THE CAT’S QUESTION
Written by Bethany Felix. Cover illustration by Shanita Lyn.
The first time the cat tried to break into the apartment unit, things hadn’t worked out so well.
He saw his chance when he noticed that the unit’s window (lace curtains, wooden wind chimes) was open for once. Soon after running up the rusty fire-escape that clung to the side of the apartment building, he saw a sheet of scalding water falling towards him. It cannot be said why someone would want to toss a pot of pasta-water out of their fifth-floor window, but that afternoon, somebody did.
The cat had just enough time to think, Humans, as his world went black.
When the cat woke up this time, he found himself in the hollowed out, tunnel-like cardboard box which he called home. (Or, which he would have called home, if he didn’t think it so strong a word.) He stretched and took stock of himself. He felt good as almost-new. He began to wash himself as questions about the mysterious apartment unit began to surface and swim in his mind, as had been the case for the past week.
The cat lived in a narrow alley next to a series of old and crumbling apartment blocks set in a compound on a very busy street. For several days and nights in a row now, the cat found his gaze drifting towards the apartment unit with the lace curtains and wooden wind chimes— a stark contrast to the For Sale/Rent sign that had previously been up for ages. From his cardboard box, the cat would look at the window and feel something strange stirring within him. For all the watching he did, he never was able to see the unit’s inhabitants. In the evenings a light came on (sometimes white, sometimes a warm amber) and he might have seen the curtains move once or twice, but that was it. There was something comforting about the window, about the unit, but there was something else, too— a question that kept drifting across his mind: what was in there?
He had one life left. His final one. And, of course, for the first time in all of them so far, now, the thought of dying bothered him. Specifically, the thought of dying before finding out what was in the apartment unit disturbed him immensely.
He had heard from the various other cats he had met throughout his lives that the more you died, the scarier it got. He had never met a cat who knew what came after the Ninth Death.
Personally, he had never been too bothered by the whole thing. You lived, you got smart enough to get better at some things, and then you died. And then you did it eight more times. And then you died for good. It was just how it was.
All his lives had been lonely. He’d always had to fend for himself, as far as he could remember. Over time, he had gotten quite adept at it. He learnt (from a particularly gruesome lesson quite early on) not to sleep near the tyres of parked cars. He learnt to be more discerning when it came to eating things he had found lying around in the middle of the street. He learnt that sometimes, being careful meant you lived longer. And sometimes, you got hurt regardless. After a while, apart from feeling rather alone in the world (but who didn’t, every now and then? he would think), nothing bothered him too much, not even the dying. Until now, that was.
Now, somehow, things had changed. And it was all because of a question that was caught in his mind, which beckoned at him in a way he could not resist.
He looked up, towards the window of the apartment unit. He could see it from his cardboard box. He swished his tail as he considered his options. And then he stepped out into the relentless heat of the afternoon.
“Grandma,” said Su, who was eight years old, and staying with her grandparents for the afternoon, “did you know seahorses are fish?”
Her grandmother was beside her at the kitchen table, holding the newspapers up and peering through the bottom of her bifocals to read them. This gave her a stern expression. Her spectacles had a beaded chain that glinted around her neck in the late morning sun. She wasn’t fond of being interrupted when reading. She glanced at Su with an amused smile of acknowledgement, then went back to reading the papers.
“Seahorses eat all the time,” Su read aloud. She tapped a grubby finger at an illustration of a seahorse sucking in plankton with its snout. She pressed her face closer to the book and watched the way a spot of sunlight moved across the illustration as she wiggled the page. Up. Down. Up. Down.
“Grandma,” Su said, and wiggled the page.
“Mm,” her grandmother said, her lips pursed.
Su got the message. She kissed her grandmother on the cheek, and then carried her book to the hall. She got out some A4 paper and some scratchy magic markers and began drawing her impression of a seahorse. She was beginning to colour it in when she heard the familiar tinkle of car keys approaching the front gate. She shot up and ran to the front grille. “Grandpa!” she shrieked.
“Hello my sayang, I bought our lunch,” he said, unlocking the grille with one hand, holding food-filled plastic bags in the other.
“Can we go for a walk?” Su asked. “Please?”
Her grandfather considered this. “Better ask the boss,” he said, nodding in the direction of Su’s grandmother.
Su smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile.
