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

by Cox, Tom

  I have to give them credit: they’d done their research. The she-devil kitten they replaced Roscoe with was an almost perfect match. Same white socks, tuxedo, Batman-mask face and button eyes. Same white-tipped candle tail. This tiny, furious monster slept peacefully as we progressed through Essex and Suffolk, but once at its new home, it began a campaign of terrible destruction, slinking out of its basket to hiss and growl at everything in its wake.

  Admittedly, we did some pretty thoughtless stuff to Roscoe – or her doppelgänger, if that’s what this kitten really was – in those first seventy-two hours with her. There was the moment when I stood on the opposite side of the kitchen to her and sliced a bagel in half directly in her eyeline, or when Gemma loudly sneezed a mere seven feet from her face, or – perhaps most unforgivably of all – the time on the second afternoon when I said, in a soft, encouraging voice, ‘Would you like some of these overpriced turkey chunks, perhaps – maybe they would calm you down?’ Looking back, I am thankful that we had the kindness not to do anything really hurtful, such as vacuum, or play the album by 1970s progressive rock band Spooky Tooth that I’d recently purchased, as I fear we might not be here to tell the tale.

  The noises emerging from Roscoe’s mouth were something I’d never expected to hear from any less than a medium-sized animal. Actually, that’s untrue. Some of them might not have been all that surprising if, say, they’d emerged from an iguana that had received some particularly bad news about its family, or maybe a raven that was having a lot of trouble shaking off a chest infection. From a kitten, however, they were unexpected. They only grew worse when we attempted to make a gesture to get her more comfortable with her environment, such as showing her the stairs (‘KAKkkkkkkcchssssssss!’) or introducing her to a catnip mouse (Awaaaaggheeeh!’).

  ‘How is everything?’ texted Jazzmine, not long after we woke up on Roscoe’s second morning in the house. ‘Is she settling in OK?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘Not sure if you spotted this yourself, but as it turns out, she is actually the miniature progeny of the monster who destroyed New York in the film Cloverfield. We’ve all tried to make it work as best we could, but after a long discussion, most of which involved her sitting behind a spider plant and going “Keeecheaggggggggh” at us, we’ve opted for an amicable separation. I’ve pointed her back in your direction. I’m hoping National Express is OK with you? Her coach gets into Victoria Station at fourteen minutes past ten. She’ll be the one sitting on her own, the one who all the other passengers are cowering from in abject terror.’ I didn’t really write any of that, but it would have been a more frank assessment of the situation than my actual reply: ‘Not bad. She’s a little subdued, but I’m sure she’ll be OK.’

  That afternoon, I decided to be a bit more honest with Jazzmine. ‘Has Roscoe always been OK with other cats?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, very much so,’ replied Jazzmine. ‘She was born in a house full of cats, so she’s always been ever so sociable. I hoped your cats would accept her, as I know she’ll like them. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, nothing too much to worry about,’ I replied. ‘I’m just slightly concerned that she would like to slowly torture them then eat all of their kidneys. I’m sure they’ll all start getting on soon.’

  In truth, it seemed that Roscoe’s rage was too absurdly tiny and ineffectual to bother my cats. As she hissed and practised her bonsai growl at Ralph and Shipley, they appraised her in the manner a busy office worker might appraise a small, ugly insect he’d spotted moving around on top of a pile of loose papers he’d left next to his desk for a secretary to shred. The Bear came over and had a couple of analytical sniffs, which received a feisty rebuke, but didn’t have a lot to say on the matter, save for aiming a look in my direction that eloquently conveyed his despair at my continued habit of needlessly complicating my own life.

  Gemma took a photo of me holding Roscoe at around this point, and we both went on to think of it as the one that encapsulated her first few days with us. Roscoe’s tiny mouth, wide open, articulates her fury at all the recent woes that have befallen her. I look a bit baggy-eyed, but I’m grinning, in the manner of a man who has just found out that dragons, while no less angry than the tales written about them suggest, have lovely soft fur and are actually only one-thousandth of their reported size. Beneath that grin, however, is a well-hidden layer of worry. ‘What if I’ve just been lucky?’ I’m asking myself. ‘What if I’ve just had a series of unusually lovely cats, and I’m about to be plunged into the harsh, bilious, affectionless reality of cat adoption that most people go through with man’s best frienemies?’

