by Cox, Tom
‘Raffles!’ I said, in my deepest voice, sensing he was not the kind of cat to be treated with kid gloves. ‘Come here.’
I patted my knee, and he made his way over to me in a fashion that reminded me of the overfed boss from a mafia film I’d just seen. When I called cats that I owned and they came to me this instantaneously, it was invariably either because I was holding a meat-based snack or they had muddy paws and required a surface upon which to blot them off, but here there seemed to be no ulterior motive.
Again, the kneading started. I was glad that the surface protecting me was corduroy this time, but I was a bit worried about its proximity to some of the more tender parts of my anatomy. I was used to this sort of thing from Ralph – the main difference being a) that Ralph’s claws had little in common with Freddie Kruger’s, and b) the accompanying noise. What was coming from Raffles’s mighty muzzle probably passed for a purr of fair-to-middling strength, but only in a magical meaty land where Iams grew on trees and cats were as big as buses.
Aided by the contrast provided by my other cats, I now began to get a further sense of Raffles’s enormity. Shipley was the first to come and see what all the fuss was about. The expression on his face was the most flabbergastedly human of a life that had already contained many astonishingly person-like moments. If I’d ever thought cats were too cool to do double-takes, I now realised I was wrong. For Shipley, who had always been possessive towards me, what he saw before him perhaps constituted the ultimate insult: not just a bigger cat at large in his domain, working his claws steadily in the direction of his owner’s groin, but a bigger cat that looked quite a bit like him, only with an extra third of muscle and heft.
Raffles’s movement was a decisive one that managed to combine speed with a look of slow-motion laziness. In a panicked flick and a nervous flurry, Shipley was out the cat-flap and cowering on the patio.
Raffles returned to my feet, and looked up at me. His sleepy eyes said, ‘’T’was nothing, fine sir, but any rewards gratefully accepted nonetheless.’
‘I’m sure things will calm down soon,’ said Dee, after she’d arrived in the room to find out what the commotion was.
She was right: by 11 p.m. that night, things had calmed down considerably. This was mainly because our house now only contained one cat. When we had gone to bed, there had been none of the usual coaxing and bribing that it took to get our pets on the bed on the occasions we really wanted them there, none of the usual celebrity tantrums or walkouts when we adjusted the duvet an inch or two beneath them. Raffles simply strolled in casually behind us, then made his way onto the bed, where he lay, vibrating deeply, looking up at us with unbridled love.
‘Where the hell is everyone?’ asked Dee.
Getting up for a glass of water, I took a peek outside onto the patio. Here I found four wide-eyed animals who had put aside their squabbles and vendettas, some of which stretched back years, to become united in fear and incomprehension.
There have been countless times when I have wished I could talk to my cats and explain the ins and outs of a difficult situation, but this was not one of them. If I had been able to speak meowese, what could I possibly have said? ‘That woman you think of erroneously as your mother had not been feeling well, so we decided that, because none of you were being particularly cuddly, we would get another cat who might be more cuddly. Yes, I know his head is twice as big as a 3-year-old child’s, but try to ignore the intimidation factor and look on the bright side. If you’re lucky and don’t get in his face too much he might even occasionally let you eat’?
Or maybe: ‘I am perfectly aware we already have three black cats, and you’re all very nice, and some would say that really is enough but it’s true: we got one more. Think of it as a homage. And please don’t think it’s because we don’t love you, because we do. Oh yes: one other thing. Did I tell you there’s another one arriving in seven days’ time? But she’s grey and very small, so you’ll probably be able to take out your frustration by pushing her around’?
Three days later, I did something that I thought I’d never do, and that I hope I will never do again, as long as I live: I returned a cat. There are the usual bonding and territory marking problems you get when adding to your feline family, and then there is outright tyranny, and Dee and I would not have been able to live easily with the knowledge that our out-of-control cat love – and, more specifically, my preposterous macho cat fantasy – had led us to alienate our gang of long-serving four-legged friends.
