Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (15 page)

With dogs, it just wasn’t the same. As we got settled in Trowse, I started to walk Nouster, Richard the landlord’s Border collie, over to the nearby country park, and I closely observed his encounters with other members of his species. The difference between watching these and watching, for example, Shipley’s encounters with Spooky, the big black tom owned by our neighbour Jenny, was the difference between watching two boozed-up football hooligans rowdily greeting each other on the street, and watching two college professors – one of whom had previously slept with the other’s wife and given his book a scathing review in an academic journal – size each other up over the crème de menthe at a dinner party.

Even Nouster’s relationship with his ultimate nemesis, a darker-hued, permanently chained-up Border collie who lived at the other side of the meadow behind our house and went by the nickname ‘Black Fang’, had none of the gradations of The Bear’s relationship with Janet. And this was
Janet
we were talking about: no cat genius, and certainly not an animal who you’d frequently find yourself using a word like ‘gradations’ about.

The secret dialogue of cats, the esoteric catiquette that they thrash out and mould between them, is one of the great fascinations and frustrations of owning them. The greater the number you own, the more amplified such fascination and frustration becomes.

What, for example, was currently the beef between Ralph and Shipley? A matter of months ago, they’d still been sleeping together in a classically kittenish ‘pile of paws’ formation and cleaning one another’s ear gunk, but now each regarded the other with caution and the punch-ups, while still brotherly, could get vicious. Did this all stem from the time that I’d given them both a going over with our JML Pet Mitt and Ralph had got just a bit more time than his brother? Did it go back to when Dee bought that extra-strong black market catnip from the online herbalist and Shipley got a bit bug-eyed and greedy?

Or had it all simply started one day when one of them looked at the other one’s bird in a funny way? Irritatingly, nobody could tell me, though I sensed that, in Shipley’s case, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In two years, that little meeyap had developed into something much more garrulous and strident. Dee loved him, and could still reduce him to beatific state by spending three minutes deftly stroking his forehead, but she was the first to confess that she sometimes found him obnoxious, loud and grasping. Since both were highly opinionated, particularly on culinary matters, it was inevitable that they would sometimes lock horns.

‘When you’re cooking chicken,’ I’d hear Dee say to Shipley, ‘do
I
start jumping around and clawing the back of
your
legs and singing “The Chicken Song” to
you
?’

‘The Chicken Song’ wasn’t really a song about chickens any more than Genesis’s ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ was a song about a lamb lying down on Broadway. It was really more of an abstract a cappella number Shipley sometimes liked to toy around with upon being confronted with raw poultry. It drove Dee mad, and she viewed it as one might the antics of a particularly tiresome office joker, but I always had an impulse to applaud every time it started up.

I swelled with pride at the assertiveness and increasingly impressive physical presence of the runt I told myself I’d rescued from Romford obscurity. The understanding was that Shipley was ultimately my cat, in much the same way as Ralph was ultimately Dee’s cat. And, as Shipley’s supreme guardian, I enjoyed hearing such varying reports on his day as ‘Ekwwwekaarapplle!’ (‘It’s bloody raining out there again – please dry my paws off with a tissue immediately!’) and ‘Eeeymeewikiwikeeyapeeeymekweeeekeyap!’ (‘IwentoutsideandtherewasagooseitmadeanoiseatmeIcan’te atitliketheotherflyingmice’). When I was too busy to pay full attention to his news, he usually resorted to more extreme measures, tearing with his front teeth into whatever document happened to be lying on my desk with no regard for its bearing on the following month’s household income.

On one occasion, when I’d ignored an overlong anecdote he was trying to tell me about the biscuit dispenser being empty and callously nipped off to get a cup of tea, he laid devastating waste to a short ghost story I’d been trying to write about a man who lives by a river and walks his neighbour’s dog. I suppose it was his way of telling me that the dialogue was cloth-eared, the non-autobiographical elements didn’t ring true and my narrative voice was woefully undeveloped. If so, as a piece of literary criticism, it was both incisive and exacting. I can only think that when, a month or so later, during one of his ritual
Daily Mirror
-chewing sessions, he ripped the word ‘pants’ out of the paper and dropped it at my feet, he was offering a postscript.

