Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (25 page)

The Bear lived by a different moral code to my other cats – to any other cat I’d known. Just because he was deceitful and scheming, it did not mean he did not have principles. Rodents – even the helpless ones that my more bloodthirsty cats left around after they’d become bored – held no apparent interest to him, birds were his fluttering wallpaper, and the nearest he’d ever come to doing harm to anything with fins was when he used to gently lap from the tank of Bev Bevan, Dee’s old goldfish. His bodily emissions, though often destructive, were never casual or slapdash. When he was required to control his bowels, and had no grand dissatisfaction to broadcast, he had no trouble doing so, such as the time we returned from a three-day break to find the cat-flap locked and him sitting in the bath meeyooping, clearly in the last stages of holding something monumental inside him, where other, weaker beings had failed to. He never muscled in loutishly at mealtimes and when it came to sleeping locations, he was always the innovator, never the bandwagon jumper or usurper.

It had taken me a while to understand him, and for him to fully trust me. I’m sure that, ultimately, he probably still viewed me as bit frivolous for his exact tastes. But a relationship between a person and a cat is about compromise. I’d also done my bit to come a little closer to his aesthetic needs over the years: some of it intentional, some of it not so intentional.

When I had my own minor health scare towards the end of 2007, it did not come as a major surprise: I’d been working myself like a computer-literate packhorse for several years, ignoring the advice to slow down of nearly everyone close to me, and it was always going to be a matter of time before it took its toll. When it did, I was lucky, in that my affliction was nothing overly serious, but it was serious enough to keep me bed-ridden for just over a month. Not long before I got ill, there’d been a report in several newspapers about Oscar, a usually stand-offish cat who lived at a nursing home in America, whose habit it was to become uncharacteristically friendly with patients in the final hours of their life, curling up on their bed and watching over them as they took their last breaths, and I tried not to think about that as The Bear padded my stomach and stared deep into my eyes.

Perhaps he did get off on strife and distress. On the other hand, he was probably just glad to see me staying still for once, and it was just another lesson that cats give you back what you put in. During this period, it struck me harder than ever just how much you could miss about this cat if you rushed into a relationship with him, just how much was truly unique and refined about him, from his falsetto purr to his uniquely articulate tail. Had I ever met a cat who was so in tune with the two-legged universe? Had I ever got to know a pet so well, or been through so much with one? It was debatable.

Of course, as long and bumpy as my road with The Bear had been, it was nothing compared to the one he’d travelled with Dee. He still came to me more frequently, and there was a sense of achievement in how I’d broken down his defences, but it did not come close to the satisfaction I felt when I found my wife and our eldest cat ensconced together in front of the TV or went into the kitchen to find them furtively sharing a packet of parma ham.

Seeing him looking so plush and content and at one with the person who had always gone furthest out of her way to meet his needs, I had a small idea. I’d read about a couple of annual awards that were given out to rescue cats, or cats who’d begun their life in tragic circumstances, neither of which actually involved the unfairness of transporting a cat anywhere, and I suggested to Dee that we might enter The Bear for one of them. Not, of course, to show that he was better than all the other rescue cats. Or because he’d understand what it meant. Just, you know, as our own little tribute to him.

‘It’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘But it has a major flaw.’

‘What’s that?’ I asked, as The Bear, clearly disgusted with the notion, jumped down off the sofa and shook off the invisible filth he’d accrued during his cuddle.

‘Well, do you not think it could be construed, in a certain light, by an outside party, that some of The Bear’s hardship over the years might have been avoided, if he had never been in our care? I think the whole point of the award is that after you’ve rescued the cat, you make its life easier.’

I could see her point. The Bear had started his existence in unimaginable terror, deserted by the scum of humanity on the side of a motorway. How could a person explain to a panel of complete strangers that, although since that terrible day he’d been poisoned, bounced between owners, savaged, got lost, got thin, been relocated endlessly, lost countless hair, rarely been without an ailment or injury and been forced to put up with sharing his space with an ever-increasing cast of taunting inferiors, none of that meant he hadn’t been loved and prioritised above all others? Well they simply couldn’t, could they? Not without writing a book on the subject, anyway.

That said, if the rescue cat judges had spent some time at our house, I’m sure they would have soon seen that, within our domestic hierarchy, his status was somewhere about four rungs above royalty. When we communicated his thoughts for him to one another, we even felt the need to do so in the voice of an ageing, demure duke who’d fallen on hard times (‘I’m
very
sorry to trouble you, but could you be
awfully
kind and fetch me another chunk of that tuna’). The judges would have noticed that. They also would have noticed us placing him on the kitchen worktop to eat, so not to be disturbed by his ravenous, uncouth contemporaries. They would have noticed us sweeping a marauding Shipley off his feet in order to keep his Bearsleep uninterrupted and, eight hours later, in order to keep it still interrupted, building a wall of cushions around him in order to protect him from a devious Bootsy.

Most of all, they would have noticed the fence next to the road at the front of our house. I would have made sure of it.

We’d had this fence modified a couple of times since we’d first realised how effortlessly and regularly The Bear was scaling it. Initially, there was the bigger fence we had built to replace it: £500 of carpentry that might as well have been a herbaceous border for all the obstructive good it did. I still remember my disbelief when, just a day after we’d had it installed, I saw The Bear crossing the road with that ‘I am a wiry force of nature and will not be stopped’ look about him. ‘Have you thought of trying carpet gripper?’ asked the burly man whom we’d employed to put it in place, when he passed the house a couple of weeks later. It was an interesting suggestion, but I wanted to stop my cats getting killed or maimed, and reducing them to limping invalids in the process would somewhat defeat the object. Nonetheless, out of it was borne the idea for the plastic spikes.

