Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  1. When engaging the attention of toddlers, do not tickle them under the chin or wave Ralph’s favourite fluffy feather stick toy under their noses, in an attempt to get them to bat it about.

  2. When the talk turns to how rambunctious little Edwin/Dylan/Amelie is, do not attempt to work your theories about ‘measuring cat strength being a bit like the foot ball results’8 into the conversation.

  3. Those cat biscuits with the fancy packaging with names like ‘Enticements’ may work as a special treat for Ralph when he is in one of his despondent moods, but they probably will not have the same effect on a colicky juve nile, and could lead to irrevocable digestion problems.

  4. When new-parent friends start to joke about how expensive their offspring’s taste is getting (‘It’s only Waitrose rusks for Minnie!’), try not to see it as an opportunity to talk about Bootsy’s preference for memory foam over polyester.

  5. Do not spend an overt amount of time cuddling Bootsy, since it may make new-parent friends think you are only slightly less bonkers than Tori Amos was when she posed for one of her album covers suckling a pig.

  6. Upon hearing friends discuss the intellectual develop ment of their offspring, do not try to compare it with that of your cats.

  This last one I found particularly difficult. I understood that it must have been a remarkable experience to have the minuscule life that you had created begin to make a noise that sounded vaguely like it was addressing you, or palpably tell the difference between an apple and a radiator. But I’ve talked to lots of parents of 1-year-old children and, in their more honest moments, they’ll admit that at that stage they’re still pretty boring: quarter-people with nothing really to say for themselves. Bootsy, by contrast, was really coming on, and already had more character than the entire combined shortlist for the 2006 Sports Personality of the Year Award. As for Shipley, his elocution was something special. And what of it if he was approaching his fifth birthday? Jamie, the son of our friends Beth and Frank, was almost eight, and he couldn’t even blow his nose properly.

  My cats were not children. I knew that. I reminded myself of it constantly, punishingly. They would not grow up to be astrophysicists, or PR consultants, or underappreciated ceramicists; they would grow up to be slightly more corpulent cats who spent even more of the day sleeping than they already did. I did not have any right to bore my more conventional, child-rearing friends with anecdotes about their behaviour, but that did not mean I didn’t find endless fascination with the way their brains worked.

  It was the sheer range of intellects that one found scattered across the cat firmament that really had me rapt. Take, say, a guinea pig: maybe it has a couple of quirky habits – perhaps it has a particularly frantic squeak and sometimes it gets a bit more of its own excrement stuck in its bum fur than do its more suave contemporaries – but essentially its just the same lovable, snuffly cretin as the rest of its species. Catworld, however, contained multitudes. Even my own small sample of felines ran the gamut from would-be Stephen Hawkings such as The Bear and Bootsy, apparently itching to transcend their physical and communicatory limitations, to out-and-out lunkheads such as Pablo and Janet.

  If Pablo and Janet had been children, I would have been under an obligation to pretend they were semi-bright or ‘just a little different’, and that wouldn’t have done any of us any good. But a cat – even an exceptionally dumb one – will always look through a dishonest man like he is made of plexiglas. If they had the intelligence of asparagus, it was my duty as a right-thinking owner to tell them so. Being called morons didn’t seem to do anything to detract from their self-confidence, and I didn’t love them any less for their mental deficiencies, so everyone was happy.

  Pablo, in particular, positively radiated stupidity. His development had been an inverted version of Booty’s: he’d got gradually fatter and sunnier, without seeming to gain one iota of acumen or cunning. His hopes for an appearance on Mastermind were not aided by that tongue of his, which had barely gone back in his mouth since he’d first passed out on our sofa. We’d been a bit concerned about deformation, but these concerns were eased by our new French-Canadian vet, who explained that the reason Pablo’s primary taste organ was making its presence so strongly felt was simple: he was missing his main two central front teeth, hence there was nothing to hold the pink stuff in.

