“Not a problem I says, and I go downstairs. I thought for a moment about nicking it from the cat’s bowl, but of course I didn’t. It was like, I knew she wanted it, so I had to do it. I had no choice. I went down to Safeways, and I bought her a packet of best ground sirloin.
“The cat smelled it. Followed me up the stairs. I said, you get down, puss. It’s not for you, I said. It’s for Miss Corvier and she’s not feeling well, and she’s going to need it for her supper, and the thing mewed at me as if it hadn’t been fed in a week, which I knew wasn’t true because its bowl was still half full. Stupid, that cat was.
“I knock on her door, she says Come in. She’s still in the bed, and I give her the pack of meat, and she says Thank you Edward, you’ve got a good heart. And she starts to tear off the plastic wrap, there in the bed. There’s a puddle of brown blood under the plastic tray, and it drips onto her sheet, but she doesn’t notice. Makes me shiver.
“I’m going out the door, and I can already hear her starting to eat with her fingers, cramming the raw mince into her mouth. And she hadn’t got out of bed.
“But the next day she’s up and about, and from there on she’s in and out at all hours, in spite of her age, and I think there you are. They say red meat’s bad for you, but it did her the world of good. And raw, well, it’s just steak tartare, isn’t it? You ever eaten raw meat?”
The question came as a surprise. I said, “Me?”
Eddie looked at me with his dead eyes, and he said, “Nobody else at this table.”
“Yes. A little. When I was a small boy—four, five years old—my grandmother would take me to the butcher’s with her, and he’d give me slices of raw liver, and I’d just eat them, there in the shop, like that. And everyone would laugh.”
I hadn’t thought of that in twenty years. But it was true.
I still like my liver rare, and sometimes, if I’m cooking and if nobody else is around, I’ll cut a thin slice of raw liver before I season it, and I’ll eat it, relishing the texture and the naked, iron taste.
“Not me,” he said. “I liked my meat properly cooked. So the next thing that happened was Thompson went missing.”
“Thompson?”
“The cat. Somebody said there used to be two of them, and they called them Thompson and Thompson. I don’t know why. Stupid, giving them both the same name. The first one was squashed by a lorry.” He pushed at a small mound of sugar on the Formica top with a fingertip. His left hand, still. I was beginning to wonder whether he had a right arm. Maybe the sleeve was empty. Not that it was any of my business. Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.
I was trying to think of some way of telling him I didn’t have any money, just in case he was going to ask me for something when he got to the end of his story. I didn’t have any money: just a train ticket and enough pennies for the bus ticket home.
“I was never much of a one for cats,” he said suddenly. “Not really. I liked dogs. Big, faithful things. You knew where you were with a dog. Not cats. Go off for days on end, you don’t see them. When I was a lad, we had a cat, it was called Ginger. There was a family down the street, they had a cat they called Marmalade. Turned out it was the same cat, getting fed by all of us. Well, I mean. Sneaky little buggers. You can’t trust them.
“That was why I didn’t think anything when Thompson went away. The family was worried. Not me. I knew it’d come back. They always do.
“Anyway, a few nights later, I heard it. I was trying to sleep, and I couldn’t. It was the middle of the night, and I heard this mewing. Going on, and on, and on. It wasn’t loud, but when you can’t sleep these things just get on your nerves. I thought maybe it was stuck up in the rafters, or out on the roof outside. Wherever it was, there wasn’t any point in trying to sleep through it. I knew that. So I got up, and I got dressed, even put my boots on in case I was going to be climbing out onto the roof, and I went looking for the cat.
“I went out in the corridor. It was coming from Miss Corvier’s room on the other side of the attic. I knocked on her door, but no one answered. Tried the door. It wasn’t locked. So I went in. I thought maybe that the cat was stuck somewhere. Or hurt. I don’t know. I just wanted to help, really.
“Miss Corvier wasn’t there. I mean, you know sometimes if there’s anyone in a room, and that room was empty. Except there’s something on the floor in the corner going Mrie, Mrie…. And I turned on the light to see what it was.”
He stopped then for almost a minute, the fingers of his left hand picking at the black goo that had crusted around the neck of the ketchup bottle. It was shaped like a large tomato. Then he said, “What I didn’t understand was how it could still be alive. I mean, it was. And from the chest up, it was alive, and breathing, and fur and everything. But its back legs, its rib cage. Like a chicken carcass. Just bones. And what are they called, sinews? And, it lifted its head, and it looked at me.
“It may have been a cat, but I knew what it wanted. It was in its eyes. I mean.” He stopped. “Well, I just knew. I’d never seen eyes like that. You would have known what it wanted, all it wanted, if you’d seen those eyes. I did what it wanted. You’d have to be a monster not to.”
“What did you do?”
“I used my boots.” Pause. “There wasn’t much blood. Not really. I just stamped, and stamped on its head, until there wasn’t really anything much left that looked like anything. If you’d seen it looking at you like that, you would have done what I did.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And then I heard someone coming up the stairs to the attic, and I thought I ought to do something, I mean, it didn’t look good, I don’t know what it must have looked like really, but I just stood there, feeling stupid, with a stinking mess on my boots, and when the door opens, it’s Miss Corvier.
“And she sees it all. She looks at me. And she says, You killed him. I can hear something funny in her voice, and for a moment I don’t know what it is, and then she comes closer, and I realize that she’s crying.
“That’s something about old people, when they cry like children, you don’t know where to look, do you? And she says, He was all I had to keep me going, and you killed him. After all I’ve done, she says, making it so the meat stays fresh, so the life stays on. After all I’ve done.
“I’m an old woman, she says. I need my meat.
“I didn’t know what to say.
“She’s wiping her eyes with her hand. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody, she says. She’s crying now. And she’s looking at me. She says, I never wanted to be a burden. She says, that was my meat. Now, she says, who’s going to feed me now?”
He stopped, rested his gray face in his left hand, as if he was tired. Tired of talking to me, tired of the story, tired of life. Then he shook his head and looked at me and said, “If you’d seen that cat, you would have done what I did. Anyone would have done.”
He raised his head then, for the first time in his story, looked me in the eyes. I thought I saw an appeal for help in his eyes, something he was too proud to say aloud.
Here it comes, I thought. This is where he asks me for money.
Somebody outside tapped on the window of the café. It wasn’t a loud tapping, but Eddie jumped. He said, “I have to go now. That means I have to go.”
I just nodded. He got up from the table. He was still a tall man, which almost surprised me: he’d collapsed in on himself in so many other ways. He pushed the table away as he got up, and as he got up he took his right hand out of his coat pocket. For balance, I suppose. I don’t know.
Maybe he wanted me to see it. But if he wanted me to see it, why did he keep it in his pocket the whole time? No, I don’t think he wanted me to see it. I think it was an accident.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt or a jumper under his coat, so I could see his arm, and his wrist. Nothing wrong with either of them. He had a normal wrist. It was only when you looked below the wrist that you saw most of the flesh had been picked from the bones, chewed like chicken wings, leaving only dried morsels of meat, scraps and crumbs, and little else. He only had three fingers left, and most of a thumb. I suppose the other finger bones must have just fallen right off, with no skin or flesh to hold them on.