The Good, the Bad, and the Furry

by Tom Cox

  Later that night, I woke to the sound of Gemma wheezing next to me. Her mum was severely allergic to cats, but she’d never previously had a problem herself, and had lived with at least one cat for most of the last six years. It made no sense, but in another way it made complete sense: the reinstatement of the old clause in my romantic life stating that I could only be properly attracted to women who either didn’t like, or were physically incompatible with, cats. We opened more windows, and Gemma huffed on her asthma inhaler, but it was no help.

  The following night she found herself in a similarly breathless, uncomfortable state. Then I noticed an odd thing: Gemma was also wheezing slightly when she sat on the sofa in the living room, but seemed completely fine when she was upstairs in the kitchen. The sofa cushions were filled with goose down, just like my duvet. That night I swapped the latter for the synthetic duvet from the spare bedroom and mercifully Gemma’s respiratory problems were no more.

  ‘I’m so relieved,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be allergic to The Bear. How can anyone be allergic to The Bear? He’s The Bear!’

  The two of them had already formed a significant bond. Being from a working-class background and a natural worrier, Gemma ticked two of his biggest boxes. The fact that she liked the music of sensitive, melancholic singer-songwriters, rather than the overblown seventies rock and power ballads I was partial to, almost certainly helped, too.

  ‘Does he always follow you around like that, staring at you?’ she asked.

  ‘Almost always,’ I said.

  It was true that The Bear had been more reluctant than ever to let me out of his sight in the last few months. I’d got to know a fair bit about black cats in the last decade – about that certain kind of intensity and magic they often seem to have, which other cats don’t – but being followed around like this by one without quite knowing what it meant had a way of making me feel a bit like Britain’s most useless witch. In many of the pictures I took of my other cats during this period, The Bear was often there, in the background, stealing the limelight with his own kind of photobomb, all based on magnetic soulfulness rather than bolshy physical one-upmanship. If he had an anthem for his twilight years, it would have been ‘Alone’ by Heart. I was aware that I was overly partial to anthropomorphism and I knew that when he did get me alone, much of his agenda was about cooked meat, but it wasn’t as if his gaze diminished in purpose when his appetite was satisfied. It had to be about more than that. Had he been stalking me in order to ask, ‘So if God is nice, why do children get ill and are men always at war?’ or, ‘So if so many people love the music of Nick Drake, why did he die depressed and unappreciated at the tender age of just 122 cat years?’ I could not have felt his sweet, beseeching bewilderment more acutely. When you added the fact that the customary camp wobble in his walk as he followed me was more of an arthritic wobble now, the daily heartbreak was only exaggerated.

  Whenever I went to visit Gemma, I felt slightly guilty. Not only was I leaving The Bear, whose habit was to sulk in the aftermath of any slightly prolonged period I spent away from home, I was foisting his melancholy on Deborah and David, who had kindly and innocently offered to feed him, Shipley and Ralph. But, having known him for a while, they were getting used to it, and I even felt I was doing The Bear a favour. There was always the chance they could put a word in for him with their ageing cat Biscuit, for whom he seemed to hold a candle even after seven years of stony rejection.

  I remembered, a decade earlier, talking through the routine of cat feeding to Bob, my first ever next door neighbour as a home owner, and feeling very adult as I did so. ‘The kettle’s just here,’ I’d announced, ‘and feel free to have a sit-down and watch TV if you like.’ It only occurred to me later what a ridiculous thing it had been to say. Why on earth would Bob, a retired headmaster, want to have a cup of tea and watch TV in a virtual stranger’s house instead of his own, sixteen yards away? But suggesting such a thing to Deborah and David wouldn’t have been quite so preposterous. Not only were they happy to feed the cats, they were also happy to stick around and give them a cuddle, particularly Shipley, whose relationship with Deborah continued to be close – if somewhat foul-mouthed, on Shipley’s side.

