I stared at my mother for a second as though she had taken leave of her senses.
Upon emerging from the kitchen in her house, she asked me to close the door behind me, and it was at that point that that I froze on the spot and opened my mouth.
Then my brain clicked into gear, and my face lost the look of surprise which it had just registered.
I'd imagined that my mother had gone mad because, had I closed the door behind me, then it would leave Danny unable to cross the boundary between the living room and the kitchen, and I'd only end up having to get up and open it for him anyway.
Danny, of course, is gone, though, and I'd overlooked that fact for a second - his physical being is replaced by a large framed photo which is unlikely to ask to be let into the kitchen any time soon.
It isn't that I don't accept it, but that I have difficulty in processing it. In other words, it takes time for the reality of a situation to separate out from the kaleidoscope of thoughts, and for the separated ideas to be permanently internalised.
When I arrived at my mother's on Thursday afternoon, I was locked out of the house, having forgotten to pick up my key when I left here. It meant I was stood outside for a good ten minutes, and the wind was agitating the shrubbery in the neighbour's garden.
Danny would hide in there a lot, and when I saw the movement caused by the wind, I looked for a few seconds for the black-and-white cat responsible. This time, though, there was no surprise or misinterpretation - I knew I'd not see him, but nevertheless I searched.
Less than two weeks after his departure, Danny is Schrödinger's cat as far as I am concerned - depending on who I am with, or where I am, or my state of mind, he is sometimes alive, and sometimes dead.
I know, truly I know, that the cat represented by the photograph is irretrievable. Likewise, the image of Bluefish which I have saved on my computer - there is no prospect of snapping my fingers, uttering an invocation, and a smiling Australian woman emerging, unflustered, from its perimeter; and banging the plastic fork on the feeding dish won't set Danny in pursuit of his next meal.
When everything else has gone, whole lives are reduced to a batch of photographs, on which we stake everything. Since December 5 last year, Bluefish is no more and no less than three or four flat, dead images. Since November 10, Danny is no more than his two dimensional-photograph, trapped forever behind a wall of glass.
Yet we stake everything on these things, attempting to use the last remnants of history as the platform upon which to build some sort of future. It pains me to report that I don't appear to be doing a very good job of it.
