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COLLECTED POEMS     THE PAIN CLINIC     THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT     KEAT'S HOUSE     

You came to me out of the mist one early November afternoon, you had come from nowhere but you were there and would not go away. I remember it was Saturday and Ezra was there and he had made several reluctant attempts to chase you away, but each time you came back and by then an unease had begun to set in.

We had three cats already and could not afford any more but your insistent meow filled me with disquiet. Lost and frightened you had managed to find a way through the high-walled trellised gardens to the strip that led to the window at the back of the block. It had been announced that the weather was to change that night and the mild late autumn would plunge below freezing. With this in mind I wondered how would you survive and where would you go without food to help you on your way. We had begun to feel churlish and ashamed of continually turning you away but you were afraid and you seemed to be rooted to one place at the edge of the strip. Your constant meowing overwhelmed the distance between yourself and us and only a saucer of food made any difference to what had become a standoff. The nearer you came the more desperate you were. The food disappeared in moments. Water seeped from your eyes and ran down your face. You were sneezing and it was the first time I had heard a cat sneeze like that. It was now clear you were very ill and we had somehow to try to let ourselves down from the window in order to rescue you. You were too tired to run anymore and sensing that cats lived here, we picked you up without a struggle. Your ears were hot and red but you continued to eat until we had to stop you, fearing your stomach would burst. You lay on your side and curled around an empty bowl of milk and fell asleep. Only then did we see how beautiful you were, a cat with slanting blond-rimmed eyes and a plunging Roman nose, an eighteen-month-old ginger tom with almond under-fur, the texture of old teddy bears. The blond rings on your tail were used to describe you in the notices that I felt obliged to put up in St John’s Wood the next day. You had simply wandered off and it would take years to realise that the flu you were suffering from would have impaired your sense of smell, preventing you from returning to the home you had left behind. You reminded us of a miniature of Mozart and so we named you and also for your constant way of walking along the piano keys. Years later Ezra told me that the next day he had taken all the notices down.

I had passed that year trying to recover from a nine-month protest in Oxford’s Wellington Square. I had run out of money for the fare for the coach each day and had spent the previous Christmas phoning round the Arts Council and the Arvon Foundation asking if they could fund a protest about the election to the Chair of Poetry in 1994. The last of my youth and the last energy I would ever have had drained away just trying to get there each day. And so I sat for most of 1995 by the open window, watching my own cats play outside, I felt anaesthetised by a growing stupor which allowed me to think only as far as the end of each day. The past was melting behind me and the future lay as a black pall. It seemed that I too was lost and nameless in the heart of St John’s Wood without the words to describe an unimaginable fear.

Stephen Spender had died in June and the few yards space between where he lived and the poplar that spanned the distance was all that was left to salvage from that year. I had fallen silent. Your persistent meow was the only sound that reached me, conjured out of the empty air as though by an unseen hand. Each day I wondered how you had found us, whose heart had you broken, for once you were surely loved. You craved for the hem of my dressing gown when it caught across your face and your place was always by my side, the last cat at the door each time I left and the first at the letterbox, a paw on either side of your upturned face when I returned.

Six years ago, without protest, you accepted four kittens into your life while still grieving for Beethoven, a cat that had been entirely besotted with you for almost five years. It would take you many months to adjust to Mahler, a polar bear of a cat, put there to take Beethoven’s place and to whom, in your turn, you would become besotted. You saw me through breakdown after breakdown, protest after protest. The poems that were written then were written alongside your meows, for you seemed to mimic Beethoven’s wailing at anything read aloud. The times I have chased you down the flat in order to get back to a poem, and so we all lived, seven cats and me in an increasingly cluttered space, filling slowly with softly forgotten and abandoned manuscripts.

I was too depressed to notice much about you this year apart from feeding you and making sure you went outside. I never saw the weight gradually leaving you and failed to register your reluctance to jump onto surfaces once so familiar. I considered parting with you two years ago to give you a better life and a garden in which you could wander at your will but I thought the other cats would miss you too much and instead, at the end of June, I added another kitten to distract you and make you play again as you used to. You were the only cat to accept the new arrival and in a moment were transformed into the grandfather of Emily who was eight weeks old. The only other change I had noticed was that you were no longer at the door when I returned each Saturday from the visit to my son in Leeds, in your place was the kitten. When I try to think about the last six weeks I remember how casually I left you all behind, exactly ten months ago tonight, pausing only to leave you enough food for the next day. I was too ill to weigh the impact of that night on you, your welfare for the first time was not in my thinking, only the end lay before me, it was the only thing that mattered.

