The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (2 page)

I braced myself for the inevitable baggage. I was in my thirties now, and could take this. Did she have seven children with eight different dads? Had she been a contestant on a reality TV show?

‘My cat, Neil, is a bit of a liability,’ she said.

‘Oh, really?’ I said. I felt pretty calm. I’d met a lot of liability cats in my time.

‘Yep. He’s bad. The other day I was sitting in the front room with my flatmate and my flatmate’s girlfriend, and Neil walked into the room and seemed to be choking on something. I rushed over to him and pulled it out of his mouth. It turned out to be my flatmate’s used condom. I ended up with quite a lot of the … stuff in it on my hands.’

Admittedly, this was
pretty extreme, but, in truth, Neil’s behaviour didn’t worry me – not even when, on our second date, Beth told me of an unfortunate incident involving a sexual encounter, a sudden, unexpected appearance from Neil, and a very intimate part of her last boyfriend’s anatomy. I knew Beth was great, and that in theory I was a fool for not wanting to take things further with her. Had she been three times as bright and attractive and lived with a cat who
didn’t
have a penchant for eating used condoms and clawing men’s testicles, I probably still would have come away from our dates with the same shrugging outlook; the outlook of someone who’d only split up from the most important and lengthy relationship of his life a year and a bit ago and, despite his attempts to tell himself otherwise, wasn’t yet in any frame of mind to be heading into another serious one.

If anything, I’d gone out of my way
not
to go out with women with an extreme love of cats – partly because it’s my habit to insist on doing everything in life in the most difficult manner possible, and partly because I’d been put off by a few slightly invasive incidents involving the unhinged 0.5 per cent of cat enthusiasts who give the 99.5 per cent of stable and lovely ones a bad name. I also couldn’t quite escape the lingering knowledge that in the past, with the exception of Dee, I’d seemingly been attracted solely to women who either actively disliked cats or were allergic to them. That had been a long time ago, and I could write it off as sheer coincidence, but a few of my early experiences as a single thirtysomething suggested otherwise. The following conversation, for example, that I had with a pretty Irish girl from a TV production company, who I got chatting to after she did a vox pop with my friend during a lull between bands at the 2010 Latitude Festival in Suffolk:

Me: ‘Who’ve
you been to see so far this weekend?’

Pretty Irish girl: ‘Black Mountain. They were the best.’

Me: ‘Me too. I loved them! I’ve been to see them three times this year.’

Pretty Irish Girl: ‘Me too! No, sorry, four! I love that seventies stoner rock stuff. I like your trousers, by the way. So what do you do for a living?’

Me: ‘I write books and a couple of newspaper columns.’

Pretty Irish girl: ‘Oh, really? Cool. What kind of books?’

Me: ‘Well, a few different kinds. The last couple were mainly about cats, though.’

Pretty Irish girl: ‘Cats?’

Me: ‘Yeah. And two about golf.’

Pretty Irish girl: ‘Golf? Oh. Weird. I hate cats. They’re all evil.’

Who was I trying to fool?
Of course
I couldn’t expect to share my life happily with someone who actively disliked cats, or even grumblingly tolerated them. I’d met a few unusually delightful anti-cat folk, but people who hated cats were often control freaks who felt the world owed them a living. People who expected other people to be eager and compliant, no matter how poorly they treated them. Churchill and Roosevelt loved cats. Hitler and Napoleon hated them. That was a vastly reductive view of the matter, obviously, but it told you a lot. How could I look someone in the eye if they told me they didn’t like The Bear? Even Katia, my former lodger, a dyed-in-the-wool Dog Person, had loved The Bear. ‘Ralph is the guy I fancy, but The Bear is the guy I love,’ she said, not long before she moved out. ‘The other two are cats.’

