Farewell to Fluffy

Back in 2010, my wife had a miscarriage. The child would have been our daughter and she would have been nine by now, had she lived. The event was more upsetting than can be quantified by words, and one of the ways by which my wife attempted to bring something positive back into her life was by getting a kitten. She already had a female cat called Gus, and took on a small feral kitten found by someone on the internet and who clearly needed a home. He was fluffy and loud. By the time he was grown it became clear that he had some Maine Coon in him, as distinguished by his size, and his big fluffy paws with fur growing from between his toes.

He still seemed a little bit wild and it took him some time to get used to me when I showed up. He wasn't like other cats. He remained wary of people and disinclined to displays of affection towards anyone he didn't know; but as those first weeks passed, we became friends.

Reductionist Cromwellian types will dispute that it is possible to be friends with a member of a different species, but that's their tough shit. Fluffy and I may never have discussed our favourite science-fiction authors, for example, but we nevertheless communicated within certain limits and he evidently came to trust me; and the trust of an animal is not something to be taken lightly. During my first decade in Texas, I probably spent more time in the company of Fluffy than I did with any other person, possibly including even my wife; and for what it may be worth, I don't think he was keen on Olaf Stapledon.

Fluffy was officially named Scarface by my stepson, who had been learning about a Native American culture hero of the same name at school. By peculiar coincidence, this was as I was still living in England, and contemporary to writing my novel, Against Nature, which featured a talking dog also named Scarface. The dog belongs to a character named Todd, who argues with his mother because she insists that Scarface is a terrible name for a dog. I maintain that this likewise applies to cats, so it was a relief that Scarface had picked up the boldly descriptive nickname of Fluffy by the time they stamped my card and let me into the country.

As we began to accumulate cats, Fluffy was the one of whom we all remained a little wary. He could be friendly, but he was big, strong, and it was a nightmare getting him into a cat carrier to take him on the occasional trip to the vet. Sometimes he braced himself against the door of the cat carrier as we tried to get him inside, and it would be like wrestling a fully grown man. Initially we tried to keep him away from any new kittens who turned up, as they did from time to time, fearing he'd send them flying with one disgruntled bat of his mighty paw, but as time passed we realised he actually didn't mind kittens, ignoring them just as he more or less ignored the other cats. This was fortunate, because they were as one fascinated by his huge Fluffy tail which flicked this way and that, regardless of whether the cat at the other end was actually awake, yielding running jokes about the tail being its own autonomous entity, and that playing with Fluffy's tail was a traditional part of a kitten's upbringing. They would watch the tail, pounce upon it, roll around with it clutched between their paws as Fluffy let out a loud meow of protest, but would never retaliate, or even take his business elsewhere. We couldn't decide whether he enjoyed the attention or was simply unable to work out what was going on.

Bess and myself had different views as to the extent of Fluffy's intelligence, and the debate began when we noticed his apparent inability to negotiate a door left only part of the way open. Cat's whiskers are supposedly evolved so as to allow the feline in question to make an informed decision as to whether he or she will be able to effect passage through whatever he or she has just poked his or her head into, and we've seen this demonstrated by a few of ours. Most of them learn to push the door open, and Jello has even worked out how to bash open a properly closed door like a small orange DEA officer. Fluffy, on the other hand, would simply sit in front of a partially open door, even with a gap of four or five inches, and stare at it. Bess's theory was that he lacked the intelligence to simply walk though, being unable to recall previous occasions of having done so without anything disastrous happening on the far side, a failing for which he compensated with his beautiful, regal appearance. My theory was that he understood the mechanics of opening a door under his own steam very well, but his regality was such that he simply believed it to be beneath him, and that opening the door all the way was our job.

In case it isn't obvious from the photographs, he really was regal, and we occasionally referred to him as our mini-lion. Excepting visits to the vet or the occasion of my cooking anything involving bacon, he spent most of his time sat around looking beautiful with what appeared to be a gentle smile on his face. In his more overtly affectionate moments he'd cuddle up with his forehead pressed against my arm, or present himself for grooming, which my wife performed with a brush under his chin and around what was, I suppose, his mane; and he clearly loved such attention.

He never fully mastered the litter tray, as did our other cats, and was occasionally prone to marking his territory, which was a pain in the arse; the former we assume may have been down to his being slightly too big to fit in the litter tray, with the latter usually committed only in protest, and once we'd worked out what was pissing him off, he generally behaved. On one unfortunate occasion he rendered my copy of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men unreadable by using it as a urinal for a good month or so before I discovered what had been going on, but I probably shouldn't have left the book where I'd left it, and it was difficult to stay mad at such an otherwise gentle, good natured cat.

Last June, or possibly July, we noticed he'd taken to peeing on the floor, and that there was blood in his urine. We took him to the vet who told us that a growth in his bladder was almost certainly cancer. We had the option of treatment we couldn't really afford, which wasn't guaranteed to extend his life by much, and which would probably be miserable for him; so we opted to do nothing, instead concluding that we'd simply have to see what happened, and if at any point he was in pain, we'd have him put down. He was ten, not so old as we'd hoped he would live to be, but he'd had a good life and was loved.

The next eight months were more or less business as usual. The blood no longer turned up in his urine, and although he clearly began to have some difficulty with peeing, he was otherwise happy until the final week or so. He stopped eating and drinking and was unsteady on his legs. He was fine sitting on the sofa as usual, but everything else had become difficult and we knew it was time. We weren't going to subject him to the cat carrier at this point, so I wrapped him in a towel and we took him to the vet. I'm still too upset to go into the details, but the ones which matter are that he died in my arms, without pain, and he knew that he was loved.

We buried him in the garden, and bought a plant called a lion's tail for the spot, which seemed appropriate. Some days I talk to him as I water the plant, telling him that I love him and miss him, and I don't care how that sounds. Three people have died on me in the last month, but this hurt a lot more than the three of them added together, and it continues to hurt. He was a constant presence in my life since I arrived in America, and sat at the heart of our household. He was like my son, or the child we didn't have. He was the best cat in the whole world.