Visions of torture

The cat is still missing.  Every morning and in the evenings I go outside into the back garden and call for him.  I hold fast to the hope that soon he will appear over the top of the back fence where I have seen him so many times before but so far there is no sign. 

And people tell me stories of cats who have gone missing and returned unchanged after a number of days, and then there are others, like my neighbour, who tells me about two of her cats, one who came back with all his claws missing.  She reckons he must have been trapped somewhere and had wrenched off his nails trying to escape.  

I have visions of torture, the ripping off of nails.  The other cat, my neighbour never saw again, but she was convinced that he had been stolen.

‘Your cat is just a huge ball of grey fur and so beautiful.  It’d be easy to keep him.’  

And so I have visions of the grey cat locked inside someone else’s house, learning fast to become an indoor cat and happy enough there.  If this is so, then it is preferable to the idea of him locked inside some lonely garage or pit or other place of torture, or worse still dead on the side of the road, to be collected as road kill by council workers and heaved onto a tip or burned in some mass incinerator.  

It is the not knowing that is hardest of all and then the giving up; the thought that one day I might stop calling the cat, that I might stop expecting him to return home.  Then there's the thought that he will fade from our memories but never quite go away, not like the cats who have died in our care, even the one who was killed on the road or the one whom my husband took to the vet who after a long life at seventeen years needed to be put down.

Who cares?  a voice inside me says.  It’s only a cat, not a child, not a person.  Cats matter but how much in the scheme of things?  

I do not want to exaggerate this loss.  It is more the sense that it piggybacks on other losses that until now had remained more hidden from view.

I find myself remembering the time when I was eight and my oldest brother left home.  He ran away as the expression goes, though he was eighteen at the time, and went missing.  He had brawled with my father over dinner.   It was Easter time, I remember, the time of the crucifixion and of Easter eggs.  These two strangely jarring symbols etched in my memory, the sweet and the bitter of it all.  My father had picked on him and my brother threw down his knife and fork and stormed out of the room.  

I did not see him again for three years. For three years I wondered where he had gone.  And I wondered that my mother could go about the business of her normal life not knowing the whereabouts of her first born son.  

Years later I found that after sometime my brother had contacted her.  He had become a lay missionary in New Guinea.  He was out in the world and doing good.  My mother must have been relieved.  As I would be relieved were I to hear that our cat is alive and well out there and maybe even ‘doing good’.  

Be concerned but not alarmed

One of our cats has gone missing, the grey one, the boy.  The one who is most persistent in his hunger and calls for attention.  My husband tells me this morning, in that combined serious but also light hearted way of his that says ‘be concerned but not alarmed’, 'the cat has not been around for two days'. 

We both know that our cats have a tendency, each one of them to stray from time to time, for days on end.  And usually they reappear.  But I have no memory of the boy disappearing.  Besides, I’ve been away myself for the past four days at a conference and I wonder if the two are connected.

I am not the chief carer of the cats.  I share responsibility with my husband and with whichever of our daughters are around, but the cat might have resented the disruption to our house hold routine and taken himself off somewhere.

Forgive me for anthropomorphising.  At this conference among other things a few people talked about the notion of ‘post human lives’.  I won’t go all theoretical on you other than to say, the notion of post human lives has something to do with the idea that human beings and animals, and machines, as well as cyber creatures, all organisms, have more in common than we like to think.  We tend to create artificial divides here.  That’s a crude rendering of this idea of the post human which I continually have the impulse to call ‘subhuman’.

I relish these conferences, the ones on autobiography and biography, and on what is roughly called life writing studies, because there are all these people – in Canberra three hundred of them – who come together from all over the world to talk about the way people think, paint, photograph, sing and write about their own lives and the lives of others.  And increasingly, there are people like me who write and theorise more explicitly about their own lives. 

At the conference in a paper on digital lives, I talked about my blog.  The hazards, the pitfalls the exquisite joys of blogging, all dressed up in a skimpy frock of what gets called 'blogging theory'. 

And now after all the pleasures of meeting new people, and of crawling around in my head with new ideas and notions, I find myself fretting for the cat. 

You might recognise him if you saw him, a grey cat, a large cat, a boy cat, who has been neutered and who perhaps resents this because sometimes he looks as though he’s scowling.  But he is a loyal cat.  A gift to one of our daughters from one of her boyfriends several years ago. 

That daughter has since left home.  That relationship between boyfriend and girlfriend  is over but the cat remains in our care, as many animals do after children leave home.  They might even be considered to take the place of the children who leave home. 

And there are other dramas and sadness afoot - too complex, too personal, to on-the-boil to mention here now, but the cat's absence stands as a reminder of the temporality of life, and it frightens me.