VIRUS-TIME SHORT TALKS No. 4: CAT

No. 4 The Designated Cat

It took me five minutes to work out what day it is. Lockdown Monday number 4? Or is it Sunday? It always feels like a Sunday on our street now.

I woke up thinking about the word ‘cat’ and the way people use it to say that something they ate, drank, wore or experienced was not satisfactory. 

Like. What did you think of that new Scorsese film? Cat. 

Are you wearing that shirt for a bet? It’s cat.

Someone somewhere probably reviewed the musical CATS as cat, as in ‘I seen that thing in the West End. The one with all the cats. It was cat.’ The musical is based on a 1939 book of poetry T S Eliot wrote, on an afternoon off from his work as publisher at Faber and Faber. The book’s not cat.

You now have learned enough to see

That cats are much like you and me

And of people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

Our house has a designated cat that visits us everyday. Cats got together at the start of the lockdown – they use miaow, not zoom – and divided up the estate. They keep an eye on us. The sturdy black one, with the red collar, covers four houses up. The grand tabby one, lustrous as a Seville orange, covers the houses near the Doctor’s surgery. Our street’s well catted. 

Our end of the street was designated the chocolate-coloured one: dark chocolate and milk chocolate patterns, with a streak of Tia Maria along the back. His breast is caramel, like a coffee, with added Irish Cream whiskey liqueur. 

He comes in under the front gate, in a reverse limbo, then he rubs himself round the corner. He sits on the windowsill of the room where I work. He gives me the deadpan stare: “what are you looking at? Get on with it.”

Then he’s over the wall, onto the wheelie bins like a parkour-specialist, a quick skite round the vegetable patch, then he bounds onto the compost heap, where he rests on the old carpet covering the furnace-like bio-mass below him. And in recent days he has the sun heating him from above. 

Our designated cat dozes, with one eye open. He’s still on call.

I’m inspired to write a cat-sat-on-the-mat poem, in homage to TS Eliot. One reviewer called it ‘a wasteland’. 

Here comes the Designated Cat. 

Who bears not one ounce of fat

When the weather is sunny

He lies on his tummy

On the compost heap’s designated mat.

Aye, you’re right. That’s cat.

Broadcast on BBC Foyle, The Breakfast Show, 27.4.2020 

Available on BBC Sounds


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