Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (21 page)

If Dee and I spent longer with Beautiful Ginger Boy than we had done when choosing our other cats, it was perhaps because he didn’t seem that much like a cat at all. Certainly, he had the tail and the cold pink nose and the pointy ears and some of the whiskers (‘the others got chopped off in the trap when the RSPCA caught him,’ said Dorothy) but his pelt had the rough, dry feel more readily associated with an animal you’d find in a warren than a living room.

As we stroked and encouraged, that tongue refused to retract. After about ten minutes, though, something happened. You wouldn’t have quite called it a purr; it was more like a tiny, just-tangible softening of Beautiful Ginger Boy’s breathing. I’d like to say it was the clincher, but in truth Dorothy had had us at hello. All we needed now was a name. On the way to the Rehoming Centre, we’d been having a discussion about brilliantly unlikely cat monikers. Rejecting my perverse suggestions of Gary and Wayne on obvious grounds of taste, Dee had said she had always wanted to have a cat called Pablo, so we decided to go for that.

If I had any concerns about introducing a feral cat to a giant feline extraterrestrial, they were put to bed within about five minutes of getting home. I’d expected more of the same quivering terror we’d seen from Pablo at Suffenham Parva, but within a moment of seeing Raffles stalk across the bedroom, he suddenly became lit from inside, emitted an elated, stuttering squeak, and scuttled up alongside him. It was one of the most effusive cat hellos I’d ever witnessed, and Raffles swatted it away as a dauntless explorer might swat away a tiny gnat in the periphery of his vision. He had bigger fish to fry – ‘fry’ in this case meaning ‘stare at in an intimidating, room-owning fashion’ and fish meaning ‘cats’ (and, in all probability, ‘fish’).

Undaunted, upon being let out of the bedroom to roam the following day, Pablo proceeded to greet Janet, Ralph, Shipley and The Bear the same way, eliciting varying degrees of indifference.

We had been lucky. Who could have said what kind of disquiet might have ensued if Pablo had conformed more squarely to the feral stereotype of the flighty troublecauser? Or maybe Dorothy was right, and all ferals were this gregarious? Whatever the case, Pablo’s status as a born cat’s cat only highlighted Raffles’s incompatibility and confirmed that we would be doing the right thing by taking him out of the equation.

Further confirmation arrived when we returned from our next bittersweet trip to Kentford with Ethel – now renamed Bootsy – who proved much more receptive to Pablo’s advances than her four new housemates. But on the way home, fully conscious that we had swapped an ageing, demanding outsider cat for a young, easygoing, easy-on-the-eye cat, my conscience played havoc with me. It was a bigger version of that feeling I’d had on the way back home with Monty after the death of Tabs, but this time I knew that the sight of Pablo and Bootsy running up the curtains – that is, if they had the time for running up the curtains, between cuddling each other – wasn’t going to be such an instant cure.

East Mendleham is a place of countless retail contradictions: a town bafflingly equipped with no less than four key-cutting outlets, but only one shop selling paint; a place where a person might search in vain for hours in an attempt to get a half-decent sandwich or apple, but find three different shops specializing in bags of dried fruit. Just one of its many oddly conceived stores was the place where I tended to buy my cats’ food during 2005, which, in addition to doing a good line in optimised biscuity nutrition and meaty chunks, also sold rather a lot of camera equipment.

Who knows? Perhaps the owner of Mattock Pet and Camera was convinced that there was an untapped market in people who liked to take snaps of their cats as they chowed down on Applaws’ chicken and cheese range, or maybe he just really, really liked cats, dogs and cameras? It was perhaps a testament to the mixed-up nature of the shop that the biggest picture of a cat – well, a puma, to be precise – was on a poster advertising a zoom lens.

With the wretch-like Pablo tucking into every meal like it was his last, I had cause to stare upon this puma frequently in the weeks following Raffles’s departure, and its resemblance to my rejected pet was uncanny.

