Our cat has gone missing and I know something beyond dreadful has happened to her. The love I feel is so zany and powerful and all-consuming that it’s turned me finally fully enragedly mad. I haven’t slept for six days and more nights. I’m so distraught and blood-pressure fucked that I can’t remember the last time I snuggled her down into a croissant shape on the duvet or smiled back in the still empty hours when she gently placed a claw on my cheek to let me know she’s capable of piercing skin but is choosing not to. She really is [was] one powerful little furball of a witch.
There’s a bastard fox out there in the back garden right now the size of a Rottweiler. The second contender I mustered up to explain what might’ve happened was an opportunistic grab by scuzzbuckets for a dog fight off the motorway in Finglas. They spray the white parts of the cats different colours, throwing them into large rusted cages with XL Bullies and the likes and bet on what colour cat will die first. She rarely goes out on the pathways or the road, sticks to the welly of mature back gardens with their rake of trees, so I don’t understand what could’ve happened. Imagine the level of desensitisation that has to happen inside a person to get into the whole dog-fighting shenanigans? We’re talking Mum was a cock-sucking street-corner hooker and Dad beat me up with the banister rail when I was four years old because his horse lost in a bet. Maybe a bit cliched of me to think exactly that but sure fuck it in anyways.
I have an annoying librarian friend who maintains the increase in starving foxes in suburban gardens in Dublin is a living metaphor for capitalism moving in to finally eat us alive, without the gravy. My friend lives on X (formerly known as blah blah) and spends all her time screaming misfired emotions at other twats who spend their days screaming misfired emotions. Ping pong for the terminally ridiculous. Foxes and cats are supposed to coexist peacefully, but then again, there are always rule-breakers. The good news is, the risk of foxes attacking cats is very low, and there are some simple things you can do to help keep your cat safe. Most of all I’m really upset because my ex, who died last year, would be all over the cat now, rubbing, plámássing, bullshitting her. She was wrong about him, that none of what happened really happened.
The last I heard from Harry was around eighteen months ago when he flung a few sad missives my way explaining where he was at, and I hadn’t the balls to tell him to do one. ‘Since you ask,’ he emailed (I didn’t ask, I was drinking whiskey for breakfast and handjobbing my way around dating apps, trying to get over him), ‘I was dosed up with two hours’ of chemo, then sent home with tablets to be consumed five times per day. After it was administered by drip I felt a wave of weirdness, with pins and needles which reminded me of the time I got heat stroke in Rome in 1987 and thought God was following me down the Via del Corso with a basket of fresh ditalini.’
My God, like I give a shit. That man took all I had to give. End of. Finito. It took me two years to remove his poxy aftershave from odour memory and empty the garage of his Beethoven CDs and piles of football crud.
We got the cat when we moved into our first home. Grey with a big white fluffy chest, blue eyes: Mrs Miggins. I named her, thankfully I still have that much to myself. She slept on our bed and followed us through the rooms monitoring whatever we did in those microscopic moments of funky domestic love. I was ecstatic about all of it, really. Harry doing me over the side of the blue ‘80s couch when he was supposed to be writing his ‘demanding’ press releases. Me making ever-increasingly gourmet food: bread to mop it all up: garlic butter and chilli cheddar zopf. Who was I kidding?
[ Short story: Reasons to End Us (An Aerial View) by Tracey SlaughterOpens in new window ]
The cat used to face away from us for a bit of privacy but pin her pervy ears back to take in the bump of human noise. So funny! Me and him, crikey, so many recipe-book dinners and night-long discussions at the Formica table – which countries in Europe to travel to, by what brand of train, and when. Always about the next big thing and the next kick and the next clandestine high. Right manic asshole. The cat knew it. She knew more than me. I hadn’t read any of the signs at all. I don’t imagine he took to the death rattle well but I was spared that drama at the very end. His new wet pussy had to endure all of that, which made me real warm inside, I won’t lie. The cat had started pissing on his shirts around the time he started seeing the new yoke. She knew he had a partner and didn’t care. She wrote that to me, a whole weekend of abusive emails: ‘Some feminist you are.’ Because, you know, I had made her suffer by proxy of being his. The pissing on the shirt was Mrs Miggins’ way of saying, ‘Watch out! Look what he’s up to! There’s another scent on here!’
On and on he wrote. ‘The side effects so far are minimal. However, I cannot touch anything cold or metallic because if I do I experience what can only be described as electric shocks. I guess the coolness reacts with something in the chemicals to produce this. So I slouch about with tea towels on my hand. Nor can I drink ice cool water, ice cubes or any chilled drinks. I’m told this will pass. For now, even water by the bedtable has to be lukewarm.’
