Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  It’s said that, in terms of cat communication, there is nothing ruder than a wide-eyed stare. If you want to make friends with a cat, you must squint gently in their direction to demonstrate that you mean them no harm, or look away from them altogether. I’d never been so sure about this: one of the rare and special things about Monty had been that he’d frequently looked directly into my eyes, bolstering my belief that he saw me as a living, breathing friend and not just a subservient actor in the solipsistic film of his life. Nonetheless, Monty had never looked at me like this. A lifetime of pain seemed to swim around in The Bear’s soulful peepers. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that, on the other side of them, a screen was currently spooling personal data, Terminator-style.

  NAME: TOM

  AGE: 25

  HEIGHT: FIVE FEET ELEVEN AND

  THREE-QUARTERS.

  FEELING ABOUT NEVER HAVING QUITE

  GOT TO SIX FOOT: MILDLY RESENTFUL

  BORDERING ON BITTER.

  NUMBER OF PREVIOUS CATS: FOUR (FIVE

  IF YOU COUNT THE ONE THAT USED TO LIVE

  TWO DOORS AWAY FROM HIS NAN, WHICH HE

  PRETENDED WAS HIS WHEN ITS OWNERS

  WERE OUT AT WORK).

  LIKES: ANIMALS, HAIRY SEVENTIES

  ROCK MUSIC, FIZZY SWEETS.

  HEROES: KRAMER FROM SEINFELD,

  The DUDE FROM THE BIG LEBOWSKI.

  SPECIAL TALENTS: GOLF CLUB KEEPIE-

  UPPIES, DISCO DANCING, HAVING A ‘KNACK’

  WITH CATS (HE RECKONS).

  WEAK AREAS: CUTE WHISKERS, COLD NOSES,

  BIG BESEECHING GREEN EYES, CLOTHING.

  PROPENSITY FOR FELINE SOPPINESS: 9.8/10.

  POTENTIAL AS HUMAN PAWN IN

  GAME OF CAT LIFE: 9.9/10.

  A few weeks previously, I’d written a negative review of a rather tedious, recalcitrant country rock album for a national newspaper. The day it had been printed had been a Friday, so, what with that being one of the seven days of the week, that night I’d been to a nightclub. Towards closing time, a man whom I vaguely knew from the record company that had released the album, whom I was aware to be unhappy with the review, had approached me and said, ‘Come on! We can’t just keep having this stand-off all night. I suppose we should put this behind us.’ Until that moment, I hadn’t known the man was even at the nightclub, never mind that he had spent much of the night shooting metaphorical daggers at me. I was also confused at just what we needed to put behind ‘us’, when all I had done was been a bit sarcastic about a record made by some despondent men in Stetsons.

  The Bear’s unflinching gaze was similarly disturbing and flummoxing. What had I done to him to merit such a piercing look? Had I unwittingly snubbed him in the street for a well-manicured tabby at some point several months before? Maybe he’d helped release a depressive country record, too; from what I knew of his résumé so far, it didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. There was always the additional chance that this was all about jealousy. I failed to see the logic, if you were worried about the wandering eye of a loved one, in planting a large piece of excrement in that same loved one’s nightwear. Then again, nobody ever claimed the affairs of the heart were straightforward.

  We’d probably been looking at each other for forty-five seconds now, though it felt more like forty-five minutes. It was the kind of staring contest that tends to be broken only by a passionate embrace, a crying jag or someone getting the crap beaten out of them. I felt that the first option was unlikely, though I couldn’t entirely rule out the last two.

  One of us had to break the deadlock, and it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to be him. ‘Um . . . The Bear!’ I called, in my friendliest singsong voice, glancing nervously across to Dee. I was used to calling out preposterous cat names in a camp voice, but this felt somehow wrong: like Eva Braun getting Hitler in for his dinner by cheerfully shouting, ‘The Führer!’

  He took a nervous step forward, his eyes never leaving mine, and sniffed a chunk of my chicken bhuna. I’d actually been saving that particular bit for later, to wrap in some nan bread, but I figured I could let it go, just this once. He took a lick, then another lick, then heard something utterly terrifying at a frequency undetectable to the human ear, jolted into an alert, upright pose, gave me one last look of disgust and scarpered in the direction of some boxes. It would be the last we saw of him that evening.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ said Dee. ‘At least he didn’t puke in your trainers. I actually think he quite likes you.’

