The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (15 page)

To add insult
to injury, a text from Deborah arrived the following week. ‘Want to come and meet our new cat?’ she asked, attaching a picture of Graham.

‘That’s Graham!’ I said, when she opened her front door to me half an hour later.

‘Who’s Graham?’

‘I mean Andrew. Well, he’s Graham now. We changed it after we caught him and got him neutered, but then he escaped again. It’s a long story. Anyway,
why does he love you, and not us
? I mean, obviously, we had his balls cut off, but
apart
from that.’

‘No, as I said, this isn’t Andrew. I mean Graham. This one’s very friendly. He’s not around all the time and he’s popped out again at the moment. I suppose it takes a bit of time for ferals to get adjusted. But he’s coming in for food every day. Biscuit’s very suspicious of him, but he and David get on like a house on fire. He’s been all over him today, jumped on his lap and everything. We’ve decided to call him Alan.’

‘But have you seen Graham close up?’

‘No, but I’ve seen him around. He’s different. Definitely a different cat.’

Back at home, I made a mental list of the facts:

1. Both cats were ginger.
   

2. Both cats had personas that had led their new wannabe owners to give them names evoking men who might work as financial advisors.
   

3. In exactly the
   same period when Graham had been getting to know Deborah and David, he had been absent from our house.
   

4. Gemma and I had taken Graham to meet a man from California who had spoken in tender, reassuring tones to him, then drugged him and removed his bollocks.
   

5. Deborah and David had not taken him to meet a man from California who had spoken in tender, reassuring tones to him then drugged him and removed his bollocks.
   

6. The picture Deborah had shown me of Alan was actually of Graham.
   

It all seemed extremely suspicious, and over the following nights I would find myself lying awake, turning it over in my mind, much as a conspiracy theory fanatic might do with the specifics of the plane crashes in America on September 11th, 2001. With Shipley and Ralph’s night-time rowdiness in full flow, I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, and wondered if it might be time for me to take down the sign on the bedroom door that said ‘CAT SERVICE STATION – OPEN 2am–5am’, since it didn’t seem to be working out for me.

‘It’s probably best if we just try not to think about him,’ said Gemma, but it was easier said than done. On the evening before my birthday, it rained hard, and water thundered into the conservatory through the hole in the roof made by Graham, which
I’d thought I’d had mended. I couldn’t help imagining him out there somewhere, soaked and shivering, wondering what that vaguely empty feeling towards the rear of his body was – that is, if Deborah was to be believed, and he wasn’t curled up contentedly at this very moment in her and David’s front room. I was being irrational. Since when had I seen a cat shiver just because of a bit of rain? But I had slipped into defeat mode again. I felt defeated by the house, defeated by cats.

As Gemma passed
me another old towel to soak up the damage, though, an amazing thing happened: a friendly pink nose appeared in the crack in the conservatory window. Attached to it was a familiar ginger face.

‘Sven!’ said Gemma.

‘Andrew!’ I said.

‘Graham!’ the two of us chorused.

It was one of those perfect moments that you’d retell later, when asked by friends about how you and your cat came to live together, with embellished details to make it seem a little more heartwarming and lovely. Except this time there was no need to embellish, because it was as heartwarming and lovely as you could hope for. Graham sauntered into the conservatory, pushing his cold nose first into my hand then into Gemma’s, sniffing about in a relaxed fashion, accepting our strokes, looking into our eyes with hope and – this was the really amazing part – trust. It was amazing, I thought, how a mere animal had the capacity to go away, assess his situation, and come back with a complete adjustment of attitude. He did smell a little more pungent than usual, but I thought it was the least we could do to invite him into the bedroom. He waltzed happily in, with Gemma trailing him.

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘He’s got balls.’

I inspected the area in question. ‘But … how … what … That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘They’ve grown back! They can’t do that. Can they?’

As I looked in more detail at the cat in front of me, taking in his bulk and the patch of white on the top of his nose that was just a bit too big, I realised quite how blind I’d been. And then all the details I’d missed began to hit me, one after another, like objects falling out of a cupboard I’d hastily, carelessly filled weeks earlier. I had been alarmed at how big Graham had looked the other day, when he’d been sitting on the deckchair next to Ralph, but I hadn’t really thought to question it.

I thought back to
a night a couple of months earlier, not long after Shipley had been ill: another period where I’d not been getting much sleep, due to Graham’s early-morning break-ins. Shipley had been making up for the valuable three or four days he’d lost, going on all sorts of mini-nocturnal adventures, and popping back after each one to tell me about it. I’d woken to the sound of cats fighting and worried it might be him, but, stumbling outside and up the stairs leading to the front of the house, I’d seen two ginger cats squaring up to one another, fur mohicans fully erect. I’d shooed them off with a sleepy, half-hearted ‘Oi! Take it elsewhere!’ and I’d identified one as Graham (or Andrew, as he was then known), but I’d been half asleep at the time, and summarily forgot about the incident. I had heard the noises of other cat fights in the night recently. But none in the last fortnight: the fortnight since Graham’s balls had been removed.

