Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (8 page)

When our cat-mad friends, Steve and Sue, came home with a winningly insouciant tabby called Molly and told us that her mum was about to give birth to a second litter of kittens any day, a few more tails around the house became an intrinsic part of any discussion about our new home. We told ourselves in no uncertain terms that these would and could not be ‘new’ Bears. Neither were they going to usurp Janet in any way. That said, Dee was excited, and I was too – and not, I assured her, for the reason that I was planning to use water to spike our new little friends’ hair into mohicans in the way that Steve did with Molly when he was bored.

‘Kittens,’ Dee would turn to me and say, out of nowhere, as the day came closer.

‘Kittens,’ I would reply.

We were worrying about The Bear, and I was not quite back in Dee’s good books, but we were also beginning to relax and look forward to our new life. That relaxation, however, was our big mistake.

I should have realised that The Bear had an instinctive, telepathic understanding of our schedule, and that geography would prove to be no obstacle to this. Another four weeks on his Orwellian tramp trail, and he would have been returning to an unpleasant twelve-legged surprise. Another eight, and we would have been gone, meaning that, if he were looking for warmth, processed meat and succour, he would have been having to make nice with a raucous Greek family and their vociferous beagle. That the day of his return was also the day of the belated publication of my article, ‘Living with the Enemy’, was uncanny. I’d just returned from the newsagent when I saw the small, paranoid creature scuttling across our communal garden. At first, I mistook it for some kind of ferret or weasel. I am pretty sure that both would have given off a more appealing odour than the one The Bear did when, a few seconds later, I arrived at the front door to let him in.

For the next three hours, he barely let me out of sight nor sticky grasp – proof of a long-held theory of mine that the amount of love a cat is able to offer at any given time always stands in direct proportion to how dirty it is. His entire body communicated his relief, all the way to that ever-expressive tail of his (see below): an instrument that so often before had seemed like the punctuation mark to his doomy internal monologue. Every few minutes, I would feel overcome by relief and affection and bend down to give him a kiss, then, getting a whiff pitched somewhere between death and cabbage, think better of it.

After so long being the bad guy, it was an additional relief to be able to call Dee and give her the good news. I had not braved a journey to one of London’s seedier alcoves and rescued The Bear from the clutches of an evil underworld employer. I had not dived in front of a moving car to save his life. I had not even climbed a ladder and coaxed him down from the high branches of a tree. But when he had scuttled across that lawn, desperate for a bowl of food and a clean, warm human on which to subtly deposit the strange viscous green substance stuck to his left flank, I had been there. And that meant something.

Dee was, of course, elated, but her happiness was tempered with ambivalence. Now The Bear was back, it simply meant that he would be gone again all the sooner. Was this how it was going to be for ever: The Bear shunted between homes like an unwanted child? Would she ever be able to fully lavish the love she wanted to on him, in the knowledge that he was truly her cat? Another tense phone call between her and The Actor followed, and it was decided that it would be kindest for all concerned to do the deed quickly. Dee had just one hour to lavish her grudgingly received affection onto The Bear before he was packed into his luggage.

We had long since realised that the merest sight of a conventional cat basket would send him fleeing for the nearest nook or cranny, so our tactic was to use the pyramid-topped biodegradable equivalent that our Norwegian vet had given to Dee and in which The Bear had been transported to us, two months previously. I volunteered for the task, knowing that he would view it as yet another betrayal. The ensuing struggle proved that, while you might not be able to put The Bear in a cultural or social box, you could definitely put him in a cardboard one, given dexterous enough hands and a skilfully placed bowl of evaporated milk.

Some people think the look of a dog that’s been wronged is one of life’s most crushing sights. These people have never known true heartbreak and are clearly labouring under the misapprehension that the spectrum of animal emotion can be summarised by drawing a frown, then turning it upside down. Throw Spot or Chutney a ball or a squeaky rubber chicken, and move on – you’ll be back in the big panting simpleton’s good books in no time. But when you’ve wronged a cat, you know you’re going to be hearing about it for some time. It’s doubtful that last look The Bear gave me as I closed the cardboard flaps will ever quite leave my memory bank. I can still see the eyes now: simultaneously wide and beseeching, yet slitted and scheming. That inimitable ear curled down again, but its fold seemed to signify something different: a resolute internal tightening. Cats’ mouths don’t communicate much, but if there was a way of shaping your muzzle to convey the sentiment ‘One day when you’re asleep, I’m going to creep into your room and cut you’, this was it.

