The Move
By JANINE PAULE
Tinka, our black cat with green eyes, got her intelligence from her mother, a tabby cat that belonged to the swimming pool boy at the hotel across the street to where we lived in the Arabian Gulf. Before I moved in to the area, the municipality used to put down poisoned fish to get rid of the stray cats. I had them all “fixed” and the problem was solved and the lads at the department I met and nicknamed Mr Fly and Mr Mosquito never had to darken our doorsteps again.
But prior to their being neutered, Mr Fly and Mr Mosquito had turned up and put some bad fish out. Tinka’s mum (we called her Mummy Cat - as she seemed to be the mother of them all, had 25 kittens in the year 1993 before I got her done) just turned up her nose at the food and slinked away muttering - “that’s not my usual waiter serving me - I don’t know this new chap and I’m not eating his food.”
I swear, that Mummy, as she threw her paws around me, thanked me profusely for taking her for the operation, as due to the fact she was so healthy and well fed had a litter of eight or nine each time, which must have driven her crazy. She was a wonderful companion to the swimming pool boy and the two chefs working at the hotel.
You could see them every afternoon when they finished their shift sitting on a bench with Mummy and sometimes one or two others at their feet. The cats didn’t ask for much, just some food twice a day and a quiet place to curl up away from the heat. In return the lads on their own, miles away from their families, got a feline friend to stroke and make them feel wanted and needed.
We first saw Tinka when she was about seven weeks old with her seven brothers and sisters, Timmy was a shy tabby and white, Scruffy and Monkey were black like her, Squeaky as her name implied was noisy, Naughty was black and white and always seemed to have his foot in the food dish tipping it over, Tiger, the spitting image of his mum was plain tabby and Softy was tabby and white and lived up to her name.
Tinka started coming round to our place and slept inside, often in a cardboard box or at the bottom of the bed. She got up early with us and spent the rest of the morning in a cactus pot outside. I used to wonder how on earth she avoided the thorns. She is sleeping in a pot next to sister Squeaky in the photograph.
How she got her name was simple - sometimes in the night she would take Mike’s watch in her mouth and hide it somewhere in a corner of the bedroom. She must have done that several times. Then twice she turned the alarm clock off. It was always at the weekend when she knew we hated waking up to an alarm and not naturally when our bodies had had enough rest. The second time we were invited to a barbeque lunch at a large hotel an hour and a half’s drive away. We were slightly late and I swear the Manager and his wife are still laughing when we apologised for being late and told them that Tinka had tapped the top of the clock so it didn’t go off as set. It was absolutely true!
Scruffy used to love sneaking in, what a character he was. Tinka hated it, as she liked to be alone and used to chase him out. He got his name, as he was such a mess, looking like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. But he had a gentle nature and just wanted some peace and quiet, out of the heat. He always used to dig his claws into the bedspread, clinging on for dear life when he sensed he was about to be evicted.
Timmy came in just for five minutes to eat biscuits, dropping half of them as he ate and then off he went. There were twenty cats altogether but many of the others never found our place as I used to feed them at the back every afternoon, the boys doing the morning shift. One day we discovered a stranger; he was huge and had a crazy habit of putting his paws across and over the food dish, preventing any other cat from eating at the same time. Normally the cats shared three of four large trays, but he made sure there was nothing left after he had his fill. He was very tame and could have been a house cat that was thrown out or abandoned when the owners left the country. That happened a lot.
Mike used to say I was always so busy feeding the cats that he never got a look in and was thinking of getting a fur coat and a tail. He used to tell people he had to get down on all fours and miouw in order to get fed and even had his own bowl.
One day Tinka didn’t turn up as usual when I got back from work in mid afternoon. I went around searching and calling her name. Suddenly I sensed there was a cat on the roof three stories up where they were doing some painting. I couldn’t see which one it was. There had been a ladder earlier in the day, which had now disappeared. When Mike got back he climbed the scaffolding and found it was Tinka. He carried a cage up with him and we used a rope and pulley method to lower her down. “Ground floor please”, she appeared to say, having strolled into the cage quite nonchalantly.
This month she will be 12 and has seemed to have a new lease of life since we moved to Cyprus. She was banned from going outside eight years ago, I will explain why next time, and she has adapted to inside living easily. Every so often she goes and sniffs at the front door but that only lasts a few minutes and then she’s settled into one of her favourite 15 places and soon fast asleep, curled up, her head tucked under in what I call her owl position. What a life, not a care in the world. I’m definitely coming back as a cat!
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