Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (13 page)

I suppose I’d always expected that this day would arrive, but what I hadn’t expected was that when it came, I’d still feel like I
needed
protecting. Somewhere along the line I had begun to believe in another one of the great lies of adult life: the one that said that because you could grow a beard and fell a tree and fill out a mortgage application, you would naturally begin to care less than you used to about small innocent animals that you’d opted to put in your care. It really was a preposterous piece of propaganda, its subtext seemingly being that animals were just elaborate children’s toys that you’d grow out of.

‘It’s an awful thing,’ said the sympathetic lady vet. ‘It’s amazing how often they get hit on the village roads. People think it’s the big busy roads where it’s most dangerous, but it’s not. It’s nearly always the young ones, too.’ As she said it, I noticed the big dark bags under her eyes.

A person living in the East Anglian countryside could be reduced to a blob of human jelly if he let himself brood over every bit of roadkill he set eyes on, but if I saw a dead cat at the side of the road, the image would always stay with me for days. It was not just the innocence of the creature itself that haunted me, but the knowledge that, as long as it remained uncollected on the verge, there would still be a family out there hoping that little Moopsy or Mr Winks had just gone on a very long walk, and would soon be back.

The tired vet was right. Eight out of ten of these cats had a youthful, skinny muscularity about them that hinted that they were at the make-or-break, loose cannon stage of their adolescence: a stage whose other side one either comes out of as a more circumspect animal, or doesn’t come out of at all. It is unlikely, however, that their traffic play extended to actual
sunbathing
in the road, and, with this in mind, it could certainly be said that Brewer lived closer to the edge than most of his peers. Perhaps a near miss would have made him approach the road with more care and wisdom. On the other hand, it might have made him feel even more untouchable than he already did, and urged him on.

In as much as a ‘live fast, die young’ philosophy can be applied to a cat, he had embodied it. You could see it in his early, savage attacks on Dee’s otter, but that was just the start and, perhaps, if he’d lived, there would have been no stopping him. James Dean spent his leisure time driving speedy cars; Brewer, who would have looked absolutely ridiculous at the wheel of a Porsche, chose to spend his sitting on the road in front of them.

Theories of predestination could definitely be applied to his demise. It could also be argued that the birdlife of Brunton might view it a little more phlegmatically than we did. Hell, I had to try to be philosophical, but it wasn’t easy. No, this was not the same as experiencing the death of a close relative or friend, but there was powerful, pivotal pain here – I felt it curdling, two or three inches above my stomach. Powerful enough to change the direction of a couple of lives completely? Possibly not. Powerful enough to turn those lives, say, forty or fifty degrees, or shunt them more powerfully down a road they were already considering taking? Certainly. I’d known that power before and as I knelt in the garden with Dee five days after Brewer’s death, burying his ashes and feeling the strange illogical extra sadness of knowing we would be soon be leaving them behind permanently, I knew it again.

And what of The Bear? What did he know? Lots of powerful things, surely. Additionally he now knew that the spot at the back of the cupboard behind the vacuum cleaner packaging was a place where someone could get some serious long-term rest without risk of detection.

Black Cats and Englishmen
 
 

I’m always a bit suspicious when people tell me that the earth’s population can be divided into Dog People and Cat People. First, when you put forward an idea like that, you undermine the existence of a huge portion of the natural world. Just because dogs and cats have traditionally proved more adept than their peers at wheedling their way into our domestic lives, that does not necessarily mean that we should accept that they have cornered the market in spirit animals. I’d be the last to deny that, on my travels, I’ve seen people who bear remarkable physical and behavioural resemblance to everything from an Afghan hound to an overweight Burmese kitten and back, but I’ve seen plenty of Vole Women and Parrot Men, too. You could fudge the issue, and pretend that somewhere out there there’s an unusually sharp-toothed mongrel or beady-eyed moggy to which the latter people are naturally aligned, but wouldn’t you just be fudging yourself?

Secondly, when you’re making these kinds of generalisations, it’s important to be clear.
Do
you mean Dog Person and Cat Person as in spirit animal, or do you mean Dog Person and Cat Person as in ‘really likes dogs’ or ‘really likes cats’? There is a difference.

Take me, for example. It probably goes without saying by now that the cat is my favourite animal. But I’ve been told that, on the whole, my own nature is a lot more doglike. This information comes from reliable sources, many of whom have owned a selection of Border collies, chihuahas, spaniels and terriers for a number of years and have known me long enough to realise that I’m clumsy, occasionally overly trusting, eager-to-please, and frequently in the habit of begging for treats. I have no choice but to believe it, and I’m sure it explains why, over the years, my cats have found it so easy to manipulate me like a big dumb sock puppet. But I’m certain that I have feline qualities, too. I prefer individual sports to team ones, for example. Those closest to me say that when I want something, I tend to
really
want it. I’m also happy to spend time in my own company.

