Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (29 page)

For the last few years of my marriage, without really intending to, I’d relied upon a stock response for the moment when strangers asked me if I had any kids. ‘No,’ I would tell them. ‘Six cats, though!’ In all honesty, it was a defence mechanism. I knew all too well how easy it was for a childless couple in their thirties, who’d been married a few years and had a house full of felines, to be perceived as employing their cats as child substitutes. I viewed the term ‘fur babies’ about as appealingly as the prospect of eating a tasty pouch from the Sheba Fine Meat Dining Collection, but I had come to the conclusion that I might as well pre-emptively get it out in the open: my domestic life was dominated not by nappies or trips to adventure playgrounds, but by the whims of several furry dictators kind enough to let me share my house with them.

I would not be so presumptuous to claim that dividing cats in the aftermath of a relationship involves one tenth of the pain that dividing kids in the aftermath of a relationship does, but, in some ways, it at least provides an insight into the latter process. It also marks a similarly painful final curtain to proceedings, an admission that you are at The End, which was another reason Dee and I chose to defer it for some time.

How do two people share between them six animals that they both love to an equal extent? Looking back, it was astonishing to think that at the close of a previous relationship I’d worried about who would get which DVD, book or LP. Put into perspective, next to what was going on now, these matters were immaterial to me: the petty schoolyard concerns of quarter-formed children.

Neither Dee nor I would have liked to think that we had a ‘favourite’ among our cats but some of the bonds we had with them were undoubtedly more poignant and adhesive than others, and our separation highlighted them, often agonisingly. Bootsy was the cat that we’d got when Dee was ill a few years ago, the cat that, in many ways, helped her recover – the one cat that, even though I was the household’s designated Cat Feeder, would always make an unconditional beeline for my wife’s lap. I couldn’t take her away from Dee, could I? No. But I also found it hard to picture a time when my working days would not feature Bootsy matching me step for step as I paced the house looking for writing inspiration, or trying to muscle her way onto the warm keyboard of my laptop, as she had done almost every day for the last two years while Dee was out at work.

But if Bootsy had to go with Dee, so did Pablo. I’d looked at him as our project cat – the wretch we’d saved from euthanasia who now would happily sleep on my chest without moving for the space of time it took me to read an entire novella – and I wanted to follow the project through, see him continue to gain in confidence. But he and Bootsy were the only two moggies I’d owned who’d ever been inseparable. If I ever needed confirmation, I only had to look at the picture of them in their cat igloo on the cover of the hardback version of my last book; a photograph illustrative of the two ends of the cat intelligence spectrum. It summed up the dynamic of their relationship: the happy idiot and the she-minx who very cleverly made him believe he had her under his control while safe in the knowledge that, all the while, she was calling the shots. Pablo very conveniently served Bootsy’s main two wishes in life: to play the puppet-master, and to be physically worshipped. But Pablo genuinely seemed to
need
Bootsy. She was not only ever so soft and comfortable to sleep on, but fulfilled that shadow carnal need in him left over from when he had balls and strutted his stuff in his free-loving cat commune. And what kind of annihilator of fun would I have been to take that away?

Mostly, our decisions regarding which cat would live with who revolved around more practical concerns. It could be said that, since Dee had owned Janet before she’d met me, perhaps she should have taken him with her. On the other hand, she had the lower income of the two of us, so it would have been unfair of me to expect her to pay the sizable vet bills that were needed to keep his hyperthyroidism at bay. Dee’s new house had only a small garden, and it would have been wrong to relocate wanderers such as The Bear, Janet and Shipley from the lush hillside where they lived and foraged to cramped suburbia. And then there was Ralph: in 2001 Dee had handpicked him from the same litter as Shipley – the one cat who could very much be counted as mine from the start, and whose destiny required no lengthy discussion – but he and Pablo were the two cats we most needed to separate.

