The Night Our Cat Would Not Leave My Mother's Door

We got Biscuit when I was nine, and for fourteen years she treated my mother like a piece of furniture that occasionally filled the food bowl. She slept on my bed, followed my father around the garden, and would sit on anyone's lap except my mother's. It was a family joke. Mum would hold out a hand and Biscuit would look at it the way you look at a bill you cannot pay.

So none of us knew what to make of that Tuesday in March. It was nothing special. We had shepherd's pie for dinner. Mum said she was tired and went up early, around nine. I was doing the washing up when I noticed Biscuit sitting at the bottom of the stairs, very still, staring up into the dark.

She started up slowly, one step at a time, stopping on each one. When she reached the landing she went to my mother's door and sat down against it. Then she began to cry. Not a normal meow. A low, drawn-out sound I had never heard from her, over and over, like she was calling to someone through the wood.

My father tried to move her twice. He picked her up and carried her downstairs and she came straight back, faster each time, and pressed herself against the door and cried again. Around midnight he gave up and we left her there. I remember lying in bed listening to it and feeling my skin go cold for no reason I could name.

At about half past six in the morning my father woke to Biscuit scratching at the bedroom door, and then he heard my mother's breathing. It was wrong. Loud and uneven, catching. He could not wake her properly. She had had a stroke sometime in the night, the doctors thought in the very early hours. The paramedics said the fact that we found her when we did made a real difference. Another few hours and it would have been a different story.

Mum recovered most of the way. She has a slight drag in her left foot and she forgets the odd word, but she is here, she is herself, she still tells me off for slouching. And here is the part I cannot get past.

Biscuit went back to ignoring her. The very next week she was back on my bed, back to looking at my mother's outstretched hand like it owed her money. Whatever had happened that night was over. It was as if she had been sent to do one job and, having done it, she filed my mother back under furniture.

I do not have a theory. I am not a spiritual person. I sell insurance and I balance my own accounts and I do not believe in much. But I know that a cat who never once cared where my mother was spent one whole night crying at her door, and that door happened to be the one thing standing between us and finding her too late.

My mother thinks Biscuit smelled something, some change in her blood, the way dogs are said to. Maybe that is all it was, a smell, chemistry, a warning written in a language we do not have. But I was on that landing at midnight. It did not feel like chemistry. It felt like being told.

Biscuit is old now, sleeping most of the day in a patch of sun. Sometimes I watch her and I want to ask what she knew. She just blinks at me and goes back to sleep, keeping it to herself, the way she keeps everything.