Spoiler! :
Chapter 1 -- The Cat.
Tell us about the boy.
I first saw the boy nine summers ago. I was slinking around the corner of The House after a rat. I could smell the meaty flesh around its rump and was already imagining my teeth breaking through the coarse skin and sinking into the soft tissue beneath. I was near to it. Slinking, close to the ground.
The first thing I saw of the boy was his feet. White shoes, laces undone. I remember wanting to paw at the laces, to play with them. Laces weren’t common around The House. The only feet I really knew of were rodent’s paws scrabbling in the undergrowth and my own ones padding the empty path between the gate and the house. He looked down and I looked up. Our eyes met. You would call that cliché, but I call it common courtesy. For a second, blue-grey studied flecked brown and then I whisked away.
The next time I saw the boy I was more prepared. I had been sitting in The Garden, when I smelt something that wasn’t rodent or flower or wood. It didn’t smell normal. I walked around to the front of the house and there He was. He was sitting outside of his house and this time, to be polite, I ignored the faint scent of vole coming from under his front porch and walked up to the top step where he was sitting.
“Hullo, cat.”
His first words to me were not riveting, but they were the first words anybody had ever spoken to me. At the time, I wasn’t sure what he was saying. His manner seemed friendly but he wasn’t squeaking or chittering like the animals around me were wont to do, and the sounds came from outside me rather than inside me like The Voice. His sounds were entirely alien.
After the dull beginning, things began to pick up. I purred and nuzzled into his leg; he fumbled in his pocket and brought what looked like a half-chewed block of mud, except it smelt sickly sweet. Still, it seemed like a gesture of goodwill.
Absentmindedly, his hand had begun to stroke from the crown of my head to the tip of my tail in long, smooth strokes. It was as though I was already his.
We sat out there for hours; staring at the street together. He seemed puzzled as he looked at it, as though he was searching for something else, something other. At that time, for me, there was nothing but The House, The Garden, The Voice and now The Boy. Unlike him, back then I didn’t know that beyond a gate there should be a street, with cars and people and dogs and other things crossing paths and entwining destinies. For me, there was The Gate, and that was where my existence ended.
I remember, that afternoon on the porch, suddenly finding that this person had become important to me. Our companionship, though silent, already seemed strong. His hand curled protectively around my middle and sometimes I’d give a contented rumble in the back of my throat.
Ah, I was young – I had had no experience beyond The Garden, no interaction apart from gently toying with my prey before devouring it. A lonely life? It was all I knew, yet in one afternoon The Boy managed to shatter it, managed to change me. Though I had a House, I’d never had a home. Now the Boy was Home and
Home was in The Boy.
But, of course, The Boy left. It scared me, when he finally got to his feet. In my life, everything was permanent. I woke up, caught my breakfast, lay in the sun (or the shade if it was too hot) and then caught something else. Routine. The Boy had changed my routine, and now he was going to change it again with just two words.
“Bye, cat!”
A hello and a goodbye was all I got that day.
After that, I waited for the boy. I sat on the porch where he sat. I stared at the spot where I’d seen his trainers. For months, nothing. I slowly began to move back into my old routine. Yet it seemed as though it was not only me waiting, but The House too. It sagged, grew dull. Like me, His presence had warmed it for the briefest of moments, and now everything seemed a little bit chillier. Even The Voice was silenced for a short while; it existed only in the whispers of the grass blades and the creaks of the porch steps as I passed them.
Then, one day, He returned. I only knew it because The Garden suddenly seemed to be blooming – the pinks were pinker, the roses more rosy. I looked at the house and then I was sure. Where the paint had been peeling it gleamed. Where there had been dust on the windows there was now only a faint sparkle. He was here.
Our afternoon was much like the first. He was silent. I sat next to him until he stood up again. This time, instead of saying goodbye he turned around with a “See you soon, cat!” and brushed the top of my head.
That was when I became His, when the House became His and when He began to visit regularly.
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