by Heidi Wyss

We were in the garden when we first saw those grey, black and white tiger markings, the flat head, and the banded tail which Kaatje promptly and accidentally stepped on with her laced boots. An anguished scream came in reply.

"I'm such a cunt," said Kaatje, shaking her head.

"Kaatje, what really annoys me is how you use that word every time you think you've bollixed the Pollux. I still don't like it."

"Neither do I."

"Well then!" I said.

"So stop being one, 'k?"

Kaatje and I go in circles. We have fun with it now but we had to learn how to do that. She'd rage and I'd sulk, more or less. She was raised by a bitter old Stalinist drunk who hated everyone except his wife, who suffered. When I met him he was sweet, I wouldn't say "charming" but he made the effort and later Kaatje remarked that he probably thought I was a communist.

"Huh?"

"Heidi! You are so naive! I mean, I think he must have read it somewhere, you know, that all lesbians are commies. That's why he's so smug about me."

He dropped dead five months later. One of Kaatje's uncles called the hospital and told them to burn the remains and send him the invoice. There was no funeral.

"I'm such a cunt," Kaatje said that night, tears slipping down her freckled face.

His communist books arrived a few weeks later. I was so excited, and couldn't wait to open them. It was a real anthropology moment.

"I say we burn them," she remarked as I paged through a fifty year old booklet about Sputnik.

"Kaatje!" I scolded.

Burning books, after all.

"I mean if they're so horrid, we can always pitch them in the skip, but I can't burn a book."

"I don't want the neighbours to see them," she replied with soft, slow deliberation. "If we're throwing them out, it means maybe we liked them once."

"Codswallop," I replied, flicking pages as I began to notice the illustrations were either artists' conceptions or studio photos of Russians in space suits. How odd...

"Stop looking at pictures of stoned, misogynist Soviet pilots and read one!" she insisted, holding out a worn, greasy volume marked 'Selected Poems by William Blake.' He'd been a true subversive in his day, the sacred political tracts hidden in false bindings, printed on cheap paper so acidic, the pages were amber yellow and brittle.

Books usually smell pretty savory to me but this one reeked. My nose crinkled.

"Definitely not one of your precious Huxley first editions, is it," observed Kaatje.

"This- is shite."

"Uh huh."

"This is fricking angry shite!"

"I told you!"

"Right. I say we burn 'em. Er, that is if you really want to."

The chimney worked fine but the fumes got intense and it was too much work so we wrapped the remains in plastic and buried them in the rubbish.

Kaatje has asked me why I stay with her and I have trouble explaining that one. She accuses me of not letting her go but that's ridiculous.

"You cry," she once observed. "You know I can't resist you when you cry."

"I don't cry, much."

"Exactly, because you know just when to do it. But that's ok," she added. "I don't mind."

Sometimes when I snuggle my face onto her neck I think it might be how she smells but I've known lots of girls with pleasant scents. She's tall and I melt when she wears tights but that's not so unusual. She's way creative, although it took me time to appreciate the processes she goes through and why not finishing over half of what she starts is part of it.

I knew it the first night. She took my hand without a word and we walked among the street musicians and acrobats and aromas of touristy foods and I just knew it, and she did too.

"You're my beautiful princess," she said after our first brief kiss, standing there in her Doc Martens (earlier, she'd demonstrated her ability to forcefully deliver the right one to skull level in a split second if need be), simple white cotton mini-dress and absolutely nothing else, not even a shred of cosmetics or anything, her hair uncombed and falling to her waist.

She put it in writing, too, the bit about the princess. Once, having a fit, she went through all the computers and tried to erase everything but I'd anticipated that and copied the important stuff.

