Lessons from a feline free spirit

I met him in a pet shop on Chapel Street in Melbourne, perched on the top tier of a multi-level cat townhouse. He slept as if warmed by beams of sunlight on a hay bale, rather than a grimy city pet shop, oblivious to his hectic surroundings. I loved him immediately, racing to the pet store during my lunch breaks to admire him through the plexiglass.

Finally, after weeks of these visits, the manager of the pet store approached me with a gruff offering: I could have the grey kitten half-price, but he needed him gone ASAP. I walked out of the shop with a warm, heavy cardboard carrier tucked under my arm. For no particular reason, I named him Horse – not after the tomcat in Footrot Flats, and not, as a vet suggested after neutering him, because of the impressive size of his testicles.

The sleepy boy I knew from the shop transformed into a cyclonic force as soon as he was released from his carrier, skidding up and down the floorboards of my flat with such velocity that my downstairs neighbour felt compelled to lodge a formal complaint with council.

Horse proved to be the feline equivalent of a bad boyfriend, both demonically possessive and a completely free agent. Insatiably adventurous and a compulsive street fighter, he refused to be contained indoors, whining incessantly to be let out, teetering suggestively on window ledges and balconies, and occasionally making good on his threats to jump. One such jump resulted in a badly broken leg, necessitating extensive surgery and a long hospital stay. When I came to visit, the vet nurse asked me to leave the room while he did his observations: Horse’s heartbeat couldn’t be heard over his purring when we were together.

I was 25 when I got Horse, 29 when I had my first daughter, and 31 when I became a single mother, running as fast as I could from a bad relationship. Baby on hip, Horse in carrier, I moved to a bright but ratty fourth floor walk-up, high on a hill with picture-postcard views. Soon after, Horse managed to slink out the front door, well before the vet-prescribed two-week indoor period. A storm hit, and he never came back. Like me, I guess, he was unmoored and overwhelmed.

I fielded phone calls from perverts and predators and loners – an abrupt lesson in what happens when you have a stripper’s sobriquet and advertise your phone number on street poles.

BUNNY BANYAI

I’d soldiered blandly through the previous three years of unhappiness, but my defences could not hold up against the loss of this preening, pugnacious beast. I plastered the surrounding suburbs with posters of Horse, the photo depicting him reclining on a vermilion velvet sofa, ears at half-mast, eyes-mid-slow-blink, wearing an expression of both love and contempt; the default position of most cats I’ve known.

Days became weeks became months. I fielded phone calls from perverts and predators and loners – an abrupt lesson in what happens when you have a stripper’s sobriquet and advertise your phone number on street poles. I began to yield to the possibility that Horse was never coming home.

A day after making the decision to find a new kitten, a phone call came from someone I’d lived near a few years earlier. She remembered Horse well from his random break-and-enters (he liked to sleep on the beds of strangers, Goldilocks on four legs), and had seen my posters. “I’m sure it’s Horse,” she said. “He’s in my front yard.”