There was no adoption. There was a fire escape, a propped-open kitchen window in the second summer of a very hot year, and a grey cat who walked in, looked at the room the way a surveyor looks at a room, and sat down on the warm part of the desk where the laptop vents.
That was four years ago. She still belongs to the flat below, in the sense that they feed her and have her on a piece of paper at the vet. She belongs to my desk in every sense that she and I recognise.
What she has decided about the flat
None of this was negotiated. It was surveyed, decided, and then simply enforced, the way cats do everything.
- The desk is hers between about ten and four
- The good chair is hers permanently
- The cardboard box that a monitor arrived in is a fixture now
- The bathroom door must never be fully closed, by anyone, for any reason
- The bed is hers only when it rains, which she can apparently tell in advance
The only creature in this flat with a schedule and no calendar.
The keyboard problem
A cat on a keyboard is a comedy bit that stops being funny somewhere around the fourth time you
find a file full of jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. What she actually wants is not the keyboard, it is the
warmth and the attention, in that order, and she will take the keyboard because it is where both
of those things are pointed.
The fix was a folded blanket on the radiator side of the desk. It took her about three days to accept it and one afternoon to make it clear that the blanket was now also hers and that I had merely been holding it. Fine. The commits have been syntactically valid ever since.
The going-away part
The awkward bit about a cat who is technically somebody else’s is that you get all of the company and none of the standing. When she is gone for four days there is nobody to ask. Downstairs is not worried. Downstairs is never worried, and downstairs is always right — she comes back on the fifth day, slightly dusty, smelling of somebody’s shed, and sits on the desk as though the desk had been the one that was missing.
I have started leaving the kitchen window propped again in summer. It is not a decision so much as an admission.