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

by Cox, Tom

  Prowling streetcat (Ixworth, Suffolk, May 2011)

  Probable name: Derek Blackshaw

  Notes: Subject seems very comfortable in his habitat, though perhaps yearns to ‘off road’ in far flung places, such as copse about five hundred yards away. Some complacency shown by culprit about living in cul-de-sac, perhaps contributing to subject’s view of itself as ‘well-to-do’ and having ‘made it in life’. However, subject seems confident yet not cocky. Had to try very hard not to take subject home, or at least not to take subject on walk to nearby village of Fornham St Martin.

  Holiday cottage cat (Dartmoor, January 2012)

  Probable name: Beryl

  Notes: Subject immediately very friendly, willingly receiving chin scritches and bedding down on stomach. Subject has love of warmth, is enamoured – in a slightly weird druggy way – with log smells and is very sociable, no doubt aided by coexisting every day with other cats and ducks, the latter of which subject seems to view in an impressively ‘live and let live’ fashion. Subject seemed genuinely friendly with both therapist and therapist’s girlfriend, suggesting lasting psychological connection had occurred. However, look through guest book at comments such as ‘I have never known a cat to be so friendly – it almost came home with us’ and ‘The in-house feline rocks!’ suggests subject could suffer from debilitating commitment issues.

  Weird car-watching cow cat (Golden Triangle area, Norwich, July 2012)

  Probable name: John the Weird Car-Watching Cow Cat

  Notes: Subject found on road, not far from house of Jay and Elizabeth, for whose party therapist was already late. Subject spent entire six minutes of session obsessively watching vehicles and refusing to answer therapist’s queries. Subject exhibits signs of ‘fake traffic warden syndrome’, displacement issues and general truculence. Left subject to get on with own business with parting shot of ‘OK: be like that, then’.

  Magical wall cat (Covehithe, Suffolk, July 2012)

  Probable name: Gwen

  Notes: Subject seems very calm, despite threat to its home from extreme coastal erosion. Subject appeared to prefer therapist’s girlfriend, though exuded an amazing aura of peace that had profound effect on therapist too, and made therapist and girlfriend agree ‘we want a cat just like this’. Upon leaving, therapist ended up waving to subject from car window, in very unprofessional and somewhat asinine manner.

  Charity Begins at Home

  Most adults will be familiar with the concept of Baby Fever: a concentrated, almost delirious period when, amongst your friends, breeding stops being merely coincidental and becomes downright infectious. The concept of Kitten Fever is less widely documented, but equally common and possibly no less hysterical. I’ve known three or four notable periods of Kitten Fever in my life – even been swept up in one myself, around about 2001, leading to the adoption of Shipley, Ralph and Brewer – but probably none quite like the closing weeks of 2011. Between November and January, it seemed that everyone I knew was adopting a new ball of fur, and that their ball of fur was the most adorable, the most quirky, the most magical.

  People who know I write about cats often make the mistake of assuming that my friends are a vast network of cat-mad people, that we all get one another’s cats together each weekend for play dates involving balls of wool and screenings of Bagpuss. For a prolonged period in early 2009, a complete stranger – someone who’d read about my books, but not read them – sent me regular emails, asking me to set her up on a date with ‘one of my cat man mates’, even though I’d replied to her initial missive to say I only had three male friends at the time who were huge cat lovers, and all of them were married.* In truth, around half of my friends merely think cats are ‘sort of OK’. But in late 2001, even the cat-indifferent amongst my acquaintances seemed to have come around to the feline way of thinking. ‘Do yours ever do that thing where they run up the curtains?’ said Ben, who just six months ago had claimed to me in the pub that cats were ‘sort of selfish’ and he didn’t get on with them, but now was enraptured with his new tortoiseshell kitten. ‘Bonzo does it, and it’s amazing!’

  ‘We seem to have a new cat,’ Deborah announced. ‘We think he’s feral, and he’s not always around, but he seems to have taken a shine us. Have you seen him at all?’

  ‘What colour is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Ginger.’

  ‘Oh. You mean Andrew!’