‘Oh,’ it would say to me, gazing judgementally down from above the counter, ‘here again buying food for your other cats, are you? That’s
nice
. I bet they’re pretty too, aren’t they. It’s good to be
kind
to cats and to feed them and
home
them. So awful when they end up spending their last good years stuck out in the cold with nobody to take care of them. But don’t you worry about me. I’ll just soldier on, until pneumonia or senility kicks in and then, one day, not long after that, my kind dies out altogether, and there are only interestingly coloured, young, good-looking cats around, and you’ll be able to sleep easy in your nice, warm, comfy bed. Which reminds me, do you still have that old fluffy towel at the bottom of it?’

The cat wants what the cat wants: I only had to look at the six layabouts sprawled decadently on forbidden surfaces all over my house to realise that. But how could I hold such id-led behaviour against them, when I was no better?

Sure, I could come up with a practical ‘reason’ to explain why I’d got each of my six existing cats. I could tell myself that Janet and The Bear were inherited, and Shipley and Ralph had been procured to celebrate our new life together, and Bootsy was the girl cat that Dee had always wanted and Pablo was my own personal first genuine ‘project’ cat. I could look at Bootsy and see a cat that was cuddly, attentive, soothing: a cat that was almost too perfect to be true for Dee, in her convalescing state. I could look at Pablo and see a cat who, though still scratchy and bare of fur and nervous of disposition, seemed to somehow know he’d faced a near-death experience and be genuinely grateful for his new home comforts. But I’d be kidding myself if this was all about benevolence, and there was no greed involved. The Raffles debacle had given me a glimpse of the dark-side, shown me just how easily it could be for someone to love cats too much for the good of the cats in their path.

I asked around among our friends to find out if anyone would be interested in Raffles, but got no takers. His surefooted manner would probably have appealed to my dad, but I didn’t want to be responsible for giving The Slink a heart attack. Several times, I picked up the phone to call Gillian at the RSPCA to find out how he was, but I knew that if I’d spoken to her about Raffles, my picture of him alone in his run would have been that much clearer, and that would have made me want to go to see him.

Such a visit would only have ended up with me coming home with him to give it one more try, quite probably with three of his prisonmates, or bedding down for the night in empathy in the cage next to him.

It’s hard to say what would have happened if Gillian hadn’t called when she did to tell us that Raffles had been rehomed with ‘a nice man in his fifties who lived on his own’. By then it had been almost four weeks since I’d first met him, but I’d barely gone an hour without thinking about him. Who knows, perhaps I would have kept pressing down on the lid of that old internal suitcase housing my cat conscience until it finally burst open more violently than ever before, causing me to give up my job, sell all my worldly possessions, Celia Hammond-style, and start my own cattery, with Raffles as the in-house ambassador.

As it was, the fantasy drifted away, and things settled back down into a kind of normality – or at least as close to normality as one can achieve, when they’re on twenty-four-hour call for six separate sets of whiskers. Dee’s health improved, Pablo’s tongue stayed out, Shipley’s Mohican subsided, and Dee and I started to come to the realisation that, while we may have narrowly avoided stepping over one line, we had nevertheless stepped over another: namely, the one that made us no longer ‘people who own a lot of cats’ and suddenly ‘The People Who Own All the Cats’. There were mouths to feed, testicles to get removed, stairs to clean, a never-more-competitive Cat of the Month award to invigilate. But every so often, I’d take a moment to think about where Raffles might be now.

His new owner would be a big man, I imagined, who favoured heavily insulated clothing and lived a simple, outdoors-orientated life. I saw him as the kind of rugged, dependable, middle-aged bachelor one scarcely sees outside books by Annie Proulx and Jane Smiley: an architect, or a boat builder, perhaps. Whilst hesitantly petting a Dobermann at Kentford, he would have looked across idly at the adjacent cat kennels, and had his interest piqued by a flash of dark muscle.