But I was not viewing The Bear as my adversary now. Far from it. The last time I’d opened that box I’d been a Cat Man. I had my cat history, cat issues, even. But now, something had tipped. I had surrendered. I had no idea whether The Bear and I would meet again, but I hoped we did. And if we did, I knew we would do so on his terms. I could call it my gaff, because I had taken out my first mortgage, but we would both know I was kidding myself. We could say that I provided the food, so I made the rules, but that would just be merely a front we would put on to curry acceptance in the wider world. I was going to be his.

Argle

The noise that accompanies the eradication – or attempted eradication – of an ear mite.

Catiquette

The ancient and mysterious social law that governs the cat universe and allows multiple cold-blooded killing machines to live in relative harmony, frequently under the same roof. When is it considered good form to steal an older moggy’s favourite spot on a favourite chair? What exactly makes it okay to virtually insert your nose into a fellow cat’s rear end one day, and a passing sniff an outright offence less than twenty-four hours’ later? In a hungry gaggle of six of Norfolk’s most duplicitous, randomly thrown-together pusses, who decides who gets priority at the dinner table, and how? If you’ve sprayed a microscopic bit of piss on a curtain, why does that make you ‘well hard’ in the environs of that room, but only ‘a bit of a big girl’ as soon as you step over the carpet divider? How does a cat implicitly understand what a ‘garden’ is, and where it begins and ends? Humans remain in the dark about all this, but catiquette provides the answers.

ES Pee

The telepathic process that leads a cat to only get properly settled on its owner’s stomach in the moments when that owner is most desperate for the toilet.

Furmat’s Last Theorem

The inarguable mathematical law that states that a cat’s affection will rise and fall in direct proportion to the dirt on its body at the time.

Nuggin

The act of pushing one’s cold wet nose into one’s owner’s hand or knuckle. Largely thought of as a gesture of affection, but sometimes given a bad press, owing to its alternative nickname, ‘Losing the Snot’.

Nuggbutt

Essentially a larger version of the nuggin, involving the full upper-head area. Usually employed at times when jellied meat is in the immediate vicinity.

Reflectytime

Those meditative I-should-really-have-a-newspaper-here moments on the litter tray or the freshly hoed soil when one’s hard-set veneer of dignity is momentarily dropped, a certain faraway dreaminess comes over the eyes and, just for twenty or thirty seconds, all in the world is right.

Uwookwack

The wobbly lipped noise made by a cat when it looks out of a window and sees a wood pigeon ‘acting up’.

Out of the Bag
 
 

‘So what do you think? Should we do it?’

‘It’s a tough one, but I know what you mean.’

‘They’ll be all right, won’t they?’

‘Yeah. I think.’

‘What do you mean “I
think”
?’

‘I just mean yeah, they’ll be fine.’

‘You don’t, though, do you?’

‘It’s just . . . ’

‘It’s not too early to leave, is it?’

‘No.’

‘And we’ve had a great time.’

‘Oh yeah, totally. And it’s almost like being on holiday where we live anyway.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So . . . I guess we ought to start getting packed, then?’

‘Make sure you save some of that leftover parma ham for Shipley when you’re emptying the fridge.’

There is no great mystery to the origins of the term ‘honeymoon’. The ‘honey’ bit refers to the sweetness of the first weeks of marriage, the ‘moon’ bit refers to the length of this period and its inevitable waning. A few of the finer details about honeymoons have changed since the sixteenth century, when the term was coined – a period when package deals to the Maldives were notably thin on the ground – but the time frame has remained fairly constant. In other words, you do the honeying bit as early within the moon as possible: a splendid idea, not least because it allows you to have a bit of irresponsible fun before your first argument in the paint department of B&Q.

Dee and I decided to take a more contrary approach. When we got married, at Marylebone Register Office, in the autumn of 2001, four days before moving to Norfolk, we agreed to delay the accompanying holiday for four and half months. The other unusual thing about our honeymoon was that it lasted three days fewer than it was supposed to.

The first part of this behaviour is fairly easily explained. By this point, Brewer, Prudence and Shipley, our new cats, were still barely bigger than my hands, and very nearly as clumsy. When you’re arriving in an alien part of the country with three 12-week-old kittens and their possibly retarded step-sibling, the last thing you want to do is leave those kittens in a cattery or alone in your new house while you jet off to the other side of the world.
³
Not only that, the stress of organising a wedding, a last minute, knotty bit of conveyancing and moving furniture from our flat, Dee’s parents’ house in Brighton and my parents’ house in Nottingham had left its physical marks on both of us.

