by Alex Howard
Living life was different. Living life was going hunting or On The Prowl… getting stroked or venturing on ill-advised adventures smelling of cinnamon. Living life gave you experience, and lifted you beyond your own thoughts and into the lives of others. It was palpable. Living was being in the moment. Saaf Landan Tom had it sussed: half thinking cat, half alley cat; half body, and half mind…
Library Cat suddenly listened to his heart. Its thump made the sound: IAMS – IAMS – IAMS – IAMS. (Clearly he was hungry.)
Living life is real, he rejoiced suddenly. Real like my beating heart.
He sniffed his food bowl and ate a big chunk of tuna. He thought about the cute tortoiseshell he’d seen out On The Prowl with Saaf Landan Tom and the wonderful few moments they had shared before she hissed. He recalled the realness of her purr and soft cheek, and how they made him feel alive and blissful. Now he thought of Puddle Cat – her glimmering fur, fine tail and deep blue smile that seemed to conceal a world of secrets. He closed his eyes. The thoughts of her spun sumptuously round in circles like toffee apples at a village fair, each one delicious but as hard to capture as the next. He sighed. They were only thoughts. He found his mind wandering back to the Humans and the disasters that befell them when they overvalued their own thoughts. Politics, wars, the Gunpowder Plot, silly “laws” about the selling of tuna…
I must seek the tortoiseshell again, he determined suddenly, surprised at his own certitude.
She was real. I must find her.
Recommended Reading
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot.
Food consumed
A cryogenically frozen worm in a snowball.
Mood
Thoughtful, reflective.
Discovery about Humans
They tend not to live in the present.
…in which our hero finds solace in Christmas
A fortnight later, Christmas had well and truly arrived. The square was empty save for the odd car that growled across the cobbles. A few days earlier had been Library Cat’s birthday. He had been given a balloon by his Human with the number 9 on it and the words “Happy Birthday!!!” along the top, clearly with little concern for his globophobia.
He eyed it with suspicion as it glided disconcertingly from one room to the next, neither on the floor nor the ceiling, a big red cushion of evil, its every detail, from its alarming turgidity to its thoughtless smattering of exclamation marks, rending him tense and uncomfortable.
On the plus side, he’d been given some cream, a catnip ball and copious amounts of tickles and scratches. But then the Humans had started to run mad. One had uprooted a tree and brought it in the house and dressed it with tiny lights, while another constructed a minute barn in the hallway and started singing to a minute ceramic figurine baby. Then there were cards with a picture of the baby; pictures of the baby on the television, and people talking about the baby in hushed revered words, while televisions, radios and stereos blared music with the words “Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. Born is the King of Israel!”
Library Cat could therefore only assume this important baby was called “Noel”. He researched in the Towsery to find the reason behind this Noel’s importance, but could find very few leads. The closest he came to an answer was a man called “Noel Edmonds” who was on television and presented a programme in which other Humans guessed what number was contained inside a box.
This Noel is definitely making the Humans jolly, that’s for sure, thought Library Cat. Fancy being the King of Israel.
He ventured out into the square to let his Christmas dinner digest. He gazed over at the library. It was completely empty, the doors locked and the lights off. It seemed strange. He thought of it during term time, of its many lighted floors, stacked like buttered bread, its basement technical, its staff hierarchical, its computers layered with secret password-protected stories… And minds everywhere so deep in thought that the very act of standing up would be like unplugging a great lake.
Where are they all now?
But in spite of the silence, Library Cat felt a strange “lift”. In the chaplaincy, he’d been tickled. Twice. Thrice even. He’d been given a handsome red collar which, admittedly, he’d gnawed off immediately, but he appreciated the sentiment. He’d sat on laps, chased paper around a strange interior tree and slept beside a fire. And the turkey, and the gifts of Whiskas and catnip toys from well-wishers had all been very pleasant. And merrily offered.
Yes, merriness, thought Library Cat. He felt it. And, even more surprisingly, he felt himself wishing it upon others too – other Humans, and other cats, but above all the students. He missed them.
He sat. He purred. He dozed blissfully, his tummy still full. Yes, Merry Christmas everyone, Merry Christmas indeed! he thought dreamily as he wended his way back to the chaplaincy to remind himself of the fate of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Recommended Reading
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Food consumed
Cream.
Mood
Merry (but on edge around balloon).
Discovery about Humans
They can be most generous of spirit.
Brown, George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters (1901)
Brown, H. Jackson, Life’s Little Instruction Book (1991)
Carter, Angela, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974)
Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas (1843)
Dunthorne, Joe, Submarine (2008)
Eliot, T.S., ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Fry, Stephen, More Fool Me (2014)
Haig, Matt, Reasons to Stay Alive (2015)
Heaney, Seamus, ‘Digging’, from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables (1862)
Joyce, James, Ulysses (1922)
Larkin, Philip, ‘Ambulances’, from The Whitsun Weddings (1961)
Larkin, Philip, ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, from The Whitsun Weddings (1961)
Larkin, Philip, ‘Whatever Happened’, from The Less Deceived (1955)
Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Shakespeare, William, ‘Sonnet 18’ (1609)
Timpane, John, Poetry for Dummies (2001)
Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting (1993)