Alex Howard - Library Cat

Library Cat looked at the paper. It contained a quotation and a question for an academic essay:

“Governmental power intrinsically; unleashes; energises; propagates and responds to a post-Romantic crisis of the ‘self’ in Foucault’s writing.”

Library Cat felt sick.

No wonder she’s confused. The professor is trying to intimidate her with the use of semicolons. Punctuation should communicate, not intimidate .

Feeling suddenly sad for the girl, Library Cat ventured in. He looked under the bed momentarily. Dust, single shoes and bus tickets lay variously scattered in its cavernous gloom, along with a single earring which Library Cat was sure the girl must’ve given up trying to find. He looked up at the girl. She sniffed and glided her finger along her phone’s oblong cube of light. She seemed despondent. Library Cat felt moved by her evident despair. Maybe I’ll say hello? He tiptoed silently along the foot of her bed.

“Meow?”

“What the F***!” said the girl scrambling to her feet in total shock, sending her phone smashing to the floor. Library Cat took to his heels and darted out the door and up a small set of stairs into the eves of an attic, his chest pounding and his paws prickling with rushing blood. A few moments later his eyes adjusted to the light. He took a few steps forward, his tail swishing curtly. The attic seemed a little like the Towsery but felt much colder, and had a peculiar herby smell. Mould crept up one wall, blooming in various daubs of grey and green like a Seurat painting, while on the opposing wall, a layer of paint flaked off the side of a stone-cold gas boiler.

Strange pictures hung on the wall – some old oils of the Highlands in moulded gold frames that looked like heirlooms, others plainer and more abstract of Scottish tenements. Clothes hung mildewed on a drying rack, and the carpet beneath his paws felt wiry and scratchy. Above, a skylight window held the moon in a slightly oblique frame – its platinums and black-blues seeming mysterious. Sitting on top of the window was a scattered array of bottles and little lozenges and Library Cat wondered how on earth they got there.

He suddenly felt calmer. Despite its dampness, the attic had a nice feel to it. Excitement and mystery seemed to commingle in its very atmosphere. What’s more, it was high up, and Library Cat enjoyed being high up. Sniffing along the corridor for mice, he heard a noise from a room. Walking over to the door in question, he paused for a minute, and pushed it with his paw. It swung open with a creek. A herby fug hit his nostrils. On a bed in the far corner, under the slope of the roof above, a boy lay on his bed in shorts, eyes half-closed smiling inanely as if in some sort of a trance.

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude”, he said lazily.

Indeed? thought Library Cat.

“Hahaha Duuuude”, the boy repeated again between laughs. “Duuude, how’d you get in, pussy cat?”

The Human’s voice sounded strange – sort of slowed-down, like a cat’s when initiating a fight. On the floor were many scraps of paper with countless bits of writing on them scrawled messily in an incredibly inelegant hand. Library Cat gazed closely at one of them:

1… group } love, communism{ WORLD } SEX{ PEACE be happy [ illegible ]…

2…. Ireland is an island!!!!!!

Library Cat paused. The Human is clearly a moron , he thought turning to leave. And charming as it is, this place is incredibly cold. It is no place for me to make my new life. They have books, I grant them, but their ways are too bizarre for me. This is their “down time” and yet they have found very odd ways of relaxing. I wonder if most Humans descend into madness behind closed doors?

As Library Cat moved discreetly towards the stairs, something else struck him about the way in which the student Humans live. Up until now, he hadn’t noticed the plethora of notes pinned up everywhere on various walls. Beneath the clothes horse in the hall, for instance, was one that said the following:

ATTENTION FLATMATES:

Throwing my stuff on the floor when it is not yet dry is NOT OKAY!!!

Wait til it’s dry or use the other rack.

Upon the door of the bedroom he’d just left was another note, much longer, written on a torn piece of paper:

Lawrence: Last night we came home to find a window open, and the washing up still not done. If you look at the rota, you’ll notice that you have not done chores for the past two months. There’s mould in the bathroom, OPEN THE WINDOW AFTER YOU SHOWER. Also you still owe us £55 for the new washing machine that YOU broke by trying to wash jeans with coins in the pockets.

Oh and don’t leave bowls in the kitchen unwashed.

Last night I saw two mice!

Thanks.

That’s it I’m staying! thought Library Cat impulsively upon learning that mice inhabited the flat in plentiful numbers.

Then a new thought occurred to him. Why do Humans over-communicate when it comes to nonsense and under-communicate when it comes to serious things? And why do they use their voices freely when it comes to nonsense, but resort to the pen and paper when it comes to reasoning? He looked over the two angry notes… He noticed how one was signed by “Tiff” and seemed angry but also quite warm, whereas the longer one wasn’t signed by anyone and referred to “us” instead of “me”. This seemed to give the vague impression that it spoke for, or was trying to look like it spoke for, the feelings of an entire group. Consequently, it possessed a certain heavy-handed gravitas, and a warmongering feel. A rhetorical flexing of the muscles. It gave the impression that the “war-on-household-chores” was not equally weighted on each side, but instead much more powerfully weighted on the side of the “us”, and thus aimed to intimidate Lawrence into action by suggesting he might alienate himself even further in this barren, cold, lonely, draughty upstairs part of the flat lest he fail to respond appropriately.

Yet downstairs it was all babble and fun, and the chatter stood as irrefutable proof that any one of the downstairs students could just as easily have come upstairs and told these things to Lawrence face-to-face, but chose not to because the anonymity, and reason, and rhetorical power of a good note nails the point home further, and is served with a bonus of a side order of ostracism. Suddenly Library Cat felt lonely, as if Lawrence’s peculiar isolation up here was seeping out through the bottom of his door and across the landing and into Library Cat’s skin like an airborne disease. He felt sorry for having thought him a “moron”. I bet he’s colder up here as well , considered Library Cat beginning to shiver himself. Trotting down the stairs, he tried to think about Puddle Cat to cheer himself up, but her beautiful image was lost amid the clamour and cold. He went towards the front door, looked up at the lock and mewed until someone came to his aid.

“The cat wants to go out…”

“No, no, don’t let him go out! Is he OK? He might get lost. Guys I think we should call Animal Protection. What if he gets hit by a car?”

Look, I’d rather just go , thought Library Cat, feeling suspicious at the Human’s sudden fit of righteousness.

“I’ll take him downstairs.”

Library Cat felt himself being scooped up, and bounced down the great echoing stairwell of the tenement, feeling more relieved with each descending storey until he was by the front door.