A Tabby-cat's Tale

by Hang Dong

  My brother slung the food on to the roof every day. His face was expressionless, as if this were a job like any other. It had to be done skilfully and accurately, but he wasn’t greatly interested in it. To anyone else, however, it looked bizarre; in fact, it had a magnetic draw. By this time, I’d moved out of the family flat, but I used to come home especially to watch the spectacle of my brother feeding Tabby. It gave me a feeling of exhilaration to watch, and I told other people too. Xulu, as my girlfriend, had the pleasure of being the next to see it, and she was followed by other friends of mine, who dropped by on one pretext or another—to borrow a book or because their work brought them into the area. Still others just had our word to go on, if they couldn’t make a personal visit. Eventually, the fact that my brother’s cat was peculiar was no longer a matter for comment, but the peculiar methods he used to feed it were. His movements had such grace, such flair, imagination and feeling, and how effective they were! My brother, meanwhile, was oblivious to the effect his behaviour was having on people.

  Every now and then, my brother would climb on to the roof to pick up the plastic bags. Occasionally Tabby would make an appearance, no longer the shy cat he had once been, no doubt because he saw his master so infrequently. When my brother threw the food up from the balcony, Tabby would come right to the edge of the roof to watch us, and as night fell and we switched our lights on, he could see into the flat if we didn’t draw the curtains. Did he look? Every day? Did deep feelings stir in that feline heart as the night drew on and day finally dawned in the east?

  One day I went up with my brother and Tabby came over to us. My brother put the food down and reached out to stroke him all the way down his back, bringing away soft, fine, dusty grey fur which slipped from his fingers like soap bubbles. I watched the balls of fur rolling far away over the roof. As my brother smoothed the cat’s fur, we talked. Our conversation had nothing to do with Tabby, and my brother didn’t even look at him, he just rubbed the fingers of his right hand together from time to time, to rid them of the fur that stuck to them, and then went back to his stroking. Tabby was intent on gulping down his dinner, his neck craned over the saucer. Gradually the sun sank in the west and the golden rays of dusk touched our faces, before they too disappeared and darkness fell. My brother was talking about some mutual friend who’d given up her job for love and moved from the northeast to Nanjing, where she’d had a son. Now the son was grown up and in the first year of university, and his parents had divorced. The woman had gone back to the northeast on her own. It was a sad story, I agreed, and I kept nodding as he told it. But what did it have to do with Tabby? Nothing. None of these things had anything to do with each other: Tabby’s dinner and his autumnal moult, my brother’s news and his rhythmic strokes, my earnest attention . . . and yet they were melded together. Each element of the scene impinged on and balanced the others. And in turn, they were all of a piece with the evening light that bathed the rooftop.

  5

  Tabby had to move again, this time at the neighbours’ insistence.

