On Cats. Doris Lessing

because I had not taken her earlier. She was very ill, they said; and from the way they said it, I knew she was not expected to live. She was badly dehydrated and had a roaring temperature. They gave her an injection for the fever, and said she must be made to take liquid – if possible. She would not drink, I said. No, they would not, they said, past a certain stage in the illness, which was characterized by another symptom: cats decide to die. They creep into a cool place somewhere, because of the heat of their blood, crouch down, and wait to die.

      When I took black cat home, she stalked gauntly into the garden. It was early autumn and cold. She crouched against the chill of the garden wall, cold earth under her, in the patient waiting position of the night before.

      I carried her in, and put her on a blanket, not too close to a radiator. She went back to the garden: same position, same deadly, patient position.

      I took her back and shut her in. She crept to the door, and settled down there, nose towards it, waiting to die.

      I tempted her with water, water and glucose, meat juices. It wasn’t that she refused them: she had gone beyond them; food was something that she had left behind. She did not want to come back; she would not.

      Next day the people at the hospital said her temperature was still very high. It had not come down. And she must drink.

      I brought her home and thought it out. Clearly, keeping black cat alive would be a full-time job. And I was busy. And, as people in the house were pointing out, she was only a cat.

      But she was not just a cat. For a variety of reasons, all of them human and irrelevant to her, she must not be allowed to die.

      I mixed a nasty but useful solution of glucose, blood and water, and fought black cat.

      She would not open her jaws to take it. A small feverish creature, shadow-light, having lost all her healthy solidity of flesh, she sat, or rather, collapsed, in my lap, and shut her teeth against the spoon. It was the strength of weakness: no, no, no.

      I forced her teeth open, using her canines as levers. The liquid was in her throat, but she would not swallow. I held her jaws up, and the liquid ran out of the sides of her mouth. But some of it must have gone down, because after the third, fourth, fifth spoonful, she made a faint swallowing movement.

      So that was it. Every half hour. I took the poor creature from her corner, and forced liquid down her. I was afraid of hurting her jaw, because of using so much pressure on her projecting teeth. Her jaw was probably very painful.

      That night I put her by me on the bed, and woke her every hour. Though she was not really asleep. She crouched, the heat from the fever sending waves all around her, eyes half-open, suffering the end of her life.

      Next day the fever had still not gone down. But the day after it had; and now the clinic gave her glucose injections. Each injection left a large soft bulge under her stiff hide. But she did not care; she cared about nothing at all.

      Now that the fever was gone, she was very cold. I wrapped her in an old towel, and put her near the radiator. Every half hour, black cat and I fought. Or rather, black cat’s intention to die fought with my intention that she should not.

      At night, she crouched by me on the bed, trembling with the sad faint inner trembling of extreme weakness, a towel over her. Wherever I put her she stayed; she did not have the strength to move. But she would not open her jaws to take liquid. She would not. All her remaining strength went into saying no.

      Ten days went by. I took her to the cat hospital every day. It was a place where young vets are trained, a teaching hospital. The people of the neighbourhood take dogs and cats every morning, between nine and twelve. We sat on rows of benches in a large bare waiting-room, with the sick animals fretting, whining, barking. All kinds of friendships were struck up on account of the illnesses of these animals.

      And all kinds of small sad incidents stay in my mind. For instance, there was a woman, middle-aged, her hair dyed light blonde, over a haggard face. She had the most beautiful large dog which was sleek with food and attention. There could not have been much wrong with the dog, which was lively, and barked and was proud of itself. But the woman stood in a light suit, always the same suit, without a coat. It was a little cold, not very, and the rest of us wore light dresses or sweaters. But she shivered uncontrollably; the flesh on her arms and legs was not there. It was clear that she did not have enough to eat, and that her money and time went on the dog. To feed a dog of that size costs a lot of money. A cat costs, I reckon, ten shillings a week, even if it isn’t a spoiled beast, as ours both are. That woman lived through her dog. I think everyone felt it. The people in this area are mostly poor: the way they looked at her, shivering there with her pampered beast, and then invited her to jump the queue to get out of the cold into the building while we waited for the doors to open, said that they understood her situation and were sorry for her.

      And an incident at the other extreme – or apparently so. A fat bulldog – but very fat, rolls of flesh all over it – was brought in by a fat boy of about twelve. The doctors had the dog on the examination table, and explained to the boy that a dog must eat just so much, and only once a day: there was nothing wrong with it but overfeeding. And it must not be fed bits of cake and bread and sweets and… The fat boy repeated, over and over again, that he would go back and tell his mother, he would tell his mother, he said; but what she wanted to know was, why did the dog wheeze and pant, after all, it was only two years old, and it would not run and play and bark as other dogs did. Well, said the doctors patiently, it was as easy to overfeed an animal as to underfeed it. If you overfed a dog, you see…

      Extraordinarily patient they are; and very kind. And tactful. The things that must be done to animals which would upset their owners take place behind closed doors. Poor black cat was taken off for her injections and was gone twenty minutes, half an hour, before being returned to me with the subcutaneous water lumping her stiff dirty fur.

      She had not licked herself, cleaned herself, for days. She could not move. She was not getting better. If all my attention, if all the skills of the clinic made no difference, well, perhaps after all she should be allowed to die, since that was what she wanted. There she sat, day after day, under the radiator. Her fur was already like a dead cat’s, with dust and fluff in it; her eyes were gummy; the fur around her mouth was solid with the glucose I tried to pour into her.

      I thought of what it was like being sick in bed, the feeling of irritable disgust, of self-hatred that sets in, until it seems to be the illness itself. One’s hair needs washing; one can smell the sourness of illness on one’s breath, one’s skin. One seems shut inside a shell of sickness, a miasma of illness. Then along comes the nurse, washes one’s face, brushes one’s hair, and whisks away sour-smelling sheets.

      No, of course cats are not human; humans are not cats; but all the same, I couldn’t believe that such a fastidious little beast as black cat was not suffering from the knowledge of how dirty and smelly she was.

      But you can’t wash a cat. First I took a light towel wrung out in hot water, and rubbed her with it, gently, all over, to get rid of the dirt and fluff and stickiness. This took a long time. She remained passive, suffered probably, because by now her skin was punctured by so many injections. Then, when she was warm, fur and ears and eyes, I dried her with a warmed towel.

      And then – and I think it was this that made the difference – I made my hands warm by heating them in hot water, and I rubbed her, very slowly, all over. I tried to rub some life into her cold body. I did this for some time, about half an hour.

      When it was finished, I covered her with a clean warm towel. And then, very stiff and slow, she got up and walked across the kitchen. She soon crouched down again, where the impulse to move had ebbed out. But she had moved, of her own accord.

      Next day I asked the doctors if rubbing the cat might have made some difference. They said, probably not, they thought it was the injections. However that may be, there is no doubt the point where there was a possibility of her living came when she was cleaned and rubbed. For another ten days she was given glucose by the clinic; forced to take the nasty mixture of meat juices, water and glucose by me; and rubbed and brushed twice a