Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (18 page)

Seeing the bloodshed on the road, I was reminded of Brewer, but not without a new ambivalence, as I considered the destruction and heartbreak we were probably avoiding by not having him here with us. Fortunately, Shipley and Ralph, though sometimes liable to kid themselves otherwise, remained predominantly mice and vole men. The one time they did catch one of the lake’s coots and bring it into the house, the bird was unharmed, and they immediately lost interest in it. If Dee and I were being paranoid, we could convince ourselves that they’d carried out the whole exercise purely for the comedic value of us chasing the bird around the living room like participants in a non-sexist, waterfowl-themed Benny Hill sketch. The humour of the situation was also not lost on Rory, the builder we were paying unreasonable sums of money to knock down several of our walls, who took a break from a cup of Tesco Value tea to watch the show.

After he had watched me perform five circuits of the rubble dividing our new kitchen from what used to be our bathroom, his face turned grave. ‘Do you want me to finish if off for you?’ he said, stepping forward with his pickaxe.

I assured him that I had the situation under control. While we both knew this wasn’t remotely true, the fear of a potential beheading prompted me to redouble my efforts, and I grabbed a red bedspread off a drying rack and used it to steer the coot outside. I was relieved to see the bird sprint to freedom, but, standing at the back door, fabric in hand, I felt like the world’s most inept matador.

Shipley and Ralph lost quite a bit of their hunter’s instinct after that and entered a more supine phase, elucidating a confusing statistic I’d once read about cats spending 70 per cent of the day asleep and 30 per cent of it cleaning themselves. The same, however, could not be said for Rory.

Ever since he’d banged his head on our living room light shade and retaliated by ripping the top two buttons open on his shirt and shaking his fist at it, I’d been noticing how tightly wound he was. Hammering away at our surprisingly sturdy 1960s walls just didn’t seem to be enough to satisfy his appetite for destruction. I hoped our new rooms would be finished before he finally burst his clothes and turned green, but the project was dragging on, so it seemed unlikely.

Living with builders is a bit like having to adopt an entirely new extended family for an extra-long Christmas, only to find that they piss on the floor, and say even more tactless things than your real extended family, there aren’t any presents, and the turkey is actually not a turkey at all, but a quarter square of cold, leftover meat pie, welded to your new parquet floor. You try the best you can to exist in this artificial situation, ignoring the fact that the top floor of your house is now a rubble pit with a toilet in the middle, surrounded by orangey brown stains and copies of
The Sun
, but eventually matters get strained.

Over a course of several weeks, Rory and I had gradually realised that we weren’t quite the people we’d first mistaken one another for, in those early, forced, cheerful hours of the first couple of mornings when I’d made him and his ever-rotating cast of colleagues their first nineteen cups of tea. I had realised that when he said he ‘didn’t agree’ with what George Bush was doing in Iraq, what he actually meant was he thought that the President should stop all this faffing around with ground troops and ‘nuke the whole place’. He, in turn, had realised that his assumptions about me being ‘pussy-whipped’ by my wife’s ‘cat obsession’ were not exactly true. Little clues must have given it away, like the time he looked out the window and saw me lying on the lawn, idly loading grass onto the back of a beatific Janet and feeding Shipley salt and vinegar crisps.

My relationship with Rory started to feel uncomfortably like a rerun of my pivotal second year at secondary school: the one where I won three playground fights and a place on the right wing of the under-14s football team, only to blow it all in the ‘Write your Own Will’ oral assignment in one unforgettable English lesson by announcing that, in the event of my death, I planned to bequeath my earthly possessions to my pet cat, which I sometimes called ‘The Ponce’.

