The death of the cat

I’d been away from Australia for three months – much of it in England where my 96 year old mother lives in a care home now.  When I came back Jack was predictably quite changed, taller, more dexterous, more dark and complicated.  Both his mother and I were a bit afraid he’d reject me after such a long time away.  I think he’d been primed to be nice on our first encounter when I got back but  he was cross with me after the initial pleasantries.   “Go way” he said.

Coming home after such a long trip is difficult at the best of times.  The house was dank and gritty with dust and  the garden deep in leaves and the plants either dead or rampaging. The lush passion fruit vine was now just basketwork on the wall.  They don’t live long anyway I’m told.

 But the worst thing I had to deal with was Fergus the cat who had been boarding for some of my time away at a place she’d always thrived in before.  She’d   come back to us plump and purring.  Not this time.  She was skeletal and her eyes were wild.  We took her to the vet and he suggested we send her to a more comfortable place, as he put it.

“You mean a dead place?” I said.

“Well some people see it another way”

I had a  grotesque vision of cats with wings and it was absurd.  Anyway  it seemed all wrong to kill her without her consent.  Nevertheless I grew to dread getting up in the morning to be met with her huge eyes and diminished frame and clear up the night’s mess.

Jack saw her once when she was so sick and stroked her head with a gentleness he would  have been incapable of three months before, and this time she didn’t run away.  “She wants milk” he said with accusation in his voice, “She wants more food”

We anguished for about a fortnight and fed her delicacies which she just  picked at. She grew weaker. She started licking ash from the fireplace.  Every morning I hoped to find her dead, and not by my murderous hand, But  in the end I gave in.  A friend said euthanasia was the last gift you could give a really sick pet.

Graham and I took her in together.  Her little leg was shaved and we stroked her as she was injected with the poison.  It was a bit like an addict getting a hit.  She looked relieved, relaxed for the first time since she’d come home.  But it felt like a terrible thing all the same.  We took her body home in a pillowcase and buried her and cried, both of us.

It began to be OK after a few days.  I reconsidered my position on euthanasia and started to think it would be the way I would like to go if I were as sick as Fergus had been.  A hit of bliss and the vet checking my heart until it stopped.  A pillowcase burial organized by loving mourners.  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a crime, what we had done.

Jack came over about a week later and we made jam tarts and I was   in his good books again.  Our rituals were back on track, the cuckoo clock, the battery powered dog that warbles “singing in the rain” – and then he said,

“Where’s the cat?”

I’d been expecting this sooner or later and told him that she’d got very sick and died.

“She’s sick.  She needs milk.  She needs food”  There was pain in his voice now.  I again said she’d died.  “She ran away”  he suggested.  I couldn’t let that go, especially in the light of having just run away for three months myself.  “No she didn’t run away.  She loved us”  I said.  “She was just very old and she died.”

On and off, all day, he interrogated me about the matter.   We have an attic which has got a bit sinister the way attics get to be as the detritis of decades gets piled into them.  Fergus loved this attic.  It was her bolt hole when Jack was after her or she knew we wanted to chuck her out.

After his bath Jack pointed up the attic stairs with a smile and said with a note of conviction

“The cat’s up there”

“No Jack, there’s no more cat”

“She’s run away”

“No she got ill and died”  

I was weary with Jack and my sorrow and guilt and then I remembered a lesson my mother taught me when I was In England with her this last time.  She has short term memory loss now. She can discuss poetry and feminism but anything new doesn’t stick.   In the early days of my stay this was hugely taxing.  I used to pick her up every day and take her to the cottage where I was staying and she’d quite reasonably ask where she was-

“Could you tell me – where exactly am I?”

“We’re in the cottage I’ve rented for my stay with you”

“Ah”

Then five minutes later

“Where exactly am I?”

In the beginning I would try to vary my answers because it seemed more respectful, more like normal conversation.  So my answer would be perhaps

“”Not far from where you live.  It’s called Cradley”

And then not long after she’d ask again

“Where am I?”

“In a holiday cottage in Worcestershire”

After a while though, I learnt to see the questions another way. The problem of where she was could not be resolved for Mum , but asking was as necessary as breathing.  To stop asking would be a sort of giving up, giving in.   And so her questions became like a sort of birdsong to me.  I stopped trying to vary my answers and just gave back my own simple response to her call.  It began to be part of  our way of getting on.  Nothing to do with information exchange – just reassurance and affection.

I realized Jack’s questions had no answers that he could process either.  Where indeed was the cat?  But he needed to go on asking just the same.  He had to confirm her going and his staying.  He’d loved her after all.  And so I began to answer not with my mind but like a grandmother bird with the same soothing song.

 I should have left it at that but I’m afraid I didn’t.  I suppose I was tired and it was the end of the day.  I half remembered the vet and his attempt to reconcile us to the cat’s death.   I am not a believer in the afterlife but Jack’s parents are.  So what the hell, I thought.   When Jack asked again “Where’s the cat?” I answered “She’s gone to heaven” and immediately wished I hadn’t.  It seemed another sort of lie.  Jack liked that answer though and savoured the word “heaven”

Rachel and Miles were rightly a bit shocked at me  making free with their belief system when it was convenient  and I was ashamed.  But I am left with a lot of confusion in my heart and my head.  Why are answers to questions so problematic? Why don’t they work? Which is the higher duty – to tell the truth as one knows it or to provide comfort and closure of a sort even if it requires  a compromise with sincerity?  What are questions for anyway?  After all some are downright rubbish like “How are you?”  Or is that really so?  Is it another instance of human chirruping – question and answer just to be nice?

