The Death of the Family Pet

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1

If you’d looked at the lamp post at the end of the street, you’d have seen the sign. The sign that from a distance seemed to be a missing cat poster. These always made The Dog Walker a little sad, so she avoided meeting the mouser’s eye. As she, like any perfectly reasonable person, did not like to be reminded that she could lose something soft and precious to her. And The Dog Walker privately suspected that she wouldn’t ever anyway, that such a misery was a noisy, and unnecessary ditty sung by the tedious, the careless and the mentally ill. Yet, despite The Dog Walker’s attempts to avert her eyes to one of these lost babies, the sign accosted her, violating her. Screeching at her like a catcaller in the night, were the big black and white letters, sandwiched between the face of a rather sorry looking black and white mammal, that screamed its little tragedy that: PICKLE IS DEAD!

No mention of a date for a funeral, as cats’ social circles are small, and generally contained within the walls where they eat and sleep, so any pall bearer was likely to already be present at the breakfast table that morning. The notice was all wrapped up in a plastic wallet to stop the fluffy face melting off in the rain, and upsetting passers by any more than was absolutely necessary. To keep the creature safe-if not from death-then at least from the English weather.

‘How perfectly deranged’ the dog walker thought. After all it was not her cat, so why she should be inflicted with this unhappy, and quite frankly irrelevant news was a puzzle to her. A boring puzzle, like the ones she sometimes politely pieced together of old cobbled streets and Victorian chocolate factories with her Grandparents. No, there was no need for crossing her chest, or bowing her head, or any I’m so sorry for your losses. Instead, she smoothed the creases of her gold buttoned grey felt coat with her left hand, and gave her grey bearded schnauzer, Churchill, a tug on his red, white and blue leash with her right, not noticing that his stately trot was slightly slower than it had been last autumn.

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2

Pickle Hoovier, was born on Easter day at number Twenty-Eight Imperial Drive, and died on Halloween week at number Thirty-Four Imperial Drive. His journey from life to death, being presumably his lengthiest trip for a cat who never left one short suburban street in North Bristol. Like many animals, though his passing hit his own house like an extinction inducing meteor, it was a contained impact, causing only a faint ‘ding-dong-would-you-like- some cat-food-no-thank-you-ours-is-very-fussy-and-will-only-eat-one-special-brand-but-thank- you-anyway’ on his next-door neighbour’s.

Pickle’s head was small and bony: increasingly resembling a velveteen version of the pea sized skulls of small animals you might find in the dusty wooden cabinets of a natural history museum. His long white nose appeared rather bulbous, almost human, due to the fact there was slightly too much exposed pink skin running up the bridge, as if the fur had been rubbed off from two decades of nuzzling and pets. His mouth, that rested above his little white chin, was an upside-down pink-lined v, like the fold of an envelope. A point exaggerated by the fact that he had lost most of his teeth in a brawl with a nasty old tom cat a few years prior. The remaining teeth were short, yellowing nubs, and bordered an anaemically pale prickled pink tongue. His food was digested in one greedy gulp: like a spoonful of cough syrup to a poorly child, or perhaps like a snake unhinging its jaw and consuming its living prey whole. Pickle had once succeeded in consuming a crunch cream biscuit in a single swallow, leaving the family to stare in awe at the remaining crumbs in the carpeted corner for several minutes, like it was a magic trick. (This continued to be a major subject of conversation for years after his death.)

There was still an imprint of spring in the Siamese cat’s body in those final few years. His baggy, white belly hung past his armpits hinting at a kitten-ish chubbiness, for Pickle had been wonderfully fat only a few summers past. But on closer inspection, the skin now hung empty like a potato sack. Similarly, the white of his fur, that even in those last days did not yellow, still could lend itself to an illusion of fluffiness. But only if the matted parts that tended to cluster from his flanks and tail, was carefully broken apart with a thumb and forefinger. (The black cat shaped comb being too rough on the tangles, tearing at his chicken skin, and causing him to cry out.) Initially, the family had tried cutting the clumps out with the kitchen scissors, but this left an unevenness to his coat that seemed completely undignified for the old creature.

No, instead Pickle had a clear routine to lend himself to the hand of the living. The de-matting, that was carried out after tea time, where after he was tempted with salmon skin, or the darker meat of a roast chicken, the creature would be carried like a baby to his stained red cushion in the front room. Pickle would then be washed with a damp soapy towel, starting between his ears, which he liked very much, and ending in the intimate area below his tail, which he liked very little. After his bath, the clumps were unknotted by hand, an action that made his human companion feel like an ape digging around for fleas.

