Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (19 page)

It took almost six months for the builders to finish their work. The moment that they did so might have had its bittersweet aspects for the cats: they’d enjoyed licking those bits of leftover meat pie off the parquet floors, and living in a house entirely full of dirt, because we’d decided cleaning was futile, was not without its advantages. Janet, who had always timed his ample fluff deposits to perfection in the old days when we’d lived in places without two-inch layers of gunk all over their floors, visibly bristled as that indomitable metal foe of his, the vacuum cleaner, began to regain its self-respect and growl to life once again. The Bear, meanwhile, could not have been happy to see his favourite stair relieved of the seven different types of detritus stuck to it, including a pair of dried-up, hair-covered leaves which he probably had by now begun to regard like a couple of crinkly-skinned, wig-wearing relatives. He, more than any of the others, had weathered the latest round of upheaval stoically. But it was obvious to see how positively the departure of our temporary, pickaxe-wielding family affected each and every member of its permanent, four-legged counterpart.

The whole point of the building work had been to quickly reach the state of calmness that we’d been looking for ever since we first moved out of the big city. The problem was that in trying to achieve that, we’d trained ourselves to be anything but calm.

Maybe I did sometimes go outside and put grass on Janet’s back or rescue a turtle, but, as soon as I had, I was instantly back inside having a discussion with Dee about steel joists or writing like the wind. Just like my cats saw bags of food miraculously appear as a result of me sitting at my computer and doing that odd thing with my hands, Rory and his cohorts must have thought the whole process was simple. The way they saw it, they handed me an invoice, and I went downstairs to cover it by writing another article – in the same way that someone might write a shopping list. ‘I wish I had an easy life,’ they would say to us, after quizzing us about our jobs, supping their tea, not realising that the moment their banging stopped, Dee and I would rush to our respective posts – me in front of the brick dust-fogged computer screen downstairs, she upstairs packing antiques or contributing what she could to the building work in order to keep costs down – and work into the early hours, before being woken up by their drilling and banging.

It was a means to an end, we knew, but there comes a point when you realise that, whatever the joys that end you’re working towards might promise, six months is a long time to be chewing dust and living in limbo amidst rubble. When we finally calmed down and gave ourselves a chance to breathe, it was Janet, Shipley, The Bear and Ralph who provided the most potent reminder of how bad we’d been at living in the moment. Was it really six months since we’d given out the Cat of the Month award? Since we’d bought The Bear a slightly unbecoming, emasculating fluorescent collar from Pets at Home? Since I’d seen a warm-furred Ralph sitting in the sun and sung him his own special version of Foreigner’s ‘Hot Blooded’ (‘Hot tabby! Check him and see! He’s got a fever of a hundred and three . . .’)? Where had we
been
?

We were back now, but it was another new year, a new spring – our fourth in Norfolk, already. We were here a bit later – and with a couple more bank loans – than planned, there was a rather ominous clanging in the pipes in our new bathroom and we were still finding bits of the builders’ chewing gum stuck to the fridge, but on the plus side we seemed to have some contented cats, none of whom appeared to be crossing any roads, and our garden was once again coming to life in slightly unexpected ways. The turtle had taken the winter off, but by the first sunny day in April it was back on the jetty, and a couple of days later I looked out the window and saw a small brown hen pecking about on the lawn – a sighting which seemed relatively unspectacular, until you considered the problematic edifices it must have negotiated to get there and the fact that none of our near neighbours kept hens.

Though often very, very fond of chicken as a delicacy, the cats I’ve owned have always appeared uninterested in it in its animated form, making me wonder if, somewhere within the labyrinth of catiquette, there exists a special Poultry Code. Monty could have picked off any of my parents’ bantam hens without breaking a sweat, but he made it clear such slaughter was beneath him. Daisy’s desire for them, on the other hand, never really went further than a tendency to crouch low to the ground in their presence: an ostensibly predatory stance that became considerably less so once you realised her tendency to crouch low to the ground in the presence of pretty much everything from windfall apples to her own reflection.

