Mouse is dead.
(Mouse, whose name outside the Diary/in our house was Moss.)
I had a phone call from a local vet, this afternoon, to say that a woman in a nearby street – but across the railway tracks – had found him dead in their garden. The woman brought the body in to the surgery, and they scanned the chip to get our number. Apparently there were no signs of trauma. That’s what they said. He hadn’t been hit by a car or bitten by a fox. ‘He looks very healthy,’ the woman from the vet’s said, on the phone.
But he’s dead. Lovely, wild Mouse – who I wrote about only a couple of days ago, I hope fondly – his big presence and strong tastes and ego and mainly gentle violence – an instant permanent absence – evergone.
A phonecall halfway through a Zoom meeting, which I had to leave suddenly.
I know this is coming out all confused.
All afternoon I’ve been looking for him by the bookshelves in my room, or on the garden fence. Not even his ghost is there, though I wish it was. There are charger wires in the world that won’t be chewed. Rats who will live to trot and screw. Dry food that won’t need to be bought. Hairs that won’t be brushed off trousers. There’s a grey toy called Friend on the kitchen floor that won’t be paddled by Mouse’s back legs, to demonstrate to the human looking on what a great hunter Mouse is. There are scratches that won’t happen to my fingers. There are dozens of stair-spats Iggy and Ella won’t have with him. The garden is theirs again. Downstairs is no longer enemy territory.
I just watched a video of six-months old Mouse, asleep on my desk. Breathingly asleep. I stopped after ten seconds. All he’s doing is breathing – black striped belly with white feet. Billions of hours of similar cat-footage and cat-photos are online. But this was Mouse, Moss, Maurice Moss, full-on basic beast, star of last year’s diary.
I can’t decide whether to tell people what’s happened. Moss has died but is still Mouse for them. Mouse can come back to life, as Iggy and Bella did. In the Diary, Mouse lives until today. He could even be alive tomorrow, if I decided to allow his strut to thrive. For now, I am too sad to make a decision. We are too sad.