To the irritable bowel syndrome from which I’d suffered all my adult life, I could recently add a sore throat and a particularly virulent pair of recurring ear infections. The latter had proved to be beyond three different doctors and three increasingly strong sets of antibiotics, and I’m sure weren’t just a natural byproduct of having spent too long reviewing Simply Red albums for a living. I’d been hoping that the clean country air would quickly clear them up, but somewhere on my third sleep-deprived trip up the A11 I couldn’t help noticing that I’d gone deaf in both ears and that a dark purple substance had started oozing out of my head. I would have been more concerned, but I was a bit too busy worrying about the giant mutant strain of Norfolk deer that I kept hallucinating in front of the windscreen and a resurgence of some even more mutant whooping cough that I thought I’d got rid of around the time of my eleventh birthday. The woeful sack of a man that flopped down among an ocean of boxes that night was hardly what you’d call a ‘husband’, never mind the kind that you’d want to whisk off in a hurry for early-marital jollies.

When we did finally make it to our honeymoon near Dartmoor the following February, we were in far better spirits (the purple stuff was long gone by then). Our holiday cottage was cosy, the pool and sauna were effectively all ours, and we had a good laugh at the comments in the guest book (‘pool too cold for baby Caspar’), but from the moment three days in when I wondered aloud if the cats were okay, nothing was ever quite as relaxed. It’s funny in these situations how quickly ‘What if Bob Potter next door has lost his key to our backdoor?’ can escalate into ‘What if the cat-flap gets locked by mistake?’ and ‘What if Janet jumps up on the hob and accidentally turns the gas on with his tail?’ Undoubtedly, Dee and I were egging one another on. Equally undoubtedly, I was the one who started it. I nearly always am.

If they’re to succeed, all co-owners of cats must go through a period where they learn to mould themselves around one another’s habits. It had taken a while for our roles to become properly entrenched, but the signs had been there right back during those first few nights together, when Janet had begun his rigorous regime of training me to get up at 5 a.m. to feed him. By the time we’d become owners of Brewer, Shipley and Prudence as well, the routine was firmly in place: less ‘good cop, bad cop’ and more ‘wet pushover cop, slightly more assertive cop’.

When we arrived at the eighties housing estate in Romford the previous September and met Mick and John, the two gay
Big Brother
fans whose tabby had just had a second litter, any impartial outsider would soon have worked out who was wearing the hair-flecked trousers in our relationship. As Dee and our friends Steve and Sue talked to Mick and John about the strength of the gay vote in
Big Brother
and their joy at the victory of
BB2
’s Brian Dowling, I strolled out into the garden and zoned in on the tiny, somewhat Yoda-like kitten leaping manically over the ornamental pond. We’d arrived with the intention of coming away with two new cats, at the most, and we’d already decided on Brian Two (black and white, fluffyish) and Brian Four (tabby, more fluffyish), but it was me who pushed for the ‘bonus ball’ inclusion of the sleek-furred, irrepressible Brian Seven (or, in Steve’s words, ‘the ugly black runty one’).

A few weeks later, though, when Brian Two (now Prudence) began to soil the duvet and Brian Four (now Brewer) and Brian Seven (now Shipley) began a bout of skilfully timed tag team claw-sharpening, I realised it was time to get tough.

‘Now,’ I explained to Shipley. ‘That’s really not on. That’s a very old chair you’re tearing up there. It used to belong to Dee’s grandma.’

‘It’s much more effective if you just growl at them,’ said Dee.

Dee and I had always laughed at the middle-class soft touch dads: the floppy men we used to see in shops in Blackheath Village, patiently asking little Sebastian or Ciabatta how they thought it made the octogenarian next to them
feel
when they stood on her bunions and didn’t say sorry. Was it my destiny to become one of these people? I hoped not. It would have been absurd to deny that my talents as a disciplinarian of small cats probably did provide a fairly good guide to my potential as a disciplinarian of small humans, but I was sure there was no affection being displaced or misplaced here.

It riled me when acquaintances and family would suggest that my cats represented some kind of trial run for parenthood. What rankled most about this was the way it carried with it the implicit suggestion that, were Dee and I to procreate, we would happily change our tune and leave our moggies out with the following week’s recycling. I love elephants and donkeys too, and, in the unlikely event I had enough room to own one, I would feed it regularly, give it a nickname, and stroke and pat it, and indulge its every whim. Would that make that a child substitute too? No: it would make it a very big, lovable, overindulged animal, in much the same way my cats were smaller, lovable, overindulged animals. That said, I can understand the slight look of horror in the eyes of my mum – a person who’d obviously made up her mind that the primary reason her only son and his wife would have moved out of the big city was to immediately settle down and start a family – the day she arrived at our new cottage to find me waiting for her at the door with Shipley in my arms, fast asleep in an upside down ‘cradle’ position.

