Feline Catalyst

NB: Minimal references to (non-violent) consensual sexual behaviour in a humorous context.

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’Feles in matta sedit’. It sounds better in Latin than the clichéd saying, ‘the cat sat on the mat’. I, the ‘Feles’ in question, am sprawling on the ‘matta’, not averse to tripping up anyone silly enough not to look where they’re going.

Something weird is going on in this household. To explain, I need to take you back to last Monday. Breakfast. Imagine the scene.

‘Nerdy Daughter’ is practising her Latin out loud, to annoy her brother, (whom I have named ‘Not Nice’) and to prove that she’s superior to him. Neither of them realises that I, the magnificent Cat, am intellectually superior to them both. Superior to everyone in the family, actually. And because of that, I notice what’s really going on in this household. The undertone. The soft belly of the situation.

Anyway, The Mama, her eyes restless, her fingers clacking her bunch of keys, blows a kiss to The Papa, saying, ’I’m going to be late again tonight, darling.’

The Nerd translates. ‘Iterum hac nocte sero venium, caro.’

’Shut up!’ yells Not Nice to his sister, clenching his fingers, which are as big as the sausages The Papa won’t let me eat. (‘Too fatty, too herby.’) Not Nice sees me staring at him and he kicks out his foot, but I evade it, as always. As I said, he’s Not Nice.

I’m the only one who notices the tight look on The Papa’s face as he tries not to look at The Mama as she leaves the house. I see the drooping of his eyes, the slight bowing of his shoulders.

From what I glean through my trusty eyes and reliable whiskers, The Mama is a lawyer and works downtown, and The Papa is a stockbroker who works from home. The Nerd and Not Nice are teenagers, so obviously they go to school. The Mama doesn’t like cooking, but The Papa does, so he makes most of the meals. The Nerd prefers chemistry to cooking, and Not Nice just likes gobbling up the food.

The Mama is very late home most nights, even though The Papa says she surely doesn’t need to do all that overtime. Her dinners therefore need to be heated up in the microwave, but she often just waves her hand in the air and says, ‘Oh, I’m not hungry’, and The Papa then looks sideways at her, and sighs. He does, after all, make jolly nice meals, and he gives me cubes of the meat or poultry (I draw the line at tofu) before he adds garlic and onion (toxic to cats) and wine (disgusting, I tried some once) and transforms everything into something fancy, that he calls by names such as Bourguignon or au Vin.

Anyway, back to Monday. Before The Mama was due home late that night, I noticed something extremely odd. Picture this. The Papa looks around with a shut-down look on his face. He seems to be checking that The Nerd and Not Nice are in their rooms (of course they are, where else would they be?) then he takes out a tiny packet from his pocket and sprinkles some powdery stuff into the plate of Biriyani (lamb, as I knew, because I had been given a taste before it got currified) and he quickly stirs it in, and covers the plate with clingy plastic.

Not long after that The Mama comes home and barges her way into the kitchen (she’s loud in everything she does) and says, ‘Oh, I can’t eat that, darling, too tired!’ and she doesn’t see his face turning red, seeming to swell in size like a tom cat fending off an enemy.

When The Papa then slams out of the room, The Mama just shrugs, and empties the meal into the trash.

I continue sitting on the matta and wondering what on earth that powder is.

The next night, Tuesday, I watch him putting more of that stuff into her ready-to-be-heated dinner, Salmon en Papillotte (I had sampled the fish and it was delicious). She bangs her way through the front door not long after, throws her keys and briefcase down, and this time she says, ‘Thanks darling, heat it up for me, would you?’

Minutes later the meal is ready to eat, and I do what any responsible cat would do under those circumstances. I start gagging, with as many dramatic sound effects as I can produce, and I manage to cough up a truly gigantic hairball.

‘Yuck!’ The Mama screeches at me, and ‘Clean that mess up, darling?’ to The Papa, and she pushes away the untouched plate. The food — and the powder — end up in the trash. Again.

So, now we come to today, which is ‘Wednesday’, according to The Papa, and ‘dies Mercurii’ when translated by you-know-who, and The Papa announces at breakfast that he has a lunchtime meeting downtown with a new client. The kids ignore him, but The Mama’s eyes brighten, it seems to me.

By lunchtime all is quiet. No humans to annoy or puzzle me. Then suddenly who should bash her noisy way through the door — strangely, the back door — but The Mama, laughing, followed by a young man I’d never seen before. I hate him on sight. I decide to call him ‘Unpleasant’.

