Kittens

When it became obvious – when Zelda’s belly grew big and distended and faintly ridiculous – Karla and I tried to guess which of the neighbourhood toms was the father.

There was Mr Black, Mr Tabby, and Mr Grey. They all seemed too big for Zelda, too worldly, like they must have taken advantage.

'I guess we'll find out when the kittens come,' Karla said.

Zelda herself was white, with a black splotch on her nose like someone had spilt ink on her and never bothered to wash it out.

We did our research. 58 to 67 days it would take. We gutted the shed, and left her in there and waited.

Then one morning, when Karla had gone off to work, it happened.

I opened the shed door. Under and around Zelda, I saw greys and browns and whites wriggling. Each one was barely a dab, small enough to steal out of someone’s pocket. More vermin than kittens.

Four lived, but one was frozen still. I called the Vets 4 Pets hotline and they told me to remove it. It flobbed like raw meat as I tied it up in a Co-op bag and left it on the kitchen table. Back in the shed, I took a photo and sent it to Karla with the caption: ‘Still no idea who the father is.’

When Karla got back, we talked about the one in the bag.

Karla went into the shed to see the four, and when she came back she told me there were three. The white one had stopped moving. I felt it, rubbed it, and that was that. This time I found a Tesco bag.

I went in at midnight and there were still three. Three was good. Three would do. I took another photo and uploaded it to Instagram. 20 likes within 5 minutes. 50 likes within half an hour. People were saying they wanted one. ‘Gonna be quite the bidding war methinks,’ I wrote.

In the morning, two more were dead. They were so cold.

I called Karla and told her the news.

I Googled ‘why do kittens die’, phoned up Vets 4 Pets again; found out that it was most likely the mother, that she probably wasn’t feeding them, wasn’t keeping them warm. They called them ‘faded kittens’; said I had to take things into my own hands if I wanted the last one to survive.

Back in the shed I tried not to hate Zelda. She hissed at me when I went to pick up her last child. It wriggled in the palm of my hand – a tiny black thing, its eyes sealed shut, its ears folded in, its claws like the first sprouts of teeth in a baby’s gums.

I took it inside the house and swaddled it in kitchen towels, made a little nest for it in an Amazon box.

Half an hour later I came back from the pet shop with a box of powdered milk and a little teated bottle. When I picked the kitten up to feed it, I saw two little buds for testicles, so I called him Harry, after the Boy Who Lived.

The milk seemed to go everywhere but into his mouth. Sometimes he would open wide and a tongue the size of a nail on a little finger would reach out with a squeal. In it went, I thought. That’s it.

I texted Karla: ‘If he makes it, how can we sell him?’

The next time I fed him, the milk went everywhere again. Smeared into his chin, dripped down his belly. And then I saw it bubble at his nostrils and come pouring out. Again and again, every ten seconds, more milk. Like it was coming out of his brain. I tried to feed the teat into his mouth, tried to be more subtle this time, but he didn’t move.

I rubbed him, blew on him, performed CPR with my thumb.

Fight, I told him.

Fight.

He didn’t know what ‘fight’ meant.

The photo now had 78 likes on Instagram.

Karla and I talked about a burial. We didn’t have a spade. We said we would get one, borrow one from one of our parents, and then dig a hole.

But days passed, and we didn’t get round to it. Laziness is a stronger force than people think.

It now felt embarrassing to ask for a spade, to admit that we still hadn’t buried them even though so much time had passed – and so we just let time pass some more.

A week went by. We could still bury them, of course. But that would mean getting them out of the bags, it would mean seeing them. I imagined crumpled tails, rotted faces, bellies sloughed away.

It was easier, in the end, just to put them in the purple wheelie bin.

By collection day, it would all be over.