Alex Howard - Library Cat

“Caaaaat?!” yelled his owner, with suspicion, from the living room.

Library Cat remained quiet. In the corner of the counter was a grassy-looking plant whose thin green stems he began to devour voraciously. Promptly afterwards he felt sick. Retching, he deposited a small soggy fur ball in the corner next to the plant and the salt and pepper shakers.

That feels better , he thought somewhat refreshed. In the other corner, he spied what he was after. He minced delicately along the counter, treading accidently on the kettle button, sending it into a furious, spitting dry boil. Finally, he sat down next to the spice rack. He biffed it with his paw. Round and round it glided, showing a blurred compound of spice names that shimmered repeatedly past his vision like a phantasmagoria or a series of atoms in a scientist’s equation:

CUMIN – CINNAMON – PARSLEY – SAGE – CUMIN – CINNAMON – PARSLEY – SAGE – CUMIN – CINNAMON – PARSLEY – SAGE – CUMIN – CINNAMON – PARSLEY – SAGE

Lifting his paw, he sent the cinnamon jar flying off the merry-go-round and down to a crash on the floor.

“Caaaaaaaaaaaaat?!”

Jumping down he sniffed and rolled in the maroon powder, until his white patches were no longer white. It smelt wonderful. This would surely give him an advantage – that stand-out-from-the-crowd edge. For who could refuse a wonderful cinnamon-scented thinking cat? He felt quite lush.

Turning round at footsteps, he saw his owner at the doorway.

“What have you done now, you wee bugger?”

Knowing this might lead to incarceration, the water spray or dried food for a week, Library Cat ran, eventually coming to a rest on the chaplaincy steps outside. He felt good – ennui appeased, fur ball purged and smelling sweet as befitted the season and his quest for love. He was ready to face the world again.

But then something curious happened. Suddenly his nose, he gasped, and let off three massive cat sneezes: “Fffffffftt! Ffffftt! FFFFFFFFTT!”

Now I should make clear at this point, Human, that sneezing for cats is very different to sneezing for us Humans. When we sneeze, we wipe our noses and move on. We realise that certain things make us sneeze, like pepper, dust, spice and pollen. But when Library Cat sneezes, he doesn’t know what is happening. His world folds in on itself: he feels alarmed, possessed and out-of-control. To top it all, he feels scared.

And his response? The same as that of any other cat when faced with something alarming and inexplicable: to glare at the nearest Human, with a mixture of distain and fear, as if they are solely to blame… on this occasion, a parking attendant in the middle of George Square.

But the parking attendant merely walked by, busy issuing a fine to a man whose ticket had expired 23 seconds ago and who, at this very moment, was sprinting over the cobbles clutching a coffee yelling, “You b*****d! I was only in ****ing Sainsbury’s, you ********!”

Perfectly horrendous , thought Library Cat. Maybe it isn’t the Humans that make me “Ffffffft” after all. He recalled having once before asked Biblio Chat about who was to blame for the strange “ ffffffft ” phenomenon.

“Ah oui, le ‘Fffffffft!’” responded Biblio Chat. “Je ‘Ffffffftt’ beaucoup en été! Le cause? Un mystère…”

“A mystery,” thought Library Cat, disappointed. “But surely everything has a cause? A reason? A purpose? A function?”

“ Non, de temps en temps, les chats – on ne sait pas toutes les réponses. On doit l’accepter, et tourner la page…”

“Sometimes we just have to accept things and move on?”

“Oui.”

“Like the Human folly, and the laws of love?”

“Oui, exactement, comme la folie des humains et les lois de l’amour.”

Library Cat yawned. This was far too much. Too much activity for one day. Too many null-achievements. It was time to sleep.

Recommended Reading

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne.

Food consumed

Cinnamon.

Mood

Curious, startled.

Discovery about Humans

Sometimes cats accuse them falsely.

The next morning, snow was falling outside and Library Cat found himself thinking about all the things he’d discovered about Humans over the last three months. He thought about how cats definitely had some things sussed like relaxing, savouring food, a respect for nature and a disinclination to stand for nonsense. But then he thought about how the Humans had sussed things that cats hadn’t, like machines that move, healthcare, buildings and how to fix roads. But then there were things that the Humans thought they had sussed but were actually embodiments of a kind of madness, like politics and wars and firework night and academic essay writing.

And finally there were feelings and emotions. Humans tended to conceal their emotions and hide them behind silence or equivocal language. Cats expressed their emotions viscerally on their faces and in the movement of their tails, and used written language purely for learning and enjoyment. They relished its folly, its dance of meanings and sounds. They understood its limitations. It was a shame that there was no feasible way for Human and cat to speak to each other, but then Library Cat got the overwhelming impression that Humans were sometimes so oblivious to the world around them that they were beyond learning from cats.

Maybe they like us so much because they can imbue us with their own emotions , mused Library Cat smacking his lips and washing his face. We provide a sort of reciprocity for their feelings. At least that would explain their stupid cooing and sudden fits of sentimentality around anything with fur and four legs .

He thought back at how contentment is the most important feeling for a cat and how undervalued it seemed at present for Humans. Instead, it was often usurped by its evil twin sister: desire . Humans thought that certain objects or people would make them suddenly happy, like chocolate or a partner with money, whereas really their discontentment rested within themselves, and these other things were a kind of smokescreen to divert their attention away from the truth – a self-deception in which they were all too adept at upholding.

But then he thought how cats and Humans were similar. Their emotions were the same, and would eternally remain so. Shame would always be shame, happiness would always be happiness, and jealousy always jealousy. They both had intelligence and he noticed how, for thinking cats at least, the two species had a choice: they could either think life or live life. Thinking life had many pleasures. Thinking was beautiful, after all. Thinking was the loveliness of Puddle Cat, the Towsery in candlelight, literature read in George Square in summer, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, the Classics and the entire cornucopia of knowledge that adorns the colourful fruit bowl of our civilised world. But thinking could backfire. It could be frustratingly elusive and never quite reach the kernel. Worse still, it could go dangerously wrong. Despotic regimes. The slaughter of felines as devil-servants in the Middle Ages. The Black Dog… All were cases of erroneous thinking – little pieces of malware in the computer programming of the mind.