This, then, must have been the battle that had played itself out for the last few months, beyond our awareness, in the pathways and nooks and undergrowth surrounding the Upside Down House: the story of two ginger cats, possibly even siblings, both of whom were looking for a home. There were two homes for them: homes owned by people who loved cats. Sadly, though, only one cat could ultimately stay in the locality. The smaller, less confident cat had been the original settler, and he’d fought bravely for his territory, but then he’d lost two vital things: small things, but things that made him feel like a man, that made him want to fight.

After that, it was
all over. There could be only one victor, and we were looking at him.

‘Hello, Alan,’ I said.

‘Hi, Alan,’ said Gemma.

‘
Meeooop
,’ said The Bear, who’d come into the bedroom to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Hi everyone,’ said Alan, not with words, but with a powerful jet of urine, some of which sprayed the bedroom wall, but most of which landed on the curtains.

It seemed that Graham was lost for ever. A week became a fortnight, then a month. I looked for him outside every night, asked amongst neighbours, but there was no sign. I left food by the door, but it was snaffled by Alan, who – though never quite as friendly as he had been the night he’d pissed on the curtains – was now carrying on where Graham had left off, in terms of coming in through the catflaps and weeing on my Bill Withers records. I blamed myself, not Alan, for Graham’s departure, but in a way it had been Graham’s own decision: we had made it clear he had a home here, and if he’d really wanted it, perhaps he would have taken it. I’d been wrong to assume all ferals
want
a home. Some of them probably just want to eat.

‘Of course, Chip’s got
his faults, but he would never have done any of this,’ said Gemma, as we sat together on the floor, putting new protective polythene sleeves on the W–Z section of my albums for a second time.

I wondered what all this spelled for The Bear, who was often still seen by Deborah and David, staring in at Biscuit through the windows of their house. That candle he held for her may have flickered somewhat of late, but it was not about to go out just yet, and I couldn’t imagine him feeling good that she now shared her house with a large, roughneck male cat from south Norfolk’s mean lanes. I was glad that Alan had found a home with two cat lovers, though, and I enjoyed the comedy of hearing Deborah call ‘Alllannn!’ every evening. It brought to mind the pleasing mental picture of her and David adopting a small, rather naughty insurance clerk who ran free in their garden, buried his own faeces and batted for the local village cricket team at weekends.

Once again, I thought of those anonymous ferals and their gossip about me, picturing their reaction to all this, and the events that had led up to it.

‘So Ginger Ron’s called Alan now, and given up travelling to settle down? That’s weird. Never saw that one coming.’

‘Yeah, and the guy in the weird sixties house with the hole in the roof got Ginger Dave’s balls cut off.’

‘What? Man, that’s harsh. I thought you said this guy was a pushover. Ginger Dave could be a bit annoying, with that throaty meow of his, but he didn’t deserve that.’

‘I think it
was done with good intentions, actually. It’s like this guy’s a charity, just for cat balls. I was thinking I might get mine done, actually. I’m tired of wanting to mount everything with a pulse. I feel like I’m chained to an idiot. I need some down time.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m not the only one. Give up the sex life for an inexhaustible supply of free food – that’s the way to go. Word’s out on the lanes. I’ve got some of my old gang coming over from just outside Stowmarket next week. They’ve been living in this derelict farm, but it’s being redeveloped and they’re looking for a simpler existence. One that’s not so dramatically governed by their hormones.’

‘I can’t believe this. You’ve changed, dude.’

We make a large proportion of the big decisions in our life in a weakened state. This is one of the reasons why, unless you’re a person of extreme, calculated rationality, life rarely follows a straightforward pattern: big stuff more than often follows on directly from big stuff, like falling dominoes. A career change might come about as a reaction to a bad job experience. A relationship might well have more chance of getting off the ground because of the failed relationship that preceded it. A house will be bought in tribute to, or as a reaction to, a previous house.

Cat ownership is
often similar. I was yet to make any very carefully planned decision regarding the adoption of a cat. The adoption of Ralph and Brewer had been inextricably linked to the chaotic excitement of a whirlwind marriage and a reckless move to a new county; the adoption of Shipley had been inextricably linked to the chaotic excitement of adopting Brewer and Ralph, combined with the chaotic excitement of seeing a nine-week-old Shipley jump over a small ornamental pond. Pablo and Bootsy had come into my life largely because of a failed mission to get a beagle and a rough calculation that its weight might compare to that of two small cats. Janet and The Bear had wandered into my life without any planning at all, leaving me no real choice in the matter. That’s just the way it works, a lot of the time. But maybe I’m making excuses for Gemma and myself, hoping that the weakened state in which we found ourselves after the disappearance of Graham accounts, in some way, for the careless haste of our subsequent actions. Forgive us: the first thing we did, after realising he was not coming back, was to go straight out and get a kitten.