  When Pablo lay on our bed, there wasn’t anything pretty or decorous about it, in the same way that there isn’t anything pretty or decorous about a slightly overweight bloke sitting on a sofa in his underpants with the TV remote in his hand. Nonetheless, Dee and I didn’t subscribe to favouritism, so we always made sure we took just as many photos of him slobbing out as we took of Ralph beaming and Bootsy doing her picture postcard thing in plant pots. When The Bear dreamed, he always looked like he was in a far-off land, populated by some kind of four-legged master race, but if you’d drawn a thought bubble above Pablo’s head in these pictures, it would have contained nothing more than an aromatic dish of cat meat or – during his more pensive moments – a plump gerbil spinning endlessly round on a wheel.

  More than a year on, I had expected the thrill of being rescued from feral existence to have worn off, but his sleeping and eating habits remained those of a cat who never seemed sure that he wouldn’t be cast back out into the wild at any moment. Where Bootsy and The Bear had long ago learned to discern the difference between the opening of a sachet of beef-flavoured Felix and, say, the unwrapping of a Toffee Crisp bar, the slightest rustle of any plastic or opening of a drawer would send Pablo bounding to the kitchen like Gene Simmons on his way to an encore.

  The way he watched every movement of the bowl always reminded me of a centre forward following the flight of a floating midfielder’s cross. Would he head it between the goalposts of the kitchen island and the banister? No, he would eat every last scrap of its contents, break wind, then find somewhere to sleep it off. When he passed out on the bed afterwards, one couldn’t help but be impressed by the level of relief: that thrill of clean covers and central heating just didn’t seem to get old. The only time I could ever remember yawning and stretching with anything even approaching that much satisfaction was once when I was seven and I’d got in a hot bath after my dad had taken the family on an overambitious, snowy walk in Derbyshire and we’d got lost and not got back to the car until it was pitch black.

  A couple of summers before we’d adopted Pablo and Bootsy, my aunt and uncle had had terrible trouble with a feral cat. This tyrant had unleashed its outsider’s rage on their cats Black-Un, Black and White and Rolly with such gay abandon that all three of them had started emptying their bowels in the bath. Not content with this campaign of fear, the terrorist had brought the battle indoors, prompting my aunt and uncle to install a magnetic cat-flap: a solution of sorts, but not an ideal one for Black-Un, Black and White and Rolly, whose new magnetic collar blocks would often leave them with their heads awkwardly attached to the front of the fridge. No feral had ever given us quite that much trouble, but I’d once woken up in Brunton to find two enormous, presumably feral outlaws fighting in our living room, and just a month or two before first meeting Pablo, an off-white feral tom with a discordant gargle had regularly rained blows on Shipley and Ralph, leading us to a failed experiment in trying to block the cat door during night-time hours.

  But maybe we’d got ferals all wrong. Maybe all my aunt and uncle’s feral wanted was a fridge door that he could get stuck to as well. Perhaps that nasty scratch Shipley had got on his cornea last year was actually the scratch of a paw stretched out in a brave, selfless offer of love. Pablo could get a bit frisky with Bootsy, but I couldn’t imagine him raising one of his big soft mitts to anyone. When, possibly perceiving his new, puffy pompom-like appearance as a threat, Shipley pounced on him, he simply took the hedgehog tactic of curling up into a ball – or, rather, even more of a ball than he already was – until the danger had passed.

  By now, all of my other cats had intricate histories with one anoth
er. When they passed each other on the stairs, they did so carrying the baggage of several hundred stolen warm spots, greedy bottom sniffs, dirty looks, territorial pissings, unjustifiable treats and catnip-based differences of opinion. But as far as I could tell, Pablo bore no grudges. Even he, however, was often on the receiving end of the grudges of others. This is what made his relationship with Janet so odd.

  Over the years, Janet had appeared to have little compunction about filling the role of House Simpleton. Perhaps uncoincidentally, he was also the cat whose psychological state had caused us the fewest headaches. Okay, so he puked like an overfed cross-country runner, and this could cause a bit of a problem when he aimed his powerful jets in the direction of the Zenith and the Nadir, the cats’ strangely named biscuit and water dispensers,9 but I knew the early warning signs now, and could usually move quickly enough to avert disaster.10 And all right, so no other animal in our care smashed more pottery and glassware, and there was that time he’d walked past a candle and set fire to his tail, but there was an equanimity of mood that went hand-inhand with his clumsiness.

