Furry Comma

21st November 2012 Wednesday

This morning I find water dripping down the walls in the utility room. Plastic roof leaking. All the boxes of the pussy cat food are sodden. And the wooden picture frame. Our builder can’t come till next week and doesn’t know which day. The lawn looks like a lake.

Later the sun comes out briefly and my husband takes a spade out of the shed and digs a squarish hole in the ground at the bottom of the garden under the trellis by the compost heap. He strikes roots of climbing rose and honeysuckle and clumps of sticky red clay but we decide it will be deep enough for our pussy cat in his box. I imagine him curled up inside it like a sleeping furry comma. It feels surreal to be doing this.

Tonight I leave the fire on by his bed. My husband nearly blows out the tall razor shell  candle which has been burning on the kitchen windowsill for two days, but I stop him in time. My brother gave us this candle and I want to keep it alight for our pussy cat -  to honour him -   till it’s time for him to go.

Tomorrow evening. I wish he would die in his sleep tonight. Then the rain pounding on the plastic roof, splashing off the walls, won’t keep him awake. And I won’t have to go through the day knowing it’s his last and is it the right thing to do.....

Wretched

20th November 2012 Tuesday

Feeling wretched.  

This evening I take the pussy cat to the vet. The mucus constantly dripping form his nose is stained red with blood. He is wheezing and sneezing - spattering the skirting boards, the  kitchen floor, his water bowl. She gives him a different antibiotic injection but says it may not work and takes a swab from his nose to send away for analysis. She weighs him. He has lost nearly 300g since last time. He shits in his carrier on the way home in the car.

I put him in the sink and try to clean him with warm water and cat wet wipes. He tries to drink out of the tap and soaks his head. He is so fragile and wobbly he falls over trying to get to his food bowl.

When my husband comes home from his walk we sit on the sofa and talk and cry. I know I can’t bear to watch our pussy cat get worse and worse and do nothing.

We sit with him on the kitchen floor and talk to him. My husband strokes his head. After a while he moves away and sits with his back to us. We make tea at the table. The pussy cat  keeps his back to us and meows a little. Then he turns and looks at me straight in my eyes. A look that brings my tears. And then I feel he knows too.

Much later I speak to our  lovely South African vet who has been treating him from the beginning.

I think it’s time, I say.

If that’s your gut feeling you must go with it,  he says.

We agree a day and a time.

But I still feel wretched.

Dank Mist

19th November 2012 

It’s a dank afternoon. Wind blowing misty rain into my face under my umbrella as I walk into town. My fingers freeze inside my gloves. When I arrive in the warm cosy room at the Mind and Body Centre my councellor makes me hot mint tea. She asks me to rate my energy levels out of ten. At first I say five. Then two. 

Why not zero? she asks.

It’s not in my genes to give up totally, I say.

She laughs because she knew my father.

What would raise it to a three - your energy level?

Not feeling bad all the time.

At the end of the session she says that during the whole hour I was most alive when I spoke about going away with my sisters to Portugal next week. That and talking about the boundaries I am drawing for myself about my husband and drinking alcohol.

She recommends bringing some lightness and laughter to our situation. Choosing it the way it is....not being a victim.

Sounds like a plan to dredge myself out of this creeping fear which sometimes overwhelms me like a dank mist.....

Bad Hair Day

18th November 2012 Sunday

How was your day? asks my husband in the bath. 

We have spent most of it together. I carry on brushing my teeth - don’t know how to answer him.

Sometimes his lost words make it like a bad hair day - it colours everything. So when we are walking in the sun swept, open, parkland of Knights Hayes Court, kicking through thick carpets of bronze beech leaves, I feel prickly and sad and distant - missing the autumn beauty all around me.

In the car I give up trying to explain what puppets are, sparked by mention of Spitting Image on the radio. My husband used to write sharp and funny political material for a late night satirical show in London - in another long ago lifetime.

