He started showing up about three months ago. Young, maybe four or five months old, with a blue collar on, so we figured he was one of the neighbourhood cats and he’d just go home. But he kept coming back. He was in the yard and in the garden. He was around during the day. Then in the evenings, he was still just… around.
After a month of his loitering, my little cat-loving cousin was over. She started calling him to her and making friends with him, and that night was the first night I gave him some food. Chicken breast, unseasoned of course, because I’d googled it and cats can’t eat salt. He was so young I don’t think he’d ever had chicken before. He couldn’t eat it properly. He had to take it and shred it with his mouth before he could get bits of it down, and when I came back to check on him, he left chicken bits scattered across the porch.
He was back the next day. I can’t remember what I gave him, but I figured, you know what, just get some kibble to keep in the house in case the cat comes around.
The cat kept coming around.
Next minute he was jumping up on the ledge outside our kitchen window, watching me prepare food and wash the dishes. Then I saw him on the security camera, sleeping on the bench on our porch. It’s a padded shoe rack bench, and the porch is small but quite sheltered, and he slept there all night long.
The thing is, I have allergies, and my elderly mom hates the idea of animals in the house. They’re dirty! She says. (Which is true.) So I couldn’t bring him in, but I felt so bad for him sleeping out there. I tried taking him a blanket. He hated it. So I bought him a little carrier case, a cheap one from Kmart, and put a self-heating mat inside, and set it on the bottom shelf in the laundry room. Our laundry room is connected to the house by that porch. You step out onto the porch and step into the laundry, so it’s separate but right there, sheltered, and even with the door open it’s quite enclosed. The next day he was sleeping in that little carrier case, it was cute.
Somewhere in those first couple of weeks, I came home and found his collar on the ground. I panicked, wondering what might have happened to him. We didn’t see him for two days. Then he showed up without it, fine. I still have that original collar. I just put it away.
After a couple of weeks of him sleeping in the carrier case, we came out one day and couldn’t find him anywhere. Then we heard him meowing from inside the long canvas laundry basket, sleeping on dirty old damp towels. He loved it in there. He also slept on the washing machine, and on the windowsill behind it, because that’s where the northern sun comes in.
One night the camera picked up three young-looking dogs right there on our sheltered little porch, and maybe a fourth in the darkness of the driveway. By the time I saw the footage in the morning they were long gone, and I couldn’t see the cat. The next day he was at my bedroom window. He’d learned by then how to find my room. He’d be on the ledge outside the window, crying, because he didn’t want to be outside I guess. I let him climb through, and he came in and promptly fell asleep on the floor for about six hours straight. He wasn’t supposed to be in the house. I let him sleep anyway. “Sorry, there’s a cat sleeping in the house,” I told my mum. I think something outside had spooked him, because normally he didn’t want to sleep inside, and a day or two later he was fine out there again.
After that he liked bolting into the house and running out again, which to me was okay. Then I noticed him going at a spot just above his tail. I thought he was just cleaning himself, until he kept doing it, and I happened to see him walking away and realised there was a wound right there. Little, but vicious looking.
That same evening, driving into our driveway, I saw him chasing a bigger cat. I don’t know if he was trying to play or actually chasing him off, but as soon as the bigger cat saw me it bolted, and this cat just stopped and sat there like, yeah, this is my house.
That’s when I put it together. A male cat, about eight or nine months old by now. A bite wound on his back. A street full of roaming cats. A property with no fence that could contain a pet. I don’t know much about cats, but I do know intact male dogs aren’t safe roaming around outside, and I figured the same logic applied. This cat needed to be desexed and that wound needed looking at.
A week or two earlier I’d called a vet just to ask about getting him vaccinated and dewormed, and when I mentioned the collar, the receptionist told me I was legally required to look for his owner for at least seven days before she could book me in. Okay, fine. It kind of broke my heart already, the idea that he might have to go back to his home. I asked my next-door neighbour, or at least left a message on their ring cam, and they walk past our house every day, so if he was theirs they would have said something. I tried posting him on a local community page on Facebook and got rejected because my account was too new and I looked like spam. I never really made the effort after that.
But now he had a wound, so I just took him in. Different vet this time, and they were really good. The wound was definitely bite marks from another cat. No microchip. “Highly unlikely this cat’s been vaccinated,” the nurse said, and the collar didn’t really mean anything. They happened to have a cancellation that same day, so they could do everything for this cat in one go: microchip him, fix the wound, vaccinate him, treat him for fleas, desex him. Wow, that’s a lot for one cat in one day. But we did it. And we registered him to me.
His name is Bruce Lee. Our outside walls are brick-clad all the way up to my window ledge, and if you walk around out there, there is nothing he could have jumped on to get up. The ledge sits about half a metre above my head, and I’m 173cm tall. For him to scale that wall? Acrobatic. Bruce Lee.
The vet said keep him inside at least two days or he’d be attacked again, or the wound would open. Then the discharge papers said inside until his antibiotics were finished, cone on for seven days. (A disc-style cone, which he absolutely hates.) So we’re talking at least a week inside, possibly two while the wound completely heals. Now I’m panicking, because how is this cat going to go to the toilet inside? Emergency shop at Kmart: litter box, litter. I had no idea how thick the litter had to be or how heavy it was, and this curious cat came and watched the whole time I was filling up the pan. I put him in just to see what happened. He started digging around, so happy, and then promptly squatted to pee. He knew exactly what to do with it. He must have been holding it all day.
Before I’d even assembled the box, he’d pooped on the litter mat I’d put down on the floor, and peed on the cardboard, towel and plastic bags I’d laid out just in case. All of it washable or straight in the bin. Genius. It’s all just working out, and now he’s taken to the litter box perfectly.
Now he sleeps on my bed. My mum still doesn’t like it. The air purifier runs on high and all the windows stay open during the day because of the dander, and it’s actually been helping. We have an indoor cat now.
Here’s what gets me about the whole thing. Nobody in this house ever decided to get a cat. Not me, definitely not my mum. But watch what we did instead of what we said: chicken, then kibble kept in the cupboard, then a heated mat in the laundry, then a window that opens whenever he cries at it. You’d have seen this coming from the first plate of chicken. Turns out a household is a system too, and you don’t find a system’s purpose in what anyone says. You find it in what the system does. Apparently the purpose of ours was Bruce Lee.
