I fell instantly in love with my second male lover three years ago when Kevin brought the little kitten home. Now there are millions of tabbies, Siamese and Persians, but I'd never seen a cat quite like Angus. His coat is a distinguished grey but the striking thing about Angus is that a white streak runs down his nose and chest, and his paws look like little white gloves. He was not only a handsome male but well dressed!
Not knowing anything about rearing babies I naturally assumed, like any good mother, that you have to feed them lots of food. So I would give him half a tin of cat food for breakfast and the other half for dinner.
In a short space of time Angus grew from a quarter kilo to over six! I realised the error of my ways when our formerly light-weight puss would jump on my stomach and it felt like a ton of bricks! Zowie almost screamed when I told her about my feeding regime. She said that I was making him fat. I immediately put him on a diet.
But Angus didn't care for the new diet - he still wanted plenty of food. Every morning he waits to be fed by one of us. And if we don't feed him by a certain time he'll jump up on the bed and make the most God awful screaming until you give in. But if I feed him, and then go to work Angus will cry out at Kevin who thinks he hasn't been fed and then gives him more food. He's managed to fool the both of us many times with that trick!
When Angus didn't come in for dinner at six one evening I wondered what he was up to. When he still hadn't come in three hours later we both began to worry. It was so unlike Angus to miss a meal. When he didn't come in for breakfast the next day we began to really worry. By the second day there was still no sign of him. Kevin was so upset he couldn't sleep or eat. We scoured our neighborhood, calling his name, looking under every bush, shrub and garden gnome, but there was no sign of him anywhere.
One thing that particularly worried us was the fact that we lived in a housing complex that was bordered by busy roads on three sides. He could have been hit by a car or, just as bad, abducted!
The worst thing was not knowing what had happened. We felt like the parents of a child who's suddenly vanished. What happened next was truly a miracle. We found him a week later. He had been hit by a car and his back legs had been knocked out of action. Angus had dragged himself by his two legs too get home. It was the heroic equivalent of a soldier dragging himself over miles of enemy territory using just his arms to get back to camp. Fortunately, the damage wasn't major. After spending a few weeks in the cat hospital he was as good as new. But this brush with death made me realise just how important Angus is in our lives. We moved out of that dangerous housing complex shortly after, partly to prevent a nerve-racking repeat of another hit and run.
When Kevin and myself have had major domestics and I have moved out for a period of time it's Angus who suffers the most. Angus gets so upset that he hardly eats. When we lived in a high-rise apartment he would run to the front door when he heard the apartment�s lift or foot steeps approaching on the wooden floorboards. We had to get back together for the sake of Angus!
Because Angus sleeps with us we assumed he was a gay cat, until the evening he brought home a girlfriend. We don't discriminate against straights so we encouraged her regular nocturnal visits and called her Coco Chanel Dolly because she is as glamorous as any fashionable woman (no, she was not named after the musical!). But we wondered why she would run away whenever she heard the rustle of plastic bags. We fed her but, having one cat already, we decided to take her to the local vet so that he could find her a home. The cat doctor told us that Dolly had probably escaped a plastic bag by some murderous owner.
Believing she was in good hands we left her at the surgery. But when Kevin returned shortly after to find out how she was the receptionist informed Kevin that Dolly was just about to be put down in the surgery. Furious, Kevin burst into the chamber of horrors and pushed the doctor of death away before he could stick the fatal needle into her. We immediately adopted Dolly into our family.
I couldn't imagine life without Angus or Dolly, and neither could Kevin. The (new!) cat doctor tells us that if we ensure that our cats receive regular check-ups and vaccinations they should live for twenty-five to even thirty years. They may even outlast us! Either way, I hope to keep sleeping with my other lover for a long time to come!
