Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (11 page)

It was hard to know what to say. For a moment, I considered relating a story about the time an old girlfriend of mine had run to her mum in tears, after mistaking a perfectly natural pinkish growth around her guinea pig’s midriff for an inoperable tumour, but I thought better of it. In the end, we spent the remainder of the journey home in stunned silence, but I think, even then, the actions and foibles that had defined the young life of the animal in the basket on Dee’s lap were already starting to take on a radically different hue in both of our minds.

The Bear put in a rare appearance when we arrived home. If you ignore the odd cardboard-based disagreement with Shipley – i.e. The Bear wanted to sleep in it, Shipley wanted to chew it – he largely remained aloof and superior around the younger cats, but now, as Prudence crawled his groggy way out of his travel basket, The Bear gave ‘her’ bottom a good, long sarcastic sniff. If he’d stood up on his hind legs, put on some reading glasses, frowned theatrically and said, ‘Now, of course, if you’d come to
me
for advice in the first place . . .’ he could not have been more eloquently disapproving.

He’d obviously known the true state of affairs long ago, but perhaps, like us, he’d also noticed that, equipped with a new gender, Prudence seemed irrevocably altered, as if in the last twenty-four hours he had not only had his biological workings turned upside down but his character with them. As we came to terms with this different persona, we realised it demanded a new name – particularly as it would be far too much hassle to have two boy cats with female monikers to explain to visitors. I quite liked Delawney, but we agreed, without any extraneous toing and froing, on Ralph, after the kid from
The Simpsons.
The inept one who’s always wetting himself.

Gribbly bits

The bits of jellified cat meat that escape from the bowl and weld themselves to hardwood floors and kickboards – sometimes even if you don’t have kickboards.

Helping

To offer crucial moral support while one’s owner is hard at work. More popular examples include ‘Painting’ (brushing one’s tail against some fresh paintwork and leaving a hairy residue), ‘Carrying’ (darting in between one’s owner’s feet when they are transporting a heavy tray of food between rooms) and ‘Testing for Bacteria’ (licking some freshly buttered bread while one’s owner’s back is turned).

Mousetache

A perfectly placed mouse, held between the teeth in a strategically horizontal manner (preferably with a slight downward droop at each end), so as to make the creature’s captor look particularly dashing. Out-of-vogue variations include ‘The Zapata Moustache’, ‘Sidebirds’, and the rare-but-always-impressive ‘Handlebat’.

Muzzlewug

The state of bliss created by the perfect friction of an owner’s fingers on a fully extended chin.

Puddings

A particularly furious kind of padding session involving soft human body parts. Also known as ‘Marching’ or ‘Cooking the Dough’.

Purple mist

The special kind of unforgiving cat anger reserved for an owner who has experimented by attaching a lead to its collar.

Quantum physics

The mysterious force allowing a contented cat to fold its limbs, head and torso into an area a quarter of the size of its usual body mass.

Rainy dry paper

Tissues (preferably Sainsbury’s Rose-Scented).

Thinking tears

Eye gunk.

Life in the Fast Lane
 
 

Every arty family that plunges zealously into country life needs a bloodthirsty neighbour on hand to help them out of a tough spot from time to time. During my final period living in the north-east Midlands with my parents, ours was a man called Frank. Lank of hair and economical of conversation, Frank lived next door and worked as a farmhand a mile or so up the road, but I remember thinking that, despite a certain ageless quality, he seemed a little too old to merit a job description ending in the word ‘hand’. Another thing about him that I found slightly unsettling was his habit of popping up from behind hedges on what felt like every occasion I ventured into our garden.

Nonetheless, I had to admit that he came in useful in the aftermath of some of Monty’s and The Slink’s more heartless maiming exercises. He also proved invaluable in the summer of 1996 when our chickens began to succumb to a variety of unpleasant mishaps.

Personally, I’d never considered chickens as pets. Unlike cats, they didn’t purr when you stroked them, and, even in the intellectually challenged field of birdlife, their stupidity was quite astounding. Nonetheless, I soon became attached to the seven bantams that my parents had installed in the coop at the bottom of our garden, particularly Egbert, our comically tiny rooster, whose favourite pastime was sneaking up on my dad in the garden and viciously peck-headbutting the back of his legs. Something I’ve noticed about chickens, though, is that, when the hard times hit, it’s easier to adopt a philosophical stance than it might be with many more resilient pets. When one of them gets snatched by a fox, you get quite cut up about it, but when five die in two weeks, an inbuilt coping mechanism kicks in.

By the time the sixth of our chickens, a panic-stricken candyfloss on legs named Egatha, had been half-eaten alive by squirming parasites, a dead hen had become seemingly just as much a part of our day-to-day rural Nottinghamshire lives as the nearby hum of a combine harvester or the smell of a burning Ford Escort coming from the picnic layby at the top of the hill. Not, of course, that we ever
witnessed
the death itself.

‘Finished him off wi’ t’ shovel,’ Frank would say, emerging from behind yet another hedge. Frank was one of those countryside men who called all animals ‘him’, regardless of their gender. ‘Don’t have to worry about t’ mess. I’ll deal wi’ it.’