My longtime school chum who's a quarter Indian and one of the wisest girls I've ever known warned me properly when Kaatje woke up screaming every night for the first three weeks we were together. I looked into that. Turns out, in her case it's a brain architecture thing and not much of a worry. Then there's Rut, my fifty two year old German friend. She looks thirty, was a cover girl at sixteen and married to a famous rock star for awhile. I fell for Rut the first time I ever saw her and she was finally starting to get clear on the concept but stopped calling as soon as she heard about Kaatje. I regretted that. I guess serial monogamy is something else entirely.

So there's this cat in our garden and at first Kaatje declares that never, ever will we have a cat. Let one into your life and you start nurturing it, worrying about it. We were both raised that way, her angry alcoholic predatory communist parents and my blissful alcoholic predatory capitalist parents both knew that people are the unwitting slaves of their pets (responsible people, at least).

It was a couple of months before we let it into the house. It accepted our caresses, then jumped onto the kitchen sink and while leaning over to lap up some stray water near the drain I looked under its wondrous, banded tail.

"Shite. It's a boy."

"She is not! She's a girl!"

"Nope," I replied, taking another look. "He's been fixed."

"You don't know anything," she muttered in her sensitive, measured way, stalking off. "I know a girl when I see one!"

For the next six months he showed up in the morning, slept on our bed half the day, spent time outside chasing small mammals and birds through the grass, then returned to spend the night either curled up on a cushion by a toasty radiator or in bed, affectionately perched and purring on our legs like a contented predator. In the morning he'd disappear for half an hour before announcing his return by jumping up and snapping the front door latch. Sometimes, if the window in the second floor stairway landing was open, he'd vertically scale the wall to get in.

Kaatje decided to call him Foopsy.

When he slept, head tilted on his paws, he had the vulnerable, heart rending look of one who, after much loneliness and suffering, has at last found emotional and physical security. Well, maybe. I know enough about cats and natural selection to assume his ancestors survived because they tended to provoke that endearing response in people.

He only drew blood a few times, and I cured him of that, screaming like a maniac, chasing him madly through the house (obviously taking care not to lay a hand on him or do accidental harm) until he dashed under a bed whining pathetically, like the true victim.

"I've never seen you like that!" Kaatje exclaimed, eyes wide with rapture.

"Try fur, get your IQ down to like, 40 or whatever and then lose your temper and make me bleed with your high performance talons while I'm trying to be sensitive and affectionate," I replied, casting off bloody tissues and flooding peroxide across the long scarlet slashes on the top of my hand.

As for food, we'd agreed to give him no more than milk and water. We were running a cat bistro, we insisted, not a restaurant.

"There's a story with him," I said. "He's obviously well fed."

My moment of truth arrived on a cold, blustery winter evening. We were in the kitchen and he padded in across the tiles, sniffing around the fridgey and miaowing plaintively.

"You're going to do it, aren't you?" she asked, her jaw set.

"No way! Let him go wherever it is he goes if he's so hungry."

Ten minutes later I was slogging through freezing rain to the town centre, where I acquired a heavy bag of vitamin enriched, protein laden cat cereal. He was on Kaatje's lap when I returned. The clinking sound of hard kitty spog hitting a ceramic bowl brought him into the kitchen before I was done pouring.

"Hmmm...!" Kaatje sighed, sniffing the contents of the bag. "It smells just like a hamburger!"

A litter box is still out of the question. He's smart enough, and has the social skills, to ask to be let out. As he leaves, one of us says "goodbye!" and he responds with an eerily inflected, whining miaow that mimics our vocal melody. The same happens with the "hellos" that greet him.

One day, we went for a long walk and he followed faithfully, trotting along behind us as we made a giant circle over the course of forty five minutes, picking up a couple more cats along the way. When we got home he immediately collapsed on the rug, legs akimbo, and fell asleep smiling, his left fang jutting out.

I educated myself about cats. The most interesting thing I learned has to do with their vision, not that they can see much better than us in the dark, but that their colour perception is dimmer compared to ours. They see only faint blues, greens and yellows (like when the colour intensity on a telly is turned down), and brilliant red apparently comes through for cats like a dull grey with a hint of something like purple. So I proposed that he probably sees us as chalken, with whitish and grey hair, which Kaatje finds fascinating.