  They said they were worried that Tabby’s pee and crap might get into the tank on the roof and pollute the water supply. The tank had a concrete slab for a lid—it was so heavy that it took two people to lift it—but who could guarantee that there weren’t cracks in the cistern, or elsewhere? Tabby might have peed in the cracks, and besides, the concrete lid was extremely porous—if Tabby continually peed on the lid, it might seep through into the tank. And that was without taking the persistent whiff of urine into account. It might easily waft into the tank and give the water an odd taste. From the fifth floor upwards, every household, apart from ours, noticed the strange taste at the same time. The day they all went up onto the roof and saw desiccated turds and fish bones littered around was the last straw. They drew a sample of water from the water tank and sent it off for analysis, in the firm expectation that the results would go against my brother. But they were inconclusive—the lab had insufficient data about the composition of cat urine. The neighbours then complained that their flats were leaking and that it was my brother’s fault—that he, in his comings and goings on the roof, had damaged the insulating slabs. (Fortunately for Tabby, they didn’t accuse him of damaging the slabs—not even a leopard or a Tabby from the northeast of China had a tread that heavy.) They were quite capable of fabricating evidence—they knew the insulating slabs had been damaged by families who were watching fireworks or comets, long before my brother started going up there to feed Tabby. The building caretakers pronounced peremptory judgement: my brother’s footprints, taken together with the yellow rainwater stains in the residents’ ceilings, proved that my brother was to blame—he must move the cat. My mother was furious at the injustice of the decision and tried to dispute it, but my brother simply buttoned his lips and denied Tabby’s existence. ‘Who says I’m keeping a cat up there?’ he said. ‘Find it and show me.’ Of course, by this juncture Tabby had taken refuge deep underneath the insulating slabs. My brother had perfect confidence in Tabby’s ability to stay hidden and was prepared to shamelessly deny his existence, despite the secondary evidence provided by the cat turds and fish heads. The neighbours knew my brother was lying but couldn’t expose him. There were those who demanded that the insulation be stripped off. This was absolutely not what they wanted, they warned my brother, they needed the insulation to prevent leaks in the roof, but they were willing to destroy it in order to expose my brother’s deviousness. What was to be done? My brother wasn’t a bad man. He was just annoyed at the neighbours, which was why he had denied Tabby’s existence. What did they mean by dragging the management into it? Besides, they had all ganged up against our family, against a poor little cat. The more my brother thought, the angrier he got. Still, neighbours were neighbours, and the matter couldn’t be allowed to fester. My brother resolved the dilemma for everyone: he acknowledged that Tabby was living under the insulating slabs, but he added honestly: ‘I have no way of getting the cat out and catching it.’ He demonstrated this by calling for Tabby in front of the neighbours. They all joined in: ‘Puss puss puss! Puss puss puss!’ The most hostile and argumentative of people suddenly adopted the gentlest and sweetest of tones. But all in vain. There wasn’t a peep out of Tabby; some of the neighbours even began to doubt the cat’s existence themselves. Everyone began treating each other with such courtesy, it seemed incredible they hadn’t resolved matters like this from the start! The neighbours, now appeased, felt awkward at having bothered a helpless orphan kitty; my brother calmed down and felt bad that he had given his neighbours cause for alarm. ‘You all go down,’ he said. ‘I’ll tempt him out. He’s a timid creature, he’s never seen such a ruckus before.’ They told him: ‘There’s no hurry. If you can’t get him out now, keep him here. What does another year or 18 months matter?’

  Winter was closing in, and there was a cold north wind blowing. In the heat of the arguments, no one had felt the drop in temperature, but now they all hunched up inside their coat collars and made their way down the step-ladder. My brother and I stayed to call Tabby, but when he didn’t respond, we climbed down to the corridor too.

  There was a violent snowstorm that night. The next morning, worried neighbours knocked at the door. Wouldn’t Tabby freeze to death in this cold weather? They sounded perfectly sincere. This wasn’t just another way of trapping the cat and bringing him down. My brother, however, was happy to reassure them that Tabby had moved down before the storm began and was living on our balcony. And he led them through the flat—not to admire the snow-scape but to point out to them a crudely-knocked-together shelter of a peculiar shape . . . Tabby’s new home.

  The shelter, in the northeast corner of the balcony, was made of broken bricks and roofed over with bits of lino and plastic sheeting. On its south side was an opening about the size of a book. My brother had only needed to build two walls, since the north side was our flat and the east side was the solidly-built balcony wall. The cracks in the walls had been stuffed with wood chips a
nd bits of white polystyrene—anything my brother could get his hands on. All the neighbours saw was a perfectly neat and clean cat shelter. They couldn’t see the cat who, naturally, was closeted inside. They bent and peered in through the door. Before they were able to make anything out, they heard a noise—Tabby’s warning hiss—and this enabled them to pass judgment. Tabby really was in there and no longer roaming around on the roof. And so a cease-fire was declared between our family and the neighbours.

