Gracchus
In the dust, a cat is writhing. It is already blind, and it writhes, not dead, but not alive. It writhes in the dust between life and death. Let’s take him to the vet, I said. She – my partner then, a long time ago – said the same. But her father’s wife said, he won’t let that cat be put down. He’s coming back from work later and he wants to see what he can do for him. But he can’t do anything for him, it’s too late. We are in the garden of my girlfriend’s father’s house. It is a big house, in a prosperous area. He’s done well to own such a big house, with a wide lawn. But he makes his wife live in another, smaller house, down the road.
His wife – and this is his second wife, still young – lives down the road. But she is here, today, to oversee the current crisis. The cat writhes in the dust; he’s had a stroke; he’s not dead, but he is not alive. The cat is an embodiment of pain. It is pain, this cat, and remains on the threshold between life and death. The vet has already been out. Put him down, said the vet, he’s not going to get any better. He’s had a stroke, said the vet. He writhes in the dust at the edge of the wide lawn of my girlfriend’s father. But the father loves the cat, who sleeps beside him every night.
The father, a vast man, a strong man, sleeps beside the cat every night as he has done since the cat was a kitten and he was ten years younger. His wife sleeps down the road with the young children, but he sleeps with the cat at the heart of his big house. You should have him put to the sleep, the vet said, when he left. It’s cruel. You can’t do anything for him. The cat is pain, pure pain, but the father is out. He wants the cat to be alive when he returns. He wants the cat to be there, beside him. But the cat’s incontinent, I said.
The smell was bad. We were with a dying animal, an animal at the brink of death. The smell was already bad as though the cat were dead. But the father wanted to be with the cat to the end. He wanted to accompany the cat all the way to death. Because he was tender with the cat as he was tender with no one else in his life. This vast, brutal man, king of his house, king of his lawn had found a tenderness in his relation to the cat. And this tenderness would disappear when the cat disappeared. He would lose his tenderness.
Every night he would drink heavily at the pub. Every night, he would stomp home to his big house, where the cat was. And they’d sleep together, the cat and he. All night together, sleeping together, traversing the night together. For he was afraid of the dark, the father. He was afraid of many things, but most of all of the dark. For a time, he was in a mental hospital. He feared the dark as he feared madness. What had happened to him to make him fear the dark? No one knew; he spoke to no one, though perhaps he spoke to his cat. Perhaps his cat knew his secrets.
But no one else knew them, not his ex wife, who’d left him a long time before, nor his new wife, who, we could see, was scared of him. Who wasn’t scared of him, this vast man, this taciturn man with great hands and a great, broad back? Who didn’t fear him, the one who drank pint and after pint every night, who panicked if he could not drink, and stomped home to his vast house in his vast lawns. He was the king of the house; what he saw, he owned.
Sometimes his son and daughter would come to him, asking for money. Sometimes he would give them money. But they came because they wanted more than money. Never mind, money would do, he gave them money. He never visited them, or anyone. Everyone had to come to him, to his house. He met the world on his terms, and his son and his daughter were part of the world.
True, when they were younger, they played pub gigs together, they’d had a covers band, and he made sure they studied musical instruments. True, he loved music, and he had pictures of the covers band in his house. There she was, his daughter, my girlfriend, and there he was, his son. Both could play a dozen instruments. Both were involved in the music business, one with a studio, one with a band. He loved music, playing it, singing it, and loved coaching his children. They sang and played with him for a time, and then stopped. He was a bully, that was clear. And after a time, it was not worth seeking the love of a bully, even by singing and playing with him.
So his son and daughter became part of the world. So they joined their mother, who had already left. Now he was alone, there was his new wife and their children, to be sure, but they were made to live down the street, away from him. He was alone with his cat, which meant he wasn’t really alone. A cat was there with him. The cat was entwined around his life as it entwined itself around his legs in welcome when he came home from work.
There was the cat, there was his house, there were his lawns, and there was the pub, where he would down pint after pint, nervously, quickly, as if there were no time to waste. He was a man of ritual, that was clear. A man who held himself together by rituals. A man who had woven a cat into his life, just as the cat had woven himself into the man’s life. They lived together, man and cat, and perhaps he hoped they would die together.
