Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (3 page)

The Cat Man Cometh
 
 

If you decided to walk through suburbia with me in the early months of this century, you were always going to end up regretting it.

Ask Surreal Ed, my regular nightclubbing friend of the time. Ed and I did a lot of walking back then: keyed-up, aimless walking, hungover, euphoric walking. He would have told you all about the surprising dangers, particularly on a wet day, of that cypress bush on the road leading from Crouch Hill to Archway tube station. But Ed always gave as good as he got, and it wasn’t like I was going to push just
anyone
into a cypress bush when they weren’t expecting it. I would have had to have known you for at least two or three years first, and you would probably have been an Ed kind of person to get that kind of treatment (the kind of person, in short, who is apt to grab one of their friends’ limbs in public at an entirely random moment, suffers from restless leg syndrome, and thinks the root of all great comic routines involves liberal use of the word ‘cheese’). But even if you were a virtual stranger, not given to surrealism and safe from the maws of dripping shrubbery, you would soon have realised that, by taking a leisurely stroll with me through the leafy streets of north London, you had made a big mistake.

Everything would probably have started in companionable, sane enough fashion. Maybe you would have told me about a band or film you’d seen the previous night. ‘Tom seems like a good listener!’ you might have thought. ‘He seems to be genuinely taking on board my view about the
Nutty Professor II
being slightly less funny than having a digit removed with a rusty hacksaw!’ Perhaps we’d reached a higher level of intimacy in our relationship, and you were telling me about a person at work on whom you had a crush. You’d paced your story well, and you were just about to get to the long-delayed climax, where the steadfast but ultimately dull colleague of you and your prospective squeeze had unexpectedly had to depart early to catch a train, leaving just the two of you in the pub, alone for the first time ever. As you began to describe the powerful feelings of wanting – no, needing – to kiss someone, but not quite knowing if you should, you watched, somewhat disheartened, as my eyes began to glaze over and I darted across the street behind a wall. What, you wondered, could I possibly be doing? Thirty seconds later, when I emerged, no longer alone, you found out.

‘Isn’t he ace?’ I would have said to you, holding my new friend’s paws up for inspection. ‘Have you ever seen such a cuddly fella?’

‘Er, no,’ you would have probably replied. ‘He’s . . . very nice. Do you think the owners will mind you doing that?’

‘Oh, we’re just making friends. Aren’t we?
Aren’t
we? I want to take
you
home. Oh yes, you like that now, don’t you? Is that your favourite place? On your scruff?’

You are now starting to look at your watch. Somewhere in the adjacent house, a curtain twitches.

‘How about a bit of chin-rubby action? Hmm? Is that nice? Oh yes, that’s a very manly purr you’ve got, isn’t it? If you were in the Mafia, you’d be the Mogfather, wouldn’t you?’

You are edging away ever-so slightly now.

‘I’m ever so sorry my lovely new meowy friend, but Tom has to go to the pub now. But he will come back and see you again. Yes,
he will
. You can be sure about that, because you’re the best cat in the world. Yes, you are. You
are
.’

I should probably point out here that this is no ‘I was young and slightly deranged, but it’s all better now’ recollection; to this day, I still find it hard to walk along a road without befriending every cat in the vicinity, but it could definitely be said that, in the period surrounding my twenty-fifth birthday, that same befriending had taken on a somewhat more . . . rabid . . . quality than usual. In fact, many of my friends from that time would argue that ‘befriending’ was not quite the right word. ‘Marrying’ might have been more appropriate.

‘You
really
like cats, don’t you?’

What can I say? When you’ve taken a wrong turn into a cat-free life style, you have to get your moggy-loving where you can, even if that moggy-loving happens to be on the run.

It had been two years since Monty’s death and, in that time, I’d reached an acceptance of sorts: if not an acceptance that there was anything predestined or inescapable about his death, then at least an acceptance that, put in the same position again, without the benefit of being forewarned, I probably would still have chosen not to take him with me to my new home. Nonetheless, I could not shake my certainty that the slightest nudge of a butterfly’s wings on my part – a slightly longer walk together, one more bit of chicken – could have kept him from his fate in that cold wet grass. Having taken my deserter’s shame and vowed to spend my time in cat-free limbo, I’d been pretty disciplined about it. Although how ‘disciplined’ I would have been had I not relocated, a few months later, to a gardenless flat in London is hard to say.

My move south had been necessitated by a new job: I’d been made Rock Critic of the
Guardian
newspaper. Living in the sticks might not seem the ideal preparation for a job writing about pop music, but my boondocks homelife in my late teens and early twenties had given me the time and space to learn my craft quickly, making up for the cultural years I’d lost as a teenager by pursuing my dream of becoming a golf professional.

That house on the outskirts of the village of Ockwold in north Nottinghamshire, outside which Monty had died, might not have provided a music-mad twenty-something’s ideal choice of lifestyle, but it had been the place where I’d turned myself round from a two-time college dropout, bouncing between income support and jobs in factories and supermarkets, to a music writer for a national newspaper. It was here that I’d corresponded with musicians in Denver, Colorado, and Athens, Georgia, and written and edited the cheaply produced fanzine that had secured me a job writing for the
New Musical Express
. The well-spoken, largely druggy, largely public-schooled men who commissioned me to write about American art rockers and the ageing hipsters of sixties and seventies pop had no idea that I did so at a desk facing a field full of cows, three miles away from the nearest bus stop and eleven from the nearest gig venue, just as they had no idea that I’d failed four of my GCSEs and lasted under three months as a BA Honours student. This was not down to subterfuge on my part: in the music journo world, talking about your background was uncool and bourgeois, and it was obvious that most of my peers saw any place beyond London’s North Circular that wasn’t Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow as an irrelevance, and certainly not something that would merit the interruption of a dissection of the latest Rocket From The Crypt single.

