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

by Cox, Tom

  ‘RAAAAALLPH!’ Ralph would shout, as more snow fell. I heard it as a lament for warmth – the sound of him forgiving summer for all the pain it had caused him in the past – but it was probably just Ralph meowing his own name, as usual.

  Now, as The Bear suns his old bones on his balcony, he looks like the pleasure of it is almost too much for him to cope with. ‘Thank you,’ he seems to be saying. ‘I thought this time would never come.’ In the garden, as I continue to tidy up in preparation for marketing the house, Shipley shoots up and down Janet’s apple tree, and Roscoe shows me around the place, as if she not only owns it but personally landscaped it: ‘This is my apple tree. Over here is my rotting jetty. I often watch ducks from here and try to intimidate them with my still-somewhat-pathetic half meow. I really should get it repaired but I never seem to find a window in my heavy schedule.’ She very rarely stays still and, with her white socks, she comes across a bit like a feline version of a fitness freak who is constantly jogging on the spot as she talks to you.

  I’ve agonised so much about taking the four of them away from all this, because it’s hard to picture a place where they could be happier. I’m not sure exactly where we’ll go – west, quite possibly – but I would hope that it might be the kind of place where it would not be unlikely for a Buddhist stranger with an amusing sweatshirt to turn up unannounced on your doorstep and tell you his life story. I know The Bear needs his research material, and I will be keeping that in mind. There’s still a lot to do before I start househunting in earnest – I imagine getting a shed that doesn’t slope at a thirteen-degree angle to the ground could help the sale – but when I do start, one thing is for sure: I’ll be thinking about the welfare of the cats as much as Gemma’s and my own.

  A fortnight ago a letter arrived from the vet: a reminder about a cat booster jab. I opened it hastily, while in the middle of three other jobs, and immediately put it to one side. Only a lot later that day, remembering that all the cats were up to date on their boosters, did I examine it more closely. I zoned out for a moment upon seeing the name, before realising, with a rush of sadness, who it referred to. We’d only called Graham ‘Sven’ for a short time, but clearly that was the name we’d given to the vet on the day he was neutered and inoculated. Where was he now? Was he still living wild? Had he travelled far away, determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and those who had robbed him of his crown jewels? Had he found another benefactor and learned to trust again? Was he even still alive? These thoughts percolated troublingly in my head for the rest of the day, and the two or three that followed it.

  We’ve had another feral visitor recently: another mourn ful evening meower imbuing the outside of the house with a ghostly ambience at dusk. Gemma caught site of a flash of ginger in the dark and was convinced for a while it was Graham, but I didn’t think the meow had quite the same throaty Rod Stewart quality, and the recent lighter nights have revealed it to be a very different-looking ginger cat: bushy tailed, long, sleek and foxy. I’m still waiting for my garden’s first actual fox, but I suppose, in the meantime, this fellow will do. I haven’t found out if the bushy-tailed cat eats vomit, though, as he hasn’t let me close enough to ask him, and I sense he is even more unlikely to since, in an uncharacteristic territorial gesture the other evening, The Bear frightened him off with one of his best ‘gargling with lighter fluid’ noises.

  What with the bushy-tailed cat’s mournful meowing and Ralph loudly talking about himself in the third person, the house remains a hive of cat activity around dawn. Gemma can sleep through this stuff, but I know from experience that it’s no use for me to try to. If I get back to the land of nod after Shipley has shouldered open the bedroom door and attacked me with a machine-gun fusillade of expletives at 4.30 a.m., I’ll only wake up again half an hour later, when Alan lands heavily on the conservatory roof.

  Last weekend, I told Deborah about Alan’s early-hours landings, and she seemed surprised.

  ‘But we keep Alan in every night. It couldn’t have been him.’

  ‘But I saw him this morning. He looked right at me.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Probably about five. Maybe twenty past.’

  ‘No, it couldn’t have been Alan. We never let him out until about seven.’