A time that I was particularly glad of Shipley’s word-smithery was in January 2004, when he managed to smuggle his way into our local mail van. The postman – a gentle man called Dave, with a strong Norfolk accent and a habit of inviting himself into my living room to soliloquise on the early albums of Deep Purple – had got almost a mile down the road towards Norwich before he heard the yapping coming from behind his seat. His first thought was that Jenny-from-across-the-track’s terrier-spaniel cross, a beautiful little piglet of a dog called Tansy, had stowed away in there. Turning round and seeing the sharp, inquisitive features of a sinewy black cat was a momentary heart-stopper, but Dave said he wasn’t really all that surprised, and neither were we. Shipley had always had a soft spot for members of the delivery trade.

‘He’s been after me parcels for months now,’ said Dave. ‘I’ve already shooed him out of here twice this week. Good job he’s got a loud voice. These diesel engines aren’t exactly quiet.’ From what I could work out from Dave’s retelling, the noise Shipley had made had held no terror or apprehension. It was more of a polite, overexcited enquiry regarding the destination of their little adventure together and whether, when they got there, there would be any chicken-flavoured snacks available.

I’d known from very early on that Shipley had some serious cattitude. He did not have Ralph’s ruffled beauty, or The Bear’s cunning, or Janet’s ability to take the good with the bad, but when it came to pure energy, he outshone them all. Keen to make the most of my new, rambling-friendly habitat, and taking note of his hound-like qualities and fondness for travel, it was perhaps only logical that my thoughts would turn back to Monty, and I would invite Shipley on a walk with me through the meadow across from the house. I wouldn’t have insulted The Bear’s intelligence by proposing that he joined in with such a flippant activity, and by that point he was far too busy with his new obsession: climbing onto the roof of the converted stable where Richard the landlord and his wife Kath lived, pressing his face against the skylight, and staring longingly down at them. Janet was also absent – probably busy trying to befriend a fox. However, not wanting to show favouritism, I invited Ralph to join us.

To be frank, I didn’t have high hopes for Ralph’s capabilities as a power-walker. This was not just because I was worried that the remotest brush with a Shetland pony or Jack Russell could result in one of his prolonged whining sessions. Since Brewer’s death, he seemed to feel, in killing terms, that he had some kind of obligation to take up where his brother left off. Fortunately, his homicide had not yet become excessive, nor had it confirmed some ominous thoughts I’d had after finding out Staithe Cottage’s original incarnation had been as a staithe where local meat traders would hang their carcasses to cool.

Lately, however, he’d been taking a more than passing interest in the two swans who circled the living room every morning, waiting for my toast crusts. The whole thing was obviously a misunderstanding. From where Ralph sat on the riverbank, two-thirds of the swans’ bodies remained obscured by the water or the stone ledge leading down to the river. That still made them big birds, but not nearly as big as they actually were, and Ralph – his memory of Brewer and the pheasant presumably undimmed – must have frequently told himself he could take them, no sweat (see below). Sure enough, before we’d reached the stile at the end of the track leading to the meadow, he’d scuttled off in the direction of the river, having spotted a bright white wing in his peripheral vision.

Shipley managed another 500 yards and seemed enthusiastic, but turned back after hearing some raucous teenagers boating on the broad on the other side of the field. As I saw his raised Mohican recede into the distance, I could hear him soundtracking every hurried step of his journey back to the cat-flap. I told Dee later that I was sure that, in between the meeyaps, I’d heard the phrase ‘I’moutofheretogetsomechicken’, but I probably imagined it. As she very rationally pointed out, ‘I’m sure when you have a repertoire of noises as eclectic as that, the law of chance says you’re bound to come out with the odd proper word every now and again.’

