Missing Mabel
Jeremy Clarke
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, Like the poor cat i’th’ adage.
Thus Lady Macbeth derides her husband for hesitating to do Duncan to death. I don’t know what quandary the cat in the adage was in, but next door’s cat doesn’t hesitate to commit murder. It doesn’t kill for fun. Worse than that, it kills to relieve its own boredom. Birds, mice, voles, slow-worms, young rabbits — it catches and dispatches them languidly, almost disinterestedly. I haven’t seen it in our garden since I ran after it and hurled a mug of tea at it, mug and all. But occasionally, first thing in the morning, I come across a circle of scattered feathers with a bloody epicentre on the lawn, which is its calling card. And another fledgling blackbird or thrush that we have grown to recognise and love since its first ungainly and comically unkempt appearance in the garden has been rubbed out.
There are not one but two cats next door. Two!! Both rescue cats. My rule of thumb about pet cats is that, like exclamation marks, two or more denote eccentricity in an owner. In next door’s case, this rule is proven beyond all doubt. The other bastard — a long-haired, flat-faced exotic — I imagine is descended from a breed that evolved in Himalayan monasteries where they were waited on by saffronrobed monks. This cat doesn’t hunt. It doesn’t do anything. It just looks down its nose at everything, including the hand that feeds it, like some dowager empress scrutinising peasantry through lorgnettes. I sometimes spit at it as I walk past, if it happens to be in next door’s garden and within range, and it looks at me as if it knows but I don’t — just what a very vulgar and insignificant creature I am. I’d have no qualms at all about testing shampoo on this creature’s eyeballs.
I don’t hate all cats. Recently, I’d unexpectedly grown to like one very old gentle female tabby called Mabel. Returning to Shakespeare, with Mabel I found myself agreeing with Bertram concerning Parolles in All’s Well, when he says, ‘I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he’s a cat to me.’ Mabel belonged not to me but to my boy’s mother. She was given her around the time my boy was born, when Mabel was already two. It was only fairly lately, however, after 15 years of comings and goings to pick up my boy at weekends, that I’d begun really to appreciate Mabel’s qualities, and then to greet and stroke her, and finally to make friends with her. I’m using the past tense because we buried Mabel last week — and I’m very sorry about it.
For such a quiet, unassuming cat, Mabel’s death was marked by something quite extraordinary. She’d been ill since Christmas — her liver was packing up and my boy’s mother was forking out £50 a month on tablets and a special diet to keep her going. She’d gone from being a fat cat to a thin cat, but was still fairly sprightly and appeared not to be in pain.
I spoke to her for the last time last week. She was lying on the doorstep warming herself in a quadrant of late afternoon sun, and I stepped over her. It was unlike her to lie on the doorstep. The last thing Mabel ever was was ‘in the way’. As my shadow passed over her she raised her head and mewed at me loudly and insistently, and I asked her what was the matter. Again, it was most unlike Mabel to be noisy or insist on anything.
The following day she was dismally incontinent inside the house, and my boy’s mother’s boyfriend decided it was time to take her to the vet to be put down. (I wasn’t there that day, but they told me about it afterwards.) So he gathered her up in her blanket and they all trooped down to the vet to see their beloved old cat off. And, as they sat tearfully in the waiting-room, an elderly couple came in with an elderly sick cat called Mindy that was also about to be put down.
The two parties of mourners got talking. It turned out that Mindy was Mabel’s sister, no question about it. Born within minutes of each other on a farm to the same mother 17 years before, the sibling cats were about to die within minutes of each other on the same table.
‘So did Mabel and Mindy recognise each other?’ I asked, goggle-eyed, when told about it later. But, sadly, both creatures were too apathetic by that stage to respond to formal introductions. Mabel was called first. And now she lies in the garden under a square paving slab and a small tub of camellias.
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