I thought wrong. The next day, he appeared again – the same deal, with the joyous whoops from my kids, my concerned shooing. But this time he didn’t leave. In the morning, he was still waiting in our back garden. I picked him up in my arms and carried him around the block to the house behind ours, and poured him (the way you can only pour 8kg of cat) over the fence into the shrubbery.
Was that the end of the story? Of course not. A few days later, I was home alone with the toddler. During his nap, I started going crazy. Was that a meow? I looked out the back. No cat. Out the front? No cat. But – yes. Definitely a meow. As my son slept, I realised the meow wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from below. Under the floorboards. After my son woke and cried and calmed, we hefted boxes and clutter out of the way and lifted the trapdoor to the tiny rock-hewn cellar under our house. And there he was. A bedraggled, bleeding cat, our friendly cat, injured and hiding, hungry HUNGRY after a long time without food. I opened a can of tuna and inspected his wounds while he wolfed it: a torn ear, a giant gash through one eye, a bloody paw. He’d been in a fight. He needed a vet, fast.
So again, I carried the cat around the block to the house where his owner lived, the house where he was meant to live. The lady opened the door.
‘I think he’s been in a fight with some other cat,’ I said.
She looked at me.
‘His eye’s cut. He needs to be taken to the vet,’ I said.
She gave a tight smile. ‘Actually, we were planning to take him to the pound.’
I must have looked confused.
‘He doesn’t like us anymore,’ she explained. ‘That’s why he’s been visiting you. We know he doesn’t like us. So we’ve put down a deposit for a new kitten.’
I took a breath. ‘You don’t want him?’ The cat squirmed in my arms.
‘No.’
‘I guess we’ll adopt him, then,’ I said.
I walked back round the block to our place, cat no longer wriggling but regal in my arms, to break the news to my husband: Tonka now belonged to us. Or maybe, more accurately, we belonged to Tonka.
