Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond

by Cox, Tom

  Shipley is also enthusiastic for the lip-stroke, and if he doesn’t get a chance to rub his face across my hand first thing in the morning, will essentially shout abuse at me for the following three hours. Shipley, however, has never liked a brush running across the side of his mouth. If someone put some bristles against my lips, I’d be tempted to give them a good slapping, but nothing made Samson happier. With that itch scratched, he fell into a deep sleep on Daniel’s lap, while Louise gently stroked his scruff.

  Selecting a cat isn’t like selecting a car or a house. Perhaps it might be sensible, after meeting certain moggies for the first time, to go back home and have a deliberating period before making a final decision, but etiquette can make such a course of action tricky. After all, what are you going to go home and discuss? The cat’s resale value? Whether that wear and tear on its paws is going to prove a long-term problem? In a situation where a member of the cat’s extended family is present, there’s also the worry about offending.

  Daniel and Louise would later tell me that from the moment Samson fell asleep, they knew they wanted him to be theirs, but at the time when they announced that they intended to take him home, I worried that they felt pressured, concerned about wasting Charles’ time.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go away and think about it for a couple of days?’ I asked. Had my public relations drive been too strong? In the last few minutes, I’d begun to see Samson through different eyes. I’d used phrases like ‘docile’, ‘affectionate’ and ‘big dribbling sopball’ when describing him to Louise and Daniel. But, at root, had I just pushed them into getting an overweight cat with an overzealous jaw and a bad habit of ripping up sofas?

  With Louise and Daniel’s decision made, Charles began to gather up Samson’s possessions. These included four large bags of cat biscuits, two brushes, some form of special cat doormat, around four feather-on-a-stick toys, six or seven catnip mice and fish. We were all surprised enough to see Charles making a second journey to what he called ‘The Samson Cupboard’, and by the third trip, which yielded a cat play-centre the size of a small dollhouse, a ceramic likeness, several cat books and what I can only describe as the first feline skateboard I had ever seen, there seemed little doubt that what we were dealing with here was the most loved cat in Norfolk.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Charles, as, wedged up to our chins with paraphernalia, we made our way to Daniel and Louise’s car. ‘It’s not essential, and naturally it’s entirely up to you, but I thought I’d just let you know that he has been used to getting at least one chicken wing every day.’

  A fortnight later, a memorial was held for Ruby at her house. There was little elbow space anywhere downstairs, and almost every neighbour and friend I’d met at Ruby’s popular end-of-year neighbourhood parties was present. On mantelpieces and tables sat a selection of photographs of her. In these, she always looked bright-eyed and happy and was more often than not holding a cat. Other moggies from her past – many of them also ginger, and impressively upholstered – were pictured, but Samson had the edge on them, and I would estimate that scattered around the house, his image could be spotted a couple of dozen times. Every time I turned round to speak to another person, I was asked the same question: ‘How’s Samson getting on?’

  Fortunately, I’d been to Daniel and Louise’s house just the night before, so was able to provide a positive answer, without too much sugarcoating, which, only a few days previously, might not have been the case.

  ‘It’s more tense than a Gaza negotiating table here,’ Daniel had told me after Samson’s first night at his new home. ‘We’re teetering on the brink of peace with a unilateral cease-claw from Ellie and Daisy.’ Samson, it transpired, had no respect for the social hierarchy that put Ellie at the top of the animal household, Daisy second, Rosie the dog third and any newcomer a distant fourth. He spent much of his first twenty-four hours hiding behind the sofa, and was reportedly finding the laminate floors, surround sound hi-fi system and lack of coal fire ‘confusing’.

  On day two he’d attempted to jump up onto a dining chair to get to where the cat food was kept, missed his footing and dragged the seat pad down on top of him. Louise had found him lying upside down, with the cushion still on him, and an expression that seemed to communicate the statement: ‘How did I get here, and can you help?’ Piled unappetisingly on top of this hardship was his new chicken-wing-free, dry-food-only diet.

