Miaow!

Her name was Ivy Violet Astra Louis Keats Worsley – Ivy for short. She was a chocolate Burmese and my very first, very own pet. There’d been loads of family pets in my childhood – a great dane called Gus, a golden retriever called Jedda, and lots of cats, Oliver with the cancer-prone ears, Louis the Siamese, Richmond Williby, the big ginger named after his birthplace. I’d also had a few goldfish – Sirloin and Huckleberry Finn – but goldfish don’t really count.

So Ivy was the first pet that was just mine. I named her with all the bombastic loftiness of a third-year acting student. ‘Ivy’ was her given name, just because I loved it. ‘Violet’ because purple was my favourite colour, ‘Astra’ to give her that necessary cosmic cat element, ‘Louis’ after the Siamese from my childhood, and ‘Keats’ after my favourite poet. Of course, she would carry my surname.

Ivy lived in the Wollongong student share house with Kirstie, Bel and I during my third year. After graduation, she and I moved to Surry Hills in Sydney to live with my sister, Emma, and her boyfriend, Andrew. Ivy used to go out prowling at night and, because on my student income I’d delayed getting her operated on, she was soon up the duff. Not long after, my one cat turned into four. I still remember Andrew, present at the birth, urging, “Push, Ivy, push!” (Good practice for the deliveries of his four babies in future years.) Two of her kittens went to new homes but, alas, the third met a grisly fate at the hands (or mouth) of Emma and Andrew’s dog Ruby.

So could that be the reason I’m not a dog person? Ruby ate my kitten? It certainly didn’t help the dogs’ cause. Ruby was an otherwise lovely animal and for all the years I knew her, I watched her bound into other people’s arms but keep a respectful distance from me. She knew I was a cat person. I like the look of some dogs. I occasionally stroke their fur, especially when it is demanded of me by my three-year-old. But I just really don’t need to touch them. And I don’t need them to lick me or slobber on me ever.

About a year after the kittens arrived and left, I took off overseas for the rite-of-passage working holiday. Ivy stayed with my sister. Em called one day to say that Ivy had gone missing. We never saw her again. I like to think she came looking for me. She’s probably sitting in a bar in Berlin smoking cigarettes and drinking milchkaffee as we speak. Sehr chic.

Cat or dog? Definitely cat.

(Postscript: My mother, in her childhood, had a black dog called Timothy Oswald Aloysius Methuselah Dooley Busby. Timmy for short.)