It was his bulk, his nobility that got me, that travelled furthest. He looked more like a miniaturized version of a great cat – the ancestor of a tiger – than himself as he lasted butted out of the catflap. Rigor mortis had his muscles, through and through, and he was still chilly from having been frozen, but even taking this away Mouse seemed more solidly framed than I remembered. A man at twenty-six years old, not sixteen. Oh, Mossy, said Leigh. He just looks as if he’s asleep. And he did – except the fur on his forehead, close to his awkwardly folded left ear, was spread as if someone were drawn up close and blowing on it with pursed lips. His whiskers no longer stuck out at natural, useful angles. They were chaotic, and that proved to me, even more than his stiffness, that he wasn’t brilliantly shamming. The signals from the long curving hairs out of his brows and his jowls – they’d gone haywire, sending off-kilter signals to his dead brain. A moment’s life and he’d have stroked them back to their best outposts. This defeated hill, it would be retaken under orders. As he passed through gaps beneath the branches of a cherry tree, or around the green of a virginia creeper, making his way up to the garden centre roof, his whiskers would have finetuned themselves once more. He would, through them, find the best way through. Instead, above a sink, with a pale blue blanket beneath him and a pale sandy blanket covering all but his furry feline head, we had to leave him – then pay, in reception, by debit card, for his cremation. His paws, though, would still be articulate; his fur could keep another creature warm. Why waste him? We know at least one amateur taxidermist – have him preserved, as a Victorian family might have done, in a comfortable tableau of echoed glory. Biting a wax finger, perhaps.
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