I’m taking comfort from a cat who moved in the day my brother died
When the dog-shaped, swan-shaped hole in my life expanded so suddenly and brutally to take the shape of my beloved brother, I suppose it was inevitable that the creature that would fill it would be a cat.
Mark loved all animals — as a teenager, he once valiantly tried to convince my mother that a bat which had flown into our garage could be domesticated as a pet — but my God, he adored cats. I honestly don’t know why. We were dog people, rabbit people, 76 guinea pig people, but as children, we only had one cat and we had him just long enough to establish that both Mark and I were extremely allergic to him. And that should have been that for us and cats.
But Mark got mad notions, and one of them involved making an elaborate cat trap from a wire basket and waiting patiently until a poor unfortunate wandered into it. ‘I caught a cat!’ I can still hear him jubilantly exclaim on that fateful day, and as it turned out, he hadn’t just caught a cat, he’d caught the pet that stayed with our family the longest of all, the one who was still there long after we’d all moved out. The one my parents paid for kidney dialysis for. The one that meant I went through secondary school with what appeared to be a permanent cold, while Mark happily sucked his asthma inhaler for extra feline grooviness.
As soon as Mark got his own place, he started befriending feral cats. Honestly, the state of most of them. And unlike the big kitten that became our domestic god, these were wild, scratchy, spitty animals that tore Mark’s arms and occasionally his face to shreds. Still, he persevered in his life-long efforts to tame the species.
When he went to Saudi Arabia for work, the only photos he ever posted were of the skinny cats he fed and befriended over there. Back home, it was Mark who volunteered to feed our sister’s occasional cat when she was travelling. I don’t think he ever fed her without photographing her.
I mentioned to him that a cat had started inspecting our front garden in the months after our dog died, and he demanded a detailed description. Cat-shaped, I said. Vaguely cat-coloured.
A week before Mark died, the cat crossed our threshold for the first time, tentatively stepping through the open back door and into the kitchen. ‘Oh my God, he’s broken the fourth wall !,’ The Young Adult exclaimed, and we all laughed at our general artiness as the startled cat scarpered from our thespian den.
And when I came back from the hospital on the morning my brother died, the cat had moved in. On a day that is mostly a blur, I was vaguely aware that as darkness fell, the cat was still here. And she has been here ever since.
We named her Markie — of course we did — and after a couple of selfish weeks when we wanted to keep her all to ourselves, we began to make enquiries amongst the neighbours as to her provenance. Because she’s not a spitty, nutty cat, but a proper, pretty little lady who clearly started somewhere else. But after extensive investigations, our best guess is that she may have belonged to one of the families who recently moved away, because nobody has claimed her.
She spends her days sleeping on The Youngest’s bed, her unexpected and very welcome college companion in this strange new version of Trinity College. Sometimes she miaows during her zoom lectures and it confuses the lecturers and mortifies The Youngest. The cat is, if you like, inhaling a degree. At night, she flits between various rooms, checking in with all the people in the house who can’t quite believe that we suddenly appear to have a cat. She is sitting on a kitchen chair across the table from me right now staring at me tapping on my laptop, wondering why I’ve taken a break from stroking her.
Maybe I should be on anti-depressants. Instead, I am on anti-histamines.
Do I really believe my only brother’s first posthumous act was to send me a cat? A cat that he knows I’m allergic to, at that? Not really. But I am immensely grateful, overwhelmed even, by the timing of her unexpected arrival in our lives and I am loving cuddling her and holding her and not being sure half the time if it’s Mark or Markie that I’m softly talking to on these long dark days when a cat, of all things, has shown us some light. And sure look it. Maybe. Just maybe.