Now ten months later and still trying to recover from that night, I was caught between the departure of a landlord who had harassed me without let up for three years and the arrival of a maniacal property developer who bought up the block from his predecessor and who drove us all before him with drills and sledgehammers. Your last four months were spent cowering from the masonry drills above and below and your home had been absorbed into the building site that lay all around. You must have known that once again the year would end as it had begun.

Two days into a protest in Parliament Square I was aware that one of you was sneezing, a sound I had not heard for eleven years, another had started to cough and as the days passed each one of you would succumb. It seemed that my life had come full circle, Parliament Square had replaced Wellington Square as the place where I would write. Overnight the flat became a field hospital and Mozart who had lived to eat now found food intolerable. You had lost your sense of smell again and could see no reason for eating or drinking. After admission, an x-ray revealed an enlarged heart that cat flu had exacerbated and after three days the vets had to give up on you. In a side room just before you were to be put down I asked you instinctively seven times, for each of the cats: ‘Mozart, do you want to come home?’ Each time you answered with a single meow. It was Friday night and I took you home in congestive heart failure and kept you going until Monday evening and it seemed that the only problem remaining was how to make you eat. And so I nursed you for eight days with another cat beside you, feeding you both through naso-gastric tubes that you so hated, it was decided to remove it and leave you to find your appetite again. Without it, you tried to jump onto the table when you came home, where I found you clinging with your claws, too weak to hold on.

We were almost through a month of cat flu, we had one more appointment on Thursday evening and all that was remaining after the all-clear was how to make you take your medication. I was looking forward to our evening together after taking you out on a lead for the first time since your illness. It was disturbed without warning by a distressed neighbour who could not accept help from the crisis team. I knew that Mozart was finally eating and as I ran my fingers in triumph through his straw-coloured fur, I kept on saying: ‘You’re going to live to be an old soldier’.

At 3am I managed to get back down to my own flat and he was fast asleep. The next morning he came as he had always done from the far end of the flat, to rub his face against my feet, his way of asking: ‘Are you alright?’ This was the purpose of his excursion and it reminded me that Mozart was his old self again. It was 1pm and time for the other cats to go outside. He made it clear that he wanted to go out and roam with them as he had done before. And so he went off in a crowd of cats, the blond ring on his tail slightly lifted from the ground. This was his reward for all he had endured.

At 5pm he was found after three and a half hours of calling his name. He was in the furthest reach of an adjoining garden, so camouflaged and hidden under the roots of overhanging ivy and divested shrubs that he could barely be seen, he had remained silent all afternoon, although only a wall separated myself from him. I turned to the neighbour who had let me into her garden and I said: ‘It’s as though you have just given me a million pounds’, and in the few yards it would take from that door to mine, I felt overwhelming joy. As I opened the flat door I ushered him in as I had always done, his back legs buckled beneath him, I thought it was just the cold, it had begun to rain in that dark place where he had dragged himself and as I stood him up again I called out: ‘Mozart, are you alright?’ and then ‘Mozart, what’s the matter?’.

Only the kitten was awake and she saw him drag himself along the couch as he must have done in the undergrowth, he was crawling to his favourite chair and as I placed him there, I saw him rub his face against the cushion for consolation, in the same way as the hem of my dressing gown would fall across his face when he was young. In the time it took to grab my coat he had fallen to the floor in order to pull himself into the dark enclosure of the low draped coffee table. There was only the time left now to take him to each cat and to call out: ‘Say hello to Mozart’, so that he wouldn’t know it was the end.

He was meowing continuously and only stopped when we reached the vet’s. Somehow I managed to persuade them to try for one last time to save him by putting him on a drip. I was in a state of shock as I placed him in the cage. I forgot to kiss him or hold him, thinking again he would pull through, I simply laid him in his cage.

That shock was broken the next morning by Barry phoning from Paris to say that the cat had died. I kept on repeating, I let him out, I let him out. My last evening with Mozart had been lost forever. He disappeared into the late October afternoon in the direction of where he had come from. He seemed always to have been aware that he was homeless once, and now I was left with his name, with nowhere to go.

5th November 2006

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