I did manage to keep my soppiness hidden some of the time – sometimes without having to try too hard. If Surreal Ed had had any doubts that I was making a gradual exit from our 4 a.m. danceathons, I’m sure they were quashed during the sleepless night he spent on my sofa bed getting his ever-restless feet chased by Brewer, Shipley and Prudence, but I still got the sense there was a part of my home life about which Ed, never much of a cat fan, remained in denial. Call me presumptuous, but on certain occasions he just seemed to be missing something: one of these being the time, not long before we left London, when he sat in my living room and told me, in hopeful, sympathy stimulating tones, about the latest girl he’d dumped. ‘What went wrong?’ I asked him, as Shipley perched happily on my shoulder and began to lick my ear. ‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘She was too obsessed with her bloomin’ cats. What can blokes like us do, eh, Tom?’

Even more oblivious to the situation were Dee’s parents. Every time they visited us, they would look at me with increasing sympathy, as if to acknowledge the strain it must have been for me to put up with their daughter’s evergrowing self-indulgent collection of filthy carpet shredders. Happy to be cast in the role of the evolved, understanding husband, I would raise my eyes and smile in a way that I hoped offered no firm opinion on the matter, but suggested an overall patience and gave no hint that I had just recently inaugurated our very own household Cat of the Month award.
⁴
It was the kind of subterfuge you learned a lot of when you lived in close proximity to whiskers.

Dee’s mum, Oriel, is one of the most philanthropic people you could hope to meet: unfailingly conscientious about the environment, a nurturer of disadvantaged birdlife, constantly involved in a dozen different forms of charity work. Her compassion, however, tends to peter out rather dramatically when the subject is four-legged and kills sparrows for sport. When Dee had first sheepishly admitted to her that we’d got some new kittens and made the mistake of mentioning they were proving a bit of handful, Oriel was quick to put forward the helpful suggestion that we ‘drown them in a bucket’. Dee had been so worried about her mum’s reaction to our new hairy lodgers that she’d actually fudged the figures slightly.

‘So how many cats is that now?’ Oriel had asked.

‘Oh, just the three,’ replied Dee.

When I questioned Dee on her deception and expressed concern about the potential repercussions, she explained that, during future visits from her mum and dad, our three all-black cats could be passed off as one. I remained sceptical, but, sure enough, over the course of three days in Oriel and Chris’s company, no questions were asked. The only extra precaution we’d needed to take was to make sure a maximum of three of our five moggies were in one room at any given time. After a while, we didn’t even bother doing that. If you overlooked the time that Shipley clambered all over Chris’s first run edition of James Thurber’s,
The Thurber Carnival
and tried to put his bottom in his face, felines quite simply didn’t feature on my parents-in-laws’ radar.

Did I say five cats? I did. Did I mean to say four? I did not. Did I say three
black
cats? I did. The Bear’s surprise arrival back in our lives came at a typically choice moment. At the moment The Actor called, Dee and I had been very carefully trying to carry a duvet from our bedroom to the bathroom without allowing the pool of Prudence’s urine in the centre of it to tip onto the floor. We’d been living in the village of Brunton for five days by then and each of those days had revealed another dozen or so defects in our perfect cottage. We’d got on very well with the people who sold it to us, taken them for rational human beings and fussed over their cats, so when, we wondered, exactly
had
they had the bad acid trip that led to them deciding it would be a good idea to paint the light switches into a permanent ‘off’ position using bright yellow paint? Had the stainless steel kitchen sink been painted in dark blue gloss in some kind of schizophrenic panic the last few weeks of their residence, or were we just too dazzled by our fantasies of country life to notice it?

While Dee had gone to work on the gaping hole in the bedroom floor, I’d started on the garden, where the compost heap soon turned out to be nothing more than a front for a minor nuclear waste dump containing old golf bags, half-filled cans of oil and nameless bottles of bright purple fluid with big pictures of skulls with crosses through them, broken glass and what we realised, in retrospect, was almost certainly the asbestos roof of an ancient aircraft hangar. It was almost a relief when Prudence decided that, much as she could see the litter tray made a lot of practical sense, she felt, on the whole, the enveloping embrace of goose down provided a much more relaxed environment in which to empty her bladder. At least it gave us a distraction from the fungus growing in the haemorrhoid-pink shagpile carpet in the upstairs bathroom.