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COLUMN<br />
East of Earwig<br />
Read-only memory<br />
Photo by Chrissy Bridge<br />
My wife's flicking through photos of Rupert<br />
the cat on her phone. One shows him almost<br />
seventeen years ago, a tiny saucer-eyed creature<br />
with exactly the same symmetrical black-andwhite<br />
markings as the adult cat I came to know.<br />
"I miss my little kitten", she says. I miss him too,<br />
although he was never my little kitten. Instead, he<br />
chose to adopt me in middle age. (His, obviously.<br />
I'm still in denial about mine.) Sadly, Rupert's<br />
not been himself for several weeks, which is why<br />
we're consoling ourselves by looking through old<br />
photos. At the moment he's sitting on the bedroom<br />
windowsill, although we only know it's him<br />
because his name's written on the label attached<br />
to a little wicker wallet. The preceding words on<br />
the label are 'In Loving Memory Of'.<br />
Rupert had been forgetting things for a few<br />
months. He'd forgotten where his outdoor toilet<br />
was. Then he forgot to eat. Eventually he forgot<br />
to keep breathing, too. One Friday morning, we<br />
woke up but he didn't. We found him lying in his<br />
bed with his offside front leg stretched forwards,<br />
looking about as relaxed as he ever did. Frozen in<br />
the perfect taxidermy of death.<br />
We couldn't bury him under his favourite tree<br />
because we were moving house and didn't want<br />
to leave him behind. So we had him cremated<br />
at Raystede's Peaceways crematorium, where we<br />
bid a sad farewell to him in his feline form and<br />
retrieved him a few days later in a disconcertingly<br />
gritty pocket-sized packet. And we wept, not<br />
just for the cat we'd lost but also for the love we<br />
weren't able to give him any more, for the extra<br />
love he'd never know.<br />
Of course, he's haunting our new home. Bad<br />
ghosts haunt with a malevolent presence. They<br />
put white sheets over their heads and say "woo".<br />
A cat poltergeist might yowl mysteriously from<br />
the wardrobe at midnight or nibble their initials<br />
into an unwary mouse. Rupert haunts us with his<br />
absence. We know the shadow by the window<br />
isn't his. There's a cat-sized gap on the sofa<br />
between me and Mrs B. The buttery crumpet<br />
crumbs remain on our breakfast plates.<br />
We'd expected to lose something when we moved.<br />
A picture frame was dropped. A self-assembly<br />
cupboard started disassembling itself. We spent<br />
a week with only a single cereal bowl between us<br />
before the rest of the mismatched set emerged.<br />
But we'd not expected to leave some of our happy<br />
memories behind.<br />
Fortunately, plenty remain. We have hundreds of<br />
Rupert photos, all copied to secure online storage<br />
in some Californian bunker. Most importantly, we<br />
still have Harry, the backup cat. He's very fond of<br />
his new home... and of sitting in the extra space<br />
that's now available on the sofa. It almost looks<br />
like he's posing for a portrait. Mark Bridge<br />
31