The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (22 page)

A continuing exception to the ‘no strings attached’ rules of Roscoe’s affection were the occasions when Gemma and I were wrapped in a towel. Roscoe loved towels so much that, were you merely holding one, she would follow you around the house in the hope that you might pause and let her attach herself to it in some way. This made for some very rewarding moments of bonding, but would have been inconvenient on a full-time basis. Because I kept rather odd working hours, I already answered the door to my local postmen and women in a variety of garments; were they to see me clad only in a large John Lewis bath sheet, I sensed they would view it as the final evidence confirming their suspicions that I was not a hardworking writer at all but a layabout who smoked weed all day in his underclothes whilst playing Mortal Kombat.

Like people, some
cats just seem to feel stuff on a deeper level than others: it’s a predicament with its pros and cons. On the plus side, as a free and easy kind of kitten who didn’t seem to let much bother her, Roscoe was completely accepting of Ralph, Shipley and The Bear. Those first few antagonistic, constipated days were thankfully an anomaly. Like many cats, and humans, Roscoe seemed a little in awe of Ralph’s magnificent physical presence, often following him around and sliding up against him – mostly to his beaming approval, only occasionally to his faint irritation. Her relationship with The Bear was more distant, but mutually tolerant – as if the two of them knew that they came from such different worlds that they couldn’t possibly clash. The only hint of aggro came between her and Shipley, since she continued to delight in getting right up into his face. Shipley’s petulance – his curses now sounding like a protest along the lines of ‘It’s my role to be annoying – this isn’t allowed!’ – only encouraged her. His attempts to subjugate her with violence were always restrained, and she remained completely fearless of him.

Her true nemesis remained her doppelgänger in the bedroom mirror. For periods of up to an hour, the two of them would stare each other out, wondering who was going to make the first move. Finally, Roscoe would decide to put an end to all this by going behind the mirror to find the impostor and punish her, only to discover that she had scarpered. Ralph occasionally checked out his reflection – which was entirely understandable, to anyone who had seen what Ralph looked like – but on the whole, my other cats appeared fairly oblivious to mirrors and televisions. Roscoe’s sharp, clear button eyes, however, seemed to pick out the action in them. She would frequently spend lengthy periods gazing up at whatever film or TV show Gemma and I were watching, every so often moving forward to attack the screen with a paw. I’m not sure how much of the action she could follow, but her taste seemed to be impressively discerning. She particularly loved golf coverage, and I was proud when she reached up to casually assault the American journeyman pro Brandt Snedeker, whose businesslike style of play never really excited me. Similarly, while she seemed to appreciate Mark Wahl berg’s excellent performance alongside Christian Bale in
The Fighter
, she understandably snapped after watching him for three-quarters of an hour in the severely substandard
Contraband
, giving his two-dimensional face what can only be described as a ‘paw smackdown’.

With Roscoe
now infertile, there were no worries about what one of the occasional male feral visitors to the house could do to her future, and ours. That said, Alan had taken a bit of a shine to her recently, and his forays into the house were greeted in a less serene manner by Ralph, Shipley and The Bear than they once had been. Deborah had told me that he’d pissed in one of her favourite boots a few weeks ago, so I should probably not have been surprised at his habit of urinating on my records in the exact same spot as Graham. Still, there was something a bit disheartening about it. It just wasn’t the kind of thing you expected an Alan to do. More troubling still, The Bear was once again following suit, with Bill Withers taking a hammering that even he might have considered harsh. The 1976 album
Naked and Warm
had come off particularly badly, and probably wished it wasn’t quite so naked, or so warm.

Maybe this was just The Bear’s and Alan’s way of telling me that nobody really
needed
to own eight Bill Withers albums, but I decided it was time to take action. I’d signed a mental contract with myself when I decided to live with multiple cats. This contract included the condition that, if I was going to be so indulgent as to let several furry urine machines share my house, I would not, on any account, ever become The Person Whose House Smells of Wee and Who Doesn’t Know It. For that reason I’d always been scrupulously clean, but there comes a point – if you have ferals, or ex-ferals, in the neighbourhood – where kitchen roll, cloths and disinfectant are no longer enough.

I’d considered
magnetic catflaps in the past, but had been put off by reports of magnets falling off collars, and cats turning up in houses with strange keys and coins stuck to their necks. ‘I wouldn’t get one if I were you,’ my aunt and uncle had told me. ‘We did, and we kept finding the cats stuck to the fridge.’ A microchip catflap, however, was by all accounts a good bet. If I’d put it off, it was perhaps due to some last fleeting hope that Graham would return, but there’d been no sign of him for almost three months now, and Gemma and I had finally faced up to the fact that he was gone for ever. The microchip flap did not necessitate adding anything unwieldy to the cats’ neck areas, and all the cats were already chipped. It would just be a matter of getting the flaps themselves, and programming in the details of the cats’ chips.

I was thinking about
more than just cleanliness here. In August we’d had a small health scare involving The Bear on his visit to the vet’s to get his latest flea treatment (the injection he was required to have due to his allergy to normal flea treatments). ‘He’s lost a little weight,’ said the locum vet, in an extremely strong Welsh accent. ‘Has he been eating much?’

I told him that The Bear had been eating more than ever recently.

‘Hmmm,’ said the vet. ‘It could be worth getting his thyroid checked out.’