I drove Will and
Mary to the railway station a couple of miles away and we said goodbye. When I got back to the house, Shipley was upside down on a beanbag that had, before it became permanently flecked with his hair, once been mine. Janet was on the floor to the left of him, breathing quite heavily, as he often did these days. I decided not to attempt to stroke him or ruffle his scruff, as I knew he probably still hadn’t forgiven me for medicating him earlier. The process had taken the best part of twenty minutes and, though I’d wrapped the pills cunningly in some turkey roll, had entailed one of them getting spat out and stuck variously to my trouser leg, a chair and two of the other cats’ backs. The Bear was outside on what, when I bought the house, had been described in the estate agent’s details as a ‘balcony’, but in recent years had come to serve more as a kind of roofless, assisted-living flat of The Bear’s very own.

As I sat down on
the sofa with a book, Ralph appeared. I didn’t have the metal clothes horse out that day, and hadn’t washed my hands in the last hour, so he was in a good mood. ‘RAAAALPH! RAaalph!’ he shouted, jumping on top of me and beginning to pad my chest. He didn’t actually stick a flag into it emblazoned with the words ‘Cats rule!’ but we both knew the intention was there.

Happiness becomes a much more complex thing to weigh when you get older. Even if it’s quite bulky overall, it tends to have little rips and chasms in it. Sometimes a wave of sadness will wash over a chasm and remind you of its presence. For me, one of these chasms was about not having someone to share these cats with, and at times like now, when I was at home alone, shortly after spending time with friends, I’d often sense its presence. Four cats, after all, seemed quite a lot for one person – significantly more than six shared between two people had seemed. Katia had got it spot on. Living with my cats often seemed less like living with four cats and more like living with two cats plus a glamorous, oversensitive rock star and a troubled yet loyal elderly academic, both of whom just happened to be a foot high and covered in fur. The Bear broke my heart on an hourly basis with his big watery eyes and his tiny
meoop
: a much gentler noise than a normal meow, but one that could still pull noisily at your heartstrings with its central question, which seemed to translate roughly as ‘Can you tell me why I am a cat, please?’ I’d bought him a catnip rat and some turkey chunks for (what I decided must roughly be the date of) his last birthday, but it had somehow seemed insufficient. I sensed, deep down, that he might have preferred the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, or a new Werner Herzog documentary that I’d been hearing very good things about.

I could think of
few revelations about my day-to-day life that would have made me feel more unmoored than if someone had found a way to measure cat IQs and discovered as a result that The Bear was a simpleton. I’d been acquainted with this cat for well over a decade now, and I felt I knew his intellectual powers. Even if those soulful peepers signified nothing and mere coincidence explained his disappearances in the build-up to every house move I’d ever made, or his eerie way of gravitating towards me every time I was ill or sad, you could not doubt that he had had the most character-building of cat lives: all nine of the standard allocation, plus seven or eight bonus ones he seemed to have been granted as a special favour.

The Bear and Ralph could not have been more different, in terms of facial expressions. The Bear went about with a permanent look of saucer-eyed worry. He’d originally been found in a plastic bag on the hard shoulder of a motorway, along with several of his siblings. In his youth his fur had all fallen out due to a flea allergy, then fallen out again due to an allergy to flea treatment medicine. He’d withstood carbon monoxide poisoning, had a hole ripped in his throat by a feral challenger, developed asthma, lost chunks of both ears, gone AWOL for almost six weeks in south London, moved house over a dozen times, and been rather brutally given his marching orders on countless occasions by Biscuit, my next door neighbours’ cat, whose
Last of the Summer Wine
affection he pined for. To look at The Bear was to see the worry of all that with the worry of the rest of the world piled on top of it. If the eyes are the windows to a cat’s soul, The Bear’s made those of all other cats look like they were made of tinted glass.

A few months ago, I’d had my house valued by a few estate agents, in order that Dee and I could agree on a price for me to buy her out of the mortgage. Having gone off to make one of the estate agents a cup of tea, I returned to the living room to find him and The Bear staring at each other, intensely, like two old adversaries who had not seen each other since the time many years ago when one stole the other’s dream job and childhood sweetheart.

‘Wow. Who is this?’ asked the estate agent.

‘That’s The Bear,’ I said.

‘He’s amazing. It’s like there’s a little bloke inside there.’

‘I know. A lot of people say that.’

