“What could have more poetry than a cat upon a bed?
The slow delicious stretch of muddy paws —
On a blossom strewn bed spread
He has been frolicking in an unruly flower field,
Fresh–faced he comes purring home to me —
To sleep peacefully by my side and make sure I’m healed”.
I read the saccharine words out loud from one of my mother’s notebooks. Scrawled above the poem, in all capitals, were the words MY CAT. It puzzled me as I knew for a fact that Oliver was not that sort of cat. He was the cat that stealthily winds himself between your legs before scratching your toes and hissing. He was the cat that is too important to use the litter box, pristinely waiting in the laundry room. He preferred to do his business in the clean sheets whirled waiting in the basket like a giant soft-scoop ice cream. And when he stretched on my bed he tore the sheets with a fury that seemed to me both ancient and unholy. But as Oliver was the last living link to my mother I was trying very hard to love him.
My mother loved misfits and rescues so Oliver was perfect. She discovered him living in the curling ivy covering her garage. He was mainly an unpleasant dusty brown apart from one half of his face that was a startling black as if it belonged to another cat entirely. The garage had long ago ceased to be where she deposited the car over night and had morphed into her ‘writing studio’. She had signed up for a poetry workshop through the local library and ever since had also started to morph into the sort of woman who needed a writing studio. She started to wear silver bracelets on both of her thick wrists, drape her neck in bright scarfs, and ordered cardamom and clove perfumed teas from India. On the phone she told me, “It’s thirteen pounds for a hundred grams so it is a bit more costly than PG”. When I expressed surprise at the price my mother told me without a trace of irony, “Oh Bethany darling it’s a small price to pay for inner goodness and they give 1% of their profit towards the education of tea grower’s children”.
My mother had courted Oliver’s attentions, leaving out delicate saucers of milk as if he was a character from one of the books she read to me when I was a child, Dinah from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ perhaps. “When I finally approached him he folded like a cheap suit”, my mother would recited each time she told the story to a new audience or when I was subjected to a revival of the myth of Oliver on one of my fitful visits. My mother always followed this with the reason for his name, “I christened him after Oliver Reed because when I saw him curled up in front of the fire, snagged by life’s vagaries, he just reminded me so much of the scene in ‘Women in Love’ with Oliver and Alan wrestling. He was Oliver from then on”. She never elaborated further and so her listeners were left trying to align an image of two naked grappling men with that of the stringy storm-tossed cat nestled in her lap.
Before my mother died I had secretly nicknamed the frenzied interloper ‘Macavity’. When my mother asked me to feed him I would sing in a whisper the line from the T.S.Elliot poem, “You are a ‘fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity’ come eat your fill Macavity”. And now with my mother’s absence Oliver and me inhabited the same space but we treat each other like members of different political parties involved in an intense struggle over entitlements.
One dull Sunday, a day when I would probably have visited my mother, I flicked through the offerings on the television and my finger froze when I clicked onto a close up image of a young Oliver Reed’s face. Consulting the channel guide I found that it was indeed ‘Women in Love’ on TCM. Unexpectedly my heart began to beat a little faster. I had never seen the movie, only goggling the naked wrestling scene, which failed to shed any light on the origins of the name my mother had bestowed on the two-faced cat. Now as I watched, the Oliver Reed character was peach, he glowed softly, lit only by the fire. His mouth was fringed in the overgrowth from his top lip and he was talking to the Alan Bates character who was out of shot, “Nothing matters in the world except somebody to take the edge of ones being alone”. He continued to speak but I had stopped listening. Those words vibrated in my head as the characters started to tackle each other. I put my hand to my cheek; unexpectedly it was as slick as Oliver Reed’s back. My breath started to come in pants and was echoed back at me from the screen as the actors performed in a homoerotic ballet, very unlike anything I’d ever seen on WWE.
As I sat immobile in my mother’s chair Oliver leapt up onto my lap; walking around a number of times he dug his claws into the fleshy part of my thighs. I had inadvertently clenched my fist; I felt Oliver’s cool tongue burrowing into the snail like space between my forefinger and thumb. I opened my hand and scratched between his ears. Oliver scrunching himself up yawned and fell asleep peacefully on my lap.
