Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (9 page)

‘Er. We have a slight hitch,’ said Dee, returning from the phone. ‘How do you fancy going to London to pick up a package?’

The way he’d told it to Dee, The Actor had not had much choice in the matter: his work opportunity in Australia was a last minute one, and involved an immediate flight. Nonetheless, demanding that his ex-girlfriend, a non-driver, travel 120 miles to collect The Bear the very same afternoon seemed a mite inconsiderate. Did he know when he’d be back? He didn’t.
Would
he be coming back at all? Er, he wasn’t sure, actually.

‘Anyway, that’s it,’ Dee explained to me. ‘No more toing and froing. This is the last time. He’s our cat now.’

Considering my dual ear infection and cough, it is obvious that the decision to zoom down to London at 8 p.m. that same night was made by a man who’d been rendered senseless by spending too long in the Relocation Zone. If I was being truthful, I’d first noticed the slight unbalanced feeling in our Ford Fiesta the previous night, but I’d quickly dismissed it from my mind. It was just another thing on a long list of jobs, something to think about after I’d found the kettle and been to the hardware store to get the stuff to block up the hole in the porch where the water was coming in and been to IKEA to buy six replacement reserve duvets for Prudence to soil. I’d barely reached the Norfolk–Suffolk border by the time everything started wobbling and I heard the ‘ftt-ftt’ sound coming from the front left of the car.

My dad did once show me how to change a tyre. I was thirteen at the time, and probably busy checking out my bad eighties quiff in the wing mirror, but I’m sure I was half-listening. If I really tried, I could probably have dredged some of the information back up from the cobwebbed recesses of my brain, but in view of the fact I didn’t much fancy getting my upper body jammed under a Ford Fiesta in a dark Norfolk layby, I did the same thing a lot of other bookish, cat-loving men of Generation X would have done: I phoned the RAC. While I waited for them to arrive, I called Dee, and the two of us put her original plan back in place: the one that involved calling our friend Michael and asking if The Actor could drop The Bear with him for a couple of days, until we would be in a fit state to make it back to Blackheath.

I couldn’t say I’d been looking forward to meeting The Actor, but neither could I pretend that the encounter didn’t have its supernatural appeal: a bit like meeting Batman and Bruce Wayne in the same room at the same time. Once again, it was hard not to feel there was a higher Bear power at work here: The Bear did not want this, so it had not happened.

But if my pointy-eared nemesis was in a mystical frame of mind, he might well meet his match later that night. A folk musician with a penchant for magic herbalism and lyrics about burning scarecrows, Michael’s many very spiritual, very 1971 beliefs included the one that animals could not be ‘owned’. In spite of this, he enjoyed sharing the big dribbling love of a gigantic, wandering ginger cat called Ramases with an old man in the flat above him.

For safety’s sake, Michael had made sure that Ramases wasn’t around when The Actor dropped The Bear off, but he’d neglected to check behind the horse’s head mask – a favourite prop of Michael’s, often worn on stage during his songs ‘Power to the Pixies’ and ‘Reality is a Fantasy’ – on the shelf above his bed. As soon as The Bear had crept fearfully from his travelling polymer prison onto the bedspread, the more established cat had wasted no time in pouncing, landing on the bed with a ‘Browwwaaagh’ noise. His vision engulfed by flaming fur and bright green eyes, The Bear had scuttled away, eventually making himself comfortable at the back of the wardrobe, amidst Michael’s collection of medieval capes.

‘He’s been there ever since,’ Michael told us two days later, when Dee and I arrived to collect him. ‘Actually, no, that’s not true. He did come out once, when I was boiling some broccoli.’

‘Ooh yes,’ said Dee. ‘That’s one of his vices.’

‘I thought you said the only thing he ate apart from cat food and cold meats was curry,’ I said.

‘Well, yeah, that is sort of true. But there was this one day when he freaked out and ate some broccoli and then a Pop Tart. Or maybe it was the Pop Tart first. I can’t remember.’

‘Well, he was very affectionate,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it from a cat. It scared me a bit. I actually had to have a sit down afterwards. Oh yeah, another weird thing, as well. I thought the battery had run out on my smoke alarm because it kept making this weird noise. It was ages before I remembered I didn’t even have a smoke alarm and realised it was The Bear.’

Thanking Michael for his good deed, we made our way back to the car. Dee had coaxed The Bear into the cat box on her own this time. I couldn’t see him through the gaps, but I sensed he knew I was there. To help the journey pass, Michael had loaned us a tape of
The Garden of Jane Delawney
, a folk album made in 1970 by a group called Trees. The first line on the album is, ‘Country air, wrap yourself around me.’ You wouldn’t exactly have called it driving music, but it was perfect for travelling to a folklore-rich place like Norfolk on a misty autumn night: all ghostly whispers, elfin melodies and creeping vine guitars. It was easy for a fanciful, overoptimistic person to get carried away about his new rural life and start thinking about the country horror novel he would write, to which this would provide the soundtrack.

For a while, the unrelenting ‘meeyeeooop’ noise from the back seat added an extra layer of spookiness to the melodies, but by about track five it started to sound a bit psychotic, so we turned it off and decided to listen to
The Archers
instead.

