Extract 11 of the Memoirs

Cats: Urine and Fury

One of those early memories that has been reinforced and possibly distorted by frequent recollection and a categorisation as one of my strong early memories is a memory from possibly age three of being on the Turpentine/forest end of the verandah with the black family cat Barry (at that time, probably the only cat we had). I hiss at Barry and he reacts in fear and retreats from me under the big cedar outdoor table on the verandah. I smile and possibly giggle as a result. Something of that nature.

I recall that I used to draw on this memory often as a child in support of the narrative that I treated Barry appallingly badly (I remember recounting the memory on more than one occasion), and was incapable of feeling any pity for him (instead, extracted pleasure from harassing him). I think this narrative has a lot of truth to it. I’m quite sure that I treated Barry as little more than an amusement which I could treat as I pleased (until maybe the age of five or so) –  at least when my dad wasn’t around to scold me for doing so. I certainly never cuddled with Barry like my dad; for me, he was the sick black creature who had issues with peeing who we put in the laundry at night, even though it got really cold in winter and that was cruel.

Barry died when I was six (I think), of feline AIDS. Actually, that’s not quite true; we put him down (though I think he was pretty sick so it was possibly the right thing to do, etc (I mean that’s the sort of thing people say, isn’t it, even though they’re not even operating within a systematic ethical framework when making such evaluations and their claims should therefore be analysed as mere expressive speech acts)). I wasn’t there when Barry hopped off this mortal coil, but I think my sister was, along with my dad. My dad was really attached to Barry and so he was very sad about the execution, even though he was the one who ordered and paid for it (it’s sort of fucked up, in a way).

We had a proper funeral and burial ceremony for Barry. My dad dug a grave, in a heavy downpour, crying (is that a false memory influenced by pop cultural representations of grave-digging or was it actually raining heavily?), and then the whole family, with our new cat Millie (a lot more on her in a few paragraphs’ time) gathered together for the funeral. I think it was a pleasant afternoon, with sunlight breaking through the big Turpentine in a lovely lacework pattern (actually, a lot of that is extrapolation). I think maybe some of the trees around us were still a bit wet, with water dripping off leaves and the like… but I can’t assert that with the same smug confidence with which I assert that climate change is an existential threat to civilisation as we know it, or that the United States is the world’s biggest terrorist organisation (this is meant to be fractally ironic or some such (the phrase “fractally ironic” only recursively amplifying the irony (this pseudo-mathematical addendum only amplifying further (oh but now you see the recursion yes?))). Was it early Autumn 2003? I don’t know; basically, I don’t remember anything about this event with confidence 60%+. My dad actually had prepared a proper eulogy including poetry recitation, and it may be that my sister had prepared something also. I don’t think I had prepared anything. I must admit that I wasn’t the least bit cut up about it; it may well be that the thought on my mind as the ceremony was about to commence and then after it did commence was something like “Isn’t dad getting a bit carried away?”. I very dimly (perhaps erroneously) recall developing an attitude of mild disapproval, although I very dimly (perhaps erroneously) recall trying and failing to cry when everyone else was (maybe? Man the fact that I can’t remember shit from my own life really casts into doubt all of history). Anyhow, I do know with high confidence (largely, I suspect, because my sister brought it up after the event on a number of occasions) that my dad was crying throughout his eulogy and his recitation of the poem. What poem, you ask? I don’t recall and I wouldn’t bet good money that my dad does himself. Perhaps it was something by Blake. Whatever it was, I think it was something with gravitas and dignity, suitable for such a noble cat as Bartholomeu (or whatever the fuck his full name was, if he had one). I don’t know. I don’t think it was a poem about cats, that’s for sure. That would have been shit.

I notice on re-reading the paragraph that I am really undercutting the sombre gravity of this event in my relay thereof, and it is rather grotesque. I regret it, but I won’t do anything about it because it’s arguably a funny paragraph. I mean, to be clear, it was a fucking sad afternoon. Fucking sad, I tell you.

Before we interred Barry, Millie hopped in his grave and we had to get her out. Millie knew what was going on, we decided. I think it may have been a touching moment, or at least one of those moments that you think Fuck that’s an anecdote happening in front of my very eyes.  

