I don't know if it's ever either fair or meaningful to say you have a favourite cat in cases such as our own, where my wife and myself have lost track but suspect the feline head count is somewhere north of fourteen; but Bean was my favourite cat, at least for a while. He was one of four kittens we rescued from a local crazy person back around June, 2019. Mark, who is generally a lovely guy despite his brain occasionally sending him down some very strange avenues, feeds the feral cats which turn up in his garden and doesn't get them fixed; so kittens come into being in large quantities and we rescue them on the grounds that, as Mark will himself admit during his more lucid moments, his cat husbandry is cranky and intermittent. We had noticed a fresh bunch of kittens springing around his yard a couple of times, mumbled the usual concerns to each other, and then Bess came home with all four of them cradled under one arm like hastily gathered fruit.
Junior gave them names almost immediately, but nothing too headachey for a change, nothing from a console game or Disney. Sylvester was the little black and white tuxedo cat whom we initially thought was a boy; Muffin was the traditional female tabby; Bear, so named because the kid thought she looked like a tiny bear, was all black and female; and Bean was the runt of the litter, an all black male about half the size of the other three - named for his being of leguminous volume in comparison to the rest. Bess was worried he wouldn't make it due to being so improbably small, but I'd seen him in action at dinner time and had a feeling he would be fine. At first I plopped a single tin of cat food in a foil tray and let them all go at it. Bean's technique was to dive right in, roll around in the food pushing the others away, then combine the subsequent clean up with dinner, eating until he became spherical, resembling a small black tennis ball with legs.
They grew and we found homes for Sylvester and Bear, but kept Muffin and Bean because we couldn't stand the thought of parting with them, and two more wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. Both of them bonded to me to an unusual degree, possibly due to my being the human who was usually around as Bess didn't switch to working from home until 2020.
Bean climbed onto me each evening as I slouched back in the couch, digesting my dinner. He'd make himself home on my chest, purring away and occasionally licking my nose. He followed me everywhere and was my little buddy. Strangest of all, or so it seemed at the time, was his smell. Bess has told me about the smell of a new baby, how it's positively intoxicating and pushes all the motherhood buttons, or was in her case when she had Junior; and finally I felt I understood because Bean smelled amazing - a scent to his soft, silky black fur which remains difficult to describe but is maybe something in the vicinity of fresh cut hay.
I began to notice something which hadn't quite occurred to me before, or at least to piece together parts of a pattern I was only just beginning to recognise as such: there really is something special about black cats. Of course, they historically have a reputation associated with the occult and are typecast as the familiars of witches and wizards, and I began to wonder if there might be a reason for this, at least beyond the hysteria and general misogyny.
Bean had certainly cast a spell on me by some definition - not least by the release of oxytocin as I stroked his improbably silky fur to induce purring, and those eyes looking out from the solid black seemed to know something. He seemed hypnotic somehow.
Bean wasn't even the first.
Our first and currently oldest black cat is Nibbler, whom the boy found as a kitten hiding under a car back in 2012. Since then there has been Jack - who was black and fluffy and therefore amazing - Enoch, Tony, and Jessie - all ferals from our yard who eventually - presumably and hopefully - found other homes, or just moved on; and also Ava, another alumni from Mark's garden who still hangs around but rarely comes inside the house.
Nibbler was the first cat I've seen play like a dog, fetching something thrown for him, bringing it back and dropping it in your lap for another throw. Nibbler also made himself the feline equivalent of a teddy by pulling the stuffing out of the sofa and forming it into a lump which he then slept with in his paws.
Ollie, our latest black cat also fetches things and has that amazing scent to his fur, and has now learned how to open the kitchen door so he can go out into the garden. This is a door held shut by a heavy spring when unlocked, so heavy that one has to physically shoulder it open when carrying a laundry basket. Ollie - who is presently about three or four months old and is still small, has learned to not only push the door open, but he's worked out how to get back in again. We still haven't witnessed him doing it, and presume he must hook a paw under the door and pull, which seems like it really should be impossible given his size and the strength of the spring, but it happens nevertheless.
This isn't to suggest that any of our other cats are necessarily idiots, but it really seems that whatever gene is associated with black fur brings other features to the party - which I state as a general observation rather than an actual scientific thesis. Perhaps we are witness to the birth of a genuine feline master race.
We lost Bean around July 2020, the same time as two other cats - Squeak and Holly went missing. We still don't know what happened. We have at least one shitty cat-hating neighbour, but he really doesn't seem like he would have the balls to do anything horrible. Holly definitely had a second home somewhere and was in the habit of staying away for days at a time; and another kitten had just turned up, which always puts everyone's noses out of joint, so it could be an unfortunate coincidence, strange though it may seem, and in the absence of any actual information whatsoever, that's how we've thought of it because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Needless to say, eighteen months later I still miss Bean and I think about him every day, but there's probably not much point in beating myself up over what may or may not have become of him.
We still have Muffin and the others, and Ollie is doing very well at carrying the traditions of his people forward.
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