A Tabby-cat's Tale by Hang Dong Read Free Book Online

and put my finger to my lips, to warn Xulu not to make any sudden movements. We were well aware that we were no match for his agility and speed, however determined we were to save him. Besides, he was much nearer the railings than we were. All we could do was wait patiently. Tabby did this a couple of times, but he never did leap to his death. Finally, we realized that Tabby had no intention of committing suicide. He was simply deep in contemplation.
    It occurred to me that it would be easy for him to lose his footing on the balcony. The railings were designed with humans in mind and were about waist-high. A cat might easily slip through the space between the railings, but Tabby had lived all these years and nothing like that had ever happened to him. He seemed to have an accurate understanding of height (or depth). He knew it would be fatal to jump from the seventh floor, unlike jumping up and down from the windowsill.
    We tried to rid ourselves of the spell Tabby had cast on us by seeing the worst, most ridiculous side of him. For instance, the way he tried to cover his pee and turds. In the early days, the cinders my brother used to go out and get for Tabby enabled him to satisfy this need, by lightly scraping them over the excrement. Sometimes, when the cinders were sodden from his pee, Tabby would refuse to do his business until my brother replaced them with dry ones. The balcony no longer had any cinders, but Tabby still kept scratching, his claws grating on the hard concrete. It was quite ridiculous. He would prowl around, repeatedly performing the same ritual, until in his imagination the excrement was covered, even though it was right in front of his eyes. The scraping-over motions had to be performed, and that was all there was to it. Realizing that Tabby retained this ancient instinct eased our minds. All the evidence showed he was still a cat, not some strange creature in cat’s clothing.
    One day Xulu gave a joyous shriek: ‘Tabby’s wanking!’ What she meant was that, in the absence of a mate and a sex life, Tabby had found some way of pleasuring himself. I followed her to the balcony, where a strange scene met my eyes: he had one hind leg raised high in the air and was reaching down to his crotch and licking the sharp, reddened tip of his penis. Of course, Tabby didn’t have our manual dexterity, so he did it differently from us. From a human, moral standpoint, there was something repugnant about the scene. What should we do? Stop him? Carry on standing there? Or go back inside and get on with our lives, pretending it wasn’t happening? If Tabby had been human, he would have tried to cover himself as soon as he discovered us watching him, especially being the timid creature that he was. However, he wasn’t human, and he carried on with shocking imperturbability, oblivious to our presence, neither hiding it nor putting more energy into his activity. Tabby was no exhibitionist, and this was no erotic performance. His very calmness was disturbing. Still, it was a comfort to know he retained his sex drive. In fact it told us that, underneath that poise, he was still an ordinary cat, just an animal.
    I realized, of course, that although there were many aspects of a cat’s life which were beyond our understanding, we humans were far superior to cats. Tabby may have been inscrutable, concealing a supra-feline soul behind a mask of unutterable feline beauty, but the most he could have been was a human. I began to feel that he must have been a human in a former life, a human whose soul had been condemned to endure the privations of the life of a cat. I imagined it (or him) harbouring suicidal thoughts, but perhaps the cat’s body he inhabited prevented him from putting an end to it all. (Conversely, many people I knew with a human face may have had the soul of a cat, or even of a mouse.) Tabby’s behaviour bore no resemblance to that of a normal cat. On the other hand, if he was