Two summers ago, on a warm afternoon, I walked through the streets of north London, carrying my cat. Dollface was 17 years old, and had been diagnosed with kidney disease. It was severe and late-stage, and there was nothing to be done. The previous night we had lain together on my living room floor while I fed her painkillers and small pieces of prawn. And then it was dawn, and we rose to meet the terrible day.
A Covid spike meant a home visit from the vet was not possible, and Doll hated buses and car journeys, so I had decided that the best way to reach the surgery was on foot. Our mission was at odds with the beauty of the day, but I was glad she got to say goodbye to the world like this: so verdant and fragrant and alive. I wanted her to take it with her, wherever she might go.
She was not very heavy by then, but still we walked slowly, me cradling her carrier, her face pressed against its gauzy window. We took the quiet backstreets, under ripening figs and crests of buddleia; stopped to smell the jasmine, honeysuckle, rose.
As we walked, I told her the story of her life. How I had lobbied hard for a cat until my husband relented – though he had conditions: it must be a ginger boy cat, named after his favourite footballer. When I collected her, from a house off the Blackstock Road, she was the last of a litter; in a clutch of gingers and tortoiseshells, the solitary black and white kitten. I thought my husband might forgive me, but the following day, when the vet announced that our boy kitten was in fact a girl, and we realised she would no longer be called Darren Huckerby, he looked at me darkly.
I used to joke that in our divorce settlement he got the house and I got the cat, but this was pretty much true. I still think I got the better deal. Over the following years, Dollface and I lived together happily in five different apartments, from London to Kent and back again. There was a lot of upheaval in that time – awful boyfriends, long work trips, a variety of catsitters – but she weathered it all with a kind of grace.
I could tell you many things about her. The near-violence of her nose-kisses; how she sang for her supper; how I came to live my life at a variety of odd angles as she sprawled across my bed, yoga mat, lap. I could tell you about the dewy morning she slipped off a window ledge and fell through the air. Or how, when I finally made it back to her at the start of the pandemic, she slept on my head for a full week. But it is simplest to say she was my home, and my measure of love.
I don’t recall how long it took to reach the veterinary office that day, but when we arrived I wrapped her in my favourite shirt and held her close while they fiddled with needles and sedatives. In her final moments, I pressed my face against her weary body. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I said.
Love slips out in seconds, leaves the body still; but somehow, I think, it finds its way to air. I see it now in the world’s sudden flashes of beauty: the colour of the sky, the softness of a morning. In the scent of jasmine, honeysuckle, rose. There she is, I think to myself. And for a moment, I am home.