One afternoon we were in a local restaurant when a friendly blond woman, one of the owners, approached our table.

"Do you have a grey and white cat?" she asked.

"Uh, yes...?"

"I thought so. We're neighbours, and I think it's ours, actually. The other day I thought I saw him sitting on your window sill and took a closer look with a pair of binoculars. I still wasn't sure. He's abandoned us, I think."

"Him!?" exclaimed Kaatje.

"Does he have a banded tail?" I asked, watching a scandalized Kaatje from the corner of my eye.

"Yes!"

"It can't be the same cat!" Kaatje protested. "Foopsy's a girl!"

"I told you, he's been fixed! ...Does he have a flat head, and sleep like... this... with his long-suffering head on his paws? And purr madly when you pet him anywhere but on his belly, which makes him viciously attack?"

"That's him! That's Bad Boy!"

"Bad Boy?!"

"I'm such a cunt," Kaatje mumbled, looking out the window.

"We were camping in Spain seven years ago," the woman explained, "and he showed up, tiny, dirty, hungry and cold. We gave him something to eat and after that he hardly left the tents. We called him Bad Boy because he was affectionate but always jumping on people and sticking his nose into trouble. When it was time to go we couldn't bear to leave him, so my daughter smuggled him in her jacket on the train."

She explained that the preceding autumn, she and her husband had gone on a skiing vacation, leaving their dog and two cats in the care of a house-sitter and when they returned, Bad Boy was only showing up for ten minutes in the morning and another ten minutes in the evening to eat and run. Lately, he'd been visiting just in the morning.

"I think just to make sure there's still food in the bowl," she added.

"You can have him back if you want!" Kaatje offered. "We won't let him in any more-"

"Oh no! He can go where he wants! I miss him though. Sometimes he comes into the garden and lets me caress him for a minute or two, and then he leaves..." she added, her voice trailing off wistfully.

"Do you like him less, now that you know she's a he?" I asked as we walked home.

"No," Kaatje replied thoughtfully. "I mean, she's still Foopsy."

"He!"

"Yeah. Anyway he's been castrated. I suppose that's why I couldn't tell."

"Have you ever met," I mused, "you know, a gorgeous boy, and wished he wasn't Y-afflicted?"

"Huh?"

"You know, girls have an XX chromosome, basically, and bois are XY. Y-afflicted."

"So you mean, have I ever met a boy and wished he was a girl?"

"Well, yeah."

"Not really. Have you?"

"Sort of. I told someone once, the only issue I had with him was that he had a penis."

"I guess castration wouldn't have been enough then, huh?"

"They've tried eunuchs, but you have to cut them."

"Like poor Bad Boy."

"Well, he seems pretty happy at least. I've known some uncastrated male cats. They spray all over everything and it stinks. They're way aggressive and roam constantly, but more territorial, too."

"Sounds about right. So what happened?"

"To what?"

"Your Y-afflicted friend."

"Nothing," I replied with a shrug.

Kaatje grinned.

Bad Boy's fixed but this hasn't entirely eliminated his territorial behavior. One day the three of us were in the garden and a terrier from across the street came wandering up, tail wagging. He'd gotten loose and wanted to make friends but Bad Boy immediately began a low, moaning growl. I'm not a fan of most dogs but this one's quite cute and personable. She approached carefree, and was panting at Kaatje's feet when Bad Boy landed a well-aimed, thumping swipe on her flank, claws fully extended. The dog yelped and ran off whimpering. Kaatje picked up our feline companion and gently admonished him, his sharp, curving talons retracted back into big, furry white paws.

"Bad Boy! Bad Boy! The most handsome cat in the world!"

Hanging dolefully in her arms, calmly purring, staring languidly with clear, green-gold eyes, he reminded me of little Alex in Kubrick's version of 'A Clockwork Orange.'