  Despite bringing a small forest’s worth of timber into the house via his rear end since we’d moved to Norfolk, Janet had, unlike Ralph, never had anything unsightly feeding on him, nor had he had one of Ralph’s low periods. Unlike Shipley and The Bear, he had never lost a portion of his ear in a fight or reacted negatively to the introduction of a younger housemate. During his leisure time, his tastes remained astoundingly uncomplicated. Where most of his siblings would need catnip bribes and imported battery-powered mice to galvanise them into a brief spasm of kittenish action, he tended to eschew store-bought playthings, preferring to spend many a happy hour slugging a dried bit of noodle or pen top around the living room.

  I had no concrete reason to suspect he was braindamaged. The one incident I was aware of that could have caused such a misfortune was the time when he leaped out of the window in our flat in Blackheath in pursuit of a wood pigeon. He’d seemed a bit woozy afterwards, but our South African vet pronounced him fine, and the lack of inherent common sense highlighted by the leap itself rendered any ‘before and after’ analysis of his mental faculties somewhat moot.

  Still, it would be patronising to conclude that just because an animal is a half-wit, it goes through life without experiencing sadness. As well as being the happy idiot, Janet had something of the dark horse about him, too – and not just in the sense that he was dark, and looked a tiny bit like a horse.

  Occasionally, I would catch sight of him sitting on the balcony outside our kitchen, staring off longingly towards the supermarkets on the other side of the lake, and wonder what he was thinking. The answer was probably, ‘Me see big water, contain many swimming food, overflown by big flying food, me eat, if could swim and fly and encase in yumjelly, but big bright corporate logos in distance scare I’, but it’s just possible there was something sadder lurking deeper in that head of his, and that it wasn’t just one of his recurring ear mites.

  The Bear, Ralph and Shipley had always tolerated Janet – gone so far as to cheerily wrestle with him, even, in Shipley’s case – but they’d done so in the way that one might tolerate a village idiot or a former children’s TV presenter high on punch at a party. I hoped that, in Pablo, he might find a friend on his level, but mostly they just ignored each other. There was the nervous initial bit where Pablo, now accustomed to Shipley’s casual arse-kickings, did the maths in his hyper-aware semi-wild way (‘black fur plus cat equals DANGER . . . minus Mohican and yappy, petulant voice equals NO DANGER’) then a few cursory sniffs and then . . . nothing.

  I couldn’t work out if both of them simply didn’t interest one another, or if each was simultaneously looking at the other and thinking, ‘Check out the dumbo – better give him a wide berth!’ Soon, though, I began to notice a subtle closeness developing between them. Perhaps I took a bit longer to catch on because there were so many noisier, more exhibitionist cat relationships being moulded elsewhere in the house, but it was definitely there. Often I’d find them in one of the house’s less frequently used rooms, sleeping a foot apart from one another. An hour later, I’d re-enter the room and notice that Pablo had moved a few inches closer to his fluffy companion, or that they’d begun to sleep in formation, legs splayed in perfect symmetry.

  Did either of these cats know what they were getting themselves into? What had broken the ice? Had they bonded when Pablo had mentioned to Janet that he, too, liked chasing bits of dried noodle around the living room floor? Or had Janet simply seen Pablo’s ginger fur and started to get fuzzy flashbacks to that decrepit fox he used to pal up with in Blackheath?

  Would they grow steadily closer before taking a tenancy agreement on the shed at the bottom of our garden? Doubtful. Would this end with the two of them taking out a mortgage together, or sipping cocktails beneath a palm tree on their honeymoon? Almost certainly not. In the end, they were just two very stupid animals, free of status anxiety or concerns about financial betterment, huddling together out of the cold.

  Funnily enough, that didn’t make it any less interesting to watch.