  ‘Will you be keeping him in tomorrow until about that time?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  The next morning, upon hearing the thump on the roof at about 5.30 a.m., I rushed to the window. As I did so, I saw a moonlike ginger face turn and stare back at me, in apparent hurt. The two of us froze in our positions for ten seconds, then he was gone. He looked well, I thought. There was still a softness about his face. As ever with Graham, I had so many questions. Where had he been all this time? Had he tried a new neighbourhood, got tired of it and decided that we weren’t so bad after all? Maybe he had never been away, and had been lurking in the dark spots around the house all the time? Maybe it wasn’t Graham at all, but yet another lookalike: the latest produce of the nest of feral ginger cats that seemed to reside somewhere in the neighbourhood? Whatever the case, I felt – though perhaps I was deluding myself – that I’d seen just a flicker of hope in that face as it stared back at me.

  What we’re looking at here is a long shot, admittedly. That was four days ago, and I haven’t seen Graham since. The current market is not an easy one to sell a house in, but if all goes to plan we could be out of here in as little as three months. That’s a relatively short time in which to win back the modicum of trust a feral cat ever had in you, and make him feel at home in your company. A feral cat, that is, whose balls you cut off without asking. But I’m not ruling anything out.

  I’ve been in a similar position before, of course: that of being on the verge of a house move and not knowing whether or not a cat would end up joining me for it. As I prepared to move from London to Norfolk in the autumn of 2001, The Bear had gone on an epic, pivotal six-week wander, and only returned in the nick of time. Dee and I didn’t take many photos of him during that period – this being a time before cameraphones and the corporate merger that meant cats got to be in charge of the Internet – but I recently found a couple of the rare ones that we did take and was reminded again of what a tightly wound, wilful cat he’d been back then: of how, on the night he’d run away, he’d forced his then-much-wirier body through a sash window that had been opened no more than a crack; of how, on the day he’d come back, he’d run, for the first time ever, into my arms and clung to me so hard, and – even though he’d smelled of cabbage and dead things – I’d held on just as tightly.

  I speculated to my dad recently on the phone about just how different both my life and The Bear’s might have been, had he not returned home in time to join me and Dee in Norfolk, but he was having none of it.

  ‘ALL OF THIS WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN,’ he said. ‘IT WAS PLANNED OUT LONG AGO. IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE YOU’RE JUST KIDDING YOURSELF. DO YOU GET CHAVS IN JAPAN?’

  ‘But what about the frog in your shoe?’ I replied. After their Christmas together, the new toad had left my dad’s running shoe. Not long afterwards, a frog had moved into the gardening shoe favoured by the original toad. ‘What if the toad had never come to my house, or if we hadn’t realised it, and you had taken it back home with you? It might still be living in the shoe. Then we would have never had this conversation. Or, if we had, it might have been slightly different, and lasted a different amount of time, which could have meant you were later going into town this afternoon, and you didn’t, I dunno, say … bump into an old friend, leading to a revelation about your past, which might have changed the rest of your life. Even me deciding to say “Onions!” right now could be changing both of our futures. Onions! All this tiny stuff is sending our lives in different directions all the time, and it’s all down to the decisions we make.’

  ‘YOU’RE TALKING CRAP. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW PREDESTINATION WORKS AT ALL. DID YOUR MUM TELL YOU THAT THE KITTEN HAD BEEN TO THE TI
P AND THE SUPERMARKET WITH ME?’

  ‘She did, yes. I’m glad he’s OK.’

  Floyd’s latest habit is to sneak into any vehicle that happens to be standing anywhere in or around the twitchell near my mum and dad’s house. This has led my dad to genuinely contemplate adding a second sign to the ‘PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY: CATS PLAYING IN TWITCHELL’ one, reading ‘PLEASE CHECK YOUR CAR OR VAN FOR ANY SIGN OF OUR CAT BEFORE YOU LEAVE THE AREA’. Vehicles Floyd has recently stowed away inside include my car, a Post Office van, and a Currys truck that was delivering a new TV to one of my mum and dad’s neighbours. Fortunately, he’s been discovered each time before the drivers have left, but last week, when my dad was loading some garden waste into the car and left the boot open, he snuck inside very quietly. He poked his head into the gap between the front seats about twenty minutes later, when my dad was already halfway to the supermarket, where he was due to get provisions for Roger and Bea, the nonagenarians next door, some of which they would no doubt later eat in the comfort of their greenhouse.

