Recently I had to come clean to the neighbours that I’ve been having an emotional affair with their cat.
It has been going on for months. We have fallen into a sordid routine of the cat appearing at the window every morning and miaowing pitifully until we acquiesce to her entry demands. This often happens while one of us is in the bathroom, mid morning wash with the window ajar to help the ageing extractor fan to battle the steam.
The open window is a defogging tactic, essential if you have a need to tackle a small but persistent group of chin hairs in the mirror with a tweezer. But the cat views it as a personal invitation to join you in the shower.
After leaving muddy paw prints on the vanity, it then hops into bed with whichever household member has ignored them to stay under the warm covers. The cat rewards their stony-hearted response by snuggling into them and purring adorably, while the other person hops around with conditioner in their eyes, trying not to slip on the soaked floor while chanting their new daily affirmation of “that bloody cat”.
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Initially, we worried about encouraging the handsome ginger tabby by supplying it food, water and chin scratches. My partner was concerned we were starting to get a reputation as crazed cat thieves in the neighbourhood. I privately agreed that in Ireland, people already assumed I was mad because I do or say things that are actually just very Australian, like communicating directly and expressing my feelings as they occur.
Becoming the local woman who robs people’s beloved family kitties would not help my already unconvincing personal “I am not mental” brand campaign.
I became one of those insufferable new parents whose once interesting Instagram feed turns solely into pictures of a small creature who everyone else finds tedious, but we think is endlessly fascinating
“If I keep giving her sliced turkey, she’s going to come back and her owners will think we’re trying to trap her,” my partner said. I suspect he had subconsciously realised that I had lured him into a relationship using the same method of a few slices of ham and no sudden movements.
Of course, over time, we both grew to love the cat. I became one of those insufferable new parents whose once interesting Instagram feed turns solely into pictures of a small creature who everyone else finds tedious, but we think is endlessly fascinating. The kind of people who insist their mewing little ball of diminished sentience “has so much personality and intuitiveness” while cleaning up after it’s poo.
“Look at her paw on my leg, she clearly loves me,” I would text my friends about the cat, which would not hesitate to eat my dead body if it was feeling peckish.
I convinced myself the cat enjoyed my company and liked to put in a 9-5 shift at our house as my work-from-home colleague because of our special bond. It was probably just because we left the heater on.
“This is what being a busy working mother juggling ambition and guilt feels like,” I said to myself when I had to ignore her demands for pats while on important Zoom calls.
The cat had turned up at one of the most difficult points in our lives. For my partner, it was when Galway lost the All Ireland Final. For me, it was around the same time as my nephew’s death
Then the cat went missing. Her actual owners reached out to ask if we had seen her. Apparently they were aware they weren’t the cat’s only family, and had some sort of progressive ethical non-monogamous relationship with the animal.
We learned that she was actually a he, and was known to many laps on our estate. We never said we were exclusive, but this revelation did make me feel cheap.
See, the cat had turned up at one of the most difficult points in our lives. For my partner, it was when Galway lost the All Ireland Final. For me, it was around the same time as my nephew’s death. No matter how much I felt like staying in bed and withdrawing from the world, a little beseeching miaow at the window made me get up. Life was still going outside and I was needed, even if it was just by a fishy-breathed little grifter angling for a belly rub.
Maybe I was letting an unwise amount of my happiness depend on an animal with free will and the capacity to leave at any moment. But I figured if the good people of Kerry could change an entire tourism industry on the whims of a wild dolphin for nearly four decades, then I would be grand.
But as each day passed with no sign of life, our mood diminished. I couldn’t even channel my sadness into search efforts; I felt like putting up posters for a cat that wasn’t even mine would finally give my loved ones enough grounds to have me sectioned.
Then, miraculously, we got a text to say he had been found after accidentally getting stuck in an empty house. “He is thin but grand,” authorities (his owner) reported, graciously allowing him to pop over to ours the next day.
When I texted to let her know where he was and to say he’d had some food and water to help build him back up, she thanked me.
But it is her I am grateful to – for being generous with her pet, but mainly for not making a complaint to gardaí over the emotionally unstable Australian woman down the road who had kidnapped her cat.