Similarly, as Dee and I cornered this hen, the celebrated composer of ‘The Chicken Song’ seemed entirely preoccupied with some heavy-duty paw-cleaning. This proved to our advantage, since it meant that, by skilfully deploying the box that Dee’s new computer had arrived in and a large plastic plant pot, we – well, I say ‘we’, Dee was responsible for the all-important dive – could capture it with a minimum of extraneous fuss. Nonetheless, it was a little bit of a workout. The perspiration on my forehead, combined with the hair that had accrued earlier on my somewhat adhesive black jumper while I’d been testing out a new pet mitt on Ralph, must have created a rather odd impression when I rushed upstairs to answer the door to our new postlady. However, seemingly unperturbed by meeting a man who looked like he’d been interrupted in the middle of an illegal shearing experiment, she barely raised an eyebrow.

She seemed equally composed when I told her about the witless feathery animal currently locked in our bathroom.

‘Chicken, you say? Hmm. I know a bloke who might be able to help you out. Fella lives a couple of doors up from me. If it’s not one of his in the first place, I’m sure he’ll be happy to take it. Just let me finish my round and I’ll be back. I’m Phyllis, by the way.’

By this point in the day, the sun was shining brightly into our new open-plan dining room. It would be downright rude to hope for such a nice day in April usually, and Dee and I were savouring the prospect of a rare Saturday afternoon off. As we waited for Phyllis to return I was already rehearsing the phone conversations that would result from the day’s events: my response to my mum the next time she asked me if I still liked my house (‘Yeah, it’s fine and the other day I gave a member of the Royal Mail a hen, which she drove away in her van, so I suppose it can’t be that bad’) and the rejoinders of our London friends (‘Don’t they have stamps in Norfolk?’). Sure enough, half an hour later, Phyllis returned, this time with a wooden carrier, replete with air holes.

After being assured that the package would be going to a loving home, we handed it over. By this time Shipley had joined us at the door. Fearing that he was having wistful thoughts of his Royal Mail-funded adventure in Trowse and poised to make a beeline for the van, I whisked him up into my arms and he offered Phyllis his Mohican to stroke.

‘He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘He’s not scared of anybody, is he? Do you have another black one? A bit smaller than this one? My husband and I sometimes see him up near the road when we’re coming back from the pub. He won’t come near us but he looks right at us with these big adorable eyes. He’s got ever such a cuddly round little face. We gave him a nickname, actually.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘Teddy,’ she said.

1. Fat Rat (May 2002)

The too-remote, too-gloomy starter cottage is on the market. Dee and I have been watching
House Doctor
religiously for what feels like the last seventeen years, without stopping. Colour schemes have become neutral. Surfaces have been Flash-wiped to within an inch of their lives. Coffee has been brewed. That large, suspiciously brown leaf has been picked off Janet’s formidable fluffy posterior at the last minute. Mr Newman has arrived. ‘It’s like the Tardis in here,’ he says. ‘Nice garden, too.’ But, oh, what’s that? It’s the world’s biggest rat, leaping out out of the antique po cabinet, and running across the room squeaking comically! That smooth operator from
Selling Houses
on Channel 4 never had this trouble.

2. Twangy Stoat (April 2003)

The length of a human intestine is approximately twenty-two feet. The length of a stoat’s intestine, meanwhile, is not notably shorter. I know this. Why? Because I have seen one stretched out to its full length across my lawn.

3. Giant Green Leechslug (August 2004)

Easily the most large and disgusting of the things Ralph has had feeding off him. Gave Dee a month’s worth of nightmares after she cut it off him: ‘Every time I dream of it, I dream that I’m cutting part of his body.’

4. Lower Portion Double-Decker Mouse (November 2004)

‘I’ve caught it!’ said Dee, holding the mini muesli box aloft in triumph, containing Shipley’s victim. ‘And it seems to have all its legs intact!’ she continued, making her way to the garden to set it free. ‘Oh no!’ she shouted ten seconds later, slightly less triumphantly, after realising she had set it free directly onto the back of one of its deceased contemporaries. ‘Do you think they mind about that kind of thing?’