As barbaric as their opinions can be, I find it useful to meet people like Rory from time to time, since they help to keep my animal-related soppiness in check. Obviously, it’s a pain to lock up your bank statements while they’re around and to grit your teeth while they make lewd comments at the female couriers who deliver packages to your house, but after a few days in their company you can’t help but shine a new spotlight on the way you behave with your cats. These moments of reflection might not make a man stop asking his moggies about their day, or shelling out to have them chipped with electronic identity tags, but they help him to refrain from passing over to the Other Side: that dreaded one from which there is no return where, once settled in with his novelty leopard animal slippers under the coffee table, he will have no compunction about referring to himself as his pets’ ‘daddy’ in formal company and dressing each of them in a £200 custom-made frilly waistcoat. I learned to keep my conversations with Shipley to a minimum around Rory, and when Dee and I had our discussion about giving Ralph female hormone therapy, we were sure to do so sotto voce.

The hormone therapy hadn’t been our idea; it had been suggested by our new vet when we’d taken Ralph to see him to try to find a cure for his depression.

When you own four cats, the cost of veterinary care can mount up frighteningly quickly. If one of those cats has a very specific flea allergy and it happens to be vaccination time and you’ve got a claw-happy feral prowling the neighbourhood, you can be looking at £400 for a month’s treatment before you know it. Unless you live in California, adding psychiatric care to this tally might seem somewhat unnecessary. On our most recent visit to the vet with Ralph, we hadn’t exactly set out to get him psychoanalysed; we’d merely noticed that he hadn’t been acting quite like himself recently and, observing that it was time for his latest flu jab, decided it couldn’t hurt to make a discreet enquiry about his state of mind with a qualified professional.

‘Cat ennui is actually quite common,’ explained the effusive Yorkshireman in the white coat (did all vets have strong regional accents, or was it just mine?). ‘Lots of different things can bring it on. A change of environment. A new cat on your cat’s territory. A change of career.’ He didn’t actually say ‘change of career’ but for a moment I was convinced he was going to.

‘The female hormones can sometimes help level the mood,’ he continued, feeling beneath Ralph’s armpits. ‘Golly. You’re a handsome devil, aren’t you?’

‘So in a way he’d be having his second sex change,’ said Dee.

‘How do you mean?’ asked the vet.

‘Long story,’ we chimed.

As is perhaps to be expected from a male cat who’d been treated as a female for the first six months of his life, Ralph had always had a touch of the pretty boy about him. If he’d been a rock star, he would have been the airheaded kind who somehow manages to be simultaneously sexy and slightly fetid. Adulthood had turned him from merely beautiful to downright magnificent. To go with his bright white bib and the tabby flame on his forehead, an imperial ruff had burgeoned beneath and to the sides of his chin. It might be thought physically impossible for a cat covered head to toe in fur to be able to possess sideburns, but there was no more apt way to describe the grandiose flaps of fur at the side of his jowls, and Ralph liked nothing better to sport them with a droopy ‘mousetache’.

However, as anyone who has been in the publicity team for a Warren Beatty press junket will probably attest, such magnificence requires its own special kind of sustenance. When The Bear permitted Dee or me to stroke his flanks and treated us to his special falsetto purr, or Shipley sang us ‘The Chicken Song’, or Janet headbutted us, the sense that we were partaking in an exchange of mutual respect may have been an illusion, but at least we had that illusion to cling to. When Ralph jumped onto our stomachs and began to knead us with his claws and dribble ecstatically, there
was
no illusion: we were there purely to remind him of his splendidness. This didn’t actually feel like such a raw deal, since being in such close proximity to an animal so in touch with his own magnificence felt like something of a gift in itself.

You can see his shining, self-revelling Ralphness in our photos of him. Either these shots all just happened to be taken at times when he has just broken wind in an unusually satisfying manner, or that glint in his eye is the glint of an animal who knows that he is being worshipped and, as the descendant of Egyptian gods, such worship is his birthright.

When you see something as self-absorbed as that captured on film, it’s difficult to resist the urge for sarcasm, and, as I stuck the photos in our albums, I would often add my own slightly derisory captions (e.g. ‘I yam Ralph. Narcissism pleases me, but I have a girl’s voice’). I knew, however, that his self-image was far from robust.

