All the big moments

It was a black cat with a white mask and, as it sat on the back porch, it looked like a burglar. All about her the suburb hummed with distant vehicles. The brick and timber houses were hedged with rhododendrons and cotoneasters, with their red berries, or overlooked by white eucalypts, some of them survivors from the recent days when all this was forest.

Life from the nearby bushlands was creeping back, wallaby investigated the roads and gardens at night and one of them, a shoulder-high Bennett’s wallaby, had taken to living in the back yard of this house.

But the cat was only interested in the universe twelve feet around her which she surveyed in the microscopic detail of her kind.

She turned, pad-footed, nosed through the cat-flap in the solid green door. An older lady sat in a leather recliner. She had long black hair (thanks to the hairdressers) and wore a red velvet dressing gown with the ceramic brooch of an angel on the lapel.

She was flexing her wrist, back and forth, bending it with her other hand as if that would help. She had carpal tunnel syndrome, a constant dull pain and it had kept her awake most of the night. The cat jumped on her lap. She stroked its back with the uncomfortable hand. “Hello Silky Puss,” she said. The cat curled in her lap then went to sleep and, after a little while, she looked up.

The lady had gone to sleep too, her head back against the chair and mouth open. It was not a good look and it is fortunate sometimes that we live by ourselves. But this was welcome rest.

Cats do not frown, but if they could, this one might of. There was no more petting to be got from her, so she jumped down.

Underneath the house there was a small flat. It had once been a surgery for a young doctor starting a suburban practice. But he became ill, multiple sclerosis, was unable to work and his family lived out his days in genteel poverty. The lady had converted it into a serviceable place to live.

Now a young man named Paul lived there. He was the son of her former lover. In his early twenties, with long fair hair parted to one side, he was a troubled boy, schizophrenic, treading a difficult path, sometimes in medicated lucidity. He had once set his father’s brand-new car on fire because he thought, no, he knew, that demons were living inside it. He could not live at home and she gave him somewhere to stay. She was like that, a kind and loving person.

The cat jumped at the table, looked briefly at what the lad was doing, then made detailed examination of the dust motes dancing in the air nearby. It seemed a faraway look.

He had a white bowl in front of him and was crumbling green plant material into it which he then stuffed into a small metal pipe. Puff, puff, he went, inhaling deeply then blew the smoke in the cat’s face.

Silky Puss reacted immediately – though in our terms it was about three seconds later. She jumped down then sat on the concrete path outside. Though it was only in millimetres, she began swaying from side to side.

Suddenly the figure we know as Bastet, the cat-goddess of the ancients, appeared before her and soon they were fast in conversation. Humans and dogs have forgotten their divinity. Budgerigars sing about it. In cats it is always alive.

“Is that so?” Little Puss might have said if cats could say such words at what the goddess told her but in an instant Bastet was gone, the conversation forgotten. The cat licked its paw.

She thought of the old lady. If she jumped up suddenly enough the cat could wake her and get more petting. She set off to do that.

Up the broken old concrete of the side driveway she padded, forefeet carefully in front of each other. Then the wind blew a browned, curled up leaf. Movement! The cat stopped and watched. It was a big moment.

Then she began licking the fur at the side. But, after all, that was a big moment too.