Cat Lover

An extract from the debut novel by Dan Spencer

Chapter One

‘Goodbye, cat! Goodbye, flat!’

The door closes: he wakes and he’s Berry. He stretches, pushing parts of Berry away from other parts of Berry. Getting onto the floor, he goes through the rooms, doorway to hallway, hallway to doorway, room to room. Lamps left lit, here and there. Ghostly colours, soaking out of everything.

He’s waiting for something. Checking. Auditing. A place for everything. It’s a jigsaw. And Berry’s a moving piece of the puzzle, going through the rooms, searching, seeking, waiting. ‘When… when?’ says the thought, twitching like a bit of thread you pat at with your paw. He gives it voice but it goes nowhere, a small keening sound, appearing in the air, dissolving…

The kitchen. He makes a fluid, S-shaped movement, a slosh of water, and he’s up onto the counter. He’s leapt like this before, knows it all. The grip of grout between the tiles. Sleek side of the cupboard. Clip-clopping kitchentop pots. Stop, at the window. Wait.

Listen. Listen to the noises of the building. Piano. Voices. Floorboards. Shouting. A slammed door. You hear this in houses sometimes: raised voices which fade away again, forgotten. That’s where you are, Berry, in a building, in a flat, what you are, Berry, a cat in a flat…

He waits. He knows he’s waiting, but what’s he waiting for? ‘Ivy,’ says the voice inside his head. It’s Ivy. And he’s Berry. He’s alive inside Berry. Lithe and alive inside Berry. But how long has it been?

Outside is the garden. The high garden wall. Steps leading up to the gate through which, any moment now, she’ll appear. Ivy. Last light’s long left the lawn. But you still see sunshine in the tops of the high, bare cherry trees in the park beyond the wall.

In the window now he sees Berry’s face, reflected, the garden dark. Didn’t notice the day changing. Didn’t not notice. How long has it been? Have you slept again, Berry? Not easy to say. He can’t simply say, ‘I’m awake now,’ or, ‘Now I’m sleeping,’ or, ‘Now I’m in a dream.’

In the black window’s reflection, the shining face covered in black fur. Two beings, Berry and him, watching each other. Stay wary. Know where you stand. What’s Berry. What’s you. What’s not… It looks hollow, the face of the cat. Spooky like an owl. Where’s Ivy? Why hasn’t she come?

Coming and going at strange times, sleeping and waking in the day and night, hard to hold on to her, the idea of her, but soon she’ll appear in the dark in the gate in the wall then on the steps into the garden then on the path through the garden then entering through the door into the kitchen, pushing her feet from her shoes and crossing the cold kitchen to enter the hallway, to sit on the floor in the hallway…

… and he’ll go to her, instinctively and wilfully, offering her Berry’s head, and she’ll hold it in her hand, his head in her hand, warm little skull, rubbing it in her hand, his head fitting her hand, her hand fitting his head, ball-and-socket, and those small growling sounds of their happiness rising from somewhere within them, between them, around them.

Chapter Two

She’s reached a place where she can do it without thinking. Ten years ago, she needed the clinical checklists; those tick-box procedures (borrowed from the pre-flight checks of airline pilots), they were literal lifesavers. In fact, at first, they hadn’t helped her like they should have done. More often, they were a series of turnstiles, blocking her and blocking her. She couldn’t keep them tidy in her head, all those ticks falling like pins.

But these days her head doesn’t come into it. You learn it in your body. Your mind is in your body. Your hands know how to work. Your voice knows what to say. Some days, she’s so outside herself, she doesn’t think a single worded thought. The name ‘Ivy’ never occurs to her. That’s the goal, that’s the want: not to think, not to think about it.

There are difficult days, of course, but Ivy isn’t there, only the goodness of her knowledge and abilities. There are days like today, at the Southern Royal, when a child is lost, one you couldn’t hold out hope for. A young man really, not a child. But he didn’t know he was a man yet, didn’t talk like one, didn’t move like one. He’d been larking about like a child. He’d fallen like a child. There’d been no saving him. The mother called to him. He didn’t answer. Brain death. The lungs breathed, the heart beat. The body lay closed like a door.

Each time it happens, you pause to pay attention to yourself. Are you here? Check. Are you now? Check. Do you feel it? How much do you feel it? Days like today, you go back over everything, ensuring that procedures were followed. Checking. Auditing. It’s required. It’s only right. You can disappear into here. You can disappear into now.

