Toast for an absent friend

My big, beautiful ginger cat would have been 16 today and I miss him like hell. He used to wake me at about 4am each morning and demand his breakfast, he used to wake me up if the biscuit bowl was empty, he used to wake me up to tell me there was either a hedgehog or a badger outside and he used to wake me up to tell me things, like when Misty came back from being missing for a week, like when Twilight got shut in the garage, like when Ratbag got stuck in someone else's garage and when Goggins had been in a fight and became very ill. Sometimes he would just wake me because he wanted a cuddle or because he wanted me to get up. I moaned like mad all the time about this. He always knew when I was upset too. Now I wish he was still here to do it.

May 4th 1990 was hot and sunny. Ratbag, Malmesley's mother had been big enough to explode the previous day and she was lolling on the cool grass in the sun. I went to work as normal. When I came home no Ratbag greeted me, most unusual, so I spent a half-hour looking for her. A cursory check of the house revealed nothing, she wasn't anywhere round about outside either. Going back into my bedroom again I heard a deep purr, a rumbling throaty noise different to her usual one. There underneath a wicker chair, at the far back in a dark corner was Ratbag. She looked at me proudly, rolled onto her side, lifted one front leg and grinned as if to say "Look what I've got." The four kittens were all lined up at right angles to their mother all sucking fiercely. Malmesley was on the back end of the row, not sleek and streamlined like the other three but squat and square-shaped but with blonde fur twice as long as the rest.

We celebrated his birthday each year, sometimes with a special tin of cat food, sometimes with a lump of cheese and sometimes, a rare meal of fish and chips from the chip-shop so Malmesley could eat the soggy fish batter. Wherever he is now in that Cat Basket in the Sky, I expect his Birthday dinner will consist of a starter of peanut butter on toast, some pieces of fish batter and a salmon skin or two followed by a cheese course of cubes of cheddar.

I think I'll just stick to the peanut butter on toast and silently say Happy Birthday Malmesley as I take the first mouthful.