  But by the time of my visit, Samson seemed, if not comfortable with his new environment, then at least less defeated by it. Ellie and Daisy had begun to realise that, though a far less intelligent creature than them, prone to making plenty of faux pas in the arena of catiquette, he was a maker of love, not war (though thankfully not in the Pablo and Bootsy sense). And, as he plodded over and plonked himself down on top of me on Daniel’s sofa, did I detect just a slight difference in weight?

  Having conveyed this information, in the most positive terms, to Ruby’s mourners, I moved into the kitchen, where I found Gaynor, and Ruby’s former cleaner, Barbara. Both were lifelong cat owners, and talked fondly about Samson’s habits: the way he never seemed to drink from his water bowl, but instead liked to splash and stir its contents with one foraging paw; his immense need to be in any room containing a human. This led Barbara to talk about Bonzo, the naughty yet faithful cat she’d had in her early years in Norfolk, who’d liked to walk, unsummoned, to church every Sunday with her, her two children and the family Labrador, and who had once spent a terrified night stuck in the vestibule with the spirits of more pious felines.

  This afternoon was a celebration of Ruby – her communal spirit, her sprightly erudition, the misunderstandings caused by her bad hearing, even – but it was inevitably also a celebration of the cats who’d kept her company, and made her solitary final years so much less solitary. On my way to the door, another neighbourly couple – a curly-haired laughing woman and her husband, a bald landscape gardener I wanted to call Roy, even though his name was John – stopped me and asked me about Samson’s whereabouts.

  ‘Oh, our daughter was terribly worried about him,’ they said. ‘She’s going to be so relieved. We would have taken him ourselves if he hadn’t found a home.’ So here was the confirmation: Samson had a fan club.

  Before I left, Charles handed me a plastic bag. ‘I forgot to give you these,’ he said. I’d not felt tearful once since Ruby died, perhaps because so much positivity surrounded her life, very nearly until the very end, but what I found inside the bag made my throat catch: six coasters, all emblazoned with a slightly faded photograph of Samson, looking never more puddle-like, gazing up blankly but lovingly at the camera – or, more likely, at the fresh chicken wing in the other hand of the person holding it.

  I’ve only seen Samson once since then. It was several months later, and he was a far slimmer figure. As he lumbered across Daniel’s laminate floor, he had a look of a cat wearing a big ginger jumper. In certain more unfeeling human circles, the flesh around his arms might have been described as ‘bingo wings’. But he retained the slowness of a big cat.

  In the time since then, Daniel has kept me up to date on his progress. Though he’s lost more weight, he’s still big enough to be seen from space. That is to say: when Daniel logged onto Google Earth to look at a picture of his house, he noticed a large ginger spillage in the corner of the driveway clearly visible as Samson.

  As winter comes on, Samson spends most of his time curled up in Rosie’s dog bed, but he’s also prone to wander off for periods of a day or two, then return, covered in mud or oil, to calmly inquire about that evening’s menu. Daniel’s theory is that he has a special passion for exploring garden sheds, but when their owners come to close them, he doesn’t have the speed or ingenuity to remove himself from them that other cats might, though always seems to land on his feet – even if this is rarely in a literal sense.

  The arrival of Daniel and Louise’s first child, Molly, does not seem to have fazed Samson. His biting is not quite as overzealous a
s it was, though can sometimes lead Daniel to turn up for work looking like he’s been self-harming. His enthusiasm for the Panic Mouse remains undaunted. One of Daniel’s Samson emails included a link to some video footage of one of his attacks on the unfortunate battery-operated beast, as in the background the Kaiser Chiefs sang ‘I Predict a Riot’, a song which only slightly gave the impression of mocking the actions it sound-tracked. I’m not sure that Dr Alex German would have been too impressed with Samson’s performance. There’s a break in the middle for a daydream. There are some fairly busy skills from the front paws, but the posterior doesn’t really join in. That, though, is perhaps the eternal nature of Samson: business in front, party in the back. A sort of feline version of the mullet haircut.