  After one visit to Devon I returned to find each of my cats’ names, and Biscuit’s, written on the kitchen blackboard, alongside an arcane set of measurements. I puzzled over these for a while. I knew Biscuit was a small cat, but I was sure she must be more than seven inches long. Only after an hour did I have a lightbulb moment and realise that the figures related to the cats’ tails. It said a lot about Ralph and Shipley’s relationship that Shipley’s pointy, slightly curly tail, even though it looked the longest, was actually only runner-up; coming in at ten and a half inches, it was a full half-inch behind Ralph’s. That said, I would not have put it past Ralph to add a bit of length with some crafty backcombing. I hoped it would not intensify The Bear’s aura of melancholy that his came in second last, at nine inches. Shipley would probably be most troubled by the measurements, and this was arguably confirmed when I found him next to the blackboard, his tail in the air, seemingly trying to straighten out the kink at the end of it.

  One day in November, heading inland to pick Gemma up from her day job in her dad’s shop, feeling battered and windswept from a rainy early-morning walk on a remote stretch of Devon coast, I found an answerphone message from Deborah. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said. ‘But it’s Shipley. He’s been refusing to eat for the last day, and seems very lethargic. Every time I go to check on him, he’s just sitting on the beanbag in the same position, and he barely reacts when I touch him.’

  Finding themselves in a situation that all pet sitters dread, Deborah and David had faced a difficult decision. Considerately, they hadn’t wanted to worry me when I was so far from home, but they’d also not wanted to leave matters too late. After I’d called Deborah back and talked it through, she and David kindly rushed Shipley to see George, the Californian vet down the road, who seemed rather stumped as to exactly what the matter was, but gave him an injection of antibiotics, and said he should be brought back the following day if there’d been no improvement in his condition.

  Later that afternoon, I called Deborah back to find out if Shipley had improved. ‘There’s no change,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sitting with him, but he seems very limp and sad. He’s not even swearing at me.’ With seven counties separating us, Gemma working two jobs, and my own weekly writing commitments to consider, it had already been difficult for Gemma and me to find time to see each other as much as we wanted to. Now here I was, doing the only thing I could do in the situation, and leaving, not much more than a day after I’d arrived.

  I raced back across the country in record time, incurring a speeding ticket along the way at a time in my life when I had never had less use for one, and only stopping to fill up on petrol and read a couple of text message updates from Deborah. When I arrived home, Shipley was lying on his beanbag: the same one he’d been on nine months previously when I’d found Janet slumped on the stairs. Usually, if I arrived back after even a few hours out of the house he’d be the first cat to greet me, getting right up in my face to tell me exactly how I’d let him down and list the gifts he now required as compensation, but now he barely raised his chin as I arrived in the room. When I scrumbled him underneath it and gave the top of his head a scritch, there were none of his usual attempts to push his nose – usually so cold, now so dry and warm – into my knuckle, or engineer a way to get the same knuckle or a finger under the side of his lip (always a weird habit of his and Ralph’s: another subtle family trait). His sinewy limbs felt lifeless, and he put up little resistance as I transferred him to a wicker cat igloo that – like most purpose-built cat beds – he’d always disliked. The Bear watched all this, perhaps confused at the new domestic arrangement where he could walk around freely, without anyone dancing about in front of his face and swearing.

  I called George the vet on the emergency number and we agr
eed that the best thing I could do was bring Shipley over again first thing in the morning. Shipley – a cat who would so often force open the bedroom door, and was normally so desperate to make the room his – now seemed indifferent to the rare privilege of being its sole feline occupant. I probably would have slept fitfully anyway, as I usually did after the drive from Devon to Norfolk, but I woke at regular intervals throughout the night, reaching out every half-hour to his igloo, to touch his flank and make sure he was still breathing. If that sounds overdramatic, it was done from the perspective of someone who’d only six months ago received a stark lesson about the gossamer thread that separates feline life from death.