Side by side ever since, he and Raffles would now spend comfortable, stoic evenings together strolling across heathland and reclining beside an open fire in his self-built A-frame. At the end of the night, before going to bed, he would put another log on the fire for Raffles, after which my former cat would rest his legendary muzzle on the hardwood floor and begin to purr like a big soft machine. Never one to spend an overt amount of time living in the past or future, he’d give little thought to tomorrow’s leftover bacon breakfast, or the cold nights he’d spent in his treeless treehouse at the RSPCA, wondering if there was anyone out there in the universe for him. But I hoped that, before he closed his eyes, he’d take just a second to remember the life that nearly was, with that other bloke – the one who wasn’t quite as good at DIY and didn’t own quite as many plaid shirts – and his wife, both of whom would have liked to have given him the life he needed but couldn’t. And I hoped that, as he did, he’d feel no bitterness, only a sense of peace, and destiny, and what could never be, and of what it feels like to be finally, properly Home.

Golfing for Cats
 
 

When I was little, I was told that on the continent people didn’t just drive on the other side of the road, they also stroked cats backwards. I forget the source of this information now. Perhaps it was a children’s book. Alternatively, it could have been a jocular elderly relative or friend of my parents. Whatever the case, I have since found it to be untrue. The place that people actually stroke cats backwards is Birmingham.

‘Come on!’ said Joyce, a lady in her late fifties with a strong Yorkshire accent and a fleece, to Barbara, another lady in her late fifties with an even stronger Yorkshire accent and a fleece. ‘Really fluff it up. Do it. You know he likes it. Oh yes! That’s right. That’s right.’

Joyce and Barbara were the owners of one of the contestants at the Supreme Cat Show, the feline answer to Crufts held at the Birmingham NEC, and I’d been watching them, mesmerised, for around ten minutes. I’m not sure why, out of all the fancy and exotic looking cats in the auditorium, I’d chosen to stop and look at Dukey, their Selkirk rex. Perhaps it was because he was the first cat I’d ever seen up close that looked like a giant furry caterpillar. Now Joyce had started going at him with the brush, he was looking even more like a furry caterpillar, but he didn’t seem to mind.

‘So is it okay to stroke and brush him like that?’ I said, watching as Joyce fiercely brushed his fur back against the grain, thinking: if I did this to The Bear, he’d piss in my kitchen blender.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You have to stroke them like this. It’s the way they’re bred. To like it.’

‘So why do you call him Dukey?’

‘Oh, that’s not his real name. His real name is Archduke Johnnybegood Zig-Zag.’

I should probably point out here that I hadn’t driven 150 miles to the NEC
just
to look at cats. I’d never been to a cat show before, and the idea of pedigree cats was a bit alien to me. Like my own cats, these animals each had four legs and a tail and whiskers, as well as a strong sense of self-importance, but that, from what I could work out, was where the similarities ended. They lived different lives: simultaneously more demanding yet moulded by humans to an extent that seemed slightly unnatural. It wasn’t that I didn’t like what I’d seen of exotic cats; I just felt a bit nervous and unsure as to what they might want from me. That said, since I’d been signing my latest book just down the hall at the NEC Golf Show, it would have been silly not to at least poke my head around the door.

I ended up poking my head around the door for several hours.

Upon being set loose in a giant auditorium containing 1,455 cats, a cat lover cannot help experiencing an initial rush of excitement. If I had looked down at the six furry reprobates in my kitchen at feeding time and imagined they were representative of the diversity of the cat universe, I now realised I had been severely mistaken. Here were cats that looked like miniature lions, furless cats, cats whose insides seemed to be on their outside, cats that looked like Benicio Del Toro . . . cats that seemed to have been squeezed out of a tube, fully formed. They all had one thing in common: somehow, none of them looked like they were as happy as they could be. It took me a while to notice this unhappiness. It crept up on me, manifesting itself in a gentle but pervasive feeling of nausea.

‘That’ll just be all those horrible cat germs,’ said Colin, one of the men who’d invited me to the Golf Show, when I took a brief breather to return to the other hall at the NEC.

