There were the lapses in memory, the befuddlement, the anxiety about lost chequebooks and misplaced keys. These were infrequent at first, but gradually they became more common, until eventually they became the norm. Even with my observation skills to help guide her, Margery seemed to be losing her grip on the day-to-day practicalities of her life. Of our life.
Having placed the clean saucepan in its correct cupboard that day, Margery went into the living room to watch television. I considered curling up alongside her to spend the evening in companionable silence, but I was hungry and I knew from experience that I could not count on Margery to remember to feed me again that evening. I had a cursory sniff of the cold mashed potato, which had begun to congeal in my bowl, before slipping out through the cat flap, on the hunt for some small rodent to supplement my dinner.
When I returned home later that evening, Margery had gone to bed. I performed my usual night-time patrol around the house, checking that all the windows were closed, the front door was locked and the oven had not been left on. Satisfied that the house was safe and secure, I curled up on the sofa and went to sleep.
The following morning I was having a wash on the living-room windowsill, listening to the sounds upstairs as Margery moved slowly around her bedroom, getting dressed and brushing her hair. I hoped today would be a good day for Margery and me: that she wouldn’t be tearful, and that she would remember to give me breakfast. Hearing her tentative steps on the stairs, I jumped down from the windowsill.
Watching her closely, to make sure she negotiated safely the twist at the bottom of the stairs, I trotted out of the living room with my tail up in greeting. I chirruped a ‘hello’ and rubbed up against her ankles.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.
I purred in reply.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. I looked up at Margery and saw that familiar confusion in her eyes, beneath a furrowed brow.
I meowed at her. ‘I’m Molly,’ I wanted to say. ‘I’m your cat!’
She tilted her head to one side, looking at me quizzically. I willed her to recognize me, to say my name again and laughingly reassure me that she could never forget who I was.
‘Have you come from down the street, puss? You need to be getting home – your owner will be wondering where you’ve got to.’
She walked past me to the front door and picked up the keys, which just the previous evening I had checked were in their correct place on the shelf. She carefully unlocked the door, struggling with the chain for a couple of moments before pulling it open. Then she smiled at me, evidently expecting me to be grateful that I was being released, free to go home. I stood on the hall carpet, my tail twitching.
‘Well, go on then. I expect you’ll be wanting your breakfast soon.’
I could feel my eyes start to prickle. Margery’s disorientation had often left me bewildered, and her distress at those moments when she seemed to comprehend what was happening to her had made my heart ache. But never before had I felt pain like this. This was different. It was the pain of not being recognized; of looking into my owner’s eyes and seeing not love, but confusion. It was the pain of feeling like a stranger in my own home.
Not wanting Margery to see my suffering, I lowered my head and slipped past her and out through the front door.
2
Margery continued to have good days and bad days, but the bad days far outnumbered the good. I learnt not to feel so hurt when she couldn’t remember my name, or appeared to forget my existence until I yowled out of hunger or sheer desperation to be noticed. It felt to me as though Margery was somehow disappearing, vanishing further and further down a tunnel inside her mind. Physically she looked smaller and frailer too, and my fur would prickle with anxiety as I watched her shakily climb the stairs at night.
Margery’s son had begun to visit the house more often. He was a small, wiry man who gave off an air of perpetual impatience, as if there was always somewhere else he needed to be. I found him difficult to warm to. I could never get the measure of him, and as much as Margery loved to see him, I sensed that his hurried air made her agitation worse. I wished I could get him to settle and relax, to spend some quality time with his mother, rather than wanting to be on his way as quickly as possible. I tried to encourage him to stay by jumping on his lap whenever he sat down, but he merely shoved me off irritably. I would retreat to another part of the room and try to convey my disapproval from a distance.
‘So how are things, Mum? You been looking after yourself?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, I’m very well, thank you, David. And how’s . . . ?’
I could see Margery’s mortification as she struggled to remember her daughter-in-law’s name.
‘Pat’s fine, thanks. The kids are all right too – that is, I think they are. Hardly ever see them these days, to be honest.’
I could see that Margery was thrown, desperately trying to picture who ‘the kids’ – her grandchildren – were. But David didn’t seem to pick up on these cues, and would carry on talking about his family or job as if Margery was fully cognizant of every detail of his life. Margery just smiled politely and tried to follow what he was saying.
She was always upset to say goodbye to David at the end of his visits, and I knew to expect tears after he had gone. Margery couldn’t put into words how she was feeling, even to me, but I did what I could to comfort her just through my presence. Usually stroking me seemed to calm her down eventually.
One afternoon in late summer, after an exuberant session of butterfly-chasing in our garden, I crept inside the house and climbed upstairs to find David going through piles of boxes in Margery’s spare room. Unable to restrain my innate curiosity (not to mention my feline love of cardboard boxes), I jumped into the midst of the operation to investigate. David had his head inside a large open box, so I found myself nose-to-nose with him amidst a pile of dusty paperwork. Evidently I took him by surprise, because he swore loudly and immediately scooped me out of the box and dropped me onto the floor. Undeterred, I found a stack of cardboard on the other side of the room and spent a pleasant hour exploring whilst keeping an eye on what David was doing.
After a while I settled down inside a box, enjoying the rays of sunshine that were warming it through the window. David seemed to have forgotten I was there.
‘For God’s sake, Mum, why on earth have you kept all this stuff?’ he muttered, and I could hear him roughly shoving piles of paper into a dustbin liner. At one point his mobile phone rang and he swore under his breath, before retrieving it from his back pocket.
‘Hiya, Pat, I’m up to my neck in it here. There’s eighty years’ worth of rubbish lying on the floor in front of me, and I’m only on the first room.’
David stood up and closed the spare-room door, evidently trying to keep Margery from overhearing the conversation. I watched and listened in silence from my vantage point inside the cardboard box.
‘No, I haven’t spoken to her about it yet. I know, I know.’ I could tell he was getting annoyed. ‘I’ve got to time it right. Got to pick the right moment or she’ll go to pieces. But I’m making a start by clearing some of this rubbish out. I will tell her – yes, I know, soon. But you know what she’s like, so determined to be independent.’
Inside my cardboard hiding place I could feel alarm starting to spread around my body. I couldn’t imagine what it was that David hadn’t told Margery, but it was obviously something that would upset her. I remained still, praying he would say more to enlighten me, but instead he became impatient with Pat and ended the phone call with a curt, ‘Look, I’ve got to get on with this. We’ll talk about it later.’