Depression, Cartoons and the Cat

Depression, Cartoons and the Cat

By Stephen Owen

TW: suicide

I think it's only women who get mental depression. If a man goes mad, he goes out into the big wide world and gets his name in the newspapers.

I live on the seventh floor. I'm forty-five and very thin, a shadow of stubble etched on my lower face. My black hair hangs in shiny shards and my eyes look like they're sinking into my head. I wear skinny jeans and a black T-shirt most days. I look like a drug addict rock star.

But I'm not crying in my bed thinking about slashing my wrists. I'm lying on the couch laughing at a nineteen-sixties cartoon. Officer Dibble, truncheon raised, both feet off the ground. He's gonna beat the shit out of Top Cat until Choo-Choo appears from nowhere, sticks out a pink leg and Dibble eats dirt.

My girlfriend, Beth wanders in. I make no effort to sit up. I stare at the TV, pretend I don't see her, which is pretty fucking difficult coz she's the size of a baby elephant. She circles the room. Hair in plaits, giant jeans, circus tent top with daisies printed all over it. Her arms are wrapped around a large cardboard box.

Beth reckons I changed after 9/11 and she's probably right. It was years ago, but I still remember. I was hungover, took some aspirin. I would have been in by lunchtime, but the world had turned upside down by then. My workplace and everyone in it had ceased to exist. Later that day, or week, or month, I emptied my wardrobe. Had myself a bonfire of designer suits, pink shirts and patterned ties. Soon after, I came back to the UK and never worked again.

Beth steps in front of the TV and blocks my view.

I sigh, stretching to look around her fat backside.

“How you feeling?” she asks.

I shrug.

She thrums chewed fingernails upon the box. Places it on the floor between me and the television. She smiles and pats the package the way she pats my head sometimes. Like I'm a dog.

“I bought you a present.”

“Yeah?”

“Aren't you going to open it?”

“What is it?”

“To keep you company.”

That's not an answer to my question.

She rubs her hands together. “For when I go away.”

I don't like the sound of this. Beth's going away for a girly weekend and I'm thinking good fucking riddance. I don't need anything to keep me company. I've got cartoons.

If all TV was cartoons, I'd watch everything. Even science shows and the news. I think kids would, too. Imagine if they went to school and had a big screen with cartoon guy instead of a teacher. He could introduce animations about history and maths and all the shit nobody likes. I reckon they'd watch it, too.

“So?”

“So, what?” My voice is flat. Sarcastic. I sit up, yawn and rub my eyes. I feel tired. The less I do the tireder I get. Is that a word? Tireder? Gravity has increased tenfold.

“Don't you want to open it?” Eyes wide, blinking. She grits her teeth, purses her lips and destroys the box like a crazy kid on Christmas morning. I just sit on the couch, brow furrowed like the dad with the hangover who wants nothing better than to crawl back into bed and sleep it off.

A fluffy, black and white kitten peers from the wreckage.

Beth gloats over the torn cardboard. She believes pets are good for people with mental problems and low self-esteem. Gives them something to focus on. She also believes in ghosts and flying saucers and the Loch Ness Monster.

There are loads of cartoon cats. I reckon they get a raw deal. Tom and Sylvester top my list of the world's most wrongly persecuted animals. Jerry the Mouse and Tweety Pie may be necessary for the plot, but nobody on the planet actually likes those bastards. They need to be caught and eaten. Why do they always make out the cats are the bad guys? The bad guys never win in cartoons.

“Pandora's purring.” Beth grins, molar fillings like lumps of coal. She lifts the animal from what's left of the box and shoves it in my face. “She likes you.”

My cat's been christened, has it?

“I've bought some food.” The feline plops to the floor. “Special kitten stuff.”

Talking of bad guys. Remember Wacky Races? A bunch of lunatics in crazy cars driving across a desert. Dick Dastardly never won a race. That's nuts. Dastardly always got miles ahead of those guys. Then he'd set a trap so everyone would take a wrong turn and drive off a cliff. Why the hell didn't he just go full throttle and win the race?

The cat crawls under the couch.

Dastardly's plan always went wrong, but in the next scene he was back in front, setting another trap. His car must have been something else, huh? It was called The Mean Machine. Double zero on each door.

“Pandora! Pandora!” Beth clambers on all fours, looks under the sofa. She wails like an opera singer high on helium. “Come out. Come out. Wherever you are!”

The kitten runs out, chasing its tail, claws catching in the carpet.

“Why are you hiding from your mummy?” She picks it up and puts it in the armchair next to the TV.

Top Cat has finished and Wile E. Coyote looks perplexed. He prods the nothingness around him as if testing the temperature of a bath with his toe, then plummets like an out-of-control elevator. He disappears into a tiny black dot and explodes in a mushroom cloud of dust. That coyote's doomed, like Dastardly and Thomas and Sylvester and all the other cartoon bad guys. Always in front, forever finishing last.

Her mobile rings. She answers it. The girls are five minutes away. A weekend of drinking and sobbing and cackling at male strippers. Beth sounds excited. She's on her feet. She strokes the kitten, grabs her holdall and pecks my cheek.

“I'll be back Sunday,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Have fun with Pandora.” Beth smiles, but it's a kind of sad face, lips clenched in a tight crescent. She walks out, down the hallway where the lightbulb needs replacing and the wallpaper is peeling off. The front door opens and closes. Roadrunner says, 'MEEP MEEP.'

I pick up the purring Pandora. She's kinda cute. Looks like Penelope Pussycat from the Pepé Le Pew cartoons, but without the white stripe painted down her back.

Cat clutched to my chest, I stand up and walk over to the window. Pandora's eyes are green and round. There are puffs of misted glass from her shallow breath. I unlock the balcony door, slide it open and step outside for the first time in weeks. The world is a long way down and people are the size of ants. My face feels dry in the gentle breeze and Pandora's claws are sharper than I ever imagined.

A plane twinkles in the pastel blue sky. A chrome bullet, low and tilted. I imagine it bursting into flames.

Bugs Bunny was in a plane once with Yosemite Sam. It was going to crash and they only had one parachute between them. So Sam shoved Bugs out the way, grabbed it for himself and jumped out.

But guess what?

It wasn't really a parachute at all. It was a rucksack with somebody's lunch in it. When he pulled the cord, it opened and loads of sandwiches and cans and bottles of pop and stuff flew out.

Meanwhile Bugs was on a collision course with planet earth at a thousand miles an hour and about two feet from impact he hit the brakes. The plane stopped dead in mid air and he just stepped off it like he was walking out of an elevator.

I dangle Pandora over the railings and imagine the cloud of dust Wile E. Coyote makes every time he falls to earth. I think of hijacked planes and Sky News and jumpers splattered like rotten tomatoes all over the tarmac. If life was a cartoon, you'd know everything was going to be all right. No matter how bad things got, it wouldn't matter, not really, because in the next episode everything would be back to normal.

Pandora meows, wriggles and scratches my hand. The pain is sharp, an injection of cat claw and a bead of blood rolls between my fingers. It meanders down my pinky, hangs in the balance, before plopping like a demon raindrop to the world below.

“It's a long way down, kitty.” I lean over to give Pandora a better look and think about cats always landing on their feet. “Let's see what it feels like.”

I straighten up, throw the kitten into the apartment and slide the door shut.

I climb over the railings and step into the sunshine.

Nobody ever dies in cartoons.