by Cox, Tom
‘But doesn’t he live with that big fluffy black guy? The one with the girl’s name? Jean, or something.’
‘Janet, you mean? Nope. You’re all clear now. He popped his clogs weeks ago. The only ones left are so spoilt they won’t care if you go in there. They don’t even kill mice any more. Just bring them in as if they want them to be their friends or something. The little one with the white heart as a bib has never killed anything in his whole life, apart from this spider he sat on once, and he felt bad about that for months.’
I could not avoid noticing that Ralph, Shipley and The Bear had displayed a notable indifference to Andrew. Shipley had made a petulant teenage ‘eeeaAAEEGH’ noise a couple of times as Andrew scuttled past him towards the catflap, but Shipley made a petulant teenage ‘eeeaAAEEGH’ noise at me at least once every hour. He’d even made it at a jar of budget crunchy peanut butter I bought from Asda the previous week. It didn’t necessarily signify anything. Once, on his way out, Andrew hurdled straight over the back of The Bear who – far too intellectual to reduce himself to violence, as always – just looked up at me as if to say, ‘Now this. Really?’ The apathy of Ralph, the biggest and ostensibly the toughest of my cats, was perhaps most surprising of all. Pablo had been a ginger and, not long before he left to live with Dee, there had been times when his and Ralph’s enmity had escalated into something verging on race war. But now Ralph barely opened an eye as Andrew came in and did his stuff.
One night I woke at around 3 a.m. to the sound of aggrieved meowing, and raced into the living room, thinking that my cats had finally decided that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it any more. What I found were two moggies fighting behind the curtains, neither of whom were mine. Even more surprisingly, neither of them was Andrew. I still didn’t know precisely what his face looked like but I knew it was neither a) white, with a moustache, nor b) a kind of weird tortoiseshell/tabby mix, with crazy eyes on top.
Many years ago, when I first moved to Norfolk, I’d found a couple of other strange feral cats fighting behind my curtains. I hadn’t really enjoyed it at the time, but as the months passed I’d come to remember it somewhat fondly. Back in the heat of the moment again, though, I spluttered in an exasperated manner, asking the pair of them ineffectually what on earth they thought they were doing. ‘This isn’t a cat YMCA I run here, you know,’ I added, ineffectually. They each gave me a snarl and slunk off, still bashing one another around the head on the way out: less, seemingly, because they had any anger left towards one another and more as one last gesture of defiance towards me.
I began to revise my plan. Perhaps I wouldn’t give Andrew to my mum after all, but would keep him for my very own, training him to defend the house from other intruder cats, in lieu of the services of Ralph, Shipley and The Bear? I wondered just how much work the ailing Janet had been doing on the battle lines, without me realising it. I’d perhaps been fooled by his easy-going nature around my other cats into thinking he was like that with all his peers. My remaining three moggies’ approach to socialising could not be more different to his: they were kind of antisocial with one another, but took a live-and-let-live approach with the other cats in the neighbourhood.
While their territorial pride remained somewhat pitiful, by summer Ralph and Shipley had, to say the least, started to make up for their post-Janet no-kill vigil of spring. Arriving on the patio to breathe the fresh morning air, I would enjoy only a few seconds of tranquillity before it was punctured by the sight of that night’s vole cull. The quarter of my garden nearest the house once again took on the feel of a mouseoleum and I gave thanks that I’d not been talked into a loan arrangement to help Russ with Baboushka (sadly, he’d moved house without ever finding her). In June, a wood pigeon crashed fatally into the living-room window, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was suicide, prompted by the carnage below. The same month, whilst gardening, I found a dead squirrel in one of the beds near the window of my study, a rictus of fright on its face. This was a surprisingly big scalp for my cats by the sedate hunting standards of their middle years, so perhaps it could be put down to Andrew. Either that, or it had died from sheer shock at realising what a massive prat Shipley was.
‘IT’S LIKE A FOOKIN’ ABATTOIR OUT HERE,’ said my dad. He and my mum had come to stay for a couple of days and help me do some gardening. ‘GOD, WHO WOULD HAVE CATS? YOU SHOULD LET YOUR MUM TAKE ONE OF THEM. GIVE HER THAT ONE WHO’S ALWAYS LOOKING AT ME.’
