The House of Cats

By Zoey Ryland

Once, my house was home to five cats. Five cats, each with a very different personality, all demanding attention at the same time, and becoming mischievous when they didn’t get it. Sound familiar? Well, raising five children at once can feel remarkably similar.

Shango. This bundle of spooky black fluff was given to me as a present by my housemates when I was eighteen. She was one of a kind from the very beginning. At times, I wondered if she might be the reincarnation of a particularly mischievous child.

In her first few weeks, she took to biting my toes while I was asleep. She became increasingly agitated when I gently flicked her away with my foot, but eventually she got the message. Reassured, I went back to sleep, only to be woken a short while later by the screams of my housemate, who came hurtling into my room. “Get this cat off my face!” Shango had somehow managed to trap her in her jaws by the newly pierced hoop in her nose.

If chastised, Shango would find something that belonged to you and destroy it in revenge. Her victims included my Mum’s first flower on a new plant I had bought her for Mother’s Day, several tropical fish she fished out of Mum’s tank, and my pet rats, whom she somehow managed to release from their cage. She didn’t kill or hurt a single one, but they all mated, and I ended up with twenty-eight baby rats.

Shango lived to the ripe old age of twenty-four. Chickens, ducks and rats were all in peril whenever she was around. Until one day, perhaps deciding that she needed a change of diet, she turned her attention to the pork chops belonging to the old lady two doors down, who had left them unattended in her kitchen.

In 1994 Shango became part of a pack of three cats, and they couldn’t have been more different! 

Tiberius and Dax, both black and white, were named the Bookends. When they slept together on the back of the sofa, it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended! Dax didn’t like being part of a pack, so she made friends with Stan, an elderly man living across the road from us. I had never seen a cat so savvy about the Green Cross Code! She would look left and right and when the coast was clear she would trot across to Stan for cuddles while I was at work. This went on for 12 years. 

Yet,  when she was home, she and her brother would resume tormenting each other—racing around the house in endless zoomies, hissing and chasing. At night, we had to be especially careful. I woke to find scratches on my arms and legs where they had launched themselves across me in the darkness.

Tiberius, on the other hand, was known to all the neighbours. Every morning he would walk me down the path and sit on the wall until my bus came (there is a bus stop right outside my house). People took pictures and waved at him until he strode back up the path and watched from a safe distance as the bus pulled away! 

 I met Joan, an elderly neighbour who lived at the back of my house, one morning when I caught Tiberius climbing up her leg. I called over, “Tiberius, get down, you naughty boy!” He climbed down obediently, but stayed at her feet, meowing. Joan then told me that she carried treats in her pocket for him every morning. No wonder they became such good friends.

One day, he broke into my friend’s shopping bag and ate his way through the cardboard box to get to the cat biscuits she had bought for her own cat. I caught him red-pawed, attempting what looked remarkably like a backwards moonwalk, with the box firmly stuck over his head!

Then there was the time he burnt off his eyebrows trying to steal my fishcakes as they cooked under the grill. His eyebrows remained yellow and singed for weeks afterwards. He was, without question, a serious foodie!

The last of the tribe were Tyr and Trance, two tiny bundles of fluff whom Bruce, my husband, attempted to smuggle out of my friend’s house. I only realised what he was up to when his jumper started mewing. He had tucked them into the pouch of his hoodie! And so, three became five in the Ryland household.

Sadly, we had Trance for only about a year. She was a very skittish little cat and tragically lost her life on the road outside my house. Tyr, however, stayed with me for nine years. He had some peculiar tastes. He loved curry and chilli and would try to climb into Bruce’s bowl at teatime. At night, he insisted on sleeping beside our heads, digging his claws into us until, by morning, he had somehow claimed the entire pillow for himself.

During the day, his favourite place was the laundry basket. Unfortunately, this made doing the washing something of an ordeal. One day, I reached into the basket without remembering he was there. Tyr launched an assault on my hand. Bruce came rushing in when he heard my screams. He found me on my knees, my hand trapped in the laundry basket, and had to carefully unpick me from Tyr’s claws.

Again, we became a family of five cats when Phoenix rocked up at our house and decided she would rather live with us than our neighbour. We agreed to take her in, as our neighbour was struggling at the time, and it was pretty clear where Phoenix had decided she belonged!

No sooner had we taken full custody of her than she gave birth to three kittens in a box in our living room. Naturally, being avid cat lovers, we wanted to keep them all. But we did the sensible thing and found them good homes.

Phoenix was pure white with amber eyes, but put a cardboard box in front of her and she transformed into the devil cat. She would crouch low inside it, and as you approached, her head would suddenly appear through the flaps, framed by enormous black pupils. I should probably have put up a DO NOT APPROACH  sign.

She was also famous for going completely floppy whenever she was told off or ordered to get out of somewhere. And she would answer back with an indignant bleat. The more you tried to move her, the floppier she became.