  Tabby’s movements were severely curtailed on the balcony. In fact, as long as we kept the door to the balcony shut, we could keep the flat clean. As time passed Tabby got used to it, and even if the balcony door was left open, he wouldn’t put as much as a paw inside the room. Our three-bedroom, one-sitting-room home had become alien territory, its drawers and under-bed spaces no longer the refuges they had once been. Under threat, his only place of safety was the cat shelter on the balcony. Besides the cat shelter, the rest of the rectangular space was bare, my mother’s plants having been grazed by Tabby, and then fumigated by his BO. All that remained to remind us of the once splendid display of flowers was a stack of flowerpots with a few lumps of dried mud inside. There was nothing to entertain Tabby. He couldn’t come into the flat. If he got sick of his shelter and the balcony, he could only leap up onto the railings and drop to his death below.

  6

  In time, my brother moved to the south of the country to make some money, and my mother found a new partner and moved in with him. Responsibility for Tabby fell on my shoulders. I had to move back home, otherwise my brother would have had to delay his trip or my mother forego the prospect of domestic happiness in her declining years. In fact, they had procrastinated for some time because of Tabby—they thought that if they waited for him to die, then they could both go their own way. They never imagined that, notwithstanding the tough life Tabby had had, he seemed to be growing younger by the day and showed no signs of old age. An inveterate bachelor, he could enjoy his good health to the full, playing with his tail and grooming himself until the greyed fur returned to its former black and white. He looked like a different cat. My brother and my mother began to worry that, having outlived my sister-in-law, he would outlive them both. They couldn’t, in all conscience, abandon him or let him starve to death, but when was it going to end? So I moved back home, and three years after my sister-in-law’s death, my brother and mother gained their freedom.

  I went to work every day, and in my spare time after work, I looked after Tabby. He had a routine that had been established by my brother and I simply continued it. I kept him out of the flat, so we had no more flea plagues. He lived on the balcony, consuming uncooked fish entrails and emptying his bowels, just as before. There was no need for cinders to cover his turds, I just swept them up. That still left the smell, which I couldn’t sweep away, although it was confined to the balcony, of course. We had never glassed in the balcony to make a sun-room; in fact, I left it open to the elements, so that the fresh air blew at least half the smell away. The neighbours kept urging us to enclose the space, as some already had, but they had their own hidden agenda: to stop the smell from spreading to their flats. They were worried the pong would impregnate the clean clothes they hung out to dry on their balconies. There was no escape for those who shared the seventh floor with us, still less for our unlucky downstairs neighbours. They reckoned they could make their own balconies into sun-rooms, to keep out the ubiquitous pong, but in that case, I’d have to pay. The alternative was for me to glass mine in. Since they could enclose theirs, I replied, there was no need for me to enclose mine. I’d only agree to do it if people who already had sun-rooms dismantled them. It was a stand-off. People who had them were hardly going to pull them down, so, naturally, my own balcony remained open to the wind and the rain.

  My problem was where to dry my own clothes. However high I strung up the clothes line, it overhung Tabby’s domain, and steam from the warm cat turds would eddy up to the clothes. I tried nailing a metal frame to the wall and airing the clothes on that, but their weight pulled the frame down and they stank just the same. I happened to be reading a book which proclaimed that good and bad smells were basically the same, the former being simply a diluted form of the latter. It was just relative. This made perfect sense to me. In the meantime, the clothes that had been dried on my balcony acquired an indefinable smell, one that couldn’t quite be described as a stink, though it would be exaggerating to call it a fragrance. I began to find myself surrounded by girls who didn’t know that I had a cat; they inhaled my scent as if they were intoxicated. I couldn’t, in all honesty, attribute this to my animal magnetism. I preferred to give the credit to Tabby. At least that was how I described it to my girlfriend Xulu, who was frantically jealous of the girls who hovered around and brushed against my clothes.