  Every so often during those first three days, Gemma and I gently encouraged Roscoe to sleep on one of the many soft surfaces we’d provided for her, but she preferred to sit sourly on floors and sideboards, as if in stubborn protest at this austere and forsaken eastern land that she’d been dragged to from the cosmopolitan comfort of west London. We gently encouraged her to use her litter tray, but it remained, to all appearances, untouched. A cuddle, meanwhile, was entirely out of the question.

  I began to look upon Ralph, Shipley and The Bear with fresh eyes. Could I really say these cats had ever caused me any trouble? None of them had ever seriously injured me or one of my house guests, or given me cause for concern with his debauched, irresponsible lifestyle. For many years, each of them had kept their faeces and what they did with it mercifully far away from me, in the open air. They even each said a happy good morning to Gemma and me every day: Ralph with a chirrup, The Bear with one of his happier meeeoops, and Shipley with a noise that, while it translated to something like ‘How are you doing, douchebag?’ always seemed to have a fundamentally affectionate undertone to it. And now what had I done? I’d gone out, and, in my thoughtless greed, got a younger model. I may as well have written them a note explaining that their love was no longer enough for me. If Roscoe truly was a monster, I deserved every bit of hardship she was going to put me through.

  By her fourth night with us, I – who’d spent, if you overlooked a short period in my early twenties, getting on for four decades living with cats – was losing hope, and Gemma – she from the hardcore dog-loving family, whose conversion to cat servitude had only taken place during the last few years – was playing the role of optimist. ‘Maybe we should have taken her brother or her sister as well?’ I said, as Roscoe scowled out at the two of us from behind a piece of 1960s West German pottery, as if making a cutting comment with her eyes about not just my presence, but my taste too.

  ‘I think she just needs time,’ said Gemma.

  I was baffled: I’d heard about problem kittens who’d had rough starts in life, but in Roscoe’s short past there was obviously nothing but kindness. Jazzmine had made it clear to us that if everything didn’t work out with Roscoe, she still had a very loving home back in London, but I’d had the heartbreaking experience of ‘returning a cat’ once before – a black almost-panther called Raffles who in 2005 had made it his mission to drive Ralph, Shipley, Janet and The Bear out of the house, preferably to a different continent – and I’d sworn to myself that I would never do it again. I knew Roscoe could not keep up this level of icy resentment for ever – it would be too exhausting for her – but I saw a difficult decision on the horizon, even if it thawed into a mere cool disdain and fury. Perhaps I could cope: one sociopath cat out of four wasn’t a bad ratio, was it?

  I was trying to be realistic, but in doing so, I was projecting myself too far into the future, taking my eye off the present, and, while I did so, the present nipped in and surprised me. That night, in the early hours, as Gemma and I slept, the catnappers who’d snatched the original Roscoe at the service station a few days earlier broke quietly into the house and switched the two cats back. I’ll never know what made them do it, but it was a reassuring demonstration that even bad people can sometimes have a conscience. I’m not sure where they’d been keeping the original Roscoe for the previous three days, but I assume it wasn
’t anywhere too traumatic, as she seemed pretty carefree when she greeted me the next morning, arriving in the kitchen with her paws in the air. I reached out for one and touched it, and she let out a small, friendly quasi-meow.

  It was a flabbergasting, beautiful high five to go alongside the eclectic morning hellos of Ralph, Shipley and The Bear. When I picked her up, I wouldn’t say she was exactly ecstatic, but there was none of the rigid anger I’d felt before. I took her into the bedroom, placed her on the bed beside Gemma, who’d just emerged from the shower, and the two of us watched, stunned, as the perfect kitten – the same perfect kitten we’d met at Jazzmine’s house – executed a series of small somersaults, around and over our bodies.

