I woke up around eleven that Sunday because I'd forgotten to close the curtains the night before, and the sun was sitting right on my face. Not gently. The kind of light that gets under your eyelids and stays there.
I lay still for a while and listened. Somebody downstairs was frying onions already. That smell comes up through the floorboards in my building like it pays rent. Eleven in the morning and onions. I've stopped asking.
I made tea. I remember the water going in, the steam bending toward the window. Then I got distracted looking for my keys and by the time I came back it had gone cold in the glass. It stayed there on the table all day. Still there when I got home, actually, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I got dressed without thinking about it. Navy jeans, the pair with the knee gone through, one of those things where you keep wearing them because the hole is exactly where your knee bends and it feels like the trousers have given up arguing with you.
Grey sweatshirt, the collar stretched out wide from being pulled over my head too fast too many times. Thin black jacket over it, because the air had that edge it gets in early spring by the water. And the white trainers with the yellowed edges. I've had them long enough that the white is more of a suggestion now.
No plan. That's the honest part. I wasn't going anywhere. I just wanted to be outside of my own rooms for an hour.
The bakery on the corner had simit still warm, which almost never happens that late in the morning. The guy handed it over in a half sheet of paper, twisted at the bottom, and the sesame came off on my fingers immediately.
I ate half of it walking. You know how that goes — you don't decide to eat it, you just find yourself holding less of it than before. The other half I wrapped back up in the paper and put in my bag. I was full. I thought maybe later.
That half simit is going to matter in about twenty minutes, so keep it in mind.
The park runs along the water. Long strip of grass, a path, benches facing out, and then the sea just sitting there doing its thing.
Most of the benches were taken. Sunday. Families, couples, that one guy who always seems to be on the phone pacing back and forth. But the second-to-last bench was empty, so I took it. The wood was still a little damp from the morning dew, and I felt it come through the seat of my jeans about four seconds after sitting down. Not enough to get up over. Just enough to notice.
There was a kid two benches down with a red balloon, holding the string with both hands like it was going to try something.
An old man was throwing bread to the pigeons near the path. Small pieces, very deliberate, tearing each bit before he threw it. The pigeons had completely lost their minds and he seemed calm about it.
A ferry went past. You could hear it before you could really see it properly — that low engine sound over the water. Gulls behind it in a loose line, the way they always are, like the boat owes them something.
I sat there and didn't do anything for maybe ten minutes. That's rarer than it sounds. And then something touched my shoe.
I looked down and there was a cat.
Very small. Grey and white mixed together, no clean pattern to it, just messy — like someone had shaken the two colours in a jar. The fur was going in about four directions at once. That specific scruffy look kittens have when they haven't quite figured out the grooming thing yet. Patches sticking up on the shoulders. A bit of crust at the corner of one eye.
The left ear was smaller than the right one. Noticeably. And it sat at a slight angle, tipped a little off true, so the whole face looked like it was permanently asking a question.
It had put one paw on the toe of my trainer. Just the one paw. And it was looking straight up at me.
I didn't move. I've learned that with street cats — if you move first, that's the end of the conversation.
So it did the moving. It walked a full circle around my ankles, pressed its side against my shin on the way past, then went behind the bench, and I heard it scuffling around back there in the leaves. Then nothing. Then it came out the other side and sat down about a metre away, facing me, tail wrapped around its front feet.
And then it just tipped over. No warning. Fell onto its side on the path like the batteries came out. Rolled onto its back, all four legs in the air, and lay there in the dirt looking at me upside down.
I actually laughed out loud. The old man with the bread turned around.
It got up, shook itself, and attacked a leaf.
Genuinely attacked it. Went low, ears back, that ridiculous sideways hop, both front paws down on this dry leaf. Killed it thoroughly. Then looked up at me like I was supposed to be impressed.
I was. I clapped, quietly, and it took that as encouragement and did the whole thing again with a different leaf. Then it got too enthusiastic and skidded on the damp path and ended up in a small heap against the leg of the bench.
It sat there for a second. Then it started licking its own shoulder very fast, like nothing had happened, like we'd both agreed to move on.