I gave Raffles a Raffles-size hug when I arrived back at the RSPCA with him, knowing that, two weeks later, I’d still have the chest scars to prove it. He didn’t look upset. He was a big man, and he could take rejection. But the bewilderment would surely kick in sooner or later, like that of a wrongly convicted prisoner who had been rescued from Alcatraz and been given his own Bel Air mansion with butler service, only to be hurled back into the clink, without explanation, as soon as he had made himself at home. He didn’t even get the privilege of being transferred to one of the more prominent runs. It was back to his old spot in the relegation zone – a place reserved for old cats and black cats, but primarily a place reserved for old black cats. I couldn’t shake my conviction that, in his big, stolid, philosophical way, he would spend the days that followed resting his comedy-sized chin on the edge of his treeless treehouse, wondering what he had done wrong. Leaving Kentford, close to tears, I made Gillian promise that she would let us know as soon as he had been rehomed.
Those three days had been difficult ones for all of us. Shipley hadn’t let his Mohican down past half mast the whole time, and Janet stuck his tongue out in a manner suggestive of utter incomprehension that there could be a black cat in the house more hulking than he was.
Ever since Phyllis had told us about ‘Teddy’ hanging about near the road, we’d been telling ourselves that she was talking about another, less well-behaved bearish black cat, but just before I’d finally given up trying to persuade everyone to come back into the house on Raffles’s first night, I’d seen a small black bottom make a telltale journey over the fence. The only sighting of The Bear in the sixty hours that followed was a flash of two big furious green eyes beneath the pampas grass. Most sad of all, perhaps, was the case of Ralph, who seemed to have fully shaken off last year’s summer affective disorder and had been enjoying the rainy late winter and spring. In a particularly chirpy mood the day after Raffles’s arrival, he somehow contrived to forget all about his new enemy’s presence in the house, and burst happily into the bedroom only to be cornered by a huge black mass of claws and dribble. In the past, we’d often called Ralph himself by the nickname Raffles. Obviously he didn’t know that he’d had his name stolen along with his territory – come to think of it, he probably didn’t even know he was called Ralph either – but it somehow seemed to highlight the aching ignominy all the more.
If Raffles had been a bad cat – a cat who behaved aggressively towards us, as well as towards his own kind, a decision could have been made much more easily. As it was, however, everyone was helpless. Ralph, Shipley, The Bear and Janet couldn’t help the fact that they suddenly had as much chance of getting a quiet sleep in our living room as they had of surviving in the jungles of Vietnam. Raffles couldn’t help the fact that he liked us so much that he wanted us completely to himself. And, as fond as we were of him, we couldn’t help the fact that such fondness could not be put above the more binding kind that has been developed with our pets over many years.
In just one way, perhaps, we could have made the situation very slightly easier.
In the flurry of Raffles’s arrival, Dee and I hadn’t had a chance to check our answerphone. It wasn’t until the following morning that we’d found the message from Dorothy, the woman at Suffenham Parva Cat Rehoming Centre, a few miles south of East Mendleham. This was in response to the enquiry Dee had made with them about their current residents before our trip to the RSPCA. It explained that they had a ‘beautiful ginger boy’ who was a lit
tle bit timid, but extremely keen on the company of other cats, and looking for a good home.
At such a juncture, most sensible people might have surveyed the four animals quivering outside their back door and the zoo-worthy exhibit languidly stretching its back legs in their living room and declared that enough was enough. But, Dee and me being Dee and me, we reached straight for the car keys.
‘It can’t hurt to go and have a look at him, can it?’ we asked. ‘Haven’t we always said that ginger cats have sunny personalities?’ we asked. We did not ask, ‘What if Raffles tears off his head and uses it as a pillow?’
Dorothy, from whose rambling Elizabethan house the Suffenham Parva Cat Rehoming Centre operated, had mentioned on the phone that Beautiful Ginger Boy had been found living in a derelict farmhouse with more than a dozen of his brothers and sisters. Before she rescued him, it had been the RSPCA’s intention to put him to sleep.
‘Of course,’ she thought to add, as she met us at the end of her drive, ‘you do have to understand that he is feral.’ I could see why she might not have wanted to mention the ‘f’ word until she’d got us captive. I’m sure I wasn’t in the minority of cat owners in viewing ferals in the same way as a protective parent might view a gang of hoodlums who regularly stole his or her offspring’s packed lunch. These were the feline outlaws who shunned my outstretched hand, left their scent on my pot plants and could almost certainly be held responsible for the lamentable state of The Bear’s right ear. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help them learn to love and be loved, more that I’d long ago come to the understanding that trying to do so would be as futile as attempting to teach a crab algebra.