I had never quite been able to work out what The Bear thought of my dad. Whenever he saw him, he looked more quizzical than ever. He was a very discerning animal, very particular about the kind of humans he consorted with, and, over the years, I’d got a good measure of the type of person he preferred. If you were a privileged or vacuous sort, he wasn’t really interested in you. If, however, you had a tendency to worry and some kind of struggle in your past, he would be at your side in no time, staring up at you with his heartbroken owl eyes.
My dad, who’d grown up poor on a council estate and had told me just yesterday, as I climbed into the loft, ‘BE CAREFUL – OVER TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE IN BRITAIN DIE FALLING OUT OF LOFTS EVERY YEAR,’ definitely fit the latter profile. But there was the slight problem of volume. The Bear’s sixteen-year-old eyesight was a little suspect, but his hearing was a thing of genuine, undimmed wonder. If I had a turkey treat for him and wanted to give him the chance to eat it alone, unswamped by other, more greedy felines, all I had to do was say his name in a tiny whisper from several feet away, and he’d be there, by the fridge. When you have ears like that, it must be difficult to be around my dad, a man whose sneeze alone is so loud that, as a teenager, I’d occasionally be able to hear it when playing football in the garden of my friend Matthew Spittal, who lived seventeen doors away.
‘IS THAT WHERE YOUR OTHER CAT IS BURIED?’ my dad asked, pointing to a seven-foot by four-foot area of loamy soil I’d recently dug out, not far from the apple tree.
‘No, that’s going to be a vegetable patch.’
‘OH RIGHT. I WAS GOING TO SAY, I KNEW HE WAS A BIG CAT BUT I DIDN’T THINK HE WAS THAT BIG.’
I took the dead squirrel to the lake at the end of the garden, and gave it a watery burial. The Bear watched searchingly from under the willow tree nearby. Was he judging me? It seemed somehow wrong to throw a squirrel in a lake, but also infinitely preferable to the first alternative that sprang to mind: putting it in the bin. Mary would have approved of my actions: everything going back to the earth, whether it be dead squirrel or cat sick. Or, as was the case here, going back to the litter-strewn lake bed. As I dropped it into the water, I saw a big fish with a moustache swim over past an empty Lilt can to check it out.
‘IS IT OK IF I GARDEN IN MY PANTS?’ I could hear my dad asking my mum. Standing several yards away, on The Bear’s balcony, he was topless, with his T-shirt wrapped around his head in the form of a bandanna, which probably explained why The Bear wasn’t up there. I couldn’t hear my mum’s response, but I sensed – and hoped – it was in the negative.
‘BUT WHY NOT? IT’S OK. NOBODY CAN SEE ME.’ My dad’s point was rendered somewhat moot by the fact that, while they wouldn’t be able to see him, my neighbours – probably about forty-six of them, in total – would almost certainly by now have heard him.
As an adult, I’d always been stubborn about accepting help from my parents. I’d only ever borrowed money from them once, and even then had paid them back later the same afternoon – and I was determined for it to stay that way. Now, however, my house and the space surrounding it was overwhelming me more than ever. Additionally, I’d lost a couple of my main forms of income, as free online content forced newspapers to cut pages. In the last year, in my more downbeat moments, I had often felt like all the smooth-running constituent parts of my house I’d taken selfishly for granted for years had got together and agreed to fall to bits at the same time, at exactly the point when I was suffering the financial consequences of a mortgage buyout and loss of work. There were surpr
ises everywhere. Who knew, for example, that if you didn’t check the ivy on the side of your house properly for a year or two, it could climb through your walls and attack your boiler, costing you almost a thousand pounds to put right? Two months ago, I’d woken in the night to the sound of rain gushing into my conservatory through a crack in the roof. With the aid of a mop, some gaffer tape and almost every towel in the house, I’d cleaned up and minimised the damage, but I knew it would only take another deluge for it to happen again, possibly with even more catastrophic results.
This latter mishap could not be put down to wear and tear alone. When Andrew arrived in the evening, he always did so via the conservatory roof, which was made of cheap Perspex. His repeated landings in the same spot, which were heavy as a brick and often caused me to shoot bolt upright from a deep sleep, had clearly taken their toll. I opted not to tell my parents this, though, as I didn’t want to tarnish their view of Andrew before they had met him. In over-ambitious flights of fancy, I’d envisaged that this weekend’s visit might be the one when I presented him to them, but at present they were still unaware of his existence, and it seemed better, for the time being, that it should stay that way. I still had lots of work to do on his behaviour – trying to get him to come near me, for example, or not to meow like he had an extreme case of laryngitis.
