I’m still getting used to my new year schedule. This is the poem that should have been posted on Tuesday as part of New and selected. I should be back on track next week.
Rainbow's End For Ned I laughed. My stepson’s tom, old Rainbow, in throes upon the backdoor mat, gasping, stretching, struggling, like the old years’ gutterings; an image of my father-in-law, eighteen months before. It felt like a bad joke. This animal I’d abused, ignored. Some remnant of a past that never included me, I wanted to eradicate. He never stopped seeking love, head raised high for the stroke. Purrs of bliss would reward my ambivalent hand. At the vet’s that morning, the locum shook his head with a hogmanay accent. This boy needs blood tests fast, but everywhere’s shut. Knowledge. Impotence. Potassium tablets prescribed, antibiotics, in case an ear infection caused Rainbow’s curious head-bent crouch. Some hope. It’s New Year’s Eve. Our piebald party’s underway, the motley guests assembled. The man who limply shakes my hand I try to tell we value, but the handshake gets no stronger. The vegetarian artist, mother of our son’s school friend, contemplates the paté. A younger woman slumps on the IKEA stool and asks to phone Saigon. Meanwhile Rainbow bubbles from his mouth and stretches mews. He blocks the path to the patio and champagne. A doctor delivers the coup de grace, via needle, then something else, to stop his vomiting. Rainbow stays in the twentieth century, in a washing basket, never makes it to the twenty-first. On Jan Two, I dig a grave as broad as frozen legs, as long as whiskers, next to the old flint wall he used to walk along. My stepson encourages Rainbow’s sister to the basket’s side, where she purrs and preens and could be puzzled. With a priest’s gentleness, he lifts the tabby body in his hands and lays it down in clay so unlike fur. He spades the soil across the frozen grin then levels it. All the while, my wife and I stand some way off weeping in amazement. We didn’t expect such grace, such a storm of loss. The old years’ fading blur of failure and compromise is no more subject to control than a cat. It may be stroked or rejected. But through our regret and cunning, it smiles its tantalising smile of hope.
