Sill

The cat meowed and both heads turned.

“Sill,” the man said, the name engraved on her bell that tinkled as she slunk towards them like a spring toy, each step a coil and a stretch. “That’s a pretty name.”

“For a pretty cat,” the woman replied, enamoured. Sill settled on her belly between them, purring against the smooth wooden floor. The two were quite pleased at this turn of events, for they were at a cat cafe, and their conversation till now had just been a way to kill time until one of the seven aloof cats deemed them worthy to approach. The other customers, catless, glanced with envy, trying not to seem too eager—I’m just here for the food, really. My girlfriend wanted me to come along. I needed a quiet space to type up my report in. I like reading surrounded by cats. I wanted to test my new camera. All this said with a flick of the eyes. The pair heard nothing because they were looking solely at Sill and how her slit-pupils sat deep in emerald.

“She has a beautiful mane.” The woman reached out to touch Sill’s thick hair, wheat mixed with ash. It gave her hair layers upon layers, made it seem thicker than it was. Her probing fingers reached skin and paused. Sill looked at her expectantly—demandingly—so she started stroking the cat, thinking that twenty dollars for an hour was not that bad after all, when only minutes earlier she had been grumbling about the juice here being more water than lemon.

Sill purred. “She likes it. That’s what purring means,” the woman said, eager to play interpreter.

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“What else could it mean? If they didn’t like it, they’d scratch you and run off.”

The man noted how her small hands barely peeked out of her sleeves. “You came prepared, then.”

“I did get scratched once, but that was a long time ago. See? She loves this.”

Sill did seem content, her claws retracted, curled into a loaf. She had grown used to humans, living in the walled garden of a cat cafe where there were no predators. They were pat dispensers and she made full use of them during visiting hours. Food and water came on a schedule, delivered by human hands. She studied the lay of the land, every nook and cranny of the cafe, solely to find the best spots to nap in. Animals are simple, however, and cannot count blessings. Cats escaped the cafe sometimes, and while they were all rescued promptly, a few would escape again, unable to understand how much safer they were in here.

“They’re like children,” the owner said as she walked in to distribute treats to the customers who then dangled them like carrots. Suddenly everyone had a cat to themselves, nibbling and lapping at their fingers, meowing for more. “They don’t even know their own names.” She sat in the middle of the room, feeding a cat in her lap and scratching him behind his ears. The customers all turned to listen to her, eyes and ears open—she looks warm, friendly, and a bit lonely. We didn’t pay for this, but surely a few minutes won’t hurt. “Sometimes I call for one and they all gather. They’re like hungry two-year-olds, whereas dogs are a bit older, mentally. But I like that about cats. Another treat, Kaya?”

The owner was old and graying and talkative, much like how your own grandmother might have rambled endlessly about old stories whether you were listening or not. The cat in her lap, bored, wandered off, but she did not seem to mind one bit, continuing to talk about her lovely cats. The customers nodded—they liked cats, so they were of course interested in her stories, far more than in their own grandmothers’ accounts of eating tapioca during the Occupation and other such dusty old stories they learned about at museums. Here was a cat lady in the flesh, exactly how they imagined, her eyes sparkling as she spoke—listen!—as if she lay dormant most of the day, awake only for this brief moment. She went on and on like a spool of thread unravelling as it tumbles down a flight of stairs about what her cats liked to eat, where they liked to sleep, which cats were friends, which cats were enemies, and which were in a cold war.

Animals are simple, and anyone would wonder if the cats were even aware of all this that they were doing, or if they were just moving on instinct. The owner seemed to understand them better than they did. Naturally. She was human, perceptive and intelligent. Still, after twenty minutes, the customers started to get a bit restless, wondering if the owner could even differentiate between them and the cats.

The owner was not stupid—she knew her customers were paying money to be here, even if she sometimes forgot while telling her stories. It was a bad habit made worse by years of living with just cats, who would put up with her rambling as long as she remembered to feed them. She wrapped up her list of cat facts at fact number fifty: that cats are lactose intolerant, which she thought was very funny even after decades of telling it to customers. Fifty was a good number to end on. She handed out more treats to the customers and left.

Sill continued to purr as the man fed her treats and the woman petted her. The rest of the cats were meowing too, pawing at the customers for food.

“What do you think they’re saying?” the man asked, curious.

“They want food, probably.”

“But they don’t sound too different from how they usually meow.”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I speak cat. I just guess what they’re saying based on how they act.”

“So if you had to talk on the phone with one, you wouldn’t understand it?”

The woman paused at the bizarre question. “Do you phone cats often?”

“No, but I’m terrible at talking on the phone. Whether it’s with a human or a cat.”

“Why?”

