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

by Cox, Tom

  Maybe this was just The Bear’s and Alan’s way of telling me that nobody really needed to own eight Bill Withers albums, but I decided it was time to take action. I’d signed a mental contract with myself when I decided to live with multiple cats. This contract included the condition that, if I was going to be so indulgent as to let several furry urine machines share my house, I would not, on any account, ever become The Person Whose House Smells of Wee and Who Doesn’t Know It. For that reason I’d always been scrupulously clean, but there comes a point – if you have ferals, or ex-ferals, in the neighbourhood – where kitchen roll, cloths and disinfectant are no longer enough.

  I’d considered magnetic catflaps in the past, but had been put off by reports of magnets falling off collars, and cats turning up in houses with strange keys and coins stuck to their necks. ‘I wouldn’t get one if I were you,’ my aunt and uncle had told me. ‘We did, and we kept finding the cats stuck to the fridge.’ A microchip catflap, however, was by all accounts a good bet. If I’d put it off, it was perhaps due to some last fleeting hope that Graham would return, but there’d been no sign of him for almost three months now, and Gemma and I had finally faced up to the fact that he was gone for ever. The microchip flap did not necessitate adding anything unwieldy to the cats’ neck areas, and all the cats were already chipped. It would just be a matter of getting the flaps themselves, and programming in the details of the cats’ chips.

  I was thinking about more than just cleanliness here. In August we’d had a small health scare involving The Bear on his visit to the vet’s to get his latest flea treatment (the injection he was required to have due to his allergy to normal flea treatments). ‘He’s lost a little weight,’ said the locum vet, in an extremely strong Welsh accent. ‘Has he been eating much?’

  I told him that The Bear had been eating more than ever recently.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the vet. ‘It could be worth getting his thyroid checked out.’

  A nervous twenty-four hours followed, all the more troubling for its echoes of Janet. The Bear was given the all-clear, but the experience served as a bit of a jolt to the picture I’d built up of him as a cat who grew more youthful with age. Because The Bear was delicate and polite and elderly, I went the extra mile to make sure he was comfortable in so many areas of his day-to-day life, allowed him little privileges that I didn’t always allow Ralph, Shipley and Roscoe. I decided that it was the least I could do to include among these comforts a sense that his territory was not being invaded by strange cats. Additionally, I concluded that the microchip flaps would be an investment for the future, when robots took over the earth and I needed a device to let nice robots into my house but keep out evil, feral ones.

  I did consider attempting to fit the flaps – which came from a company called Sureflap – myself, but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t. The first handyman I paid to install them half-fitted one, leaving it partially hanging out of the wall, mounted on a piece of wood he appeared to have found in a bin, then left, seemingly on the verge of tears, shaking his head and muttering the phrase ‘I tried to make it good’. After that, I never saw him again. I was beginning to think the brand name of the flap was less a reference to the solidity of the apparatus than to the state that the person dealing with it was likely to get into, but a couple of weeks later, a burly, shaven-headed man in his fifties called John came along and very calmly rectified the damage. I would have pegged him for a dog man, but, as I wrote out a cheque for him, he told me he was a lifelong cat lover. ‘That one watched me the whole time,’ he said, pointing out The Bear. ‘He seemed very interested.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’ll do that,’ I said.

  ‘I stopped to give him a cuddle at one point. He really holds on tight, doesn’t he? I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like that from a cat before, and I’ve known a lot of cats. He has this way of looking at you. Like he’s been here before. Like he knows stuff. I don’t mean in a bad way, though. I mean in a kind way, in a good way.’

  With a Sureflap, all you have to do is put some batteries in, pop it into memory mode and pass a cat through the flap a couple of times, so it memorises the code on their chip. If I ever read the instructions that come with products, I would have known this, but I don’t. Instead, before I tried the flap out, I took all the cats to the vet’s, in two separate journeys, to be scanned by a new Norwegian vet, so I could get their code, which I’d assumed I’d have to program into the flap by hand. Rightly, the cats seemed to view this as a faintly ridiculous exercise, and surely would have told me of my idiocy had they been able to speak.

