The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends

by Cox, Tom

  The stand-off between Andrew and The Bear and me only lasted twenty seconds, and concluded with our feral friend’s usual balustrade-hurtling exit towards the cat-flap, but seeing him up close gave me hope for our future together – or his future living with my parents, at least. Not only did there seem to be loving potential in his face, but I’d noticed scabs around his ears, more evidence that he was homeless.

  Not that I had any shortage of new tenant offers elsewhere. Barely a week went by without someone offering me a cat to adopt, but I was determined to stand firm for the time being. Nor were the offers limited to the whiskery. After I’d visited an animal rescue centre in north Norfolk, Jane, a friend who volunteered there, offered me a pygmy goat to adopt. The idea was appealing, but I had to decline, having researched a) just how much different stuff goats like to eat, b) just how much of that stuff is poisonous to them, and c) just how much it would bankrupt me to make the garden goat-proof. I reasoned that if I couldn’t afford a new roof and shed for myself then I probably couldn’t afford them for a waist-high horned creature with a chequered past.

  In another of my less pragmatic moments, I did seriously consider an alpaca. I even carried out some research into the matter, going trekking with a few of them in the company of Mary and Will – who, Mary was often heard to claim, ‘looks a lot like an alpaca’ – near Wells-next-the-Sea on the Norfolk coast. Alpacas originally hail from South America, and are part of the same camelid family that includes camels, llamas – the creature which, with the possible exception of Will, they most resemble – and guanacos. They differ from llamas in being smaller and more sheeplike, and in being bred primarily for their wool.

  They’re quite common in Britain now, yet a surprising number of people are still unfamiliar with them. ‘What’s an alpaca?’ asked a couple of friends, to whom I patiently explained that it was a character from the children’s TV show In the Night Garden which had escaped and now lived wild, surviving on its wits. My mum was surprised when I explained to her that ‘alpaca trekking’ meant ‘alpaca walking’ and not ‘alpaca riding’, but even a seven-year-old child passenger would probably have proved too weighty for the six alpacas I met. Macchu, Picchu, Pedro, Costello, Padro and Pepe were all much daintier once you got close to them and realised just how much of their bulk was made up of fur.

  I’d fancied alpaca or llama trekking for a few years, and not just because I felt it was the closest I might ever get to recreating the early scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. After an unsuccessful call to a local llama sanctuary, whose denizens were suffering from the viral ruminant disease blue tongue – an affliction I’d made the mistake of referring to in the recent past as both ‘blue tooth’ and ‘camel toe’ – my search had led me to Ian, a sleepily cheerful man in late middle age with a sun-blasted face that spoke of the happiest kind of north Norfolk life. Ian booked me, Will and Mary in for a two-hour trek with his fleet of charismatic alpacas. It turned into something very close to what Will repeatedly described as ‘The best day ever!’ but then if I was being honest I’d suspected it wouldn’t be anything less, right from the moment Ian had answered my opening question, ‘Is now a good time to talk?’ with the statement ‘Well, I have hold of six alpacas and a cheese sandwich, but, yes, it’s fine.’

  ‘These are runt alpacas,’ explained Ian when we arrived. ‘They’re the ones none of the breeders want.’ Because of this, each of his Peruvian and Chilean alpacas had cost him only a few hundred pounds and were, he said, ‘very cheap to run’, surviving mainly on grass and chopped apples. One thing alpacas don’t like – as Ian informed us, just after I’d looked directly into Macchu’s eyes – was being looked directly in the eyes. I noted this down, thinking of the irreconcilable problems it might cause for The Bear.