Do I think the two thirds to one third split we eventually decided upon was fair? No, but only in the sense that I don’t think pet custody cases can ever be fair. It was also clear that we had sorted the situation out more amicably than most. During our break-up, a friend of a friend, Steven, told me a story about the two expensive pedigree Bengal cats he and his ex-girlfriend had owned. Steven saw himself as the main cat owner in the couple, chiefly because he had been responsible for nursing one of the Bengals to health when, as a kitten, it had suffered from a rare virus from which his local vet had told him it would not recover. One day, a few weeks after his girlfriend and he had split up, he had got home late at night to his isolated cottage after being away on a business trip and found that she had been back and taken both cats. That had been over a year ago, and he hadn’t seen either cat, or his ex, since.

Perhaps the one area of contention might have been The Bear: a cat that had been Dee’s companion since she was nineteen. Some might have assumed we’d end up in a courtroom with him, each of us, unbeknown to the other, hiding Tesco Finest Shetland Isles Smoked Salmon in the lining of our jackets in order to convince a judge that we were more worthy of The Bear’s affection. In truth, there was very little to debate. This was not fundamentally about Dee’s greater history with The Bear, the fact that he had once been her former boyfriend’s favourite cat, or about her frequent claim to me that ‘he likes you better’. It was mostly about the fact that neither of us wanted this survivor cat – this veteran of fourteen house moves – to have the trauma of moving again.

Once, early during my attempt to catch Winston the stray, I’d gone out to check the trap, and been elated to find him in there, disorientation all over his muzzle. A bigger surprise came when I realised that his enormous, ugly neck wound had completely healed. It had taken almost a full minute before I realised that I was actually looking at The Bear, and, by mistaking him for Winston, I’d momentarily been able to see him through the eyes of an outsider, and realise his true plump, lavish healthiness. The rejuvenating effect that five and a half years of being in the same place had had on him was plain and radiant to see.

Over the following months, I would occasionally visit Pablo and Bootsy, and Dee would report back to me on how they were settling in to their new home. They had been thrust into a far less rural habitat, but it was a cat-friendly one nonetheless. I knew this from two frustratedly catless friends in the area, Drew and Jecca, who had set up their own ‘Cat Stock Market’ on the Internet in order to keep track of the ups and downs of the endless moggies who visited their garden, including the mighty Gingersaurus and the near-iconic Crybaby Hedge Cat, a creature I’d sadly never crossed paths with on my visits to the area and who sounded, from all descriptions, like Ralph’s lost soulmate.

Not that Bootsy and Pablo’s world of two allowed for much furry networking. Their relationship had reached a new, intimate intensity, the highs and lows of their dry humping sessions respectively higher and lower than ever before, their post-semi-coital cuddling now undisturbed by the malicious whims of Ralph and Shipley. Due to the lack of space outdoors and an evil tortoiseshell cat that liked to stare in through the window at her, Bootsy had taken to emptying her bowels in Dee’s fresh laundry pile, leading Dee to succumb to the purchase of a litter tray. Pablo himself had refrained from exploiting this but in a spirit of generosity, perhaps to atone for all the times he had bitten her neck overzealously while frotting with her, would follow Bootsy into the litter and bury her wares for her.

Perhaps even more eccentric was Pablo and Bootsy’s new drinking regime. Both had always been fussy drinkers, in their own personal ways. Bootsy, while stopping slightly short of demanding her own water filter, liked to have the cold tap in the kitchen slowly dribbled in order to get the water at its freshest, while Pablo’s preferred receptacle was a glass that had been placed in the sink the night before. Now, walking into Dee’s kitchen, I noticed a full water glass in the cats’ drinking bowl. ‘It’s the only thing that seems to work,’ she told me. ‘I’m hoping it might encourage them.’

When I arrived, Pablo still bounded towards me as soon as I came in through the front door, but Pablo would probably have bounded towards Hannibal Lecter if he’d also come in through the front door. In Bootsy, by contrast, I could see genuine recognition, and critical appraisal. I thought I saw a hint of the resentment of the unfairly abandoned, but Bootsy had never been a fan of facial hair, and any shrinking away from me she did was probably just a reaction to my latest beard. After fifteen minutes, she’d thaw out, and then, when it was time to leave, I’d find it hard to prise her off my chest. I could have really milked it, claimed this was evidence that she obviously couldn’t bear to let me go, but the truth was that she’d always had trouble retracting her claws.