  The following morning, I woke to find the sun beaming through my tiny studio flat in Blackheath. Returning from a morning stroll across the heath to get a newspaper, I could not help but bask in the goodly shine of the universe. Normally, when I felt energised like this, I would already have been looking forward to my first beer of that evening, but now my mind was not on the pub, or that night’s gig. In all that time I’d been burning the midnight oil had I just been trying to light the way to the right cat-loving girl? It seemed so. As I moved towards my desk, even the knowledge that I had to review the new Simply Red album later that day could not dampen my spirits. I noticed the green light blinking on my answerphone.

  The message was from Dee. She did not exactly sound upset, but her tone had more of a quaver to it than usual. ‘Don’t take this personally, because I’m trying not to,’ she said, ‘but this morning The Bear got through the window and escaped. I’ve been all over looking for him, but he’s gone.’

  PUSS, MOG OR SUPERVILLAIN: SOME TELLTALE (THOUGH NOT CONCLUSIVE) SIGNS TO LOOK OUT FOR WHEN TRYING TO WORK OUT THE BREED OF A NON-PEDIGREE CAT

  Puss

  Propensity towards leanness.

  Chatty manner, which in more extreme cases results in ‘office joker’ reputation.

  Short hair.

  Expressive whiskers.

  Predilection for stretched sleeping positions.

  Fondness for window sitting.

  Mog

  Greater tendency for success in the public eye.

  Sun-loving.

  Deep meow.

  Intrinsic sense of entitlement combined with ‘won’t get out of bed for less than £3,000’ laziness.

  Longish-to-long hair.

  Predilection for huddled sleeping positions.

  Fondness for boxes.

  Supervillain

  Unerring talent for camouflage and self-sufficient hiding spots.

  Unflinching eye contact.

  Resourceful bowel movements.

  Sensitive skin.

  Litany of long-standing grudges.

  Penchant for tightly scrunched sleeping positions.

  Constant need to be at higher-than-thou vantage points.

  Beneath the Undermog

  Thankfully The Bear didn’t stay away for long – not that time, anyway. Because the flat had small opaque windows and backed onto an inaccessible area of waste land, it had been difficult for Dee to look for him, but she took the pragmatic view that a cat who could shin six feet up a wall and insinuate himself through a three-inch gap in a window could quite easily perform the reverse of the same feat. Sure enough, three days later, a wounded ‘meyoeeyee’ noise accompanied by the scrabble of claws on brick heralded his return – a return he chose to celebrate late that night in his own special way, deep in the enveloping comfort of a vintage handbag, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘the wee hours’.

  Dee, however, had seen that the writing was on the wall, and a few weeks later, she reluctantly handed him over to The Actor. Painful as this was for Dee, she had to face up to the logic of the situation, since The Actor had a) been missing The Bear hugely, b) lived in a flat with a garden and c) didn’t own vintage handbags.

  Over the following weeks, reports would filter back to us of a completely different cat: a happy, frolicking bundle of quickly regrowing fur who could be seen skipping off over the fence of an evening, tail pertly in the air, to see if The Actor’s neighbour’s cat was ‘coming out to play’.<
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  ‘They even bite each other sometimes, apparently,’ said Dee.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he gives The Bear a little nip on the neck, and The Bear nips him back on the forearm. Bit weird if you ask me, but at least they’re getting on.’

  Weird? It sounded great.

  On one hand, I found myself viewing all this as a kind of defeat: I wasn’t accustomed to cats disliking me and the fact that this one had belonged to the person with whom I was starting to think about spending the rest of my life, not to mention that I had been seemingly outcatted by a hardened mogophobe, made the failure sting all the more. On the other hand, I could not say I was totally unhappy with the situation. In the brief time I’d spent with The Bear, I had felt a little like an unwanted step-father trying to appease the problem child of his new spouse. Looking into his eyes, I had not been able to shake the feeling that he was up to something clandestine. He always had that air of someone gathering data.