To love a cat is to be part of a very exclusive cult, to remain ungoverned by Christian morality, or blue blood lineage, and to accept as your sovereign not a queen but a kitten. And in these acts of devotion, his human companion felt like Mary Magdalene washing the feet, or rather paws, of her Christ. But was then quickly struck by a shameful unease that this was perhaps a horribly blasphemous thought.

For the family unit that makes the household pet a possibility is a violent little nation state of ideological zealots; its borders closely guarded. A mega church in miniature. In this sense, the family pet is a cute little contradiction.

The decomposition of Pickle had begun nearly a year before his tired front leg was bandaged on the veterinarian’s table, and the poison injected in. It was around November 2020, during the bleak midwinter lockdown, when animals had begun to gather with increasing boldness in his garden, his kingdom. A new neighbour had moved in next door, meaning Clove, the gentle Rottweiler had been replaced by two youthfully overbearing cats with butter yellow fur. On one occasion, the pair even went so far as to venture into his house, and sniff at his food. The audacity! Like moss creeping over a poorly tended grave, nature was popping up in places it would not have dared previously. Pigeons were becoming bolder, drinking at the water in the dirty, old frisbee that was Pickle’s preferred watering hole. Even tiny field mice were spotted napping with their babies next to the badly painted garden gnome. Clods of dirt in the form of overconfident wildlife, stoned down on him. For the garden was an extension of him, his body, his world, and a variety of mewing, tweeting, squeaking mushrooms were beginning to blossom from his (still living) carcass without his consent, and, in his receding power he was helpless to stop it. But he still took his morning perambulation in stiff, arthritic movements, as the rigour mortis set prematurely in. Step by stone paved step: he didn’t like the feel of grass on his paws. And how comforting it was to see his black and white body through the kitchen window, as the kettle boiled.

He had faced indignities in his long life, some relative of the family who used claims of cat allergies to treat him cruelly. Referring to him never as Pickle but only as ‘the cat’-and kicking him with the side of their shoe when no one was looking. “Out of the way, cat!” they said with such nastiness. Then there was the son of that relative who had once inserted crayons into Pickle’s rectum, and who he would always run from at a flashing speed.

“Animals sense evil” the daughter always said in response to this flight, smiling at her insight. She was fifteen, but saw herself as an ancient, with sage like wisdom, though in reality acted much younger, living in the world of children’s picture books and gold star stickers.

Then there was the meeting with Margaret, the pug. (“After the Iron Lady.” his owner had once said proudly.) Margaret had not only bitten Pickle on the tail, but had emitted a death rattle out of her disfigured airways that was so chilling it could have frozen the sun. Generations of inbreeding had stolen the creature of breath, and gifted her with such shallow eye sockets that the question of her bulging peepers prolapsing was not a question of if, rather of when. The sight of such profound suffering for this mutant, so far from the wolf pack, almost emitted something resembling pity (alongside abject fear) in Pickle. Almost.

Though in all honesty, Pickle’s greatest trauma, was not such passing physical intrusions, but rather that terrible day in 2014 when the front room was redecorated. No human being could appreciate the terror of entering a familiar setting and seeing it so hideously warped. It would have been as if you left your front door and the sky was suddenly made of cheap brown leather, and the ground beneath you had turned to chocolate pudding. It was an eldritch terror of the highest order, and yet the humans had found it funny because they could not have possibly understood. The impudence of those upright beasts who anthropomorphise the sacred and unknowable parts of a creature, till an animal is just another piece of merchandise to be bought and sold at the toy store. What a blessing it is that all nature is not human nature!

But there was no indignity like old age.

Pickle had seemed almost startling large in his youth, with big white lion paws the size of a human hand, but as if time was prematurely pulling his body back into the dirt, he seemed to be so small in that final year. He was black and white: a tuxedo cat, half Siamese, half giant panda his cat guardians joked. (Sometimes the joke varied to half Siamese, half cow, which the family found equally amusing.)

A black clover shaped splodge, like a half moustache, illuminated the right side of Pickle’s nose. (Though the family always cringed when some boorish visitor referred to him as a ‘Kitler’, with a thigh slapping chuckle.) His ears, though not as cartoonish large as they had been as a kitten, were certainly big and bat like, with folded skin in the corner where a greasy, gritty material had begun to gather. The insides of the ear were pale and exposed, with a stalk in the middle-that resembled the poisonous stamens within the petals of a lily, and a tendency to gather clumps of sticky black wax. His yellowing claws, were lined with a thick brown dirt that was most likely faeces around their root. Yet, any attempts at cleaning carried the risk that the brittle nail may detach entirely, like deshelling a nut. The furry trousers of Pickle’s bended back legs were patchy and frayed, with the pinkness of exposed skin seeming rather obscene. His shoulder bones were sharply pointed, like the arches of a Gothic cathedral, giving the creepy impression that the little thing was turning into a living tomb, a skeletal Saint Chappelle.

