Lots Of People Will Unsubscribe As A Result Of This, Solely Because It's My Second Post In Consecutive Days, But The Fact Is My Cat Died And I Needed To Write About It

Back when I lived on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, a little over a decade ago, there was a running joke amongst people who knew me that my house was a kind of after-hours youth club for cats. I had four of my own at the time, which some might claim is at least 1.3 too many, but it also wasn’t greatly unusual for me to wake up in the early hours of the morning and find a couple I’d never seen before in the kitchen sink, taking turns to suck water from the leaking cold tap, or beating seven shades of shit out of one another behind the living room curtains. In 2010 I committed the error of making it publicly known that I was quite fond of ginger ones, prompting, over the next few years, about seven to turn up from what I imagined to be a wide orange nest high in one of the trees just beyond my garden. The largest and most confident of these, soon to be christened Alan, took a few weeks to decide whether he preferred my house or that of my neighbours Deborah and David, but, after taking a long relaxing piss in one of Deborah’s favourite boots, concluded that next-door was the better base for him, long term. His brother, who I gave the working title of Graham, soon reluctantly accompanied me to the vet, where, for a sum larger than any I’d earned from my journalistic employers that month, I was able to get his bollocks professionally sliced off. Unsurprisingly he bolted the following day and I never saw him again. Reinforcements, however, were imminent. Territory was marked, to the detriment of the W-Z section of my record collection. The classic run of Bill Withers albums from 1971-1975 came off particularly badly.

I decided it must have been the neighbourhood: it was simply an “uncouth homeless orange cat” sort of place, just as it was a “throwing fast food wrappers in the lake” sort of place and a “brawling on people’s car ports on a Friday night” sort of place. I’d miss it, but the time had come in my life to embrace change. In early 2014, though, when I relocated to an idyllic rented cottage 360 miles away in the grounds of Dartington Hall in Devon, I soon noticed another, much scrawnier stray ginger cat hanging around in the garden. Every night, he meowed outside my bedroom window, while in the day he competed with the local gulls and jackdaws for the leftover chunks of mechanically recovered meat my own cats were too posh and self-important to eat.

I called him George, as that was the word he sounded like he was forlornly meowing outside the window, and, after slowly luring him inside the house, took him to be neutered. His reaction to this undignifying experience could hardly have been more different to Graham’s: possibly in gratitude at being unchained from his idiot, he melted into my arms, and for the remainder of the spring and summer we were virtually inseparable. The scratches and patches on his fur began to heal, he put on weight and began to enjoy the finer things in life, such as a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc on the terrace of the Grade II listed medieval gardens just up the hill from the cottage.

George was impressively mellow around my other male cats. Often I would wander outside and find him on his back at the centre of the sceptical circle they had made around him. “Watch out,” I’d hear one say. “I think he has a gun.” But George would just stretch out with the dreamy, unhurried look of the former nomad who has finally found his place in the world. “Guys,” he would say, gazing at the sky. “Have you ever really thought about how amazing clouds really are? I mean, really thought about it?” The one problem was unfortunately a big one: the newly testicle-free George was unable to stop harassing my female cat, Roscoe. Soon, Roscoe began to go missing, sometimes for days on end. A choice had to be made: only one of these two cats could logically stay living with me. Would it be the anti-cuddle, aloof Roscoe, a cat who has been described by at least two women who have got to know her well as “a weapons grade badass shady bitch”? Or George, who snoozed calmly on my lap every evening, and, like me, believed ‘Peace Frog’ to be the best song by The Doors? I concluded my loyalty could not go to a sexual harasser, however excellent his taste in music. I loved Roscoe, despite her flaws. Her happiness was paramount. George went off to live with my parents, several hours north, in Nottinghamshire. I didn’t invoice them but my dad gave me some firewood he’d found down by the river behind their house to sweeten the deal.

Please note: this isn’t the firewood my dad gave me. This is some much better firewood that George chopped himself.