5. Forlorn Blobby Mass (March 2005)

Just because your identity was nebulous, do not think that you do not merit the term ‘plucky’. You did not go to the wheelie bin without a fight, little man/creature/thing/viscous gloop – you were an absolute bugger to get off the entrance hall floor, and you will be remembered.

Crouching Puma, Hidden Bear
 
 

While we both agree on the basic circumstances, the finer details of what caused us to almost end up owning seven cats remains a point of contention. Dee maintains that everything got out of control because I went to the Celia Hammond Animal Trust (CHAT) and came home feeling my moral obligation to house a quarter of the UK’s unwanted felines more acutely than ever. I admit she has a valid point, but I remember that everything really started with a rough estimate about the weight of a beagle.

Ever since Dee and I had been together, we’d periodically had conversations about owning dogs. Actually, ever since we’d been together, we’d periodically had conversations about owning goats, pigs, capybaras, donkeys, llamas, sheep, bonobo chimpanzees, tiger cubs, pandas, giant rabbits, chipmunks and wallabies as well, but the ones about dogs had more of an intent, summit-like quality about them and had come up increasingly frequently, particularly since we’d left Staithe Cottage and began to miss our time with Nouster.

It would all invariably start when the cats were being particularly arsey with us, or I began to fantasise about having an animal that would sit obediently at my feet and look up adoringly at me while I worked. We’d usually discuss the matter and come to the conclusion that we were quite content owning animals that can take care of their own excretory needs and that dogs are both too easy to live with and too hard to live with in all the wrong ways. But in early 2005, a decline in Dee’s health meant we considered the canine question at further length than usual.

All her life, Dee had suffered from migraines. In years gone by, these would occur every month or two. Two or three hours in a darkened room and she’d be back on form. But more recently, particularly after her Yosemite Sam-like run of head injuries, the migraines had increased severely in both frequency and strength. One second, she’d be typing or reading or speaking to someone on the phone; the next, she’d look down at her fingers and be unable to see them. She began to forget basic words, stutter and use phrases that seemed to come from completely different sentences. We were both extremely frightened. An MRI scan and tests at the neurologist’s failed to provide a definitive answer to what was wrong, and only led to more tests. Having begun a new job at an arts centre ten miles from our house, she was forced to quit. Tablets provided by her GP only made her sleepy and even more confused. We started to wonder just what kind of long-term toll all these knocks and jolts had taken.

Dee’s inspirational step-grandma, Chrissie, suffered a stroke at the age of seventeen, and attributed her full recovery at least partly to surrounding herself with animals. With this in mind, we thought the fresh air and unconditional cuddles that went hand-in-hand with dog ownership could only help Dee’s cause.

But, as so often before, when it came right down to it, we couldn’t quite see ourselves as dog owners. Yes, we liked saying ‘Hello!’ in overexaggerated posh voices to dogs on the street. But did we want a ball of hyperactive, wagging idiocy getting under our feet on a daily basis? Maybe not.

Ultimately, we liked to feel we had to work for affection from our animals, even when one of us was ill. We also concluded that a beagle, Dee’s favourite type of dog, might be the last straw as far as The Bear was concerned. We’d seen his look of resentful disbelief when he’d been reunited with Janet upon first moving to Norfolk, then seen that look grow as he’d met the nascent Brewer, Shipley and Ralph, and come to terms with the scandalous realisation that, from now on, he would be cohabiting with six lesser intellectual beings, rather than just three. Who knows what would have happened if we introduced the Real Enemy – the ultimate dumbo foe – into the house? It could have pushed him over the edge . . . or at least into the crawl space beneath the Upside Down House, where he would probably stay indefinitely, refusing to groom himself, making sculptures out of mouse corpses and planning how exactly, when the right moment came, he would dispose of the six frivolous individuals above him.

To be fair on myself, by the time I arrived at the Canning Town branch of CHAT, I was probably not in one of my more robust mental states. As well as fretting about Dee’s head, I’d been woken up early by the sound of Shipley destroying a box of tissues and waylaid by a damp-smelling man outside Canning Town tube station who wouldn’t let me past until he’d imparted some hugely vital details to me about a revolution involving stick insects. I’d been dispatched to meet Celia Hammond by one of my newspaper editors, who wanted me to interview her about her cat rescue work and her past as a high profile 1960s supermodel.