  All this brought me back to a recurring vision I’d been having of my parents in three decades’ time, at Roger and Bea’s age, asking me to get their shopping for them, their house now completely overrun with animal life: the toads now not just in footwear in the porch, but happily taking their own seat at the dining table. The vision frightened me a bit, but perhaps not so much as it should have done.

  ‘IF YOU’RE GOING OUT LATER, REMEMBER TO WOFFAL,’ said my dad.

  ‘Oh, are you saying that out loud as well now?’ In the last few months, as a time-saving device, my dad had been writing ‘WOFFAL’ at the end of his emails to me: an acronym of his standard ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ warning.

  ‘YEAH. I’M GIVING IT A TRY AND SEEING HOW IT WORKS OUT. HAVE YOU GOT YOUR CAR READY FOR WINTER?’

  ‘It’s April the twenty-first.’

  ‘I KNOW, BUT YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL. I’M NOT SURE I LIKE THIS NEW FROG THAT’S LIVING IN MY SHOE. IT’S A BIT MORE SNOOTY THAN THE TOAD.’

  ‘Well, it might decide it doesn’t want to be there any more, and you’ll get a nice toad again instead. There’s nothing you can do to change it. What will be will be. As you said, it was all decided a long time ago.’

  ‘EXACTLY. YOU’RE LEARNING.’

  As parental advice went, ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ had served me pretty well over the years. Of course, sometimes to really be able to watch out for the FOOKWITS AND LOONIES, you needed to have some experience in dealing with FOOKWITS AND LOONIES. I would never have had to tell a hardy perennial such as The Bear to WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES, as no doubt he’d experienced plenty of them in his time (he had, after all, been living with Shipley for twelve and a half years). His eyes and those notches in his ears told a tale of plenty of FOOKWITS AND LOONIES. Yet those eyes also said, ‘I have accepted the existence of these individuals and intend to be calm about it.’ That and, as always, ‘Can you tell me why I am a cat, please?’

  I mentioned earlier that The Bear, as a cat, was not subject to the same natural, noticeable physical changes brought about in humans as a result of ageing, but that’s not quite true. In looking at those photos of him from 2001, I noticed something which gave me a bit of a jolt: his eyes looked very different. Still sad, but less deep, and wide. And I realised it was true: that pained owl look of his had not quite been there back then. It was actually a result of time and experience.

  ‘What is it, The Bear?’ I, Gemma, and friends who visit the house will still ask, looking into those eyes. He’ll answer only with another bereft look. While others shout and swear their way through the day, he continues to offer his silent commentary: all-knowing, wry, dignified, troubled.

  Nowadays, at feeding time, Roscoe, Shipley and Ralph eat on the floor, but The Bear climbs onto the step stool above them. Partly because he is missing several teeth, he likes to go at his own sedate pace, carefully sucking the jelly off each chunk of mechanically recovered meat. As he does so, he will pause every fifteen seconds or so, as if paranoid an adversary might be creeping up behind him holding a Post-it note with the word ‘Wanker’ scrawled on it. He always gets his food first, and I stick around, making sure the others – OK, I’m primarily talking about Shipley here – don’t muscle in on him. Some might say I’m spoiling him, but I see it as a fundamental part of the conditions I agreed to when I decided to live with my particular set of cats. In a similar way, had you decided to take in as pets three salamanders and the art critic Brian Sewell, you’d find it necessary to segregate a little area purely for Sewell so he had space to work without being disturbed.