We have a constant yoyo conversation about what to do about the pussy cat.....his thin, big-eyed face is also colouring my day like a dark uncertain stain.

And I keep thinking about my dear friend whose daugher is unbearably ill......

Later when my husband is making a list of his wierd and wonderful ceramics for his exhibition he asks me,

What are thos things near God with wings? I think it starts with A. It’s not ambulance is it?

Angels, I say....

reminding me that bad hair days always pass but the hum of angel wings never ceases.....I just need to stop and listen.

And my hair does need cutting.......

A Lost Art

 13th November 2012

I’m making a fresh green curry patste - lots of coriander and garlic and chilli....slicing up long finger aubergines and the dense flesh of a crown prince squash the colour of sunsets...preparing tomorrow night’s supper for my friend from Scotland who is coming to stay for a few days ....and I’m thinking about the faces of the newest and smallest people in  my life.

Yesterday I saw the tiny sleeping face of my great niece, who is just four weeks old, and her shining parents, bright on a computer screen - as if they are with us in my nephew’s kitchen - and not in Beirut where they actually are.

And I watch the face of my great nephew, who is eighteen months old, as he sits next to me in his mother’s car pushing the buttons and turning the knobs on the dashboard with his little fingers totally absorbed in his adventure, everything new and exciting.

He doesn’t need to learn to live in the present..... I wonder when I lost that art....and if it’s possible to learn it again....and let the past go.....leave it behind in the country where it belongs and just love each moment without it being good or bad - each one a smile in my heart....

Octopus

11th November 2012

The pussy cat is doing his best. My husband says he’s put on weight when he lifts him onto the counter top for me to squirt his antibiotic down his throat. It’s for his runny phlemy nose but it’s not working. He’s calmer since we stopped taking him up and down the stairs for a drink.  I sat with him for a long time on Friday and talked to him in my head - letting him go, trusting him to guide me...

Tonight I light a candle for me and my husband while he is downstairs and I am upstairs.....

asking for help with this surrender thing which feels like abandonment but could set me - and him -  free....losening the octopus tentacles I’ve wound round him....one sticky sucker at a time....

Fortified

10th November 2012

Today we are using my nephew's gift of our National Trust Membership. We walk around the kitchen gardens at Barrington Court -  a fifthteenth century house which fell into wrack and ruin and was bought and renovated by the Lyle family of the of the Tate and Lyle sugar company. The sun streams onto rows of huge red cabbages, rather slugged leeks and the bright orange papery domes of straggly cape gooseberries. The air is icy in the shade.

In the cafe I send back my horrid butternut squash soup as it’s luke warm  - it comes back hot but still horrid - too much medicinal thyme flavour.

At the entrance desk to the house the woman offers us two printed tour guides. My husband refuses his,

I can’t read, he says

She laughs but I don’t think she knows why.

We wander through the oak panelled corridors and empty echoey rooms with huge arched fireplaces and up and down turret staircases with twisted barley spindles. My husband mostly gazes out of the mullioned windows at the lovely views beyond with all the trees in their soft gold and bronze colours.

On the way home we stop at Tesco’s in Honiton to buy catfood.  We have a row in the middle of the wine aisle. My husband puts 3 huge bottles into the trolley. He says its a good deal, really cheap wine. I read the labels - it’s English fortifed wine. Even when I tell him what it is -  that it’s not wine it’s like sherry, sweet sherry -  he doesn’t believe me and says he wants it anyway. I feel my anger like liquid murder rushing through my heart.

At home I make supper. He drinks a lot of the fortified wine. He asks me why I don’t want any.

Now he’s sleeping and I’m the one with the headache which of course will only be relieved by a dose of forgiveness....but tonight I’d rather fortify myself with draught poison -  killing myself off in the sea of my own rightousness...... diving into the archives of my grievances where I gather the evidence of all those years of believing myself unfairly treated....drowning in poor me.....Uck.