In the time it took Su and her grandparents to have their lunch, and for her grandfather to take her for a walk (after she had successfully tied her laces all by herself, with a glowing sense of accomplishment), the cat had almost died. Twice. Both times during attempts to get a human’s attention. He had almost gotten run over by a truck, and he had almost fallen into a (disturbingly) deep sewer whose grate had been missing for months and never replaced.
He had approached and followed three humans — a man who seemed to be on his way to the bank, a teenager who was leaving the apartment grounds and a woman on her lunch break at a nearby park — to no avail. They were extremely unfriendly. And they were all busy.
So the cat sat under the playground slide, guarding his final life. The fresh memory of the truck’s roaring engine and screeching tyres struck the cat, and his fur prickled at the thought. He remembered the shock of stopping just before stepping into the depths and darkness of the sewer. But underneath these thoughts and feelings was a deeper revelation. The cat didn’t want to die, and it wasn’t just self-preservation. He wanted the answer to his question first.
An untied shoe caught his attention.
His pupils went huge and round as he watched shoelaces dragging past him. For a moment, the shoes (and the feet that went in them) seemed to hesitate, just shy of the slide’s steps. Then he saw a child’s face, upside down, switching from surprise to pure glee, half-covered in hair.
“GRANDPA THERE’S A CAT UNDER THE SLIDE!” cried Su, while she crouched down to get a closer look. “Hello,” said Su. “Wow! A cat! Wow. I’m going to call you Fluffy.”
The cat looked at Su. He considered that a human was paying attention to him. And then he thought, I might as well try. Maybe this will be the one that works.
The cat got up and slipped out from under the slide. He looked at Su, and saw that Su noticed how he was behaving. Then he walked to the part where the playground ended, and the park began, and looked at Su, and waited.
All of Su’s dreams had come true. The cat wanted to be followed! Did it want to play? Did it want to show her something? She ran to her grandfather, and told him about the cat. Before the cat knew it, he was being followed — across the park, across the street, and along the pavement that led to the crumbling, old apartment blocks — by a child on the best adventure she’d had in ages, and her bewildered grandfather.
“I used to work here,” said Su’s grandfather, squinting up at the weather-stained, moss-accented apartment blocks in the afternoon sun. “Maintenance.”
The cat was now staring up at the side of one of the buildings. Su thought the cat seemed extremely excited, although he just stood still, his tail curling as he looked fixedly at something.
“It looks like he’s looking at that window,” said Su’s grandfather, and the cat turned his head to them again.
Su thought she saw him wink.
“Grandpa, can we go there?”
“There?” Her grandfather pointed at the window with the lace curtains and wooden wind chimes. He looked at his granddaughter, who was grinning profusely. They had come this far, he thought to himself. “I think that’s unit 203,” he said. “This way, my sayang, the stairs are here.”
This time the cat followed them, padding up the stairs and along the corridor, feeling strangely aware of how hard his heart was beating.
Unit 203, like most units, had a grille with a small entryway behind it, and then the front door. The small entryway consisted of a money plant spilling tendrils down a tall stool, a small shoe cupboard and a mat. Su looked at the cat, who looked right back at her and then gave her a slow blink.
“You’re welcome, cat,” Su said, beaming. Her grandfather was looking at her, shaking his head and almost laughing. “Go,” he said, “ring the bell.”
Su stood on her tiptoes and rang the bell.
After a moment, the front door opened a crack. An elderly lady in a colourful, flowy house dress peered out from behind it. “Ah… hello?” she said, uncertain of what she was looking at. A man, a small girl… and then she saw the cat. The cat and the lady looked at each other for a moment. Something shifted in the atmosphere. The lady opened her front door a little wider, and looked at Su and her grandfather. There was a sort of wonder and joy that had come over her. She listened as the people in front of her told her that they had followed a cat to her doorstep.
She had always been a cautious person, but she opened up the grille and started to crouch slowly towards the cat, who did not move away.
“I always wanted a cat,” she said, scratching the scruff at the side of his face. “But I never got around to it. I —,” she covered her smiling mouth, shook her head. Su and her grandfather waited.
“Well,” she said, as she held the grille and began to stand up, “my husband was allergic to cats. Very badly. He passed away last year, and it’s been lonely. It’s so… odd,” she said, looking at the cat. “When I moved here I thought to myself, ‘Leela, you only live once.’” She laughed. “I told myself I would get a cat.”
Years later, the cat is falling asleep, curled up in Leela’s lap as she works on a watercolour painting of him. They are not lonely. As he begins to drift off he thinks that perhaps when you find the answer to your burning question, once is enough.
Once is plenty.
