MONTY, my brother
Mum says everyone misses Monty’s diary and she thinks they’d like it if I meowed on her blog to take his place. Unfortunately, I’m not as confident about public meowing as Monty was, and sadly I don’t think I could ever ‘take his place’, as my brother was a one-off. But I’d like to please Mum, so I’ll give it a go. I’ll tell you about Monty, shall I?
The first thing you’d have noticed if you saw us together, was that he was bigger than me. We’re cross-breeds, apparently, and Mum says he was far more of a Rag Doll and I’m far more of a Siamese. Being bigger than me, though, didn’t stop Monty from jumping on me for fun. Sometimes he hurt me – I don’t suppose he meant to, but it made me wary when he was around, keeping ready to retaliate. I tended to sleep with one eye open. Now he’s gone, I don’t have to keep watching my back, and I must admit I do feel more relaxed . . . but that took a long time, because at first, I just missed him.
Of course I missed him – he was my brother. We lived together in our first home, with seven other cats in our family. I don’t know why we had to go from there to the Home for Homeless Cats (Mum calls it the ‘protection centre’), but we were scared there, and glad we could share a cage. We were still scared when Mum and Dad came to take us to our Furever Home, but gradually we realised it was going to be a nice life here, and now I definitely wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. The home comforts are pretty good, and they do their best, considering they’re only humans, and old ones, at that.
That day – when Monty left us – I knew he wasn’t well. He lay down on the floor and gave a really loud cry, and I didn’t know what to do so I sat down next to him and washed his face, in case that would help. But I knew, somehow, that licking him wasn’t going to be enough. Mum and Dad looked scared as they put him in the Vet Basket . . . and I waited on the windowsill when they went off in the Car. And when they came back, later, without him, and Mum’s face was all red and wet, I knew. I just knew: he must have gone to live in another world, to spend the rest of his nine lives without me. They said there'd been something wrong with his heart, but I always thought he had a good heart, because he loved everyone.
I cried so much, so loudly, that first night, that Mum and Dad let me go into their bedroom with them. I knew it wasn’t normally allowed but I couldn’t even enjoy it because I felt so lonely, and so upset that Monty had gone without me. I was so upset for a lot of days afterwards too, that they took me to the Vet – as if that would cheer me up! You’d think they’d have realised by now, how scared we all are of going there! But the vet was nice to me, stroked me a lot and told Mum to buy some tablets and sprays and things from a place called ‘Internet’, which were supposed to calm me down.
I don’t know if all that stuff worked, or whether I just gradually came to terms with Monty leaving me behind. But to be honest, I’ve begun to realise there are some perks to being the only cat in the family, and not just the lack of being jumped on. There’s also the fact that my favourite little tins of wet cat food are big enough for two – we used to share one. Now, Mum dishes up half, so if I eat it and look at her longingly, she puts the rest of it down. Of course, I then leave most of the second half for a while (and as we cats all know, wet cat food is only edible for the moment it takes to land in the dish). So she sighs and throws the rest away. It’s always fun to play these little games with our humans, just to keep them on their toes. They should know that our food dishes must have something in them at all times, otherwise we start to panic that we’re never going to be fed again, and might feel forced to hunt for something outside, just in case. And we all know how upset the humans get about us bringing prey indoors, don’t we? I’ve never quite worked out what the problem is with that. They bring their shopping inside!
Well, I think I’ve meowed enough to you for today, humans. It’s a cold day and I need to get underneath the sofa cushions for a good sleep now. At least I have all the sleeping places in the house to myself these days. But I’d still choose to have my brother back, instead, if I could, to watch him plod around the place lazily the way he did, taking his time, never rushing, always flopping against the humans’ laps and snoring. That was Monty – everyone loved him. But I did, most of all.
RIP Monty, 14 July 2024, aged 11
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