Another of my cat-like aspects is the perverse behaviour to which I’m sometimes prone. I don’t think of myself as a difficult or stubborn person, but when I look back at the grander ebb and flow of my life, it is characterised by a pattern of contrary gestures. Hard-won acceptance among the tough kids in the GCSE badlands of north Nottinghamshire is followed by a deliberate, obstinate defection to the side of the geeks. The ethics of a childhood spent in a working-to-middle-class left-wing home among books, records and art are cold-bloodedly abandoned for golf. Golf is abandoned for a stint in a punk rock band (a real puzzler, this one, since the music I tend to like most is precisely the stuff punk came to kill). The isolation of the countryside is abandoned for London. London is abandoned for the countryside. If cats enjoy spending time in company, it’s perhaps because they can naturally empathise with such obtuse behaviour.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend this style of living as any kind of template for a sane, well-rounded existence, but for the first two and a half decades of my life, it served me quite nicely. I also know that in late 2002, when I felt the pull of my Contrary Gene once again and chose to ignore it and opt for a more moderate approach, things didn’t work out quite so well. The six months that followed perhaps go a long way to explaining why cats live a happier life for failing to acknowledge such thorny concepts as ‘middle ground’ and ‘compromise’.

Either that, or they simply illustrate that when you are considering buying a house and you hear thumping techno music coming from the house attached to it at 11 a.m. in the morning and, when you ask the vendor if such music is a problem, they tell you they’ve ‘never heard a thing’ and ‘the walls are too thick anyway’, you should run far, far away.

Dee and I had already been toying with the idea of selling our cottage in Brunton before Brewer’s death, but in the days that followed it, as every four-by-four that zoomed by our windows loomed larger than ever in our imagination, the scales were tipped. The mere possibility that, by staying put, we might be putting Ralph, Janet, The Bear and Shipley in danger was horrifying. Add that to our continuing fears about being cut off from society, and our decision was made.

Understandably, a move back to the capital was tabled. Of the fifteen or so friends who’d talked so excitedly about ‘following’ us to Norfolk in the aftermath of our wedding, only one couple had braved the move. Even more isolated than us and with an even more gargantuan renovation project to suck up their time, they’d split up not long afterwards. The others who did manage to make it up to visit us did their best to pretend not to be underwhelmed by what they found, but we could see their bewilderment. ‘I know there must be an Aga here somewhere,’ their eyes seemed to say, ‘but I’m just not seeing it.’ I’m not sure what they were expecting – maybe a cross between an interior shoot from
Country Life
magazine and something that you’d find on the sleeve of an early Fairport Convention album. Whatever it was, it almost certainly didn’t involve the Brunton Remand Centre or the area’s numerous derelict petrol stations.

But moving back to London would be admitting defeat, wouldn’t it? And what kind of life would living in a tiny two-bedroom flat backing onto a communal yard in Greenwich or Putney (borders) constitute for Shipley, Ralph, Janet and The Bear? Besides, it wasn’t as if we didn’t like living in Norfolk itself: we’d been falling further and further in love with the county’s unassuming cheeriness and ruggedly understated landscape for eighteen months now.

We decided to look for a happy medium – the kind of place an estate agent would describe as ‘close to local amenities’ but which simultaneously touched on rural tranquillity – and Devlin’s Cottage, in the town of Holsham, a few miles north of Norwich, fitted the bill. All sixteenth-century beams and crooked, murderous staircases, its situation, on a long row of similar terraces on a one-way street spotted with speed bumps, was such that, providing we were careful whilst opening the front door, the cats would have their work cut out to get to any road in the vicinity, let alone one traversed regularly by speeding Range Rover drivers. Instead, they would have their own little paradise: a tinkling stream at the bottom of the garden and an adjacent meadow and churchyard.

And us? Well, we’d have a considerably smaller living space, and we’d miss Bob and Rosemary, but we’d also have a less formidable mortgage, allowing us to finally fully appreciate our more sedate choice of life. Not having to drive ten miles every time we ran out of Persil non-bio would be nice, too.

The noise terrorism began on Christmas Eve, the day we moved in, and did not let up until the day the following June when we were finally driven out of the place for good. At first we told ourselves that it was Christmas, and, while that season was not traditionally associated with sitting in one’s bedroom and playing drum’n’bass at top volume, we should live and let live. Then, when our other, slightly cowed, neighbours met us and told us how sorry they were to find that we had been palmed off with the cottage adjoining the ‘problem house’, we told ourselves that maybe our 19-year-old, wannabe DJ neighbour would soon get a job or get a place of his own and stop living with his mum. Much of what happened afterwards belongs in another, much darker book. Let it suffice to say that finally, after trying and failing to appeal gently to the DJ and his browbeaten yet fiercely loyal mum – a woman who, shortly after first introducing herself on the week we moved in, greeted us with the phrase ‘I saw you out my window and I said to myself that I could
tell
you weren’t from round here’ – and wasting day after day building cases with the council for a noise abatement order and with our solicitors against Devlin’s Cottage’s former owners, we called it quits and put a deposit on a rented house just outside Norwich.

