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Here’s something strange: when I was a kid my cat got killed by a fox, which was quite vexing really, as well as quite fucked, because I’d seen a fox out on the street the night before when me and my Dad were walking back from the fish and chip shop in Finchley and my Dad had gone “look, Lily, a sneaky fox”, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and both of us suddenly bolted upright, and it seemed somewhat numinous, it seemed somewhat spiritual, even to a kid, or maybe especially to a kid, this encounter with an absolute other. He stared for me for quite a while. I stared at him for quite a while. We shared a bit of a moment. We were transmitting a meaning, even, even just sharing a silence, like two people who stare at each other in a situation because they both understand something, like two siblings staring at each other when they hear their parents shouting, they’re sharing an understanding, which is what tenderness is. I was sharing a tender moment with a fox. 

But then he scurried off looking all shifty, like he’d just pocketed a stranger’s iPhone before slipping out of a pub. This ruined the tenderness. This shiftiness, since we didn’t share the shiftiness — I didn’t feel like I’d done anything wrong — had gone and made it weird. 

And then the next night, we heard all this screaming and scurrying outside in the garden and then my mother ran and opened the curtain for our wide glass doors that look out into the garden and we saw it there, lit by the light of our living room, the fox standing over our cat, which it had killed with some bites through the neck. Christ alive! The horror of the thing! The betrayal! From this same fox, presumably! 

And so I grew into a mature form of spirituality (I imagined my growing like a yew tree creaking and writhing outwards and upwards into a more twisted and elder and melancholic form): an angel can be a malevolent thing. My mother ran into the kitchen and got out a kitchen knife and ran back into the living room and opened the door and ran out into the garden in her dressing grown screaming and the malicious fox slipped upwards through the air like a quick sudden flicker of flame and curved itself over the garden fence and slipped into the darkness of a neighbouring playing field. 

It would have been quite a thing to see my mother stab a fox to death, to be honest. It would have been quite a thing. The sheer drama of gushes of blood splashing onto her perfectly white dressing gown. I’d have found it quite exciting, to be honest. I’d have found it quite exhilarating. To see my mother slip a knife in and out and in and out of that malignant fox. It made me breathe quite quickly, the thought of it. Was something wrong with me? My cat was dead yet the grief hadn’t hit me yet, only this lust for lurid vengeance. 

I was learning things about myself and about the world; forms of knowledge which you then have to learn to repress. 

See I hit a girl in the face in school the following Monday. My mother in my headmistresses’s office in the afternoon had to explain “I’m sorry, she saw a fox kill our cat on Saturday. She’s a bit traumatised, to be honest. Maybe I’d be a good idea if I took her out of school for a few days, and talked to her a bit more about it, if I helped ground her.” My mother hadn’t spoken to me about it at all. And she didn’t after that either, I just played Pokemon in bed for 3 days, allowing animals to kill other animals over and over. 

She spoke to people about it around me, she drew out all the drama and sucked in the sympathy, of course. But what do you say to a kid after such knowledge (isn’t that what the concrete-dull cliche trauma is, after all, isn’t it just knowledge, too much knowledge too quickly?). Nobody knows, nobody knows. The true technique for consolation beyond meaningless cliches and kitsch and failure to connect to feeling whatsoever remains utterly mysterious. For nobody truly knows how to sincerely say “I’m sorry you saw a fox tear through your cat’s jugular” and achieve something by it. Even a hand just holding a hand afterwards would feel strange. 

But it’s true that deep and restorative tenderness is feasible from time to time in this fallen life, it is true. But it’s like finding gold or writing an actually decent poem: there’s no replicable method to it, it’s not like drawing water from a well, or even drawing blood from a wrist with a razor, and would that it were so simple! 

Here’s something strange: in uni, in first term, I was haunted by the ghost of that dead cat. Or haunted might not be the word. It was altogether a more complicated experience. A ghost always comes to one in one’s loneliness, doesn’t it, a ghost is a lonely thing that lingers in lonely places and bothers lonesome folk. A loneliness came to haunt my loneliness, a dehydration hallucination in my hangovers, when for a period I was just drinking far too

much, too homesick and adrift. I thought I was actually going mental. But I’d go to stroke it and my hand would slip through its solid shadow, and it’d be gone, and I’d will myself to go and pour myself a rational glass of water. Oh cat! Oh Dusty! You’d look at me with your eyes and I’d feel wanted, and unlike a mangy thing that gets no phonecalls from its mother and pushes over bins from scraps from last night’s McDonald’s. You’d look at me and I’d feel there’s still mystery in this world.