“I need to lipread a bit to listen well. It’s also weird not being able to see the other person." The man paused, as though struggling to connect what he had just said to the topic at hand. "What I meant was that I have to guess too, sometimes."

“Huh,” the woman said, having learned something new about him. “I didn’t know that. I’ll be more careful over the phone, then.”

"But we're not talking on the phone now," the man managed after a brief pause. "So don't force yourself. It's fine, really."

“I'm not forcing myself,” the woman murmured, focused on stroking Sill who lay there eyeing them intently, almost as if she were listening.

Sill was a surprisingly quick eater. Her demure nibbling was enough to devour all their treats in just a few minutes. She looked at them judgingly, as though they were both worthless now that they had no more food to give, but Sill was fair and just, letting them pet her as reward for what scraps they had fed her. The pair exchanged sheepish grins and continued to indulge in her warm fur, the woman stroking her back and belly while the man scratched behind her ears. They were getting good value out of their twenty dollars, their half-empty cups of juice lying forgotten, giving the air a faint citrus tang. The meowing slowed as the customers ran out of treats one by one, and in its place came the gentle rustling of leaves on swaying trees, footsteps in pairs as couples walked past, looking through the windows, water bubbling to a boil as the owner brewed tea in the back room. It was a lovely afternoon to be at a cat cafe.

A while later, Sill meowed, not unprompted, but with purpose. It was in response to a meow from a grey shorthair from across the room, snuggled in another customer’s lap. They were communicating.

“Are they talking? About what?” the man asked, eager for a translation. This time, however, the cats were not doing anything that offered context to their meows. They were just sitting in well-defined loafs.

“I don’t know. Do you? Read their lips or something.”

“I can’t read a cat’s lips.”

“What about their whiskers? They flutter when they meow.”

“Well, yes, but I don’t know what that means. Do you think cats do?”

She blinked and furrowed her brows. “Yeah. Maybe it’s part of their language. It’s hard to hold a conversation when all you can do is meow.”

The shorthair meowed again, and so did Sill, her tail coiling. They had moved beyond first contact and were now in a proper conversation.

“That probably means something. A meow plus a coiled tail,” the woman observed.

“As opposed to a meow with fluttering whiskers, or a bare meow?”

“Yes, exactly. That’s how they do it. They need ways to differentiate their meows,” she replied, feeling confident in her theory. “Look, even with tones, you only end up with four more meows.”

“Six meows in Hong Kong. Do you know six meows?” he asked Sill, who yawned and purred in response. Sill did not know where Hong Kong was. She only knew the inside of the cat cafe.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, I am sure cats have more than six words. Non-verbal communication. You hear about it all the time. Cats must be much better at it than we are.”

The man was not listening. He was observing, reading Sill’s every twitch and gesture, engrossed in their conversation, lovingly scratching between her ears. He was already good at reading humans, especially the woman next to him whom he observed a bit more closely than others, but this was his first time trying to read a cat.

He had never been good at understanding speech, forced to learn to read eyes, lips, brows and other such cues to help fill in the blanks. He was not deaf—tests showed that his hearing was perfect—but parsing words was sometimes difficult, especially in Singapore where there are no quiet places to meet. It was embarrassing, being the friend who always needed things repeated twice or even thrice. The cat cafe was his idea; though he had no experience with cats, he figured it would be quiet enough that he would not be a bother.

The conversation ended there, unfinished, as he focused on petting Sill.

The woman sat there, confused. They had been colleagues for a month, and she had a vague hunch his hearing was not the best. Repeating herself was no problem at all; she sympathised a little, and she liked that he was particular about understanding her perfectly instead of ignoring what slipped by his ears. But this was a cat cafe—it was dead silent! Still, he was looking at Sill so intensely that she did not want to interrupt him. I was surprised when he suggested coming here. I never mentioned my cat to him, so how did he know? Besides, this is clearly his first time touching a cat. He seems to like Sill, though. It would be nice if we could come here again. Eyes down, back to Sill—who had turned to stare at her. She wondered what her emerald eyes saw.

The conversation between Sill and the cat across the room ended abruptly. Both cats returned to their duties of being cute and aloof and sometimes needy.

“So? What were they talking about?” the woman asked.

“I have no idea.”

The hour passed quickly. The room was now orange, the sunset diffusing through the curtains like a bedside lamp. They both seemed a bit reluctant to leave. Leaving meant exiting the warm quiet of the cat cafe, and it was difficult to resist the urge to stay under the blankets a while longer.

But the shop would be closing soon, and the last thing they wanted was for the owner to have to shoo them away. Sill knew they were leaving and climbed into the woman’s lap, purring, forcing her to stay put and pet her some more. She smiled, tickled by Sill’s thick hair, and gave in. The man gathered their belongings to give her a bit more time.