I was supposed to be interested now that cancer had arrived at the terminus. Once I was interested in absolutely everything about him: what his spoilt kids wanted for Christmas, if he hadn’t shat for a week, his boss’s refusal to send on a herogram for a new scoop he’d managed to hunt down. ‘If I swallow cold drinks they turn my tonsils into thorns and the pain is so severe I think my throat is closing up. This induces panic but I was warned in advance to sit still and breathe deeply. There is thankfully an emergency 24-hour admission line if I get horribly sick. I can be brought into the Centre at any time of the day or night for treatment.’
The line that got me was when he said he’d be kicking the booze for good. The yellow skin pallor was just exhaustion apparently, caused by overwork, of course. Dr Dee had given him new-fangled vitamin-drench pills to combat it. Eleven tablets daily and he was doing nothing but catching up on Middlemarch (after all these years). I’d bought him the first edition for his birthday when we stayed at the Anantara Grand Hotel in Amsterdam at ridiculous cost. No memory of course of the cat screaming blue hell at him every time he guzzled a glass of red wine. Me saying, ‘Listen to Mrs Miggins, she’s trying to warn you, something is up in there.’ And I’d pat my tummy to show him what was wrong with his.
The cat was right. Harry ended up with stomach cancer and at first tried to pawn it off on my vegetarian grub. ‘The doctor said it might well be connected to what I was eating.’ Fuck right off! Nothing to do with the three bottles of red wine a night, drowning out that narcissism with giddy highs, all those teeming new ideas? Thinking of when he could fool me next to get away somewhere fabulous with that geebag. ‘I know this alien invader could kill me,’ he wrote. ‘The rationalist in me understands that, but I believe it was caught in time.’ Of course it was, because you’re so incredibly special, you’re the exception! Christ, the cat had the measure of you, prick. ‘I am determined to pull through. I am still the devil’s own.’
I had told him our cat had a problem with how he was behaving and that I couldn’t work any of it out, I was too damn tired. We were only in our flat six or seven months. ‘Every time you pick up a glass of red, she screams her lamps out at you. You need to change your lifestyle habits for real.’ Mrs Miggins began attacking him around this time – first jumping on his feet in bed, and later going for his face out of bed. I found it hilarious, to be fair. That is, until the new woman, Sarah, rang one day to tell me what had been going on all along, and I collapsed in the hall. When I woke, Mrs Miggins was on top of me, licking and biting my chin, showing the gravest level of concern. Her breath smelt of cheap fish pouches and grass.
They create what’s called a Trout-Y procedure (named after a French surgeon) which basically fashions a new smaller stomach and that’s why the recovery period was so arduous for him. The new girlfriend had gone off to America to take up some admin position there and my future ex-husband wrote to tell me that a carbon copy of himself, straight out of The Matrix: shadowy, spectral, livid, had staggered out of his body, glared, and strolled off into the bushes.
That’s not to say there weren’t some stellar memories. Like that lovely Italian restaurant in Frankfurt with the superb flat-leaf parsley risotto, when he deliberately missed a football match to spend extra time with me. But the cat even stuck her paw in then. I got a phone call from my mother to say she’d gone missing after the spaying op, we’d have to cut our trip short.
The first weekend Sarah got in touch to tell me what was going on, Mrs Miggins didn’t leave my side. Ironically, this woman Harry had replaced me with said she had endured ‘so much’ in the acquiring of him, and therefore from both of us by proxy, that all she wanted now was some time for them to be happy. ‘You need to stop ringing him about the cat,’ she said. I tried to explain about his drinking, that it wasn’t all knee-slappy jokes at the bar, enjoying perks of his jammy job, that there was a serious side to how he wasn’t handling life. She laughed me down. ‘He’ll be dead from cancer in a few short years,’ I told her. ‘Even Mrs Miggins has told him’.
I heard through the grapevine that he was back humping his first girlfriend from decades ago when his new soulmate was off working abroad. An addiction after all. You can be pure rubbish at the sex but still want more of it as a type of counter-fact. Mrs Miggins moved straight onto his side of the bed and stayed tucked tight into my armpit, until the tears stopped and so did the emotions, all of them. So when he first wrote telling me he had found out why he was feeling so lethargic, so heavy-legged and sick, I laughed myself stupid and Mrs Miggins thought it was a game just for her, rolling and rolling on the bed, the pink pad of her paws high in the air and, my God, that crazy little woman was smiling through her grey and white fur, I could put money on it. ‘Karrrrrmaaaaaa,’ she said.
‘You asked for integrity, well, here it is: in many ways it feels like half a life without you. That said, I’ve been over for a tour of the northeast where she’s currently based and she’s coming here for all of August. The kids have eventually agreed to meet her. All are doing well in their lives. It might console you to know your nemesis, my ex-wife, is still blackening my name. I don’t throw enough money about apparently, even though she’s inherited an eye-watering amount from a far-flung relation, she’s determined to wither me down completely. Pure hatred. As long as she doesn’t get at my pension I’ll be happy. She hasn’t even passed on good wishes via the kids, imagine? That does sting. Fact is she’s been a depressed wagon for as long as I can remember and I simply don’t care anymore. Everyone else is being lovely, anyone who matters, including you.’