  Fortunately, the fiasco surrounding the catflaps ended there, and, when they actually began working, there were no real hiccups. That is, if you overlook the first day, where Ralph stood outside the bottom floor flap meowing his own name, and several days after that, where Roscoe didn’t seem to be able to get it into her head that she wasn’t supposed to open the flaps backwards, using one of her paws. About a week after that, I saw just how effective the flaps were, as, from the living-room window, I watched Ralph shoot into the downstairs flap, then Alan attempt to enter behind him, only to be denied, like a driver who’d tried and failed to cheat a parking barrier by tailgating the car in front.

  I imagined those two gossiping ferals again, meeting by the compost heap at the bottom of the garden to discuss this latest development.

  ‘So that’s it, then: the end of an era.’

  ‘I’m telling you: this is the way society’s going now. Computers are taking over. Soon there won’t be any jobs for real, honest cats, defending their territory.’

  ‘Since when were you a real, honest cat?’

  ‘OK, but still. It’s sad, y’know. A sign how things are changing.’

  ‘I heard Black Whisker Ed was heading over from Framlingham tomorrow. He’s going to be well pissed off when I tell him we’re postponing the Cat Skins party.’

  ‘Rather you than me.’

  ‘I’m going to miss fighting behind those curtains in the living room. I reckon in time we’ll look back at it as our own equivalent of the golden age of the illegal rave.’

  I inspected the job that John had done on the bottom flap. It was a neat one. He had ‘made good’, as builders liked to say. Just a few feet away, the hole in my conservatory roof had opened up again. Above it was a fence badly in need of paint, and a garden gate that had come off its hinges. Carry on around the corner and back into the house and you would find sofas decimated by claws, a scuffed floor that more houseproud people might have resanded and varnished three or four years ago, and a small hole in a wall, through which two slugs eagerly poked their heads. Head back downstairs, past chewed carpets, and outside again, and you saw a shed, now missing its door, and leaning so far into next door’s garden that it had ceased to resemble a broken shed and taken on the appearance of an abstract art project. ‘If you ever decide to put this place on the market, please remember to tell me,’ said John, who clearly had the vision of a man who spends his days ripping things down and remaking them with his hands.

  It was something I’d thought about recently, a lot – especially as I knew how much Gemma missed the West Country. If it were to be the case, I’d have to attend to all of these cosmetic matters first. And I planned to, just as soon as my bank account had recovered from the cost of getting two hi-tech catflaps fitted, having one cat tested for hyperthyroidism and injected with grade-one flea protection and two other cats sterilised – one of whom actually lived with me, and one of whom had summarily vanished. It was a matter of priorities. As a place for humans to live, my house had never felt more threadbare and vulnerable. But for cats, it was a bona fide fortress. That was the important thing. Wasn’t it?

  Keeping our Cats out of the Bedroom: Instructions for Housesitters

  1. Dear______ and ______. Thanks again for doing this. It will make our holiday so much more relaxing to know you are here. We are confident the cats will be in good hands with you, and I doubt they’ll cause you an
y trouble. Just wanted to warn you about one thing: it’s absolutely crucial that during your stay you keep all four of the cats out of the bedroom. The old intellectual black one pissed on the curtains a while back, then the middle-aged mouthy black one pissed in the same place to wind him up. And, even though I’ve washed the curtains thoroughly several times since then and they smell lovely now, you know how it is: once a cat’s pissed on some curtains, that cat will never really forget that those curtains are a lovely place to piss.

  The narcissistic tabby one and the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon aren’t interested in pissing on the curtains, but they do love to bounce all over the bed when their paws are muddy. Also, the narcissistic tabby one really likes to meow his own name and the word ‘HELLO!’ at 3 a.m. You don’t want that in the same room as you. Believe me.

