At five o clock on the afternoon of my 48th birthday I was sat on a wall outside a unit on an industrial estate in Swinton waiting for a cab. The unit contained the only main emergency veterinary centre for Greater Manchester open on Sundays, and had taken a rather frank approach to the volume of business this implied.
They were nice enough people, though. We all knew that the cat had to be put down, but they went the long way round in telling me that. Polly was 17 and had been in steady decline for months, in the manner of old cats, where you know that there’s nothing to be done about it except feed it bits of tuna and tickle its ears. But cats have this habit of going into a sudden terminal spiral, and when I got up this morning, mildly hungover and raring for a book buying binge in town, it was clear that she’d gone into hers. She’d have lasted till tomorrow but that would have been dragging things out.
I’ve been a cat undertaker for years, without really knowing why. Mrs Treasure and I are, for preference, dog people. But we’ve always had cats since we’ve been together. Mrs T had got one – the original Polly – before I met her and brought it up to Manchester when I squatted a place for us back in ‘87. She disappeared one day, presumed hijacked by the convoy folk who used to use Hulme flats as a base of operations, and so probably transported to Stonehenge or wherever else those toerags went on their circuit. Her successor, Spike, was a big, black, arrogant Tom, run over one day by a bunch of junior gangsters steaming down Chichester Road, which Hulme gangsters habitually used as a rat run. I buried him in the front garden.
I took Suki, a cat of sustained, almost admirable viciousness, on her last trip to the vet five years ago. She went into a decline after becoming too feeble to savage small garden creatures. Suki wasn’t very good company, so Mrs T bought Polly the second as a companion cat back in ’95. In those days you could still buy cats under the counter at dodgy suburban pet shops. I mean that literally. Mrs Treasure asked if they had a cat, and the owner pulled open a drawer and produced her.
Polly the second was a small, neat, unobtrusive house tabby. She went out once and came back pregnant. Jasper, the one of her four offspring we kept, was a large, friendly, dopey tortoiseshell. He went into his death spiral last year, spoiling my otherwise unmitigated joy in Stoke City’s masterful demolition of Bolton Wanderers in the FA cup semi-final. Cats have a habit of doing things like that, too.
So, now, for the first time in our life together, Mrs T and I have no cats. Well, not quite. If dogs insist on getting front and centre, cats tend to exist in your peripheral vision and after a while you move around the house in a manner that accommodates the expectation of their presence, waiting to trip you up on the stairs or suddenly emerge from nowhere and start slow-walking in front of you as you try to get from room to room. We’re still acting as though Polly and her antecedents are around; and I imagine we will be for some time. I suppose this is where the identification of cats as ghosts comes from.
Sympathies. My parents just had their cat of about twenty years old put down and visiting there the other weekend I could still see her out of the corners of my eyes every now and again.
Are you planning to get another cat, or will you wait for the inevitable to happen naturally?
Posted by: Martin Wisse | May 21, 2012 at 07:04 AM
Whenever I leave a bag or a coat on the settee in our kitchen, on re-entering the kitchen I assume its our old dog Gordon and reach out to flick his ears.
Posted by: johnf | May 21, 2012 at 07:25 AM
god what a bloody awful day. Comiserations.
Posted by: dsquared | May 21, 2012 at 09:25 AM
Sorry buddy.
Posted by: Left Outside | May 21, 2012 at 12:17 PM
That sucks. They do have a way of doing that. I buried my first wife's cat on the day her dad died of kidney failure. She was on her way to the hospital and found her in front of our apartment, she had been hit by car. She'd renamed it Jennifer after the victim in this then fairly recent and notorious murder after she had been loudly sexually assaulted by one of the local toms (she was fixed so...). I dug a deep hole in the rain her dad's backyard that afternoon.
Posted by: Barry Freed | May 21, 2012 at 01:13 PM
I'm really sorry, Jamie.
Posted by: Alex | May 21, 2012 at 06:18 PM
Sympathies. My parents just had their cat of about twenty years old put down and visiting there the other weekend I could still see her out of the corners of my eyes every now and again.
Exactly the same with my folks, last year. Cats stay around long enough for you to get used to them, but not long enough to outlive you, unfortunately.
Posted by: ajay | May 21, 2012 at 06:29 PM
Sorry about that. Grim old job.
Posted by: chris y | May 21, 2012 at 07:28 PM
So sorry to hear that Jamie - but thanks for this piece.
Posted by: Jakob | May 21, 2012 at 08:24 PM
those toerags
Would those be the 'Brew Crew', who I was told about five years later had stopped Hawkwind doing festivals because of their penchant for smashing things up?
Posted by: skidmarx | May 21, 2012 at 09:23 PM
Sad.
Posted by: alle | May 21, 2012 at 10:05 PM
Sad news: my sympathies. We once had a cat that my mum took to be put down. She said he was in decline. Turned out she was a bit quick on the draw: vet said he's fine, just needs some ear drops; sent him away. Lived out another three years quite happily, I think.
Mum is now 77. I'll be keeping an eye on her.
Posted by: Charlie W | May 22, 2012 at 01:05 PM