Gus II

We've been having quite a lot of rain and my shoes - sneakers, pumps, tennis shoes, whatever the hell you call those things - are getting soaked on a regular basis. An hour or so in the dryer, which is in the garage next to the washing machine, usually does the trick; but unfortunately the soakings have become such a regular occurrence that they're starting to pong, necessitating the additional application of baking soda. This time though, the smell lingers in the garage, which is worrying. It gets worse over the next couple of days and it dawns on me that something may have crawled into our garage and died. Its happened before and it's usually a possum.

Monday comes and I move a toolbox and discover a dead cat. They look different when the life has gone out of them and it takes me a moment before I realise that it's Gus II. It feels like I've been punched in the stomach. I'm fairly sure I saw her as recent as Saturday when I gave her the usual bowl of Nine Lives.

When I first met my wife, she had a female cat called Gus, short for Asparagus after some character in a headachey musical. Gus was grey and stripey, a pleasantly plump American shorthair of oddly Victorian appearance in that she tended to look as though she didn't approve. Gus was a wonderful cat.

At some point during the expansion of our cat colony, I took to leaving uneaten bowls of food outside for a couple of strays I'd noticed hanging around our garden because I didn't want it to go to waste. Among these cats were a pair of similar type to Gus, and as they were female and seemed to be related, I began to think of them as the Gus sisters, specifically Gus II and Gus III. They were both feral, accepting food but running off if I came too close, and looked similar, excepting Gus III being much larger. They groomed each other and often ate from the same food bowl with their tails intertwined, hence my presuming them to be closely related. I've no clear idea of when they first turned up but assume it to have been at least five years ago.

Our feral cat colony - the guys who don't get to come in the house - comprised about five or six cats at one time, but has been just two or three for most of its history, with members drifting off, presumably having discovered a better deal elsewhere, or turning up to fill a vacancy. At some point a few years back, Gus III became a no show for whatever reason, leaving us with just Mr. Kirby, the Wombat, and Gus II. Then we lost Mr. Kirby - which was fucking horrible - leaving just two, both of whom seemed to have integrated fairly well with our official cats.

The Wombat is a huge ginger male who walks like a wombat, hence the name, and always looks pissed off about something. I've never been able to get close to him, but in recent years he became good friends with Gus II and I often found them curled up together in a corner of the garden, apparently united by their refugee status.

More recently still, Gus II apparently decided I was okay, despite being a human. She'd dance around my feet when I took the food bowls out in the morning, even submitting the occasional meow and allowing me to pet her without flinching. It had taken years but it seemed worth it, and now able to get close I began to realise just how tiny she was - even smaller than our own Daisy, who has remained at what pretty much amounts to grown kitten dimensions.

I'd seen Gus II on Saturday, and now she was dead, leaving the Wombat looking distinctly forlorn. I buried her at the end of the garden marking the grave with rocks, as usual.

It's never easy when they die, and I suppose she wasn't even our cat, technically speaking, but in a world of increasingly vocal flat-earthers and persons who make it their business to make life as unpleasant and pointless as possible for the rest of us, Gus II was a tiny, brown stripey thing which used to dance around my feet and always seemed happy to see me. There was nothing negative about her having existed, only good from what I could see.

Life goes on, I suppose.