McLaren Street, Adelaide, South Australia, 1991
This story takes place in 1991. Months before I decide to move to Deep Creek. I’m wrestling with the Dark Night of the Soul.
Raffi and Sunny decide it’s time to take action. And so they do. And it works!
Sunny was sitting on the highest branch, deep in the jungle, silently closing in on a delicious-looking parrot when she heard the noise. Something crashing against the front door jerked her back to consciousness. That must be the newspaper. It must be morning. This was McLaren Street. In Adelaide.
(Too bad about the parrot.)
Sunny yawned and stretched before curling up again, settling her stripes on the placemat next to the fax machine. Its warmth and vibration steadied her. Some cats had fireplaces. But there was something secure and dependable about the fax machine. It was rarely covered, except when some emergency meant papers were laid out on every horizontal surface in Wendy’s home office. It made a good bed. And it was close to Wendy.
Sunny opened one yellow eye to examine her friend, hunched on her ergonomic chair in the spare bedroom that served as her office. Absentmindedly, Wendy lifted a hand from the keyboard to caress her.
“Sorry, Sunny,” she whispered. “I didn’t think it would take all night. This report’s way more difficult than I imagined.”
Wendy sighed and coughed, turning over a page and finding her place again. She turned back to the screen. Homelessness: An Urgent Problem for Australia, it read. The report was due that afternoon. Nearly two hundred pages. She’d written most of it in the past week. At night after the phone stopped ringing. While her friends and colleagues slept tucked in their warm beds.
Sunny was not mot much into language. She rearranged her furry body in her imitation of a shrug. Of course, she preferred a soft bed and the comfortable curves of a woman’s body to a fax, however warm it was. Who wouldn’t? She suspected that Wendy preferred her bed, too. But humans were hard to fathom at times. Sunny emitted a contented purr, more to console Wendy than anything else. This exhausting business must stop. Sunny’s job was keeping an eye on Wendy, and she wasn’t having much success. She drifted back into the jungle to the sound of Wendy’s coughing. Bronchitis was Wendy’s self-diagnosis.
“It’ll be gone in a few days,” she whispered.
Later that day, Sunny conferred with Rafi. They’d lived with Wendy for seven years in six different houses. Theirs was a good friendship. Twice when they lived on a busy road in the small town of Armidale, Sunny saved Rafi’s life by running into the house, calling, and making those sounds that seemed to work with humans. Both times, Wendy rescued Rafi, then a tiny kitten, from oncoming traffic, with seconds to spare. At the time, Wendy berated herself for naming Rafi after the Armenian terrorist who bombed the Turkish embassy in Ottawa. Deference to authority was not Rafi’s strong point.
And, despite differences in character and appearance, the two cats were close mates. They tolerated Wendy’s erratic lifestyle, the madcap way a single woman cares for pets. Odd people came to look after them when Wendy went away on business, which was often. Food ranged from the worst generic cat food to chopped liver, Swiss cheese, and melted ice cream. When Kristin looked after them, things always took a turn for the better, for she was an excellent cook who often experimented with fish pies. Mostly, life was good in inner-city Adelaide.
“We’re enjoying our life a lot more than Wendy is,” Rafi offered as they stretched out on the table in the little courtyard soaking up the last of the afternoon sun. She nuzzled her sleek black head into the cream fur of Sunny’s tummy.
“Wendy hasn’t laughed for weeks. Her face is so pale. And that coughing worries me. Does it sound like bronchitis to you?”
“And have you noticed,” Rafi continued, “when she talks to us or feeds us, her mind is elsewhere — split off. She never notices us unless we speak to her. She keeps dropping things, bumping into things, and constantly stubbing her toe.”
Sunny had inspected the bruises on Wendy’s thighs, located at desk height, where she had injured herself leaping from her kneeling chair to grab the telephone, answer the door, make an urgent photocopy, or send a fax.
“It’s this terrible thing humans do, this home business,” Sunny agreed. “Did you hear all that rubbish about how good it is to work from home? What’s worse, she’s even going to study how these poor humans can more easily work at home.”
“She never stops, this human. The job’s always there. How often have you seen her start work in her bathrobe and slippers? No coffee, no breakfast. Not even a shower. And that coughing! She’s a wreck, a nervous wreck. It’s not right, I tell you. If we were sick like that, we’d take a break. Of course, we would!”
