November 26, 2014 - Written by: Beth Teverson

What Pets Can Teach Us…

So the other day I woke up hungover to shit and barely remembering my walk home. I called my friend to reminisce about last night’s frolicking and he kindly informed me of a dramatic monologue I’d indulged in.

‘You told me all about your dead cat.’ He said, ‘You even cried at one point!’

‘Oh dear Lord.’ Thought I, as the small fragments of memory began to resurface. ‘Not that again.’

You see, the cat I was in tears over died almost two years ago. And sure we were close but I thought I’d moved on from this. How can we hold such a deep attachment to a pet- it’s just an animal right?

I thought back to the very beginning. We’d got said cat (formally Ollie but around 10 years later had a Prince-esque name change to Beep Beep) when I was about nine years old.

He was one of eight or nine cats owned by a couple that were moving to Australia. We’d been told as a kitten he was found in a pick up truck traveling from Leeds. We decided to take him and another called Frisbee (I still don’t get why they called it that) to be farm cats – you know- live outside and eat the rats and stuff.

On the second night both Frisbee and Ollie ran away. I remember as I child walking in my dressing gown around the farm that night, endlessly calling and calling for them.

Suddenly I heard a ‘meow’ from the one of the old barns. I followed the call and searched with my torchlight to find a pair of eyes staring back underneath some corrugated iron. I picked him up and he scratched me to hell but I didn’t let go.

I would spend the next few months trying to get him out from underneath a particular set of shelves that he would hide under. I guess you could say we bonded.

Somehow over the next few years he became less and less a farm cat and more just your regular cat. He slept on my bed, on the lower part of my back that always had a bit of pain.

When I was fourteen we moved house for the first time in my life. I was so scared: scared of the future, scared of what I was leaving behind, my whole childhood was in that place.

I was in the last car to leave and I sat with Ollie (or Beep Beep as he was known by then) clinging to me for dear life as we drove away. He kept calling, it was the strangest noise I’d ever heard. I guess when you think of the last time he was in a moving vehicle it’s not so surprising.

A couple of months later I was walking to the bus stop and he followed me half a mile up the hill.

‘Go back!’ I instructed, shooing him away. And although he stopped following me he kept calling and calling.

When I got into school I suddenly became really sick and I’m never sick-hungover maybe- but never just sick.

Later I told my mum how strangely he’d acted.

‘Maybe he just knew.’ She said.

Then, one day in late February about three years later, as all kids inevitably do, I left home. I went travelling for five months and when I returned in July he looked so old. He’d lost a lot of weight and his fur was in clumps.

I went to university a few months later, returning every Christmas and Easter but he never recovered. The last Christmas I returned he was more senile than my grandmother. He was so deaf that I would shout

‘Beep’

‘BEEP!’

But he wouldn’t stir; he just continued to stare into the carpet. A few days after I got back to University my mum called me outside the library (I was in third year y’know). She told me he looked really ill and it didn’t look as though he was going to last the day. I had feared this moment for a really long time. He was going to die and I wasn’t there.

AND THIS IS A CAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT.

But it broke my heart. And we’ve all been there right? That evening as I waited by the phone for my mum to confirm I thought long and hard about it.

Pets become so much a part of our lives, especially as children. They teach us about responsibility about affection and, eventually, how to cope with loss. They’re as much a part of our childhoods as the friends we had and the games we played. And over time they become reflections not only those times, but of us.

I still miss that goddam cat so much, particularly because my nomadic lifestyle doesn’t permit me to get another one. Still, there’s a black and white cat that prowls the streets near where I live. Sometimes he’ll come over and say hi and I’ll stroke him a bit. I’m yet to pick him up and have a dance though – somehow I think it’ll only be Beep that would let me take his dignity like that.

And now I’m positively blubbing again!

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out ‘Bye Bye Princess: The Law of Sacrifice‘?