  And, after all, I’d got the cat I’d been hankering after, hadn’t I? In February, Dee and I moved into an airy flat on the other side of Blackheath (borders), and I quickly began to cement my bond with Janet, although it’s unlikely that this was anything to do with my natural cat aptitude, since bonding with Janet could hardly be considered a unique achievement. His circle of acquaintances included everyone from the postman, against whom he rubbed every morning, to the mangy fox with whom he regularly sat in sociable, idiotic silence in the garden we shared with the two flats below us. At one point, when I was sitting on the lawn with him, he did find a vole, and I thought I was about to see his long-suppressed dark side, but he just purred at it. His sole enemy was a neighbouring muscular white and black tom, with whom he could be found below our bedroom window in the early hours engaged in another round of a marathon, Beano-style punch-up: all clouds of smoke and random jutting limbs.

  As for The Bear, Janet had always liked him too. Seeing them together, I had been reminded of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, with Janet as the big, dumb Lennie and The Bear as the diminutive, scheming George. The only difference, perhaps, was that while Lennie was always an intrinsic part of George’s schemes, The Bear wouldn’t usually have lowered himself to include a nincompoop like Janet in his. Most of the time, they’d found a way to peacefully co-exist without anyone getting hissed at or sat upon, but just occasionally, Janet would feel an uncontrollable surge of affection and rush out of nowhere towards his smaller companion, swamping him with his limbs. This would invariably end with The Bear in an ungainly and unfeline position, looking like a Mini Metro caught beneath the undercarriage of a juggernaut.

  He must have thought he’d finally rid himself of the big populist retard when he moved to The Actor’s flat, so I can imagine his disappointment when, the following May, he was forced into a convenient reunion. Dee had received a call from The Actor explaining that he was in hospital having been set upon by a gang of youths in Woolwich and would be spending some time in recovery at his parents’ house. During this period, The Bear would once again come into Dee’s custody. Arrangements for the switchover quickly ensued, the goods swapping hands on a dark street in neutral territory, as if they were not a scrawny domestic cat but a suitcase full of heroin or illegally imported panda claws. After this, The Bear was transported to our living room, where he edged out of his basket and sniffed the air nervously, before an excited Janet greeted him by squatting on his spine.

  In the six months since I’d last seen him, The Bear had put on a few pounds. The fur on his back had resprouted, but his stomach was still bald, and his face remained unusually expressive and nuanced. That his expressions only seemed to stretch from ‘Wounded composer of verse’ to ‘Why the fuck have you done this to me, you shitbat?’ did not make them any less remarkable in their soulful multitudes. He clearly bore a grudge and, since I worked from home, I was the one who tended to be on the receiving end of it most of the time.

  I’ve always felt that a house without a cat is a house without soul. Admittedly, it’s often a clean house without soul, but, as much as I hadn’t missed the muddy paw prints and discarded mouse stomachs in my cat hiatus of 1998–2000, the places I’d lived had seemed sorely underpopulated and hollow without the presence of a wet nose and a rubby tail; like unusually cluttered show homes. In those years I’d fantasised about a home office where self-loving lumps of fur would drape themselves lazily over fax machines and keyboards, and, since living with Janet, I’d been doing my best to live the dream, postponing deadlines in order to stage games of cat football against him in the living room using a hacky-sack and attempting to train him to warm my feet while I wrote. When one day he cut off an important conversation I was having with an editor by flopping on the receiver, I couldn’t bring myself to be mad, so pleased was I to have the chance to call back and say, ‘Sorry about that: my cat just sat on the phone!’ Less than a year before, this had been a scene from one of my ultimate daydreams: the stuff of wild, unattainable fantasy.

