Lucy

On my 4th birthday I was given a kitten.

It’s my earliest memory: Swinging my legs, high up on the kitcken table, choosing her name.

I called her Lucy and she was my Light.

Dressed up in dolls clothes and pushed around in a pram. Bumped down the stairs in the bottom of a sleeping bag. Lucy tolerated it all.

She gave me worms, constantly and in the summer the house was jumping with fleas and catshit dried up under the piano.

My parents never fully cleared up any of it.

My mum said she was a ‘special needs cat’ and it is true that she would sometimes fall asleep whilst grooming, her leg in the air, her pink tongue still out.

Lucys favourite place was on the kitchen table next to the radiator. A battle played out every day which my dad always won.

He would roll up the Evening Standard and wave it shouting ‘HutsaHutsa!! Off the table catcat or I’ll make cat pie out of you!’

Then off she would dash.

A blur of black and white fur. Making for something electric to perch herself on, delicately. The tv. The washing machine. The record player.

We slept together every single night. She wasn’t curled up at my feet. No, she got herself right under the duvet. Lying alongside me like a lover. Front legs round my neck. Cheek to cheek. Dribbling into my ear.

And as I fell asleep we would breathe together. I sped up my breathing and who knows, maybe she slowed hers down.

Anyhow we breathed in synchrony and then The Wheel would appear in my tummy.

Like a ferris wheel.

On the in breath round from bottom to top, Outbreath; back down again.

She was my meditation master.

Night after night as my parents stormed below, she saved my chubby, bruised, uncomprehending little heart from breaking.

She died when I was 20. Job done.