Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond

by Cox, Tom

  During a routine examination in May that year, the vet held a stethoscope to Janet’s chest and looked up at me gravely.

  ‘I’m afraid she has a heart murmur,’ he said.

  I opened my mouth to do what I always do when I take Janet to the vet, which is explain exactly why he’s not a she – a story which usually involves a shrug and the use of the phrase ‘it’s very fluffy down there’ – but thought better of it. Instead I asked, ‘So what exactly does that mean?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t mean too much right now,’ said the vet. ‘We use a scale of one to six to measure the intensity of the murmur, and she’s a three, which means she’s not in need of medication at this point. Do you ever notice her panting?’

  ‘Yes, quite often.’

  ‘The important thing is to keep her away from activities that get her overexcited.’

  After packing Janet back into his extra-large cat basket and enduring a couple of particularly fervent fart-hisses, I began to ponder the vet’s advice. Precisely what activities did get Janet overexcited? And how would I keep him away from them? It wasn’t as if I could sit him down quietly and break it to him that the time had come in his life to give up his pentathlon ambitions and stay away from Norfolk’s many tempting topless bars. Much of his energetic life took place far away from me, in an unknown nocturnal world. The best I felt I could do in the circumstances was intercede when Shipley made a beeline for him and keep him away from uncut catnip. I also began to feed him in a separate area to the other cats. Yet no amount of food seemed to satisfy Janet. He always seemed skittish, weaving around my legs asking for more, asking for something, but not, evidently, affection.

  In addition to constant hunger, Janet’s illness manifested itself in another, more unexpected way, too: tidying.

  As anybody who owns them knows, cats are remarkably clean animals. This is because they are uniquely skilled in wiping the dirty parts of themselves on other things and people. Possessing a particular talent for this is Janet, who, after a journey outside, will leave approximately a third of his loose unwanted body mass on the carpet and duvet cover. He’s always been a thorough groomer, but after he became ill, his cleaning sessions gained a new intensity. The vet told me that this was a symptom of stress. I’m not sure, however, that you could put his new, rather curious style of extracurricular cleaning down to the same thing.

  Because of the structure of my house, the fence to the front of it, and the gradient of the hill it’s built into, my garden is not easily accessible to intruders. The place, however, has always been a magnet for litter. On those Wild West Friday nights in which East Mendleham specialises, bottles and chip trays fly over the fence and catch in the hilly, loamy beds to the right of the house. Meanwhile, old crisp packets, bottles and cans often wash up on the shore of the lake at the bottom of the garden. These are the danger spots, and, apart from that, the rest of the garden is usually pretty clean. But for the last few weeks, I’d noticed a new, creeping spread to the litter, into the main part of the garden, directly behind the building.

  When Dee and I first bought the house, it had been only part-occupied for the preceding months, and we found chewing gum, condom wrappers and cigarette butts on the patio – a sure sign that kids had been using it as a venue for multi-purpose lurking. It seemed unlikely that the culprits had mysteriously returned after four and a half years – they would probably have grown out of such pursuits, having almost started primary school by now – but it seemed equally unlikely that the wind had blown quite this much litter to the direct rear of the house. It started to occur to me that the only reason for finding five empty packets of Spicy Tomato Wheat Crunchies on your flagstones was that someone had been sitting on your flagstones, eating five packets of Spicy Tomato Wheat Crunchies.

  I tried to stay vigilant, keeping my eyes and ears open, even contemplating creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and bursting abruptly out the back door and shouting ‘CAUGHT YOU!’ but to no avail. The litter continued to accumulate, in the area directly behind the back door and my study window, with no obvious source. Before long, disposing of soggy Mr Kipling packets and crinkled, greying Sunblest bags became no less an intrinsic part of my morning ritual than making coffee, turning the kitchen tap to a trickle to meet Bootsy’s demanding thirst-related needs and shouting at the presenters of BBC Breakfast for speaking to me as if I was simple.