  The other thing about alpacas is that they fart. A lot. Fart, in fact, in the manner of animals who have found out that farting is to be outlawed in only a few sweet hours. In this sense, I’d drawn the long straw by being at the head of the party with Macchu, leaving it to Mary, directly behind me with Picchu, to bear the brunt of his refried grass smells. Macchu was, Ian told me, quite the drama queen, known to get in a bit of a flap around dogs and swift-limbed humans, and – atypically for an animal whose DNA had been shaped by mountainous terrain – a bit unsure of himself on slopes. ‘He once fell down a steep grassy bank,’ said Ian. ‘And early on when I started walking him, he’d often sit down in a middle of a trek and refuse to move.’ That Macchu was the organically elected leader of the group was a measure of the intriguingly inverted manner in which alpacas sort out their power struggles. Here, weak and nervy men were to be looked up to and admired. It was an intriguing state of affairs, and you couldn’t help but dwell for a moment on what might happen if the alpaca hierarchical system was transposed to the human universe: Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army being sent up in a fighter plane above enemy skies, say, or Woody Allen finding himself selected for a dangerous polar mission.

  As a treat, towards the end of the trek the alpacas were led towards a sandy stretch of bridleway near the coast road, where they could enjoy a dust bath before chowing down on the chopped apples that Will, Mary and I had been instructed to bring for them. I could tell that Macchu was looking forward to at least one of these events because from about the three-quarter mark of the trek he’d been making an odd quivering sound in the back of his throat, not unlike The Bear’s chirrup-purr. As someone whose favourite member of the Muppets is Beaker, I didn’t mind being with a creature of such comically jumpy disposition, but I did look across enviously from time to time at Will and Mary’s more mellow alpacas – particularly Will’s charge, Pedro, whose impressive fringe I would later find myself trying to mimic in the rear-view mirror of the car while stopped at some traffic lights just outside Fakenham.

  Perhaps in retaliation for me staring him out earlier, Macchu, having wolfed down the apples, chose to shower some of them right back in my face. I was told by Ian that, in alpaca world, such an enthusiastic flob is seen as ‘a gesture of affection’. Nor was it entirely unpleasant. Alhough, slightly less pleasantly, I was still finding bits of congealed Granny Smith-flavoured saliva in my beard and hair an hour later.

  While my adventures in the Norfolk countryside tempted me to expand and diversify my crew of animal lodgers, they also showed me the commitment I would need to do so responsibly. Never was this more apparent than when I visited Karen, a friend who, with her husband Jeff, maintained her own smallholding and free-range food company a couple of miles up the road. ‘Here are my jobs, and that’s just for this morning,’ Karen said, holding up a sheet of A4 entirely covered in text on both sides, as we sat in her kitchen. I’d been very busy the previous day, but her list made my own, written on my kitchen blackboard – now half crossed out and shot through with a derisory dribble of Andrew’s urine – look rather shameful.

  Below us on the floor, one of her Siamese cats, Vinnie, dragged an old, saliva-sodden toy rabbit, which was missing one of its legs, over to his food bowl and began to eat. ‘He always does that,’ said Karen. ‘He doesn’t seem to enjoy his food as much unless it’s by his side. It was an old toy cat before that – a pathetic thing that looked as if it was crippled – but that’s now interred in the new kitchen wall we built. If he can’t find the rabbit, he’ll usually substitute it with a slipper.’ In addition to their cats, Jeff and Karen lived with sheep, dogs, a rather magnificently attired fop scarecrow, and several varieties of pigs and chickens; the latter included a frizzled Poland called Colonel Fitzwilliam, who Karen described as ‘a right bugger’ and who bobbed about feistily behind the wire mesh of his run as I greeted him, not unlike a striker in a football match jostling for position amongst an imaginary opposing team’s defence in anticipation of a corner.

  Fitzwilliam was, however, less formidable than The General, the cockerel Jeff and Karen had owned back when they founded their Samphire food company. The General had a dislike of the colour red that could be considered extreme ev
en in the notoriously red-hating cockerel universe, and had once viciously cornered a man who had come to clean their kitchen Aga. Apparently The General ‘didn’t take kindly to the big red face on his Henry vacuum cleaner’.

  Karen had been particularly keen to show me a couple of her new lambs, Grayling, who she described as ‘the boldest lamb I have ever met’, and his much smaller brother Thomas, who was hypothermic when he was born and had to live in Karen’s living room for a while. Karen is a person who will make the statement ‘There’s a lamb in my living room’ in much the same way other people say ‘There are some apples in my kitchen’.