We buried Barry next to Stumpy – which reminds me that the Reader has no clue who Stumpy is. Stumpy was a cat who turned up at my parents’ doorstep in Marrickville (or was it a house they had before Marrickville?) before I was even born with a fucked-up tail on account of some incident involving a firecracker (some sadistic asshole had apparently attached a firecracker to its tail). The fucked-up tail is why it got the name Stumpy. Stumpy was a cat that ended up dealing with health issues and ultimately died of leukaemia. I have no memory of Stumpy, even though she must have survived long enough to make it to Wahroonga in order to be buried there, which means that she must have been around at least until I was almost 2 and probably a little later than that. Stumpy’s grave was marked with a glass bottle.

Anyhow, we got Millie out of the grave and then Barry was buried (I actually don’t remember any details of how Barry was buried (was he in a casket or some shit? Pretty sure my dad wasn’t holding some stiff with rigor mortis and maggots coming out its eyes, because I’d definitely remember that (like how I have a vivid memory of the stinking, bloated rat on the lawn with maggots wriggling out of virtually every pore of its body)).

The long and short of this memory is that Barry died and we put the post-animated body in the fucking dirt, so that he could become a feast for the various disgusting creatures of the underworld. Now onto Millie.

Millie lived with Barry for about a year. She always wanted to play with Barry and he didn’t have the energy or zest to join in. I remember there was a lot of, like, playful mounting and things of that nature that we found amusing, because Barry would always be extremely dyspeptic and cantankerous but was too good-hearted or frail to lash out.

How and why did we acquire Millie? I’ll deal with the why first. We acquired Millie because my sister wanted a dog and we couldn’t get a dog because we couldn’t easily fence off our property to prevent the dog straying too far during the day, and a cat was the next best thing (if that ‘explanation’ doesn’t satisfy you, I’ve got a fistful of words to throw angrily at you: fuck off you cunt, I simply don’t give a shit). I think it was in very late 2002 – perhaps a few days before my sister’s birthday (it was a birthday thing) – when we travelled to the RSPCA to choose a kitten (nobody wants adult cats). I remember we ended up at this sunny, semi-covered area with like a very long row of cages containing kittens (if I am remembering the place correctly in my mind, it was probably far too hot for these little kittens and therefore kind of cruel). Miranda had the option to pick ones she liked the look of and (try to) cuddle them, with the assistance of an experienced employee. I think Millie was not the first. I think that the first few she picked up were, naturally, pretty frightened and therefore somewhat resistant to the whole embrace-with-a-member-of-a-different-and-much-bigger-species thing. But Millie, the beautiful black-and-grey tabby with magnificent green eyes (and perhaps a bit of Chincilla) (she looked quite a lot like the tabby kitten that is on Whiskas cat food)), acted completely calm in Miranda’s arms and allowed Miranda to give her a long cuddle without disturbance or incident (she may well have purred too). And so Millie had succeeded. Later we had discovered that Millie – that devious Mephistophelean schemer – had just been dissimulating. It turned out that she hated affection and cuddling, that she was selfish to her core, perhaps incapable of love altogether (a.k.a a typical domestic cat, a species which was domesticated much more recently than the dog and belongs to a less social Family than dogs)…

Millie has always been, in most respects, a rather repugnant creature. Not physically. Physically she is beautiful (I know that sounds like I want to have sex with my cat and… well I do). As a kitten and in her younger ‘adulthood’, she was very sleek, lithe and agile, capable of astonishing leaps and hunting feats. After her kittenhood phase of spending her time sleeping in the drawers of desks and any other tightly confined spaces she could find (young cats seem to have claustrophilia), she moved onto the other quintessentially feline activity of leaping up to the tallest possible perch in any given room (which often involved quite dangerous acrobatic feats, like 1.5m+ leaps from one surface to another). She was so agile, in fact, that she managed to kill a couple of birds in her early life in spite of her bell.

