(Original title – Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback)

If you know me, you know I love my damn cat.

Her dumb little face.

Her stupid little paws.

Her insistent meowing.

She is the one topic that is guaranteed to bring me to tears when I think about the future.

Minou stumbled into my life in January of 2013. I was dating Dan at the time, and we’d been talking about getting a kitten as a companion for his older cat, Ronya. We’d been to the Lort Smith Shelter, and a couple of other shelters and weren’t really ‘sold’ on any of the kittens they had in stock. One of the kittens, a tiny little grey thing, was so traumatised from her desexing operation that she was literally shaking and huddled in the back corner of her cage. I cried a little.

Because I was unemployed, breaking a new kitten into our house was going to be left to me which was fine. A day or so after New Years’ Day, Dan’s mother sent him a text with a screenshot of a Gumtree ad, for a vet nurse in the area who was fostering three kittens. One was a white, deaf male that would need to go to a particular home, there was a calico / tortoiseshell girl, and a tabby girl. We call the vet nurse and make a time to see the kittens, and jump in the car and drive the 10 minutes to her house, taking a carrier with us just in case.

The nurse’s 12 year old daughter was sitting on the couch, cuddling a placid, tiny calico kitten, opening her mouth and letting the kitten put her face into her mouth. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Dan sits down beside her, me beside Dan, and after chatting for a few minutes I ask if we can hold the kitten. This tiny, alien looking thing snuggles into him against his chest and closes her eyes, promptly purring up a storm.

I know this is the kitten we’re taking home. She’s now ours.

Because Dan’s hands were filled with kitten, it was up to me to fill in the microchip registration paperwork. My name went on as the owner, Dan’s as second contact. But we had to choose a name. We’d spoken briefly about names previously – if we’d adopted a grey or white (or one of each) kitten, its name would be Gandalf. My old housemate Gen had always referred to a ginger tomcat who used to visit our townhouse as “Minou” (French for cat) – I called him “Fantapants” – and it was just such a perfect name. I got naming rights of this tri-coloured alien masquerading as a baby cat, so Minou it was.

I drove home because Dan refused to let go of the kitten. He sat in the front passenger seat, holding her the whole trip home. She was so quiet, and calm, and placid. She was the perfect addition to our little family. She even brought her own little additions along for the ride, which culminated in her first vet visit less than 24 hours after we adopted her because she was covered in fleas.

And then she got comfortable.

Holy fucking hell, she was a terror. She wasn’t quiet, or placid, or calm. She tore up and down the hallways, falling over herself because she couldn’t retract her claws and they would get caught in the carpet. She meowed, constantly, at everything. After the initial introductions were done between Minou and Ronya, Minou would lay in wait around a corner and pounce on her, biting her ears and wrestling with her, biting her face, biting her legs, chasing her tail, biting her tail. Basically being the biggest jerk of a cat ever in a teeny weeny kitten body.

But I fell in love with her despite her jerkiness. When I would sit on the couch and watch X Files after applying for jobs or going to interviews, she would climb up the back of the couch and onto my shoulder before curling up under my chin and falling asleep. When Dan and I would go out, she would hear the garage door open, the car pull in, and she would race to sit on the shoe rack next to the front door to greet us as we walked in.

I tried to teach her to sit, as Ronya had been taught to, but Minou was always so food-obsessed and yelling meows at me when I went in to feed her that I soon gave up, but it turns out Dan persisted. I always addressed her by her name, and when I would call for her, she would come running. Coming when called and then sitting on command – I soon realised that she wasn’t so much a cat as perhaps maybe a dog, or she thought she was a human as well. Just a small, furry, four-legged human with a tail. I would talk to her all day, mostly because I didn’t have anyone else to talk to, and she would talk back, staring at me with her big eyes and a mildly interested expression on her face.

As she grew, she stopped sleeping on me during the day, and refused to settle on my lap for snuggles, but Dan was like catnip for her. She and Ronya would sleep on his legs while we watched TV at night, and I would have to settle for being allowed on the same couch as them.

Dan and I split when she was 9 months old. The breakup was hard enough, but the thought of leaving her dumb little kitten face was heartbreaking. Don’t get me wrong, I shed tears for much longer than I should have over the demise of the relationship, but nothing upset me greater than the thought of possibly leaving her behind. I’d thought that splitting the cats up would be traumatic for them given they had bonded, but Dan insisted he couldn’t look after two cats, so I should take Minou with me to live with my parents in Adelaide – and whilst I was glad to be given custody of Minou, I was pissed off at his reasoning. If I hadn’t been able to take Minou with me, would he have given her away to someone else? Yeah, I called bullshit too but didn’t say anything to him.