Colin, it would be an understatement to say, was not a cat lover. I didn’t want to fuel his prejudice, so decided to stay quiet about the woman I’d earlier seen slobbering wet kisses on the lips of her favourite Siamese, or the man I’d seen underwrite the tastiness of the cat food he was promoting by shovelling three or four spoonfuls of it into his own mouth. In view of these incidents, Colin perhaps had a point, but I wasn’t sure the unusual sensation in my throat could be put down to something as simple as germs.

In our idle moments, Dee and I had occasionally speculated about which one of our cats we’d exhibit at a cat show. Normally, we’d decide on Ralph or Bootsy, before imagining the chaos that would follow, as our naked savages disgraced themselves before their better-heeled contemporaries. These conversations were safe to have, in that they involved a purely imaginary scenario. We could never
actually
take our cats to a cat show, since we were fundamentally disturbed by the idea of a) keeping a cat in a cramped enclosure or dragging it across the country for any reason that wasn’t of dire necessity and b) putting a cat on a platform to show it was ‘better’ than other cats. That said, I wanted to believe that some of my preconceptions about the Supreme Cat Show were not true. And the truth was, I met some nice people there, but when I’d been walking around for an hour and did not feel my usual compulsion to own all the cats, I knew something was wrong.

The fact was, I did not want to take these cats home. I wanted to set them free.

Moreover, when they were free, I wanted them to run out into the streets around the NEC (okay, well maybe not the streets directly around the NEC – that would have been dangerous), mate with other, less cosseted cats and create kittens whose ethnicity would render them outside Supreme Cat Show regulations, before finding homes with little old ladies who would want them purely for companionship.

When a cat breeder is asked if it’s okay to keep a cat in a confined environment, they’ll often reply that ‘pedigrees are different’ and ‘they actually really like it’. During my time at the Supreme Cat Show I frequently heard the idea put forward that all the hoopla was actually for the benefit of the cat, who knew it was being showed off, and wanted to win its category just as much as its breeder did. But while I understood that cats were a proud miniature people, I could not quite believe that their capacity for hubris would extend to a burning desire to snatch the Best of Variety semi-longhair neuter crown from a neighbouring silver tortie Maine coon.

Similarly, the stares I felt from many of those cages seemed to go beyond the normal levels of eloquent feline disapproval to communicate something more damning. What they seemed to say to me was: ‘You as well, hmm?
Pfff
.’ Did these cats care when their cages were draped in tinsel, or decorated in a
Breakfast At Tiffany’s
theme? Did it make their day to be held up above a crowd with a cup and a framed certificate? Did they rationalise it all and come to the conclusion it made the interminable, claustrophobic journeys from Cardiff and Newquay and Ripon and Edinburgh worthwhile?

Or would they rather have not been here at all, or at least have had the chance to leg it around on their own, sniff each other’s bottoms, peruse the fine range of high-grade catnip cigars and wander up the hall to urinate on a few golf bags? We’ll probably never know for sure, but the body language of the winners seemed to offer a fairly emphatic answer.

So why did I stay so long? Firstly, the shellshock of being in a cat-dominated place in which I didn’t feel entirely comfortable took a while to properly sink in. I think I also wanted to stamp this environment on my brain for ever. It was confirmation that there would always be people whose cat obsession had run away with itself far more extremely than mine. It served both as a reassurance about my current self and a warning about the future.

The Supreme Cat Show seemed to be proof that one can’t hold onto cats too hard and one should realise that it’s wrong to take them away from the dangers of the outside world completely. Most of the cats in this room would live their whole life indoors, spoiled, coddled, possibly dressed up in preposterous garments. That meant they probably wouldn’t be found lying mysteriously lifeless on a cold wet lawn by their owners, or get run over by a heartless four-by-four driver, or wander off into the depths of south London and come back looking emaciated and smelling of cabbage, but it also meant they would miss out on a lot. Maybe it was self-righteous to believe that they were all living less happy lives than The Bear, Janet, Shipley, Bootsy, Pablo and Ralph were, than Monty had, than ever Brewer had, but I could not help believing it. And, as I began to believe it, a little bit of ancient cat guilt subsided.

