Cat Lover
At 09:07, Emily was sitting in her office cubicle, chewing at her nails. She was distracted. She had buried a cat only half an hour before she had got to work. Her desk was in the heart of the shared office space, amongst the leafy plants in terracotta pots and neon bean bags scattered on Amtico flooring. Despite the cat’s death, Emily was more perturbed than bereaved. The cat, Cindy, had belonged to Christine, her old flatmate, who had moved out three months ago to teach English in Beijing for a year. Emily had never really bonded with her - the cat, that is, or Christine, really, come to think of it.
The Tuesday after the Friday that Christine left, Phil sent Emily an Instagram DM letting her know that things weren’t working anymore. He came to pick up his things when Emily was at work - she had forgotten to take the key out from under the Snoopy doorstop. In hindsight, she wished she’d replaced the key with that nurse costume he’d made her wear two Valentine’s Days ago. Never mind, it probably wouldn’t have fit under Snoopy anyway.
She swivelled on her office chair. Her teeth, tongue and lips were negotiating the removal of a sliver of dead skin that had flaked free from the cuticle of her left pinky finger. This was an art in which Emily usually excelled, but, in a split-second of ill-judged over-ambition, the tug of her teeth ripped the loose skin over the barrier from cuticle to flesh - instant haemorrhage. Given her expertise in the nail-biting field, she was equally across its risks. The only way to control the bleeding was to push it firmly against the side of her thigh, whereby the denim of her navy jeans served as an excellent tourniquet - the fabric thick enough to absorb the blood and dark enough to conceal its evidence. Phil would’ve been smug if he was there, seeing the blood, he always used to bat her hand away from her mouth. Haven’t you grown out of that habit yet, he’d say.
Chewing her cuticles helped her mull over her options, like a cow chewing the cud. When the cuticle ruptured, the best solution she had come up with for the cadaver was to stash it in a park bin. Not her local park. But, a nice one, nonetheless: Newell Park. It had bigger bins, with wider apertures.
In truth, Emily hadn’t buried the cat, she’d actually just scooped it up with a dustpan and brush and put it back into its basket. When she had left the flat, it looked like it was sleeping. Deeply. Deadly.
She had considered throwing the cat out from the balcony - which was really just a big window she used to smoke out of - before Phil quit. Ultimately, Emily had decided against the cat-balcony-flinging plan: her flat was on the seventh floor and looked over the car park. At best, a neighbour would have found the cat’s splattered carcass in their parking space and disposed of it accordingly, and, at worst, the falling corpse may have concussed said passing neighbour, which could have led to a law-suit and a £350 fine for owning a pet, against accommodation regulations.
At 10:01, Emily decided it wasn’t excessively early to dismiss herself from her desk, under the guise of grabbing a coffee: soya milk latte with half a sugar. Her flat was only ten minutes from work, but, this morning, she made it door to door in a record eight and a half minutes.
Right.
Cat still in the basket.
Obviously: still very dead.
Bag for cat?
Rucksack.
No, her mum had got her that hot pink Eastpak two Christmases ago and was a handy overnight bag for trips to Kent on family gatherings.
Tesco bag?
Too thin - might tear: odd looks on the bus.
Bright orange drawstring bag from Year 9 PE?
Perfect.
With the cat in the bag, so to speak, Emily got on the bus and rode it to the Newell Park - the one with the big bins. She grabbed her coffee en route. It was only 10:43 as she passed through the park’s high, black iron gates and onto its gravel footpaths. There was a bin just by the entrance - she could dump the cat there- but that seemed a little rushed. It would be disrespectful to part with the cat at the first bin she saw, not to mention a tad suspicious: offloading the cat from the bag into, arguably, the most public bin in the entire park. Though, on second thought, she shouldn’t really tip the cat out. It would be best to count the bag as a necessary loss - less conspicuous.
Emily walked through a promenade of fat oak trees: sturdy trunks and flimsy leaves quivering in the breeze. Nature really does empty the mind - gets you to notice the minutiae of life. The therapy session that Phil got her as an anniversary gift expired in a week. What would he say now if he saw her with a dead cat in a bag? He might say nothing at all, or he might affect concern and ask how she’s coping. Good job she’d had the foresight to put a towel and goggles on top of its body - that way she could tell him she was going swimming. Something a healthy and well-adjusted person would do. That’s what Phil said.
Phil swam a lot.
Along the path there weren’t many bins, so Emily sat down on a bench, laying the duffle bag beside her, so it was just touching her leg. She could feel the vertebrae of the cat’s curled spine against her leg. She sat still, just breathing, not picking her cuticles, or any other dead skin, for that matter. She felt peaceful for the first time since, well, before Phil. She’d email work to say she’d gone home poorly. She could work from home - the ever-convenient portability of the fact-checking profession.
Emily placed her hand on the bag, she was fairly certain she could feel the thigh of the cat through the polyester - if that’s what you call a cat’s ‘thigh’? She searched for its head, Cindy’s head. There it was. She kept her hand there as she looked across the field: men in dusty overalls were taking an early lunch, pigeons strutted at their feet, waiting for crumbs, a woman in black spike heels and a trench coat was talking to herself, gesticulating wildly. But then Emily saw the woman’s earphones; she must be on one of those hand-less calls, the kind that make you look like you’ve gone completely mad and started shouting into the wind. Two women were jogging on the path on the opposite side of the grass, Emily followed them with her eyes, their heads bobbing up and down, up and down, past a bin. The bin was really big, with a really wide aperture.
Emily kept her hand on Cindy’s head and with the other she took out her phone and typed ‘taxidermy’ into Google Maps. ‘Tess’s Taxidermy’ was three miles away: an hour’s walk, a thirty minute drive and a forty-five minute bus ride on the 211. Phil always used to say that Google Maps overestimates how long journeys take. Phil was always running late.
Emily had never taken the 211 bus before. Its seats were upholstered in a deeper red than the buses in her area, it must be an older model, maybe from the 70s. Emily let Cindy take the window seat, naturally; it was Cindy’s first time on a bus, in all likelihood. When the upper deck was empty, Emily loosened the drawstring bag and poked Cindy’s head out of the hole so that Cindy could see the shop fronts, street corners, unsuspecting dogs flashing by below.
Tess, the taxidermist, was rather hard to find and Emily had to ask three total strangers for directions, but to no avail. It was only when she took a left down a cul-de-sac, that Google Maps had omitted, that she finally reached her destination. Emily pushed on the doorbell and its buzz reverberated in the porch and provoked a rush of barking dogs to come clattering to the door. A woman, in her mid-forties, poked her head out of the door and four greyhounds flew past her legs, wriggling round the porch: a whirlpool of iridescent grey fur.
* * *
Three months later, Emily went to pick up Cindy, helping her into her new black leather hand-bag, embossed with a ‘C’. They went straight to Newell Park.
They go there every day and sit on the very same park bench, along that oak-lined promenade, looking out across the grass at the bobbing and weaving of daily life.