I am not a snitch! I know this because the words I’m telling have never come sliding out of my mouth and because when Kayleigh took a twenty out of the register that one time, that one time I saw anyway, she told Bethany, who was making wide-eyes my way, don’t worry about her. And she was right. But it didn’t matter because she got fired soon afterwards anyway – though not for that, apparently. See, I’m not usually in the know enough to be a snitch. No one will tell me even now what Kayleigh did.
Still, it’s important you know this about me upfront. It’s my firm belief getting other people in trouble places you yourself too close to a firing-zone which can expand at random, because trouble is nothing if not an over-reactive pufferfish of a bitch. And it’s not like the cat was causing a commotion, content as it was in the little sling held loving-tight to the man’s chest. Until you saw the unhuman green-eyes in its furry head, adorned with the distinctive markings of a mackerel tabby, you might even have thought it was a baby and oh, a man doing the childrearing how modern, or oh that’s so normal I shouldn’t remark on it even in my mind—fuck. It’s hard to tell, with Members of the General Public, what they’ve seen and what they haven’t. It looked like no one had seen the cat but it sure felt like they actually had. Although staff and customers are natural enemies, we are more fearful of those we suspect might be acting outside our own master/servant dynamic than each other. This man wasn’t wearing a coat on a cold day and he had long hair – borderline behaviour – but clocking the cat pushed him out of our sphere and firmly into the crazy/homeless Venn diagram. Regardless of his particular brand of problem there was a definite consensus none of us were going to set a fuss in motion about The Man Holding a Cat in the Bookshop. That sounds nice, doesn’t it. It sounds like the kind of book the bookshop would display in its big window: The Bookshop Cat. Heart-warming. Our Pick of the Month for November. Curl up with this purr-fect book! I asked Michael once if I could put a recommendation up and he said no. Efe told me later people in the bigger bookselling business, who make the real decisions about what books are going to sell before they get to bookshops, pay to put up those up. And Michael sometimes asks her to write out all those individual, honest testimonies because she has Good Girl handwriting. You learn things like that, about how the real world works, in a bookshop cafe.
To let the man know what you know about me, I smiled before I looked away. I didn’t lean over and ask Jakob what we should do, I made the executive decision it was fine. Sure, I continued to watch out because yes, the cat was just a good sleepy boy but he was also strapped to an unknown entity and either of these things near food is a health-hazard. Izzy told me if I ever wanted to progress at the cafe/in life I should take more of an interest in health and safety. It’s a transferable skill and actually really interesting? So sometimes when she is here I pick up and pretend to look at the big red binder we keep under the counter because if you’re not pursuing management then your commitment to the whole-thing is in question. Why are you even at the bottom if you’re not aspiring to get to the top? This is how I learnt that if there’s a fire the shift-manager has to make sure everyone else has left before they can leave themselves. But as far as I know there’s nothing in the whole binder about cats and their owners and how we should deal with them vis-à-vis their being in the cafe-space; which is actually a moot point anyway as neither the man nor cat ever entered the legally defined area constituting what the binder calls my remit, the limits of which are marked by flimsy pastel-coloured railings that look like they were stolen from a garden centre. In conclusion, they were never officially my problem/responsibility. So it was fine to instead concentrate on writing and rewriting my text to Isaac.
Some man just came in with a cute kitty :3
Might have been acceptable in the early 2000s.
A customer came into the bookshop with his tabby cat. It was so cute!
Clinically long.
Cat in the bookshop!
Too complete.
How could I make this an anecdote to ride all the way to a moustache ride? Perhaps I should’ve taken a picture. I tried to think if Isaac actually liked cats. On August 12th 2018 at 21:43 hours he’d posted a photo of himself holding up a cat Simba-style and captioned it pussy-lover, but it wasn’t his or anything. I had asked. Maybe he only tolerated cats for wordplay opportunities.
Cat in the bookshop!!!
My breakthrough was realising it could be less about the cat. What would Daria type?
this guy just came into the bookshop with a wholeass cat. who does that?
It was important to remind him I worked with books and hated people. In fact, speaking as kinda a book-person, he had declared this cool — a word he assured me had come around to be used sincerely again. However, I didn’t want him to realise I was more book-adjacent than directly involved, without even the power to put his pamphlet in the window, or that the only discount I could offer him was 10%, and that was only off cafe items. Being poor/powerless is bad enough without people/Isaac knowing it isn’t serving any wider/artistic purpose. So I was deep in my drafts and it was close to my shift being over when Maya grabbed my arm.