The Pickle cat’s voice was his most distinctive feature, the Siamese cat having the most

gutturally, demonic scream of any of God’s little things. It can penetrate through tightly sealed double glazing, and trample past discreet net curtains to trespass pleasant small talk and ravage any afternoon nap. Some liken it to the crying of babies, but surely the howling of those cast into the gutters of hell would be more appropriate! It caused complaints from up and down the street which led the father (an upstanding Methodist preacher of a man) to lie outright, claiming the screams to be foxes copulating in the night. Nothing to do with his house, his family, his cat. But how quiet it had been when that screaming stopped.

Pickle’s eyes were murky, polluted green swamps, the kind you’d find a shopping trolley sticking out of. After a nap, his ridged third eyelid would slide unpleasantly into view, its milk white membrane slipping queasily around the surface of the eyeball. Certainly, his sight must have been smeared and soiled in those last months-though the daughter, acting as an amateur optician, did try to give him regular sight tests by waving a pen back and forth against his face. Results were unclear. In her weekly food tech class, the daughter had to fill in little paper booklets on the different food types. That week it had been fish. The teacher had told her that when checking the good health of a fish at market you are meant to check if the eyes are shiny and bright. Certainly, no one would want to buy Pickle at market for their fish supper, which is just as well, as she needed him here, with her.

If Pickle was an art history lover (he was not) or if he could recognise his own reflection in a mirror (he could not), he might have compared his own corpse-like countenance to Holbein’s own vision of the dead Christ in his stony tomb. Green skinned: putrefied, the son of God reduced to a chunk of smelly cheese at a supermarket counter. Life size but lifeless, a dead doll, with glassy open eyes.

Alarmingly, cats’ eyes do stay open after they die, squashing any illusion of post-mortem peace. Though, the family had never paid much thought to a cat’s eye ball, as the creature only a minute ago was a singular, named entity, rather than a list of mouldering, faltering and tumorous parts. (A heart that was beating too slow, a stomach full of growths that was tender to the touch, a nose that was too pale, bones too brittle.) But without the electricity to animate the creature, how quickly the now sightless, yet still staring eyes had become uncanny. Bulging in their lactescent slick, the daughter had been keen to clean them with a tissue, to scrape the brown, muddy tears out of their duct before the big sleep, to make him look neat and nice, but it did not make things any less unpleasant.

Pickle had suffered awful bowel problems during the last weeks of his life, releasing his bladder in hot, lengthy jets across the sofa, over his special red cushion, and sometimes onto family member’s laps. Pickle looked up at them with murky and unblinking eyes as they responded with shrieks, cleaning sprays and cries of ‘bad cat!’ This was all naturally meaningless, the creature could not be shamed or shouted into self-consciousness, as he simply had no sense of self. His tuxedo markings after all were only an illusion of high society formal wear, the creature was in fact completely and unceremoniously naked, with no intention to apologise for anything.

The question of hygiene became the creature’s death sentence. On the early morning of the last day of the mammal’s long life, he was found in his fleecy bed covered in the now cool waters of his own liquid excrement. It was this bad odour that caused a family member to phone the vet because, they decided, if something did not smell right, then something was not right.

The appointment was for midday, and the daughter and the father decided to spend Pickle’s few remaining hours attempting to bathe the feculent creature in the kitchen sink. The water exposed how little of Pickle was left, his black and white fluff had been shrouding the fact that the creature was now only bones. His tail all wetted down looked like the wormy tail of a plague infested rat, his legs were slicked down sticks, and his spine was just too lumpy to belong to a living thing. In a desperate attempt to hide the family pet’s status as almost-corpse, they tried to puff him back up with a hair drier, which only fanned the scent of burning dung across the kitchen. Save for one long yowl of senility, Pickle was largely and unexpectedly silent and motionless during his first, and final, bath.

‘There was no fight left in him.’ recalled the father several days later at the kitchen table-talking like an old veteran about a fallen comrade.

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3

It would be appropriate here, or perhaps much earlier in the story, to translate the events to first person, to have Pickle tell you the grand old story of his life like a Dickensian hero. It would start with his birth, fluffy and new, next the early months with his brothers and sisters, and Siamese mother. Then onto his first meeting with the family, where he was exchanged for a bottle of wine and taken home, only a few doors down the road, during the long summer holiday. And then on and on, until that final scene on the vet’s table. But Pickle quite simply does not speak English, or any other language that could be translated to a coherent narrative beyond base sensations of: warm, play, hurt, eat, drink, DOG, run, fight, jump, BIRD, up, SCARED and sleep.

