Bono

“You’ll find out when we get there,” I said. “We can leave if you don’t like it.”

Skyscrapers perforated clear spring air as the taxi glided through rows of blooming trees on Park Avenue. With New York at her magical best and my daughter opening herself to art, I was on a high.

“I oughta kill you!” a Hummer driver shouted through his open window at our driver, who apparently hadn’t moved over to let him into his lane.

We cowered, half expecting Hummer man to raise a revolver, leaving us to mop the cabbie’s brain off the sidewalk.

“Bastard,” our driver muttered as he pressed the accelerator and swerved ahead at teeth-shattering speed. Once a safe distance from his aggressor, the driver slowed down to explain he was a practicing Buddhist and a pacifist. But he’d lived in the city twenty-seven years so was entitled to use the local lingo.

Lydia quickly overcame her reservations about “old stuff”. The wry twist of a mouth in a Gainsborough portrait, or a witty twinkle in the eye of a woman wearing an eighteenth-century wig are reminders people haven’t changed. Power, sex, fame, and death are ongoing obsessions.

I was drawn to the works featuring animals. Cats, dogs, and horses are portrayed with great tenderness in paintings three hundred years old. It was comforting to see the connection between humans and their quadruped friends is eternal. The trouble was from every exquisitely painted animal eye, I saw Bono staring back at me. As Monet had admired the universe in his pond, I considered the possibility of comprehending all creation in Bono’s amber gaze. Our prisoner was getting to me.

* * *

We arrived home to the sound of paws scuffling over floorboards.

“Oh well,” I said, watching a pom-pom tail disappear under the bed. “Only two days to go.”

Whatever Bono got up to while we were out exploring the city was a mystery. I was disheartened. It was like living with a ghost.

“Till what?” Lydia asked. She was opening a can of cat food.

We’d given up trying to keep Bono in the Bunker. It was pointless. Whenever I opened the door a crack to shove a food bowl in there, he bolted out and refused to be caught.

“Jon said we can take him back to the shelter at the weekend. Remember?”

Lydia looked shocked.

“We can’t do that!” she said.

“Let’s face it. He’s a disaster.”

“No, he’s not! He’s beautiful.”

“He just hides under the bed and glowers at us like we’re a pair of murderers.”

Lydia’s eyes became as moist as Monet’s pools.

“You say you’re a cat person,” she said.

“I am, but . . .”

“He needs us.” Her voice was ragged with emotion.

“I know, but he’s hardly thriving.”

“Nobody said it was going to be easy,” she said. “Can’t we keep him at least until I go home? It’s only seven more days.”

I could hardly say no. A week would go fast enough.

* * *

Lydia’s passion for Bono intensified by the day. As she lay on the floor beside the bed talking to our shadowy guest with endless patience, a tangible bond developed between them.

Bono had a wily street-cat side. Whatever he’d been through, he’d proved himself a survivor. At times he was so silent and still, we forgot he was in the room. As he listened in on our conversations, it seemed the shadow under my bed was finding out everything about us. I wondered what was going on inside his head.

Though he refused to approach Lydia during daylight hours, at night he crept out to sleep on the back of her sofa bed above her head. The moment she woke, he flitted away again.

It was all very touching, but I had more urgent worries.

When I replaced the meal with food that wasn’t laced, he treated it with the same disdain. With the cat putting himself on a starvation diet, there was no hope of sneaking medication into his meal. To make things worse, since our ghastly struggle to get the pill down his throat, I was his least favorite human.

There was only one person to call.

“Hi there! How’s Bono settling in?” Jon’s voice radiated warmth.

It was one of those questions with a long or short answer. I wasn’t about to own up to the chimney incident.

“He’s okay. He’s drinking lots, but he’s stopped eating the canned food you gave us.”

“I see.” Jon didn’t sound at all alarmed.

“The first time was understandable because I’d crushed a pill and spooned it through the mash,” I said. “He must have hated the taste of it.”

“Have you been able to give him pills manually, the way I showed you?” Jon asked.

“Only once,” I said, tears rising in my throat. “He hates me now.”

I’d seen cat whisperers at work on TV shows. The problems people have with their cats are almost always due to human failing. I used to look down my nose at the couple whose cat attacked their ankles. Couldn’t they see the feline was bored? Now I was as much a wreck as any hapless TV cat owner. I could sense Jon listening carefully, like a psychiatrist, at the end of the line.

“Of course he doesn’t hate you,” Jon said. There was kindness in every syllable.

“And I can’t catch him to have another go. He’s too fast on his feet.”