Minou and I had our first road-trip together the day we left Melbourne. She sat huddled in her carrier on the backseat, wide awake and staring the whole time. She meowed loudly and incessantly for the first leg from Berwick to Brunswick to pick up my sidekick Laura who was coming along, but once Laura was in, she was silent. I’d given her Valium to keep her quiet and calm, but I’m not sure it worked. She was quiet, but definitely not calm.

Mum and dad had just moved into their place a few months before we arrived, and their enclosed patio out the back was filled with boxes. Once Minou was settled, their pile of boxes became her box fort, and she would climb up onto the highest stack and curl up to sleep in the sunshine, or stare out the window at the birds that frequented the yard.

I had three months of unemployment when I arrived in August of 2013. During that time, there was plenty more opportunity to bond and talk at her and teach her phrases. Oh yes, my cat doesn’t just understand a word here or there – she has questions and phrases she responds to:

• Want to go outside? – she runs to the back door so I can open it and let her outside for a bit
• Want one of these? – for her fishy dental treats; she automatically sits and waits for one to be put on the floor in front of her, then hidden on her cat tree for her to find
• Want to come up? – giving her permission to jump up next to me on the couch
• Where is kitty / where is Minou? – she meows, or comes out from where she’s hiding so I know where she is
• Don’t eat that
• I got your head – when I grab her head and she wrestles me to get free
• I got your butt – when I grab her on her back where her tail starts and she bites me to get me to stop
• You got me! – when we’re playing “hide & pounce” and she wins because she runs at where I’m hiding and taps me
• I got you! – when I hide and I tap her first when she comes running
• That’s not yours – when she is looking at something like my dinner, and I need to remind her that steak is not for cats
• Eat some food – when she’s annoying me in the kitchen and I want to distract her
• Do you want pats? – for when she’s meowing and I think she wants pats (usually she acquiesces if I ask before forcing affection on her)

The words she responds to:

• Sit
• Gentle – when she’s biting me too hard, she stops and licks my hand or arm instead
• Down
• Inside – when she’s outside and I want her to go inside
• No
• Good girl
• Some more – this is her cue for headbumps, because she’d headbump me and then I’d ask “some more” and she thinks this is what it is now
• Kisses – she gives kisses on demand
• Chicken
• Food
• Birdy! – when there are birds outside and she’s not near the window; she comes running and looks outside
• Pats – when I’m about to pat her and I don’t want her to get spooked or run away
• Cuddles – when I’m about to force cuddles on her and I want her to not claw at me to get away

She did pick up a weird habit in Adelaide. She developed an enjoyment of licking the edge of my mother’s expensive new sliding blinds, something she has carried with her back to Melbourne. She did this so much that they frayed. She licks curtains, and vertical blinds, and the edge of shoes, and metal combs, and hair brushes with bristles, and reusable shopping bags, and the edge of cardboard boxes… Anything sharp, or an odd texture, she’ll lick and lick and lick until I realise the annoying noise is her licking something weird and I get up and distract her or physically remove the object of her affection.

As a 100% indoor cat, and me having lived in an apartment for most of her adult life, she’s only had access to a balcony. Since moving to the little villa-unit thing we’ve got at the moment, she has recently been granted some unsupervised outside time in the backyard. I don’t think she’s realised she’s a cat, because she hasn’t once looked at climbing the wooden fence. She seems content to patrol the yard, always around the edge of the grass, and eat the grass, and only walk on the grass if absolutely necessary in order to chase and pounce on a dead leaf that has moved across it. She sits on the brick edge around the lawn and just watches the bugs flying and birds flying overhead and enjoys the sunshine. Or she rolls around on the concrete scratching her back and meowing the whole time. I leave the laundry door open for her to come and go as she pleases, which means that every ten minutes or so she pops in and meows at me to say “hi, here I am, I’m being good” or “I saw this and chased this and was in the sun” and then goes back outside, lather, rinse, repeat.

Have I bored you enough yet?

In summary, I love my cat. She is my child, and I would only trade her for a less broken cat maybe once a month when she wakes me in the middle of the night to rub her eyes and ears.

And she has her own Instagram – instagram.com/minou.andme should you like to keep updated on her goings on.