Letters to the Lost: 1

During the first lockdown back in March 2020, my writer friend suggested we each write a letter to something we had lost as a way of keeping ourselves motivated to write during that period. What follows is my first offering:

Dear Merry,

I bought you from a pet shop in Lewisham on a whim when I realised a change of address to a quiet life in a sleepy London suburb was not going to change a thing. I bought you because he was missing his own cats, because he was stuck in an eternal rebound of longing for his childhood home and wanting to run screaming from it, because the impact when he hit rock bottom had shattered something less tangible but more precious than bone… because I needed something to love that did not terrify me.

I put the cost of your purchase on my student credit card, it was that easy. You mewed in fright all the way home on the noisy London bus, and when I opened the flap of your temporary cardboard home in our living room, you leapt straight under the cover of my thick brown hair, clung to my shoulder, sucked my jumper and kneaded my bare skin with your tiny pin-prick claws. Like us, you were too young to leave your mother.

You were tabby but had a hint of Bengal, perhaps the reason for your £80 asking price, quite a sum, especially back then. You had the greenest eyes I had ever seen, with obsidian pupils forever contracting and expanding as you scanned for mischief and threat. We bought you a few feather toys and a basket to sleep in and I called you Meredith, The Merry Cat or Merry for short.

He didn’t know, but I named you after the girlfriend of a first crush of mine. He was my secondary school best friend’s older brother and from the age of 12 until the age of 15 I utterly adored him. I spent hours practising saying ‘Hello’ and not blushing; a feat, even when I met him again in my 30’s at her wedding, I don’t think I ever managed. In Chemistry one morning, my best friend had passed me a note that read:

“Sorry to tell you this news but J has a girlfriend!”.

I passed back my note: “Devastated! How can this be happening???”

Her name was Meredith, Merry for short (’as in Merry Christmas’ she would say with a laugh, according to my friend’s letter) and she was kind, quirky, pretty and funny, and he, naturally, was head over heels in love.

“Don’t worry, you’ve still got Axl Rose,” she’d said as an act of consolation.

I am still not sure why, all those years later I would remember this and name you after something that had dealt me a blow. But it suited you, and I think perhaps I was attempting to make myself impervious.

Home was an upside down rented 2 bedroom house in a development called Waterside, named due to its proximity to the river Beck, the old aquatic boundary marker between Sussex and Kent that ran alongside our house. We kept you inside for the obligatory number of weeks following your inoculations, and you would terrify us by scaling the curtains and dangling off of the Juliet balcony on the first floor. Luckily the integral garage already had a cat flap, and when you were allowed to venture outside, we propped the internal garage door open with an old Caterpillar boot so that you could come and go as you pleased.

When my Mum visited, she assured me you were a wild cat; a mad, untamed feral thing that did not belong in the house. She only ever saw you bouncing off of the walls, stalking and pouncing on bare feet, or was forced to dodge the partially sheathed claws that darted out from the overhang of the stair case where you would crouch, attempting to swat every passing human head on their way out of the house to work or university. She never saw you at night though, under my hair, curled into my neck, or on your back on my lap purring as I tickled your soft white belly fur.

He also adored you but, like the move, your arrival only offered a temporary break in the weather. The bandages came off in time and he hid his scars with long jumpers, even in the heat of summer, but the the bottles continued to accumulate in the garage at a slow and steady pace. You slept on the end of our bed and when he stayed up late listening to records and passing out on the sofa, you stayed in bed with me.

One afternoon I came home to find a puddle of wet clothes by the front door, and upon walking upstairs, I saw that he had broken our latest agreement by opening a beer before 6pm. Apparently he had been trying to sleep in the afternoon when he heard your mournful yowls coming from the river. Had you been trying to catch a bird? Or merely miscalculated your showy tight rope walk routine along the metal barriers the council had put up along our stretch of the river? It was summer, so the river was not particularly fast or deep, but you could not jump out again so he had jumped in, still wearing his old man slippers which he wore purely because I hated them so much. He lifted you to a nearby branch and you had leapt out of the river and ran straight into our house. He meanwhile could not find any purchase on the vertical concrete walls encasing this urban waterway, and was reduced to calling out to a neighbour for rescue. Luckily our group of nine houses were pretty much all populated by retired and elderly occupants and a group of older ladies, whose houses you were known to frequent for a cheeky fish supper, lowered a ladder down to him.

I do wonder Merry what you made of the two of us. The constant cloud of Camel Lights when we were fit for them and cheap rolling tobacco when one of us, or both, had found spurious reasons to quit our part-time jobs? Did the woman next door but one feed you properly when, in his mania following a visit to his parents, he would come in the house and shout up the stairs that I would need to pack and grab my passport as we were heading to Gatwick to see what last minute plane tickets we could get on that day. Destinations were unimportant, it was all in the getting gone.

What did you make of all that vinyl spinning on the record player that you loved to watch wide eyed and always attempted to pat with your sheathed paw. Did you like Nick Cave? Side with him over Galaxy 500? Or did you like my love of the Blues, Will Oldham and Northern Soul? Did those towers of books everywhere that were forever toppling onto you as you played on them, cause you any real harm?