But as far as personality is concerned, she has always been a monumental asshole. I mean, sure, she used to do cute things as a kitten, like sleep in the desk drawer downstairs and play in boxes, and, sure, you could get her to sit on your lap after dad trained her on that (but she would only accept being on your lap facing away from you), so there was an element of affection. And, sure, it was fun watching her run around the house insanely in pursuit of toys thrown by my dad (while he repeatedly said “Skitch ‘em, Milly”, for some unknown reason). But most of the time she was an annoying asshole. The biggest problem was that she used to moan and scowl and whine for food relentlessly and endlessly. (She’s still alive and she still does this, but it’s not nearly as bad. She’s mellowed a lot.) As a child coming home from school, the first thing I would do would be to fill her bowl with ‘nibblies’, even though my dad didn’t want me to feed her at that time, since the alternative was to be jumped on, scratched and generally tormented wherever one went in the house, and whatever one was trying to do. Even when you had just fed her, she would often keep pestering you for attention (or more food?). Often, when you had just put food in her bowl, she would apparently not notice or think, “I deserve something better”, and thus continue her moaning and whinging until you wanted to kick her to death.

In later years, when I was on my laptop (I only got my first PC in late year 9, I think), playing Skyrim or TF2 or doing homework or writing a terrible poem, she would start walking all over the keys, fucking up my shit. And sometimes she would try to claw me if I kept ignoring her and brushing her away. After she had done this several times, and I had thrown her off the desk several times, I would eventually resort to closing the door of the room I was in so she couldn’t get in. I got more brutal over time (to be fair, I felt like she did, too, like a mini-arms race). Similarly, when I was playing FIFA by myself during one of those long, lonely school holidays, Millie would often try to jump on my lap, even after I had angrily pushed her off. This caused me great frustration. If she persisted, I would eventually be forced to angrily carry her to the window and toss her outside. For most of my life, Millie has just been an immense annoyance.

Before she became severely arthritic, Millie was also a terrorist to the animals around the house. Under dad’s command, we would always have to bring her in at night (if it was night-time and “someone had let Millie out”, he’d blow his top, as is his custom). This was a sensible policy, given that she would kill possums if given the opportunity. On one occasion, in 2009 (there or thereabouts), my dad discovered Millie on the veranda eating a possum whole, bones, guts and all (I guess it was a ringtail), leaving only the tail. Most of the time, her hunting practice would be to stun and stupefy a rat or big lizard from the garage (or wherever else she found them) and then carry it to the veranda, mewing at us to open the veranda door so that she could present her kill to us inside the house.

Speaking of lizards, one very tragic thing about Millie’s presence is that she dramatically reduced the lizard population around the house. Before her arrival, you could barely step ten centimetres around the house without stepping on a lizard (which would subsequently drop its tail and slither around absurdly and piteously). This may not be connected to Millie’s arrival, but I also remember that we used to also have a blue-tongue lizard visitor (by this I really mean that I have a memory of a blue-tongue lizard sitting perched above us in the neighbour’s garden visible from the driveway, and also a very hazy, possibly false memory of my dad saying, when I told him of this memory, that this was not a one-off event). After years of Millie’s marauding about the garden – after her brutal, ongoing campaign of terrorism and rapine against the local reptiles – you could barely spot any lizards whatsoever (I’m saying by about 2006 we noticed there were many fewer lizards).

(One very tragic and really scary thing about the ecology of the garden around the house is that there used to be masses of snails in the garden at the front of the house, leaving slime trails all over the brickwork and the marble porch). Then we suddenly noticed around 2007 or 2008 that they had disappeared, completely: it went from a thriving population to total extinction. I also recall that there used to be occasional butterflies in the back garden. I’m not sure I’ve seen one for years. My dad has repeatedly lamented ever since I was a kid how there used to be many more insects around when he was a kid, including butterflies of all different kinds, cicada shells on virtually every tree, and also far more spiders and snakes. I seriously worry about the rise of the manicured garden, and herbicide and pesticide overuse. I seriously worry about ecology in general. That study of insect populations in Germany recently publicised in the Guardian [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809] was jaw-droppingly ominous. Unfortunately, the percentage of the population that knows a lot about ecology and cares about it is vanishingly small. The percentage of the population that is capable of nonlinear thinking about environmental threats is similar.)

Ever since Millie became arthritic, she stopped hunting completely. Luckily, the lizard population recovered. A couple of years ago, I was walking along the newly made path by the side of the house near the bamboo, and, looking down, suddenly had an incredible flash of déjà vu. So many lizards were wriggling about my feet, darting away into the shade as I approached – just the way it used to be when I was a little boy. The lizards were back. How thrilling it was.

There are various more random details about Millie that must be included, for the sake of comprehensiveness.