To be completely fair, in the week before we moved, the repetitive beats had been reduced to a level where they didn’t quite make our wood burner shake so violently or send the cats running quite so quickly out into garden with their fur standing on end. We
had
experienced a full three weeks of respite since the last time one of the DJ’s friends had vomited on our front door, but by then the place had become tainted for us: it had been asking to be renamed from the off, and continuing to refrain from referring to it as Devil’s Cottage would have been an act of gross insincerity.

‘If you get it wrong, you’ll get it right next time,’ went the excellent song on the radio in my friend Don’s van, the day he helped me pick up the last of our furniture from the house. I could see what the lyrics were getting at, but it seemed to me that ‘if you get it wrong, you’ll get it wrong the next time as well, and the time after that, but after that you might get it right, if you’re lucky’ was a more universal maxim. I’d heard the old adages about failures being a necessary part of success but, as someone who had lived in houses with noise problems before, and who came from a family who’d turned property disasters into an artform, I felt that this was one failure I could have avoided. When Michael, the mystically inclined folkie friend who’d so kindly looked after The Bear when we’d first moved to Norfolk, claimed that our bad luck was something to do with the peacock feathers we’d put in a jar – what he called ‘the evil eye’ – I took it with a pinch of salt, but when I looked back at my life as a house mover it was hard not to feel like the victim of some kind of voodoo.

Dee, too, had done enough househunting in her time to know the warning signs. But the couple who’d sold Devil’s Cottage to us had had a Golden retriever, and people with Golden retrievers didn’t lie, did they? If only we’d been able to ask The Bear’s opinion, we probably could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. From the moment he first stepped into the living room, sniffed the carpet, curved his tail violently, and scuttled behind the washing machine, you could tell he didn’t like the place.

If I was beginning to feel the stigma of The Guy who Moves House a Lot, I could at least console myself that I wasn’t alone. My grand life total of house moves was now sixteen, which was only four more than The Bear’s – only two, actually, if you count his relocation to and from the hard shoulder of the M23 – and considering that he was two decades younger than me, you could argue that, of the two of us, he’d had it considerably worse. By now, his Bear sense would tingle at even the most inconclusive glimpse of packaging. If we bought a hairdryer or new computer, we’d make sure we were quick to hide the evidence. He’d always had a love–hate relationship with cardboard, but after our move to Devil’s Cottage, this took on an almost sadomasochistic aspect. In his opinion, there were only two things worth doing with a box. If it was there to signal more upheaval in your life, you pissed on it. If it came in peace, you curled up in it. Sometimes, you just said the hell with it and did both at the same time.

If ever there’d been a time when Dee and I genuinely wanted to be granted our wish of being able to talk to our cats, it was now. What we would have given to have been able to sit all four of them down and tell them that all this upheaval was going to be for the best in the long run, and that, even though it might not seem that way sometimes, we had their best interests at heart. I’d seen that ‘I’m going to have to be the new kid at school again, aren’t I?’ look before – in the mirror, among other places – and I was now realising it was by no means exclusive to the human species.

Much as they seemed to like Devil’s Cottage’s backdrop, it was fairly obvious that none of them had any great affection for the wonky, portentous edifice itself. While not quite of a volume that would combat next door’s zombie techno beats, Ralph’s witching hour whining had reached an all-time high of piercing insistence. As he wandered the tiny rooms of the building, he would sound like he was reading a list of grievances off a tiny clipboard, ticking them off as he went along. ‘Reaarrroow!’ Tick! ‘Beeeullawgh’ Tick! ‘Seegraaaeooowgh!’ Tick! Janet was never one to wear his darker emotions on his sleeve, but one couldn’t help noticing that, when he squatted on The Bear’s back, he did not do so with quite the élan of old. While also essentially upbeat, and typically chatty, Shipley had undergone a remarkable physical transformation: the Mohican that he had displayed the first time he heard the bark of the DJ’s Great Dane
⁶
had now frozen permanently to his back like biological armour, primed to expand at the first sign of danger, but never fully deflating.

But it was The Bear, as ever, who proved our major concern. He did his share of hissing and adopted a formidable enough hind-legged pose when Shipley or Janet overstepped the mark, but I’d still never seen him attack another cat, and considered such an occurrence a physical impossibility. Yet the cuts on his body when he returned from scoping out Devil’s Cottage’s surrounding area suggested that he was doing battle with
something
.

His left ear now had an inch-long battle rip starting at its tip, and, while he would have to lose a lot of weight and fur before he once again came to resemble the forlorn creature who’d stolen my chicken bhuna two autumns ago, he was beginning to look a little torn and frayed about his edges. There was a new, rather strange looseness to his undercarriage.