When doctors lose a child, there are parents who say that you did all you could and others who say, ‘What went wrong? What didn’t you do?’ And there are parents, like today, only the mother alone this time, who are both people at once, who say everything, back and forth, and all over the place, thanking you and blaming you and crying out in all sorts of ways.

Days like today, if Clover phones to say, ‘How was work?’, Ivy will answer immediately, ‘We had a death,’ and she’ll feel her sister, inside the phone, recoil.

She should be gentler with Clover. It’s too cold, too sudden of a plunge into Ivy’s world, to be told it like that. A death, another death! Like dinner being served: Voilà!

But if Clover doesn’t want to know the answer, she still wants to ask. Ivy knows what she’s up to. Clover’s feeling out her sister’s sorrow. How’s your colour? How’s your temperature? Can you describe the pain? Is it sharp or more of an ache? Clover’s running through her own series of checks, whenever Clover calls.

Of course, what follows the lost child is unrelated. They lost the child in the day. They spent the day losing the child. The Head Wound arrives much later.

When he comes, Ivy’s shift is long finished but the hospital has flowed on, carrying her with it.

It’s very early or very late. They’re in those six months called winter. Signs of morning look a long way off. Up here, in this country, this time of year, it can be night-time all day. But she’s happy with the dark. It’s something good about this season. Whatever your shift, night or day, you can enter in darkness, leave in darkness.

When the Head Wound turns up, Ivy is standing drinking tea. She’s made tea for the nurses. Back home, an empty flat awaits. But there’s company here. She’s made tea, an actual brewed pot, signifying something. A much-needed message to the nurses: We’re in this together. I’m with you in this. As a doctor, you have to get along with them. Really, you’re alone in it, but there’s this message she’s speaking. Come, drink tea. Come, talk with me.

‘Sad,’ the nurse is saying. ‘Terrible. Dreadful. I know, I know. I don’t know how you do it, Doctor Dover. Just a lad. The poor boy. His poor mother. That poor dead boy. Just a fall. Just a game. Just boys being boys. Only one misstep and that’s it. How do you do it? Stay so professional. So untouched? So clinical?’ The nurse pauses, takes a sip, lets her compliment sink in.

No, it is very sad, says Ivy.

‘And you with your losses, Doctor Dover.’

Yes, we do all have losses, don’t we. But you can’t make it personal.

‘But you,’ says the nurse. ‘With your losses. Close to home.

Ivy has nothing to add. Why discuss Iain Keele with this woman? Would this woman even know about that? Ivy simply smiles, sips, moves her head a little.

‘And then the investigations, the paperwork!’ says the nurse. ‘They always think there’s negligence, don’t they? The loved ones. They always think the doctor did something wrong, when we all know you didn’t, because you didn’t, did you? You can’t have done—? What could you have done differently? You probably wonder about that.’

No, nothing to be done.

‘Not that we haven’t seen some mistakes in our time. The eyes and ears, us nurses. Almost invisible, we are. But the things you see! The things some doctors do! Then lowly yours-truly has to pipe up, “Excuse me, Doctor, are you sure that’s the right dosage?”’

That’s nurses for you. Full of respect and admiration but always ready with their tuts and told-you-sos. The heart and soul and muscle of the profession but then they have to be the brains as well.

‘What gets me through,’ says the nurse, ‘is my man. Someone to talk to. Someone to complain to. Not that he listens, but it does the job.’

For me it’s the cat, says Ivy.

It’s half a joke. A pet cat can’t be compared to a human partner. Everyone knows it. But now Ivy is saying how undeniably lovely, how loving Berry is, how he’ll come seeking her when she’s most vulnerable, like a kitten, like a child, nuzzling her still fingers, climbing her resting legs, patting his paws at her dreaming face, calling out sweet nothings, unendingly.

 ‘Aye,’ says the nurse. ‘Devious wee bastards, aren’t they?’

It’s then that someone looks in on them, seeking another pair of hands. The backlog is burgeoning. Could somebody jump in and clear a few patients? This fellow, this head wound, perhaps?

The nurse doesn’t turn around but holds her mug tight, squeezing the last of its warmth, taking her time, contemplating something. ‘A cat’s not a man, though, of course,’ she says. ‘Do you have that, Doctor Dover? A man. Someone. Have you found that again?’

Then Ivy looks past her and answers that she’ll see to him, the Head Wound.

A head wound isn’t unusual at this time of night. She thinks nothing of it. And seamstress work isn’t really in her job description, plus the nurses are proprietorial about it, but tonight the staff’s diminished (when isn’t it?) and everyone has their hands full, so Ivy stitches him up as a last task, like she’s tying a bow on the end of the day.