In January 2003 or January 2004 (not sure! (if it was 2003, Millie would have been only a few months old and not yet at full size probably)), we decided to try taking Millie with us on our annual two-week holiday to South Durras, a sleepy beach town 15 minutes north of Batemans Bay (where we rented the same house for perhaps 8 years in succession). I wasn’t in the car with Millie; it was either my mum, my sister and her friend M, or my dad, my sister and her friend M. (I can’t remember which parent I was taking the trip with.) I think originally she was being kept in her cat cage in the backseat – a cage which she later came to associate with terror and trauma – and I believe that she got quite bad motion sickness and perhaps vomited while in this cage. Understandably, she was terrified. At some point the people in the car (I’m leaning towards the view that it was my mum driving that car) decided that it might be a good idea to let her out of the cage, probably motivated by anguished mewing and such. But this was a disaster. As it was recounted to me when we met up with them at (I think) some petrol station at some point in our journey (maybe at Braidwood, a town with a wonderful old-fashioned boiled lolly shop which we often stopped off at when we weren’t just taking the slightly quicker coastal route), Millie went bezerk when let out of the cage. She was wide-eyed, stiff-tailed, climbing all over the place, in a mad panic. If I recall correctly, she also micturated in the car, possibly due to pure terror. So it was a disaster. And so the family vowed that Millie would never be taken on a long car trip again. Thereafter Millie would reside in a boarding house for the duration of our holidays longer than three days (if it was three days, we could get my dad’s mum to come over to feed her or, later, for a few years, J, the girl in my year at primary school, who lived up the street).

Millie is a very furry cat in winter, and always malted massively in summer. Our house had a lot of cat fur in it (we also used to have (until 2009) these horrible grey carpets through the house that smelled pretty rank and musty because the house has always had major dampness problems, being both poorly designed, without air-conditioning (a choice, for environmental reasons) and in the wettest part of Sydney (a city which, contrary perhaps to people’s perception, has the second highest aggregate rainfall of all Australia’s capitals (behind only Darwin (so Wikipedia told me a few months back)) (it’s true that even in La Nina years we rarely get relentless rainy periods, but when it rains in Sydney it pours (the frequency of rain may well be lower than Melbourne)) so it was lucky I didn’t have any allergies (but absolutely shit for my dad and sister)).

In winter, when we had the fire going (as we did every night from mid-Autumn to the end of Winter (house has no heating either)), Millie would prostrate herself in front of it, fully stretched out to prevent overheating. In summer, she would do/does the same thing under the verandah.

As parenthetically mentioned above, Millie has been terrified of her cage her entire life. It is very difficult trying to put her in it in order to take her to the vet or to the boarding place in Glenorie. She doesn’t get severely car sick these days, though, luckily.

Millie once got a paralysis tick and my dad only saw she was in serious trouble late at night (I think she was having serious trouble breathing) and had to rush her to this place at, I think, Ryde before she died. He ended up getting a speeding fine for going too fast on the Highway near Lindfield Public School.

Millie used to have a feline friend that she would ‘chat to’ on the driveway every now and then. By and large, though, she has always been very antisocial.

Whenever we used to eat at the dinner table (which was rare), Millie would sit on one of the chairs with us and sometimes (at least the first few times) try to eat the food. It seemed like it was an important status thing for her to be up high with us when we were eating.

When we started connecting an office projector to our shitty TV to watch TV and movies and play PS2 on the opposite living room wall (which we did for many years, powered by my technical expertise alone), we would often like to joke when Millie was present with us in the living room that Millie was watching whatever we were watching with us. It sometimes seemed as if she was watching. Perhaps she was too.

When the brush turkeys arrived at our house in 2009 or 2010 (whenever it was), we were very concerned that Millie would hunt them and eat them. She didn’t. They were too big for her, I guess; I think they scared her. She would initially sort of stalk them but she never leapt on them. Perhaps she would have if they had arrived a couple of years earlier.

Millie often spends her time resting in the bamboo, surreptitiously. Maybe her penchant for doing this intensified with the arrival of the brush turkeys. I think she likes surveilling them from a covert position.