Seeing my disappointment, she went straight to her computer search engine, with the help of which she managed to track down a cat lead. What she was proposing seemed ambitious, but I decided to roll with it, remembering a childhood image of a brace of Siamese strolling imperially around a campsite alongside their owners. Dee had long argued that Shipley had a bit of pedigree in him. True as this might have been, it turned out that it was not the specific bit of pedigree that makes a cat predisposed to relinquishing its independence and agreeing to be treated like a toy fox terrier. You might have imagined he would have mistaken the lead for an unusually stretchy collar, but we hadn’t even pulled on it, and his Mohican was already up higher than ever, telling us that it would be unwise to take the experiment any further.

Chastened, I returned to my routine with Nouster, Richard and Kath’s dog: a circuit of the nearby broads and the country park, up the hill past Whitlingham Hall, down through the woods, then back through the meadow, where Nouster would round things up with a ten-minute woozle (named by Richard and Kath, this downright confounding activity involved Nouster watching the ground intently with a raised paw then pouncing on invisible creatures scurrying about far beneath the earth).

I made sure our yomping was completed before dusk, since that was when the country park – like any patch of countryside unusually close to a city centre with a public right of way – began to quickly take on a less salubrious character. Away swam the swans, home went the cyclists and hale and hearty sexagenarian couples with Labradors, and in came the prostitutes, drug dealers and adulterers. In fact, you could say that Whitlingham Park had a rare distinction in that it was not only the regional hot spot for dogging but also the regional hot spot for, well . . .
dogging
. However, I imagine if I had the tough, unquestioning mind of a true Dog Man I would have been less liable to let such notoriety bother me.

Being able to borrow your neighbour’s dog at a moment’s notice on a 365 day per year basis is a terrific arrangement. You get fresh air and the glowing feeling of an animal’s respect, without the hassle of having to hose the muddy broad water off him afterwards and put up with his needy, fetid, baited breath as he eagerly waits until your next sojourn, his mind unable to focus on anything else.

If Nouster had been The Bear, he would have been able to suss me out in seconds flat. One look at me nervously holding onto a bit of rope the time that Richard had asked me to help him moor his sailboat would have told him he was face-to-face with a faker. If that didn’t do it, one sniff of my odour – surely so different from the one of pipe smoke, outdoor grind and linseed oil that lingered permanently around his true master – should have given him all the information he needed to know. But, the way Nouster saw it, from the moment I got hold of his choke chain, I was the closest thing to God.

I liked the ego boost that this gave me, but what kind of person would one become, if that sort of behaviour started permeating their expectations elsewhere in their daily existence? A dog might be for life and not just for Christmas, but it serves as a much better primer for the latter than the former. The Bear might not have used those unfathomable North Sea eyes of his to inform me that I was brilliant and clever because I could throw a stick or a squeaky rubber bee for him to chase, and shout ‘Keep in!’ when a car was coming, but at least I could not accuse him of ever having raised my expectations unrealistically. He would never have led me to believe that life was a walk in a country park where people did what you said when you barked instructions at them and, even if he had, he would have been careful to convey that that park was an equal mixture of light and dark, good and evil.

Like all cats, The Bear knew about nuance and subtlety and grey areas and indecision: I could see it all in his tail every time he moved, and numerous times when he didn’t. But sometimes it seemed that his wisdom was even more refined than that of the rest of his species. If I studied Janet or Ralph or Shipley, I would have been required to severely stretch my metaphors to conclude that life was about whining in echoey rooms or having your dignity removed in a neck harness or underestimating the size of waterfowl. What I learned from The Bear, by contrast, was that life was about going from home to home without really meaning or wanting to and not quite knowing if you loved it or hated it, that it was about trying to keep your head above water and fending off illness, that it was about ambivalence, that it was about an eternal search – and not one that would end with a lovely cottage by the river that, sadly, you could never own outright – for something that was unattainable, that it was about pressing your snotty nose against the glass of the skylight. If I ignored the bit about the snot, the echoes were obvious. There really was no getting away from it. The two of us had a lot more in common than I’d once imagined – and quite a bit more than I would have liked to admit.