  ‘No, this is definitely not Andrew. I’ve met Andrew and never been able to get close to him. This one’s very friendly.’

  A little before Christmas Gemma and I drove to the Midlands, where we visited my dad and mum, whose relationship with Casper the friendly ghost cat – now a fully grown, proud specimen of cathood, and even more reminiscent of Monty – had reached an intimacy that had started to include grooming. (I hasten to add that the grooming was entirely carried out by my mum; Casper, being of noble stock, would never stoop to a job in the beauty industry.) ‘YOUR MUM LOVES THAT CAT MORE THAN ME,’ said my dad, emerging to greet us in the drive, having dragged himself away from the compost heap where he’d been having an afternoon nap.

  On the way we visited my old friend Lucy, whose new cat Baldrick, a Ralphesque tabby with a giant tail that seemed to be held permanently perpendicular to the rest of his body, was proving to be a handful. ‘He eats everything,’ explained Lucy, stroking the huge Baldrick, who was the nearest I’d ever seen to a genetic experiment in which a cat has been crossed with one of the bendy buses introduced to the London transport network a few years ago. Yesterday, he had even eaten some of her decorative tinsel. ‘I woke up this morning to a Christmas miracle in the litter tray: the year’s first golden festive poo.’ Baldrick did have his uses, though. Lucy had long complained that her housemate, Gary, had a disagreeable habit of walking around the place in ill-fitting trousers that displayed a considerable portion of his bottom. Last week, sitting on a backless chair, Gary had received something of a shock when Baldrick walked past beneath him, tail typically erect. ‘It went, you know, right into the crevice,’ said Lucy. ‘He screamed quite loud. He’s been a lot better at covering up ever since.’

  Something about Baldrick’s rather fetid youthful exuberance took me back wistfully to the younger days of Janet and Ralph. Not that I had any real need for another, younger vulgar cat. Ralph’s gestures of vulgarity retained their erstwhile exuberance. Notable recent transgressions included cleaning his bottom at such a volume that I had to ask the man from the Financial Times I was speaking to on the telephone to repeat his email address three times, coming in through the cat door with algae stuck to his back legs, and coughing up a hairball of such formidable size, I felt I was being a little rude by not offering it a spare futon for the night. That said, Kitten Fever was having an undeniable effect on Gemma and me. We’d been together for a few months now, and knew that we could not carry on living on opposite sides of the country indefinitely. Speculation about a new cat of our own was inevitable.

  ‘I had another dream about Chip last night,’ Gemma told me. ‘He was being a bit of an idiot, pushing his weight around. He brought in a frog.’

  ‘Again?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep. Third time this week.’

  By this point, I was very aware of Chip’s habits and foibles: the obsession with amphibians and heights, his excessive moulting and frequent fights with other neighbourhood cats. This was fairly remarkable, considering there was a strong possibility that he was yet even to be born. It was the first time I’d ever had a girlfriend who’d mapped out a cat’s personality before we’d met him, but I found myself getting swept away by the Chip legend, caught up in his mischievous yet intoxicating persona. The one problem I had with him was the moniker. To me Chip sounded like the name of a spoilt teenager from a 1980s American high school: the kind of kid who lorded it around the school, but was ultimately destined for a future of bar jobs and petty crime. I’d also kind of had my heart set on calling my next cat either F Cat Fitzgerald or Ethelbert – my favourite name for an
Anglo-Saxon king, since it’s the only one that contains an entire middle-aged couple from early 1960s Britain.

  ‘No, no,’ said Gemma. ‘I mean Chip as in “potato”. I hadn’t thought about the American name. Are Americans really named that?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s what kids named Charles get called when they grow bigger and develop an irksome personality.’

  ‘Oh, OK. That’s not how I think of Chip at all.’

  ‘What colour is he?’

  ‘I told you: he’s ginger, all over.’

