How to make a choice when there’s no good choice to make.
What a feral cat taught me about being human.
I arrived at dawn. The overnight ferry from Athens was on time, but not as I’d imagined. I’d expected a Mediterranean cruise with balmy deck-bar and quiet music. I got an industrial ferry carrying trucks, backpackers, priests (so many priests) but with very few windows.
I’d promised I’d stand on the deck in the late night and look at Mediterranean stars. The torrents of rain didn’t stop me, though, of course, the clouds hid the stars. It was a dumb thing to do.
As the ferry docked, already I was shivering — the inner heat of fever battling the outer chill of wet clothes.
My Greek host met me and I pretended I was fine.
I’d misjudged the weather too. Early March on Lesbos is colder than I’d thought. I was under-dressed and bravado didn’t compensate for decent socks or a warm coat.
I was visiting the island to teach a short workshop, and had been lent an unoccupied apartment. It was a small basement flat with little light, where no one had lived for many months.
My home for the week.
We stood in the early-morning gloom of the single room, my host and I, and I knew I was ill. I needed sleep. My host told me things I ought to know — how to heat the water, how to heat the room. I nodded and shivered.
She reached to the floor-to-ceiling, inbuilt cupboard and, opening it, said:
“You can put your suitcase…….”
A violent scuttle. A cat shot through the half-open cupboard door, and out of a hole in the screen covering the back window. Outside, a vacant wasteland.
The cat stopped. She stood on the window ledge, half-in, half-out, watching us. Utterly immobile. She was semi-feral and terrified.
Why did she not just leave?
Faint sounds from the cupboard gave an answer. Inside, a small cardboard box and five kittens. Their eyes were still closed. They mewed and blindly sought the comfort and the food that, moments before, was all they’d ever known.
Mother-cat stood on the window. She was entirely trapped between two unresolvable needs: to get…