  It was not until we returned upstairs that we found the true explanation for Roscoe’s transformation. Over the last few days, the litter we had put out for her had remained virtually unchanged in shape and texture, save for a couple of small wet patches. I’d heard a loud scraping sound the previous afternoon and had rushed upstairs, hoping for the best, but found The Bear in the litter: not, from what I could gather, putting it to its intended use, but happily splashing about in it like a granddad who’d reached some kind of cathartic end point in a stressful period in his life and decided to relive his childhood in a neighbour’s paddling pool.

  There was always the possibility that something of Roscoe’s lay under there, or – though I didn’t want to face up to the possibility – had been deposited in one of the nooks in the house where she’d been hiding out. But we hadn’t seen her in the litter tray, and we worried how almost four days without a bowel movement might have been affecting her. Clearly, it had been affecting her more than we could have imagined, as in the tray now was the single biggest kitten turd either of us had ever clapped eyes on. A turd so huge, it could probably have beaten one of Ralph’s most formidable hairballs in a fight. A turd that contained within its dark textures all the fury of the last few days.

  ‘I think it could be alive,’ said Gemma.

  ‘It’s bigger than her head,’ I said. ‘Actually, no. It’s bigger than two of her heads.’

  ‘OK,’ said Gemma. ‘Here’s how we work this. You deal with that. I’ll make a cup of tea.’

  Lots of people experience irregular bowel movements in a new place. I used to have a friend – who for purposes of tact, I’m going to call Benedict, since I’ve never had any friends called Benedict, and am fairly unlikely to do so – who once admitted to me that he found it impossible to move his bowels for the first three or four days of any period he spent away from home. Benedict had tried everything from a fibre-heavy diet to meditation, to no avail. He just had to wait the constipation out, until his body adjusted to its new surroundings, and he knew after that it would be OK. Maybe that was what had happened to Roscoe too? She’d frozen up at first, but finally something inside her had decided it was OK – that there was nothing to fear in this place after all – and now the holiday could properly start.

  I had made the decision to wait for a little while to tell my parents about Roscoe. During my mum’s last visit, Shipley had perpetrated one of his most sneaky and vicious attacks on The Bear to coincide with our evening meal, and since then she’d been making more noises about helping me out by separating the two of them. I knew she felt I already had too many cats, and I could anticipate her faintly despairing disapproval at the idea of one more. My parents are born worriers, and the way I saw it, I wasn’t lying by not telling them about Roscoe; I was just editing the truth for their own good. My plan was to wait until Roscoe was completely settled in and had become so irresistibly, infectiously happy it would be impossible to disapprove of her presence in any way. Then I would break the news. Obviously, my last, similar plan involving delaying the introduction of a cat to my parents hadn’t worked out too well, but this one was falling into place quite nicely. Roscoe was still a little unsure about being picked up, but in the fortnight since The Day of the Enormous Turd, she was nothing but delightful. There was still a vague feeling that she was a blank canvas, but her foibles and quirks were slowly starting to reveal themselves. My top ten of these fluctuated from day to day, but at this point could probably be listed, in no particular order, as:

  Sitting on the side of the bath and meowing at the water in it, as if pained by its beauty.

  Watching televised sport with rapt attention.

  Licking my armpit.

  Getting all up in Shipley’s grill and giving him a taste of his own medicine.

  Running up the side of the shed.

  Walking on hind legs and doing ‘wavy paws’ prior to food time.

  Trying to beat the crap out of the evil kitten in the ‘small window’ (mirror) in the bedroom.

  Going absolutely nuts and rolling all over Gemma and me at any point that we had a towel wrapped around us.

  Doing a vertical take-off in an attempt to get quickly from one side of the bed to the foot moving tantalisingly about under the duvet on the other.

  Going up to a dead vole killed by Shipley and growling at it, then pawing it three inches to the left, as if in the belief that that officially meant she could take the credit for catching it.

