Although I was advertised as an indoor cat, one of a pedigreed litter from a breeder in Billericay, Essex—dewormed, house-trained, fully documented—part of me has defied this genetic tweaking and remains in thrall to the great outdoors, yearning for a breath of that free air, the comingling of diesel fumes and fox and dog and shoe and shit and mud that defines the world beyond the flat in which I am captive.
I suppose you would say this urge is a residual part of the DNA that links me to lions and tigers and the other truly big cats (big in the sense of absolute size rather than relatively big from regular free feeds in comparison with feral, street-smart versions of my species. Or big in the sense of plumpness requiring regular weigh-ins at the torture chamber of the white-coated bipeds who prescribe what Dolores knew to be something called Obesity Management. Imagine the humiliation if they did that to humans queuing at McDonald’s or Burger King or Krispy Kreme Doughnut—do not!—stands!).
But what would I know about DNA, or cheetahs or pumas or ocelots or caracals for that matter? Or McDonald’s etc? I am, after all, a cat. A sly and clever cat, it is true. A wily, calculating and very very beautiful cat. But a cat nonetheless. A housebound flat-cat. I have no access to the terminology of human science, although I am struggling to acquire some biped language: the sound X, for instance. Eks, pronounced in varying degrees of approval or offense, denotes a request for my presence or a condemnation of some recent and unwelcome action; reward or reprimand.
It is hard to discern the distinction because I have no access, either, to the human moral code.
I am required, rather, to be somehow inscrutable, occasionally affectionate, and most often indifferent to human blandishments, except when my stomach tells me that the giant bipeds who think they understand me must be persuaded to forage on my behalf and offer provender.
As a cat, I have impulses rather than detailed game plans, whose logic is not readily evident to the two-legged monsters I have acquired as my feeders, acolytes and servants. Or, indeed, to me.
Why, for instance, do I sometimes take it into my head, at a time in the dark hours when no food or company is forthcoming, to propel myself at speed down the long, central corridor of the biped lair, tossing myself into the air with giddy loop-the-loops and high-dive twists to land on the human sleep-pad with such force that lights go on and the word eks is pronounced by a voice I recognize to be both male and angry.
Why do I prowl across somnolent biped forms under feathery covers, probing with my paws for the firm, warm terrain of certain mysterious zones of their bodies?
Are these the moments when they—humans, that is, not cats, of course—would prefer to be sleeping? How would I know? I have no real memory of my forebears. I was removed from my parents and siblings in my earliest days. I have lived since then in a moving forest of enormous legs many times my own height that end in a lower horizontal plane that could crush me—although that does not prevent me from trying to weave between them, potentially tripping them, sensing their presence through my whiskers, furry flanks and tail.
I have no quadruped contacts or acquaintances. I sometimes think I am turning into a biped or that some process is underway to confuse my felinity with the otherness of my companions. My life is full of such barely perceived musings that cross my consciousness like shadows and then are gone, leaving only an interrogative trace. Like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
The what?
But why, despite my title as a flat-cat, with every known creature comfort of board and lodging, games, toys, catnip, regular meals, occasional “treats” resembling prawns (I know only that I like prawns, but I do not know what they are or do) would I plot and fret and try to position myself so that, when the bipeds fail to enforce the elaborate security precautions they undertake before opening the big white barrier leading to the universe beyond my immediate knowledge, I may propel myself at speed out into that space of heady liberation?
And why, oh why, do I choose, during these giddy moments of freedom, to scamper upward, using the series of platforms that lead to other human boxes rather than down to where my instincts tell me there is access to the perils and delights of life beyond the cat flap—faint intimations of strange odors: leaf mold, urine, slugs, roots, traces of many other cats, pussies galore? (How do I even know how to describe these elements, other than by supposition about a world I have perceived through the hard, invisible, transparent barriers that enable me to sit for hours and follow the antics of flying, winged things, and loud rumbling large things and quadrupeds on leads that do not share my flat-cat ground rules? How can I prevent myself from inquiring into these mysteries, to the extent that I can? How can I know what curiosity did to the cat?)