Dead cat. Ally, he’s got a dead fucking cat.
Up close the man seemed further along the crazy axis than I first thought, with small cuts all along his hands, and a blank look in his eye as he held up the dead cat. It didn’t look particularly dead, but it smelt dead. Overwhelmingly dead. Without consciousness the body had relapsed into flesh and was just rotting. And confronted with death I asked –
Sir, can we help you?
Because maybe I sometimes am management material, but the man was not so he responded by placing the cat’s head in his mouth. Or more placing his mouth over the cat’s entire tiny head. As he tried to manoeuvre their two bodies I could see the cat’s neck was raw, a band of wet pinked fur, like it had been wearing a too-tight collar.
Sir? I’m not sure how we can help?
He stopped to look at me in mute distress. Out of the sling/bag, the cat looked a lot smaller. It looked like a different cat altogether, maybe even a Bengal. A stray tabby I could understand but Bengals can cost up to a grand. Where did he get this cat?
Sir is this your cat?
He resumed mouth-to-mouth. Mouth-to-maw? Mouth-to-muzzle? Despite all furry art to the contrary, a human mouth is simply not made to fit over a cat’s. However, I couldn’t help but think there had to be a rational way to do it. As the sane person, my fingers wanted to reach out and readjust his, not like that like this.
I’m going to go get someone, I can’t—
Maya didn’t bother hiding her distress and straight-up ran away. When in doubt, get a manager was a mainstay of the binder, but so were retain a calm, professional demeanour at all times and never leave the counter unattended UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Someone had to hold the line.
I think there’s a vet near the station. Do you know the way? Out of here you take a left, then another left onto Crosswell Avenue—
I had stopped truly seeing things during my commute at this point, but I was fairly certain the place I passed twice a day almost every day was a vet. It was covered in purple paw-prints so garish that familiarity couldn’t entirely erase them, but it could have been a pet shop. And even if it was a vet would they be open or able to perform necromancy? At best, they could help dispose of the body (for a fee). When my family’s cat died we disposed of him in the garden. Then we moved away and I sometimes thought about Tango being there and his ghost wondering why we left him and isn’t dispose of the body one of those cases where the euphemism is worse than the actual action?
I used to have a cat. I’m sorry.
I said and I was.
I thought I was going to vomit I just wasn’t sure what to let’s see.
uh huh uh huh
Maya and Michael on the stairs about to be upon us: me – a potential future manager – thinking about a dead cat, and him – a potential future local news story – holding a dead cat. His hands carried on stroking and soothing without thinking and his mouth/eyes said nothing.
Sir, the vet is about five minutes from here. I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You can’t have a dead animal in here I’m afraid.
I looked straight at him while I said this, very firm and direct, stared him right out of my remit, and was therefore unable to see if Michael was impressed by my handling of the situation. If he was he didn’t mention it later when we went through the incident for the log-book.
Alright. Bethany said she saw the man come in earlier with the dead cat. Jakob says it was alive. Regardless, I just need to know how long it was in here for, if it touched anything, basically—what happened?
You remember Schrödinger's cat right, in his little box with the hammer and the acid and the vague radioactive substance? Maybe you also know Schrödinger was a Nobel Laureate/paedophile because a small card next to a book about him in a bookshop said find out more about the man behind the cat in a script with such delightful loops you googled him later, or maybe he was referenced in a story by a man you were kind of/not exactly involved with/have fellated more than once and so you googled him to ensure your praise of his work was informed enough. But for Michael, as site-manager, remit covering both bookshop and cafe, a cat dead/alive/both/neither are all as bad as each other and so it didn’t matter if it came in dead or was murdered on the premises or if it made a mockery of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The question wasn’t really, as snitches like Jakob and Bethany thought, what happened but rather what will happen as a result.
Hopefully this just a one-off freak occurrence, but if you ever become cafe manager you might have to deal with
But I had dealt with it. I had solved Schrödinger’s Cat: Bookshop Edition. Where philosophers and successful people differ is that the former engage in thought experiments which raise questions and the latter with scenarios that have answers. I dealt with it.
I thought about my text to Isaac and realised I needed to redraft.
Someone came into the bookshop today with a dead cat :(
Can I call you?
Olivia Payne is a librarian working in London. She has previously had work published in places including Uncharted, Cobra Milk, Ellipsis Zine, Pithead Chapel, Alphabet Box, and Sonder magazine. She is currently working on her first novel.
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