  The following week, I put many of these facts, and a few others, in a convenient email digest to my mum, along with three of the sweetest photos Gemma and I had taken of Roscoe: one showed her stretched out happily inside a padded Jiffy bag, in another she was sneaking up on The Bear from behind as he did a ‘you just can’t get the convincing stalkers these days’ face, and in the third she sat companionably with one of my old trainers, as if believing it to be a new, trustworthy friend.

  I felt pretty pleased with my public relations skills, but, when a reply popped into my inbox half an hour later, I braced myself for a small telling-off: something at least along the lines of the times when my mum saw the amount of empty crisp packets in my car or the state of my garden shed. Instead, what I saw was a picture of a tiny black and white kitten.

  The kitten shared a colour scheme with Roscoe, but that, and the fact that they were both clearly of feline descent, were all the two of them had in common. This kitten was far more white than black, smaller than Roscoe, and – though this might have been partly to do with the position in which it was curled up – its head appeared to be roughly the same size as its torso. Around its mouth and on its nose were splotches of black, as if someone had used it as a furry Rorschach test. I felt that my mum was sending me some kind of coded message, but I had no idea what. Was she using this kitten’s faintly beleaguered face as an abstract form of semaphore to demonstrate her own disapproval at my kitten? Was she suggesting I should have adopted this kitten instead of Roscoe? Or maybe she hadn’t seen the text of my email, had misunderstood, and thought I was challenging her to a game of Who Can Send a Photo of the Sweetest Black And White Kitten?

  ‘What is that?’ I asked her on the phone a few minutes later.

  ‘That’s Pusskin. That’s what I’m calling him for now. He’s our new kitten.’

  ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Next door. Casper’s house, although he’s not related. I’m a bit unsure about him at the moment. He doesn’t seem to have much of a personality. I still prefer Casper. Next door’s other cat had a litter recently, and they said a few were going spare, so we thought we’d give him a go. Your dad’s still a bit uncertain too.’

  ‘What about Casper?’

  ‘I suppose he’s just going to have to deal with it. The fact that he already knows him will probably help.’

  ‘So you decided to get a kitten, and I got a kitten. At exactly the same time.’ (This was a white lie, in order to stay consistent with my email, in which I’d told my mum that Roscoe had arrived only last week.)

  ‘Yes. It is a bit weird, isn’t it? I would say I think you’re silly for getting another, but I suppose I don’t have a leg to stand on. She looks very nice.’

  I had hypothesised many different reactions to Roscoe from my mum: utter disbelief, frown
ing exasperation, resigned acceptance … that special voice she does when she says ‘Oh, Tom’, leading me to believe I’ve not only let her down, but myself down, too. What I hadn’t expected was a kitten-based retaliation.

  That first picture began a pattern that would last for the next couple of months: a kind of kitten one-upmanship played out in the form of photos and progress reports. There was no reluctant, Roscoe-style teething period for my mum and dad’s kitten. From about two hours into his first day in their house, he became a force of nature: a tiny fur whirlwind who, if he was awake, was either smashing something (an expensive sculpture of a bird and a vase my dad had bought my mum many years ago for their tenth wedding anniversary were early casualties), purring at something or stealing something. They named him Floyd, after the late TV chef Keith, whose lust for life he appeared to share. The name was my dad’s choice, and one that wasn’t so much embraced as accepted by my mum, who had vetoed my dad’s earlier suggestions of naming him ‘FLOB’, after the cousin who’d led my dad’s teenage gang in the 1960s, or ‘DIRTY BERTIE’, and mine of Rory, as a shortened version of Rorschach. I’m not sure if my mum was putting on the nonchalance a bit during her first conversation about Floyd, but, whatever the case, it lasted about five minutes. From then on, she was smitten in a way that was impossible to hide.

  ‘Have you ever tried throwing a ping-pong ball for yours?’ she said. ‘Floyd loves it. You must try it.’