Millie has often been terrorised by the yappy Bichon Frise dogs from the big house next door (whereof there have been several generations now, never more than two at once). These dogs, starting from the OG, “Lemmy”, have possessed and passed down a trait of extreme territorial belligerence and yappiness. I don’t think the family that owns them has ever walked any of these dogs they have ever owned (they do have a large amount of lawn space to roam), which probably is one of the factors that helps explain their extreme territorialism. The second two dogs in the lineage used to attack me whenever I took out the bin (I guess they figured the street near their house was their territory too). Even though they were small, they would scare the shit out of me and I recall that there were several occasions where I took the bin half-way down the driveway, then saw that the dogs would assault me if I went further and decided to return home and finish the bin job a few hours hence. Many years back there were a few incidents where the original two dogs (Lemmy and Ruby (Ruby came much later than Lemmy, who was there for years by himself, and turned Ruby from a friendly, cuddly dog into a monster)) literally chased Millie right back to the house. Once I seem to recall they forced Millie to run up a tree right near the front of our house.

Millie has always been terrified of dogs (no doubt the nasty personalities of these dogs described above have contributed to this complex), which, along with the fence problem, is another reason my dad was always hostile to the prospect of us getting a dog after Millie (even though dogs are 9 million times better than cats). When we minded our maternal cousins’ super friendly, young and energetic labradoodle Styx for one week in 2014, Millie was initially absolutely terrified and couldn’t tolerate being indoors when Styx was indoors. Eventually, she overcame that (and I think she hated the idea that she might be losing access to her own house), but when Styx approached Millie when Millie was perched up on high (like on the ironing board at the back of the house), she would stiffen and hiss and we would have to pull Styx away.

Millie typically sleeps in my parent’s bed at night, though she definitely always preferred resting on and sleeping in my bed to my sister’s, when my sister and I were both living in the family home. This is probably mostly because I always was the one to feed the cat and because I spent much more time with Millie. Maybe also because I was bigger than my sister in the period I am talking about and because I became more aggressive with Millie as I got older (I think Millie realised that I had become at least as alpha as her, or more alpha, so she respected me). I have snuggled with Millie every night whenever I have held the fort alone (I have done this for quite long stretches in the past – I did it in 2015 for four weeks, resulting in Raskolnikov levels of solitude). Often Millie just sleeps on soft objects (like my washing) in my room. My dad trained Millie to get under the covers in Winter. Millie has gotten under the covers with me a few times. Not many. I remember I used to have big issues whenever Millie tried to sleep on me, because I sleep almost on my tummy and move from side to side a lot and I would always have to shift her. Eventually, she would lose patience altogether after being knocked off so many times.

As suggested before, I feel as if Millie’s personality might have mellowed. She’s a lot meeker now and less strident in her demands for food. I think she doesn’t even care to jump on your lap when you’re watching TV these days, like she used to. She mostly minds her own business now, which is actually wonderful. She’s no longer that much of an asshole.

For the last few years, Millie has had bad arthritis (getting worse) as well as an only recently vet-diagnosed kidney issues (overwhelmingly common for cats in old age) which cause her to drink a vast amount of water and want to piss all the time. The arthritis has long been an issue; she probably stopped doing acrobatic leaps way back in 2012, maybe earlier. She now walks with a limp most of the time and doesn’t run at all, although we have been giving her this stuff in her food for a while that seems to alleviate the symptoms. The kidney problems came later. I remember my dad told me to take her to the vet to see what was wrong back in, like, 2015, but I didn’t and told him I did and that there was nothing wrong because I was a lazy piece of shit. The excessive peeing is a pretty terrible problem, because it means we have to empty her tray way more, and also because she often tries to pee in my shower. (Several years ago, it occurred to her that it must be ok to urinate in the bathroom if that’s where we do it and, despite castigations after implementations of this false lesson, she still tries to do it.)

She’s probably actually in pretty good nick for her age. She’s very old – 15, if it’s correct that we did get her near the end of 2002. She may not die for a couple more years yet. Who is to say?

Anyhow, I like my cat and all, but I think cats are a scourge – in my country at least. They kill far too many native animals [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cats-killing-one-million-birds-in-australia-every-day-estimates/9013960]. And they’re mostly rubbish to be around.

Millie is ok. I spend most of my time joking about eating her. I have joked to one or both of my parents, “When are we going to kill Millie?” hundreds of times. My dad used to get quite angry at this; I would try to explain to him that Millie clearly viewed us with total contempt and was an extreme Randian egoist who, if incarnated in human form, would be repugnant and intolerable. Nevertheless, I still felt a bit guilty myself when he pressed me on it. I never seriously thought about killing my cat.