A suggestion from a reader: Could I, yes, write about cats but not link them to this Keats and Eng Lit stuff?
Mouse hasn’t appeared much this subsequent year. He’s grown up from a kittenish curiosity to a weirdly incoherent tomcat (minus balls). Very rarely does he pass over my desk or my lap, not when I’m trying to write. I think this is less because I kept putting him down on the floor, all last year, and more because he’s become fascinated with chasing flies, climbing fences, hunting mice. He feels the call of the suburban – the mild-wild.
Our other cats, Iggy and Ella (to give them their diary names), were dead in last year’s fiction, but are now with us again. Mouse often chases them upstairs, which is where they live – in Leigh’s study, with food and water in bowls on the floor, plus a litter tray. He eats their food. He probably takes territorial dumps in their litter tray, too.
Mouse walks as if his back legs were metal stilts. When he sits, it looks like he’s a normal-shaped cat sitting on a tabby pouf. Quite often, he seems to lose balance and fall off whatever he’s traversing. The garden fence. The back of the sofa.
The other day, I saw him sit on a copy of the London Review of Books which slowly slid off the kitchen table. Yeah, meant to do that, said Mouse, as he squeaked away. We hadn’t oiled his robotic stilts. But who could go near them? If you try to stroke his gorgeous ears, he’ll let you touch him once, twice, then he’ll flash out with a paw full of claws. Or he’ll cock his head and see how tickled you are by his incisors. Why, he asks, does no-one want to play-fight? You lot are so dead.
It’s only when he is very tired, and possibly when unbeknownst to us has killed something and lapped its blood, that he’ll settle for a cuddle. Iggy and Ella, by contrast, will always welcome the intimacy that expands cat-pleasure to all there is in the world. They purr-soothe us purely.