  With the arrival of The Bear, however, this greeting card picture of Man and Cat harmony was strategically shattered. One of the problems was that, while Janet was now permitted to roam outdoors, his wandering, unpredictable step-brother could not be permitted, on any account, to follow him. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him escape!’ Dee would say, as she left for work in the morning. From there, a typical day would proceed with me returning from dropping her off at the train station and getting into a panic at finding a flat containing only one cat, then spending the next twenty minutes frantically looking for The Bear, before getting into a horizontal position on the kitchen floor and peering through a hole in the kickboard beneath the oven. Here I would find three eyes glinting back at me suspiciously. Paranoia and terror would take hold, as I speculated on exactly what kind of beast I was facing, until I realised that one of the eyes was just an old marble. Having managed to squeeze himself into the one corner unreachable to human hand by a matter of millimetres, The Bear would resist all attempts at bribery, meat-themed or otherwise, until, at about 10 a.m., I finally gave up and decided to get down to some work. For the next half an hour, all would be peaceful, until, in the corner of my vision, I’d see a streak of black smoke waft past my study door, pursued by a considerably more corpulent streak of black smoke with a lolling, enthusiastic tongue.

  Janet might have been The Bear’s tormentor, but in truth, The Bear probably saw him as more of a nemesis than an enemy, and one of the things that made nemeses different from enemies was that you could sometimes put aside your differences and join forces with them. In many ways, it seemed that the pair were suddenly united in the goal of stopping me from getting anything vaguely productive done. Sometimes, I’d be disturbed at my desk by a hollow scraping sound from the next room, and arrive in the kitchen to find them both on their hind legs, tapping at cupboard doors like joint-casing diamond thieves or property surveyors testing partition walls.

  What were they planning? And why was it that The Bear was able to time his asthmatic fits so perfectly with Janet’s vomiting fits or industrial digging sessions in the litter tray? Had George decided that he could use Lennie to his advantage after all? And did Lennie even realise that he was part of the plan, or was he just really glad to have a playmate that wasn’t an arthritic, senile fox?

  Take pets of shin-height or above and use their unruliness as an excuse for your lack of productivity and you might get a certain amount of sympathy. Everyone’s heard of ‘problem dogs’. I imagine a volatile llama could be an absolute bugger when you’re on deadline and were I to, say, invent a high-spirited ferret called Charles, the condolences would undoubtedly have flooded in. But cats are supposed to be background pets. Try explaining to a new parent that your cats are keeping you up at night and wait for the ensuing silence and subsequent unreturned phone calls. Nonetheless, please believe me when I say that those were tough days. Compared to the nights sandwiched between them, however, they were a picnic: an upbeat Barry
Manilow-soundtracked scene from the feline remake of Turner and Hooch.

  The Bear would usually wait until Dee and I were at our most tired before striking. Crawling into bed after a long day, feeling a little like arctic explorers in the final few moments before planting the flag, we would notice the stain, but usually not quickly enough not to be lying in it. Even in a near-comatose state, you’d find yourself taking time to admire the accuracy: if The Bear had used a tape measure and a compass, he could not have made his aim more central. On most occasions, even if we’d huddled next to the wall and held our stomachs in, we would have found it hard to avoid direct contact with the fruits of his labour.

  There’s a photograph taken by Dee that speaks volumes about this period of our lives. It shows me sitting under the duvet on the fold-out sofa bed on the living room, bleary and baggy-eyed. On either side of my feet sit Janet and The Bear, the former apparently happily preoccupied with some hamster-on-a-wheel footage on repeat play in his head, the latter staring demonically at the camera. On the back of the photo, Dee has scrawled ‘Tom, Janet and The Bear: Blackheath, 2001 – on sofa bed because of The Bear’. Obviously, to any sane person, who has never been pushed around by a pet, there must seem something desperately wrong with this scene, and I have to admit that even I sometimes look at it and wonder at the wisdom of allowing your cats to take pride of place on your one remaining unsoiled bit of bedding five minutes after one of those cats has just weed on your mattress, but I know that by that point, normal human–cat etiquette could not be applied to the situation. The Bear had rocked my smug sense of cat veteran’s wisdom. I was off balance. It wasn’t just the strange ‘meeoop’ noises he would make in the middle of the night that would have me stumbling across to the kitchen to check if the battery in our smoke alarm needed replacing. Neither was it the nervous wait for the next suspicious brown stain or pool of liquid (you know you’ve got a problem pet when you find yourself pouring a cup of Earl Grey and asking yourself, ‘Is it just me or does this taste slightly . . . tart?’).