The inside cat would like my attention. She wants to sit on the pages of my assignment which are spread around me in a half circle in front of the fire. When I decide to tidy up a bit she jumps about trying to sit on the papers I am touching, only for me to add them to the pile and reach for another one which she must, in turn, sit on.
I go to the kitchen to check her food bowl and she follows, purring. It's full.
She wants to be with me in the toilet, poking her paw under the door and trying to swing it open enough to get through. On my way out I pick up her dry sick from the carpet with a piece of toilet paper and dispose of it. She's had plenty to eat.
In bed she wants to sit on my chest, padding and purring loudly, before finally settling down at my feet.
I didn't want her.
After the old cat died I had hoped the outside cat would get a second chance to be an inside cat. When we got the outside cat the old cat made it clear there could be only one.
The old cat was like having my own dog. Whenever I pulled up in the car outside the house he would come running from some hedge or other on the street, where he had been waiting for my return to greet me. I had him for eight years.
One night, when my girlfriend of the time had been out with her friends til the early hours of the morning, I heard the front door open and the sound of her stumbling in. The next thing I knew there was a pressure on the pillow beside me and something cold and wet in my ear. The cat had followed her in.
We had never seen this cat before, though we had lived in the house for some months, but he struck me as a very polite cat. We didn't feed him at first and he was very good about it, but after a week it was obvious he was there to stay and we bought that first pot of cat food.
He wasn't the type to twine around your legs in that irritating way to suggest he wanted something. He was content to merely sit at a civilised distance and give you one quiet but assertive meow. If you took a step towards him he would lurch forward and butt your leg with his head. He wasn't terribly keen on being patted, but if you put your face near his he would happily exchange headbutts for ages. I got so much into the habit of expecting headbutts from small animals that when an acquaintance introduced me to his Shi-Tzu I horrified him by pressing my forhead to the dog's before I realised what I was doing
The cat - the old cat - had no tail. For me all cats with tails began to look odd. He outlasted the girlfriend and lived with me in four successive houses. He left a scar on the nose of the Pitbull-SharPei cross a friend brought to our house and who really wanted to make friends with the ball of black fur under the coffee table.
We had our little games. I would try to make him symmetrical and he would rear back and with both paws scratch me symmetrically on both cheeks - but he never really put his claws out. And whenever I pulled the car up outside the house he would come running from wherever he was.
Eventually the old cat became the disgusting cat. His bottom was never clean, and neither was the furniture where he used to sit. He started to always be hungry, and lost his politeness about asking. He stopped burying his doings, and soon there was no spot on the back lawn where you could safely put your foot.
I took him to the vet, and they said they could do a test for two hundred dollars but that that would only tell them which thousand dollar course of treatment to pursue. I took him home and read about cat diets on the internet. I snarled at the children to stop giving him milk and stopped feeding him biscuits in favour of pieces of raw meat.
It seemed to be working. He perked up and his bottom started being clean again. And then after a week there was a knock at the door. I opened it to two stern faced ladies from the old-folks home kitchen. One of them held the old cat, his back end wrapped in a towel. I should take better care of him they said. They'd cleaned him up they said. They'd been feeding him left-overs and cheese they said.
I took him back and begged them not to feed him again. So much for controlling his diet.
A few days later I came home for lunch and saw him through the window lying very still under a tree in the only sunny spot. I went out to see him. I finally acknowledged how thin he had become. His face was limp and his breathing shallow. I stroked him and told him I was glad he had found the sun, and that night I took him back to the vet...
I didn't want the new cat - the inside cat. She had a tail for starters, and the outside cat had just started showing his face again. But it was hard not to smile at her tiny kitten tail quivering with ecstasy at her first taste of tinned fish.
Now she is walking back and forth over my keyboard, but she at least has the good manners not to actually tread on it. And when I pull the car up outside my house, she comes running.