A friend who volunteered at another branch of CHAT had told me that, while living with the rock star Jeff Beck during the seventies, Hammond would sneak rescue animals into Beck’s castle, until finally the place was overrun with more than 100 cats and dogs. Nowadays her life was completely dictated by cats in a way that even I could barely imagine. By day, she would take dozens of them in out of the cold, neuter them, feed them. By night, she would go on midnight raids, rescuing strays from the site where the 2012 London Olympic Village was being constructed.

When I asked what time I should stop by the Canning Town branch, one of her colleagues told me, ‘Oh, just turn up – Celia lives here.’ It was only when I arrived that I realised she was not using a figure of speech: Celia really
did
live in this unprepossessing building on Canning Town High Street, grabbing at most a couple of hours’ sleep per night on a couch in a cramped kitchen at the back of the building strewn with cardboard boxes, Whiskas tins and perma-stained coffee mugs.

Having led me into this room and offered me a seat on an old towel, Celia told me somewhat dismissively about her past as a friend to Mick Jagger and Twiggy. She then handed me a tiny yelping black and white kitten and a container of milk, while she took a phone call from a woman who had thrown her cat out onto the street ‘because it had fleas’ and then found neighbourhood children trying to kill it with sticks. Today, Celia told me, was a ‘quiet day’, which I soon came to understand to mean that the phone only rang with another report of feline woe once every minute, instead of once every twenty seconds.

By the time Celia had shown me into the main area where the recent influx of vagabonds and orphans were kept, I knew I was in trouble. The tiny yelping kitten had reminded me of Brewer and I’d had to get a vice-like grip on myself to leave it behind, but as soon as the roly-poly ginger in the third cage along and I set eyes on one another, there was an unmistakable chemistry in the air. ‘How many cats precisely could one fit with them on the Liverpool Street to Norwich train, without causing upset to one’s fellow travellers?’ I wondered. For not the first time that day, I decided it was a good thing I had not brought the car with me.

Before I’d been to CHAT, I’d often seen signs for cat rescue centres whilst out driving and had a barely controllable urge to hit the indicator. But I had always talked myself out of it, knowing that I would only come away with a new mouth to feed or a fresh wave of impotent rage at an unfeeling universe. Somehow, calling on some unsuspected reserve of self-discipline, I managed to walk out of Celia’s place empty-handed, but it wasn’t long before the old guilt kicked in. How could I go blithely about my day-to-day existence knowing there were cats out there being hit with sticks, cats getting covered in glue and paint, cats – really surprisingly plush-looking cats, who would probably happily sit on your knee for up to three hours without budging – languishing in cages, unwanted? Yes, Dee and I were already taking care of a gaggle of feline misshapes, and, yes, we were fighting a losing battle against the mud stains on our stairs, but wasn’t it my duty as a Cat Man to make my use of the meagre cup I’d been handed to help bail out the sinking ship? After all, if you totted up the strays at Canning Town, the Lewisham branch of CHAT and the home in the Sussex countryside that she almost never visited, Celia had roughly 600 more cats than me, and did you hear her complaining about mud on
her
stairs?

‘So, sod it, let’s get another,’ said Dee, when I told her about my experience at CHAT. ‘I mean, bloody hell, we were almost going to get a medium-sized dog. That would have been loads more work than another cat.’

‘It would probably weigh as much as two of them, for a start,’ I added.

‘Oh, at least! And besides, I’ve had enough of living with five blokes. It’s time I had some female company around here.’

Having been a firsthand witness to much of the long, fraught story of Dee’s search for an extra female around the house, I was only too keen to help her find a girl moggy without male genitalia. Our visit to the Kentford RSPCA in Suffolk the following day yielded an immediate candidate.

Ginny, who in more refined feline circles would have been probably referred to as a ‘Blue’, couldn’t have made her motives more obvious if she’d whispered ‘Get me out of here – I’ll make it worth your while!’ into our ears. She was clearly a creature with an enormous capacity for love, but, after we’d spent two minutes taking turns letting her cling to us, our long-sleeved T-shirts were starting to resemble mohair sweaters.

