The cat is perhaps my favourite creature. When Friday — our cat — passed away on 31 January 2001, my mother said that he was irreplaceable: we never kept a pet cat again. Much as I had loved Friday, I was unhappy at the prospect of never again having a feline companion at home. Friday had been a constant source of strength in our lives. In particular, I recall that he used to clamber up onto my bed whenever, as a child, I used to cry; he would meander around my body, meowing, and stroking his silky, furry frame against my arms, as though he understood my sadness and wished to cosset me. I felt much comfort on account of this cat — Friday in no way seemed to conform to the commonly-held image of cats as calculating, solipsistic animals.
After a prolonged illness, our cat finally withered away due to the deleterious effects of having been stricken by cat flu. It was distressing to witness him — in the final two years of his life — with pus unceasingly streaming from his eyes, his form becoming gradually emaciated. One of the things that I recall from that time was the food that I fed to Friday in an attempt to console him as he struggled with the damaging effects of ill-health. Earlier in my life — I have memories of Friday dating back to the beginning of my salad days — we would buy this loveable feline tins of cat food from the supermarket. Towards the end of his life, this did not seem good enough, and I began to insist that my parents splash out on the finest ingredients as Friday’s inevitable death approached.
Around five years before Friday’s passing, my aunt gave one of her cats — also now dead — to my grandmother. My grandmother gave the name of Purpose to her pet. She regularly bought milk and mince from the nearby town of Malton. While she often went spare when I asked if I could eat some of the mince, and drink some of the milk, she was very happy to feed these products to Purpose.
At the time, it seemed somehow morally unjustifiable that my grandmother regularly served expensive food and drink to her cat, but took little care over the meals that she made for visiting family members: pans not properly scrubbed following the cooking of stews would be reused to prepare coffee cake, and bits of onion — unwelcomed by us — would find their ways into our mouths at afternoon tea. Purpose never seemed to be beset by such culinary adulterations. In hindsight, I understand my grandmother’s actions. Her affection for her pet seemed to increase after the death of her second husband around eight years ago; consequently, she purchased more luxurious foods for her cat. In times of solitude, a beloved pet can seem like a great source of strength: pets, because they cannot communicate with humans by using language, can never really be said to crib; they are easy to look after, so it is not troubling to have them around all of the time; and, again because of their linguistic inabilities, we can create whatever emotional connection we want with them — pets, being emotional bedrocks, embody, in some senses, the idealised characteristics that we long for in human relationships. If this argument is accepted, it seems perfectly appropriate to lavish them with fine foods.
I think that I now understand the reasons why my grandmother was so liberal in indulging her cat’s apparent gastronomic preferences. I did the same for the increasingly frail Friday, clinging to the hope that he — and what he represented — would remain alive despite all of the evidence which suggested otherwise. After Friday’s passing, we buried him in a Prada boot box, and had planned to plant a tree on the spot chosen for his grave. We did not plant the tree. Distraught after our cat’s funeral, we did not join my grandmother for afternoon tea that day either: we had wept enough already, and, knowing that onions induce tears, we perhaps felt that grandmother’s coffee cake could wait for another day.
- Kit Hildyard
