Forever Cat

It’s been happening for a little while now. Sounds and voices creep out of my cat’s mouth at inopportune times. At first, it was only odd little noises, a creak or a bell, while he dozed on the windowsill. Then a word here and there, half-swallowed. Last week, a whole sentence over breakfast. Last night was the worst yet, but last night, I understood. 

The house had gone still. The street outside was quiet, and the only light was the small red blink of the smoke detector on the ceiling. He was curled at the foot of the bed, a warm, heavy weight against my ankles, when the sounds came, thin and crackling, like a radio drifting between stations, then sharpening into something crisp and deliberate, like the foley effects in an old radio play. Wind. Rain on a tin roof. A church bell tolling twice, far off. Footsteps on gravel, coming closer. A door creaking open, then closing softly. 

The words started out mumbled and jumbled, overlapping like people talking in another room. Different voices with different moods. I lay perfectly still, telling myself it was the neighbours’ telly leaking through the wall. I always did and it never was.

“That’s the way around the town.” An old man, cheerful, as if he were giving directions to a lost tourist.

“Go up the ladder to get down.” A child this time, laughing. It made no sense, and somehow that made it worse. 

The voices came faster now, tumbling over each other, louder with every line, until one cut clean through the rest.

“Nice to talk, is it?” A woman, sharp and sarcastic, so close to the end of the bed that I pulled my feet up under the duvet. The cat didn’t stir. All at once, the voices stopped. The silence that followed was worse than any of them. I could hear my own breathing, the blood thumping in my ears, the faint creak of the window as the wind leant on it. I counted to ten. Then to twenty. I had almost convinced myself it was over. Did I go to thirty?

Then a woman screamed. It was high and raw, and it stopped too suddenly. I jerked upright, my heart thudding. 

I reached for the lamp, then froze, my hand hanging in the dark. A man was speaking. His voice was worse. It was low and flat, almost gentle, and it kept stopping, starting again, as if he’d lost his place in the sentence. At first, it was too muffled to make out, but then three words came through clearly:

“We buried you.”

I fumbled for the lamp and switched it on. The cat was sitting up on the duvet, facing me. What was odd was that I knew he wasn’t saying this stuff. His jaw didn’t move. His whiskers didn’t twitch. His yellow eyes stayedfixed on mine, unblinking and calm. The sounds just rose out of the small dark space between his teeth, the way music spills from a speaker. His mouth was simply the vessel.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The cat blinked, stretched his front legs across the duvet until his claws snagged the fabric, and hopped down off the bed. He trotted to the doorway, tail up, and looked back at me.

“Mrrp?”

It was his breakfast noise, the one he makes every morning at six when he sits on my chest and stares at me until I get up. Except it was barely past three.

I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to put my feet on the floor in the dark. But he kept at it, louder each time, winding himself around the doorframe, and in the end it was easier to follow him than to lie there listening. I flicked on every light on the way down the hall.

In the kitchen, he went straight to his bowl and sat beside it, looking from the bowl to me and back again, the way he always does. When I didn’t move fast enough, he stood up on his back legs and pawed at my pyjama bottoms. He rubbed his cheek along my shin. He purred. He was so completely, stupidly normal that I laughed out loud, and the sound bounced off the tiles.

I took the box of biscuits down from the cupboard and gave it a shake. His ears pricked up. He meowed again, impatient now, and I crouched down to tip a handful into his bowl.

That was when he stopped meowing.

Then he opened his mouth wide, as if stuck in a yawn, and the voices grew clearer. His eyes stretched wide too, the black swallowing the yellow.

This time there was no mumbling. The voices came through clean and close, one at a time, as if someone were flicking slowly through a box of old recordings.

Seagulls crying. The rumble of a bus pulling away. A shop bell, jangling as a door swung open. Then: “Back again, are you?” It was the old man, warm and wheezy. “Seen you round the bakery, and down by the post office, and outside the pub. That’s the way around the town, isn’t it, puss?” But his voice was changing as he spoke, thinning, then cracking, then rising, the years peeling off it until it was a boy’s voice, bright and breathless. “Forever wandering, you are.” And then old again, so old it was barely there. “Same as when I was a lad.”

The cat’s tail flicked, just once.

Birdsong. Leaves rustling. The clang of a ladder against a fence, then the creak of it taking weight, rung by rung. Then the child, giggling, calling upwards, as if into the branches of a tree. “No, silly! You have to go up the ladder to get down. You’ll be stuck up there forever otherwise.” A pause, then a squeal of delight. “Good boy!”

I looked down at the cat. He was still staring at me, mouth open, but his ears had softened, and something in my chest loosened with them.

The woman came next, and she came in pieces. A gramophone crackling through a dance tune in another room. A clock ticking, a little louder every time it came back.

“Aren’t you a beautiful boy? Yes, you are.” Bright and fond, younger than I’d heard her before.

Then, wearier: “Please, not tonight. I just want to sleep.”

Then the voice from the bedroom, sharp and bitter: “Nice to talk, is it? Nice to talk all night, every night?”

Then footsteps, pacing, back and forth across bare boards. And last, barely a whisper: “Whose voices are those? Whose voices are those? Make them stop.” Then, after a while, very faintly, she was humming the dance tune, and beneath it, steady as anything, a purr.

I stayed crouched on the kitchen tiles with a fistful of biscuits and didn’t move.

The man was the last of them. A car door slammed. Thunder, far off. Rain hissing on leaves. Then the scrape of a spade biting into dirt, over and over, and his breath coming hard. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It has to stop.” Then the soft, final thump of earth.

A long silence. Then the man again, his voice cracked right down the middle. “How are you…? No. No, you can’t be.” A breath.

“We buried you.”

Somewhere underneath it, faint as anything, the clatter of a cat flap.

The cat’s mouth was still open. There was one voice left.

And then, for the first time, I heard a voice I recognised.

It was mine.

Older, thinner, frayed around the edges, but mine. “It’s all right, mate,” it said, soft as anything. “You go on now. Find someone who’ll feed you.”

The cat closed his mouth. He stood, padded across the tiles and pushed his head into my hand, the one still full of biscuits. He ate them straight from my palm, purring the whole time.

I sat on the kitchen floor until the window began to turn grey. He climbed into my lap sometime around four and didn’t leave it.

I’ve thought about it a lot since. I could take him to a rescue centre. I could drive him to the other side of the city and leave him there. I could try what the man tried. But I think I know how that would end: with him trotting back up the path, tail high, wanting his breakfast.

Besides, he’s curled on my feet as I write this, snoring faintly, one paw over his nose.

So, we’ve come to an arrangement. I feed him at six. I leave the radio on at night, so the house is never quite silent, and when the voices come, I scratch him under the chin until they pass. Most nights now, I sleep straight through.

I’m careful about what I say to him. I tell him he’s a good boy. I tell him he’s handsome. I thank him when he leaves a mouse on the bathmat. Little things. Things worth keeping. And sometimes, when he’s asleep, I tell him I love him. I hope he keeps that one.

I hope whoever’s next isn’t too frightened.

I hope they feed him.