But the cat had preceded him. The cat was going ahead of him, and he wanted at least to accompany the cat all the way to death. He’d left instructions: the cat must not be put down. The cat had to be alive when he returned in the evening. So the cat writhed in the dust. So the cat blind and mad writhed in the dust, at the brink of death, no longer living, but not yet dead.
I have dreamt of you, anonymous cat; in my dream you spoke from where night touches day. As your stillness, totem, set itself against the memory of your agony I learnt of the agony which will one day separate me from everyone, sacred being, man apart. You spoke to me, cat, and I learned of a dying unto which we will all be delivered. You spoke, cat, your address reached me from the dawn and from the dusk. Lesson of margins, lesson of thresholds: I am still your student, I live beneath you, knowing that one day I will meet death with your face and I will know your agony in my own.
Henry
I would like to have been there when R. discovered Henry’s body. Henry was his cat, after all, or he was Henry’s man; there was a rapport, that was clear, and there was something at stake in their relationship, that mattered to them both. When Henry had chosen to live with us, he was already old. He had lived in a house on the other side of the road, but his owners had bought a dog. So he sunned himself in our garden, rolling full stretched in the dust and, one day, came into the house and stayed.
His long white fur was always matted and dirty, his nose, too was dirty. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine if you passed your hand down his back, and from his tail, great tufts of white sprouted irregularly. He was sticky, too, never quite clean, but sometimes R. would comb all the dirt from Henry’s coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood and up arched his tail, ragged plume.
He was already old, it was true, but it was with us that he elected to spend his last years, this old tom, who we called Henry. R. had moved back into the house at the same time; cat and man recognised an exile in each other. Both were transient; they moved between places; this is what they recognised. Both were on their own and both, for a time, had experienced the luck of a house that welcomed them. Good fortune in the vale of tears! Happiness of a last home in the wilderness!
You asked for nothing, Henry, and you came to us, asking for nothing. Happy we were to discover you asleep in this room and then in another. You passed through our rooms, Henry, and our house became a place of transience, and I knew again the impermanence of the world and the fleetingness of good fortune. I knew it, Henry, and R. knew it, he who would fall from the world even as I returned to it. That is why I wanted to be there when R. found Henry’s body stretched out dead on the kitchen floor. There was no one in the house; two exiles – one dead, one alive. A dead cat and a man who was now without witness.
Petruskha
She had only one word, but it was a word that could be inflected for every occasion. Like a little bear she prowled our house, getting older and more tiny. At twenty-two she could still climb the sofa and meow her one word. If we ate, she hunted what we ate; we shared it with her, buying an extra fish from the fish-and-chip shop, or a cooked chicken from the supermarket. She ate very well, but she was old, and deserved to live well.
She had been my landlord’s mother’s cat, and like his mother had lived into great old age. She had survived the tenants and guests who passed in and out of the house; she was there, growing more crotchedly as she grew older, as the house turned around her. She was its centre, its mobile, vocal centre, passing from room to room on her inspections, and sometimes playing like a kitten on the stairs when your fingers became creatures who popped through the railings. So she indulged us: she was no kitten, though she knew we liked to think of her as a kitten. So she indulged us, for she knew we’d need playing with. She passed from room to room, seeing all, impressed by nothing. All would pass, she knew; all would change, but then nothing would change, for her gaze rested equally upon all.
Her one word: ‘n-gow’. her one word, by turns imprecation and complaint, by turns the frustration of the ‘one cat protest committee’, as my landlord called her, and a greeting. ‘N-gow’: word addressed to the world in general or to herself, word for all and for no one, register of frustration or crotchedly joy. Speak, Petrushka (that was her name), you have the right, for all that you have seen, and for all your eyes have rested upon! Speak, cat of another enchantress and survivor! For you know, Petrushka, what rests in the turning of the world! You held the resting-point at the heart of that house; it was yours, your threshold, your reserve! You watched us pass and the world pass, watched the doors swing open and close, watched guests and tenants stay and then leave again. The house was yours, cat-witness, and you rested in its secret.
When did she die? When she was swollen with a cancer. Three days before, she sat with us in the sun. There we were on the patio, eating our dinner, and there was a chair for her, where she sat approvingly. Then her abdomen began to swell; she was ill, we knew that. She was twenty-two and it was time. The vet injected her, she struggled and was still. There were perspiration marks where her paws touched the leather. Now the limp body of a Manx cat, a little bear, born without tail and as small as a kitten.
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