World Without Pip

I don’t say to people, my cat was killed, I say, my little cat. My lovely little cat.

​Pip was diminutive, particularly in the summer, when he’d moult his cold-weather fur and take on the proportions of a pitiful stray in a Disney film. A scrap of a thing with enormous lantern eyes.

Little cat, also, because his littleness was a comedic punchline. Everything about Pip was outsized, from his insistent gobbiness to his insatiable appetite for food, for company, attention, affection. Everything about him always seemed ready to burst out of his tiny frame. Being a cat made Pip impatient. There was so much life to live, and our slowness to accept him as a fully-fledged person wasn’t his problem.

He swaggered into the world every day just as he swaggered out of the box on the day that I brought him home. I had been warned that kittens were always shy at first and would spend the first few days hiding. Nobody had told Pip and his brother, Sam, who entered the unfamiliar room with the unassailable confidence of gap year lads getting off the plane. When my housemate came home Pip immediately clawed up the inside of her leg and had to be birthed, still clinging on, from out of her skirt.
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I often joked that I felt less like Pip’s owner and more like his agent, conducting business on his behalf, fielding compliments from his many admirers, trying to keep up with his busy social life. And what a life it was. Sometimes he would disappear for months at a time and the news would filter back to me – Pip had been hanging around at a laundrette, a student house, a primary school. Pip had been climbing into baby’s buggies, following gangs of teenagers, demanding belly rubs at the bus stop. Strangers would text me pictures of themselves holding and fussing him. I made a Facebook group to help track him down during these periods of absence, and people shared their Pip photos though they were celebrity sightings.

Pip made trouble. He worried me endlessly with his long disappearances. I got countless phone calls – sometimes more than once a week – from local vets’ surgeries, to whom Pip had been handed, mistaken for a stray. I grieved his loss many times before his actual death. He burned through approximately 39 lives. The size of his ego was such that he could not bear the limitations of one household’s love: he demanded everybody’s, and all for himself. 

​He declined to share our love with Sam, who was muscled out until he gradually, quietly, sweetly went to live with a family a few doors down the road. Their own cat had been lost, and Sam seemed to know what they needed. He’s patient and unassuming. They call him an angel. His new owner tells me that he sleeps on her little boy’s bed every night. After I had the call about Pip’s death and was waiting, tearfully, for my boyfriend to arrive from London, there was a click of the cat flap and Sam came in. He rarely ever comes into this house these days. But he came upstairs and curled up on the bed with me, purring, until I wasn’t alone anymore.

Sam is an angel. Pip was a gorgeous, glorious fiend.

Pip squirmed with joyous smugness when you scratched his head. He oozed frankly offensive levels of contentment when you buried your hands in his impossibly soft belly. He was a lesson in laziness, a gremlin of shameless greed, an egotist, a drama queen, a diva, and - if you caught him in the right mood – an adoring, sweet-hearted baby.

 He would let you cradle him in your arms and dance with him around the kitchen. When he was sleepy enough he could be slung around your shoulders and worn like a fur scarf. He loved to be carried – in fact often needed to be, as he would follow people further than his paws could carry him. On the day of the Brexit vote Pip followed me all the way to the polling station and had to be handed to the politely baffled stewards while I went into the booth. (He would have voted Remain, of course: he was a Romanian cat.) He didn’t like the idea of people going anywhere he couldn’t. As a kitten he once climbed onto the bonnet of my car as I started the engine and yelled at me pitifully through the windscreen, paws splayed.

​He believed, against evidence to the contrary, that his vocalisations were always understood. As an intelligent cat he had a wide range of noises, which included the insistent yell (I want food, but not the food that’s already there), a pitiful wail (I want you to stop the rain so that I can go outside), a perky chirp (I’m here! I’ve arrived! Attend to me!), and best of all, the little chirruping noises that signalled a level of content beyond ordinary purrs. The yells and the wails would be deployed repeatedly (frequently at four in the morning) until you had got him what he wanted. Pip didn’t always know what that was, exactly, but that was never the point. ​

He liked to be heard. He liked to be involved. Parties were not a time to hide under the sofa but to sprawl across three laps at once. He liked to be close. He liked to be scratched under the chin and kissed in the warm spot where his ear joined his head. He was not ashamed of asking for love, or taking it, or giving it. He was not afraid that he wouldn’t be loved, because he was utterly and perfectly himself, the most perfect creature alive.

I hope that I am not too sentimental. I know that Pip would probably have eaten my face if I’d died first. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Pip could love, and that he loved people. Loved me. He sought people out not just through some robotic need for warmth or survival, but for friendship. I couldn’t sit down in the house for three seconds without him getting onto my lap. All day while I worked at my desk he would stretch out on the bed nearby and snooze companionably, snuffling in his sleep, paws twitching as he dreamed. When I had a lie-in he would sometimes crawl under the duvet and tuck himself next to me, stretching out and insisting on being cuddled close, like a little spoon. He was romantic like that.

The love he gave was every bit as fierce and extravagant as the love he demanded: and when you are loved by this loveliest of creatures, this force of nature, this wild thing, when he has chosen to come in from the night and curl on your lap to let you love him too – how bad can the world possibly be?