Alex Howard - Library Cat

“Bye bye, puss, take care!” said the student disingenuously, closing the door behind him and leaving Library Cat alone and cold once again.

Recommended Reading

The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown.

Food consumed

Anchovy pizza.

Mood

Curious, becoming lonely.

Discovery about Humans

Humans can be alienating and cowardly when it comes to speaking their mind.

And then some days, everything is strange.

Just over a week had passed since Library Cat’s attempt to go missing. His old home returned to him in a sort of embrace with each vase and box of books seeming to apologise for having stood by silent during his untimely exodus. Nothing was said about the library books; they stood in his bedroom stacked up just as they usually did. With each afternoon that passed a heavy, grey rain lashed the windowpanes like a malevolent ghost, harder and harder as winter sunk its jaw deeper and deeper. Ginger-coloured leaves started to blacken and rot. People stopped going outside. Cats stayed in the warm.

And yet this particular day saw Library Cat on a long walk. Something was scurrying in his mind, around and around day and night, keeping him awake. A walk was always an attempt to purge such cog-spinning moods.

They always seemed to help. They always seemed to ease things…

At this hour – 4 am – the drizzle had given way to a velvety, clear night. The moon hung freshly in the sky above, decorated with countless stars that flickered like lighthouses across a misty, calm sea. On the fuggy Cowgate, the moon’s whiteness illuminated the backs of mice and rats as they scurried behind bins and down drains.

And yet Library Cat hardly noticed them.

As he climbed Borthwick’s Close towards the Royal Mile, a particularly foolhardy rat scuttled right across his paws. Yet Library Cat hardly winced.

As the clock of St Giles chimed the hour of 4.15 am, our little black and white cat was struck with a curious feeling. It washed right over him with the same speed it takes light to travel two inches, and in its vast soundless wake, a deep and profound tiredness seemed to spread through his body and sink down into his every limb. Somewhere, deep within the plumbing of his brain, a plug had been pulled. The elixir that swirled down the plughole, sparkling and unstoppable like the sand of an egg timer, was neither the iridescent manna of happiness, nor indeed the red, clotting molasses of fear or anger or jealousy.

It was, quite simply, the elixir of wellbeing .

Library Cat walked the length and breadth of the Royal Mile for several hours. It’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon, it’ll be gone soon . Something, and he wasn’t sure quite what, was getting the better of him. He skulked up past the gallant City Chambers and eerie Mercat Cross where foreign tourists had already started to congregate for the day’s first underground ghost tours. Several people spotted him and came over to tickle him.

“Here, puss puss puss puss!”

But Library Cat just walked on, not even stopping to see who they were. The cobbles felt tacky under his paws; some were lathered with spilt fizzy drink, while others were thickly rinded with food muck. Normally, these might consist of little snacks. But right now, Library Cat felt he hardly even had the energy to sniff them.

It must be made clear at this point, Human, that normally Library Cat felt perfectly comfortable in his own company. He would trot along with his mind stretched out alongside the warm embers of his thoughts. He would heat his soul by them and feel them diversify his emotions. They made him feel free and alive. But now his thoughts seemed to writhe like salted slugs, their churning a physical agony, and their twisted dance too ghastly to behold. Library Cat wanted rid of them. Loneliness started to tower up around him in great sheets of Perspex. He suddenly felt enclosed within the sheets. Life felt muted. Other Humans felt distant; even their chatter and coos of affection felt as if he was hearing them down a long, hollow pipe.

But the salted slugs writhed louder than ever in a froth of red, like the macabre death cries of a bloody war that no one else could see.

What’s going on?

As he turned the corner onto George IV Bridge, he noticed odd new thoughts rushing into his head that seemed to open and close absurdly like tiny little cocktail umbrellas. One such thought he had was to chase his tail, and that if he did, his mind would feel much better.

I outright refuse , thought Library Cat sternly to himself, the still-glimmering rational quarters of his brain kicking in. I’m not going down that road again. You can give that one up, Brain .

Library Cat had once had the misfortune to be struck down with a severe bout of tail chasing in his younger years. “Silly Cat!” the Humans would say, many of them laughing at the same time. “Probably got fleas… quit being daft!” What none of them seemed to understand was just how strangely addictive tail chasing was to the cat in question. Aside from knocking over various ceramic ornaments, tipping them precariously towards the fireside and setting many a plate of food flying, the tail-chasing cat in question would often be scolded by a proximate Human for “being so stoooooopid”. This was difficult to hear, when your brain was completely deluded and telling your paws and your mouth that your tail really was a mouse, when deep down you knew, really, something was wrong with your head but you couldn’t do anything about it, because your head was in charge of you, and yet it was short-circuiting like a snake devouring its own tail.

Nope, not going down that road again , thought Library Cat with conviction.

For a moment, at least, he felt better. The warm smell of butter and croissants hit his nostrils as he sauntered past the Elephant House café. Over in the graveyard behind Greyfriars Kirk, he could see a clutch of cats, skulking between the headstones. He wondered whether going to see them might shake off his foul mood; it would be a means of distraction after all. But something about the way the cats moved and hissed at each other suggested they were not especially nice cats, and so were probably not worth the time, and might make him feel even stranger. And he was simply not in the mood for a catnip tryst.

Home. Home would surely help. A warm radiator, some food, a read, and then maybe head for a nap in the turquoise chair and a trip up to the Towsery to hang out among like-minded cats. This would surely make things better. It was okay, he was in control.

Nearly there , he thought as he saw the blocky university buildings stubbing into the grey sky above. Focus, focus, there are many cats who are much worse off than me, I’m sure…

But the moment Library Cat attempted to gain perspective by recalling all the other suffering in the world, a great mushroom cloud of all the global misery seem to splurge up into his mind: homeless cats, abused cats, cats maltreated by their Humans, cats living in slums, cats teased by their owners, cats with horrible life-threatening diseases… sacrificed cats. He soon began to feel ill-justified in having ever felt happiness at all, as if his suffering so paled in comparison to all the other greater sufferings on earth that his feeling unhappy was, itself, utterly indulgent, and that all the pleasures he’d derived in life so far – the reading, the strokes from Humans, the catnip, the treats, the books – were all a great sham, like the thin flaky crust atop a planet that really only conceals the simmering, churning mass of hellish mantle underneath it, ready to bubble up the moment the crust ruptures, and that to believe anything else was pure delusion.