  2. There is a slight problem with the bedroom door. Even though it’s heavy, it doesn’t quite click shut properly, which means that the mouthy black one, who is as strong and sinewy as a monitor lizard, can push it open. My method for stopping this from happening used to be to place a very old, large, coverless cushion behind the door, but I don’t do that any more, because the old intellectual black one did something unspeakable to it. Also, don’t even think about using that sausage-dog-shaped 1970s draught excluder. It’s useless. I don’t know why I bought it really. I suppose when you’re hung over and you’re out shopping with friends, stuff like that can seem like a good idea, but you often regret it. Try using one of the massive heavy cushions off the sofa instead.

  Also, if you’re passing the big secondhand shop on Magdalen Street in Norwich, maybe you could drop the sausage-dog draught excluder in there for me? Ask for Eric. He’s the one with the limp who looks like he used to be in The Hollies.

  3. If the mouthy black one is feeling particularly determined, he can still push the door open, even if one of the massive heavy cushions from the sofa is behind it, especially on nights when he’s waded through the fen up the road and wants somewhere soft to wipe his paws. As he does so, he’ll normally make a very loud sweary noise, a bit like a disgruntled teenager, but also slightly like an angry pterodactyl. Don’t worry, though: this only happens twice a week on average, and it’s manageable. You just have to keep one eye constantly open and be ready to leap out of bed and intercept him before he spreads peaty jet-black muck all over the duvet and my original 1970s Superman pillowcase.

  4. Sometimes, when the mouthy black one breaks in and you’re trying to intercept him, the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon will nip in after him and scurry under the bed. Try not to concern yourself too much with her. She’s very hard to catch and the worst she’ll do is attack your feet in the night or burrow into your stomach as if it contains a treat that, with enough probing, she thinks she will be able to find and eat. Most probably she’ll just head into the bathroom next door and fall asleep on the folded towels. Make sure that before using it you remember to wash the towel she’s slept on, though – and perhaps the one underneath it, just for insurance. When you carry the towel to the washing machine, she will probably follow you, with a slightly unnerving, eager look on her face.

  5. The old intellectual black one does sometimes have night terrors. I probably should have mentioned that earlier. Please don’t be alarmed by these. They normally involve him walking around the kitchen making a weird wobbly-lipped noise which sounds like he has seen the ghost of a deceased lover or is questioning the very nature of existence. I probably make that sound worse than it is. The narcissistic tabby one, for example, is far, far louder when he walks around meowing his own name or ticking cat jobs off a small invisible cat clipboard. The old intellectual black one won’t trouble you for long – maybe forty-five minutes at the most. Pop in there and give him a cuddle if possible. He’s used to that, and he might feel even more alone and scared without it.

  6. Of course, while you’re on a separate floor of the house, comforting the intellectual black one, there’s also the possibility that the mouthy black one will take advantage of your absence and break into the bedroom, followed by the small black and white one who looks like a living cartoon, and the narcissistic tabby one, who does, I should probably say, have a small problem with bringing slugs in on his back at the present time. If so, you can’t be blamed, and maybe it will be best to abandon the bedroom altogether. You don’t want to be waking up later with bits of soil or slugs between your toes, and, in the words of a couple of my friends who have stayed over recently, ‘That sofa bed is almost as comfortable as some real beds!’ Don’t worry. It’s no big deal. Have a fantastic stay and we’ll see you in just over three weeks!

  P.S. If you visit the farm museum up the road, make sure you get some fudge from the shop. It’s excellent.

  It’s Ralph’s World – The Rest of Us Just Live in It

  Taking into account that the seventies was such a loud decade, in terms of music and politics and fashion, there’s something surprisingly quiet about the generation born during it. People born in the seventies – or ‘Generation X’, as we’re sometimes called, when it’s convenient – have neither the massive strength in numbers nor the cultural explosion of the baby boomers to define them. Nor do we have the ‘in your face’ element of Generation Y. Yet what comes after Generation X – what every Generation X-er has to deal with, and will almost certainly have something to say about, if you speak to them at any length – is arguably the most significant generation gap of the last century: that between people who grew up with the Internet, and people who didn’t.

