The cat that wasn’t there

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

I was sitting in my dressing gown in front of my computer, my bare feet idly stroking the back of one of the cats that had decided to lie down under the desk. This happens a lot, and my reaction isn’t conscious. It’s much the same sometimes when watching TV, or reading a book—you can be stroking a cat with a free hand for half an hour or more, and not realise until you hear the purring or the cat decides it’s had enough. This time, though…

I answered the phone to D and became aware, while I was talking to him, of what I was doing with my feet. I looked down and under the desk to see who it was…

There was no cat.

That’s right. There were two cats fast asleep on the sofa, on the other side of the living room, and it was easy to tell from their entrenched positions that they’d been like that for some time. I’d spent what must have been quarter of an hour running my toes from the cat’s shoulders down to the base of its tail. I recall at one point the cat flipped over and I was tickling its belly. I felt the warmth of the body beneath the fur, the life within.

There was no cat.

I’d like to say it was my dear departed Dolly come back for a visit, or maybe one of the other felines we’ve loved and sadly seen pass over down the years—DJ, perhaps, or Gucci. But I can’t say who it was, or even if it was a ghost at all, or just a remarkably well-formed figment of my imagination. Whatever it was, it was, most definitely, a very strange and wonderful occurrence.

categories: animals, strange