When people tell me that cats are independent animals unrequiring of attention, I can’t help but immediately wonder if they’ve actually owned any. If they have, you can guarantee they’re the kind of people who spend half their life moaning that their cats aren’t as friendly as other people’s. Cats might seem remote and self-sufficient, but it’s all a great big front. Thousands of years of living with humans has taught them that by playing hard to get they can best shape us into what they need us to be, which is somewhere a cross between a cleaner, a chef, a masseur, a nurse and a supportive, ego-free friend to use as a sounding board for their greatest fears and darkest desires.

I’d always noticed how talking to my cats and stroking them made them calmer and more sociable. In Ralph’s case, this applied tenfold. If we went a few days without being around to stroke or pet mitt him, or tell him he was a rock star, he could fade away so completely into the background that we half-expected to look at those beaming photos of him and see bits of them vanishing like the ones of Michael J. Fox’s family in
Back to the Future
.

On the morning of our move itself, ten minutes before the removal men arrived, I’d had to make a last-minute dash to the vets, having found Ralph cowering in the kitchen, suffering from what can only be described as a very nasty rear-end blockage. The problem had cleared up after a few days (‘Very unusual– it may just have been down to stress,’ said the vet, a nice Swedish lady), but, for Ralph, the weeks that followed had been little more than an existentially futile, high-pitched journey from buddleia to laurel to hole in boiler room wall to pampas grass back to buddleia. I had no idea what was especially significant about the hole in the boiler room wall, but it must have had something going for it for him to spend an hour a day howling to be let in to stand and stare into it.

Ralph could skip and prance and trot when he wanted to, but he’d always had something a little doleful about his prowl. It was the gait of an animal seemingly forever slightly resentful that he couldn’t walk on two legs. Now, though, as the summer stretched on, the mere act of moving from one bit of foliage to another at all looked like a genuine effort.

Picking up on his self-neglect, parasites would mark him out as an easy target. ‘You look like you’ve slept in a hedge!’ is hardly a wounding accusation to level at a cat, but, arriving indoors, he’d look like he’d slept in five, all at once. Even Janet, always the unbeaten master when it came to bringing shrubbery into the house via the rear of his body, was starting to look a little bit awestruck by the sheer variety of mixed media stuck to his kid step-brother’s fur.

As I pulled leeches off Ralph’s flanks and briars out of his feet and burned swollen, Satanic-pincered ticks off his neck, I was careful to be gentle, but it appeared to make little difference. I’d expected him to at least walk away from my grooming sessions with a bit of energetic indignance, blaming me for his pain, but his expression just said, ‘Whatever, dude – it’s all the same sticky outdoor crap to me.’ Ten minutes later, he’d be back in a bush, killing us softly with his high-pitched song. If this had happened a couple of years previously, Dee and I would simply have said, ‘Oh dear, Prudence is calling!’ and gone back to our business. Now, all we could do was get him injected with girly drugs and hope for the best. But what if they took too much of a hold and made his sideburns disappear?

Our theories about the cause of his depression accumulated, both in number and hysteria. Was he belatedly missing his old pal Buttercup, or the other tabby from his litter: the one we’d been thinking about taking home, only to change our minds after seeing it fall asleep in its crud tray? Was he suffering from a rare summer form of seasonal affective disorder? Could his state of mind – and his new nervousness around garden tools – be the result of being chased out of a shed by one of our new neighbours? And, if so, why did he still persist in hiding in their gardens and whining?

Who knew what kind of experiences contributed to a cat’s anxieties and phobias while it was out of your sight? DIY diagnosis was probably futile, and it was hard to tell if the female hormones had any effect, but I felt I could at least prescribe one home-grown remedy of my own – and one whose benefits would stretch far wider than Ralph’s increasingly corpulent, forlorn form – and that was an intensive course of not moving or hacking into our home for at least the next couple of years.