Cat Stories (2006)

My Sister’s Roommate

She followed my sister’s best friend all the way to our father’s house.

This was a few years ago, and it was pouring down as it’s wont to do on an Icelandic early evening.

If you’ve never been to Reykjavík then it’s hard to imagine the way it looks—feels—around you on a wet day.

The style and architecture are constant reminders of the Icelandic tendency to follow trends and fashion with no consideration or regard for context or propriety.

Roads after roads of buildings in any sort of style and architecture. Modernist, fake Georgian, post-modern experimentation, an occasional pre-war building clad in corrugated iron.

It’s as if a deity with very little going for itself in terms of taste or class (“Hah! I’m omniscient!”) had decided one night on a drunken bender to see how many unique variations the human animal had made of the bog-standard mind-numbingly boring house.

A deity that then dropped it all off on a scattered, rock-blasted island in a fit of annoyance as the examples just seemed to pile up with no end to the drudgery in sight.

None of them alike and yet they manage to build up to an architectural pattern of mundanity that inspires an ever oppressive and desolate feeling of desperate repetition.

Through the rain and through this neighbourhood of cluttered houses, this cat decided to follow my sister’s friend.

Kitten, really. She couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old.

So… when the duo—the friend and the cat—arrived at my Dad’s place where me and my sister had just had dinner, the friend was carrying the kitten under her jacket.

We fed it the only thing that was available. Which were a few slices of ham, this being my Dad’s house. He’d been a bachelor for a few years by then and had already settled into a pattern of near total disregard when it came to food and kitchens.

(That got sorted later on when he remarried, but I digress.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if we hadn’t just had my Dad’s “ham sandwich and a coca-cola” one course special for dinner as well.

His other two culinary specialities were bolognes and lasagna, but the ham sandwich often won out for purely resource reasons.

“Uh, guys… Do you mind if we just have sandwiches tonight? I didn’t have time to go to the store.”

But the cat—the kitten—she loved it. Starving, she ate every single scrap of ham that was left.

And it was when she looked up at us that we realised it.

It wasn’t one of those “ooooh, look at the kitten” moments.

More of a “look, I’ve had some shit, frankly. But you guys are gonna sort it, alright?!”

The look the cat gave us had enough of an order in it for us to have no choice, really.

I have problems thinking of her as a kitten. Especially now that she’s close to or over ten years. (I’ll have to ask my sister. I’m awful with remembering dates.)

She’s a cat as far as I’m concerned. An adult that ‘has had some shit’ in her time but, as we all like to say in our family, if you keep on trucking, things tend to get sorted in the end.

She was battered. Her hind legs were mildly deformed due to malnutrition.

She recovered from that, but she still walks with a bit of a ‘John Wayne’ gait at times.

She’d also been hit on one side of the head. She’s blind in one eye, or at the very least has very diminished sight in it.

There is the occasional moment when she’s trying to bat at a branch or a toy and consistently hits the empty air a couple of inches to one side.

But that’s all right. She still manages to catch and kill stuff occasionally. Mostly flies and spiders, but you have to take pride in your accomplishments. No matter how small.

So when this cat—I’m not even going to bother to call her a kitten—came with us home to my mother’s place, the only one of us that wasn’t worried at all was the cat.

She just stared at our mother with a distilled fusion-bolt of determination that, since it had enough force and energy in it to burn a hole into a ten-inch thick titanium sheet, was more than enough to melt the heart of our mother.

Which meant that my sister now had a roommate.

Kisalísa is her name and now that my sister’s moved out she’s got the room to herself.

At which point my mother, her husband and our stepbrother began to refer to the room as “the cat’s room.”

Then it escalated into being the “cat’s floor” since my sister’s room was—is—the only room in the basement.

My sister prefers that to “the hidey-hole” which is what my mother would otherwise call it.

Selfishness, playfulness and predatory ruthlessness mixed in with abominable cuteness are all qualities usually associated with a beloved house-cat.

Stubbornness and determination—a will to live so strong that it’s palpable—those aren’t supposed to be the most distinctive qualities of a cat.

But in her case they are.

That Crazy Bastard

Kópavogur is an odd part of Iceland.

Technically it’s a town in its own right. A place with its own local council, police force and whatnot.

It is engulfed by the capital. Reykjavík has grown to the degree that it almost surrounds what would in any other circumstance just have been annexed into the larger body.

In many cases Kópavogur is closer to the Reykjavík city centre than most of the outlying suburbia.

At the time my grandparent’s moved there, with my Dad in tow, the place qualified as ‘countryside’ given the poor road system of those days.

As well as the fact that there were a lot fewer of us Icelanders in those times.

Despite my poor grandmother’s massive culture shock of having a farm as one of your nearest neighbours they did fairly well on the whole.

It’s hard to imagine it not having been a step-down for her, given her family and background.

It was pretty much as close to an uncool semi-rural life that you could get while still being within commuting distance of the capital.

Sort of mitigated by the fact that my Grandad’s always been fairly cool. I wore his old leather jacket for years as a teenager.

He was the sort of old guy that can start a conversation with a woman several decades younger than him, make her laugh, and not make it look or sound sleazy.

It was into this environment that the cat—later to be affectionately known either as “The White Cat” or “That Crazy Cat”—came to be adopted.

The poor thing had to be hand-reared by my Grandmother. It was one of those circumstances when the kitten really shouldn’t have been able to survive without the parent, but humans made do and managed to keep it alive into adulthood.

He – it was a male – was stark white as well, a beautiful cat by all accounts.

As my Dad is fond to say, since he was reared by humans, the white cat had no conception of cat manners.

He knew the basics of human manners. Like when and how a cat is supposed to interact with the monkeys for food.

So the human-cat thing was sorted.

Cat-cat communication was another matter entirely.

He was blind to all the subtle cat rituals that surround any local cat community.

How you approach a garden you know is monitored by another cat.

How you approach and greet a strange cat in the street.

The curious cat dance of growling and posturing that takes the place of pre-battle evaluation and negotiation.

All those small details.

A strange cat that tried to intimidate the white cat with the standard cat routines and rituals was in for a rude surprise.

Because the white cat would just wade in and smack it on the head.

It’s hard to tell whether it was simply the element of surprise or whether the white cat was simply a fairly strong fellow, but the white cat in the end dominated the entire cat population in neighbourhood.

Goes to show that being a sociopath is one of those qualities that clears the path to power.

The fact that a large proportion of the succeeding generations of cats in that neighbourhood were stark white was just one part of its legacy.

It’s hard to tell where things start with personality characteristics.

One theory is that The White Cat behaved like it did around other cats because of its lack of cat-manners, for want of a better word.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t explain why it was widely regarded as completely insane.

And when I say widely I mean widely, at least for a cat. My sister once was told by at work that the work-mate’s grandmother had told her stories about that “Insane Cat” that belonged to one of the neighbours.

My grandparents’ white cat.

If it saw or smelt something it wanted, it took it – to an even greater degree than you see with the already congenitally selfish species we call cats.

Very little in terms of inhibitions.

A little furball lunatic that even on the best of days evoked a shake of the head and the refrain “That Crazy Bastard.”

The main difference between family members and the neighbour-victims was the family members were saying it with a soft smile.