Finally, I think there was one more reason that I stayed at the Supreme Cat Show longer than might have been rational: stubbornness.

When I’d announced to Colin and the other organisers of the Golf Show I’d be spending my time in between signing sessions with what Colin called ‘all those folks around the corner who smell of wee’, they’d initially thought I was joking. ‘Yes,’ I’d told Colin. ‘I admit it. I like cats.’ He rolled this information around his mouth for a moment like a suspiciously tangy crisp, not seeming to like the taste of it.

I’d seen this reaction before – it was only a more horrified, uncomprehending variation of the one I’d witnessed so often all that time ago when I would abandon my nightclubbing allies to befriend random cats on the streets of north London – but now, faced with such a full-on, unlikely intersection of two of my life’s main interests, I felt I needed to take a stand. Colin had only met me four times, but he knew I loved golf. Now he knew I loved cats, too. Did he know, though, that, given the choice of whether to abandon one or the other, I would ditch my putter in a heartbeat? Why should I stick up for a sport full of sexist jokes, sports casual pimp trousers and silly headwear? Exactly what was wrong with cats, and the people who liked them?

A grand gesture needed to be made. I had spent four hours of my day at the Golf Show. If I did not spend more than four hours in the adjacent hall, I would be doing cats a disservice. If I could just come back at the end of the day with a nugget of evidence to show Colin that, no, it wasn’t that weird for a heterosexual bloke who liked sport to like cats, I would have done my minuscule bit to help the Cat Man’s historical plight.

Of course, in many ways, the Supreme Cat Show had turned out to be exactly the kind of scenario that reinforced the stereotypes cheery golf-loving, dog-playing blokes like Colin associated with cats. It was ever so slightly pungent, it was strange, and it was just a little bit macabre. Initially, I’d envisaged returning with a group of broad-shouldered men, all with birdies on their mind and happy tabbies poking out of their rucksacks. This vision had been modified when I’d had chance to take in the overriding female demographic of the crowd. It was then scotched completely when I met Leona from Oxford who, while I’d been admiring her Bengal, had told me that ‘you don’t get many men here, and most of them who do come here are gay’. By this point, I’d just overheard a lady stroking a Norwegian forest cat and telling her friend, ‘No, he’s not a substitute; he
is
my child’ and I was about ready to go home.

And then I saw him.

I’d been speaking to Trish, a Burmese owner from Carlisle, at the time. She’d been telling me about how it was her first time at the show and she was enjoying it but finding it a bit cliquey, not least the fellow exhibitor who’d peered in her cage and turned her nose up and said, ‘Is that a
tabby
cat?’ She continued but, as I saw his Pringle T-shirt, I began to zone out from her slightly piqued monologue. He looked to be about my age – maybe a year or two older. Short hair. Sporty demeanour. Cat basket in hand. Bingo! And he was heading straight for me . . .

‘Oh, this is Mark, my husband,’ said Trish.

So, I marvelled, this was him: the one other Cat Man at the Supreme Show who didn’t appear to be bored or gay or at work. Did he, just like me, watch the new Iams commercial and, despite getting annoyed by the woman who says ‘I can’t get up without my furry alarm clock!’ and knowing it wasn’t intended to appeal to his demographic of hairy thirty-something, sport-loving men, find himself repeatedly rewinding it and watching it again, just to see the bit where the tortoiseshell kitten does the waggly thing with its paws? Maybe, in fact, he was the real exhibitor of this couple, and Trish was just his accomplice?

‘So, you’re mad about cats, too?’ I asked him, possibly a bit too fervently.

He opened his mouth and just about managed a syllable, but Trish got in there first: ‘Oooh no. Mark doesn’t really care about cats either way. He’s mainly just here as my driver and carrier. What he really wants to do is go to the Golf Show—’