After Cleo

Cleansed

When drugs aren’t all bad

Vivienne’s voice was warm and sympathetic over the phone.

‘If he was my cat I’d put him on a medication like Prozac,’ she said.

‘But . . .’ I began, hearing Mum’s voice booming from her plastic urn: ‘Prozac! For a CAT??!!’

‘Look, I’m sorry. I know we’ve discussed it before and you’re against it, but Jonah’s problems can’t be cured behaviourally. He’s got into a pattern you won’t be able to break.’

I felt a total failure. If pets reflect the personalities of their owners, what kind of lunatics were we?

‘It’s not your fault,’ Vivienne continued. ‘Orientals are nearly always high-maintenance.’

I drew a quivery breath. Our bag of options was empty. ‘Will he have to stay on it for the rest of his life?’ I asked.

‘Not necessarily. After a few months it might change his brain chemistry and he’ll start behaving normally again.’

Months?!

When I talked to the vet, she said not to feel guilty about having a chemically altered cat. She had a pair of Orientals at home and she’d had to put them on it every now and then.

Back home, I guiltily placed half a yellow pill in a dish of Jonah’s favourite tuna. When I returned several hours later, the tuna had gone. All that remained was half a pill gleaming in the bowl.

I ground the other half of the tablet into a powder and spooned it through his next meal – which he refused to touch. In desperation, I pummelled the medication to a pulp, added it to an eye dropper fill with milk and tried to squirt it down Jonah’s throat. He put his head back and sprayed it all back at me.

Vivienne paid an emergency visit and taught me how to hold Jonah firmly, prise his jaw open and drop the pill into the back of his throat as quickly and neatly as possible. She made it look easy, but when I tried it next day Jonah wriggled and squirmed like a seal before spitting the pill on the floor. Then he pretended to swallow it, after which he let it drop discreetly on to a cushion. After a gladiatorial battle, I finally won, stroking the pill gently down his gullet the way Vivienne had shown me. As Jonah skulked away, his tail lowered, I felt terrible.

Over the following days, Jonah became a quieter, more amiable cat. The spraying stopped almost immediately. I started trusting him enough to let him back into rooms he’d been banned from during daylight hours (though not enough to unravel the piano’s cling wrap protection). He spent most of the day in the living room, dozing in the sun on top of the alpaca rug. While he still ran to greet people at the door and jumped at sudden noises, he was altogether calmer and easier to live with. We were happier. He was more content in himself.

The person I’d expected to voice the most disapproval of the new drug regime was Lydia. I thought she’d urge me to seek some other psychic or maybe an animal shaman. But she’d been working in a psychiatric ward lately. Medication, she said, could change lives.

Hoping we were on the brink of a new, odour-free life I embarked on a full-scale house clean. With her impeccable nose, Katharine helped me discover tiny spots on the skirting boards and stair rails that I’d missed before.

We were ready for a new phase.