A nervous twenty-four hours followed, all the more troubling for its echoes of Janet. The Bear was given the all-clear, but the experience served as a bit of a jolt to the picture I’d built up of him as a cat who grew more youthful with age. Because The Bear was delicate and polite and elderly, I went the extra mile to make sure he was comfortable in so many areas of his day-to-day life, allowed him little privileges that I didn’t always allow Ralph, Shipley and Roscoe. I decided that it was the least I could do to include among these comforts a sense that his territory was not being invaded by strange cats. Additionally, I concluded that the microchip flaps would be an investment for the future, when robots took over the earth and I needed a device to let nice robots into my house but keep out evil, feral ones.

I did consider
attempting to fit the flaps – which came from a company called Sureflap – myself, but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t. The first handyman I paid to install them half-fitted one, leaving it partially hanging out of the wall, mounted on a piece of wood he appeared to have found in a bin, then left, seemingly on the verge of tears, shaking his head and muttering the phrase ‘I tried to make it good’. After that, I never saw him again. I was beginning to think the brand name of the flap was less a reference to the solidity of the apparatus than to the state that the person dealing with it was likely to get into, but a couple of weeks later, a burly, shaven-headed man in his fifties called John came along and very calmly rectified the damage. I would have pegged him for a dog man, but, as I wrote out a cheque for him, he told me he was a lifelong cat lover. ‘That one watched me the whole time,’ he said, pointing out The Bear. ‘He seemed very interested.’

‘Oh, yes, he’ll do that,’ I said.

‘I stopped to give him a cuddle at one point. He really holds on tight, doesn’t he? I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like that from a cat before, and I’ve known a lot of cats. He has this way of looking at you. Like he’s been here before. Like he knows stuff. I don’t mean in a bad way, though. I mean in a kind way, in a good way.’

With a Sureflap, all
you have to do is put some batteries in, pop it into memory mode and pass a cat through the flap a couple of times, so it memorises the code on their chip. If I ever read the instructions that come with products, I would have known this, but I don’t. Instead, before I tried the flap out, I took all the cats to the vet’s, in two separate journeys, to be scanned by a new Norwegian vet, so I could get their code, which I’d assumed I’d have to program into the flap by hand. Rightly, the cats seemed to view this as a faintly ridiculous exercise, and surely would have told me of my idiocy had they been able to speak.

Fortunately, the fiasco surrounding the catflaps ended there, and, when they actually began working, there were no real hiccups. That is, if you overlook the first day, where Ralph stood outside the bottom floor flap meowing his own name, and several days after that, where Roscoe didn’t seem to be able to get it into her head that she wasn’t supposed to open the flaps backwards, using one of her paws. About a week after that, I saw just how effective the flaps were, as, from the living-room window, I watched Ralph shoot into the downstairs flap, then Alan attempt to enter behind him, only to be denied, like a driver who’d tried and failed to cheat a parking barrier by tailgating the car in front.

I imagined those
two gossiping ferals again, meeting by the compost heap at the bottom of the garden to discuss this latest development.

‘So that’s it, then: the end of an era.’

‘I’m telling you: this is the way society’s going now. Computers are taking over. Soon there won’t be any jobs for real, honest cats, defending their territory.’

‘Since when were you a real, honest cat?’

‘OK, but still. It’s sad, y’know. A sign how things are changing.’

‘I heard Black Whisker Ed was heading over from Framlingham tomorrow. He’s going to be well pissed off when I tell him we’re postponing the Cat Skins party.’

‘Rather you than me.’

‘I’m going to miss fighting behind those curtains in the living room. I reckon in time we’ll look back at it as our own equivalent of the golden age of the illegal rave.’

I inspected the job that John had done on the bottom flap. It was a neat one. He had ‘made good’, as builders liked to say. Just a few feet away, the hole in my conservatory roof had opened up again. Above it was a fence badly in need of paint, and a garden gate that had come off its hinges. Carry on around the corner and back into the house and you would find sofas decimated by claws, a scuffed floor that more houseproud people might have resanded and varnished three or four years ago, and a small hole in a wall, through which two slugs eagerly poked their heads. Head back downstairs, past chewed carpets, and outside again, and you saw a shed, now missing its door, and leaning so
far into next door’s garden that it had ceased to resemble a broken shed and taken on the appearance of an abstract art project. ‘If you ever decide to put this place on the market, please remember to tell me,’ said John, who clearly had the vision of a man who spends his days ripping things down and remaking them with his hands.

It was something I’d thought about recently, a lot – especially as I knew how much Gemma missed the West Country. If it were to be the case, I’d have to attend to all of these cosmetic matters first. And I planned to, just as soon as my bank account had recovered from the cost of getting two hi-tech catflaps fitted, having one cat tested for hyperthyroidism and injected with grade-one flea protection and two other cats sterilised – one of whom actually lived with me, and one of whom had summarily vanished. It was a matter of priorities. As a place for humans to live, my house had never felt more threadbare and vulnerable. But for cats, it was a bona fide fortress. That was the important thing. Wasn’t it?

1. Dear______ and ______. Thanks again for doing this. It will make our holiday so much
more relaxing to know you are here. We are confident the cats will be in good hands with you, and I doubt they’ll cause you any trouble. Just wanted to warn you about one thing: it’s absolutely crucial that during your stay you keep all four of the cats out of the bedroom. The old intellectual black one pissed on the curtains a while back, then the middle-aged mouthy black one pissed in the same place to wind him up. And, even though I’ve washed the curtains thoroughly several times since then and they smell lovely now, you know how it is: once a cat’s pissed on some curtains, that cat will never really forget that those curtains are a lovely place to piss.