How a cat named Horse came into my life when I needed him most

I met him in a pet shop on Chapel Street in Melbourne, perched on the top tier of a multi-level cat townhouse. He slept as if warmed by beams of sunlight on a hay bale, rather than a grimy city pet shop, oblivious to his hectic surroundings. I loved him immediately, racing to the pet store during my lunch breaks to admire him through the plexiglass.

“Insatiably adventurous and a compulsive street fighter, Horse refused to be contained indoors.”

Finally, after weeks of these visits, the manager of the pet store approached me with a gruff offering: I could have the grey kitten half-price, but he needed him gone ASAP. I walked out of the shop with a warm, heavy cardboard carrier tucked under my arm. For no particular reason, I named him Horse – not after the tomcat in Footrot Flats, and not, as a vet suggested after neutering him, because of the impressive size of his testicles.

The sleepy boy I knew from the shop transformed into a cyclonic force as soon as he was released from his carrier, skidding up and down the floorboards of my flat with such velocity that my downstairs neighbour felt compelled to lodge a formal complaint with council.

Horse proved to be the feline equivalent of a bad boyfriend, both demonically possessive and a completely free agent. Insatiably adventurous and a compulsive street fighter, he refused to be contained indoors, whining incessantly to be let out, teetering suggestively on window ledges and balconies, and occasionally making good on his threats to jump. One such jump resulted in a badly broken leg, necessitating extensive surgery and a long hospital stay. When I came to visit, the vet nurse asked me to leave the room while he did his observations: Horse’s heartbeat couldn’t be heard over his purring when we were together.

I was 25 when I got Horse, 29 when I had my first daughter, and 31 when I became a single mother, running as fast as I could from a bad relationship. Baby on hip, Horse in carrier, I moved to a bright but ratty fourth floor walk-up, high on a hill with picture-postcard views. Soon after, Horse managed to slink out the front door, well before the vet-prescribed two-week indoor period. A storm hit, and he never came back. Like me, I guess, he was unmoored and overwhelmed.

I fielded phone calls from perverts and predators and loners – an abrupt lesson in what happens when you have a stripper’s sobriquet and advertise your phone number on street poles.

I’d soldiered blandly through the previous three years of unhappiness, but my defences could not hold up against the loss of this preening, pugnacious beast. I plastered the surrounding suburbs with posters of Horse, the photo depicting him reclining on a vermilion velvet sofa, ears at half-mast, eyes-mid-slow-blink, wearing an expression of both love and contempt; the default position of most cats I’ve known.

Days became weeks became months. I fielded phone calls from perverts and predators and loners – an abrupt lesson in what happens when you have a stripper’s sobriquet and advertise your phone number on street poles. I began to yield to the possibility that Horse was never coming home.

A day after making the decision to find a new kitten, a phone call came from someone I’d lived near a few years earlier. She remembered Horse well from his random break-and-enters (he liked to sleep on the beds of strangers, Goldilocks on four legs), and had seen my posters. “I’m sure it’s Horse,” she said. “He’s in my front yard.”

I bent the laws of time and traffic, appearing at her address within minutes. In a tight ball lay an emaciated grey bundle. That cannot be him, I thought. That ravaged spook is not my healthy beautiful boy.

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Still. “Horse?” I called. He answered with a single, distinctive meow. Horse.

He had a deep abscess on the side of his body and was near death from starvation; another week and he wouldn’t have made it. Intuiting, I believe, that I was looking for a replacement, Horse placed himself where he knew he would be found, and waited.

Horse eventually left me again, five years later, bristling from the imposition of a new partner and a new baby. He befriended a lonely, intellectually disabled neighbour in the boarding house next door, who seduced him with daily offerings of roast chicken. When we moved around the corner to a new flat, Horse declined to join us. Every day, he walked back to the old flat. And every day, I brought him back to the new one, until it became clear that the will of a Burmese tom cat is stronger than that of a frayed young mother.

It didn’t hurt as much to lose him the second time. He had come back to me when I needed him most, and now someone else needed him more. I don’t carry my past heavily any more; I can recount the harshest details of it without reliving it. But when I think of my reunion with Horse, I time-travel: I can feel the tilt of the sun as I peered into the yard where he lay, the scratchy black tights and flimsy floral skirt I was wearing, and the great gulping sobs of relief and gratitude I cried on that busy Northcote street.

A pet is not a child, or a lover, but Horse came as close to my heart as any living creature has. He is, presumably, long dead now; may he forever quash his opponents in the dim celestial alleys of his heaven.

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