Then it came back and sat in front of me and did the thing that got me.
It didn't meow. It opened its mouth to meow and no sound came out. Just the shape of it. Twice.
And it kept looking at my bag.
So I got the simit out. Unwrapped the paper, tore off a piece — the soft inside part, not the crust — and held it down low so it wouldn't have to come far.
It came over. Put its nose right against the bread. Sniffed it properly, thoroughly, the way they do, whiskers moving. Took its time about it.
Then it lifted its head and looked at me. And didn't eat it.
I sat there holding a piece of simit in the air like an idiot.
I tried again, closer. Same thing. Nose, sniff, look up at me. Nothing. It wasn't scared of it, it wasn't uninterested in me — it just wasn't going to eat bread.
And it was so small. That's what got under my ribs a bit. It was maybe two and a half months old, if that. Small enough that you could see its shoulder blades move separately when it walked. Something that size doesn't need bread. It needs actual food, and it needs it fairly regularly, and clearly nobody had been handling that part.
I wrapped the simit back up. Put it in my bag. Sat there thinking.
There's a market at the exit of the park. Red sign, other side of the road, maybe a hundred and fifty metres from where I was sitting. I could see the corner of the sign from the bench.
So I stood up. And the cat stood up too, immediately, and took two steps after me.
I crouched back down. I said, out loud, in a normal voice, like it was a reasonable thing to say to a two-month-old animal — "you wait here."
It sat down. I don't want to make that sound like more than it was. Cats sit down. But it sat down, and it looked at me, and the little bent ear did its thing, and I said it again. "Wait here."
Then I went. Fast. Faster than I'd meant to.
I don't know why I was hurrying. Nothing was on fire. But I crossed the road badly, between cars, and the automatic doors of the market did that slow thing they do where they open at exactly half the speed you need.
Wet food first. There was a whole shelf. Kitten, two to twelve months — I stood there reading the small print on the back like it was a contract, which, fine, maybe it was. I took two of those. Then a small bag of dry food, the smallest one they had, because I genuinely did not know what I was doing yet.
Half a litre of water. And then, at the front by the till, a little plastic tub. The kind you'd put olives in. Two of those would have been smarter but I only took one.
The queue was one person long and that one person was an elderly lady counting coins.
She was counting them out of a small cloth purse onto the rubber mat, one at a time, and every so often she'd lose track and start again. The cashier was completely unbothered. I stood there with two tins of kitten food, a bag of dry, a bottle of water and a plastic tub, watching the tiny pile of coins grow, and I could feel myself doing that thing where you shift your weight from one foot to the other.
And the whole time I was thinking: it's not going to be there. Obviously it's not going to be there. It's a street cat. Something will have gone past, a dog, a kid, another cat, and it'll have gone into the bushes and that's it. That's how this ends. I'll walk back with a bag of cat food and sit on a damp bench on my own.
She got there. She paid. She said something kind to the cashier that I didn't catch.
I came out of the market and crossed back over and walked into the park with the bag banging against my leg.
I could see the bench from a long way off. Second-to-last one. The kid with the red balloon had gone. The old man was still there, out of bread now, just standing.
And there, on the path, in exactly the spot where I'd left it — not a step to the left, not a step to the right — the cat was sitting.
Completely still. Front paws together. Tail curled around them. Facing the direction I'd walked off in. Like a small badly-made statue somebody had left out in the weather.
It hadn't moved. It had actually waited.
I stopped about five metres away, because I needed a second.
The sun had moved while I was in the market. It was coming across the water now at that lower angle, and it was hitting the cat from behind, and you could see every bit of that messy fur lit up at the edges. The small ear. The crooked set of it.
It saw me. It didn't run over. It just opened its mouth again, that silent one, no sound, and waited for me to close the distance.
I had two tins of food in a plastic bag, a tub meant for olives, half a litre of water, and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with the animal sitting in front of me.
She's fine, by the way. I'm telling you now so nobody has to
read this worrying about how it ends.
*I'm the developer of a small pet medication app, but this post isn't about
that — it's just what happened on Sunday. Part 2 tomorrow if anyone wants it.*