  What was almost as spooky as the appearance of the litter was its frequent vintage. I’m aware that there are some fairly timeworn products knocking around East Mendleham – one of its kebab shops had only recently got rid of the last of a supply of bright red ring-pull Coke cans that I’d suspected were ‘retro’ in a worryingly genuine way – but many of the brands residing in my flowerbed hadn’t been widely available in supermarkets since the last Conservative government. ‘Do people still really eat Mini Gems?’ I found myself asking. The following weekend, I even found some Bird’s Instant Whip, a product with which I hadn’t come into contact since my mum flicked some of it at my dad and my Uncle Tony on a family camping trip in 1984.

  Of course, I’d seen Janet lazing about next to the rubbish as it appeared, but it didn’t initially occur to me to connect the pile of litter with the pile of cat alongside it. Janet, who’s more of a dozer than a sleeper, can do his lazing in a remarkably eclectic array of habitats, and his penchant for hard surfaces was one of the quirks of his middle-age, alongside his ever-loudening yawn and that increasingly ubiquitous fart-hiss. If he was lying on the flagstones, next to a faded box that once contained some Findus Crispy Pancakes, was that really such odd behaviour for an eleven-year-old cat debilitated by a heart murmur and an IQ of twelve? Maybe not. I did, however, start to have my suspicions when one day I found him loitering just outside the back door, meowing mournfully, with a full, sealed bag of pre-Gary Lineker era Walkers Salt & Vinegar sitting a matter of millimetres from him on the ground. These suspicions were confirmed during one of the final days of summer 2008, with the help of Deborah next door.

  For some reason known only to them, it delights my cats when I go out into the garden. If the weather is balmy, and it’s been a day or two since I’ve ventured out, it will take a matter of seconds before each of them emerge onto the lawn alongside me. It’s as if they are celebrating me coming to my senses and realising that true life is not spent in front of a TV, cooker or computer, but in the undergrowth, rooting out voles and marking the pampas grass with the most quint essential scent I can muster. Shipley is particularly hyperactive in this situation, and will usually hurtle down the steep lawn behind me, building the momentum needed to shin up his favourite apple tree at the bottom of the slope. As a single, continuous, fifty-yard move ending at the summit of the second-highest tree in the garden, it’s impressive, but perhaps not quite as much so as Shipley believes, and I will often puncture his self-delight by heading straight back towards the house. At this point he will chase me back up the lawn, clapping the back of my legs in outrage.

  I’m sure all this looks very odd to normal people, such as the taciturn gardener who’d done some clearance for Dee and me earlier in 2008: one of those slow-moving, brusque, dog-owning, inexpressive fiftysomething men who seem to live in every third cottage in Norfolk. No doubt Phil from Get Yer Phil Garden Maintenance was bemused to find a small, demanding, grey she-cat repeatedly hurling herself in front of his feet as he walked up the lawn, while her owner collected wet, crumpled packets of Salted Chipsticks from the undergrowth, while getting his calves clawed by a bigger, black male cat who appeared to swear, rather than meow. Phil remained cool in the face of Bootsy’s flirtation, but I liked to think I could see the mental battle going on behind his eyes: one part of him screaming ‘Go on! Stroke her! You know you want to!’ while the other countered with ‘No! Don’t be so preposterous! You are a man approaching sixty with a German shepherd and an extensive collection of trowels! Think what this would do to your reputation!’ I decided then was not the time to warn him abo
ut the demanding frenzy Shipley will go into any time he spots a man wearing gardening gloves, an item of outdoor wear which he perceives as a slightly dirtier, but no less enjoyable, alternative to his favourite pet mitt.

  Having lived next door to me for a number of years, Deborah is far more accustomed to observing this kind of chaos, but I was still a little embarrassed to see her emerge from behind the hedge and spot me holding in one hand a soggy Golden Virginia packet and a water-filled bag formerly hosting some Merry Maid chocolate caramels, and on the other a gardening glove, with which I was massaging Shipley’s scruff, to his beatific delight. We greeted each other in the usual way: her asking after the cats’ health, a brief update on the unrequited love between The Bear and Biscuit, and my usual apologies for the numerous occasions recently when Ralph had sat in a bush in her garden and howled his own name at the top of his voice.

