Bono

Chapter Ten

HOLY SMOKE

A cat can be an angel or a devil—or both.

Lydia regained composure as we climbed the steps to the red door. Slipping the key into the heart-shaped lock, I was still wondering how a homeless cat could reduce her to tears. In her working life as a trainee psychologist back home, she dealt with harrowing human stories every day.

“Bono doesn’t know he has three years to live,” I said, as she carried her precious cargo up the first flight of stairs.

Thoughts flashed back to the doctor’s surgery. When she told me the cancer growth in my right breast was large, the prospect of dying filled the room with leaden weight. I didn’t have the courage to ask those words every human dreads saying—“How long have I got?” But she could see it on my face. She wrote a prescription for sleeping pills to get me through the next few days and said they needed to do more tests. I closed in on myself that day and focused on survival. Though my body had since recovered, I was still in an emotional fox hole.

Animals have the ability to pad lightly and with an open heart into each moment. They do not regard their lives as a line with a beginning, middle, and ending. The creaks and groans of later life are little more than passing inconvenience. However sick Bono was now, he was living the adventure to the fullest and without self-pity, simply until it stopped. I had a lot to learn from him. “Three years is a long time to a cat,” I added. “Besides, anything can happen . . .”

I reminded her of our physiotherapist friend, Stephen, and his part kelpie dog Millie. Stephen was devastated when a vet told him Millie had two months to live. The vet had overlooked the fact Stephen has a special affinity for failing bodies, both human and animal. On a diet of organic meat and unadulterated devotion, Millie was still thriving five years later.

“If he finds a good home,” I said, puffing up the second flight. “He could live for ages.”

Oh yeah, the inner cynic piped up. This city’s packed with saints begging to adopt a cat that’s going to cost them a Kardashian’s ransom in vet’s fees, pee all over their apartment and then snuff it.

My live-in critic introduced himself (it was always a male voice) when I was at journalism school more than forty years earlier. He’d come in handy a few times, especially when I’d been working in the aggressively sexist environment of newsrooms. The witty asides and sneering negativity felt like a protective coating from the more shocking aspects of human behavior. Like most smart-asses though, the inner cynic vanished when times were hard. He offered no consolation through the death of a child, cancer, or the loss of friends, who were starting to fade away with sobering regularity. Though I managed to repress the voice for a while during the spiritual nineties, I never succeeded in getting rid of him completely.

I stopped on a shadowy landing to catch my breath and examine a DO NOT SLAM DOORS! notice scribbled in angry red capitals and duct-taped to a battered-looking door. Whoever lived in there was directly underneath our studio. They must have suffered under the reign of the previous tenants.

After taking a deep breath, I scooped the cat bed and food bags into my arms, plowed up the last flight, and punched the number code in our door lock. Bono peered inquisitively through the wires of his cat carrier as Lydia placed it on the floor. He seemed calm. Lydia and I exchanged looks. We both ached to let him out to explore his temporary home. But Jon’s instructions had been clear.

“Guess he’ll have to go in the Bunker for a day or two,” I said.

“But this place is tiny,” Lydia said, waving her arms until her fingertips almost touched the walls on both sides of the room. “And he’s so passive. Can’t we let him out just for a few minutes?”

True, by Australian standards the studio wasn’t much bigger than a birdcage. No doubt Jon gave the same advice to everyone he sent home with a cat. Unlike the wild, bouncing Bono we’d seen at Bideawee, he seemed to have become a different animal. He was placid, almost unnervingly quiet. When I peered into the carrier, a cherub gazed back at me.

What could possibly go wrong? I nodded.

Lydia squeezed the latch on the cat carrier. It sprang open with alarming speed as a ball of black wool burst out, and whirled about the room. Ears flattened against his scalp, eyes ablaze, the cat spun past us in a blur.

Lydia prepared to dive for him as he hurtled toward her, but he made an artful detour at the coffee table and circled back to the center of the room, building up speed like a hurricane.

“Stop!” I yelled, pointlessly at the spiraling force of nature that bore no resemblance to the playful mini lion we’d collected from Bideawee. “You’re supposed to be sick!”

He spun faster and faster, past the coffee table, sofa, fireplace, coffee table, sofa . . .

I made a grab for him as he galloped, scooting past my knees. It was the first time I’d touched him. The fur on his torso felt coarse and warm, like sheep’s wool. His ribs were hard and sharp. He slithered out of my hands.

Having known a few hyperactive children, I’ve learned if you keep your cool and refuse to get sucked into their manic state, small creatures run out of energy and calm down—eventually.

Coffee table, sofa, fireplace, coffee table . . .

Any moment now, Bono would collapse exhausted in a humble ball of fur.

Sofa, fireplace, coffee table, sofa . . .

The cat accelerated, toppling the vase of daffodils and spilling them onto the floor. Then, to our horror and disbelief, he shot up the fireplace.

Lydia and I shared looks of astonishment. We emitted a simultaneous cry as clouds of rubble and dust avalanched down the void into the room. The only evidence of Bono was a black lion’s tail, dangling like a doorbell through a curtain of dust from inside the chimney.

The room fell spookily silent. Particles of soot and plaster surfed the watery sunlight. Lydia and I stared at the tail.

“Do you think I should pull it?” I asked.

Lydia didn’t answer, but her cheeks were flushed. A cat’s tail is a nursery of nerve endings. It contains up to twenty-three bones, which is impressive considering there are only seven in a giraffe’s neck. Pulling a tail, even to rescue its owner, almost certainly qualified as animal cruelty. On the other hand, it might save his life.

We heard a shifting sound from inside the chimney. It was followed by another plume of plaster billowing out of the fireplace. My hopes lifted. Maybe Bono had come to his senses and was trying to turn around and come back down.

To my dismay, the tail became shorter. We stood helpless as the cat clawed farther up the cavity until all we could see was the scruffy ball at the end of his tail.

It was incredible he’d managed to squeeze into such a narrow, vertical tunnel. But, to the regret of millions of mice, cats have famously “floating shoulders” that enable them to shimmy into any space wide enough to fit their whiskers.

Silence. It seemed Bono had encountered a blockage in the chimney and couldn’t move farther up, or for that matter, down. He was stuck. I could almost hear his brain whirring up there. Lydia was on the brink of tears again.

“He’ll be all right,” I assured her. “He’s a street cat.”

One good thing about a feline with an enigmatic past is you can invent any kind of history for him.

Crouched at the entrance to the chimney, I bristled with panic. These antics could bring down the entire building. If not, Bono was likely to endure a horrible end up there, squeezed between bricks and starving to death. We’d lie in bed at night listening to his pitiful meows . . . until they stopped.

There was a scrabbling sound. A fresh cascade of debris landed on my boots. I stepped back. The stones were getting larger. As a piece of broken brick crashed on the floor, the end of Bono’s tail moved sideways and then disappeared.

A nanosecond later in a hailstorm of rubble, a small animal tumbled down into the room. White with dust, eyes bulging and teeth bared, it resembled a mythical creature from an Indonesian carving. As it torpedoed though my legs, I grabbed it. Holding it in a wrestling grip, I carried it to the Bunker and shut it in.

Lydia swept the rubble and stuffed the chimney with plastic bags, while I opened a can of cat food. We had no chance of dispensing that crazed animal’s medication in the way Jon had demonstrated. I concealed a white tablet in the mush and tiptoed to the Bunker door. Not a sound came from inside. In a single movement, I wedged the door open, shoved the bowl into the darkness, and shut it.

All three of us needed a time out.