Friday
Terence was a prescient cat. He was deaf in one of his ears, from which protruded elegant curved strings of hair, and he was blind in one eye, adding to his roughened lion appearance but he was, as a matter of fact, an omnipresent creature of the universe. Once he completed his early evening grooming and fed only from the freshest pellets inside his bowl, drank gracefully with the pointy tip of his tongue, he threw his tail up high and walked to the couch near one of the two living room windows. Adjusting three or four times to find the perfect spot, he eventually rolled himself into a bun between two huge pillows, deeming the vantage ideal for what was to come. For everything that was to come.
He was glad that it was coming. Not that he cared that much about anything as a cat, and yet he couldn’t disagree with the fact that Eugenie White, who liked to called herself Mom but was really his assigned lifelong servant, was lagging. The main criticism Terence had to express towards Eugenie was that she was a lady one year short of forty years old and that she was living the existence of a grandmother. She had become such a recluse, not that she was unpleasant to other humans, no, far from that, but she had declined so many social plans in the last four years that she was providing no entertainment to the house whatsoever anymore. No one called with gossip, no one came over anymore.
And Terence liked drama. He enjoyed scratching his claws along the cork patches Eugenie had rolled around the legs of the dining room table, he wasn’t against chasing a bouncy ball or even the evil red laser and knocking over some potted plants occasionally, and he could really lose himself watching the street below their apartment on the second floor any time of the day, especially when the birds gathered on the balcony, but he missed when she had people over, especially men. Then, drama was guaranteed, five stars. He had particularly been fond of the last man who had shared Eugenie’s life for a short period of five months, and the thought made him close his eyes and relish a little bit. Fighting, crying, lots of passive aggressiveness and sarcasm, all the things he cherished.
Now, she had pretty much turned into a nun, but that was about to change.
On this Friday night, he knew she was exhausted after a long week teaching those insufferable teenagers at her job, and he was concerned she was not at all in the best shape to accept the explosive episode coming into her days, but he had to trust that everything was happening for a reason. Terence was a big-time believer in dharma, I mean, how could you not be, when you were a house cat that ate for free and never felt too cold or too hot, and received the services of a human every moment they were home? He trusted, warmly.
When it came to crisis, there was little comparable to what was announcing itself as the storm clouds had formed above the city center and the first drops of rain had begun to fall cozily against the glass of the two high door openings of the living room. Soon, the thunder came, quaking inside the old walls of their building, and the little drops of rain transformed into a curtain of violent pouring, deafening, accompanied by strident gushes of wind blowing the autumn leaves horizontally along the boulevard, whistling like an alarm. Good, Terence thought, satisfied by the exposition scene, while Eugenie sat next to him and scratched his chin lovingly, whispered some intelligible nonsense into his non-functioning ear and placed a plate of chicken nuggets and a glass of white wine on the coffee table next to the couch. All that cacophony outside, the unhinged elements of the storm, would drown the commotion to come.
He thought about the boy. Well, he wasn’t as much of a boy as when he and Terence had first met, some five years before, but he felt like a boy to Terence in comparison with Eugenie, who was a lady of mature age with the habits of a senior. What a strange human, the cat had observed. He didn’t buzz the door or walked like other humans. Instead, he bounced around and ignored gravity, and he had showed up so many times on the balcony, which was a very strange conduct that Terence had never seen another person adopt without a ladder and a heavy firefighting gear, but that had been greatly entertaining.
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He had indulged the boy, back then, resisted the urge to play hard to get, and hung out some hours at the window with the boy. His name was Barry, Terence knew. Sometimes, he came wearing some usual human clothes but, some other days, he had visited in some sort of Halloween costume, the top half of his face covered by a mask that had huge ant’s eyes. It was confusing but, again, entertaining, and Terence had learned to look forward to the boy’s next visits. It would have been ideal that he had brought some treats with him but, seeing that he only showed up when Eugenie was absent, he had not dared coming inside the flat and therefore, had not needed any offerings to appease the real master of the house, always coming empty-handed but always with a smile, some gentle knocks on the window, always playing with his hands and some very cool blue iridescent lightening strikes that he could, for some mysterious reason, produce out of his fingertips.
And now the boy was coming, Barry was coming. Not just with the blue, this time, but with some red. Some deep flashy red. He was bringing all the colors. Terence watched the rain pour and the wind tear the avenue with some empty trash bins and whirls of papers, he watched the Fall season trees get stripped off their leaves into the perspective of winter by the violence, and he felt the excitement fill up his heart. Fortunate, he thought, that the weather was so savage, especially the water part. It would make Barry’s journey to Eugenie White pretty much unnoticed, mixing into the fresh sky water the dark smears or hand prints he would have left on the décor as he slowly wobbled and limped, letting dissolve the puddles that would have formed under his body when he paused to catch his breath against a trash bin.
“Who wants a chicken nugget?” Eugenie asked Terence as she took a bite while nicely sliding the laptop on the coffee table and starting to browse for a nice Friday night watch. She chewed on her nugget and her eyes hungrily scanned the screen, and Terence knew she was searching for something, anything, that involved a lady detective coming back to her hometown to solve a murder that would stir up some old secrets and bring her together with a forgotten lover from her youth. The algorithm would give her just that, but Terence would have had a hard time hiding his amusement if he had not been a cat.
Those nuggets would go cold, and the show would never be watched, not a minute of it. She would not even get the chance to sip on her wine. He felt slightly bad for her; she had put on her favorite sweatpants after a long rejuvenating shower, the trousers that were so soft with the fleece inside, a wrinkled tee shirt and her weekend jumper, and she was so ready for a well-deserved moment of unwinding. But no, he saw, all this was for the best. Eugenie needed a reset. He couldn’t be sure how things would unfold, though, and this troubled him a little bit. How would she react to what was about to pulverize her daily life? The anticipation for delightful drama took over and Terence sank his little head deeper in the middle of his shoulder, resting his chin on his chest. Delightful, truly.
Detached from Eugenie’s enthusiasm being absorbed by the task of queuing her episodes, he waited, looking at the window through the slits of his half closed eyed. One minute later, Barry emerged on the balcony, seemingly out of nowhere. Even for Terence, who knew anything and everything and the past and the future, and how all things would end, his appearance made a certain effect. Struggling to get back on his feet after crashing between the potted plants of the terrace –fracas that had been muffled by the storm, playing the scene in an old silent movie—, Barry pulled himself up against the window and leaned forward. He was coiffed with an oversize hood, his hands rolled inside the long sleeves to dissimulate the blood on his fingers, and he looked literally flattened by the rain. Hunched forward, one hand holding his stomach, and the other resting on the two layered glass. He looked like a dark dark shadow. If he was so impressive to Terence the Cat, then, how terrifying would he be to Eugenie White?
The last seconds of a peaceful but hermit-like existence were dispersing in Eugenie’s timeline. Two, one. Zero. Barry knocked forcefully on the window.