Portrait of the artist as a young cat

I first ran into her in a bar in Bangkok. She was perched on a bar stool, bottle of Leo in one paw, lazily chatting up the owner's girlfriend (a beautiful Siamese from Taiwan who made lounging across the counter look like a fine art). She didn't even look up when I sat down next to her: it was up to me to break the ice. The usual round of travellers' introductions ensued: name (quickly forgotten), country of origin, itinerary, manifesto. She pinned me down fast to some cold British town; I couldn't place her accent, her clipped and almost-flawless globish. She told me she'd been born there, in a disused bathroom on the third floor. Spent her early kittenhood doing the rounds, traipsing up and down stairs to the tune of her mother's tyrannical yowl. Keeping an eye, her mother used to say, though she never said what for. Her, she mostly just made eyes at the backpackers for whatever treats she could get out of them. She had a taste for sugar, and catnip when she could get it. And those eyes, Jesus, no wonder she got by ok: when she switched them on and turned them on you there was no way you could make a clean getaway. Electric blue. Yeah, she knew how to get by.

We spent the night knocking back bottles, talking poetry, music, drugs. That place was her cultural capital: she moved through it, fluid in her narrative element, throwing me titbits of stories along the way. The third floor, that was where she came most solidly into focus, sitting in the dark on the checker-board lino as she sparked up her eyes and told me about this artist that used to live there when she was a kitten. It was the pictures, she purred, as much as the paint fumes: she couldn't get enough of him being around. Used to wrap around his feet while he worked, share his 'nip when he had it and paint stories with him into the smoke. He was spoken for of course: a young German shepherd who'd chase her off whenever she was around and then pointedly go and lick his hands. But he always had time for her when the dog wasn't there. It was the pictures, she said, and I guess I believed it because of her eyes, the colours she could see.

At dawn we picked our way across crashed-out hippies on mattresses and up to the roof to watch the sun come up. She sang to me, some song I don't remember, then curled up on my chest and went quietly to sleep. I didn't have the heart to disturb her, so I lay there still until sleep caught up with me too. When I woke up she was nowhere to be found.

Next I heard she was living the life of Riley down in Phuket somewhere. Got picked up by some rich family and whisked off to the lap of luxury, or so the Siamese at the bar said, tail flicking gently in disapproval. What was a backstreet kitten like her doing down there anyway? What happened to the revolution?

I got her side of it months later, at a chance meeting in a bar in Sydney. I'd almost walked straight past her: she'd lost a bit of her spark by then, her eyes only running at half-power. It was pretty obvious she wasn't being fed. Told me this family had coddled her for a bit, given her a cushion to sleep on and tins of tuna when they remembered, but it was all for the kids' sake: they hadn't really planned on keeping her long. Besides, she wasn't good at being a house cat. She needed to be out and about, but they just wouldn't let her: doors and windows were always locked, and they were miles away from the backstreets and alleyways she'd been missing anyway. Sometimes she'd claw the furniture, she got so bored, and then she'd be in trouble and there'd be no tuna for a week.

For lack of anything better to do, she'd taken to doing a few laps of the pool now and then. Not in front of the humans, of course - she knew better than that - but one day one of the kids caught her at it, and that was game over far as the grown-ups were concerned. It just wasn't fitting behaviour for a cat, you know? They got rid of her and bought themselves a nice little well-bred neurotic Persian blue.

She found her way to the beach and lived there for a bit, making friends with the fishermen and curling up on the rocks once the sun had set. One day one of the guys smuggled her onto his boat for good luck, which suited her, she said: she'd always fancied running away to sea. The smell didn't bother her, except when she'd had a few too many the night before, and besides there were fish heads and guts every day. She couldn't complain, even if the other guys did give her that look from time to time, like what's a cat think she's doing on a boat anyway? She made herself useful catching rats, and after a while the guys got to like her, to think of her as part of the crew, more or less. Then this Chinese cook came aboard, and she figured it was time to move on. It was the looks he gave her, sharpening his knives. She didn't like what he was thinking.

She jumped ship in Tokyo and hung out there for a while: found a nice little spot in Odaiba where the police were pretty friendly. First morning there one of them woke her up. Didn't move her on or anything, just pointed her towards a bench in the sun and let her carry on sleeping. Gotta love the Japanese. She developed a taste for sashimi, soft pink flesh between her teeth. It's a fetish, she told me, licking her lips. Sends a shiver down your spine.

But Japan was too clean and clinical for her: like a ketamine dream, all the levels you slip through, floor after floor riding escalators in department stores you can't get out of, until you want to throw up just to see a stain, raw and visceral and real, on the floor. The men's eyes on her made her skin-creeping paranoid: all those glassy stares, internal CCTV. She kept her eyes switched off, wrapped her soul up tight, and snuck it out through customs somehow using the fake name she'd chosen for her hanko (外人霊 - gaijin rei - in case I wanted to know).

Figured she'd try her luck down under, but Sydney was tough: the toms were all testosteroned up and the water was way too cold for swimming, as she found out when she jumped ship to avoid border police somewhere along the Sydney-Hobart route. She spent her days stalking bats in the Botanic Gardens (possibilities of contracting lyssavirus notwithstanding) or singing for money under the conquistador helmets of the opera house, learnt to lie convincingly to bouncers about an evening's alcohol intake and mastered the art of the morning after.

She told me other things as well, that night in Sydney: confessional things dredged up from the bottom of a bottle of Victoria Bitter. It wasn't just the swimming thing, though that was part of it. She'd never been keen on sitting on people's laps, preferred a quick tickle behind the ears to an all-over-body stroke, and didn't tend to purr much at all - well, only when someone got things exactly right, and that usually took more training than she could be bothered to give them. She'd never felt quite at home in her fur: the way she walked or wagged her tail, the delicate little movements that were so, well, cat-like. She just didn't feel quite right being a cat, she confided finally, a good few beers down the line. There was just something so tame about it, so stay-at-home, sit-by-the-fire-looking-pretty, sneak out at night for your bit of excitement and always back by breakfast time if you want to keep being let back in. It all sort of started in her teens, when her mum had made her have her canines taken out. That settled it, far as everyone else was concerned. No more chasing cars or fetching sticks. Time to grow up into the cat she was born to be.

There were little tears in her eyes when I told her the same sort of thing had happened to me, and she nuzzled up to me right there in the bar in front of everyone, and followed me home after last orders. The bitemarks on my neck the next day made me smile every time I caught sight of them in the mirror, though trying to explain them to the wife wasn't a conversation I enjoyed having.

I lost track of her again for a while: got caught up in my own narratives, the politics of the personal, putting fists through windows to try and break back into a broken love bubble. Ended up hiding out on a riverboat with all the lonely people, the rest of the town's marriage refugees. One evening, just as I was about to turn in, I heard a patter of paws on the roof and an unmistakeable miaow. She poked her head through the hatch a few moments later, clambered in and sauntered over, a smug smile on her face, pockets full of sweets she'd shoplifted to keep herself in sugar. Somehow she'd managed to track me down.

We made a nest of sleeping bags and curled up together, swapping stories, sharing scents and colours, songs and shivers, until we were both warm and purring, slowly teasing out each other's souls from under fur and skin. The next morning she was gone, like a ghost, leaving only her scent and some hairs on the pillow, a muddy paw-print on the floor by the door. I rolled over, burrowing into the warm hollow her body had left, and breathed in her scent, knowing our paths would cross again some day. I don't tend to remember my dreams, but if I did I know that in them somewhere would be an unmistakeable miaow and a pair of electric blue eyes that glow in the dark.