  I gave Daniel Samson’s coasters, but, somehow, in the process, one was left in my living room. I keep meaning to post it back, but Daniel has told me not to worry about it, so it stays on the coffee table. Shipley isn’t supposed to sit on this table, but then I’m not supposed to eat fizzy cola bottle sweets: I still do, and there’s not much anybody’s ever been able to do about it. He rarely sits on the surface itself, as he prefers his posterior – still large, but not dangerously so, by Alex German standards – to be cushioned by a placemat or a coaster. It’s perhaps my imagination, but he does seem to spend much of his time sitting on Samson’s face.

  ‘Dream on,’ I tell him. And, settling down, that’s perhaps exactly what he does: dozing off into a parallel world where he is the fattest, the coolest, and ginger cats crumple and submit at the terrifying, descending sight of his formidable, amply cushioned bottom.

  Animals I Have Considered

  Stealing. Number Two:

  Grumpy Bat

  NAME:

  George the Bat (unconfirmed).

  OCCUPATION:

  Various posts as Back-Up Haunter, Fake Undead, and Session Spook, Office of British Hauntings, East Anglian Division, 2009–10.

  HOME:

  The Hellmouth, South Norfolk, UK (‘Second left after the BP Station, you can’t miss it, if you see the electrical wholesalers on your right you’ve gone too far . . .’)

  BRIEF CV:

  Brought in by Pablo and abandoned upside down near cat flap, apparently unchewed, presumably on the grounds of being ‘one of them unlucky ghostmouses’. George looked a bit dead at first, then began to silently scream at me, with a face even more expressive and strangely human than that of Gizmo from Gremlins, before flying up to perch on the ledge of the sliding doors in the living room. Here, he proceeded to make chuntering noises. These, while on first hearing are easy to mistake for pure panic at being in an unfamiliar environment, soon came to feel like judgements cast down from on high: not just on Pablo, Shipley and Bootsy, all of whom were watching sceptically from below, but on me, my new brightly coloured t-shirt from the sale rack in H&M, and even, ultimately, the copy of Frampton Comes Alive! I had left out on the dining table. George was eventually captured in a ‘Golf: Violating the Rules of Fashion for 300 Years’ novelty coffee mug and released gently back into the wild.

  PROS:

  Constant griping good for stamping out complacency, both personal and cat-based: ‘Are you going to be nice and shut up, Shipley, or do you want me to go and get the bat?’ Tremendously effective shoulder accoutrement of the ‘people might not notice it at first, but when they do they won’t stop talking about it’ variety. Potentially awesome weapon to send through the bedroom windows of sleeping enemies on recondite ear-whispering missions.

  CONS:

  Grumpiness. Guilt trips. Constant conversations in the ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Nothing . . . I’m FINE’ ilk. Public appearances leading to misunderstandings with overzealous Goths. Unresolved heartbreak over the The People Sheep could get in way of Making a New Start.

  Put Your Money on a Pony

  After everything that eventually happened between us, it would probably be a bit too easy for me to say now that I could tell Boris was a problematic sort right from the moment I first set eyes on him. I’ll also admit that there have been times that I’ve not been the best judge of character on first impressions. But I can remember that in this particular instance the alarm bells did ring unusually loudly, right from the off. I know that there are those who were there at the time who will say that that’s rubbish, that I’m imposing a non-existent narrative on unconnected events. And if that is their opinion, I accept it. It is wrong, but I accept it. I was there, and I know what I saw and heard.

  The first time I met Boris would have been in the summer of 2007, on one of those perfectly cloudless, friend-packed, not particularly goal-orientated days that are ten-a-penny in your youth but become all too precious in your thirties: a day when everyone is wrapped in a collective mood that’s lethargic, just slightly giggly, and any future or past more than twelve hours distant seems temporarily immaterial. Even though Dee and I had messed up our map-reading on the way to the stables, putting Steve and Sue and Karl and Naomi, in the car behind us, and Leo, in the car behind them, through a u-turn assault course and making everyone half an hour late, nobody seemed to hold it against us. We were set to have a picnic on Holkham beach later that afternoon, one of the most spectacularly beautiful spots in Britain, let alone Norfolk, and everyone was excited. Everyone except Boris, who, from pretty much the second we got out of the car, mainly just grumbled and dragged his feet. One thing was for sure: from the way he was acting, nobody would have suspected for a moment that I’d been generous enough to refrain from asking him to go halves on the olives and salami that we’d brought from the grocers in Aylsham.

