Sitting in our car and turning pages through a novel I’m not reading, I watch a cat move furtively around the carpark of a residential-house-block-turned-surgery-practice.
She is hunched low like a coiled spring, hunting something I cannot see. Her sleek black coat glistens in the day’s glow. An Australian summer’s day that taints the mid-morning with a chartreuse hue so playful and kittenish it borders on reckless oblivion.
Watching it, I think of a fun-sized panther. I try smiling and fail.
I cannot channel the playful infectiousness of the cat or the glory of the golden morning because my wife is inside the building, getting the results of a tissue sample the doctor took previously of a mysterious dark growth under the nail bed of the big toe on her left foot. For many months, the nail silently germinated through various shades of yellowing discolouration. Every other morning, I played the role of photographer, assessor, and witness-bearer.
“It’s still yellow like last week, but in a different place.”
“A different place?!”
“The colour moves. Maybe it’s going through a natural bruising, healing process.”
“You don’t know that! Just take the photo. . . .”
Under the spell of what became a blind compulsion–buried deep within the bowels of despair and grief–my wife ran hither and thither to various foot and nail specialists for answers.
The latest episode: “It’s either fungal or a melanoma . . .”
That’s the fork-in-the-road ultimatum proffered by the podiatrist whose office I am parked outside of, during the initial consultation. Delivered in that declining-pitch tone and ending on a pause as if to imply that the sentence continued.
“. . . the choice is yours.”
The steel doorbell rings loudly as my wife exits the practice. The cat is caught entirely off guard. In a scene of abject fear and comedic timing, it spins around, seeking immediate protection behind nothing but thin air. Perhaps hoping its sheer blackness will do the legwork? It then makes a launching dive for the neighbouring fence and disappears.
Black cats have a long history of links to superstition. Ask a pirate in the Caribbean during the 1670s. Or a good Catholic from the eighteenth century or a sailor’s wife; they’ll all tell you. Perhaps I will be in literal luck?
As my wife walks to the car (the descriptive adverb forlornly comes to mind), my imagination becomes treacherous: Pirates liked black cats; that’s got to be a good thing. Oh, wait. Don’t pirates usually have a leg missing? I looked for the cat one last time as my wife got into the passenger side. I am completely disarmed by a smile I can only describe as genuine and unfettered. Here, returned whole, sits the woman I love. All ten
fingers and ten toes of her. Finally, my face softens. I feel the colour of the day and its warming refreshment. It’s now that I feel joy for the yellow morning.
“What are you smiling at?” she asks.
“You just scared the life out of a cat when you came out.”
“Did I?” she replied, clicking her seatbelt in. “I suppose it has a few to spare.”
Silently, I confer with myself. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one.