What did you do in those hours when we took our nightly walks, whatever the weather, around the quiet suburban streets? You began to know our routine when at 10pm we would stop our own work, put on our coats and head out into the night, not returning until 1 or 2am? I’d see you watching us go from the bedroom window, and sometimes you would race us through the front gardens as we walked along the main road, him carrying a bag of cans into the crisp, suburban night. The orange glow of a stranger’s living room, looks so much warmer than mine.

You know Merry, it was all I had left up my sleeve at the time after he refused the professional help offered. Motion, keep him moving and talking. Under stars of violet. Every night it felt that we embarked on our own quest for Ithaca and the passage to dawn was strewn with peril of an unnamed kind. Under stars of blue. He was cleverer than me, a first class philosophy graduate, insanely well read and a brilliant musician who seemed to spend his daylight hours honing his bladed words, or gathering the heavy stratum of his ideas that had fissured and compressed over the course of his life, to throw at me as we walked in the shadows. Under stars of silver. It was between these vicissitudes that I danced and dodged through those dark streets, him constantly demanding that I make my arguments on behalf of God, womankind and the art, books and music that I loved, while he tried his best to spear or squash them. Under stars of you.

I know this dancing of mine pleased him, and like a teenage Scheherazade, I was grateful for the abundance and ease that my own words flowed, tumbling from me in a thousand shades. They hovered in the air for me to grab at and transform like a balloon puppeteer, and I took care not to burst my creations before releasing them into the night’s sky to delight him. I would grasp other heavy weighted words with deftness; weaving, pairing, double knotting and laying them in front of us to tread on and bear us up, while dropping small, smooth ones behind us that would reflect the moonlight and lead us back home again if we lost our way. And despite the viciousness of some of these attacks when he would accuse me of not ‘being true to myself’, perhaps there is a part of myself I’m only beginning to acknowledge, that misses these high-stake nightly combat sessions.

I bear no physical scars from those days like he does Merry, but words still act as my autoimmune response to life and I routinely struggle to regulate their flow. What I may think is a playful display of cascading and jumping fountains, all to often results in my turning to find a prone, drenched audience, left in a state of bewildered silence.

When you were around a year old I realised that what was tracking us through these days was growing bolder. I started to see its shadowy figure everywhere I looked. I also suspected that it was him and not me that it stalked so relentlessly, but that it would not offer me mercy if I stood in the way of its attempt at a final take down, especially since he was not going to face it, or even try to defend himself. He had settled, almost comfortably into fatalism and I was isolated and exhausted. I started looking around other areas in London, making enquiries in secret, circling ads in Loot. Every phone call, every attempt at escape returned the same result: the landlord does not accept cats. I knew I would have to take you with me, I could not leave you with someone who could barely look after themselves.

Eventually I started to feel something resembling resentment when I put out your food each morning. I imagined dropping you off at a cat’s home and then dashing round to the estate agents to put down that deposit I had been saving on the sly for the home that would change everything and make my life my own again. So convinced I became that a new address would solve my problems, that I repeated that process 21 times over a period of 21 years, earning the nickname ‘The Littlest Hobo’ which my friends would often hum the theme tune to when I walked late into the Blackheath bar. Turns out I was wrong about not being hunted.

I wonder though Merry if you read my mind during that time, sensed this as I lay next to you hearing your deep purrs, saw this in my dreams as you lay curled up on the end of my bed.

One day I came home from uni and he said he had not seen you all day. You did not come home that evening. The next evening, as I headed off for an evening shift at Blockbusters, your bowl of food remained untouched. The next morning, still no sign of you. He started to knock on doors and spoke of making posters. I said I would knock on our neighbours’ doors, which I did, but no-one had seen you. I hoped you had not been snatched or hurt but I also recognised another hope that lingered somewhere in the back of my brain: the hope that you would not be found.

When I did not try too hard to find you and refused to help him make posters, he became frustrated and angry. Later that evening when I left my reading to see if he wanted to go for a walk, I opened the door of our study to see he was sitting in semi-darkness, listening to John Fahey, chain smoking and drunk, very drunk. From the off I could tell he had marinated in this mood for some time and decided to extract myself before a fight could be picked. Not possible.

“I know you are going to leave me. The estate agent called and left a message for you. Heard that area in Lewisham’s a shit hole, it will suit you just fine. Good luck. You didn’t have to kill the fucking cat though.”

“I didn’t kill the cat.”

“But the rest…?”

“But the rest is true. I can’t be here anymore, with you.”

“Finally, finally she speaks the truth.”

I slid down the wall and for once stayed silent, letting the words lacerate, death by a thousand cuts.

But I didn’t die that night. I took myself upstairs, put a chair under the door handle and called for you in whispers one last time out of the bedroom window into the gloom. When I did not hear your responding miaow or see that glint of white chest appearing through the bushes, I said a silent prayer for you, thanking you my beloved Merry, for your self-sacrifice.