  When Karen wants her sheep to come to her, she shouts ‘Sheep!’ at them. I watched her do this and the bounding, woolly results were joyful to witness, inspiring in me hope for the obedience of all sorts of undomesticated animals: the belief that, to finally achieve their often overlooked cuddly potential, ultimately all a Mediterranean seaside cave full of lizards might need was a little love and a kind, outdoorsy woman to shout ‘Lizards!’ at them every day. I’d recently made the tentative decision to go vegetarian, and I’d felt bashful about visiting Karen and Jeff: not only did I know I’d have to admit to them that I could no longer eat their delicious pork pies, but I would have to get my head out of the sand and stare what I’d been eating in its adorable, fluffy face – even, as it turned out in Grayling’s case, to massage that same fluffy face and let it nibble a considerable portion of my trousers.

  I felt more philosophical than I’d imagined, meeting Grayling and his friends. The Samphire animals were hugely loved, and the ethical difference between eating them and being a veggie seemed far less vast than, say, that between eating them and eating the hens that I saw cramped into the disgusting-smelling lorries that regularly barrelled past my house on the way to the local chicken factory. All the same, I doubted my ability to take on even a minor version of Karen and Jeff’s workload. ‘There’s never really a time when I’m off duty,’ said Karen. ‘When you take this lifestyle on, you accept that you don’t go on holiday.’

  My reservations about making such a commitment were reinforced when, on a walk near the village of Garboldisham, I was enlisted to rescue an escaped turkey by another smallholding owner, Georgie, who was just returning to her land. I’d been doing some research on ancient burial mounds for something I was writing that week, and my intention at the beginning of the afternoon had been to find the barrow allegedly containing the two-thousand-year-old remains of the rebel Iceni Queen Boudicca. Instead I ended up spending a couple of serendipitous hours meeting the livestock owned by Georgie and her husband Richard, and riding on the back of Richard’s tractor to go onion picking. The escaped turkey turned out to be fine and when Georgie let me hold it, I amazed myself by doing so without shouting ‘Bollocks! It’s a massive live turkey! In my actual arms!’ But as it struggled and clucked in my grasp, I noticed another turkey in the field behind us, limping along in an extremely sorry fashion.

  ‘Is that one OK?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘One of the others probably jumped on its back, and we might have to put it out of its misery.’

  When you keep animals – big, proper, messy outdoor animals that you can potentially get very attached to – this is everyday life. I’m sure you become slightly numbed by it after a while. But what if you don’t want to become numbed by it?

  It all brought me back, once again, to cats. I’d done pretty well with my three. Each of them clearly thought I was OK, despite the fact that I was from a vastly inferior species to them; none of them required me to muck them out, or regularly call a vet to my property to see to their various ailments. For a terminally soppy person like me, who enjoyed country life but still wanted to have a life outside it, they were the perfect pets. I refused to put them in a cattery, on the basis that they had no way of knowing I was ever coming back for them, and I rarely left them alone for long, but at least I still let myself have some kind of existence beyond them. Were I to have a couple of goats or pigs, that would be The End. I would be tied to their every need, and would never stay a night away from home again. I would end up being defined as a Goat Person or a Pig Person far more than I had ever allowed myself to be defined as a Cat Person.

  I’d travelled very little in the last few years. Partly I’d been unable to afford holidays, and partly I’d had a wussy reluctance to leave my cats. But this summer I had at least managed to make a few brief trips to the other side of the country. Sticking to my usual habit of doing things in the most difficult way possible, I had decided that 2011 would be the year when I fell in love with someone who lived 367 miles away. I was introduced to Gemma by a friend of a friend, and it had taken us a whole half-hour of our first face-to-face meeting to decide that we wanted to be together, despite the fact that she resided in deepest, darkest Devon and I lived in lightest Norfolk.