‘Of course,’ said Dorothy, ‘the thing about ferals that a lot of people don’t know is that most of them actually get on very well with other cats. They’re actually very easygoing. I’ve got eight of my own. I’m telling you, once you go feral, you don’t go back.’
Intrigued as I was to hear this, I can’t say that my first glance inside the cage in her garage went further towards shattering my preconceptions. The cat lurking there was undoubtedly ginger, and the acrid waft of testosterone that surrounded him pretty much confirmed he was a boy, but easygoing? And beautiful? Beauty was a hard thing to get a handle on, when an animal was this obviously petrified and underweight. Dorothy’s decision to hold his scruff and present him to us on his hind legs, so as to highlight his bulging eyes and protruding tongue, did little to detract from the aura of wildness.
If Dee and I spent longer with Beautiful Ginger Boy than we had done when choosing our other cats, it was perhaps because he didn’t seem that much like a cat at all. Certainly, he had the tail and the cold pink nose and the pointy ears and some of the whiskers (‘the others got chopped off in the trap when the RSPCA caught him,’ said Dorothy) but his pelt had the rough, dry feel more readily associated with an animal you’d find in a warren than a living room.
As we stroked and encouraged, that tongue refused to retract. After about ten minutes, though, something happened. You wouldn’t have quite called it a purr; it was more like a tiny, just-tangible softening of Beautiful Ginger Boy’s breathing. I’d like to say it was the clincher, but in truth Dorothy had had us at hello. All we needed now was a name. On the way to the Rehoming Centre, we’d been having a discussion about brilliantly unlikely cat monikers. Rejecting my perverse suggestions of Gary and Wayne on obvious grounds of taste, Dee had said she had always wanted to have a cat called Pablo, so we decided to go for that.
If I had any concerns about introducing a feral cat to a giant feline extraterrestrial, they were put to bed within about five minutes of getting home. I’d expected more of the same quivering terror we’d seen from Pablo at Suffenham Parva, but within a moment of seeing Raffles stalk across the bedroom, he suddenly became lit from inside, emitted an elated, stuttering squeak, and scuttled up alongside him. It was one of the most effusive cat hellos I’d ever witnessed, and Raffles swatted it away as a dauntless explorer might swat away a tiny gnat in the periphery of his vision. He had bigger fish to fry – ‘fry’ in this case meaning ‘stare at in an intimidating, room-owning fashion’ and fish meaning ‘cats’ (and, in all probability, ‘fish’).
Undaunted, upon being let out of the bedroom to roam the following day, Pablo proceeded to greet Janet, Ralph, Shipley and The Bear the same way, eliciting varying degrees of indifference.
We had been lucky. Who could have said what kind of disquiet might have ensued if Pablo had conformed more squarely to the feral stereotype of the flighty troublecauser? Or maybe Dorothy was right, and all ferals were this gregarious? Whatever the case, Pablo’s status as a born cat’s cat only highlighted Raffles’s incompatibility and confirmed that we would be doing the right thing by taking him out of the equation.
Further confirmation arrived when we returned from our next bittersweet trip to Kentford with Ethel – now renamed Bootsy – who proved much more receptive to Pablo’s advances than her four new housemates. But on the way home, fully conscious that we had swapped an ageing, demanding outsider cat for a young, easygoing, easy-on-the-eye cat, my conscience played havoc with me. It was a bigger version of that feeling I’d had on the way back home with Monty after the death of Tabs, but this time I knew that the sight of Pablo and Bootsy running up the curtains – that is, if they had the time for running up the curtains, between cuddling each other – wasn’t going to be such an instant cure.
East Mendleham is a place of countless retail contradictions: a town bafflingly equipped with no less than four key-cutting outlets, but only one shop selling paint; a place where a person might search in vain for hours in an attempt to get a half-decent sandwich or apple, but find three different shops specializing in bags of dried fruit. Just one of its many oddly conceived stores was the place where I tended to buy my cats’ food during 2005, which, in addition to doing a good line in optimised biscuity nutrition and meaty chunks, also sold rather a lot of camera equipment.