While my dad thanked him and discussed one of the numerous crime waves sweeping our three-building neighbourhood – the tying up and beating of the couple at the farmhouse down the track, perhaps, the entirely unrelated armed robbers who’d been hiding out in the adjacent woods, or the hungry fox that Frank had come to view as his archrival – Frank would hand me the shovel. I’m not sure quite sure why he handed it to me, but I would take it anyway, just to give myself the illusion that I was contributing. During our time in Ockwold, I’d got accustomed to laconic men thrusting death-tainted objects into my hand. While home alone, I’d often had to answer the door to the local gamekeeper – a man with a huge bulbous nose and a complexion like rice paper pressed onto offal – and watch dumbfounded as he wordlessly shoved three still-warm, yet emphatically deceased pheasants at me. You might have imagined this would have chipped away at my inborn squeamishness, but I always felt queasy holding an instrument that only seconds previously had brought about the demise of something so fluffy and helpless.

You only had to watch my dad chopping logs or building the chicken run to see he had no trouble throwing himself into country life. Having repeatedly campaigned and petitioned for us to live in the middle of nowhere, he liked to picture himself as a take-care sort of outdoorsman. When it came down to the literal meat and bones of the country, however, he was found wanting.

In the anecdotes my dad told to friends, Frank’s mercy killings were always painted more as a favour to Frank from us than one from him to us: naturally my dad
could
have finished off the half-dead rabbit or mouse or stoat, but with Frank standing there behind the hedge, dribbling with anticipation, it hardly seemed fair to deny him.

‘DID I TELL YOU HE’S GOT A LITTLE PLATFORM OF EARTH IN HIS BACK GARDEN WHERE HE KILLS THEM?’ my dad would say to a pair of enthralled, urban-dwelling NUT workers in our living room. ‘HE EVEN SOMETIMES MAKES HIMSELF A CUP OF TEA FIRST AND GETS ONE OF HIS CAMPING CHAIRS OUT.’

The way he portrayed it, by letting our neighbour put our wounded out of their misery, we were doing the community a service: if Frank hadn’t been popping up from behind one of our hedges with a rifle in his hand and a bloodthirsty grin on his face, he would have been making a nuisance of himself on Nottinghamshire’s public footpaths, looking out for rabbits who’d been incautious with barbed wire fencing and making presumptuous offers to the owners of three-legged dogs. But I knew, my mum knew and he knew that he wasn’t telling the whole story. I’d seen my dad on the few occasions when he’d put a small creature out of its misery on his own, and he was the solemn antithesis of a man in his element. One time, shortly after The Slink – a much fiercer predator than her nervously low-slung gait would suggest – had left a mouse to writhe around on the kitchen floor with a broken back, I’d watched through my bedroom window as he placed the unfortunate creature in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag and reversed over it in his Vauxhall Astra estate.

Of course, not being on the main household committee, I had the luxury of staying out of matters of animal euthanasia. As someone known to suffer weeks of remorse after accidentally treading on a money spider, I had never for a moment considered taking a mallet or spade to one of the half-dead rodents that Monty and The Slink left on the back doorstep.

Curled up happily on my bed or trotting alongside me in the countryside, Monty was incontrovertibly my cat, but with a paralysed shrew between his teeth, he became my parents’ responsibility. If his hunting was getting out of control, well, surely that was because they hadn’t been disciplined enough with him or weren’t buying him enough cat food. As the people in charge, it fell under their jurisdiction.

Five years later in Norfolk, though, when the disfigurement began in earnest, it was not so easy to wash my hands of the matter.

If there was an interim period between stage one of Brewer’s kittenhood, where he seemed to spend 90 per cent of his days climbing up the patio doors and crying at me to let him in out of the cold, and stage two, where he became the East Anglian animal kingdom’s answer to Son of Sam, I must have blinked and missed it. His voice might have still been of a tone that made every passing pushchair a potential misunderstanding, but, in purely physical terms, he came out in the spring of 2002 with all guns blazing, ready to put his milksop months firmly behind him.

Lord knows what would have happened if we hadn’t robbed him of his crown jewels. Muscular and silky-coated,
⁵
he was already, at the age of eight months, considerably larger than The Bear, and visibly gaining on Janet by the day. If you look like that in the cat world and you don’t hunt, your peers probably start to question your manhood, but did he really have to start in on those lovely baby rabbits that sometimes wandered through the hedge at the bottom of the garden?

It was quite horrifying, and also somewhat breathtaking, to watch – and not just for us, clearly. Shipley and the newly masculine-ish Ralph had their bloodthirsty moments, but most of the time, they preferred to stay on the sidelines while Brewer got stuck in, with the taut stares of goading men at a cock fight. There was no fight to speak of, but it didn’t take long before the first cock arrived. That pheasant really didn’t know what hit it when it wandered into our garden: as Brewer took it down I was reminded of an unusually overweight and oblivious centre forward being tackled by a savage left back in a Sunday League football match I’d once watched.