  The Bear still has plenty of amazingly sprightly moments. He’s struck up a quiet bond with Roscoe, who he has perhaps finally accepted as an ally, due to her continued, fearless baiting of Shipley. I’ve caved in and started allowing him in the bedroom again, and he and she often sleep on the bed together, their paws sometimes lightly brushing as she edges closer to him. A couple of weeks ago he could be witnessed jumping out at her, kittenishly, from behind her favourite mirror, no doubt in the process making her even more confused about that lookalike nemesis of hers who seems to live in it. He still plays shyly but enthusiastically with his old toy mouse, and the occasional deceased real one that Ralph and Shipley bring in and complacently discard. In the last few months, though, I’ve noticed the difficulty that The Bear has in climbing down from any object higher than his own head. The camp wobble to his walk is getting ever more wobbly and, when I stroke his back, it feels brittle, like Janet’s did in his final couple of years. Over winter, he would sometimes shuffle towards the catflap, see that it was raining outside, then look up at me and turn around, as if to say, ‘Oh, it’s all a bit too much. I don’t think I’ll bother.’ I’ve perhaps believed him, more than any of my other cats, to be invincible, purely because he’s withstood so much, but I should probably prepare myself for the fact that The Bear might not keep going strong for another twenty-two years and become the world’s oldest ever feline.

  I try not to imagine life without The Bear, but when I let myself slip towards doing so, only a confused, blurry picture emerges. I find it easier to imagine myself with an entirely different name and career, living in a country I’ve never visited. I really do love all of my cats equally, and for different reasons, but my relationship with The Bear is unique: not so much a bond with a cat, but the kind of attachment you might have to a mute friend you’d met in a hostage situation, and who’d been burdened with the job of feeling every emotion twice as acutely as anyone else.

  It’s a shame there weren’t more photos of him taken earlier in his life, but I take plenty now. People have a habit, in the age of cameraphones and social networking, of being a bit too quick to turn all sorts of experiences into a ‘memory’, but I know it will be important for me to remember The Bear. When he is gone (and it pains me even to write the word ‘gone’), maybe I will finally crack, and go back on everything I’ve told myself about cat-related paraphernalia. Perhaps the photos will spread out across the walls of my next house, until there is barely any paintwork visible. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll get a tattoo dedicated to him as well. He certainly deserves a tribute of some permanence, because he’s been such a good friend, such an inspiration: a cat who’s weathered the tough stuff in his life – the plastic bag he was dumped in, Shipley, Biscuit’s rejection of his love, his several illnesses, the injuries inflicted by all those other, more violent cats alongside whom he just wanted to live in peace, his many house moves, the early uncertainty about which human would be his forever human – and never let it turn him bad, instead growing progressively nicer, more charismatic, more him, as a result.

  Maybe he did go through a stage where he had the capacity to be a bit swaggering and indifferent, like my other cats, or maybe his eyes saw too much too soon for that to be possible, then just kept seeing more. I wonder, if he had his chance to do it all again, in a different way, whether he’d take it. Perhaps not. Yes
, he might be younger, and scar-free. He could have the confidence to hurtle up a tree or rip a vole’s face off. And that would be great for him in many ways. But what wisdom would he lose in the process? What enigma, which layers? Would he be so warm and interesting to be around?

  And – crucially – could you then still say that he was truly The Bear?

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thank you to Hannah Boursnell, my editor, and the rest of the team at Little, Brown, who believed in this book from the word go, and fulfilled my wish for a cover that reflected its content – which, as I’ve realised in the past, is not always an easy thing to find in the world of twenty-first-century animal-themed non-fiction. I am also massively grateful to Trent McMinn for taking such a lovely shot of The Bear for the cover (and for being very forgiving when I threw turkey in his hair by mistake), and to the following people for their encouragement during the book’s creation: my fantastic parents Jo and Mick Cox, Gemma Wright, Martin Fletcher, Kate Carter, Jazzmine Breary, Laura Penn, Pat Bristow, Adele Nozedar, Rebecca McMahon, Amy Corcoran, Hannah Harper, Jack Burton, Karen Nethercott, Ian Curtis, Will Twynham, Mary Epworth, Amy Lyall, Emily Aaronson, Elizabeth McCracken, Stephen Dray, Jonny Geller, Joe Hollick, Ed Wilson, Rebecca Willers, Emma Hope, my neighbours Deborah and David, and anyone who’s ever sent me a nice message about my writing over the Internet.