My power of memory is of itself so capricious that I cannot recall what I truly remember and what I do not. But I believe there was an episode when the big white barrier of my prison opened for a long time and I sped and scuttled and headed uphill along the platforms and no biped pursued me and my hypersensitive ears detected the familiar sound of the barrier below closing. But I heard it from the outside! And I learned fear.
If I knew what Stockholm syndrome was, I would say I displayed it because, without my biped captors to recapture me, I had no real idea what to do, or really where I was, except that the urge that sends me usually to my dark litter box came upon me and I had no means of access to my private place so, perforce, was obliged to perform the intimate act in the liberated zone and, out of courtesy, did so outside another of the barriers in a higher place than my usual habitat. The cat, in other words, shat on the mat.
Then I detected the sound of the barrier below opening and voices crying, “X, X, X,” in various tones of despair, wheedling and pleading. I scuttled down the same platforms as I had just ascended. I ignored the evidence of my presence deposited on a higher plane. And I allowed myself to be picked up and nuzzled and given an inexplicable treat—a reward I assumed, and who could blame me, for leaving my waste matter at a distant barrier rather than on my own doorstep, following, I believe, a human adage, and so resolved that, if ever I staged another breakout, I would do the same in the same place and thus qualify for another treat.
Well, you can’t always be 100 percent right, even as a cat. My toilet functions drew some kind of response from an upper-floor biped. I was reprimanded, although, being a cat, I could not link the raised angry unpleasant voices to a specific event, or even to myself. And so, of course, the next time I escaped, I ventured to the same place intent on repeating my performance to earn a new reward. But before I could even begin to arrange myself, a great towering barrier swung open and, looking upward, I found myself peering over vast distances into the face of an unknown biped who looked down at me with an expression recognizable—even across the chasm of the species—as one of pure malice that injected a kind of pinky, purply hue into features distorted by rage. There was noise, confusion. A second unrecognized biped stood behind the first. Neither of them wore the wrappings favored by their kind. Both appeared to be of a gender I had once been. But these impressions had barely been registered before, with my heightened sense of terminal, imminent threat, I became aware of a raised, swinging thing—the humanoid equivalent of a paw—that was accelerating toward me, and so I was able to turn and flee before it connected. And, for once, my inner navigational systems ordered descent and before I knew it I was hurtling back into more familiar environs where identifiable bipeds tut-tutted and hoisted me to great altitude to stroke my stomach.
Human anger is not pleasant for small, vulnerable animals. Imagine if humans were shouted at by members of an alien species two hundred feet tall—they would soon understand why creatures develop bolt-holes between suitcases below sleep-pads, behind sofas near warmth, among the piles and layers of artificial skins the bipeds collect to adorn and shield themselves.
My preferred retreat is only occasionally available when accidental access is permitted to the large, crowded, dark spaces where humans put the body coverings they use as compensation for having no fur, and the barriers which are usually closed are left open.
(“No animal shall wear clothes.” Who said that? No, I don’t mean who said that as in which human folding paper thing contained that question. I mean: who said that in my head? Is there someone else in here with me? Because the answer to the former question would be Orwell’s pigs and I don’t even know how I would begin to know that. And the latter question would worry me—if I knew how to fret. But if there was someone in here with me, they could perhaps explain things to me, like: what is an Orwell? Who is a pig?)
Reaching my favorite hiding place is an adventure in its own right because the only way to get there is vertically with a leap and a bound and a scramble that propels you upward, past the three shiny knobs of the places where bipeds store items to disguise their pudgy paws and enormous, inelegant (mostly) unlicked bottoms and onto the places above where, if you don’t fall, you can snuggle into the woolly, scented chest coverings and turn yourself around and look back onto the human sleep-pad and you can hear them calling, “X, X,” and know from the growing anxiety of their tones that they do not know where you are and worry that you have somehow gotten past the great white barrier again and have left your calling card on a higher plane.
Again.