On Tuesday evening last week, 6th August, 2024, my dad telephoned me to tell me George had died. The news was not unexpected. George had been suffering from a brain tumour, was almost blind, and, we assume, in a vast amount of pain. We do not know exactly how old he was. I assumed 11 or 12, but might have been wrong judging by what the vet said about the shrivelled state of his kidneys: perhaps the change in George’s size in the early months of our acquaintance was not, as I’d thought, the final growth spurt of an adolescent cat, but simply the journey from malnourished to nourished. For most of the final decade of his life, he’d had the run of a big garden, and the fields beyond, with his best friend and lover Casper, a soppy white cat who defected from my mum and dad’s neighbour’s house to live with them. Less harmonious was George’s relationship with my parents’ other cat, Bridget, although it didn’t quite descend to Roscoegate levels of mud-slinging and controversy.

Casper died of a heart attack in early spring last year. George never quite seemed the same afterwards, although perhaps that’s just me being one of those annoying writer people who try to impose a narrative on everything. I am sure, whatever the case, George missed Casper acutely. I can still see them, the summer before last, fresh from a disco nap together, tails interlocking, waltzing out into the midst of a family gathering in the garden. The summer before last? No! Summer, 2021. I’d just got together with Ellie. “You have to meet my mum and dad’s cats,” I told her. “You will have never seen two cats more in love.” Since then, she arguably has: our own cats Jim and Charles. That is to say: no cat has ever loved a cat as much as Jim loves Charles. Charles loves Jim too, in the way that the young, arrogant singer of a punk-pop band loves the fan who arrives at his dressing room door, clutching an autograph book, a large sponge and a bar of soap.

Cats tell you a lot about time, about its preciousness, about its hard facts. Cats tell you that summer 2021 isn’t summer 2022, like you’d thought. You live with cats all your life and eventually can’t help but begin to measure your life in cats. Those measurements can be sobering. My childhood cats and early adulthood cats are all gone, all but one of my full adulthood cats too, and I’m now fully in middle-aged person cat phase. Fucking hell, is that the time already? Remind me what the next stage is, and the one after that? Actually, on second thoughts, don’t. Leave me here a bit longer, suspended in soft delusion. But also all this is messed up because if there was any justice cats would live longer than us. Cats should live as long as other bibliophile animals such as tortoises and bowhead whales. Longer, perhaps, as they have better comic timing and far more to offer on a cold winter’s night.

I didn’t know the last occasion I saw George would be the last occasion I saw George, and I haven’t been back to my mum and dad’s house since, so there’s this odd empty space in my mourning of him, and what I do when I feel the empty space as a physical place in my ribcage is go and find Jim and press him close to the space. Jim, who has never turned down the chance for a hug, is entirely cool with this. If it was up to Jim, he’d be industrially glued to my chest all day. Me on my back in the fruit aisle at Sainsbury’s, calling over to a stranger, “Please could you pass me one of those honeydew melons? I can’t reach them right now because I have this comically enormous ginger cat on me.” That, I imagine, is what Jim’s dreams look like. Or would, if he had any mental picture of the fruit aisle in Sainsbury’s to draw upon from memory. I look at Jim and think of George, think of me and George in summer 2014 at Dartington with matching oxeye daisies in our fur, and I want to freeze time. I want Jim to be here forever, just as soppy and talkative and sociable as he is right now. I look at him and promise I’ll make his life as easy and relaxed as it possibly can be. I say it to him, not out loud, but with that hurting space in my chest.

But I also feel guilt about George, when I look at Jim. Jim used to be thinner and lived in a barn until Charles invited him over to live with us. In a way, George was my original Jim: the mellow orange cat who wandered into my life from an unheated place and gave me the gift of sharing his. He became a bit of a cocky lad after that in a way that, after two years, Jim shows no sign of becoming, but I still remember how George clung to me in those early weeks - clung with an apparent gratitude that acknowledged I was the one who’d made his life healthier and easier - and when I went up to Nottinghamshire to visit my parents and him and Casper and Bridget, he always seemed glad to see me. There is a pea-size, wasabi-coated demon in my head that wants to tell me that I let him down, abandoned him: both back in 2014 and then, again, in 2020 at the end of a period when - after his skirmishes with Bridget were causing my parents excessive stress - he briefly came back to live with me in Devon as an experiment (Roscoe decided, once again, that the experiment was unedifying). But my mum and dad - especially my mum - adored George. Adored his odd combination of swagger and reserve, adored the way his thick strong tail would thwack their legs in greeting and he would bound down the garden in pursuit of them when they were out there, digging and pruning and planting and watering. They adored him so much that when he got ill, his illness completely ate their life, became the troubling theme of each day, above all of the many other possible themes.