 At this moment I wish that somewhere there could be some nice mother bird to take me under her wing  and sooth my soul with a few answers.  I don’t think I would really care if they were true or not just as long as they were there..  And I could ask again and again.

Jack and Barbara

On the days I look after my two year old grandson Jack, we sometimes cross the road to visit my friend and neighbour Barbara.  She’s the senior resident of the street. She’s lived here for over sixty  of her eighty four years and can tell anyone around what went on in their house before they got into it.  She can tell you about sousing a brawler with the contents of a chamber pot and boiling up lead to make sinkers for Chas, her husband’s fishing rod.  They raced pigeons from the back yard then.  It all sounds much more interesting than today.  Now Chas has died and Barbara still misses him a lot.

I started taking Jacob over when he was a tiny baby.  I was rather in awe of him and I think Barbara was too.  He had black eyes and a furious cry.  There was nothing pleading or pathetic about it.  Whilst I did all I could to identify the cause of his rage and calm him, Barbara had a different approach.

“Let it all out boy” she’d say, “Let him get it out”

I couldn’t do that of course and went on trying to sooth him.  Eventually he’d exhaust himself and go to sleep and we could both relax with our tea.

As Jack grew there were more divergences in our approaches.

“What’s he eating?”

“Just his mum”

“Well there you are,  He’s hungry.  You should give him some sugar and water in a spoon”

A shiver of horror passed through me.

“Oh no his mother wouldn’t allow that” And nor would she.  Likewise when he began to crawl and touched a plug

“You need to give him a little smack for that.”  I held my own and didn’t.

When he began to make sounds but not known words she’d interrogate him fiercely

“What do you mean?  Talk English can’t you.”  She was joking but formidable all the same. She has a shock of white hair and the deepest voice of any woman I know.

But Jack has taken her in his stride and until recently I’ve managed to resist all attempts to undermine the modern parenting style I try to copy from his own exemplary  mother and father. Healthy food, no sugar, no snacks, gentle guidance on to the safe right path.

However, when Barbara got the biscuit tin out I began to lose my grip.

“No,” I said.  “He doesn’t have biscuits

“What!”

“His mother doesn’t want him to have sweet things”

“Look at him. He’s hungry .  You’re starving him.” She’d say. “He’s got to eat.  He’s growing”

Jack was in fact fixing the tin with a beady eye.  He looked at Barbara with trust.

“It’ll spoil his lunch” I parried with an old phrase taken from my own grandmother.  But I lost.

“Only a plain one”

What?  You think I’ve got anything else.  I’m a pensioner.” She said smugly.

And after that Jack would go and stand by the biscuit tin shelf every time we visited and watch the battle commence.  When I realized  it was their  two wills against my one and I wasn’t going to win, I thought I’d try at least to minimize the damage.

“Could we call them something else Barbara,  If he starts saying the B word at home his parents are going to wonder where he learnt it.  Lets call them peacocks – and only one. ”

 Last time he’d wangled two.  I was especially anxious as now Jack would joyfully say as we crossed the road Barbara - Bikkit.  I hoped the peacock ploy would at least confuse the issue a bit.

Barbara’s house is nice for me and Jack.  It is a small terrace  with no doors so I can watch him as he ranges through the rooms, right out to the bathroom at the back where Fred, the parrokeet  lives in his cage . While  Jack  checks out Fred , Barbara and I catch up on the local goings on.  Who’s been burgled and how.  Who’s selling up.  Then he’ll come back and play happily with Barbara’s many childproof bottles of pills and supplememnts which rattle and roll pleasantly and he’ll turn on the torch which she uses to check which ones to take.

Sometimes we go out into the yard where Barbara grows some lovely orchids.  I can never get mine to flower and am always asking how she does it.

As well as Fred the parrokeet in the bathroom there are  two other birds who occupy cages in the  yard.  These parrots joined Barbara’s household decades ago  in one way or another. One of them, an ancient  corella, had been owned by a workmate of Chas  way back in the nineteen forties.  The friend was going on holiday and moaning about what to do with the bird.

“My old woman’ll take care of him for you” said Chas helpfully.  The man never came back and Barbara has the parrot still.

When you open the back door into the yard there is a clatter of wings as about a dozen pigeons take flight from around the cages where I like to think they.ve been passing the time of day with the parrots or maybe they are even descendants of the old racing pigeons.  But Barbara says it’s just the seed that brings them.

Jack was not keen on the  garden parrots.  Both are very very old.  The sulphur crested cockatoo screeches horribly as he furls and unfurls his yellow topknot.  The corella  has a decidedly weatherbeaten appearance not improved by putting his head into a rusty old tin can and banging it on the bars of his cage.  There was nothing about either likely to appeal to a small child but in the beginning I tried anyway.

“What’s that one’s name?” I asked pointing to the cockatoo.

“Charlie” said Barbara

“He’s called Charlie, Jack.  Say Hallo Charlie”

But he just looked from a safe distance and wouldn’t.

“And that one?” There was a silence and then Barbara said

“He’s Charlie too”

It was only on a later visit that I asked why both the parrots were called Charlie.  Barbara looked to see that Jacob was down in the kitchen communing with Fred and then bent towards me “His real name’s Bastardhead” she said “But I couldn’t have him hearing that.”

I was relieved that Barbara had decided to keep that dark. Not just one but two taboo B words in Jack’s rapidly increasing vocabulary would have really brought my grandmothering skills into question.