They all just showed up and my transition to Mad Cat Lady is complete
Awoman on Twitter says she’s decided to take a permanent step back in her career and will be working part-time and entirely from home from now on. The reason for her correspondence, she explains, is she wants a cat and is wondering if she needs to proactively go to a cat shelter or whether they’ll just show up of their own accord.
They’ll show up of their own accord, I reassure her; because that is what cats do. I could tell her about the little cat that I’ve tripped over several times in the past few weeks on my nightly excursions to the toilet (I’m not old, I have a congenital kidney defect). I can identify this cat only because he wears a little bell around his neck, which rings when he darts sideways to escape my leaden trajectory.
This is the latest cat to make himself at home in our home: he actually lives seven doors away in The Twins’ house, though he couldn’t possibly have been aware of that connection when he decided to make his occasional nocturnal excursions through our house. His known provenance does, however, mean that we know his real name, but in keeping with what has become a tradition, we call him something completely different. For operational reasons and fear of being cancelled, I can reveal only that this young interloper looks a bit like a Friesian cow with a small moustache. And that The Youngest thinks it’s the laziest of all the names we’ve come up with for the cat universe in which we now live and she’s kicking herself that she wasn’t here the first time he showed up.
Shadow’s origin story, on the other hand, is a complete unknown (and, for my money, hers is an even lazier name, for which I’ll admit responsibility.) Best guess is that Shadow’s more permanent home is on the road that backs onto our back garden, as she always arrives that way, before she slips in the small fly window of our downstairs bathroom which is permanently open because you can’t put a cat flap in a glass door.
Shadow is black — like I say, lazy — which one of the million Instagram catthemed posts forwarded by The Youngest informs me is genetically the strongest and most resilient breed of cat. Certainly, I have to admire her chutzpah. While other cats basically mooch in the hope of food, Shadow pro-actively rubs my legs and miaows affectionately, before hissing viciously at me when I wearily put the bowl of food down for her. Once, The Youngest came downstairs in an empty house and was quick enough to film Shadow opening a closed kitchen press from the inside and emerge to demand more food.
Mr Oscar Browne, the elder statesman of the group, lives across the road and has been our own cat’s mortal enemy since before we knew there was a wildly dysfunctional social network of felines in the area just waiting to move into our home. He’s in his 15th year, which to my mind affords him a title and because he looks almost identical to our own full-timer, we’ve gifted him the same surname as hers (they are both brown tabbies, which apparently means they’re very good natured, though clearly neither of them has seen that Instagram post.) Then there is The Gingerman, who poos in our front garden while making direct eye contact with us, The Dark Knight Rises (now we’re talking) and poor True Love’s Kiss, who, since she doesn’t come around here any more, has presumably ceased to be.
The fascinating thing about this busy community of uninvited cats is that they all absolutely hate each other. Sometimes I see other people’s houses (or Instagram posts) in which cats co-habit peacefully and tenderly and I wonder why my own house is essentially Cat Fight Club. I used to think it was just our own permanent resident who has a rotten personality, but I’ve seen other members of the gang going at each other in my kitchen when she’s not even in the house. So they’re all as bad as each other.
The other people in this house are happy enough to engage with all this cat shenanigans but they don’t think I should be encouraging all these part-timers by feeding them, even if I do so with rolled eyes. All I know is that three years after my cat-mad brother died suddenly and his namesake Markie decided to move into our house on the worst day of my life, my transition to Mad Cat Lady is now complete. And like Shadow in our kitchen press, I’m more comfortable with that than I ever could have imagined.