  It could not have become much clearer during our early conversations that she was a fellow animal nut. It came as no surprise to me when she confessed she was marginally more of a Dog Person than a Cat Person, but she loved cats too. In fact she had, until very recently, been living with one – an animal who, judging from her exclamations of pain during our early phone conversations, spent a large portion of its time using her as a climbing frame. When she was younger, she’d had the pleasure of cuddling a lion cub, and on one of our first country walks together, she’d also informed me that she’d ‘milked loads of stuff’ – a statement whose initially cloudy nature was clarified when she added that her primary school had been located on a farm. She was also the first person I’d ever dated who had picked up a real live Emperor penguin in her arms and cuddled it. ‘They’re not as rubbery as you think,’ she explained.

  Gemma was briefly back living with her parents and, before we visited their house, she warned me that their rescue dog, a Jack Russell/terrier cross called Scrumpy, had an aversion to men with beards. ‘We think he was used for fighting before we got him from the rescue centre,’ she explained. ‘Our theory is that one of the men who made him do it had a lot of facial hair, and he wants revenge,’ she continued, as I involuntarily put a protective hand up to the thick fuzz on my cheeks and chin. Our initial encounter reminded me of the time in 1997 that I’d emerged out of Glasgow Central station and immediately been asked for a fight by a small, wiry Scotsman wielding a can of Kestrel super-strength lager. I sensed it was less that Scrumpy didn’t approve of my beard; more that he would like to eat it, preferably accompanied by a side order of face. In time, though, I won him over, even being permitted to tickle his stomach on my third visit. ‘He can never meet your cats, though,’ said Gemma. ‘He hates cats.’

  Before her first visit to my house, I briefed Gemma thoroughly about The Bear. I knew his intensity could come as a shock to the uninitiated. When she arrived, the cats filed out to meet her in the order I’d anticipated: Shipley arriving first, to show her around the place and explain the various improvements he’d made to it recently, followed by Ralph, a little nervously at first, but soon permitting her to revel in his magnificent sideburns.

  ‘Why does he keep doing that squinting face?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Have you washed your hands recently?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I did it as soon as we got in.’

  ‘That’ll be it, then. He can’t stand that. He’ll be better in half an hour or so, when the skin’s natural oils start to return.’

  ‘Raaaaaaalph!’ said Ralph.

  Twenty minutes later, The Bear arrived. I say ‘arrived’; it was actually more like he materialised. It had been raining, and, without warning, there he was not three feet away from where we sat, drenched, wide-eyed and glistening, in a ray of fresh sunlight that seemed to be shining just for him – seemed, even, to be what had transported him here – peering at us as if looking simultaneously into Gemma’s past and our future. In so many situations, The Bear eschewed the vulgarities of everyday feline behaviour, but he had the same reaction to rain a
s my other cats: it seemed to imbue him with extra confidence. Mostly the confidence to find a human and wipe the rain on them as quickly as possible. As he went about his work of using various parts of me as a towel, his eyes burned into Gemma.

  ‘I feel like he knows all my secrets,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he does by now,’ I said. ‘He’s obviously not too upset by them. Otherwise he’d have been out of here by now.’

  ‘I can’t believe he’s a cat. It’s like there’s a little person in there, behind his eyes.’

  She reached beneath The Bear’s chin to give him a scrumble, and he accepted it. He then made one of his rare forays onto my lap, and began his gradual, meticulous routine of getting settled.

  ‘Why does he keep going round and round like that?’ asked Gemma.

  ‘That’s just his ritual. This is nothing. Sometimes he’ll do it sixteen or seventeen times before he finally plonks himself down. His all-time record is thirty-six.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘It’s good that you seem to get on, because when we split up, he’ll be yours.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘That’s just the way it works.’

  In the evening, the final furry member of the household arrived, his stealth in creeping through the cat door too quiet for his entrance to be audible, although his heft on the conservatory roof had given him away a couple of minutes before that. ‘Be very quiet,’ I told Gemma, as we crept up the stairs and poked our heads around the corner to see Andrew munching from the biscuit dispenser.

  ‘Oh, he’s beautiful,’ whispered Gemma. ‘He definitely doesn’t look like an Andrew to me, though. Much more like a Sven, I reckon.’