That had been almost six months before, and in the intervening period, Dee and I had taken one reality check after another about country life. We had done nothing as tedious as ‘research’ before moving to Brunton: our original feeling had simply been that it was in Norfolk, and Norfolk was all lovely, wasn’t it? Well, yes, to an extent, but moving to a village ten miles from the nearest supermarket, the bulk of whose employment was provided by a nearby remand centre, with only one driving licence between the two of you, was always going to be a culture shock after living in a city where all your materialistic desires were on tap, day and night. Clinging to our idea of a rural idyll, we often couldn’t even find a rural Lidl. And why had nobody thought to tell us that in the Norfolk countryside winters last eight times as long as they do in London? I’m sure I’d been reading too many of those ‘Life in the Day’ columns in the back of the
Sunday Times Magazine
where successful rustic creative types talked about getting up with the dawn chorus, working for five hours, then spending the afternoon going on country walks and pottering about their herb garden, but back in Blackheath I’d begun to kid myself I would be moving not just to a whole new place, but a whole new time zone, where days lasted three times as long.

These
real
days dragged on in an entirely different way. There were still deadlines to meet and email to keep up with and a mortgage to pay, just as there had been in Blackheath, but there was also DIY to do, and mud – most of it brought in on twenty small but surprisingly absorbent paws – and no pub or club containing half a dozen friends where you could forget about it all, and driving, endless driving, and tiny Victorian cottage windows with the dark, dark, interminable night beyond them. In five months, I don’t think I’d pottered once.

The autumn of 2001 was a seductive time for a London resident to be nurturing a small-scale Back to the Land fantasy. Moving to the country and getting it wrong has become a cliché now, but back then early evening television was newly inundated with programmes seemingly telling city dwellers that all they needed to do was look fifty miles or more beyond the M25 and buy a giant farmhouse and they would never need to work, get in a traffic jam or have their vision sullied by a branch of Sock Shop ever again.

These shows were not the catalyst for our move, but they acted as a form of affirmation – and the fact that the houses in them always seemed to feature a contented sleeping cat on the bed helped, too. When we’d stood on the pavement outside the bar where we’d had our wedding party that October night, friend after friend had told us that, what with the attack on New York a few weeks ago, they didn’t feel safe in London any more, and they’d probably be hot on our tails in a few months’ time. We knew this was largely the drink and the occasion talking, but that did not mean we didn’t like the sound of it. We felt less like we were embarking on a new life and more like we were the team leaders of an unusually domesticated outward bound expedition, scouting out the territory before the rest of our group made their way through the brush to join us. If friends did not ask us to reserve them a seat in the local pub, they talked to us as if we were pioneers, setting off for nineteenth-century Montana to set up camp amongst ignoble tribes and cowboys.

‘You’re so
brave
,’ I remember a couple of people saying.

Were we? Really? That probably depends just how wussy and middle class your criterion is for bravery. It wasn’t as if we were off to trade in all our earthly possessions and follow the Bhagwan Rajneesh with a new loosely clad surrogate family. We weren’t starting our own smallholding and making our own yoghurt, or renovating a dilapidated monastery. We’d even chickened out of our original plan to buy a goat for the back garden. We were about to move to a small, slightly neglected detached house in a cut-price area of Norfolk to raise some cats, with a view to writing a few books (me), selling some old things on the Internet (Dee), and, if we got a chance, enjoying a bit of golf and horse riding in our spare time.

Both of us had done this before, anyway, hadn’t we? We’d lived in the countryside for the majority of our childhoods. But living in the countryside under the shelter of your parents’ roof is very different to living in the countryside in your first house in your mid-twenties with no friends or relatives within a sixty-mile radius. I may have lived in London for less than three years in total, but the place had been shaping my social habits for a lot longer than that, and Norfolk’s particular pace of life required some acclimatisation. When you’re used to getting most of your mail franked a couple of hundred yards from Oxford Circus tube station, walking into your village post office and listening to the following ten-minute conversation – and I
mean
ten minutes – playing out is always going to throw you off balance:

Man 1: ‘Keeping well, John?’

Man 2: ‘Keeping well, Mick.’

Man 1: ‘Keeping well. That’s the way you doos it.’

Man 2: ‘Certainly is, bore. Certainly is. How about yourself?’

Man 1: ‘Ah, not so bad. Not so bad.’

Lengthy pause.

Man 2 (pulling face of intense concentration suggestive of Mathematical Olympiad): ‘Not so bad, eh? That’s the way you doos it. Lovely job.’

Man 1: ‘Certainly is. Certainly is.’

Man 2: ‘Making much money at the moment?’

Man 1: ‘Ah, not so bad, not so bad. Just taken on a little job for my sister’s bloke.’

Man 2: (squinting into middle distance in manner of someone who has seen a squirrel in a top hat on the other side of the road breaking into his car): ‘Hmmm. Well, you gots to sometime, haven’t you?’

Man 1: ‘You can say that again, my friend.’

Man 2: ‘Easy does it.’

Lengthy pause.

Man 1: ‘Easy does it. You got that right, my friend.’

Another lengthy pause in which both parties make ‘hmm’ and ‘nnn’ noises at one another.

Man 2: ‘All right, Mick. Best be getting on. Take it easy, bore.’

Man 1: ‘Will do. You yourself too, my friend. Steady as you go now, bore.’

Man 2: ‘Ooh yes. Steady as I go. You know me. That’s the way you doos it.’

Man 1: ‘Ha. You can say that again, John.’

When Dee and I did eventually get served that day, the postmaster looked at Dee’s six variously shaped, flawlessly packed inland eBay packages like she’d just handed him half a dozen unpackaged, unaddressed slices of pizza and asked him to personally hand-deliver them to the Bronx.