Yawning, Rafi contributed another concern.
“She’s also sleeping badly. Haven’t you noticed? She’s up a lot at night, creeping around, writing notes to herself on those little pieces of yellow paper and sticking them on the bathroom mirror. I almost expect to find a note sticking to my fur one day: Wendy reminding herself to feed me or give me my injections. This is getting out of hand. I can’t remember the last time I could sit on her lap for more than ten minutes without her jumping up to finish something or attend to something urgent. This has got to stop.”
The two friends continued their prognostications well into the night. Then their biological clocks cut in.
“We are nocturnal,” Sunny reminded her sleepy companion. “We’re meant to sleep in the day. Staying awake a bit longer won’t kill you, Rafi. We’ve got to find a solution before Wendy gets sick. Then we’ll be in a real mess.”
Finally, they found a solution: Mica, Wendy’s friend, was visiting from the bush for a few weeks. They loved to curl up in bed. He smelled alive, like an animal. He wasn’t into tidying things up and was the only human who listened and knew how to play. Mica communicated directly without language. He liked them, although he told them they didn’t belong here and was glad to hear they’d been sterilized.
“You’re not natives,” he reminded them. “Your feral mates wreak havoc where I live, massacring birds and other small creatures.”
Once, Mica caught Sunny stalking a bird in the courtyard. He screamed at her. Mostly, he accepted them.
Later that week, Wendy left for a few days interstate. That was their chance. They cornered him in the living room. They explained Wendy’s condition as Mica sat on the floor amid ashtrays, bottles and cans, testimony to the day’s indulgence. Mica agreed.
“Please understand,” he whispered. “Until this week, I hadn’t seen her for years, not since the early eighties. But you’re right: she’s gone downhill. She’s a good woman with good intentions. But she’s not going to be any good to anyone or anything in the condition she’s in. Didn’t her father nearly die of a heart attack in his forties from worry and overwork?”
The two cats nodded. They knew all about Gordon, Wendy’s alcoholic father. What she didn’t tell them directly they picked up from her dreams, for Gordon often appeared there. Dead of heart disease at 69, Gordon never learned how to look after himself.
“She’s nearly fifty,” Sunny reminded Mica, who was almost that age himself. He looked sixty, she thought, looking up into his weather-beaten, scarred face, veteran of twenty years of rough rural life. Mica smiled. He remembered when he first met Wendy. They were in their early thirties.
“Wendy’s house, where we first made love, “Independence,” is not far from here.” Wendy still knew how to relax in those days. He told them how he and Esther celebrated the ban on uranium mining by dancing together on the sidewalk and out into the street in North Adelaide. “Esther was an excellent cat. She loved to dance.”
After much discussion, Mica finished the Fosters in the fridge, and the three conspirators forged their resolution as they picked at the remains of Mica’s pizza. Wendy wanted to leave her business to study ecology in the bush for a year. She deferred to Mica’s opinion on ecological matters because he understood the natural world.
“But,” Sunny reminded them, “Let’s remember that she’s terrified of living without her urban comforts. Honestly, can you imagine Wendy in the bush? She has never pushed a wheelbarrow. Her idea of construction is hanging a picture. She’ll need lots of encouragement to leave the city, Mica.”
Finally, they agreed. Mica would remind Wendy that planners like her needed to be ecologically literate. He would support her intention to study ecology by living directly in the natural world for a year. That way, he could repay her help over the years: with the cost of books, typewriters, and election campaigns. He would provide moral and intellectual support.
And the girls would find themselves another home. They had their eyes on Angela’s household. Angela’s two girls, Johanna and Monika, were friendly and old enough to care for them. They could manage Misty, the family’s elderly tom, who wasn’t much fun.
The next time Angela visited Wendy for a meeting about the Adelaide housing project, Rafi was all over her like a rash. Sunny managed a refined purr. They were nothing if not charming.
“Cats are meant to be tarts,” they reminded Mica, who questioned their integrity. “That’s why we’re so soft and cuddly.”
Mica ran a thin, nicotine-stained finger along Sunny’s striped back. “Soft and cuddly, for sure,” he muttered. “And a lot easier to handle than Wendy.”
And so, the three conspirators hatched their plot. And it unfolded in the fullness of time.
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