Once I visited the pub next to the
NME
office with some of the staff, and one of them put a question to the table regarding where everyone had been when they first heard Love’s classic
Forever Changes
album. As achingly credible answer (‘getting head in a goth girl’s flat’) followed achingly credible answer (‘getting stoned by the Thames and watching the sun come up’), I became increasingly uncertain as I thought about my own response (‘sitting in my bedroom, clearing up shrew blood and trying to get a plague of harvest midges off my pillow’), and was relieved when the subject changed before I had a chance to voice it. I was not ashamed of my bumpkin status – in fact, without really knowing it, I probably quite liked the way it set me apart – but I realised that it was time to get a little closer to the action.

For more than a year, I’d thrown myself more or less as boisterously into London life as was possible without actually scaling Big Ben and doing the caterpillar on its roof. Like a lot of other music journalists I knew, I drank lots and lots of beer and went to four or five gigs every week. Unlike a lot of music journalists I knew, I invariably celebrated the end of those gigs by going to a nightclub and dancing my socks off to the funk and disco hits of the distant past, then – if there was an extra half an hour or more to be wrung out of the night – another nightclub, where I would do the same thing all over again. It was not a life that invited pet ownership, but I’d enjoyed it thoroughly. It was, however, always going to be little more than an interlude. If I had not rushed off in the direction of the RSPCA or the Cats Protection League in the aftermath of Monty’s death, I may have told myself it was because I was keeping my vow, but, more likely, it was because I secretly worried about the extreme acts of feline philanthropy that might ensue. I’d always loved cats: their fuck-you swagger, the art of their paws and tails and muzzles, the ageless comedy of their innate touchiness, the way they made every smidgen of affection they gave you feel like a hard-won personal victory. But now my lifelong need to be in their good books had the fuel injection of guilt. If I could not have all the cats, it seemed easier to have none.

Well, ‘none’ is not strictly true. I did actually have
one
cat. Sort of.

Daisy had never been intended for me in the first place, and while the official line was that she was my mum’s, it would be inaccurate to say that she was spiritually owned by anyone. A scraggy bundle of fully formed tortoiseshell neuroses, she’d appeared under our kitchen table one day in 1991, a present from my cousin Fay, whose friend’s cat had recently had a litter. Caught off guard, we were nevertheless pleased to welcome Daisy into our family, although Daisy’s feelings on her new domestic set-up were more ambivalent. They became more ambivalent still after being chased under the bed by Monty.

Human nicknames are so often glibly explained, but cat nicknames tend to evolve in a more visceral, abstract manner. Why did I sometimes call Monty ‘The Ponce’? It’s hard to say. One day, for a reason known only to herself (if that), my mum decided to call him ‘Ponsonby’. I shortened this, adding the ‘The’, possibly to acknowledge some aura of aristocracy. Daisy’s transformation into ‘The Slink’, however, was less of a mystery. You wouldn’t exactly have called what Monty did to Daisy bullying; his regular chasing and rugby-tackling of her never involved flying fur, and seemed to be just his casual way of reminding her that he quite simply didn’t have time in his impeccably managed feline schedule for a shilly-shallying neurotic step-sister – let alone one with the bizarre defect of hissing when she was happy and purring when she was agitated. With each subsequent attack, her posture, which had been somewhat sausage dog-ish in the first place, became more low-slung, until it was clear that by continuing to call her by her original moniker we would have been lying to her and to ourselves.

Since Monty’s death, The Slink had not exactly come out of her shell in the manner we’d expected – though no doubt my dad, reminded on a daily basis of the loss of the beloved, solid Monty by The Slink’s sheer nervy unMontyness, did not help with his stomping feet and foghorn shouts of ‘OY!’ every time she strayed towards his favourite armchair. I knew I had not put the effort into my relationship with The Slink that I needed to, and our contact had petered out into a series of pessimistically proffered hands, sudden shooting movements under sofas and strangely irate purring sessions.

I told myself I was content with this for a while: I had a lively social life, a good job, and a cat – albeit a possibly mentally disturbed one that barely seemed to remember who I was – that I could go and see every month or two. But in summer 2000, when I moved from Crouch End (borders) in north London to the leafier Blackheath (borders) in south London, began to lay off the beer, get a little more sleep and spend a little more time at home, I realised that all I had been doing was keeping my love of cats in an undersized suitcase: I could press down on its lid, but it would spring open sooner or later with renewed vigour.

When the contents of the suitcase began their inevitable spill, it must have proved disturbing for the hard-living, bohemian men with whom I spent most of my time in those days – men who’d probably presumed that my first love was Budweiser or Fleetwood Mac – not to mention for sportier, animal-indifferent longer-term acquaintances like Surreal Ed, who’d never had cause to cross paths with my cat side before. As a 25-year-old, I could count my cat-mad male pals on the fingers of one finger.
¹
We might have been entering a brave new male millennium, containing such unthinkably evolved phenomena as hair serum, exfoliating face scrub and George Clooney, but for the longer-haired men working in or around the notoriously androgynous sphere of music, to witness the bonding process between man and cat could still apparently be a scary thing. I can see that it must have been odd to be walking along having a perfectly normal conversation with someone who you’d pegged as having fairly simple priorities in life, and then see him suddenly cross the street in the direction of a ball of fur and begin acting like his brain has been transplanted with that of a self-neglecting 72-year-old widow. But what was the big deal? The way I viewed it, there were lots of very ugly things in London, so, on the occasions when something beautiful with a glossy coat came along and nudged its cold nose into your hand, it seemed churlish not to take a few moments to celebrate the mere fact of its existence.