Graham Swift - Tomorrow

“He’ll be back,” Mike said. “Cats do these things. Lives of their own, he’ll be back.” Your dad, the biologist, the wise expert on animal behaviour. But the days passed, and your dad, I know, was thinking, praying, just as much as I was: please don’t let him be dead, please don’t let Otis be flattened somewhere, a gritty, bloody mess at the side of the road.

Reactions and repercussions. Nearly six years had passed since those bad enough days of the visits to Doctor Chivers, but now we found ourselves only re-enacting that earlier time — lying once more, I’m afraid, with even less evident psychosomatic cause, with our backs turned coldly on each other, our very bed yearning for that soft early morning thud. Not just dismay, but abstinence, and not just abstinence but blame. This must be someone’s fault. If we’d never gone and got Otis in the first place…And wasn’t that Mike’s fault? (Mike, who’d been such a pillar when my dad died.) Mike, and that cat-woman, Mrs. Lambert.

Judge us, strictly if you must. What a pair of babies we must have been. But think it through. There’s still a lot of explaining to do. Take it, perhaps, if you can, as a sobering piece of instruction. You’re sixteen and now and then you must still feel the clutches of childhood pulling you back and making you feel, just when you don’t want to, like mushy infants again. But your parents were twice-sixteen and more when a cat succeeded in turning their lives upside down.

Unless I’m wrong about you. Unless you really do live in that cool and shrugging, impervious world where tomorrow will be just a passing, absorbable jolt to you. And why should I be just as afraid of that ? A tougher world, in some way I don’t understand. Surely the argument should run that, in places like Putney at least — Putney, of all places — the living should only get softer and softer. Surely it has. But maybe you’re part of some new steely generation whose future is going to require stern stuff of you, in ways that even you don’t know yet. Though that waiting fact, I sometimes sense it, is already being instilled into your little frames (I still think they’re little). You’re being geared and primed, even as you sleep right now.

Enough, it seems to me, that you have to face tomorrow. The future, right now, is simply tomorrow. By which, of course — I keep forgetting — I really mean today. We’ll find out soon just what you’re made of. And that’s the very phrase, I think. Our ludicrous distress over a cat: what was that really made of? I need to tell you more about Otis. But don’t, at least, imagine that we’ve ever thought about you, as we once found ourselves thinking about him: that if you’d never come into our home, we’d never have suffered all the agonies of fearing we might lose you.

PICTURE US, ANYWAY — and mock us, if you will — in our bedroom in Herne Hill, in the first weak light of dawn, our backs grimly turned on each other, waiting, hoping for a little duvet-denting pounce. After the fifth or sixth day, even this pathetic scene would have looked more pitiful still. The fact is, Otis wouldn’t have been there, but nor would your dad. You’d have seen your mother lying by herself with just a dip in the sheet where your dad had been.

I never urged him to it. On the other hand, I never told him not to. I never said: don’t be a fool. Your dad, who could hardly blame himself for Otis’s disappearance, nevertheless, after a certain while, saw it as his duty, his vaguely penitential mission to get Otis back. The days of his dawn patrols.

I’d pretend still to be asleep or at least I’d never acknowledge his slipping from the bed. I’d give the impression, perhaps, that this was behaviour I only expected and would even have demanded. There’s a word, perhaps, for my behaviour. I’d be aware of him getting up and stepping carefully across the room. A little later, I’d hear the click of the front door being gently shut behind him. I wouldn’t move.

It may be hard for you to imagine your father — though it may become tomorrow’s presiding image — like some vagrant without a home. When these days he drives a top-of-the-range Saab, and in any case has the occasional services of a driver, in a dove-grey jacket and peaked cap, to pick him up, often me as well, and drive him hither and thither (I’m talking, of course, about Tony, in his black Mercedes, who’s stopped threatening — I know it wouldn’t look cool — also to drop you off at school). It may be hard to picture your father wandering like a lost soul round the streets of Herne Hill. But I still see him doing it and never without a pang.

I’m seeing him doing it now, though he’s here beside me, as if the whole sorry phenomenon could be weirdly transposed, even now, to Putney. And I think Mike still dreams of it — those dreams we all have of impossible searches, unendable tasks. He may be dreaming of it this very minute. He’s back there, tonight, in those dawn streets, looking for Otis again.

I didn’t force him to do it, but once the pattern was established, it couldn’t be abandoned. It became a kind of ritual, a superstition. Your scientific father, your hard-hearted mum. Our cat might already have perished, but if your father missed one of these sorties, then Otis was surely doomed.

I don’t know what he actually did. But I suppose he did what anyone committed to such a desperate exercise would have done. He kept his eyes open, he scoured the gutters and kerbs. He looked under parked cars, among putout dustbins. He stood listening intently, perhaps, beside plastic-sheeted skips. And, of course, he would have called out. Perhaps reluctantly and softly at first, feeling an idiot, not wishing neighbours stirring in their beds to hear what might sound like the cry of some lunatic, but then loudly, unashamedly: “Otis! Otis!” A cry we’d both got used to uttering, sometimes to the accompaniment of a rattled box of cat-crunchies, and to hearing fall, bleakly, on empty air.

The theory was that at dawn errant cats — or returning, limping-home cats — would be conspicuous, a reasonable enough theory. In the hour or so before human traffic starts, cats own the streets. And your dad must have seen them. He must have seen black cats and since, at a distance, one black cat can look much like another, your father’s heart must sometimes have raced…But no, it wasn’t Otis.

Picture your father in tracksuit and trainers. A rare sight now, though remember he was thirty-three then, and what else, at that time of the morning, should he have worn? At that hour, apart from cats, a sparse turn-out of dedicated joggers would have been the only other life around.

And I confess that your dad and I, as we passed thirty, had been seized by one of those keep-fit fevers that can strike couples at about that age, and nowadays even seem the norm. Don’t assume, my shrimps, that you will be immune. Not that either of us, if I say it myself, was in poor shape. But in our case you might say it was something more than the regular malaise. I think our unspoken argument may have gone like this: if it’s to be just us, then let us be a specimen pair, let us be trim and exemplary — adverts for non-issue. Forgive us. Though in your dad’s case it wasn’t so simple and even worked in reverse. I think your father (the qualified biologist) may actually have thought that if he exercised and sweated and generally pumped up the virility, then perhaps — who knows? — that slovenly sperm count of his…

When all’s said, I started going to a gym — and, as you know, I still do. Your father, only getting what Tim Harvey paid him, started to jog (or to use his word, “run”). And his exertions lasted about a month. But he kept the tracksuit and trainers, still in almost-new condition, and now, for these Otis-searching forays, out they came again. A perfect alibi, in fact. He wasn’t a suspicious and possibly demented loiterer, he was just an early-morning jogger. He just happened to be peering under a Volkswagen.