While watching the old horror movie, The Exorcist, the boyfriend of the daughter had said, somewhat unkindly, that a demon would never possess a creature as simple as Pickle, that any malevolent force would glide over him as indifferently as if he was a potted plant.

Unburdened both by history and the pronoun ‘I’, a cat does not have to worry about such shallow things as the possession of a soul or the existence of God as in their merping intensity they are already a part of the divine.

He showed neither fear or despair in his final moments, a car ride being a thing much more frightening and strange than something as warmly ordinary as death.

Pickle in fact died purring, and though he was on the hard flat table, he felt a sensation of falling.

But though the vet was kind, she could not have seen Pickle as the God that he was, being just another sad little creature, with a sad little family. The vet, like so many others, offered up the wilted consolation that a long life, meant a good death. A good death! As if death could be anything but mean.

The daughter, who had had no concept of death beyond dancing skeletons in picture books, believed in the good death until that moment that death actually came. Had thought it profound to write vague statements about ‘passing on’ and going ‘back to the earth.’ Half remembered quotes attributed to old painters on the internet about flowers growing from dead bodies, and that being eternity in her religious studies homework. Something about atoms and stars, and bodies being made out of the same thing as all that celestial stuff, so nothing was lost or gained. Though she had gotten an A*, a stamp, and a sticker, she quickly realised this was all quite wrong. That death was a smelly and sinful thing, that offered no peace, and that the earth was not an eternal warmth, but cold, hard and hateful. No hell beneath to warm the paws.

Quite useless in death, Pickle’s flesh did not feed any baby animals, growling and bouncing in their newness. His bones did not make any singing instruments, sharp tools or mighty weapons. His fur was not made into a fancy hat or a part of a winter coat, or a piece of a baby blanket. No red roses or white lilies sprung from his part of the cemetery. Nothing was built or made or eaten or grown from his garden grave, as he had grown and eaten in life.

It rained as they brought him out into his garden, his own personal kingdom of Xanudu. A little toy, wrapped in a pink blanket the vet had given them, no longer able to resist the confining swaddles of dress up, just another little plaything, as the funeral possession moved limply forward. The father being a pious man in the Wesleyan tradition, did not attend the funeral because cats, he asserted, did not have souls.

The death of the family pet was the beginning of the end. As if Pickle had been their gatekeeper against death, guarding the family in their little walled garden of innocence, and stopping the skeletons from climbing over. Soon there would be more funerals, none of those were particularly peaceful affairs either, with no real story or sense to them. Death being ultimately a random selection of objects given outsized emotional significance. The carousel of vending machine sandwiches at the hospital, the blue headed pimples of mould in somebody’s bathroom, the window pane of a church, the corner of a carpet. There was recorded music, piano and pop, and flowers in the shaped of nouns, and buffets with crips in bowls and cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and all the things you thought there would or should be. But no one was accepting of what was meant to be the inevitable, clasping hands resisted the moving of the body after the service, and some people screamed.

The graveyards weren’t peaceful either, they were too big for one thing. A thickly veined statue of a horse for someone named John who presumably was not a horse but there was no man astride him to suggest otherwise. The graves chiselled like teddy bears for the children, which the daughter was told to look away from. Plastic windmills in the gravel, blue Christmas lights with a battery pack over the grass of someone’s Dad, stone kittens with sparkly eyes for someone’s Grandma, some soggy Christmas cards, and a big mossy Jesus. Nice little objects, intent on domesticating death.

And as the daughter held the festering alterpiece of Pickle’s body, small, small, so small, she knew that she wanted death to have no part in anything she loved, for it was vicious and burrowing and bad. And no clumsily carved cat shaped pumpkins placed over Pickle’s corpse hole on Samhain night would make it any better. Even if they do say that the veil between the spirit world and the human world is the thinnest. Even though they were not meant to celebrate Halloween anyway, as the father asserted that it was the devil’s holiday, and that death was nothing to fear, because he'd be seated with the angels anyway.

So, Halloween came, with Pickle in the ground, and five hundred children wearing skeletons costumes, bloody masks and cat ears trampling down the street, beating down the doors of Imperial Drive, whooping and whinnying with their prizes, a father in an inflatable tyrannosaurus rex costume as their suffering, silent chaperone.

And there he is above the houses, over the roofs, and past The Dog Walker whose schnauzer’s steps got slower by each passing season. Elevated from the miniature mountains of suburbia, is Pickle, our Old God, certainly not an angel, but something large, holy, and altogether alive, bounding through the black sky on Halloween night.

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