had congealed, and a milky film covered the open eyes. I got a plastic bag and tried to put Tabby in it, but rigor mortis had fixed him in a long, stick-like shape, and the bag was too wide and too short to hold him. I swapped it for a large black bin bag which completely enveloped his corpse. I finished by putting this dubious-looking bundle inside a carrier bag from a fashion shop. No one would know that it held the corpse of a cat. I carried it, and Xulu and I set off for the Peace Supermarket.

  Our plan was to go and buy food and disinfectant, then bury the cat, then return home and give the bedroom and the balcony a good clean. I had to carry our purchases and Tabby in the same hand. We (Tabby and I) squeezed our way through the crowds and onto the bus, and from there into the cheerful bustle of the main street. (It was a Sunday.) It was all so familiar—the noisy children charging around, the advertising balloons rising into the air, the blue sky with its little white clouds, the gleaming silver and black cables criss-crossing over-head—but I felt quite out of place because I was carrying the corpse of a cat. As if by magic, the corpse made me aware of both the beauty and the desolation that existed in the mundane world around us. The magic lay in the fact that this was a morbidly anti-social cat who, in his lifetime, had never stirred out of doors, but was now hanging around among the shopping crowds—as a stiff.