He’s a big man, the Head Wound. She sits him in a chair, pulls the curtain half across. I feel like a tree surgeon! she thinks, orienting herself around him. His knots, his whorls. He has the odours of the woods, the streets, the cold outside. Fumes lift off him like an idling truck.

Let’s take a look at you.

As she gently brushes at his brow, as she leans over him, the man tries to explain himself: ‘Football,’ he offers, and she can’t help but say, Football? What kind of match ends in this?

The other, American kind of football, it turns out, though he doesn’t seem to be from there, does he? Where’s that accent from? She can’t place it.

‘A friendly,’ he says. ‘Shirts and skins. I know what you’re thinking. Not very friendly, eh? Or you’re thinking how it’s not the season—?’

No, she wasn’t thinking anything. But now she sees a gang of men bashing skulls on a floodlit field. Shirts and skins. Darkness. Pools of light. Men. Unbidden, she im agines the span of his bare shoulders, perspiration on his neck, his thick back, heavy breathing… But why, when she feels no desire for him whatsoever?

Sorry.

He has flinched. She wasn’t being careful. Is he tender? Did she assume, as she pulled the suture, that he wouldn’t feel the pinch, a strongman like this?

For some time, she says nothing more. Focus on the job in hand. The head in hand. To treat this small amount of damage, there’s no need to ask more questions, to do more digging.

Already, she has him figured out, hasn’t she? She’s used to men like this, with these late-night injuries. You can guess what they get up to. The bad choices of men at night. What’s different is he’s cleaned himself up. He’s put on a fresh shirt. On the collar, a little blood has dripped. His hair is still wet from the shower, the skin flushed. A slight breath of alcohol lifts from his pores.

She watches her own hands as they care for the head.

A weighty, lumpy object. There’s lots to it, much to discover. The brow protrudes and seems to separate into two fists. The forehead is marked and rough. At the hairline, where the hair grows wildly (like gorse), the scalp becomes smooth and round. The nose has a strong bridge then it’s bulbous at the end. Under the eyes, the skin sags but the face, as a whole, is fleshy. Much of him is hidden under that beard. An endlessly intriguing case. A terrain her fingers navigate…

… and she’s travelling back ten years or more to that first head, the old woman, the head she shared with three other students, that first week of medical school, whole bodies too hard to come by. Tonight, her mind keeps travelling out. She keeps leaving herself. It’s not like her. She isn’t like herself…

Impossible, at first, the head on the table. The head of the bodiless woman. So still. So pale. Its death, its beauty. Impossible to reach out to it. To touch it… And she’s thinking of Keele again, of holding Keele’s head. Keele’s head in her hands. Keele’s hard and angular head. Keele’s spiky mind. The dart of Keele’s eyes. Keele’s lips flickering as he talks and talks, only ever shut up with a kiss…

You’re good at that,’ says the Head Wound.

He’s looking up at her. He has these boyish, baggy eyes he’s gazing up at her with. Watery moons in pink hammocks. He’s watching her hands, or trying to, peering up through his eyebrows. Her hands. His head. They’re things outside of them, beyond them.

Keep your scalp still, please.

‘You could do it in your sleep, I bet,’ he continues, with a winking voice, and his meaning must be, mustn’t it, to call to mind her bedroom. It’s what he’s up to. She knows him – not him, but men like him, talk like this. The sly flattery of the night-time arrivals. The men who call you ‘nurse’ to wrongfoot you, then sweep you off your feet.

Then, momentarily, it occurs to her she likes him – not him, but men like him; not likes them, but likes the easiness of them, their straightforwardness, their obviousness, their simplicity. You know exactly what they are, what they want, every move they make. She laughs and he probably thinks he’s done it, lured her somehow. No chance!

She’s finished with him. But she’s so deep now into another work schedule that she might as well stay on. It wouldn’t be her first back-to-back double. She might as well stay until sunrise, a different woman on a different timeline.

Then, as she sees off the Head Wound, she hears herself saying, Listen, shall we get a drink?

Cat Lover by Dan Spencer is published by Atlantic Books.

Dan Spencer’s writing has appeared in journals including Popshot, Litro and New Writing Scotland, and in Gutter since the early days of its career and his. His novel Cat Lover (about an uncanny love triangle between a struggling A&E doctor, her new geologist boyfriend and her murderous housecat, set in a Glasgow tenement) is out now.