There was something else that was unusual about Ginny, a familiar look about her that I couldn’t quite place. Dee was the one to put her finger on it.

‘She looks like your mum,’ she said.

I’d never met an animal that resembled one of my parents before and I discovered I had mixed feelings about it. I suppose if you bear in mind the popular theory that most dogs look like their owners, then it wouldn’t have been that unusual to have a cat that reminded me of one of the people whose genes I share. But I couldn’t quite squish visions of Ginny interfering with decisions about household decorating, reminding me to drive carefully and telling Dee that I’d ‘always been boisterous’.

Keeping our options open, we moved on to the next run.

‘Here are Ethel and Austin,’ said Gillian, the jolly welly-wearing lady from the RSPCA. ‘They’re brother and sister, but they need to be separated, we think, because Ethel needs to come out of Austin’s shadow.’

As Austin (grey, stunted) began to climb up my head and inspect my hair for hidden rodents, I looked across at Dee, who was having a far less rough-and-tumble encounter with Ethel (grey, boss-eyed, even more stunted). I only had to take in the sensually arching back and gently flexing claws (Ethel’s, not Dee’s) and the faraway look in the eyes (Dee’s and Ethel’s) to know how this would end.

‘So, she’s definitely female?’ I asked Gillian. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

‘Oh yes, absolutely no doubt about it.’

We stepped towards the next three runs, saying hello to Popsy (white and black), Shuttlecock (jet black) and two brothers, Bourneville and Cadbury (black and browny-black), but being sure to move quickly, for fear of racking up yet more emotional attachments. In doing so, we knew that we were fundamentally unscrupulous people. ‘The Black Cat’, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story of a feline provoking madness and murder and its vengeance, was over a century and a half old, but it still said a lot about the raw deal given to society’s darker common-or-garden feline. Black cats might have been welcomed into households across the world, but their oppressed past as the victims of slaughter and superstition still tainted them. As Celia Hammond had told me, ‘It’s rare that people come here looking for a black one.’

I was sure that it was pure chance that had led to Ginny, Austin and Ethel being given pole position in the runs ahead of their witchy compatriots. I’m equally sure, however, that, by making a fuss over the more exciting colours and overlooking the more everyday hues in the runs beyond them, we were doing just what every other cat hunter at Kentford that week had done before us.

But what else could be expected of us? I could see that there was no going back for Dee and Ethel now. I suppose I could have told Shuttlecock, Bourneville and Cadbury that some of my best cat friends were black, and cited the examples of Janet, Shipley and The Bear waiting for us at home, but I doubt that would have cut the mustard with them.

The final bit of cat housing on the row appeared to be empty.

‘This is Raffles,’ said Gillian. ‘He’s sleeping at the moment.’

Somewhere in the dark at the back of the run – the part that formed a sort of cat treehouse, without a tree – I saw a big black shape stir. I peered in, hopefully, but had a strange instinct not to get too close. A second later, an enormous muzzle – the kind of muzzle that begged to to be celebrated, the kind of muzzle that more primitive civilisations would have mounted in memoriam – poked its way out of the entrance hole, and lolled on the wood.

‘Brrroaaaaaghwww,’ it said, insouciantly.

I took a step back, almost falling onto the gravel path behind me.

‘He’s a big boy, isn’t he?’ said Gillian.

In truth, the answer was no: Raffles wasn’t big. ‘Big’ was what Ralph, Janet and Shipley were. Visitors to our house would often comment on their size and jokingly ask if we fed them out of buckets. But if I had ever taken one of them out for a walk into East Mendleham town centre on a lead, the only stares I would have got would probably have been for being weird enough to take a cat out shopping with me. If I took this beast out, however, passers-by would bow down before me in deference. ‘Look! It’s that bloke with the puma,’ the local yobs would say, tipping their baseball caps as I went by. Pretty soon, I’d be one of the town’s most notorious characters, right up there with that bloke who shouted ‘Fuckin’ come on then! Let’s be ’avin you!’ to the birds and the old man who sometimes busked outside the Co-op and got his Border collies to howl in time with his ukulele.