The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (5 page)

At least I had
a warning system when there was a rodent on the way, in the form of Ralph’s special Mouse Meow. This was different to his normal meow, which entailed a shout of ‘RAAALLO!’ or ‘RAAAALPH!’ It was more urgent and, if such a thing could be deemed feasible, even more self-satisfied. It was impressive that he could meow at all with a fresh mousetache across his face, but I think if he’d been really clever he would have invented another meow to differentiate between the times when he had brought a mouse in, the times when he had brought a vole in, and the times when he had brought a moorhen in.

I’d always
purchased collars with large bells for Shipley and Ralph, to prevent them catching birds. Moorhens, fortunately, weren’t a regular occurrence, but Ralph had somehow managed to drag one through the catflap a week ago, leaving it intact in my study to sit stunned for a moment then excrete its way dizzily around the carpet. I wasn’t happy about it, but there’s one good thing to be said about clearing up a room entirely spattered with viscous moorhen poo: it gives you a fairly revelatory appreciation of all the times in the past when you weren’t.

Adjudicating ‘disputes’ between my cats and the creatures in my garden was all part of the peculiar madness that grips Norfolk every spring. It’s the same madness that prompts an old man in the town where I live to stand at the edge of the lake and yell ‘Come on then! Let’s be ’avin’ you!’ at the ducks as he feeds them, the same madness that had caused a fisherman on the banks of the River Wensum in Norwich to bound up to me the previous week waving a camera and a bream and ask, ‘Will you take a picture of me and my fish?’ The moorhens that came into the garden were a sizeable element of the story, as were ducklings, and a muntjac deer Ralph had over-ambitiously tried to get a bit handy with when it was having an afternoon nap behind my pampas grass. I loved the county more than ever at this time of year. It was holidaying in Norfolk in the spring that had initially convinced me I could live here, and, if Janet’s death had prompted any thoughts of starting again elsewhere, they were soon quashed by seeing the oil-seed rape appearing in the fields beside the back lanes, my garden coming into unkempt bloom, and taking a picnic in the sun under the shadow of Norwich Cathedral.

In the first few
days after Janet’s death I’d found it hard to shake an odd feeling: a strange conviction that I’d forgotten something, without being sure what, accompanied by a sense that, if I strained my mind hard enough, I could remember and somehow bring Janet back. It was a different feeling to the one I’d had directly after the previous cat death I’d experienced first hand: that of Brewer, Ralph and Shipley’s brother, in 2002. Back then, I’d been angry as well as devastated: half at myself for buying a first house next to precisely the wrong kind of road for a cat owner – one along which people drove very fast but was also subject to long periods of quiet that brought about a false sense of security – and half at the prison officer who’d run him over then raced off into the night, leaving my kind neighbour to rush Brewer hopelessly to the vet. Anger was not what I felt now, and my state of bereavement – though at first an enormously powerful sensation that had manifested itself deep in my chest – soon became more philosophical, with the fully dawning realisation that, of all the ways to go, Janet’s surely had been one of the better ones, and, if he’d continued deteriorating for another year or two, he would probably not have been a happy cat.

His death, however, had
left a hole in the house. It was like the hole the death of a widely loved, long-serving doorman might have left at a shabby hotel: the kind of person about whom an acquaintance might have remarked, ‘I can’t believe Jimmy’s gone. I mean, I guess I never got to know the real him, but in a lot of ways you could say he
was
The Moorhen Astoria.’

I think I’d accepted Janet was no longer here. Or had I? When there were three cats in front of me eating I’d often catch myself whistling absent-mindedly for one more. For the time being, his pills remained in the kitchen drawer, the bottle three-quarters full. I wanted to find the owner of another cat who suffered from hyperthyroidism so I could pass them on, but it was a difficult topic to raise. How exactly would I put it? ‘Hey! I’ve got some Jaffa Cakes in the cupboard. Would you like one? Also, do you fancy taking my dead cat’s medication off my hands?’

Walking helped, enormously. In
the weeks following Janet’s death I hurled myself into the Norfolk countryside even more zealously than before, tramping along towpaths, past sluice gates and ruined monasteries, over stiles and through meadows in my threadbare walking boots, enjoying the feeling of surrendering myself to the elements, free of physical baggage. Sometimes I was joined for these walks by friends, or by Henry, a cocker spaniel owned by my friend Hannah who lived up the road: a somewhat Janet-like dog in both his uncomplicated approach to the world and his penchant for stagnant water. I was equally happy being alone, though. I loved the simplicity and purposeless of walking: you weren’t trying to win a game, or prove anything, or to get ahead in life; you were just out in the air, putting one foot in front of the other for the sake of it. I’m sure it’s possible to feel worse after a walk, but it had not happened to me in recent memory. I think, even though at one point I didn’t realise it, I’ve always felt the same, right back to my late teens, when I went on three- or four-mile rambles in the Forestry Commission land behind my parents’ old cottage in north Nottingham shire with my childhood cat Monty. I told myself this was merely a way of killing time while I wasn’t engaged in the much more crucial activity of interviewing rock bands, but it was actually one of the highlights of my week.

‘MONTY WAS A
BRILLIANT CAT,’ my dad would often say in his extremely loud voice. ‘THERE’LL PROBABLY NEVER BE ANOTHER ONE LIKE HIM.’ My dad’s tone seemed to imply that if you were a cat, you faced a choice early on in life: you either knuckled down, got a job and bettered yourself, or you lazed around and became one of society’s drop-outs.

