It was J, my South African ex-girlfriend, who told me that your cats come back to you in the end.
We were sleeping in a tent in Mpumalanga, or cuddled together at her house in Johannesburg, when she broke this news to me.
I dismissed it in my usual way: you and your African shamanism. But she insisted it's true, even if I cannot accept it as being the truth.
That's your problem, said J - if it's not in front of your eyes, you don't care. There are things in the universe, though, that you cannot perceive with sight alone. You must listen to them with your soul and with your intuition, and then all will be revealed.
With that in mind, J continued, it is my contention that your cats return to you after their death. The colours are different, yes, but there is something nevertheless consistent about each one that marks it out as significant.
My eyes rolled mockingly. Are you sure, J? Are you sure? Your talk about evidence that my eyes can't process is a neat cop-out, and I feel it leaves a huge gap in your argument.
Danny was put to sleep on November 10 last year, and as far as I am concerned, that is as far as it goes. There is no extension to his existence; no return, and he sinks ever-further into the recesses of memory.
There is now another cat, and I was astonished when the vet told me this tiny ball of fluff is two years old. It cannot be - I am convinced you're wrong. Later, the vet conceded - yes, I overestimated. I was out by half, and New Cat is no more than 12 months old.
This puts the birth of New Cat at around the same time as the departure of Danny. Like the Dalai Lama, you cannot anoint a new one until the incumbent has died. Now I find myself suppressing the idea that a cat's repertoire is small anyway, and feigning surprise that Danny's dislike of being picked up from the floor is shared by New Cat; that both sniff the breeze before deciding whether to venture outside or not; that both shift into a playful mood when my fingers make ripples on the underside of a rug or blanket.
Intuition tells me there's nothing in it, and I said before that sanity breaks down once we begin to associate everything with everything else. The human in me sees connections, however, and I cannot prove that these connections are no more than flickers of the mind.
