Two years ago, when Li Ling, the kids and I moved out of my parents house in Bukit Timah to our own flat in Pasir Ris, it was hardest on Gorby.
Ling and I had the benefit of time, foreknowledge, active hands in the process. Blooby, Gorby’s sister, had by then retreated to a familiar sedentary life of eat, sleep, and the occasional lizard, dragged in leaving a trail of blood, body parts strewn across the terrazzo floor.
But Gorby was still Mr Bukit Timah. We would spot him prancing around the actual Bukit Timah Road, near the Tessarina Apartments and Tan Chong Motors, a full two-hundred metres from our house. Unlike us, Gorby had two channels of entry/exit: regular sidewalk when pesky humans weren’t around, or the wide drain when we were.
Once Gorby went missing for a full eighteen hours. It was his first full night out. We grew anxious. When he returned the next morning, smelling of stale beer and garbage, I saw my younger self in him, remembering my own adolescent nights of too many Graveyards at Zouk, slobbering up the driveway after stumbling out of the cab.
Ling and I eventually figured out that Gorby must have gotten locked in the Tessarina’s rubbish room. Was it love that distracted him that night? While I appreciate stray cat challenges everywhere, a part of me still, father to son, regrets that we snipped him, that we stopped him from living a full life. Perhaps then not only his spirit, but his blood, would still be around.
There is some irony in the fact that Gorby, such a wonderful longkang cat, was not himself allowed some gutter sex, to father another longkang cat. On that note, please resist the use of “Singapore Special”, yet another in our globalising society’s subconscious efforts to eradicate Malayan colloquialisms in favour of bland, anglophilic universalisms. “Longkang cat” is much nicer, much more befitting of the samseng swagger of Gorby and his ilk.
Then there was the six month period when Gorby morphed into some Arnie-type Terminator, protecting my parents’ house from the marauding feline invaders. It was the only time his fur has ever grown stiff, his entire habitus electrified like a cartoon cat, one uni-shaped ball of energy.
Ling saw all this but I never did cos I’m too much of a chicken. Just the shrieks alone, when the cats ripped into each other as poor Ling screamed for them to stop, would give me nightmares. I would wait in bed for them to return, and then mutter something about the need to keep Gorby in at night. Ling would somehow manage in one breath to both admonish and cheer her boy, the protector.
In the weeks leading up to the move, I spoke more to Gorby. “Go! Leave the house! Enjoy the great outdoors while you can!” I like to think that he heeded my advice, that he roamed the neighbourhood while he could.
But nothing, not even salmon treats or Cheetos, can really prepare you for the unknown. And so when Ling and I moved Blooby and Gorby to our eleventh-storey flat, it was paradise for one, prison the other. Blooby quickly settled in to her new, sheltered routine. True, her favourite lizards are less common here. But on the flip side she doesn’t have to worry about my younger sister, who loved scaring her, or my two nieces, whose shrill voices unintentionally scared her, or the countless visitors my semi-retired father would have trooping around “her” space. Blooby has become so decadently comfortable in Pasir Ris that she has ballooned and we have since put her on a strict diet.
Gorby, however, always seemed to have this quizzical look on his face in Pasir Ris. Where is the bigger playground? Where are the birds and squirrels? Why am I stuck so high? Where are you going when you step through those closing doors? How do I get back down to earth? OK, Mama & Papi, the joke’s over. When can we go back home?
I still feel bad for shrinking Gorby’s universe from one square kilometre to one Singaporean flat (and its balconies). There’s nothing wrong with the flat, of course. Singapore has some of the best in the world, Ling and I are loving every minute of it—and will be through the next hundred and fifty years of mortgage payments.
But Gorby, through no fault of his own, was spoiled. Should I be happy that Gorby spent his youth roaming, paws to earth as his ancestors might have? Or sad that he was forced through this emotional rollercoaster, his last days lived as another digit in the Singaporean high-rise matrix?
Gorby is my first BFF/ being/ loved one to have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not because of it, just during.
The coincidental thing, as Gorby will surely tell you when you see him in heaven, is that for two years now he’s been on a strict Stay at Home notice.
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I have nicknames for my closest friends. Crowd favourites include Nickelodeon for Nicole and Bombay Sapphire or Sapphy for my elder sister. Years after they met her, some friends like Jacko knew my sister only as Sapphy. In the days after Gorby died, serendipitous Facebook conversations lifted my spirit, like one about food between Bunny, Channy and Kecoh, all of whom knew Gorby.
While each nickname is special in its own way, I have always derived the most pleasure from introducing and explaining Comrade Gorbachev Marx Homas, or Gorby.
Gorby joined our house a year after Blooby did.