There's definitely somebody home in that broad, flat, tiger striped head. We enjoy imagining that he views us as affable, big mice, his property, perhaps his seraglio, and in exchange for protecting us as part of his territory, he marks us with his scent, pounces on us, accepts our affection, lets us feed him and still manages to sleep eighteen hours a day.

Not that we need much protection. Kaatje single handedly ran off a burglar one afternoon while I was asleep upstairs. She chased him down the street, mostly upset that he was on a bike and she wasn't on hers. I doubt Bad Boy would have done, had we known him at the time.

There's a bloke who lives nearby and drops in now and then. Kaatje rides bikes with him sometimes. Fabian's a pleasant hippie, doesn't work, but has lived around here all his life and everyone seems to know him.

I learned in my teens that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat cats. One day Fabian proposed to drive us to a nearby village for a short hike along the beach and through the local woods. He insisted Kaatje and I sit in the back seat together and of course we subsequently teased him about being our chauffeur. When Fabian makes an effort at interesting conversation, one can't take what he says too seriously. That evening he informed me that the planet Venus is blue and that Einstein 'discovered' photosynthesis. It took me at least twenty minutes to disabuse him of those two ideas and I doubt it was even worth it. Anyway as it began to get dark we were walking along a tree canopied path when a kitten started following us and patiently did so for well over a kilometre. This inevitably provoked thoughts and comments about Bad Boy. Suddenly, Fabian picked up a pebble and pitched one at the kitten, who darted off into the brush.

"Fabian!" I cried.

He laughed. Within a few seconds the kitten rejoined us, Fabian skipped another pebble and the kitten again retreated to the side.

"Stop it!"

"He'll be back... there, you see?" said Fabian, nodding as the determined kitten jumped back onto the path.

Kaatje was now far ahead of us on the darkening trail.

"Do you think Kaatje's mad about something?" he mused.

"Not really. She's just a brisk walker."

We soon came to a narrow, paved lane between tall hedgerows. Kaatje was nowhere to be seen, but in the middle of the deserted lane, centred directly beneath the amber beam of a street lamp, carefully arranged on the tarmac in smooth pebbles, was the outline of a heart, unmistakably created and left by her.

Staring down I wanted to pick up the pebbles and keep them but no, that would destroy the gesture. At last I walked on, the image of that pebbled heart in amber light engraved on my memory.

Kaatje was waiting for us around the next bend, a patient smirk on her face.

Back home, Kaatje explained, "I just had to walk ahead. He wouldn't stop talking and I wanted to hear the birds and the animals and the wind in the trees."

I told her about the incident with the kitten. The next day Fabian's distinctive ring sounded at the door but we didn't answer.
"We'll see less of him, I think," Kaatje remarked.

Until this moment I hadn't actually compared the strikingly different ways my two companions made use of pebbles as we walked through the woods that evening.

Our neighbourhood has a large cat population and the relationships among them are complex. Cat fights are common and this fascinates Bad Boy. Nothing gets his attention (with the exception perhaps of fresh ground steak) more than the wailing-child sound of two tomcats doing combat. One night we heard the undeniable signature of Bad Boy's screams and a few minutes later he snapped the door latch, staggered in covered with blood (some of which didn't seem to be his own), went to his bowl for a snack, drank a copious amount of water and collapsed onto the sofa in the lounge. That's where we cleaned him up and he didn't budge for a day. After a visit to the vet's (he was quite the cooperative patient), a course of antibiotics and two solid weeks on the couch, we knew he was on the mend when he began climbing the stairs to sleep on our legs in the big bed again.

So my bytch is, the mere lack of testosterone doesn't quite do it for Bad Boy, but we adore our Y-afflicted little eunuch all the same.

Heidi Wyss is the author of Gormglaith, 76,000 words of radical feminist separatist literature set in a scientifically plausible future. The novel can be read online for free at http://www.literateweb.com/wyss.htm