At a glance, you probably wouldn’t have noticed these spikes stuck to the top of the fence, but I’ve seen some of East Mendleham’s more observant pedestrians wondering about their purpose – most of them probably just come to the conclusion that we own a very big, unruly dog. Roughly an inch long and made out of hard plastic, they’re not exactly lethal, but, if you put your hand on one and got your weight on top of it, you would almost certainly draw blood. For The Bear, we hoped, they would provide a preventative shock, without the subsequent drawback of amputation. But we’d made an error in our calculations: namely, that the pads on The Bear’s feet are made out of reinforced donkey hide.

I had never seen The Bear scale the fence with the spikes on it, but I knew from the frequent cat-sized landing sounds on our conservatory roof and his mysterious, sheepish appearances beside our wheelie bins that he did so. He was a little arthritic by now, and I failed to see how a cat that struggled with the leap from the floor to our kitchen island could claw his way onto a jagged precipice three times its height. The details of his exact method could probably be filed alongside such other Bear-related enigmas as The Mystery of the Place that is Very Warm and Comfortable for Long Sleeps and Clearly Somewhere in the Vicinity of the Airing Cupboard but Where Human Eyes Cannot See and The Mystery of the Place that Smells of Cabbage and Death Where You Can Stay for Over a Month While Your Owners Panic Over You and Write You Off As Dead.

‘He really is a spirited fellow,’ the fictional rescue cat award judges would say, having been told all this. Being fictional, and thus entirely manoeuvrable by me, they would have been staying with us a week by now, just so they could get a comprehensive overview and make sure their judging process was as fair as possible. ‘So, Mr Cox, would you say that he’s the cat you’ve been closest to over the years?’

‘It’s hard to say. I love all my cats equally. But yes, you could say that there is a special connection between us.’

‘And tell me, Mr Cox, if you had to choose a song to sum up The Bear, what would it be?’

At this point, I’d pause for a moment to properly contemplate his character. I’d think about all those inexplicable fights and how they clashed with what I knew firsthand about his attitude to combat. I’d wonder if the only reason he’d had them – the only reason he ever scaled that fence, perhaps – was because he was defending his five step-siblings, and that, unlikely as it may seem, he was the sort of cat who would risk his neck for his brother cat. I’d think about how much trouble he had seen in his lifetime, and how he was the cat who wouldn’t cop out when there was danger all about. I’d think about what a complicated man he was, and how ultimately, nobody understood him but his woman. What song would suit a cat like this? I mean, The Bear wasn’t all that similar to Monty, but . . .

‘There is only one,’ I would say. ‘It’s got to be “Theme from Shaft” by Isaac Hayes.’

And then, thanking me for my time and scribbling the phrase ‘possibly bonkers’ in their notepads, they would leave.

1
. Leo was terrific, one of the most fun-loving friends you could hope for. He also had one of the droopiest moustaches in north London and liked nothing better than a Saturday spent vicariously clothes shopping with his best female friends. Those girls who guessed wrongly at his sexual orientation didn’t know the hours of fun they were missing – not just in the vintage section of Top Shop, but in his flat, with his ageing tabby, Tab-Tab, a cat so docile it would gaze up lovingly at Leo as he used its plush back fur to polish the parquet floor of his Kentish Town flat.

2
. ‘How was I to know?’ protested Dee. ‘It’s very fluffy down there.’

3
. Okay, so maybe ‘other side of the world’ is a slight exaggeration, but Devon’s a long drive from Norfolk.

4
. Having at one point put forward the suggestion of mounting the winner’s photo on the fridge in a magnetic frame and photoshopping a baseball cap on their head, I reconsidered and decided this would be going too far.

5
. In his time, Brewer had sent some truly frightful, gaseous substances through his digestive system and it was a constant source of speculation for us how tumble-dryer fresh his pelt always remained.

6
. Sorry, did I forget to mention the constantly barking Great Dane? I did, didn’t I? Still, such a thing can seem a minor aural concern, when you feel like you’re trapped inside a giant industrial heartbeat and you’re beginning to appreciate just why the repeated playing of Van Halen proved such an effective form of psychological warfare in the smoking out of General Noriega from the Holy See’s embassy in Panama.

7
. Something tells me that when Eliot gathered Munkustrap, Bombalurina and Jellylorum together for their nightly kibble, he did not do so in a terraced house, with a Great Dane next door.

8
. Just as it had never made sense to me as a kid that Aston Villa could beat Liverpool 2–1, and Liverpool could beat Wimbledon 5–0 but Wimbledon could beat Aston Villa 3–0, it did not make sense to me now that Ralph could beat up Shipley, and Shipley could beat up Janet, but Janet was still, on balance, slightly harder than Ralph.

9
. Zenith and Nadir of what, exactly? Reasonably priced Tupperware pet food receptacles? Do the manufacturers of these products know something we don’t? Do dry food and water represent the respective high and low points of feline existence? Or did they just like the sound of the words and not bother finding out what they meant?

10
. If I was in another part of the house and heard a sound like a blocked waste disposal, it was usually too late to save the day, but if I was in the same room and saw him looking like he was getting ready to re-enact the video to Break Machine’s 1983 hit ‘Street Dance’, I could generally manage to slip a nearby bit of cardboard under his chin just in time.