Outside, there was even more to take care of. My shed now had no door, and leaned so severely that it was half in Deborah and David’s garden. The small, ancient wooden jetty leading out over the polluted water of the lake had decayed to the extent that, standing gingerly on it to give the squirrel its send-off, I’d run a serious risk of finding out what someone living in medieval Fenland might have thought of as a weekend spa break. Earlier in the year, a dead tree that my mum had warned me about – warnings I’d summarily ignored – had crashed down in high winds over the path leading to the lawn. With the wet spring, and the lack of care I’d given it over the preceding three years, the rest of the garden omin ously previewed a future age where men have surrendered completely to the will of plants.
‘MY MATE DAVE BLACKWELL SAYS IF YOU HAVE ONE OF THESE IT MEANS YOU’RE INTO WIFE SWAPPING,’ said my dad, as we chopped back my out-of-control pampas grass.
The noisy gardener/quiet gardener dynamic had worked for many years for my mum and dad now, but I did wonder if, somewhere in the back of my mum’s mind, there was a fantasy parallel existence where she and BBC Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don sat beneath a weeping willow, sharing lemon drizzle cake and gently discussing deadheading. I think perhaps my dad was aware of this too, as was evinced on the one occasion they’d met Monty Don. Last year in the car park, after a spoken-word event hosted by Don, my mum had come a little too close to reversing their car into the famous gardener. ‘SORRY ABOUT THAT,’ my dad had told him. ‘SHE BLOOMIN’ LOVES YOU. SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN HEARTBROKEN IF SHE’D KILLED YOU.’
My mum is so green-fingered, her hands are virtually a form of foliage in themselves. If there’s nobody around to stop her, she’ll garden until it’s too dark to see the fronds right in front of her face. My dad, meanwhile, has never been one to do things by half, or even by three-quarters, and, at sixty-two, would throw himself into any physical activity as if the digits in his age were the wrong way around. But neither of my parents were in the best of health, and I worried about them. ‘I’LL BE FINE,’ said my dad, when I voiced my concern about him climbing six feet to saw off part of the dead tree that was still standing. ‘I’LL BE FINE’ was, I couldn’t help but recall, exactly what he’d said to my mum eighteen months previously, just before he’d fallen out of that tree in their garden and come within a couple of millimetres of ending up paralysed for the rest of his life. That said, doom unto others as you doom unto yourself was not part of his philosophy. ‘WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T PUT THAT SAW DOWN AND TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF THEN STAND ON IT,’ he said to me as I began to cut a branch, even though I had expressed no wish or plan to take my shoes off. ‘BE CAREFUL WITH THAT LIGHTER FLUID,’ he said as I started the bonfire; two minutes later, he was throwing an amount onto it roughly equal to the amount of water you might throw on a bonfire of the same size if you wanted to put it out.
As my mum weeded and my dad and I sawed and burned the dead tree, Shipley sprinted around the garden ecstatically, shooting up and down Janet’s apple tree and clapping the back of my bare legs with his paws in protest when I went back into the house to fetch drinks for everyone. He and Ralph had always loved it when I was in the garden; even if they were in a deep sleep in the most distant part of the house, they had a telepathic way of knowing when I’d gone outside, and would join me within a matter of seconds. If I was honest with myself, this was one of my main reasons for putting my financial concerns to one side and staying in The Upside Down House: the cats loved it. Previously I’d lived in houses that didn’t suit my cats, but the Upside Down House ticked all the boxes. Indoors, they had plenty of space to ignore each other. Out of doors, they had a spacious hillside – or hillockside, this being Norfolk – to play on, with its own supply of takeaway food, yet it was also an enclosed environment that discouraged wanderlust. As a younger cat, The Bear had liked to roam, but now he was too arthritic to shin up over the front fence to the road, and Shipley and Ralph had long since cottoned on to the fact that all the good places to be were at the back of the house, not the front, where the cars were.
