Twelve Hours, One Cat

Her name was Anneke and the cat's name was Boris and I had known them both for about six minutes when she asked me to take him. Schiphol, gate D57, a Tuesday in February, and everything was cancelled. Not delayed. Cancelled. There'd been weather in the wrong place and the departure board was a wall of red and the queue at the desk went back past the Pret. I'd been sitting on the floor against a pillar with my bag between my knees, doing the thing where you refresh the airline app as if that's ever helped anyone, when a woman with a cat carrier sat down next to me and said, in the flat way Dutch people say catastrophic things, "My mother is dying." I said I was sorry. She said thank you, then explained. Her mother was in a hospice in Groningen and had maybe a day. Anneke had been flying to Dublin for a job she was starting, she was moving, the cat was moving, the flat in Dublin was waiting, and now she needed to be on a train north in forty minutes and the cat could not come, because the hospice didn't take cats and her sister was allergic and there was, in short, no plan for Boris. "I have a friend in Dublin," she said. "She can collect him. But someone has to bring him." I looked at the carrier. A pair of yellow eyes looked back. "You have a trustworthy face," she said, which is a thing nobody has ever said to me before or since. I'd like to say I thought about it. I didn't. I said yes. She gave me the carrier, a bag with his food and a litter thing and his papers in a plastic wallet, a piece of paper with her friend's number on it, and a hug that was mostly desperation, and then she ran, and I was sitting on the floor of Schiphol with a cat. The next flight to Dublin was at 6am. It was 5pm. Here is what I learned about Boris over the following twelve hours. He was seven. He was a British Shorthair, grey, with a face like a disappointed magistrate. He did not like the carrier but he did not, as I'd feared, howl about it; he just sat and radiated judgement. He liked to be spoken to. This I found out around hour three, when I'd run out of things to do and started, out of boredom, narrating the departure board to him. "Frankfurt, cancelled. Lisbon, cancelled. Oslo, delayed, lucky them." He put his face against the mesh. He purred. It was the first time I'd felt like a competent human being since about noon.

Around hour five I had to deal with the litter thing. I'm not going to describe that. There's a disabled toilet on the D pier that has seen things. Around hour seven a security guard came over to ask about the cat, and I showed him the papers, and he looked at Boris and Boris looked at him and the guard said, "He's not happy," and I said, "He's Dutch, he's fine," and the guard, who was Dutch, laughed for a surprisingly long time. Around hour nine I fell asleep with my hand on the top of the carrier and woke up because Boris had reached a paw through the mesh and put it on my wrist, very gently, like he was checking I was still there. At 4am Anneke texted. "She's gone. I was there. Thank you. How is he." I sent a photo. The magistrate face, up close, one yellow eye. She sent back a heart and nothing else and I sat there in the fluorescent light with a stranger's cat while a stranger's mother had just died and felt, I don't know. Involved. In a way I hadn't asked for and wouldn't give back. The flight went. Boris under the seat in front, silent, dignified, furious. Her friend was at arrivals with a sign that said BORIS in big letters, which made me laugh out loud, and she took the carrier and said "Anneke says you're a saint," and I said I was a man who'd been sat on a floor for twelve hours, and she said "same thing," and that was that. Anneke sends a photo every few months. Boris in the Dublin flat. Boris on a windowsill. Boris looking at the rain with the face. She started the job. She's alright, she says. She's getting there. I never did catch her surname. I've got a cat's, though, if that counts. It's on the papers. Boris van der Berg. Trustworthy face.