I took today off work. It was not a duvet day, or a sickie, because the deal for part timers at the plant centre is that if you don't turn up, you don't get paid. I couldn't imagine that with the snow they would have many customers, if any, so I thought they could manage with two people, and I did not think my chest would stand working in a polytunnel in close to freezing temperatures for nearly eight hours. Also, the grey tabby had to go to the vet, and as we both expected the worst I did not want the Systems Administrator to make the trip unaccompanied, and take whatever decision had to be made single-handed, and drive back to the house alone with the empty basket.
When we first saw the grey tabby she was six weeks old. Out of a delightful swarm of kittens in a front room in Romford, she was the one making a determined line for the back of the television in the far corner. We said that we'd have that one, because she had the most get-up-and-go. When she was thirteen weeks old we brought her home. It was July 1999, a very hot day, and she and her brother panted alarmingly in the back of the car in the clogged traffic on the A12. Her given name was Ronkerval Betty Boo, a ridiculous name if there ever was one, and we called her Belle.
The grey tabby had incredibly crimped, electrically charged fur which stuck to everything. Her face ended in a long snout, for a cat, which with her imperious expression gave her a vulpine look. Her chin was soft white. You can see similar long, white tipped faces on the little cats that lurk in the edges of seventeenth century Dutch paintings. Her voice was loud, an expressive yelp, and if she was alone in a room, or on the landing, she would howl because nobody was paying attention to her. Her feet were vast, with great tufts of fur between the toes. She loved being fussed, right up to the point where she got bored of it, when she would suddenly growl and stomp off your lap, as if she had been importuned. She stamped when she entered a room, so that you knew it was her coming. She was particularly the Systems Administrator's cat, and loved to lie stretched out on the SA's chest, faces inches apart, claws digging into the quaking human skin beneath.
Though the spirit was titanic, the flesh was weak. She was always a skinny creature, even by Maine Coon standards, and the vet who micro-chipped her struggled to find enough fat to bury the chip, itself only the size of a grain of rice. As a youngster she suffered from a couple of bad abscesses in her feet, presumably resulting from infected bites, and after the second one the vet said that she was worried about the grey tabby's immune system, and then became embarrassed and told us to forget that she'd said that. The vet's intuition was right. In middle age the grey tabby developed an auto-immune problem in the pads of her feet, which became hugely swollen, and one burst through the skin in a raw lump. Surgery in such cases does not always work well, because there is no healthy tissue to stitch and the wound tends to break down repeatedly. The grey tabby's skinny frame came through the general anaesthetic, and the wound eventually healed, rather to our and the vet's surprise. Months of steroid pills followed, and the grey tabby's pads, though never again normal, ceased to be grotesque.
She continued to live an active life, stomping out into the garden, always in the direction of the lettuce farm rather than the wood, shouting, growling, purring, sitting on the ice in the middle of the frozen pond and daring it to break. She was not a thrifty cat, perpetually skinny and always the first to be hungry. She got gradually thinner. On Saturday morning when I came downstairs she seemed rather spaced out in the hall, and spent the day curled in a chair where she doesn't normally sleep. She had suddenly lost a lot more weight, and smelt slightly bad. By yesterday morning it was clear that something was seriously wrong. She went out into the garden, and then sat in the snow looking in through the glass door. Once inside, she didn't wash herself and spend the morning curled on her wet fur. She ate a tiny helping of food, very slowly, purring, but was even thinner, and constantly dribbling. The smell was rank.
I rang at 8.00am on the dot this morning to get a vet's appointment. We hadn't driven over the snow in our lane since it fell, so the SA went out to warm the car up and turn it around, and then once it was moving didn't dare to stop until the farmyard, where the neighbours had scraped the snow off the road. The SA had to walk up to the house and we made a sad little procession going back to the car, the SA in the lead, carrying the basket with the grey tabby wrapped in a purple towel, me following behind carrying a shovel for the snow, just in case. When we arrived it was obvious that most other people booked in today had cancelled, but the tone of my voice had probably told the receptionist that an appointment 'today' meant just that.
The vet's verdict was bleak, but not unexpected. Kidney failure, and given the speed of the grey tabby's decline, almost certainly some other problems as well. Acute dehydration. We could have blood tests done, and have the grey tabby put on a drip, and given huge shots of antibiotics. She might rally short term, but there was no treatment for the underlying kidney disease. No prospect of a proper, permanent cure. When the grey tabby had the operation on her foot the vet had to ring for us to come and collect her early, she hated being there so much. Having her rehydrated so that she could spend her last few days at the vet with kidney failure was no option at all. The SA signed the consent form for euthanasia. I think the vet was relieved that we had done the right thing.
We agreed to leave the body with them. Our other pets are buried up in the meadow, but with the cold and the frozen ground we both had visions of the burial turning into something out of a Coen brothers black comedy, or not being able to dig deep enough and finding the fox had dug her up. The vet agreed to send us the bill. Payment is normally at the time of treatment, but they're sympathetic that way, when it comes to the end of life, and we didn't feel like fiddling around with credit cards at the reception desk. We told the grey tabby she'd been a good cat, and stroked her terribly bony back for the last time and went home, with the empty basket. And because of the way that normal life has to carry on even in the face of disaster we went via the farm shop, although we agreed that we weren't feeling hungry, because we would be later, so that we could get something for lunch and for supper. The bill will be extra for the cremation, but worth it not to be trying to hack a grave out in the snow. We didn't want the ashes. I don't know what we've have done with them.
It is the nearest that human beings get to being gods, to love animals, that have such little lives compared to ours.
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