Early one morning a few days back, Mr Litlove came into our room in a state of some concern.
‘Harvey hasn’t come in for his breakfast,’ he said.
I hadn’t entirely got my eyes open at this point and my brain certainly wasn’t yet in gear, but this was surprising news. As our cat has grown older, so he seems to have grown hungrier. He has two meals a day, breakfast and teatime, and he anticipates both by several hours. His strategy – and it is a good one – is to make an utter nuisance of himself until such time as food is put in his bowl. This is easily achieved; he particularly likes to jump onto the desk where I am working and start systematically nudging items off of it. The more fragile or essential, the better. He has perfected the moaning miaow until it is like fingernails scratching down a blackboard. If all else fails, he resorts to the relentless headbutt against my shins. Missing a meal is not something he does. Ever.
I started to think about this, and realised it was worse than we thought. ‘I don’t remember him coming back for seconds after his tea last night, either.’ I said. ‘I think he’s been out since early evening yesterday.’
You see, I suspect my cat has Alzheimer’s. Physically he’s pretty spry for 15. But an extension of the ASBO-like behavior has recently been to keep returning to me and asking to be fed, after his bowl has been filled.
We talk about this a lot.
‘Harvey,’ I say, ‘I’ll bet if you just go and look in your bowl, you’ll find you haven’t finished what you were given.’
Moan, moan, moan, says my cat, roughly translated as: ‘You’ve got to come with me. My bowl is empty, stupid human. You never feed me, and I ask and ask and ask.’
So we go back to the bowl where – surprise! – half his meal still remains. And I return to my desk and wait for the whole performance to start over in another fifteen minutes. When the weather was hot in the summer, he often managed to leave enough time for flies to start laying their eggs on his leftovers, adding a veneer of disgust to ongoing tedium. Halving his portions did nothing for his permanent conviction we are starving him.
Basically, I spend way too much of my day going backwards and forwards to a cat bowl, and when I shut him out in the kitchen in total exasperation, he sits on the floor with his nose up against the crack of the door, oozing resentment, determined to be first in the queue when it opens again.
So the evidence in the case of the missing cat: no pestering after tea, and a complete no show for breakfast. If there’d been an accident, I felt sure we would have known about it. The likeliest scenario was that he had found one of those little old ladies that cats have in their fantasies, with endless patience and a free hand with the tin opener. Given that Harvey is very much Mr Litlove’s cat, and spends his evenings ignoring me and gazing at him in adoration, I wondered whether it was too unfeeling to allow just a teeny notion of kittens to enter my imagination, adorable, funny new kittens, sweet, charming, playful little kittens with big eyes and button noses and those entertainingly oversized feet. Once the fluff has settled, I promised myself…
Mr Litlove returned from rowing pondering Harvey’s fate.
‘Perhaps he got shut in somewhere,’ I said. At which point Mr Litlove said, ‘Oh.’ And then he dashed off outside. When he returned he was triumphant. He suddenly remembered that the previous evening he’d shut the door to his workshop (our ex-garage) without looking behind him. Harvey had emerged as soon as he opened it, mewing with more justification than usual about his lack of regular meals. Alas it unleashed a whole new level of paranoia in him, so that by the end of the evening, even Mr Litlove was suggesting he had played the hostage trump card quite enough.
Upshot: no kittens.
Yesterday Mr Litlove went to London for work. You may recall a few months back that I was somewhat annoyed with him when he went to London and neglected to mention the fact, leaving me thinking he was dead in a ditch somewhere because he was unusually late home. Well, yesterday I thought to myself I would not be caught out that way again. Oh no. Everyone makes mistakes but only idiots make them twice. I was determined not to be flummoxed no matter how late he stayed out. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to get an email from him about 6 o’clock, saying it had been a long day of meetings and he was tired and looking forward to coming home. He didn’t know quite what time that would be. No problem! I replied. I’ll make dinner and keep it tenderly warm for you like a good wife should. About three hours later, I received a text that read: ‘Need food. Going for a pizza. Will be late home.’
I thought: I do NOT believe it. He’s tricked me again. I salvaged what could be kept from dinner and stomped off to bed. When he finally got in and I asked ‘What kept you?’ thinking perhaps the meeting had gone on far longer than expected, he said, and I quote: ‘They were drinking.’ I see. They were drinking and they handcuffed you to a nearby bar stool and made you watch. I am forced to the conclusion that London makes Mr Litlove extra silly. I need a new strategy for when he next has to go there, one that involves me going out for an expensive meal with friends, I think.
And finally, my friend’s husband’s funeral was today. I noticed that most of us got through the speeches okay, but the music very nearly undid us. That’s music for you: a direct hit to the places you’ve just about kept protected. Someone’s favorite piece of music is so redolent of their spirit. I held it together by imagining what songs Mr Litlove would want and wondering how often they had requests for Kylie Minogue and Atomic Kitten. Probably more often than you’d think. Just in case you’re wondering, this is what I would like, please, thankyou.