  What would my life have been like, by now, if I hadn’t chosen to own cats? On a surface level, it might not have been all that different. In many ways, cats would not appear to have affected my existence very much at all. I still met people in my working and social life every week without the subjects of cats coming up at all. Within a couple of months of meeting me, most friends would probably know that I liked golf and seventies rock music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but only the closest of them would know I liked cats. Maybe I had a bit of hair on my clothes from time to time and the odd scratch on my hand, but one didn’t wear one’s cat love on one’s sleeve in the same way that one wore one’s other interests. Loving cats wasn’t like loving skiing or comic books or arthouse films: when you walked into a pub, you usually didn’t feel the need to tell people about it, either stylistically or verbally. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I liked cats, it was just that a lot of the time it was hidden, by custom and by nature.

  At the same time, though, I knew, with the obvious exception of Dee, my parents and my nan, cats had probably done more to shape who I was than any of my other loves. When times had been difficult over the last few years, it was my cats that had kept me sane. Would Dee have recovered quite as well from her migraines without cats around? It was impossible to tell, but one thing was certain: they hadn’t not helped. What would Dee and I have done in the darkest hours of our property disaster if we’d not been distracted by Ralph getting stuck up a tree or Janet sitting on The Bear’s back? When I’d chased Felix around the house all those years ago as a toddler, I might have been primitive in my methodology, but I’d hit early upon a universal truth: cats did function as living stress-relief balls. Certainly, they made you stressed sometimes, but when living alongside creatures this fundamentally ridiculous, how could one not keep a sense of humour through life’s daily crises?

  I felt sorry for people who came home to the deflated atmosphere of mogless homes. I wondered how they survived. Every day, I was lucky enough to witness a miniature soap opera being played out amidst my furniture. Without it, I would have been lost.

  When Dee and I had decided to upgrade from four cats to six, we told ourselves that there was no real difference. In truth, there was a very real difference. There had been no hiding the new additions from Dee’s parents this time – or at least not without a padlock, a muzzle and a tub of black paint. We also noticed that we spent more time observing our cats than ever before. How could we not, when there was so much going on?

  I could assure myself that I didn’t go on holiday very often or for very long because I was a homebody or because I was a workaholic, but that wouldn’t have been telling myself the whole story. If I was a bit more honest, I could have said it was because I found the idea of putting my cats in a cattery a little horrifying, or that I was worried that, if we left them at home on their own for too long, soon
er or later Janet would block up the Zenith or the Nadir with his regurgitated uber-chunks, but even then I would not quite have been getting to the core of the matter. Quite simply, I did not want to spend much time away from my cats.

  It may not have always been obvious, but my cats were moulding the way I lived all the time, in all kinds of ways. When, in 2006, I decided to fulfil a lifelong dream by spending a year competing as a pro golfer, one of the most important parts of the planning of my schedule was weighing up how much I’d miss my cats while I was away at tournaments. As well as helping decide where I lived, my cats dictated what time I got up in the morning, how long I stayed at parties, the scheduling of my weekly food shop, the layout of the inside of my house, the layout of the outside of my house.

  All this had been happening for a long time now, but since the arrival of Pablo and Bootsy, there was no escaping the fact that I was another half as much under the paw as I’d been before.

  My life, much as it sometimes seemed so, was not a game of cat pontoon, and I seemed to have reached a cat limit of sorts. But I knew just how little it would take for me to let my self-discipline slip. This was the eternal temptation of cat ownership: no matter how covered your house was in fur, no matter how much of a twenty-four-hour servant you had become to your cats, it was always possible to convince yourself that there was room for one more, that it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

  After all, you didn’t need a licence to own a cat. You didn’t need to build them a kennel. They looked after themselves, didn’t they? That propaganda about cat independence is strong stuff and can work its magic on the wisest of us. The paradox of that independence, however, is that it is also what makes the average, free-roaming cat so much more fragile and harder to own than so-called ‘commitment pets’. It’s another part of the smallprint many of us don’t read when we sign up for the grand Cat Contradiction.