  Back when I was a teenager, I had a habit of pulling leaves off trees and bushes as I walked past them. I know it was wrong, and I’ve grown out of it. Such low-level vandalism is just about forgivable in a thirteen-year-old, but Boris was mature enough to know better and I’m not kidding when I say he stopped at almost every bit of foliage we passed and yanked a piece off it. We’re talking quintessential, malevolent, adolescent boredom.

  Then there was the moment when Naomi pointed out the stable door which concealed the gelding called Conker, and said how it was funny because, the way his name on the door was written, it actually looked more like ‘Cancer’ and Boris just sort of snorted derisively, like he was above all of us. Even if he hadn’t thought it was funny, it wouldn’t have cost him anything to laugh, just for the sake of Naomi’s feelings.

  Dee often finds excuses for that kind of behaviour on behalf of the likes of Boris, and maybe Boris, being the one true local among us, was looking at the situation from another angle, taking the environment for granted. But the way I saw it, we were in one of the prettiest parts of North Norfolk, the sun was shining, hares were leaping in the fields, and you’d have to be a singularly ungracious, stubborn individual not to give in and bask in the good vibrations.

  ‘I think he’s a bit of a git,’ I said to Dee, careful not to let him hear me.

  ‘I can’t believe you would say that,’ whispered Dee. ‘Give him a chance.’

  ‘He’s really truculent. And to be perfectly frank, he smells. I can’t see myself even staying friends with him after this.’

  ‘You never know. You might grow to like him.’

  It really wasn’t that I had anything against the way Boris looked. He was pretty easy on the eye, in a hirsute kind of way, and seemed to know it. I also wasn’t really intimidated by his handsomeness. I mean, I was actually a bit taller than him, although I could tell, when I stood near him, just from the way he was carrying himself, that he’d kidded himself into believing he had a couple of inches on me.

  Mostly, I just felt sorry for Steve, whose bad luck it had been to end up riding Boris. Steve is a very confident guy, with a sharp and notoriously filthy sense of humour, who’ll often be at the helm of the conversation in whatever room he’s in, but we were in Boris’s kingdom now, and Boris wasn’t going to let him get the better of him. From where I stood with Leo, we had a good view of Boris’s truculence in f
ull effect – the leaf munching, the dawdling, the ultra-sarcastic ‘harrumphing’, the refusal to respond in the slightest as Steve pulled on his reins – and the two of them had dropped well behind the rest of the party.

  The original plan had been for Steve, Sue, Karl, Naomi, Dee and me to go riding together, but then, late on, Leo had called, and it turned out the stables did not have an extra horse available for him to ride, so, rather than leaving Leo on his own, I’d dropped out, forfeiting the fee I’d paid for my own ride.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ everyone had asked me, and I’d gladly received the sympathy, subtly playing up my martyrdom. In truth, I was ecstatic. In the handful of times I’d ridden before, I’d far from mastered it, and remained nervous around horses. Horses, meanwhile, were fully aware of this, and, I was convinced, had a habit of goading me accordingly.

  I knew Dee loved horses when I first met her, but I wasn’t aware of quite how much until our second holiday together, in Devon, when she asked me to stop the car so she could say hello to some of the indigenous ponies that roam across Dartmoor. Before long, three of them were in the front seat with me, eyeing me beadily and chewing the steering wheel. The steering wheels on Ford Focuses from the 1999–2001 era are a bit rubbery and no great pleasure to pass through your hands, but that didn’t mean saliva and bite marks were going to improve their design. Dee, however, seemed unconcerned, and was standing outside the car simultaneously enclosing two of the other ponies in her arms, with a gummy, toddler-like grin on her face.

  ‘Give them a hug,’ she said. ‘Don’t be scared.’