Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (10 page)

‘You up at the Murrays’ old place?’ he said, as he began to violently shake a package containing a 1930s chandelier that Dee had sold to someone in Loughborough.

‘That’s us!’ we said, our grins freezing to our faces.

‘The ones with the cats, aren’t you?’ he asked.

We answered, once again, in the affirmative.

‘Stayed on the market a long time, that did.’

It was important not to be scared, we told ourselves. I’d grown up in a couple of ostensibly sinister villages in north Nottinghamshire, after all, and I had never had my body encased in a giant pagan structure or chopped up and served in a hot dog at a local fundraising event, had I? We were not characters in
Straw Dogs
or
The Wicker Man
. Just because the taciturn, vaguely intimidating manner of the postmaster had now been rendered the stuff of cliché by 100 horror films and comedy sketches, that didn’t mean he was going to care enough to stop being taciturn and intimidating. This was real English life – the dominant kind. Sleepy. Local. And, okay, just a little bit unsettling. And if it was a little disturbing that he’d heard about us on the village grapevine so quickly, we were learning that ‘The Ones with the Cats’ wasn’t always such a bad label to carry around with you.

We’d first met our next-door neighbour, Bob Potter, when he’d been over to welcome us to the village two or three weeks after we’d moved in. A man in his late sixties with an aura that was simultaneously businesslike and slightly woollen, he wore his former profession – that of secondary school headmaster – across his brow. Any semblance of gruffness, however, soon evaporated when a perky Shipley greeted him on his way into our kitchen.

‘Ah, cats,’ he said, instinctively seeing that Shipley was angling for a gentle pat on the bottom of his spine. ‘Love ’em, I do. Proper pets. You get back what you put in. If you go away and want them feeding, just give me or Rosemary a shout.’

It’s always nice to have a feline ambassador when you have guests over. That role had traditionally fallen – and still did fall, to an extent, to Janet – but from the moment Shipley had first skipped confidently out into the flat in Blackheath and sniffed the bigger black cat’s bottom, he’d made mimicking his step-brother his full-time occupation. There was something very Scrappy-Doo about this. Shipper was already beginning to lose that Yoda look he’d had at eight weeks old, and his newfound gregariousness had already stretched to encompass everyone from Dee’s stepgrandma to the heavily tanned man – at least, I hoped it was tan – who’d cleared out our sceptic tank.

‘You’re very friendly, aren’t you?’ said Bob, upping the pressure of his pats, to Shipley’s delight. ‘I haven’t met this one before, but I think I’ve met a couple of your others. Another bigger short-haired black one and a little tabby. They both come and stare in through our kitchen window. The black one clears off very quickly, but the tabby one just keeps staring at our Buttercup. She’s the youngest of our three. He sometimes presses his nose up so close to the window that he leaves a smear.’

As we got to know Bob better and he continued to report back on the secret lives of our cats, it did not surprise me that The Bear and Prudence were usually the main focus. The Bear had been in a particularly wilful mood since his arrival in Brunton, and, having found a hole in the back of a cupboard in the living room, he’d spent much of the time keeping himself to himself – with the exception of the odd scratching or ‘argle’ noise – in the esoteric airspace between the living room ceiling and the floorboards of the spare bedroom. But I knew he was not one to take a narrow view of his surroundings and that he would have been careful to take the time to scope out the neighbourhood.

As for Prudence, we’d been wondering why she had a lovelorn air about her, and her nasal functions had been a touch on the leaky, snuffly side since our first week in Brunton, when she’d fallen out of a tree in the garden and cut her nose. Obviously making your first contact with your neighbours through the medium of cat snot was not an ideal scenario, but it was good to know that, in Buttercup, she had a new playmate. It also explained the somewhat forlorn wailing noise that was becoming an increasing part of her night-time ritual. Actually, in view of the fact Buttercup was a boy cat, it probably explained it a little
too
well.

‘I’ve been reading about this,’ explained Dee. ‘You’re supposed to have them spayed when they’re five or six months old, but sometimes they can come into heat a bit early. Do you think she’s, y’know, calling?’

When we’d chosen the kittens, making sure that one of them was female had been an important part of the process for Dee. If she had indulged me in my campaign for the wild card that was Shipley, it was perhaps partly because she knew that she’d been granted the privilege of first choice. The choosing hadn’t taken long, and the deal was sealed when Prudence immediately fell asleep in the crook of her arm. Eschewing gender, my selection criterion had been a little different: I wanted two cats that looked like they would chase a hacky-sack around a room for periods of up to an hour without getting cynical. It’s more difficult to tell the gender of a cat from their behaviour when they’re very young and I’d already chosen Brewer and Shipley before I was told they were boy cats. That I wanted to name them after a beardy, all-male 1970s stoner folk rock duo was moot: if they had both been girls, I would probably still have named them after a beardy all-male 1970s stoner folk rock duo.

Now, though, it seemed obvious who the blokes around the house were. Brewer’s signature throaty exclamation – more of a ‘eweow’ than a ‘meow’ – might have been more redolent of a human crèche than the prowling fields of his ancestors, but at five months old, he was already bigger than The Bear and showing a leaning towards wanderlust. Shipley, meanwhile, was getting more sinewy by the day and, if his garrulous meeyapping was not entirely masculine, his deep throat purr gave him the aura of the undersized, geeky kid who can already mysteriously grow sideburns in the fourth year of primary school.