  Xulu didn’t want to move in with me. She disliked cats, especially Tabby. She had tried to get into my mother’s good books by pretending to care for him, and her failure on that front had mortified her. But faced with this bevy of girls, she hatched a plan: she would ensure that her body became impregnated with the same smell as mine. That would tell the world we were bedmates, and therefore soulmates. If necessary, Xulu could hint that the odour was hers and it had rubbed off on me. This meant, of course, that she had to live with me, sharing the same food, drink and toilet facilities, and the same balcony on which to dry her clothes. I was moved by the sacrifice she was making. In order to absorb Tabby’s smell, she took over all aspects of his care—feeding him and, especially, cleaning up after his turds. She accepted even that mucky task without complaint, devoting herself to Tabby just as my sister-in-law used to. However hard we tried, we men could never offer care like this. Such tranquil scenes of domestic harmony could only be created by a woman. Of course Xulu didn’t take Tabby in her arms, pick off the fleas or bathe him. But she would get close enough to pick up his scent. If she called his name, ‘Tabby! Puss, puss, puss!’, he would sometimes meow in answer. There was mutual understanding in their glances, even if they couldn’t be said to love or trust each other. For instance, she never suggested finding him another mate, nor did she take him on outings, to give him a break from the balcony. She didn’t knit him little jackets, as my sister-in-law had done, and certainly never tried to persuade me to release him from his prison.

  We went out very little, apart from my trips to the office and Xulu’s to college. Xulu wasn’t keen on me hanging around outside, attracting girls who complimented me on my masculine odour. Gradually we closed ourselves off from the outside world. I did the shopping and cooked, Xulu took care of Tabby. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a ménage à trois, although Xulu kept her distance from Tabby, as a step-mother would. It was lucky, really, that we had Tabby. He provided a distraction; otherwise, as a couple, we would have died of boredom. Tabby was the one focus of interest in our otherwise hopeless lives. We learned to observe him quietly. As far as I was concerned, that taught me not only about Tabby and the way he lived, but also about his relationship with Xulu, or rather, Xulu’s with him. Did Xulu examine me and Tabby in the same way? If she felt her life to be as meaningless as I did mine, then perhaps she did. Here in our flat, as we each observed Tabby, we often shared our observations and drew conclusions—but there were other bits we didn’t share. For instance, our partner’s relationship with Tabby. It seemed to belittle that partner, by reducing him or her (in fact, it was really her, i.e., Xulu) to the level of a cat. Of course, putting Tabby on an equal footing with my girlfriend made his status rise commensurately. This was not a nice thing to put into words. If my life hadn’t been so unutterably dull, I wouldn’t have sunk so low as to amuse myself by comparing my girlfriend to a cat. Around this time, Xulu started making sketches of Tabby. She drew him big and small, sometimes in a complete silhouette, sometimes exaggerating a certain part of him. You could see from her drawings it was a cat, but I’d be hard put to say it was Tabby. She was self-taught and had never taken any drawing lesso
ns, but her sketches were extremely vivid—it was clear she had a natural ability. I was amazed and delighted by her cat drawings, but it worried me that she only ever drew cats. As time went by, she drew more and more, until eventually she was producing several dozen a day, and they leered and smirked at me from every corner. Every time we had an argument, she would scribble a frantic sketch, and every time she ovulated and was afraid of getting pregnant, the sketching reached a peak. Her thoughts and her moods were reflected in her frenzied sketching, and though I knew that, I couldn’t see what she was getting at with her cat drawings, which depressed and worried me. It was obvious that Xulu wasn’t thinking of honing her cat-sketching skills and making a living from them in the art world. You couldn’t fault her for effort, but she was slapdash, drawing on any old bit of paper she could find, which she then just discarded. The backs of used envelopes, the blank pages in books, and the calendar and the tablecloth, everything was covered in Xulu’s weird cats. She used any drawing implement that came to hand—ballpoints, marker pens and so on. We had a weird cat living on the balcony while every day the flat filled up with more and more images of cats. There wasn’t a nook or cranny that didn’t have one. It was driving me mad. When she wasn’t drawing cats, Xulu took a chair to the balcony and sat there, deep in thought. She stared, gimlet-eyed, at Tabby, her head no doubt teeming with more feline images. It seemed to me that Xulu herself was growing ever more cat-like: not only was her whole body permanently impregnated with the smell of cat, but her appearance, behaviour and personality was growing stranger by the minute. It was as if she were morphing into Tabby. I wondered if the same was happening to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, one day, passers-by looked up to see two big cats on the balcony.