Look Both Ways

Look Both Ways (you dumb animal)

Tuesday, 25 October 2005

By Dr Frigmund Pseud

The cat died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.

Actually, I can, it was yesterday. I just thought a jokey reference to Camus would take the edge off the grim tidings. He was fond of a joke, was Camus.

The cat was a she, and she had no sense of humour. Her name added to -sketball was a sport wherein suspended from her waist, she would be passed from the left to the right hand behind the back, Globetrotter style, whilst the player whistled 'Sweet Georgia Brown'. She put up with that, and us having her skin-cancery ears chopped off, even the ultimate insult, the getting of The Puppy. But never a skerrick of a smile, just the humourless glare, the resigned tolerance of her humans and their ridiculous ways.

She was trying to get home. She'd seen us from across our street, pull up in the car from a pleasant Sunday afternoon visit to my in-laws. It being Feed-Cat-Time, she'd made for the front gate and for the first and last time in her nine years neglected to take into account the sports car whose thirtysomething male driver was admiring our row of Edwardians whilst accelerating off the speed bump outside our house. He didn't stop - we presume either his suspension was so responsive it failed to register the innards of our beloved animal on his gluteal proprioceptors, or he just thought the speed bump was a bit bumpier.

I hope his Sunday ran according to schedule; Lord knows you can lose precious seconds by not accelerating with gay abandon off the top of every speed bump so as to reach maximum velocity prior to screeching to a suspension-sparing twenty k in front of the next. Because that's the point of speed bumps isn't it? To annoy people so much they don't use your street anymore. I certainly think stopping and getting out and watching with us our cat's final twitchy bloody seconds in the gutter would have had a similar effect â I wouldn't want to drive down a street on which I killed someone's loved pet if I could avoid it.

I spin this particular yarn of vitriol from a raw hairball of loss; I'd had this cat since before I met my wife, and been through nine years of student-dom and early doctor-ness with the ever-present white hairs floating about. The first chat-up lines I tried on Mrs Pseud in the student common-room were generated by the presence of said sheddage on my black student casual work uniform. We thought the cat had a good few years left in her, such was her tenacity of spirit - she endured many movings of house, many bekennelings, a couple of operations, and sundry semi-hostile co-pets.

So I vent considered fury at the driver who killed her. Then I recall how I drove Mrs Pseud and The Puppy to the in-laws earlier that day. We did a rat-run through another suburb, and I do recall playing the same speed-bump-game myself. I stared periodically at real-estate signage instead of the narrow road in front of me. I can't be sure I didn't kill a cat yesterday. Maybe I did.

So what was the hurry? Why the rat-run on a Sunday? Why the speed-bump-game?

Because that was before the moment I turned on my heel at the commotion around our front gate and saw a wild mess of legs propel a white fur-blur in a zigzag across the footpath to flop into the gutter under our car's back wheel. Before the instant I clicked that it wasn't some crazed jack russell on the loose, saw the familiar collar and heard the oh-nos leave my lips. Before the shock of the injuries done my dear little companion, and the terrible relief of her rapid little death.

Before all that, I had evidence that shit doesn't happen. Not to me or anyone important to me anyway. It goes like this: Yes, shit happens to other people - evidence on the news, in anecdotes of others who are not me or not enough like me for that to count as evidence that it might happen to me. The reason it doesn't happen to me is that despite the cognitive evidence that shit doesn't care who it happens to as long the laws of physics and probability are obeyed, the emotional evidence requires currency, recentness. So no shit had happened to us for a while - there's your evidence, off you go, barrel down that someone-else's street, check out that auction sign, you're safe.

Rubbish, isn't it?

We watched a beautiful Australian film last month, called Look Both Ways. Its chief strengths, I feel, are the absence of native fauna (Bill Hunter included) and an arresting depiction of the modern relationship with risk. Our heroine goes through life visualising calamity at every turn, as if that will somehow make her safer. We must have been sharing the cinema with many like-minded neurotics, as it seemed the whole place heaved and sighed in resonance with the flow of ideas.

I do that. I see, at most if not every kerbside I cross, a glimpse of the oncoming traffic derailing and collecting me. A flash, just a flash, but enough to maintain my vigilance. Left, right, left again, and, yeah, right again too. And left once more. You never know.

But things had been going so well. Not world-rockingly well if that was the case, as in a major windfall like a promotion or a prize-winning, I'd be checking ten times at each kerb! No, just quietly well, stably. We had our home, jobs, and pets, and it was the first beautiful weekend of the spring. Sod-on-high was rubbing his hands together and despite years of listening out for the sound, on this glorious Sunday afternoon, I didn't hear it. Neither did the cat. We did cut her ears off, I suppose.

the spread of slow-growing but stubborn skin cancers on the exposed pink ear-tips. What did happen, of course, is that she misjudged, after years of dodging traffic, her run home. Perhaps intact ears would have heard it coming.

Today, my ears are super-intact. I've seen trains crash, toddlers squished, dogs and old ladies fly like rag-dolls over bonnets, all while this little life progresses around me much as it would on any sunny spring Monday. Trains pass, toddlers are ushered up over the kerb, dogs and old ladies reach the bench for a rest in the shade. I feel exhausted, and restless. I cannot work, and I cannot do nothing. My Petty grief is ridiculed by the part of me that says come on mate, it was only a cat!'

So.

The argument for going to work tomorrow:

The jobs will pile up regardless, meaning the later I get there, the harder it will be.
Professionalism means going to work when you don't feel like it.
The cat would have gone to work. She was no OTT woe-is-me sort.

And the argument for staying home again:

I work in psychiatry, not surgery. To try to work when emotionally off-kilter, however understandably, is like trying to take out an appendix with a wooden spoon.
Professionalism means ensuring a sustainable relationship with your work, which means paying attention to your life outside work.
I tried to go in this morning and man-sized tears blurred my vision at the first speed-bump.

'Pussy!' cries her ghost from the grave in the front garden. Did I say she had no sense of humour?