Jiāng 薑 (“ginger”) is so named because of his colouring. Not “ginger” in the Western red hair colour sense, but root ginger, the common ingredient in Chinese cooking. His owners, Irish David and English Jane, had done a degree in Chinese, you see.
Jiāng is a long lean cat. His fur is speckled with various shades of brown. His tail is a gorgeous series of rings of darker and paler brown, like a lemur’s tail.
I was visiting David and Jane one day, standing at their front door after having rung the bell, when I suddenly looked up and spotted Jiāng sitting on the external sill of the first floor window, looking into the distance like he was day-dreaming. I called out to him, “Jiāng!” He turned round, immediately meowed back, and actually started to walk along the eaves over the ground floor (which is rather precarious) to come across to me. He did reach me, jumping down from the first floor.
A while later, David asked me to go to their house and stay overnight a few times a week during the three weeks that he and Jane were going to be away in Botswana. A neighbour would come round and put down food and water, he said, but they felt that Jiāng needed company. The last time they went away for three weeks, Jiāng wouldn’t leave them alone after they got back: he stuck to their heels wherever they went in the house, refusing to let them out of his sight, as if afraid of being abandoned.
Being an evening teacher, and going to the pub with my (mature) students after classes at nine o’clock, I’d only arrive at David and Jane’s house around 11:30 pm. Feeling that I couldn’t just go straight to bed, I’d switch on the TV and sit on the floor, leaning back against the front of the sofa in a near-horizontal position. Jiāng would come and sit on my chest, stretching out his long body over my front: his hind legs down my upper legs to just above the knees, and his head below my chin, paws wrapped around my neck. (Writing this has just made me realise that when stretched out, he's more than half the length of me!) He’d then go to sleep contentedly in this position, leaving me unable to move until my legs went numb and I had to shift, or I had to go to bed.
It was just before the cat-sitting stint that I got an attack of bad back. My lower back suddenly simply gave way one day as I was walking down the road — without my usual rucksack, ironically. I felt a sharp twinge, and couldn’t stand up straight after that. I tried all sorts of things: stretching, massaging my back with a tennis ball, using the hand-held massaging rod from China.
A kind Japanese colleague gave me some heat pads, each individually packed and sealed. The moment you open the pack, the contents, which feel like crushed up lava or porous gravel, will start to get hot upon exposure to air, lasting some ten hours. You slap one on the affected area, held down with some tape.
I’d open one of these heat pads at bedtime at David and Jane’s, so that I could sleep pain-free. It was winter at the time. Jiāng was normally not allowed in the bedrooms, but I decided to let him sleep in my bed for a prolonged duration of human contact, since he was left alone all day. (I’m allergic to all sorts of things like house dust, pollen of all kinds, smells like perfume, deodorant and flower fragrance, but luckily and mercifully not to dogs and cats — it’d be a massive hole in my life not to be able to have them around me.)
Part-way through the night, I was woken up by this feeling of a huge weight on my right hip — I’d been lying on my left side. It turned out to be Jiāng perched on my hip, as that was the spot nearest my lower back, where the heat pad was. Cats are so good at finding heat sources, aren’t they? (See also Four-legged heat radar.) One always knows when a car’s just come back or parked — from the cat sitting on its bonnet.
I left Jiāng there for a bit longer, not wanting to disturb him in his sleep, so I was locked into that position for a while. Then, I had to change position, so I picked him up, moved him off my right hip, and turned the other way. Back he’d climb onto the other (/left) hip, and stay there until I had to change position again.
At one point, I turned to lie on my back, so there was no hip for Jiāng to perch on. Undeterred, he then snuggled right up against my side. (Most considerate of him not to plonk himself on my tummy. Actually, on second thoughts, that'd be because the heat pad was on my back, the other side of my tummy.)
This position shifting for me, and for the cat accordingly, went on every hour or so throughout the night. (Apparently, we toss and turn 40–50 times a night in our sleep.)
After David and Jane got back, they reported that there was an improvement in Jiāng: he was not as clinging as before when they got back from their previous holiday. My back, however, had not improved in spite of those heat pads. Maybe because it had to carry the weight of a long lean cat perched on top, not daring to move for fear of disrupting his slumber...
What is short-term physical pain in exchange for an eternal and irreplaceable smile-triggering and heart-warming memory, huh?
(London, UK, 1990s)
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