Back at The Upside Down House, I was noticing changes in my cats too, many of them arguably less subtle. The Bear’s contentedness had now become so extreme it could, in a certain light, have been looked upon as smug, and he had been experimenting with a new ‘advert dog’ head movement during the times he caught me alone in the kitchen: a slight tilt of the chin, coupled with widened eyes, followed by a just-perceptible nod towards the food drawer. Ralph certainly seemed happier for Pablo’s absence, but I wondered if his war against ginger had defined his reason for existing for so long that he felt like half a cat without it. My hopes that he would stop shouting ‘RALPH!’ outside the window at five in the morning had come to fruition, but only for him to begin shouting ‘HELLO!’ outside the window at five in the morning instead. This was impressive enough, something I could boast about to friends, but in the end it was a little like the man on the other side of the lake who swore at the ducks: on the four hundredth listen, the eccentricity started to peel away, and you started to realise that you were just hearing the sound of someone going about, what to them, was the fundamental, mundane business of the day. We all had a job to do. In my case, that meant sitting in front of a computer and writing. In Ralph’s case, it meant repeatedly shouting oddly human greetings at the top of his voice until someone came outside and gently nudged him in the direction of the cat flap while calling him an irritating cock puppet. It wasn’t much of a living, but someone had to do it.

When I’d lived with Dee, I had always been the person the cats had harassed most fervently for food and attention, but I was not imagining it when I noticed that, without her there, they began to redouble their efforts to gang up on me. I have no idea what tipped the balance. It wasn’t as if Dee acted like a Victorian schoolmistress with them; she’d simply been better than me at ignoring them when they were at their most demanding. Did they see a hint of defeat in my eyes? Or was it a kind of natural selection: the strong preying on the weak, as they have done in animal and human life for time immemorial? Whatever the case, without Dee there, they had never been so loud and demonstrative regarding their needs.

Sometimes, I got the sense that Janet and Shipley had got together and decided that, if they tried hard enough, they could physically bat me from my study on the ground floor all the way up two flights of stairs to the fridge. I had always thought ‘ankle biter’ was a term exclusively applied to dogs and small children until Shipley began obsessively following me around the house in late 2009. ‘How would one go about putting a restraining order on one’s own cat?’ I wondered to myself, as, in the midst of a conversation with the postman, I felt a pinch and looked down to find a small black muzzle fastened neatly yet insistently onto the bottom of my leg.

Of course, one advantage of having four, instead of six, cats is that there are marginally fewer cleaning duties to perform. Pablo and Bootsy were champion shedders and sometimes when I missed watching Pablo hooking a paw into the back of the biscuit dispenser or the ballet of a Bootsy jump up to the arm of the sofa, I could at least try to convince myself that there was compensation in now once again owning two dark blue sofas, instead of one orange one and one grey one. Despite this, I continued to employ a cleaner for two hours a week.

When I tell people I pay someone to clean my house, I always hear the same voice in my head. It’s not the voice of anyone specific, more an amalgam of that of old, forgotten school friends and elder family members who grew up in poverty. What the voice says can be clearly discerned as ‘OOH, get
you
’ but it actually sounds more like an insistent, piercing fire alarm of the kind that might wake you in the middle of the night in a hotel room and lead to some kind of embarrassing naked episode. Despite the voice’s disapproval, every Monday, when my cleaner, Melissa, leaves, I feel purged and secure in the sense that I have fought off a nightmare future vision of cat ownership for another week. Quite simply, a small amount of professional cleaning feels to me like a mandatory part of not becoming the super villain known as Bad Multiple Cat Owner. This has been pretty much the case since the day in 2005 when The Bear was going through one of his darker phases, and Dee and I used a UV light to perform a rather troubling forensic examination of the substances on our curtains and cupboards.