pets

Before I was the age when my mind taught itself to remember things a ginger cat would sometimes jump into my parent’s garden in search of food. My mum left out milk and leftover scraps for the cat until it started to return every day. It began to spend more time in our garden than out of it, and that combined with the ragged state it turned up in was enough to make my parents adopt it. They created a small area in the corner of the kitchen for the cat with a bed and some toys, and named it Jasmine because “that’s what you’d have been called if you were a girl” my mum said. Jasmine only exists to me now in the few pictures we took with her.

I was a cruel and self-centred child; my mum tells me I’d yank on Jasmine’s tail and watch her scream. In return she’d bite and claw at me until I whelped and crawled away. She didn’t live with us long as her teeth began to rot and she would squeal and twist her body as if always in pain. My parents took her to the vet one day and returned without her. She was my first pet.

Years after this, at the end of school one day, me about five or six, my mum came to meet me in the playground to walk me home like usual and told me we were going to the Cat & Dog Shelter later on to buy a dog. This is the first time I remember adopting a pet. The dog we returned with was a big bulky thing, all black fur, the breed I don’t remember. Its height on four legs almost reached mine on two. It scared the shit out of me and my child’s way of showing this was by running frantically around the house, screaming to my parents to get it away from me, and telling them it had bit my hand when from what I remember it hadn’t. After two days my parents took the dog back. I could tell my dad liked this dog, it was the large-but-friendly type of dog he had wanted, and he was clearly unhappy about taking it back. We returned again with a different dog: a small white dog of mongrel breed, which exact breeds they could only guess at. The shelter didn’t know his name or exactly where he was from, they could only tell us that he had been picked up as a stray and that he had spent a week or two with multiple families but always ended up being taken back to the shelter. In the car home he whelped loudly for the whole journey and jumped all around the car and nearly on the gear-stick. My dad was still yelling at him when we got home. “Let’s call him little bugger” he said, “or little shit”. Years later we’d notice that if the name Dylan ever came from the speakers of the telly he would jump to attention and stare at the screen. I forget who decided his name but we called him Alfie.  

Alfie was an adorable creature: soft and malting without being overly fluffy, he had a single patch of black hair which made a circle around his right eye and which provoked kids to run up to us during walks and ask who had given our dog a black eye, or if he only had one eye, or if his name was Patch. He was a fast dog and as a child I made it a point to race him (and lose) wherever we went. One of my fondest – or at least most pure – memories is from the first two weeks after we adopted Alfie, made no less good despite my suspicions that my recollection of it might be marred in childhood nostalgia. My mum and me had taken Alfie for a walk just before evening time on the large fields that separate my estate from the shopping centre. I’m running across the field, jumping and spinning and laughing, lost in a total state of flow, like a caricature of splendour from a cheesy movie. Alfie is running freely with me, my mum not far behind. The sky is golden, sun fluttering through clouds, the grass blossoming, the whole moment perfect. I remember it happening exactly like this.

We had two cats by the time we adopted Alfie named Holly and Sophie. Holly was a mix of black and white fur: the top of her head black and her legs white, the two colours seeming to battle with each other on the sides of her body. She was a friendly cat, happy to sit in my presence. Her name brings to my mind the kiss-inducing Christmas plant. Sophie was an all-black cat, skinny, shy, with quick and lucid movements – her quick and unlikely presence in a room could be compared to a shadow’s fleeting appearance as the sun quickly runs between two clouds. These two cats are forever linked for me, presences in my house and in my life from my earliest memories, and linked to each other like sisters even if, thinking back, they made very little contact with one another. On more than one occasion my mum and me watched from my bedroom window as Holly walked the fence where a congregation of the neighbourhood’s cats were meeting on next door’s fence, where she would claw at the air until they were frightened away or on rare occasions fight them and push them off the fence. I’d sometimes treat Holly like a play thing: I’d pick her up and spin her round, or carry her upside down by her back legs. I can still remember the glowing red lines that ran across my skin after she’d scratch me. Holly’s presence was big in my life while Sophie remained in the background, she didn’t always sleep in the house and during the day would escape into the neighbourhood to wander the streets. Alfie ignored, sometimes chased, Holly but got on well with Sophie, having more of a relationship with her than I viewed from any humans.