“Do you think they feel lonely? Once everyone leaves,” she asked, running her hands through Sill’s coat.

“I think they’d appreciate the peace and quiet. They’d go insane if they had to deal with customers all day.”

“Really? But I’m being so nice to her.”

“Well, yes, but not all customers are as nice as you.”

“You think so?”

A pause. He was behind her, so she could not tell why. “Anyway,” she said, tickled by Sill shifting in her lap. “We really should go. Did you take the train here? The station is across the street.”

“No, the bus.”

“Oh.”

Another pause. Sill looked up at her through her slit-eyes, then at the man, then back at her. Animals are simple; they cannot understand human speech. Still, there was a day last August when the woman came home red-eyed and sniffling. She fed her cat as usual before flopping into bed, face-down, trying not to cry. Her bed sagged ever so slightly, and she felt four small paws climb onto her back. Her cat curled up on top of her, warm and comforting, like a weighted blanket, and meowed. Meows have a way of defusing situations, making them seem anticlimactic. She laughed into her pillow, rubbed her eyes dry and rolled over to cuddle. She understood that meow, somehow, and perhaps that was why she liked trying to translate them.

Then she yelped, her hand jerking away from Sill. “Ow!”

The man dropped his bags and knelt to check on her. A drop of blood and a hairline scratch. “It’s not too serious. Does it hurt?” She shook her head, embarrassed, but he ignored her, holding her small hand as though cradling a sparrow, inspecting it. She stared at the floor, not sure where else to look.

He guided her to the bathroom to rinse the wound. He was meticulous to a fault, the type that would look both ways before crossing not just once or twice but thrice, his head on a swivel, and so he had brought with him rubbing alcohol, plasters, everything. She found it a bit silly but also flattering that he had come so prepared today. She gasped as the alcohol stung her, but he told her it would be okay. It was not a serious wound at all; small enough that such treatment was overkill, that she wondered why Sill even bothered scratching her. She knew how cats scratched when they were upset, and this was not it. To target her fingers, the only part of her left uncovered by her long sleeves, felt oddly premeditated. Still, it was nice to be fussed over, so she let him plaster the wound.

They left the cat room and paid at the counter, but the owner stopped them, aghast at the tiny band-aid on the woman’s hand. “A scratch?” she asked, pale.

“A small one,” the woman said. She did not want the owner, old enough to be her grandmother, to die of shock. “It’s nothing. Really.”

“Nothing? Don’t be ridiculous! I have antiseptic in the back room—”

“No, no, it’s fine. Really. He helped disinfect the wound. He, uh, brought all that with him.”

“He did?” the owner asked, looking at the man who looked away in response. “But… Well, fine. You should still get it checked at a clinic, though. Just in case. There’s one across the street. I’ll pay. Please—I would be so worried if anything happened.”

Who could say no to a pleading old woman? She gave in and agreed. It wouldn’t take long, the owner assured her before apologising profusely for Sill’s poor behaviour. She was a naughty cat, smarter than the others, she said before stopping herself in case she started rambling again.

“And take your husband with you,” the owner said, looking at the man. “Just in case. You can’t visit a clinic alone. What if you faint on the way out?”

The woman turned beet-red and exploded, yelling that they were not married, that she was only twenty-two, that she could go to the clinic alone and that her blood pressure levels were perfectly healthy and that there was no risk of her fainting, while the man stood next to her awkwardly, letting the fire burn itself out. The doctor down the street was used to patients arriving with scratches, but this was his first time hearing muffled yelling through the walls. He wondered if a very different sort of patient might walk through his doors today.

The owner apologised again, a bit embarrassed, though like most old people she did enjoy watching young people get worked up over nothing. It was nostalgic. The two gathered their belongings and left.

“Sorry about that,” the woman mumbled as they stepped into the sweltering heat. It was almost sunset, but this was still Singapore. There was no escaping the boil of the sun.

“It’s fine. Let’s go.” They crossed the road.

But as they turned towards the clinic, the woman glanced back at the cat cafe and saw Sill, still in the cat room, staring at her through the glass. Her eyes, fractured emeralds, saw all, and for a moment she wondered if animals were not so simple, if they could read her like a book without knowing the words.

The brief moment stretched, their eyes still locked, and when she saw those slits narrow imperceptibly, she could tell—Sill was amused. With those eyes alone, she spoke.

A truck rushed past, the wind in its wake breaking the spell. “You okay?” the man asked, turning back, noticing that she had stopped.

“I… yes,” she said, glancing back at the cafe, but Sill was gone. “Let’s go. Before the clinic closes.” But as she followed him, she could not take her mind off what that cat, with only six meows at most in her vocabulary, had said to her.

You just needed a little push.