She was a nice enough beast, but I did not love her never succumbed was, in short, protecting myself. “My cat was a half-grown black-and-white female of undistinguished origin, guaranteed to be clean and amenable. It was only after 25 years that Lessing was able to own another cat.
And for years I matched cats in friends’ houses, cats in shops, cats on farms, cats in the street, cats on walls, cats in memory, with that gentle blue grey purring creature which for me was the cat, the Cat, never to be replaced.” For a week she lay in my arms purring, purring, in a rough trembling hoarse little voice that became weaker, then was silent licked my hand opened enormous green eyes when I called her name and besought her to live closed them, died………” We dosed her with what there was in the house, but that was before antibiotics, and so she died. But she sneezed and wheezed and then grew burning hot with fever.
She screamed, was pulled out into a chill wind, washed in permaganate, for the tub was filthy and held leaves and dust as well as soapy water, was dried, and put into my bed to warm. The cat fell into this tub when it was full of hot water. When I woke in the mornings, my face turned to half-frozen linen the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and antiseptic the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold-but in the crook of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend….Through the months of the dry season the only water for the garden was the dirty bathwater. I was put in the little room at the end of the house….The cat, a bluish-grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed.
“After a certain age-and for some of us that can be very young-there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before, they have appeared before, masked differently, wearing different clothes, another nationality, another colour but the same, the same, and everything is an echo and a repetition and there is no grief even that it is not a recurrence of something long out of memory that expresses itself in unbelievable anguish, days of tears, loneliness, knowledge of betrayal and all for a small, thin, dying cat.
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