The first time the doctor saw cats in his yard, he had just returned from dinner with a patient, a former patient whom he cured of infertility by removing some fibroids in her womb, causing her to conceive less than a year after. To appreciate the doctor, this patient made nsala soup and brought it to his office. Then, one thing led to another, and he removed her clothes, kick-starting a long relationship, the kind so sweet that stopping was difficult yet was a bumpy ride on a long, dangerous road.
The second time was the following night. He and his lover returned, this time from the hospital where she had waited around the parking lot for him to finish a scan on a pregnant woman. The cats were waiting.
The first time, the lovers paid no attention to the cats though it worried the doctor. He had lived in the apartment for four years and counting and had never seen cats. But as he drove into the compound, his headlamp caught the cats; four of them, scampering about, their shiny eyes seeming to glare fiendishly. When he came out to see the woman off afterwards, he noticed the cats again, now close to his veranda. He jolted.
His woman asked, "I didn’t know you keep cats?"
The doctor shook his head. "Not mine,” he said. “I am surprised to find them here."
On the second night, the cats were there by the extreme of the compound just like the day before. And something told the doctor that all was not well. He expected the cats to be afraid, but they hovered about, making loud cries that caused him to feel unease.
He unlocked his door hurriedly and took his lover inside. But everything had changed.
His lover had buttoned up, and instead of clinging to him as she always did as soon as they were in the sitting room, she sat on the sofa, tapping her left foot rhythmically on the tiled floor.
When the doctor came back into the sitting room, having scrubbed his arms and face, he noticed the woman was still sitting down, tapping her foot. He shrugged. But something about the cats scaling his fence and coming into his compound bothered him. He sat beside the woman on the sofa. It was a hot night, and there was no electricity. He needed to bathe but wondered if the woman was hot and would go to the bathroom with him.
He turned on a lamp, illuminating the room a little. It was a spacious sitting room, big enough to contain numerous cushions. There was a large wall television and a bookshelf by the left side. A huge glass centre table sat alone on a rug with Arabic inscriptions. Plastic lilies grew in a fake glass by a stool in a corner, and the woman knew that in the lilies were condoms.
While the doctor and the woman drove home, she had undone her buttons, exposing a cleavage so smooth and daring the doctor could not wait to get home. And while they chatted, about work, about her husband who relocated to New Jersey to live with his brother instead of living with a woman who had cheated, and about the best form of contraceptive she could adopt since the one she was on was getting her fat, the doctor's thoughts strayed far, yearning for his bed.
"Why do the cats unnerve you?" the doctor asked. He drew her face to his, attempting to kiss her, but she turned away.
"Where do the cats come from?"
"I don’t know. I swear I have never seen them before yesterday."
"Yesterday was my first time of seeing them as well."
"You see. But there are bushes around. They may be wild cats."
The woman took a deep breath and sat up. "Look, I don’t know why, but they scare me."
The doctor wanted to tell her the cats bothered him too, but he said instead, "You shouldn’t be scared. They can't come into the house, you see."
Just then one of them, a female cat, cried loudly, like a human. It jostled the woman so much she stood.
"Make them leave!" she shouted at the doctor.
"How?"
"Just make them leave." She was breathing hard.
Read full story in Obinna Udenwe's collection.