  ‘More litter, then?’ she said, acknowledging the contents of my left hand. ‘It’s amazing what he does with it. I’ve never seen a cat do that before.’

  ‘Who? Do what?’

  ‘Who? Janet, of course! Who else? I see him fishing it out of the lake and walking up your garden with it between his teeth. He brought some up to my back door the other day. An old packet of fisherman’s bait, I think.’

  With the possible exception of Pablo, Janet had, over the years, been arguably the least enigmatic of my cats. He’d never really had much time for gammon or smoked salmon or even the more expensive cat food Dee and I sometimes purchased for The Bear. Maybe it was because he originally hailed from the East End of London, but he liked his meat as jellified as possible, with no frills. Had he been one of my male friends, on a night out, he would have been the kind who insisted on finishing up in a kebab shop, and would make a point of getting on first-name terms with the owner, in hope of future discounts. His life as a predator, meanwhile, was simple and uncompetitive compared to his feline housemates. Essentially, put him in an evenly matched tussle on the kitchen floor with half a Savoy cabbage, and he was happy.

  Unlike The Bear or Bootsy, Janet never gave me the sense that he was plotting to take over the world, and, unlike Shipley and Ralph, he never gave me the sense that he was plotting to take over me, but, like all cats, he had his mysteries, even if they were slightly vacant ones. His love of litter was the biggest and most vacant yet. Without doubt, I was grateful that he was saving me making my weekly trip to the lakeside to collect the detritus from the shore, but was being helpful really his intention? Was a crumpled, squashed can of Lilt just a ‘present’: his pacifist’s version of the shrews and voles Shipley, Ralph and Pablo left outside the bedroom door? I felt it was more than that: that he was looking to find some cure for his ills in the depths of his garbage.

  In her later years, my parents’ last cat, Daisy, had suffered from an overactive thyroid gland. Admittedly, when her thyroid problems began, Daisy had never looked for solace in three-year-old Blackcurrant Flavour Ice Snappers or Original Pom-Bears: The Teddy-Shaped Potato Snack, but I was familiar with some of the other symptoms of the disease, so when I took Janet to the vet, concerned about his further weight loss, I wasn’t surprised to hear my fears confirmed. Dee and I were left with two choices to treat Janet’s hyperthyroidism: a daily course of tablets, or an expensive radiation procedure in which Janet would be sent away for several weeks to have the tumour in his thyroid gland shrunk.

  We knew that committing to the former option would mean that there would never again be a time in Janet’s life when he would not need medication, but we also were reluctant to choose the latter – not just because of the astronomical cost, but because it would mean sending a lonely, confused cat with a heart condition away from home for what to us would seem an agonisingly long period and what to him would probably seem an endless one.

  The tablets were slow to take effect at first, and Janet initially continued to lose weight. Way back when another vet had originally corrected Dee on his true gender, the vet had laughed, pointing out how unlikely it was that a cat so big could be female. In the past visitors had ‘coo!’d and ‘cor!’d over Janet’s size. But now when I picked him up, he seemed more dishcloth than cat. If not for his impressive fluff, there would have been nothing to him.

  Now that his hobby had been rumbled, he appeared to see no point in hiding his love of litter, and began to deposit it inside the house, with added sound effects. Bringing in, for example, a yellowing packet formerly containing some Wildlife Choobs jellybeans (Tagline: ‘Baby Koalas are the size of a jellybean when they’re born!’), he would announce his discovery with a mournful wail. It was the kind of noise you might imagine a cat making after it had waved its family off on holiday, only to see the miniature car they were driving plunge over the side of a deep harbour.

  I noticed that often, it seemed that the greener, older and more anonymous the litter, the louder the keening sound. To hear such a haunting wailing was baffling, but also somehow appropriate. Some of the cellophane bags he was bringing in were so old there seemed a genuine possibility they could contain their own resident spectre. Perhaps most worrying of all was the moment when I stumbled upstairs to make breakfast and almost stepped on a six-year-old used condom. Closer inspection, carried out with some rubber gloves, revealed it to be a more innocent item: a wet, cellophane tube of indeterminate – though almost certainly not carnal – heritage. However, I could not help but view it as a warning. I knew, from the mating calls I often heard from East Mendleham Park, that it was not impossible that the worst could one day happen: I might step sleepily past the cat flap one day, feel an unpleasant squelchy sensation, and realise I had a prophylactic attached to my big toe.