  Because I was born in 1975, it means I am one of the last group of people able to remember the time when men and women would go on nights out without any thought of taking photos of one another, when an answerphone was largely considered a luxury that only posh people had, when arranging to meet someone meant trusting that they’d be there at the time you’d agreed upon and waiting a while then going back home if they weren’t, when pornography was something mainly found high on a newsagent’s shelf or torn up and strewn, inexplicably, across the countryside not far from my house. It also means I can remember a time when being a cat lover was very different.

  Cats have been all over the Internet for many years. This makes total sense, as they seem to spend half their lives trying to stand and sit on the keyboards of our laptops. For a cat lover, though, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. There’s the wonder of having access to innumerable funny cat videos and being able to share your love of cats with other ailurophiles around the world. At its best, it can be very creative – like a more sophisticated version of ancient Egypt, with LOLcats and viral potentiality instead of hieroglyphs. (And who knows? All history is distortion. Maybe the Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats but just liked to share stupid pictures of them, and stuff got exaggerated over time?)

  Yet, at the same time, the sheer overkill of cat-related memes – and, for all the great cat-related content, there is no doubt that a huge amount of it is mawkish, repetitive, platitudinous rubbish – has turned ‘cat’ into a dirty word for many Internet users: something lowbrow that gets in the way of the real issues of social networking, such as telling people what you had for breakfast, upping the ad revenue of the Daily Mail by posting outraged links to its articles, or arguing with a complete stranger about whether or not you tweet too much. Cats, no doubt, would be disgusted at being branded as lowbrow. They’d also surely be very disheartened about the sad knock-on effect of cat meme overkill, which is the fact that – especially if you’re female – a love of cats, and a domestic set-up where several of them are present, has to many people become synonymous with the state of having no life, and few romantic prospects.

  When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, most women I knew had cats. I don’t remember that it signified anything other than that they liked cats, and were probably quite kind and nice. Certainly, I saw a couple of people who had more cats than was healthy either for them or the cats, but that didn�
��t seem anything to do with the fact that the animal they were projecting their unhappiness onto was feline: they could just as easily have been living with too many weasels or parrots.

  Nowadays, though, Crazy Cat Lady is entrenched in our psyche. Like all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth to her, but she’s a million times more present in that flippant but damaging thing ‘Internet banter’ than she ever could be in real life. Jokes about Crazy Cat Ladies seem harmless enough, but at their core is a disturbing echo of the hysterical witch superstitions of the late Middle Ages. I’ve known several women who have wanted to get a cat, or an additional cat, but have hesitated, or decided not to, because of ‘what it might say about them’.

  Personally, I’d like to see Crazy Cat Lady’s name never mentioned again: for the good of male–female relations, for the good of feminism, for the good of human self-esteem, for the good of cats – particularly rescue cats. That’s clearly not going to happen, though, so instead a large faction of women have started embracing the Crazy Cat Lady title as a subversive way of drowning out the negative assumptions that go with it. In 2009, you might not have seen ‘Crazy Cat Lady, and proud of it’ in many Twitter biogs, but by 2012 it had become far more common, along with a flaunting of cat tattoos and cat-related furniture and clothing. This not just from single, childless women over the age of thirty-five, but from women of all ages and appearances, in many different careers, with varying romantic statuses.

  Admirable as this proud attempt to turn the tables is, and support it though I do, I’m not sure if I’d be bold enough to join in, if I were of the opposite gender and had been put in the Crazy Cat Lady box. I think the chief problem is, as much as I love cats, I don’t love many cat-related things. It’s another stipulation of my contract with myself as a cat owner. I’ve got two T-shirts with cats on them: one was sent to me by a cat charity I supported, and the other was bought as a present, less because it had a cat on it and more because it was funny. I don’t have any cat jumpers, or an armchair with a cat print on it. I currently have some form of drawing or sculpture of a hare in every room of my house, yet I only have one cat-themed wall hanging: a montage of photographs of an upside-down Janet, to remind me what an adorable nutcase he was.