  This had become potentially overwhelming. If what Deborah said was to be believed, we already had two ginger cats in very close proximity to us. Bringing another into the mix – particularly one with a reputation for high jinks – could well turn out to be a mistake. Not that I had anything against gingers. Most of those I’d met had been sunny, upbeat sorts. Jackie, my ginger cat expert friend from Wales, once described them to me as ‘Buddhists, living in the now’ – a statement that made perfect sense when I first heard it, although later, when I thought more about it, I wondered what it said about Jackie’s findings with regard to other cats. Had she discovered black moggies, for example, to be perennially stuck in the past, chewing over lost career opportunities, and tabbies to be forever getting ahead of themselves with their crippling excess of ambition?

  Samson, the heavyweight marmalade cat who used to live across the road, had a bit of a Buddhist quality about him. Actually, the term that sprang to mind was more ‘massive stoner’ than ‘Buddhist’, but I had easily been able to imagine him at the meditation course I’d attended a couple of years ago, mindfully spreading loving kindness to his extended social circle or picturing his nostrils as caves and his breath as the wind blowing into them. I could not quite imagine Andrew – or Sven, as he was now called, two out of every five times Gemma and I referred to him – in the same scenario, but who knew what might happen, with a little persuasion and a calmer lifestyle?

  I was convinced, by the noise that he made outside almost every night, that he wanted me to catch him and was just having trouble admitting it to himself. It was a throaty, rather feeble meow: one that seemed to snake and whisper through the gaps in my house’s structure. To many people it might have been a meow that said ‘I am a ghost cat, and I want to haunt you, but I am finding it a challenge, due to the fundamental problem that I am scared of my own tail.’ To me it was a meow that said ‘Please love me, feed me cooked meats, and make a warm, comfortable place next to your laptop for me to rest my head.’ The moments when I caught him eating from the biscuit dispenser and he paused and stared at me became more prolonged and aching, allowing me to fall more in love with his defiant, yet somewhat vacant, moon face.

  My other cats were often around at the time, and continued to mind their own business; only Shipley showed a degree of petulance about the situation. I was used to walking into various rooms of my house to be greeted by a group of cats giving me ‘What do you want?’ looks. But when one of them wasn’t even mine, it became a bit galling. It was high time I rectified the situation, before Gemma and I properly considered the prospect of finding a home for another cat we’d never met – one who wasn’t, to our knowledge, so desperate for food.

  Gemma was now living with me in Norfolk around seventy per cent of the time, and living and working in Devon for the other thirty per cent. Andrew’s timing was no coincidence. Surely he wanted to be the first cat we had co-owned, and he just needed that little bit of encouragement? Our plan was simple: the next time Gemma was here and we heard Andrew upstairs, we would creep up there. Gemma would bar the cat door, and I would leap on him.

  There were, however, two large flaws in our thinking. First, there was Andrew’s ability, while fairly loud in exiting the house, to enter it with enormous stealth. Due to these entrances I imagined him with tiny jewel thief’s gloves on his paws, easing the catflap gently shut behind him with a grimace of pained concentration on his face. Only if the house was utterly silent and our antennae were on full alert would we hear him arrive. This was a big ask in what was a loud and rather grouchy building. The mere clink into gear of my central heating often sounded like a goblin had done something unmentionable to a robot in the spare room and the robot had found the experience surprisingly enjoyable. How were you expected to listen out for an experienced cat burglar in that kind of environment? We were asking for almost impossibly tranquil circumstances: no Ralph meowing his own name, no Ralph snoring, no Shipley – now back to full fitness, with a personal volume control that once again went all the way up to eleven – telling people to piss off, no watching TV, no ducks outside having heated discussions about duck things.

  Second, we lived in a house with two catflaps, the second having been installed on the top floor a few years earlier to give Ralph and Pablo more chance of entering and exiting the house without crossing claws. If Gemma and I blocked the top entrance, Andrew was swiftly down to the other one, and its ‘in only’ lock function was no match for a cat who had been surviving on his wits for more than year. Many, many co-ordinates had to be in place, and we weathered six weeks of near misses before, finally, the three of us found each other frozen in a stand-off in the kitchen, like hoodlums with raised guns in the closing scene of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I moved slowly towards Andrew and, as if in defeat, he accepted a gentle rub on the head. His fur had a rough quality to it, similar to Pablo’s in the early days of his retirement from feral life. His ears were spotted with even more scabs and cuts than I’d expected, and he gave off a rather pungent odour. Upon inspection, his standard man parts were, as we suspected, very much intact. He didn’t purr, but seemed to enjoy the contact, and made no attempt to run.

