On cats, neighbours and imaginary boundaries

Thursday, 22 January 2026

Virginia Fallon is a staff writer and columnist based in Wellington.

OPINION: A few months ago I shut the door on the night, turned around, and realised I had accidentally brought someone else’s cat into my house.

This was easier to do than it sounds. It was nearly dark, I was very tired, and performing the familiar evening choreography of getting my two cats inside. I went out, scooped up one, next the other, shut the door, and only then noticed that something was off.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked it, “and what are you doing in my house?”.

The answer to the latter question of course was that I’d carried it in. The former, meanwhile, took a few days to figure out.

The cat in question is a large grey boy who lives in the house behind me. He is 10 months old, which is exactly the same age as my two girls because, in the mysterious way that the worldwide cat distribution system works, he’s their brother.

I’d seen him before, even exchanging niceties when he was skulking about the garden or sunbathing on the bonnet of my car. Now though, much like a vampire who needed to be invited in, he’s mostly found loafed comfortably on the floor or hanging about on the kitchen bench.

There are unspoken rules around cats and neighbours, and most of them involve pretending not to notice either. Cats do not believe in property boundaries, and humans who live near cats eventually have to learn not to insist on them. We do not accuse, interrogate, or stand on fences yelling “is this your cat?” into the twilight. We accept that cats operate on a system of overlapping jurisdictions and moving borders.

This makes it difficult to know what to do with a cat who wanders into your house. Do you escort him out, apologetically? Do you open the door and hope he leaves of his own accord? Do you lock down the house or dig a moat? Really, you do nothing, which seems to be what the cat was counting on.

It’s not like I’m in any position to complain because for long years my old cat Fleabus lived with the people next door. She took her meals there, slept there, and tolerated me as a sort of inconvenient birth parent who occasionally demanded visitations. Sometimes in the mornings I’d stand in my kitchen waiting for the jug to boil and wave to Fleabus who was also standing in the kitchen, just the one across the driveway.

So when the big grey boy started appearing here, I recognised the system immediately: payback. This is the peculiar memory of cats at work and I cannot object without implicating myself.

When Big Grey’s owner apologises I just shrug and say things like “well what do you do?”. He’s neither a replacement for Fleabus nor a problem for my other cats, he’s just found a way of fitting nicely into the gaps. He leaves when he wants to, returns when he feels like it, and I think of him much like I do a freelancer: attached but not committed.

And he seems a nice enough cat. He doesn’t complain about what sort of food is on offer, doesn’t antagonise the girls, and never behaves as though this place is actually his.

All this, frankly, makes for one of the more reasonable male presences I’ve ever had in my house. He asks for very little, offers no opinions, and understands that presence is not the same thing as ownership.

He comes, he goes, I leave the door open, and somewhere in the neighbourhood the system quietly balances its books.