On The Gold Coast: Heard But Not Seen
At last Judith Wallis comes face to face with a cat whose plaintive cry of loneliness has been haunting her days and nights.
Shadows soften as the lowering sun steals colour from the garden. All is grey. Melding ephemeral grey in that pause between sunset and night.
It is the time the stray slips from his hiding place, his fur coat cloaking him invisible. His presence is subtle but I know he is there, ghosting along the edge of the driveway, fleetingly in clear spaces and lingering beneath the bushes.
At dusk each day, his plaintive cry of loneliness grows louder as he approaches, fades as he passes by. Going where, I wonder? For days this nocturnal creature has haunted me.
Time after time I have peered out of the windows, stood waiting by the door and ever he evades my watchfulness, gliding past heard, but unseen.
I am awakened throughout the night by his pitiful plea at eleven and two of the clock. And again in that nebulous time when the moon is gone and stars begin to pale in the predawn light. Before magpies raise sleepy heads and with throat aquiver, cast their own plaintive calls across dew drenched suburbia.
It has rained these past four nights yet still he visits, coming always from the same direction, never returning. Where does he come from and where does he go? This unknown cat that arrives at my front gate and slowly, with woebegone sound, makes his way to the back fence and vanishes.
In the darkness I hear his lament and bury my head in the pillows covering my ears. The misery of his mewling weaves through my protective fingers and into my soul imbuing me with a matching melancholy.
The sound ceases and I strain, listening. There is no sound at all, no scrabbling over fences or up a tree, no quick rush of departure. I fall asleep and dream of lost home and family awakening with a sense of grief not entirely my own.
It is the eleventh day of the cat. Rain is still falling and gloom shrouds the garden. I sit at the window watching water drip when again I hear the stray coming. He calls weakly, wrenching my heart with the sound. Coming nearer. Close, so close. Where is he?
I lower my gaze to beneath the window and find myself looking into the eyes of a large cat. The golden eyes stare back. Striped on top snow beneath, he stands with one satin paw raised, frozen at the point of our contact. From crisp whisker to plumed tail, he is magnificent. This is no stray. Lost, deserted perhaps, but newly so.
For a tiny moment my gaze flickers and he is gone. Quickly I move to the side window --- the door --- outside, but he has gone, melded into the soft wetness of a spring evening.