  All my cats, past and present, had different ways of reacting to a trip to the vet’s. Pablo’s check-ups had been soundtracked by a bloodcurdling war cry that didn’t let up from the moment I started the car to the moment he was unloaded onto the examining table – possibly to signal his fear that he was being transported back to the harsh feral world he had come from. At the other end of the scale, Ralph would act like he was far too fancy for the whole fiasco, then undermine himself by eating one of his scabs in front of the vet, or letting off a fart of the variety known at my secondary school as ‘silent but violent’. Bootsy had always largely seen it as another opportunity to be admired by strangers. Janet had weathered the experience with faintly wounded stoicism, and The Bear gave the impression of plotting darkly in the back of his cat basket, while periodically lamenting his existential condition with his broken-smoke-alarm meeoop. With Shipley, it was expletives all the way, combined with the hint of a sense that, given half the chance, he would be up and out of his basket to take on any Jack Russell, Rottweiler or giant lop-eared rabbit who happened to be in the waiting room at the time, possibly with one paw strapped behind his back.

  Today was different. That he did not utter a single profanity at me from the moment I ushered him into his basket to the moment George began to examine him was perhaps the plainest measure of how poorly he was. I was amazed at how much weight he seemed to have lost in just a couple of days of not eating. George still seemed baffled by his condition, but gave him a series of antibiotics. ‘We’ll give him the works, and see if it helps,’ he said. ‘These will take a while before they have any effect. The best thing might be for you to go out for a little while, take your mind off it, then see how he is, and give us a call if there’s no improvement.’

  As instructed, having placed Shipley on the bed, with a plate of turkey chunks easily within reach, I left the house, striding deep into the Norfolk countryside: so often my saviour in times of trouble. As I walked, I thought about all the times I’d said mean things about Shipley to my friends – the occasion last week, for example, when Katia had asked after his well-being, and I’d described him as ‘a crocodile-faced thug’. I thought about the cats’ mealtimes, when I would purposely put his food out last. This was a mandatory measure, due to the speed and greed with which Shipley ate, but I still felt bad about it. Had I ever singled Shipley out for a special turkey treat while the other cats were asleep, in the way I did with The Bear? A few times, but maybe not enough. Because Shipley was so demanding, so completely, constantly in your face, there never appeared to be any need to make sure he got enough attention. But there was nothing to say he wasn’t just like Ralph and The Bear: nurturing his own little dream of being my only cat. Perhaps even more so, in a way. Maybe Shipley’s attacks on The Bear came about because he heard what I said about The Bear – my comments about how intellectual and gentle and special he was – and felt lonely and neglected. During my last relationship I’d always been the one who saw the good in Shipley, but maybe I hadn’t been seeing enough good in him. He was still the same kitten who’d waited at the end of the bed that night in 2001: wanting to be close to the action, and thinking of ways to get there, ahead of the prettier or more intellectual cats.

  ‘He’s an amazing cat,’ Gemma had told me. ‘I’ve never known a cat like this, who’s so patient when you wobble him about and stuff. I mean, I know he comes across like a bit of a hooligan at first, but he never seems to go off in a huff, like other cats.’

  Shipley’s default mode might have been ‘potential ASBO’, but when you were actually giving him attention, no cat could match him for tolerance. If Ralph was sleeping on my chest and I adjusted position, he’d usually storm out of the room, like a rock star waltzing off stage in a tantrum because the sound man hadn’t quite got the level of his vocals correct. If I did the same thing while Shipley was sleeping on or near me, he didn’t mind, as long as I was planning to stick around. There was none of the finessing you had to do with other cats; he wanted you to stroke him, ruffle him, jiggle him and turn him upside down, and he wanted you to do it as vigorously as possible. Or, to put it slightly differently, in the words of a friend who’d been massaging his neck at one of my parties: ‘Essentially, he’s a massive sado-masochistic perv.’ Shipley was so muscular and strong and resilient, and there was so little sadness about his demeanour, you never stopped to consider that he could ever be frail or ill. But his body was vulnerable to the same diseases, the same chance mishaps, as any other cat. Something had invaded his system, or had misfired, or broken for good, and all that invincible boisterousness I’d taken for granted suddenly seemed impossibly fragile.

