Graham Swift - Tomorrow

It was a Sunday morning, about ten o’clock. We were in the kitchen. The weather was damp and dull, a little threatening, but the back door was resolutely and hopefully half-open. And then there he suddenly was, like a precisely realised wish. A barely believable scuffling sound outside — more laboured and protracted, perhaps, than as we remembered it. But there he was, hesitantly pacing the kitchen floor, as if it might be a trick. As if he might be a trick. But he wasn’t.

It was Otis, certainly, though it also wasn’t Otis. He was thin and weak and bedraggled, his fur had lost its shine. He seemed as amazed to see us again as we were to see him. It was as if he’d wriggled free, only that morning and only in the nick of time, from some terrible sticky end. He couldn’t explain. We’ll never know.

But how little it takes to transform the world. Misery to joy. Even the feeble flick of a cat’s tail, even the shaky tread of four paws. We held him in our arms again. He weighed less, he weighed so much more. He managed a little reconnective purr.

“Straight to the vet’s tomorrow morning,” I said. A rather peremptory way of marking this miraculous moment — already the brisk, emotion-quashing mother. But Mike agreed. Both of us were oddly practical and bustling. Shouldn’t we have just wept? But the fact is, now it was so wonderfully over, we half wanted to pretend that this nearly three-week desertion had never occurred. It was some weird and not very excusable aberration on our part, perhaps. We fed him. The tins were still there. There was his basket and cushion in the corner. Nothing had changed. We wanted the eclipsing illusion that he’d never been away and we’d never become, meanwhile, the bedraggled and diminished creatures we’d turned into.

But how little it takes. By the afternoon, the day had turned conspiringly, blissfully wet. Steady, set-in rain, like this rain falling now. How malign and bleak that rain would have seemed with Otis still gone. But we went back to bed. I almost said “all three of us.” We hadn’t done this for nearly three weeks, let alone on a wet Sunday afternoon. And Otis, it was not difficult to see, needed his bed too. He was with us again, if not quite with us as before. He curled up exhaustedly on one corner of the duvet, while we went thankfully, irresistibly about things. Even asleep, he worked his magic.

That was late April. Of course, we came to understand that things weren’t, exactly, as they’d been. That Sunday afternoon was like a little separate island of reunion in the falling rain. Otis was back, but he was a shadow of himself and, even with loving care and feeding up, there was still a phantom absence. Again, I don’t really mean my poor dad, barely two months dead as he was. Guess who I mean.

I went along to the vet’s that Monday morning. I had work to do, I was still involved in the Bassano studies, among other things, but I called in and made excuses. I didn’t say, “It’s about my cat.” We might both have gone, but these were the days when Tim Harvey had stepped aside. Your dad couldn’t deputise for himself and an issue was being put to bed that week. There’s a curious phrase, “being put to bed.” Perhaps I felt, in any case, it was my particular duty, as — a mother. I’ve said it twice now, haven’t I? The whole thing was suddenly pretty obvious, or it must have looked so to our vet.

Who wasn’t Nokes, who’d moved on, but a new man, Fraser, whom we’d never had to deal with before. Nokes, it’s true, I’d never much liked. He was like some jaded GP: mid-fifties, a gruff, conveyor-belt approach. No bedside manner. You wondered if he really liked animals. On the other hand, it needs to be said, we got Otis from Nokes, which is how we got you.

Fraser was around forty and reminded me a bit of Doctor Pope — without the psychedelic ties. But the most important thing was that Otis seemed to purr instantly, trustingly under his hand.

“I’m Alan,” he said, having shaken my hand. “And this is…?”

“Otis.”

“Otis. Nice name. Hello, Otis. It looks as though Otis has been in the wars.”

I explained.

“It happens,” he said. “Cats do these things.” I’d heard those words before. “Some go missing for months. But all’s well that ends well. I’d say Otis is going to need some looking after.”

His hands were feeling Otis for hidden injuries, and Otis went on purring.

“After the late-great, I assume?”

Of course, I had to tell him, with a little flutter of embarrassment and without further embellishment, that he was right. He said there weren’t any rules that he knew of for naming cats.

He had the bedside manner. He had a touch of downright impudence too. Doctor Pope had a little of that, and it had worked, pretty infallibly, on nineteen-year-old girls. But I was thirty-two now.

Perhaps I had that age, and other things too, stamped on my forehead. The fact is that our vet, Alan Fraser, was the first person to utter, and with a casual, smiling directness, as if he’d just completed some easy diagnosis, the words — the thought — that your father and I had never uttered to each other. “Child substitute,” he said.

Child substitute! No doubt as part of some long and reasonably delicate sentence, but it leapt out at me like some pronouncement in italics. Not even a question mark. How dare he?

But he seemed ready even for my flush of indignation. He smiled almost teasingly.

“It’s nine o’clock. You’re my first. I know that’s because it’s been counted as an emergency — which, incidentally, it isn’t, strictly. But anyway, most young mothers usually come in a little later, after they’ve dropped the kids off at school.”

It was true. In the waiting room there were two old biddies, one with a cat, one with a Scottie dog. Both of them had given me narrow looks when I was called in first.

I nearly walked out. I nearly grabbed Otis from under his hands and stormed out like a real matron. Except that, of course, would have made it obvious that a nerve had been touched, it would have made me look a fool. And in any case, he spoke with that unruffled smile, as if he’d hardly needed to explain his process of deduction, it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes. As if he’d been here many times before and always thought it best to get it out in the open.

“Don’t be offended — you wouldn’t be the only one. And no need to look apologetic. It’s one of the virtues, one of the many virtues, of having a cat. I have two of my own. They’re wonderful creatures, I don’t have to tell you that.” Otis still purred away. “He’s a lovely cat — though not at his best right now. I’m sure it made your day when he came back. We’ll need to do some tests, I think.”

I’m getting very close to the nub of things now, to what your father is going to say to you. It seems to me, in fact, that he’s going to have to speak to you a bit like a vet or a doctor, or some sort of knowledgeable and caring practitioner. You’ll have your unexpected and worrying appointment.

I began to think, in those days when Otis required particular looking after, that another virtue of having a cat might actually be that of also having a vet. Someone, I mean, unlike Ian Nokes, you could actually talk to. God knows, you can’t often do that so easily with your doctor, you always feel you’re taking up their precious time. And that’s when it’s you who’s under discussion. But vets can be people-doctors too, it seems. And Alan Fraser’s surgery, with Otis there, like some guarantee, on the table, could be a strange little closeted confessional.

Speaking of doctors: when Doctor Chivers gave your dad the grim news, it was not really in his brief to do much further talking, along the what-happens-now lines. He was just a sperm man, really. He sketched in some possibilities, which would be matters for other professionals, but, of course, it would be up to your dad and me, as responsible adults, to weigh up for ourselves the available options. And, as you now know, though it must have sounded extremely odd to you, we settled on — childlessness.