London Letter

Tormented by cats

You either are a cat person, or you’re not. I’m not. Yet we have a cat that does not accept this. Cats are far more perceptive than dogs, and I say that as a dog lover. In fact, there’re times I think they’re spookily psychic – and I believe that our current cat has psyched out something from my past and is using it to haunt me. It happened when I first moved to Empangeni in the 1990s and left the front gate open. A kitten came bounding up to me, playful as a … well, kitten and as I bent down to pat it my bull terrier came hurtling out, grabbed it by the neck and shook it. The dog let go when I yelled at her, but it was too late. As I picked up the cat its eyes glazed over and its neck was at an impossible angle. I put it inside and then knocked on neighbours’ doors asking if they were missing a kitten. None were. When I returned home it hadn’t moved. The eyes were still glassy, the body growing cold. I then dug a hole in the back garden and buried it. A few nights later I woke in a sweat. What if the kitten hadn’t been dead? What if I had buried it alive? The thought haunted me. I wished with growing desperation that I had taken it to a vet. I often thought about that kitten and when we came to England we decided that the kids should grow up with animals as both management and I had done. There was a notice on the school board about a cat needing a home as the owners were emmigrating to Australia, so we took her in.

Bad history
Her name was Pixel, as the owner was a computer geek. He told us she had been rescued twice before from bad owners and thus was somewhat reserved. Reserved was not quite how I would have described her. She was instead half feral and we had to keep every window closed to stop her escaping. Then one freezing December night she somehow slipped through a fractionally opened door and was gone. Two days later I heard her meowing from a tree in our garden and climbed up the iced branches to fetch her, which was a bit thick as she could climb trees far better than me. But anyway, from then on she decided I was a hero. I couldn’t relax without her jumping on me or trying to get onto the bed with me. As a non-cat person, you can’t believe how irritating that can be.

Suspicions
So I started to become suspicious. Was this really hero worship, or deep down did she know that I had buried a fellow-feline in Africa and was deliberately tormenting me? Consider this: she always jumps on me just as I’m about to fall asleep, ruining any chance of sweet dreams. She leaps on my lap just as I’m about to get up. She howls for food when I’m furthest from her bowl. Indeed, Pixel has an uncanny knack of being in the wrong place with me not only at the wrong time, but all the time. If I am about to sit down, she will be on the chair. If I’m going to use the computer, she is lying on it. It’s so bad that I even find her dozing on the dustbin outside when I’m about to throw something away. I voiced my concerns to management, who discarded them with a contemptuous snort. Some cats are just stupid, she said, which is why Pixel likes me. This nonsense about a kindred spirit buried in a shallow grave in Africa more than a decade ago was just psychobabble. As I grow older, I tend to beat myself up less for mistakes of the past, particularly as there’s not much you can do about them. So I now hope that Pixel is instead showing me that I have been forgiven by the cat world, and that the kitten nailed by my rampaging bull terrier was indeed stone dead when I buried it. She’s just making me work hard at it.