I went to see him at the hospital, to see how dreadful he looked. The stench in the ward was something else. No window view out to the skyline, just a greasy sliver of an old boy’s knobby head, harsh sheen off a green metal bed, a few chairs for the spectators. ‘Despite health insurance there’s zero chance of my own room,’ he whimpered.
[ The North Road: A short story by Eoin McNameeOpens in new window ]
The motherfucker could no longer eat, unable to down a thing. Noon brought hefty cabbage smells for those who could, metallic stomach remedies, post-dinner faecal eruptions. I moved out onto the corridor for the second round of clean-ups, when staff rolled the punters on their sides without grace to wipe their arses. He was losing his mind, raving about all the lovely legs around his bed. I told him I’d heard he was screwing someone else, and someone else again, daughter of a dissident republican. Was the new girlfriend sticking by him now? Did he think she would if she knew what he had done to her too? He chuckled a bit, then coughed so hard his face went a weird royal blue. Nurses rushed in to do something strategic to him, I wasn’t sure what. Shit, I was glad to walk out of the place, feeling properly shook. I’d spent seven years with the twat, but I strolled away that cold spring afternoon without even a ‘cheerio’.
‘Don’t be preparing for my funeral just yet,’ he emailed a day later. ‘I’ve got plans for treatment out of here, a second opinion, full liver wash. I’ll be right as rain by next Christmas.’
That line where they’d said to him: Don’t go rushing out buying bags of spinach now. The lovely face I had adored for so long, pure jaundice in the windowpanes. He had me as an alias in his phone to keep me ‘safe’.
Morphine’s yer only man.
Moving forward, headfirst.
It does yes, feels like my brains are full of cheese.
There is no pain.
Downstairs our world is wicker, richer.
Ach, they’re still doing the rounds, still coming in.
Coffin carrier making final call.
Him and haggis face, twisted morals.
Chasing my hearse for a ham sandwich, good luck to him.
I let you down.
No one was out for their hole.
We have a deep bond, don’t we?
Legs sinking. Time taking piss now.
Not airy more ill feeeeeellling
You and her both.
I think about you.
Milky airbags. Black knee-high boots in winter.
Red lippy.
Cat for your birthday.
What was her name?
Birds twerking in a low sky.
I didn’t set out to lure her. Gregarious. Compulsive.
Did you wish this?
Put your moan on me. Marauder.
No fork in road.
Get help. Sing.
My kids will be OK. My strong kids.
Off they pop.
Today my nails and teeth fell out.
Always washed my hands after going to the loo.
I’ve cleaned my fair share of toilets.
What did it for me?
We barely knew what would happen.
You reached for my hand
We strolled around Smithfield Square.
You held my hand.
So warm a thing.
No woman had ever done that.
I thought, she’s a cracker, hold on to her.
At the time I meant it.
Not feeeeeeeeeeeellling
feelingill illing ing
feel
One month after communication stopped Mrs Miggins was vomiting around the house in small smelly patches. She’d look at me, ‘pluerrp’, turn her head away again or stick it between the curtain slit to get air. She was also drinking way too much water for my liking. Big lengthy lapping noises. Sleeping for a long time on the cushion on top of the chest of drawers, not the bed. When she did go out at, say, 5am, she’d be back in again by 5.30, running to the window and mewing for me to go and see what she was looking at. Giant orange fox, daddy-o, sniffing the grass, having followed her trail intently. He looked nothing like the skittish ones that belted about the front of the houses at night-time, dragging bits of rubbish bags with them. This fecker was calculating, nasty, after Mrs Miggins’ ass for sure. Everyone kept saying, ‘Too rare, a cat would put up a huge fight, do damage. Foxes are only interested in birds, rabbits’.
But last weekend, after Harry’s anniversary, Mrs Miggins didn’t come back at all. No sightings on the Resident Association app. Plenty of neighbours know her, they remarked all the time on how gorgeous she was. A sinking feeling, truly. I hobbled out with leaflets for at least 120 houses, shoving them into letterboxes, even ones with ‘No Junk Mail’ plastered in shiny silver. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CAT? Knocked on doors, windows. Contacted local vets, but no updates of any mowed-down animals or horrible accidents. I’ve posted on all the relevant pages online, ones with gorgeous wild faces of lost girls and boys, some ugly faces too. I don’t know what else to do. Why can’t they stick to rats, birds, fruit, insects? Jumping off sheds and high fences like maniacs. Even a fox walking on three legs still moves very quickly. The trick, I suppose, is to make them feel unwelcome in your garden, humanely. And keep the cat indoors.