Who knows? Perhaps the owner of Mattock Pet and Camera was convinced that there was an untapped market in people who liked to take snaps of their cats as they chowed down on Applaws’ chicken and cheese range, or maybe he just really, really liked cats, dogs and cameras? It was perhaps a testament to the mixed-up nature of the shop that the biggest picture of a cat – well, a puma, to be precise – was on a poster advertising a zoom lens.
With the wretch-like Pablo tucking into every meal like it was his last, I had cause to stare upon this puma frequently in the weeks following Raffles’s departure, and its resemblance to my rejected pet was uncanny.
‘Oh,’ it would say to me, gazing judgementally down from above the counter, ‘here again buying food for your other cats, are you? That’s nice. I bet they’re pretty too, aren’t they. It’s good to be kind to cats and to feed them and home them. So awful when they end up spending their last good years stuck out in the cold with nobody to take care of them. But don’t you worry about me. I’ll just soldier on, until pneumonia or senility kicks in and then, one day, not long after that, my kind dies out altogether, and there are only interestingly coloured, young, good-looking cats around, and you’ll be able to sleep easy in your nice, warm, comfy bed. Which reminds me, do you still have that old fluffy towel at the bottom of it?’
The cat wants what the cat wants: I only had to look at the six layabouts sprawled decadently on forbidden surfaces all over my house to realise that. But how could I hold such id-led behaviour against them, when I was no better?
Sure, I could come up with a practical ‘reason’ to explain why I’d got each of my six existing cats. I could tell myself that Janet and The Bear were inherited, and Shipley and Ralph had been procured to celebrate our new life together, and Bootsy was the girl cat that Dee had always wanted and Pablo was my own personal first genuine ‘project’ cat. I could look at Bootsy and see a cat that was cuddly, attentive, soothing: a cat that was almost too perfect to be true for Dee, in her convalescing state. I could look at Pablo an
d see a cat who, though still scratchy and bare of fur and nervous of disposition, seemed to somehow know he’d faced a near-death experience and be genuinely grateful for his new home comforts. But I’d be kidding myself if this was all about benevolence, and there was no greed involved. The Raffles debacle had given me a glimpse of the dark-side, shown me just how easily it could be for someone to love cats too much for the good of the cats in their path.
I asked around among our friends to find out if anyone would be interested in Raffles, but got no takers. His surefooted manner would probably have appealed to my dad, but I didn’t want to be responsible for giving The Slink a heart attack. Several times, I picked up the phone to call Gillian at the RSPCA to find out how he was, but I knew that if I’d spoken to her about Raffles, my picture of him alone in his run would have been that much clearer, and that would have made me want to go to see him.
Such a visit would only have ended up with me coming home with him to give it one more try, quite probably with three of his prisonmates, or bedding down for the night in empathy in the cage next to him.
It’s hard to say what would have happened if Gillian hadn’t called when she did to tell us that Raffles had been rehomed with ‘a nice man in his fifties who lived on his own’. By then it had been almost four weeks since I’d first met him, but I’d barely gone an hour without thinking about him. Who knows, perhaps I would have kept pressing down on the lid of that old internal suitcase housing my cat conscience until it finally burst open more violently than ever before, causing me to give up my job, sell all my worldly possessions, Celia Hammond-style, and start my own cattery, with Raffles as the in-house ambassador.
As it was, the fantasy drifted away, and things settled back down into a kind of normality – or at least as close to normality as one can achieve, when they’re on twenty-four-hour call for six separate sets of whiskers. Dee’s health improved, Pablo’s tongue stayed out, Shipley’s Mohican subsided, and Dee and I started to come to the realisation that, while we may have narrowly avoided stepping over one line, we had nevertheless stepped over another: namely, the one that made us no longer ‘people who own a lot of cats’ and suddenly ‘The People Who Own All the Cats’. There were mouths to feed, testicles to get removed, stairs to clean, a never-more-competitive Cat of the Month award to invigilate. But every so often, I’d take a moment to think about where Raffles might be now.