Every so often, Dee or I managed to get in quickly and perform a rescue operation before the fatal bite. Baby sparrows were flicked out of jaws and placed in maximum security recovery in a cardboard box in the spare room, complete with breadcrumbs and a small bowl of water. Sometimes, they’d come through it and we’d release them into the churchyard over the road. More often, we’d return to find them keeled over on their side, frozen in a death mask of bewilderment.

‘You . . . did . . . this,’ a mouse would say to me, as it pulled itself out of a spilt pile of coffee grounds on the kitchen floor with its one remaining leg. ‘Y-y-you . . . gave . . . these killers . . . a . . . h-h-home . . . and . . . let . . . them . . . do . . . what . . . they . . . pleased . . . and . . . now . . . y-y-you’re . . . not . . . even . . . man . . . enough . . . to . . . end . . . my . . . s-s-suffering.’ My remorse was not assuaged by the knowledge that if I put the poor little sucker in an empty tissue box and hid it in the hedge he would probably peg out from a heart attack in ten minutes flat anyway. I was a bad, bad person.

Nothing, however, quite seemed to underline my inherent cowardliness like the episode with the wood pigeon.

Dee and I had reached an agreement about the most problematic forms of cat-related debris: I was in charge of dead and half-dead things, puke was Dee’s area, and when it came to improper bowel movements, we both mucked in. Nonetheless, the appearance of Woody – and if this creature was not called something as uninspired as Woody, it was obvious it was wide-eyed and characterful enough to deserve
some
kind of name – demanded a household summit.

‘I really think we have to put it out of its misery,’ said Dee, and as I surveyed the light-grey catastrophe in front of me, I could only agree. Nonetheless, the fact remained that I’d never put anything out of its misery in my life, with the possible exception of a chicken casserole I made in Home Economics when I was thirteen. I even had the car keys and a Sainsbury’s bag out at one point, but Woody kept looking at me in that way that seemed to say that he’d be right as rain just as soon as he could get that wing working again.

I finally decided that the most compassionate course of action was to put him in a cardboard box, close its upper flaps, and leave it behind a bush, in the hope that in, say, an hour or two, he would drift off gently into a blissful, never-ending sleep. Over the next five hours, I made four return visits. Each time, I’d open the box to find his whirlpool eyes looking up at me in a manner that seemed to say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m absolutely
fine
– ’tis but a scratch.’

When I came back the next morning, he’d gone. I began to concoct a theory about him ‘just having needed some rest’ or being subject to a rescue operation by a crack team from a nearby rookery. ‘Nature is amazingly resilient. Maybe he patched himself up in the night,’ I told myself, until I saw a chirpy Shipley sitting on the wall outside the kitchen with a grey feather hanging out of his mouth.

There was no Frank figure in Brunton – or at least not one that I would have felt confident in approaching about my problem. I was alone with my conscience and my cleaning fluids. If you got in there early enough, it was possible to avert disaster, but it meant being permanently on your guard, and learning the tricks of the trade. Were Brewer, Shipley or Ralph to arrive through the door with a ‘mousetache’ draped across his upper lip and a demon glint in his eye, it was absolutely crucial not to grab at him too hastily, least he try to make a snatch at the victim itself, for this could result in a fatal tightening of the jaws. Much better to have a spray gun on hand. A loud clap of the hands worked sometimes, as well, but that necessitated a two-man operation: one to make the noise, the other ready to jump in with nimble hands and an appropriate receptacle if the rodent was subject to a touchline fumble. It must have been a surprise for the six other members of the Brunton Village Book Group when our dissection of
Tender is the Night
was abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Brewer with a shrieking vole between his teeth. Their bewilderment can only have increased when his owners began to follow him around the room applauding his bloodlust.

Founded by Dee and me and Bob Potter and his wife Rosemary, the book group represented a nebulous attempt on our part to integrate with the local community. ‘Local community’ in this case meant Bob, Rosemary, a lady called Isabelle who was married to a friend I’d made at the golf club down the road (‘the road’ being twenty-two miles long), a man called Simon who’d once interviewed me for the
Eastern Daily Press
, a couple called Ben and Molly whom we’d met in a record shop in Norwich, and – when she could make the sixty-mile drive from her home in Suffolk – Dee’s step-grandma, Chrissie.

We did bravely venture into the village pub once, but it was clear from the way that the local remand centre officers regarded us over their pints that they had mixed feelings about a long-winded discussion of W. G. Sebald’s
The Rings of Saturn
being played out next to the dartboard, and we went back to a monthly alternation between our living room and Bob and Rosemary’s.

I’d heard all the stories about provincial book groups: the initial honourable intentions to examine exactly how intentional the feminist subtext of Daphne Du Maurier’s
Rebecca
is, followed by the inevitable descent into parish newsletter gossip and wife-swapping. Our group couldn’t have been more different, but it did undergo its own kind of degeneration. We all loved Kate Atkinson’s
Emotionally Weird
, but when Shipley was doing the Dance of the Rushing Endorphins on the rug in front of you, it was all too easy for good intentions to get abandoned.