A few weeks after adopting Alfie we took him on a countryside walk. The location I don’t remember. It was a long path for dog walkers with a wooden fence that separated the path from the fields where horses and cows and sheep roamed. Not long into the walk Alfie climbed under the fence and went running wildly into the field, ignoring the shouts of my parents. Both my parents ended up climbing through the fence to run after Alfie, worried he’d get himself kicked by a horse. They chased after and eventually caught him. I can’t remember the rest of this day but I imagine it involved my dad shouting a lot. After this I developed a severe fear that Alfie would run away. I would complain any time he was let off the lead; if it was my mother walking him I’d make sure he was not let off the lead at all. If we were walking with my dad and he was allowed to roam free I would start to panic, if he ran out of sight I would become almost twitchingly stressed. Soon after adopting Alfie my parents made it their mission to train him: this was to remove his more extreme behaviours of pissing and shitting all over the floor, and to train him to sit and give his paw when commanded. He took to these lessons quickly but his desire to run off into the surrounding area and ignore shouts to come back were never quelled. Now and again he would run and be lost to my neighbourhood and I would either sit in the house holding back tears at the thought I would never see him again or would be outside chasing him. I remember a time when Alfie pawed his collar from his neck and ran from my parents who returned to the house; I was so worried I left what I was doing and walked through the streets topless to find him, and due to the lack of collar picked him up and carried him down the street and into the safety of my house.

One afternoon, sat in our living room, my dad told me he wanted me to see a therapist about my panics over the dog. I said I didn’t know what he meant, but while saying this I heard Alfie barking outside and I shuffled myself across the floor to check – like I always did – if he had somehow managed to escape the garden. “See” my dad said “don’t you want to know why you’re doing that?” but nothing ever came of this. I’m unsure why this panic appeared in me but it wasn’t something I cared about exploring at the time. Looking back I can make a few guesses. I was an only child; I wanted to rebel but I couldn’t do this when I spent so much time among adults. I was never friendless at school but I was an inactive child and spent most of my time inside with the comfort of video games. Alfie was a presence that asked nothing of me but I had infinite love for him. My overactive mind must have rebelled against any thought of losing him.

It’s morbid to think about the deaths of these three animals but they happened so long ago there feels like a barrier between me now and me then. Sophie was hit by a car in the road next to my house. She survived the night in the vets while I stayed the night at my grandparent’s like already planned, my mum told me that Sophie had died the next day when she picked me up. Holly’s passing was different. She crawled into the bathroom and lay behind the door for days hardly getting up. I can still picture my dad carrying her through the house and to the car to take her to the vets. He came back without her with teary eyes. When he came into the house my mum and me both burst into tears. Thinking back, it’s probably the biggest outpouring of sadness I’ve ever shared with someone. Alfie deteriorated like that too: towards the end he had to spend nights locked in the kitchen to stop him shitting on the floor of the other rooms. One day walking home from school I saw my dad’s car driving the opposite way as I approached my street. When he and my mum got back they told me that that morning Alfie couldn’t stand and that the vet had chosen to put him down. I felt anger towards my parents over this for a long time, that they’d not let me give Alfie a last goodbye, that I’d missed him by less than five minutes, but I never told my parents this. I didn’t cry when they told me, I felt empty and numb, and only pretended to look sad for my parent’s sake. It wasn’t until later on that night, when my parents had gone to bed, that I walked into the kitchen and stood crying uncontrollably thinking about Alfie who had slept on the floor I was standing on now less than a day before.

Now I’m sat here writing this and my dog Bronson is lying across from me on the sofa in between my parents; his eyes are closed and he looks so peaceful. He’s a Whippet, anorexic-skinny looking with his rib cages and his spine sticking out, but he’s a healthy and well fed dog. He has short dark fur but if you are close to him you can always feel him radiating heat. He runs fast but not quite as fast as he used to. I look forward to seeing him every time I come home from university. We were told that he came from an abusive home and this was obvious in his behaviours when we first adopted him: he ignored all humans, hid at even the slightest noise, and didn’t seem to know what to do with people being nice to him. But he seems happy now, carefree, and I think we’ve given him a good home.