Maybe I could find another house like this, but it would not be easy. It was obvious to me that the main reason for the recent improvement in The Bear’s health and happiness was that he had gone seven years without moving house. He’d been forced to move umpteen times in his sixteen or so lives and had always loathed it, often staging magical disappearances just as contracts were exchanged or tenancy agreements were signed. I didn’t want to put him through that again. He’d shown early on in our friendship that he was a fiercely independent cat, perfectly capable of upping sticks if a situation wasn’t to his liking, but after his early vanishing acts, somewhere along the way he seemed to have put his complete trust in me to dictate his future. Because of that, it seemed the least I could do to make him my priority. But could I cope, in a house I couldn’t afford, needing more maintenance than I could manage?
One of the good things about hard physical work is that it makes you so tired you stop worrying about all these things, and that night, not long after my mum and dad and I stumbled in from the garden, I fell into a deep sleep. Andrew might have thumped down onto the conservatory roof in the early hours, but if he did, I was too comatose to be aware of it.
‘I’VE FED THE CATS,’ my dad told me the next morning, as I arrived in the kitchen. On the counter were three empty food sachets: three times as much as I normally gave The Bear, Shipley and Ralph in the morning as an addition to the biscuits in their dispenser. On the floor were a variety of dishes, only three of which were actually intended for cats. ‘THE BIGGER ONE OUT OF THE TWO BLACK ONES TRIED TO EAT THE OTHERS’ FOOD.’
‘Thanks. Yes, that happens quite a lot.’
‘NOT THIS ONE.’ He pointed to The Bear, who was sitting on his favourite step stool, looking a little bemused. ‘HE’S A GOOD ONE. IS THAT THE ONE YOUR MUM WANTS? YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM TO US. I THINK I’VE LEFT MY CHOCOLATE UNDER THE CUSHION ON YOUR SETTEE. I HIDE IT FROM MYSELF UNDER SETTEE CUSHIONS SO IT’S FUN TO FIND LATER. SORRY IF I’VE MADE THE SETTEE STICKY.’
I inspected the coffee pot on the kitchen counter: in the bottom of it was a thick slick of coffee, suggesting that my dad had ground approximately the amount of beans I do in, say, a fortnight. I knew the caffeine wouldn’t make much difference to him. In the comic-book series, Asterix’s best friend Obelix has no need for the magic potion that Asterix’s tribe drink; having fallen into a cauldron of it when he was a baby, he has since been permanently under its spell. My theory had long been that something similar had happened to my dad in his childhood with an unusually large urn of coffee, meaning that he now operated permanently on the level that most p
eople attain only after six or seven cups of the stuff.
‘I’VE BEEN UP SINCE FIVE,’ he said. My dad tells me he’s ‘BEEN UP SINCE FIVE’ a lot, but in this instance the information was superfluous. I already knew he’d been up since five, as I’d been up since five too, having been woken by the sound of him loudly clucking at next door’s chickens.
‘HAVE YOU SEEN THE GARDEN TROWEL ANYWHERE?’
My dad often drinks whisky before bedtime, but this never seems to have any effect on him the next day, and he’s at his most garrulous early in the morning. I’m a morning person, but I’m slower to get my head together. When he stays over, I can sometimes find it a bit much.
‘CAN YOU PUT ROLLING NEWS ON THE TELLY FOR ME?’ he continued. ‘I ALWAYS WATCH ROLLING NEWS AT THIS TIME IN THE MORNING WHEN I’M AT HOME. EITHER THAT, OR I LISTEN TO SOME BLUES OR JAZZ REALLY LOUD. DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT MY MATE JEFF WOULD DO IN THE SIXTIES? AFTER A BATH HE’D PUT ON HIS ELECTRIC BLANKET AND LIE ON IT SMOKING AND LISTENING TO HOWLIN’ WOLF SONGS UNTIL HE WAS DRY. WHEN YOUR MUM FIRST CAME TO MY HOUSE I BORROWED PHIL DAY’S COLLECTION OF JAZZ LPS AND PRETENDED THEY WERE MINE. SHE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE. DOES THAT TOASTER WORK? I COULDN’T GET IT TO MAKE TOAST.’
This would all have been discombobulating enough, but seeing, in the middle of it, a small toad hopping across the kitchen floor in the direction of the cat biscuit dispenser, made it more so.