  ‘Definitely a Sven,’ said Gemma, joining in with the head rub.

  We left Andrew-Sven in the small glassed-in room on the top floor of the house. The thinking behind this was that lots of windows would make him feel less like he was being incarcerated. The next morning, I was touched to find that he had moved from the chair where I’d left him into the wicker cat igloo so disdained by the other cats. This, I told myself, is what you get from a cat who’s known hardship: a proper, non-complacent appreciation for items of furniture that have been built and purchased specifically with his or her comfort in mind. ‘Andrew!’ I called, and he woke up rather slowly, as if from a long deep sleep for which his body had been yearning for years.

  Later that morning, in the vet’s waiting room, Gemma and I continued to try out names.

  ‘Gordon!’ I called to Andrew.

  ‘No way,’ said Gemma. ‘Not trustworthy enough. Bob!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I see Bob as more of a tabby name.’

  ‘Colin! Rameses! Ethelbert! David! Wulfric! Don! Ken! Benjamin Netanyahu!’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous now. Actually, Ken’s not bad.’

  As Andrew-Sven-Ken sat on the vet’s examining table, we continued.

  ‘Roy! Pierce Brosnan!’ cried Gemma.

  ‘Grant! George!’ I called.

  ‘Yes!’ replied George, the Californian vet, looking a little startled.

  ‘Sorry! We were just trying out names for the cat.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ George said, clearly relieved that I didn’t want him to sit on my knee while I kneaded the skin at the back of his neck.

  George broke the news that Andrew had severe ear mites, for which he would need a regular dose of treatment, as well as flea treatment and worming tablets, and a test for feline AIDS. Add this to the price of his neutering, and I was paying close on two hundred pounds that I didn’t possess for the welfare of a strange cat whose future with me was by no means guaranteed.

  Herein lies one of the reasons a vast number of cats are given away, particularly in the current economic climate. It’s easy to picture cat ownership, unthinkingly, as a loose, inexpensive contract between you and a freelance employee: sure, you need to buy food, but everything else kind of takes care of itself, doesn’t it? It’s possible to be blinded by t
he seeming invincibility of kittens and forget that a cat’s health is your responsibility too, and it requires its own monthly stipend, whether in the form of pet insurance or a fee allocated for future health mishaps. As a cat owner who is not made of money, at some point in the future it is likely that you will stand in a vet’s surgery and ask yourself the question, ‘Can I afford to pay for this?’ Then, if you’re a decent person, you will ask yourself the natural follow-on question, ‘Can I afford not to pay for this?’ I knew what I was getting myself into with Andrew when we captured him and took him to the vet’s: that there was every possibility that, after he’d been through his cat MOT, he might escape or be bundled off to live with my mum and dad, or with someone else entirely. So – just as I had done a few months previously, when Shipley had been so ill – I told George to give him the works.

  ‘Have you thought that maybe Andrew is Chip?’ I asked Gemma, on the way home.

  ‘You mean Sven? Noooo. Chip is very different. He’s much lankier, more spoilt. I’m beginning to think he’s a bit of a prat actually. Maybe we shouldn’t adopt him after all. He’ll be OK. Everyone warms to Chip at first, until they get to know him. He always lands on his feet.’

  That evening, having brought him home again in his new testicle-free state, we finally agreed on a name for Andrew that we both liked: Graham. It was a moniker that had all the trustworthiness of Ken but also brought to mind the wearing of a quality wool cardigan. A Ken, I felt, might have an intrepid side, a list of outdoorsy life goals he’d want to tick off on his bucket list, but a Graham would ultimately be happiest at home in front of a fire. I didn’t actually have a fire any more, as I’d paid an angry builder a few years ago to knock down the wall that my house’s chimney was attached to, but we could cross that bridge when we came to it. The first thing was to see if Graham liked living here.