A few nights ago, I had to turf a very indignant Louis Catorze off my lap to answer the door. It was a lady that I’d never seen before.
Lady: “Hello, I live at number sixty-three [or whatever number it was – I was so mortified at being caught out in my pyjamas at 8pm that I missed some of the detail]. I don’t suppose you’re missing a cat, are you?”
My brain: “Oh shit. What’s he done this time.”
My mouth: “No, I’m not. My cat’s right here.”
I pointed down to the space on the floor where Catorze would ordinarily be, in the event of someone knocking at the door. Naturellement, the one time that I actually wanted him to appear, he didn’t. Yet somehow I refrained from dragging the lady into the house, screaming, “See? It must have been some other black cat! You can’t prove anything!”
Lady again: “It’s a white Persian cat, with a name tag that says “Betty”. She has a phone number on her collar but the last few numbers have rubbed off.”
My brain: “THANK GOD.”
My mouth: “No, that’s not my cat. But she lives in the third or fourth house from the end of the street, the one with the blue door. And her Cat Daddy is called [name of neighbour who lives with Betty].”
That is the scary thing about us cat freaks, Mesdames et Messieurs: we may never have spoken to you and you may not even know who we are but, if you have a cat, we know your name and where you live. Our subversive network spreads deep and wide, like the French Resistance during World War II.
Catorze and Betty have never crossed paths – at least, not when we’ve been watching him. When he’s alone and unsupervised out at The Front, who knows what he does? But, as he has a dislike of long-haired cats, I don’t imagine the encounter would go well, plus Betty is something of a bruiser, having been witnessed fighting with Catus Interruptus on one occasion.
That said, it would be quite funny to see two such diametrically-opposed cats facing off: an angelic white Persian with a pink diamanté collar, and a scraggy, black devil-cat with fangs.
What a good thing it is that we have the AI Bot, to turn our visions into almost-reality:
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
louiscatorze.com 
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