I didn’t expect George to be gone so soon. When he was back in Devon with me, at this time in 2020, climbing the trees in my garden with limitless energy, I would never have imagined he had only four years left. But I’m no genius where foresight is concerned. When I began to write a series of books loosely themed around cats, 17 years ago, I didn’t realise those books - not the books themselves, but their theme, and what some people who hadn’t read those books imagined those books to be - would have a negative impact, especially in literary circles, on people’s assumptions about the very different books I wrote afterwards. I also didn’t anticipate that those four “cats and beyond” books would also become an invisible contract meaning that, every time a cat in my life died from then on, I would feel obliged to write publicly about it. I also didn’t anticipate the way that, doing that writing, as much as I dreaded the prospect of it, would, the first, and the second, and the third time, prove deeply cathartic. I also didn’t realise that my reaction to the many people who had been dismissive or downright insulting about the fact that I’d written about cats would be not to stop writing about cats, but to do bullheadedly something else: continue to write about cats whenever the fuck I wanted to. That is: not more than was naturally required, but definitely not less, either.

So I’ve decided to write this for me, today, instead of the other piece I was going to write - instead of the editing I should be doing on my next novel, which I have already put off for too long - because it feels right, and because George is heavy on my mind. On Saturday, I’ll go back, for the first time since George’s death, to the house where he lived and the garden where - along with his best friend and his predecessor - he is now buried, and no doubt an extra portion of reality will rain down on me. No doubt I will think - and talk with my mum and dad, as I often do - about his mysterious beginnings, and wonder how on earth a soft, often cowardly cat with that much love to give ended up homeless in my garden all those years ago. While I’m there, I might also think back to October 2015, and the morning the photo that heads this newsletter was taken. It’s a photo I like a lot, snapped in the field behind my mum and dad’s house, and I don’t think I’m deceiving myself when I look at the scene in it and remember the lovely day it heralded: one of those particular scrubbed autumn ones where, at about 9.30am, the sun cuts through the mist and leaves everything dazzling and apple fresh. I knew, without having to whistle him, that George would be behind me soon enough, as I walked out into the field. I remember I felt light and a little amped-up that morning - I’d recently made some freeing changes in my life and the day seemed to spool out in front me, bigger than it was - and George’s excitement seemed to mirror mine as he jinked in front of me and thwacked my legs with his tail. By that point, he’d been living with my parents for a year - long enough for him to be settled in his new home.

I took the photo, then the two of us paused to chat. I talked using my mouth, while George talked, as he often did, using the beat of his tail against my shins.

“Do you remember the time you tried to follow me all the way to the post office?”

“I do! You were quite mean. You pretended to walk back home, then gave me the slip.”

“I think you’ll find I was thinking exclusively about your welfare. The post office was over a mile away, there was a busy road to cross, and dogs were often in the queue. Some of them were quite big and had reputations as massive twats.”

“Ok, you’re forgiven. So what do you have planned for today?”

“I’m not totally sure. I don’t actually have to do anything.”

“What a coincidence! Me neither. Brilliant, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Is it that my mum took a photo of you and texted it to me with the word ‘neck!’ underneath it again?”

“No, not that, although I’m aware that she keeps doing it. I’m not sure why. Is she mocking me? I think I have a nice neck.”

“You do. You have an excellent neck, and I think that’s kind of her point. So what, then?”

“I own you.”

“I did know that.”

He looked into the mist, where the sun was starting to reveal the line of trees in front of the river. “Can I tell you something else?”

“Go for it.”

“I own all this, too.”

I didn’t doubt it then, and still refuse to.

My most recent books 1983, Villager, Notebook, Ring The Hill and Help The Witch are all available with free international delivery from Blackwell’s. George also appears in Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind.

Footnote: Deborah, my former neighbour I mentioned here who kindly took in Alan the feral ginger (RIP), is an excellent artist and can be found here on Substack as Deborah Vass.

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