The Bear did not blithely let the universe revolve around him, like many cats. He examined each molecule of it intently and anxiously.

Ralph, by contrast, was
a cat who beamed with self-satisfaction on a near-permanent basis: an animal so pleased with himself that he walked around every morning talking about himself in the third person. But they were both needy: cats who were nervous around strangers and seemed to
want something from me that, no matter how much I wanted to, I could not quite pinpoint, much less give them. Ralph wasn’t the kind of cat who could be content with being next to you. When he climbed on my chest, he expected no half measures. He wanted my undivided attention and worship. In one sense, this was fine: he was arguably the most majestic of my cats. People were always telling me how handsome he was, and he had a way of making it feel like he was granting you a rare pleasure when he let you stroke his magnificent sideburns. But the experience came with its own inherent risks. A bit like Jim Morrison at the height of The Doors’ fame, he was a paradoxical combination of beauty and questionable personal hygiene. He was the kind of cat who, were he left to fend for himself, would probably be followed everywhere by a squad of opportunistic flies, in much the same way that seagulls follow ships.

Maybe it was a
measure of their very worship of an animal who was essentially a cross between a lion and a young Warren Beatty, but smaller creatures had a way of attaching themselves to Ralph. A recent example were the slugs that had infested my kitchen. I don’t really associate slugs with the height of winter, but throughout December a multi-coloured tag team of them had snuck in through one of the increasingly large holes in the walls and began making their presence felt. At first, I’d seen a couple wriggling about in the cat biscuit dispenser, like nightmarish limbless children playing in an unusually grimy ballpit. Then, a week or so later, I noticed a strange, brown, elongated raspberry in a bowl of Country Crisp I’d just poured out from a box that had been left untouched for a fortnight or so. I then noticed, somewhat more perturbingly, that it was moving. Pretty soon, perhaps having checked out my other cats and found them substandard hosts, the slugs began attaching themselves to Ralph’s back. This could come as a nasty shock, on the occasions when I was sprawled out on the sofa, watching TV with Ralph sitting smugly on top of me. I did, though, find that the upset was reduced slightly if I imagined that I was actually looking at a snake riding a small horse.

Janet (so named
because Dee had been erroneously told he was a she, by the East End urchins from whom she adopted him) was my number two most unkempt and unhygienic cat – or my number one, if you were to go with Katia’s theory that Ralph and The Bear weren’t cats at all. For the last couple of years, he’d been bringing in all manner of ancient sweet wrappers and crisp packets that he’d found floating in the shallows of the lake at the bottom of my garden. He could often be found with a collection of twigs, or a considerable part of the fresh undercoat from one of my neighbours’ garden gates, stuck to his hindquarters. His dishevelled appearance wasn’t really his own fault, though. He’d been a large, muscular cat in his youth, but when his hyper thyroidism had been at its worst, the spring before last, in the midst of my break-up with Dee, he’d lost so much weight that he’d started to resemble a recently used black dust cloth. With the upping of his medication, he’d gained some weight and seemed happier, but he wasn’t the happy-go-lucky cat he used to be. Never was this more clearly illustrated than in the wrestling bouts that Shipley still attempted to involve him in. Theirs was the nearest thing any two of my cats had to a friendship: a bit like a big brother–little brother bond in which the little brother was having trouble accepting that the big brother would probably rather now be going on a cruise or watching repeats of
Murder She Wrote
than rolling around on the floor in a bundle of limbs.

As my two ‘cat’ cats, Shipley
and Janet were also the most public, my ‘people cats’ – although in Shipley’s case I suspect this was largely because it’s very hard to subjugate and intimidate people when you’re not around them. They were always the first – and often the only – cats to greet my visitors: when my hippie folk musician friend Michael visited a couple of weeks after Will and Mary, Shipley was at him with a volley of questions almost as soon as he was through the door. This was a lot to take in for Michael, who moves at a pace that is very much his own, but thankfully Shipley soon calmed down, settling into a bout of passionate lovemaking with the velvet cape Michael had taken off and made the mistake of leaving unattended on a sofa.