Monty, who died in 1998, was not my parents’ last cat. Daisy, a tightly wound ball of tortoiseshell neuroses who’d served as Monty’s whipping girl, had survived for nine further anxious years after his death, running from the sound of my dad’s thunderous footsteps, occasionally offering my mum morsels of affection but arguably finding true companionship only with an old feather duster that my parents had bought in the Mansfield branch of Wilkinsons in 1990 (our theory was that she thought it was an uncommonly accommodating parrot). It was, though, Monty’s gold standard of feline behaviour that mostly explained the catless state my mum and dad had lived in for the last three and a half years. He was the kind of supremely confident, outdoorsy, no-nonsense cat you might find in a Victorian children’s story, and I could understand why you wouldn’t want to try to replace him. In more recent years, though, there’d always seemed to be something missing when I visited my parents’ house, and I saw it as my job to campaign for change. It had been six years since I’d last had a kitten in my life. With Janet’s passing still so recent, I wasn’t quite ready for another of my own, but that wasn’t to say I wasn’t ready for another of
their
own.

‘I think it’s
time,’ I would say to my mum.

‘Neh,’ she would reply. ‘I’m really enjoying how clean the house is at the moment.’

‘I feel you could really benefit from it.’

‘Maybe. But, if I get one, how will I know it’s a good one?’

‘Most of them are good ones, as long as you treat them well.’

‘Hmm. Maybe. But, no, I’m fine.’

I could see the cracks beginning to show, though, especially on the occasions when she visited my house. ‘You’ve got too many cats. You need two, at the most. I’ll have this one,’ she’d say, picking The Bear up. The Bear, having long since deemed my mum of sufficient intellect to be worthy of his affection, could not resist a stand-up cuddle. He would begin to purr, and cling to her with his koala-like claws. ‘He’s a good one. And Shipley’s always bullying him.’

It was true: Shipley did give The Bear a hard time, but I could never quite convince myself it was a hard enough one to justify a permanent separation. Shipley would sometimes donk The Bear on the head, but mostly his specific brand of cowardly aggression involved turfing The Bear off a warm spot he quite fancied himself, or dancing about in front of him, pulling the obnoxious faces of a feline punk. Being a cat who believed strongly in non-violence, The Bear never once retaliated, instead relying on his sole defence: the ability to make the noise of a small dragon gargling with lighter fluid.

‘Eweeeeegggghhh!’ Shipley would say to The Bear, dancing about in front of his face in the kind of way that, were he human and in a nightclub, would probably soon result in someone punching him in the neck.

‘Aaaargle baaargle
aaargle,’ The Bear would reply, and scuttle behind the sofa.

It wasn’t pretty to watch, but normally their exchange of opinions escalated no further.

That was, however, immaterial.
This was The Bear we were talking about, for goodness’ sake.
He was the best cat in the universe. Of course, there were times when I thought
all
of my cats were the best cat in the universe, but, from a purely objective point of view, The Bear really
was
the best. Yes, he might have peed on my curtains a couple of times recently, and there had been, in the dark early years, the incident with the turd and Dee’s dressing gown pocket, but on the whole, no cat had a sweeter nature. As if to underline this, he even had a white patch on his chest in the shape of a wonky heart, like a permanent badge of his sensitivity. He was a complex, superior being, and it took time to understand him. My mum might have thought she was ready for that, but she would probably feel different when she’d spent a couple of days being followed around by him, with those deep, watery pupils making a thousand pressing queries of her. It took nerves of steel to cope with that kind of thing. Even after more than a decade of knowing him, it would often be all I could do not to pop down the local park with a crate full of extra-strength lager after seeing him materialise out of nowhere next to my chair, his question-mark eyes boring deep into me. Besides, for my parents to adopt The Bear would be breaking the unspoken law that surrounded him. The next person to own The Bear would have to be my next ex-partner. These were the rules, and they were now very firmly established.

Actually, I could
see one good reason why my mum and dad were reluctant to get a new cat, and might only want a special, pacifist one, such as The Bear: their garden had become more of a wildlife haven than ever in recent years. I may have had moorhens and muntjac in mine, but I had not quite managed to cultivate a close personal relationship with either, as my mum and dad seemed to have done with the fish, frogs, toads, blackbirds and woodpeckers living at their place. Barely a day seemed to go by without a text update from my mum of another intense brush with wildlife. Sometimes, the action was not even limited to the outside of the house.

Not long after I’d most recently arrived at their front door, my dad had taken me to one side. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he’d said.

When my dad
says ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ it usually means one of three things: a) he’s about to ask me if I’ve completed my tax return, b) he wants to know if I’ve got my car ready for winter yet, or c) he wants to warn me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND NUTTERS’ next time I go out. This time, though, his agenda was different. He led me into the porch and pointed at a rack that contained various gardening footwear – some of which, from what I could gather, dated from as far back as 1946.

‘I’VE GOT A TOAD LIVING IN MY SHOE,’ he said.

I bent down to look at his slip-on gardening loafers: the same gripless shoes he’d worn, in defiance of my mum’s wishes, to climb and prune a tree in the pouring rain fifteen months ago, as a consequence of which he had fallen to the ground, several feet below, and broken his spine. Sure enough, tucked up cosily inside the left shoe was a small, greeny-brown toad. It looked very content – complacent, even. Stuck to the toe of the loafer was a Post-it note with the words ‘TOAD IN SHOE!’ scrawled upon it.