They both drop their briefcases at the foot of the stairs. Then Unpleasant sees me glaring at him.

‘What sort of cat is that?’ he asks, his voice slimy with disdain.

‘He’s a purebred Ragdoll.’

‘A what?’

At least he doesn’t translate my distinguished breed as The Nerd had tried to do recently, ‘felis catus flaccida,’ to which Not Nice had sniggered.

I admit, I don’t really understand human mating behaviours, but I do know, thanks to The Nerd, that it’s easier for all concerned if adult humans are like swans, monogamous. Which doesn’t sound much fun (not that I know much about fun, sadly, because, as Not Nice reminds me from time to time, I had my boy bits snipped when I was a kitten.)

Anyway, apparently The Mama believes that swans do miss out on all the excitement, because she is giggling in an annoying high pitch, and tugging at Unpleasant’s shirt, and they are standing on my matta — my matta! — and mashing their faces together and making grotesque sucking noises. Now she is leading him upstairs to the bedroom. The bedroom! The room that I have always been banned from (so that The Mama and The Papa can, presumably, carry out Serious Swan Business.)

I know that Unpleasant should not be here, so I stalk them, in my silent way. When I reach the bedroom they’re tearing off each other’s shirts and trousers (Unpleasant displaying an unpleasant bulge in his underwear) and it all feels wrong to me.

So I charge at one of Unpleasant’s hairless legs and he falls, as helpless as a newborn kitty, knocking his elbow on the bed head.

‘Stupid cat!’ he roars, hopping around the room on one foot, and cradling his elbow in the other hand. (The bulge, I noticed, had flattened out.)

I detest being called a stupid cat. I am so smart, I could translate this entire account into Latin, if I chose to.

Revenge is sweet. I launch myself skywards against his bare chest, and he staggers against the wall, swearing loudly enough for my ears to turn inside out.

The Mama asks him, ‘Shall I kiss you better?’

‘No!’ he shrieks.

I leave them to sort it out themselves, and I flop myself artistically (a trait unique to Ragdoll cats, — Google it, if you don’t believe me) on the second-to-top stair. Unpleasant then hobbles through the bedroom door and starts down the stairs. It’s not my fault that he doesn’t see me, is it?

He lands at the bottom of the stairs amusingly quickly, and cursing more horribly than ever. He seizes his briefcase and in spite of his new limp, he leaves the house as quickly as though pursued by the Rottweiler next door.

I sit on my matta and award myself an all-over Wash of Victory, my tongue brisk with triumph. The Mama stomps downstairs and accuses me of some truly awful things, but of course it is beneath my dignity to acknowledge her. Defeated, she picks up her briefcase and marches out of the house.

Before long The Papa gets back, and the kids return from school, bringing their usual bickering.

‘You took my charger!’ accuses Not Nice.

‘Did not!’

‘Well where is it then?’

‘Ignaro,’ said The Nerd.

I can only assume that Not Nice mistranslated ‘I don’t know’ as ‘You’re an ignoramus,’ because he reaches out in fury to seize her hair, but I get there in time and bite his ankle. So satisfying.

He yells loudly enough to wake up all the dead cats since the days of Ancient Egypt, but unexpectedly he wins the round.

‘Fluffy bit me, Dad!’ Fluffy bit me!’

So now you know my shameful secret.

My name is Fluffy.

I have lived with this embarrassment all these years. Me, a cat of such magnificence, called Fluffy! (The Nerd had once tried softening the blow by translating it as Floccus, but it was still an act of cruelty to cats.)

I fasten my gaze onto these two teenagers. One is self-absorbed, and the other no nicer than a hairball. One of their parents is admittedly a good cook, but has turned into (I suspect) a poisoner, and the other one is an affront to my eardrums, as well as being a Very Naughty Swan.

I shake myself, swish my gorgeous tail, lick my right paw for no reason at all, then come to the conclusion that life in this establishment no longer suits me. I will miss the gourmet tidbits, but I deserve to be taken seriously.

I decide to make my home next door.

The Mama had left the back door open since lunchtime, so I slowly stroll through, not looking back, and squeeze through a gap in the fence. The Rottweiler sees me, and I inflate myself like, um, a fluffy balloon. The dog yelps and runs to his Mother, who’s sitting in the garden, reading.

She says, ‘Oh what a beautiful cat!’

This place will do me nicely. I sidle over to The Mother, intending to introduce myself as Mr Magnificent. But wait, I can do better than that.

I’ll let her know that I’m here to stay, and that my name is… Dominus Magnificus!