Prudence was not only less muscular and boisterous than her brothers, she was also a bit more high-pitched and high-maintenance (it was a constant source of fascination to me that three cats from the same litter could have such aggressively eclectic voiceboxes). If she was permitted the odd bit of special treatment – an extra bit of wafer thin ham here, an extra soiled duvet there – it was, I was reminded by Dee, only right, since Pruders was the only other woman in a house containing five blokes. I was careful to agree with this at all points and not bring up the subject of women’s lib in the cat universe. I could have done without the 2 a.m. wailing sessions in the echoey spare room, though.

‘You want to get her done,’ said Bob one day, leaning over the fence, as we observed Prudence shinning up a tree in his garden in pursuit of Buttercup.

If I’m completely frank, I have to admit that, had Dee pushed for a Prudence litter, my resolve would have been quick to crumble. Nonetheless, while my feeling on the subject of kittens remained of a fundamentally ‘Bring them on!’ nature, I could not see any logic to adding to the UK’s population of cats, when there were still so many out there that needed rescuing. And much as we’d enjoyed the synchronised wacky races around the living room and the ping pong ball football and the way Prudence and Shipley and Brewer fell asleep afterwards in a perfectly arranged triple-decker pile, the mentally taxing game of Hide the Litter Tray had not been quite so enjoyable, and we were not looking forward to a second heat. Only by moving the box full of granulated clay by increments of an inch every eight hours or so had I finally convinced the three of them that there was nothing inherently primitive about evacuating one’s bowels in the open air.

Even now, with the box gone and the ‘tray’ just a heap of intermingled soil and litter in an unused flower bed at the back of the garden, Brewer didn’t seem to quite grasp the age-old tradition of burying your wares: the useless scrape-mime he did over his increasingly virulent packages was a sort of post-excretion cat equivalent of air guitar. Me? I was just glad that none of this was happening indoors any more and taking time to relish the once seemingly unachievable luxury of going to bed without finding tiny bits of clumped grit stuck between my toes. I planned on making it last.

It’s always a significant moment in a man’s relationship with his cat when he takes it to get its sexual organs nullified. In view of the fact that The Bear could shoot me daggers for the mere crime of getting in his light while he was cleaning his paws, I was thankful that the loss of his testicles was one of the few misdemeanours for which he could not hold me responsible. Brewer and Shipley didn’t have his chronic oversensitivity, but the day I picked them up from the local vets – and by ‘local’ here I mean ‘would have taken you half a day’s journey on horseback to get to in the nineteenth century’ – I could tell from one look in their drugged eyes that there would never be quite the same trust between us again. Their throaty, thankful mewls might have been a way of expressing superficial pleasure that I was there to collect them from the bad place with the knives and the cage, but they disguised something else. That something was the wariness of those who can never go to asleep again entirely certain in the knowledge that something near and dear to them won’t be stolen.

But what would really be different for Shipley and Brewer? They’d have one or two less urges, and a slightly lighter feeling around the undercarriage, but that would be about it. Prudence, who followed them two days later, would have the much greater indignity of having to walk around with a fifth of her body shaved, like the result of some malicious game conceived by easily bored children.

Waiting for Dee in the car park as she brought our tabby out after her ordeal, I could tell, even from a distance of thirty yards or more, that my wife looked unusually dejected.

‘Poor Prudence,’ I said, as Dee slumped down in the passenger seat with a giant sigh. ‘Still, she’s been brave, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes,
she
has been brave,’ said Dee.

‘Perhaps we should give her some of those treats when we get home,’ I suggested. ‘The ones that look like camel bogeys.’

‘Yes, perhaps we should give
her
some of those treats.’

I looked across at Dee. She seemed to be behaving oddly, not like her normal level-headed self. I’d known her to get upset about the hardship endured by her cats in the past – particularly that of The Bear – but this was only a routine operation: a rite of passage, really, kind of like a feline Bar Mitzvah. Her voice seemed fraught, and it scared me slightly.

‘Did the vet say anything about her?’ I said.

‘Oh, he said plenty. But nothing, specifically, about
her
.’

I looked across at her again. She raised her eyebrows at me, and a flash of recognition passed behind my eyes.

‘You mean . . .?’ I said.

‘Yep. I mean . . .’

‘But . . .’

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘I know. But when the vet looked, all the equipment was in evidence. Meat and two veg. What we’ve got ourselves is a whinging little bloke.’

How could we have allowed this to happen? Was this, when it came right down to it, the kind of people we were? The kind of people who couldn’t go on holiday without worrying that one of their cats would switch the hob on with their tail? The kind of people who couldn’t change tyres? The kind of people who couldn’t accurately distinguish the gender of an everyday household pet? I was now even more certain that I was going to put the goat plan on the back burner.

When we’d been to collect Prudence from her original owners, they’d assured us that she was one of the three of their little Brians who was female. We’d even performed our own check. Admittedly, it had been a bit half-hearted, and had essentially involved nothing more than blowing the hair back in the area in question, but we’d been satisfied with our findings – or lack of them, as it were.

For Dee, the humiliation was twofold, since she’d already been through this once with Janet. ‘You would have thought I’d learned that you have to check more thoroughly with hairy cats, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘The vet did say that as cat nuts go they were on the small side, but I think he was just trying to make me feel better.’