  In the last two and a half years, I’d been repeatedly told by friends that I’d ‘done well to hold it together’, considering I’d been through a divorce, paid a large sum to buy someone out of a mortgage, and had to significantly rethink my future. But a lot of the things holding my life together still seemed very brittle: my ailing house, the fact that I was earning less than half of what I’d once earned and spending much of that on sustaining a new, long-distance relationship. I had doubts about how well I might cope if another of my cats died: another cat whose history was inexorably intertwined with a part of my life that I’d had to abandon.

  Returning from my walk, I opened the front door with a lump in my chest. The house seemed eerily quiet. Ralph was out, and The Bear stood at the top of the stairs, as if he’d been waiting for me. ‘I intuitively know everything you’ve been thinking,’ said his eyes, ‘and I’ve got various responses, but I think it’s best if I put them in writing.’ Shipley was on the bed, just where he’d been before, but as I entered the room, he stood up. He seemed wobbly, and it took him a couple of goes, but he was soon on his feet, and a small, throaty noise emerged from him. I couldn’t make it out at first, but I leaned in more closely and asked him to repeat it.

  ‘You’re a dickhead,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘You’re a dickhead,’ he repeated. ‘Actually, no. A total nobhead. I’d kick your arse if I was twice as big as I am and didn’t have this headache. Now pick me up and turn me upside down.’

  I did what he requested, and heard, just perceptibly, the beginnings of a purr.

  * * *

  By that evening, Shipley was swearing again with alacrity. He swore at me, he swore at The Bear, he swore at Ralph; he swore, in a more affectionate way, at the turkey chunks I fed him. He even swore at a leaflet I’d brought home for Barometer World museum in the Devon town of Okehampton. I called Gemma to report the good news, but before I did so, I let Deborah know: she’d been texting every hour for a report on Shipley’s condition, and was massively relieved. He was still a little wobbly, and didn’t quite eat as much as usual, but whatever had been in George the vet’s magic syringes seemed to have worked.

  His reaction to being singled out for special treats, away from the others, and being allowed to sleep in my bedroom for a second night on the trot was much like what I imagine to be the reaction of a warlord who invades a new country and, instead of facing resistance, is greeted with open arms. He seemed a bit suspicious. However, he was soon taking full advantage of the latter privilege, purring aggressively in my face, inserting his bottom directly in front of the book of Alice Munro stories I was trying to read, and waking me up at
4 a.m. by pinching the skin on my elbow between his front teeth. I took all this – and the bagel he bit into the following morning while my back was turned – to mean he was on the mend.

  Some Anonymous Cats I Have Psychoanalysed on my Travels (2010–2012)

  Dustbathing flirt cat (Castle Acre, Norfolk, December 2010)

  Probable name: Desdemona

  Notes: Met subject on hill leading back into village after long walk. Was extremely tired, so couldn’t actually be bothered to stroke subject, but subject refused to take no for an answer (abandonment issues?). Subject seems remarkably clean for one who patently enjoys rolling in dirt. Infer from this a possible tendency to overgroom as way of correcting mistakes subject feels it has made, and views as ‘unclean’. Ultimately found it quite hard to leave subject behind, despite severely aching blisters and desperate need for large ale.

  Pub cat (Norwich, February 2011)

  Probable name: Albert

  Notes: Sensed subject as easygoing presence, but instincts were wrong. Subject seemed irritable that I had taken its seat and when my friend Amy told subject that subject was ‘magnificent’, subject looked disdainful and let out small hiss. Subject clearly suffering from superiority complex, due to being fussed by punters all day. Could perhaps do with exposure to sparser environment, where people are not saying stuff like ‘Wow! A cat! In a pub!’ every five minutes, and take feline presence as more of a given.