  In the period Janet’s illness had developed, there had been two major bird problems around the lake at the centre of East Mendleham. Firstly, for the previous eighteen months, the water had been infested with poisonous blue-green algae, decimating the local duck and goose population. Signs were posted on lampposts asking the public not to make the problem worse by throwing bread into the water, and even the old man who swore while throwing Hovis at the ducks had toned down his act somewhat.

  Admittedly, the second bird problem was one that didn’t impact on quite so much of the locality, but to my cats, it was no less critical. In recent weeks, an avian tormentor – I have no idea what kind of avian tormentor as it kept its identity top secret – had begun to imitate the whistle I used for my cats at mealtimes.

  I already had a certain amount of experience with birds that mimicked the sounds of domestic life. A previous example of this was the Telephone Bird, which, for a couple of months, had sat outside the kitchen window, replicating the ring of the house’s landline. Even more impressive, perhaps, was the Pablomeow Bird, whose cheep was a near-exact replica of the frenzied noise Pablo made at times of hunger. The Foodwhistle Bird, however, was more sophisticated than its predecessors. Its taunts were not just designed to bamboozle but to seriously mess up a cat’s diary.

  My cats could probably just about distinguish between the noise I made and the noise the Foodwhistle Bird made, but it was a close call and, as it started its merry tune, Pablo and Janet could often be seen bolting through the cat flap into the kitchen, an eager look on their faces. Even at times of low-level hunger, their more unflappable peers, such as The Bear, could be seen opening one vaguely inquiring eye as it whistled. I was not sure if it was a mockingbird in any official sense, but even if it wasn’t, it probably should have been made an honorary one. One thing was for sure: if at this point my cats were to co-author a book with the same title as a famous mid-twentieth-century novel written by Harper Lee, its theme would not be racial tension in the Deep South.

  I had actually come across a nascent Foodwhistle Bird before, about fifteen years previously, while living with my parents, but this latest one was far more skilled at disorientating its victims. On one hand, I had to sit back and marvel at what an amazing evolutionary step it seemed to mark for mimicry. ‘What could possibly come afte
r the Foodwhistle Bird?’ I wondered. ‘The Really Hungry Tiger Bird? The Seinfeld Slap Bass Bird? The Jeremy Paxman Clearing His Throat On University Challenge Bird?’ On the other hand, I decided to put my awe aside and take some action, for the good of my cats’ sanity. After all, I’d been using the same whistle for the various cats in my life for three decades now, and perhaps the Foodwhistle Bird was a sign that it was time for a change.

  I went over a few options. I could have experimented with an entirely new whistle, but who’s to say that, in time, that wouldn’t have been appropriated by the Foodwhistle Bird as well? There was also the option of reverting to a roll call of names, but that seemed like needless extra work. Instead, I opted for my vinyl copy of ‘My Sharona’, the 1979 American number one hit by the power pop band The Knack. I’m not sure quite how the decision came about, other than one night at jellied meatslop-dispensing time I happened to be listening to it, and its jerky, near-spastic rhythms seemed appropriate to the manic process of feeding half a dozen furry forces of nature – particularly when Pablo mistimed a jump from the chair to the kitchen work surface and dive-bombed unceremoniously into a shelf of cookbooks.

  In truth, I couldn’t really tell if my cats could discern different types of music from one another. I had always felt that they had a particularly disapproving air about them when I was playing Hall and Oates’ ‘You Make My Dreams’, but maybe that was largely a reaction to the special backwards dance I liked to do to it. Whatever the case, ‘My Sharona’, with its snappy riff, seemed as good an option as any for my experiment. Certainly better that than an eight-minute epic off the second Emerson Lake and Palmer album.