The Good, the Bad, and the Furry

by Tom Cox

  ‘What’s that he’s got on?’ I asked my mum, quietly.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘It’s Paul’s security pass for work. It fell out of Paul’s coat when I was putting them away, and your dad picked it up and put it on. I’m not sure if Paul’s realised yet.’

  My dad was holding the supersoaker and reminiscing about the games of ‘Army’ that he used to play as a kid on the street where he lived. ‘I USED TO LOVE MY TOY DAVEY CROCKETT RIFLE BUT SOMETIMES WE’D ALL JUST USE IMAGINARY GUNS. THE O’DOHERTYS WERE CRAP AT MAKING THE SHOOTING NOISES, THOUGH, BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T AFFORD GOOD IMAGINARY GUNS. DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME I CHARGED ALL MY MATES A PENNY EACH TO SEE A SQUASHED MONKEY I’D FOUND ON THE STREET? I FOUND OUT LATER THAT IT WAS JUST A BIG FROG.’

  In recent weeks, according to my dad, a huge, brutish black cat had been hanging around the garden and intimidating Casper and Floyd. The supersoaker had been ostensibly purchased to scare it away, but I was starting to have my doubts. I’d seen the black cat come in through the catflap on Christmas Day, and Floyd had bounded up to it as if to say ‘Hi! I’m Floyd! What’s your name? What shall we do NOW!’ The black cat didn’t seem very impressed, but neither did it look like it was about to start any kind of serious ruckus.

  When everyone else had gone home, my dad reluctantly laid the supersoaker down, poured us both a glass of whisky, and I watched an episode of Dad’s Army with him, just like he’d done at Christmas many times with my granddad. The one difference being that my granddad never had a white and black cat fast asleep upside down on his legs, purring at a volume only slightly softer than most outboard motors. When the episode was over, my dad told a story about the time my grandma had called the police on him for leaving pennies on the railway line, then fell into a deep sleep to match Floyd’s. On his hand, I noticed the words ‘Potatoes’ and ‘WASPS!’ written in blue ink.

  I’d struggled a little bit in the last few years with Christmas presents for my dad. He’d seemed very happy with the whisky and books I usually gave him, but I wanted to be more original. It wasn’t easy, though. Most people get harder to buy for as they get older, and if I tried to purchase a gift in one of his specialist areas – gardening, for example, or bebop or doo-wop records made between the years 1944 and 1954 – I’d probably get it wrong or find that he already had it. This year I’d bought him a nicely crafted model of one of his favourite 1950s cars: a result of me making a mental note of a conversation back in spring where my dad had announced, ‘IF I WAS RICH ALL I’D DO IS BUY A LOAD OF OLD CARS AND BRUM THEM ALL DAY,’ and my mum had replied, ‘And not have a wife any more.’ I was pretty impressed with myself, but now, looking at him there on the sofa, snoring away with Floyd, I wondered if I’d tried to be too clever. I’d begun to realise in recent years just how brilliant my parents were and was increasingly proud of them. With my dad heading into his mid-sixties, I’d wanted to get him something intricate or unusual to show my gratitude for all the love and support he’d given me over the years, but maybe I just had to face the facts: all he’d ever really wanted for Christmas was a big fake gun and a kitten.

  Ten Reasons Why My Oldest Cat Is Sad

  1. My cat is sad because on his travels he has discovered a machine with a face and he now has some concerns he would like to raise.

  2. My cat is sad because he never got on the property ladder when he was younger and thinks it might now be too late.

  3. My cat is sad because he picked up his housemate’s catnip by mistake and it’s made of different stuff to his.

  4. My cat is sad because of the insufferable smugness he must deal with every day, in his line of work.

  5. My cat is sad because harsh words have been exchanged about some of his artwork and now there is an atmosphere of tension and regret.

  6. My cat is sad because books are sometimes not about what they say they’re about.

  7. My cat is sad because a female colleague of his has seen a ghost and appears to be very shaken by the experience.

  8. My cat is sad because he does not want to make a psychedelic folk rock album with me, or be part of the photoshoot for its cover.

  9. My cat is sad because of animal cruelty.

  10. My cat is sad because we have only just started playing Scrabble and already his luck is down and I am using the game as a way to hurt him.

  Hardy Perennial

  There was a time, back around the turn of the millennium, while I was living in London, when I would remain fairly oblivious to the change of the seasons. To a certain kind of overawed, excitable man in his early to mid-twenties who calls a big city home – the kind of man I was at that point – winter, spring, summer and autumn tend to be little more than the gently fluctuating wallpaper behind the really important business of going out to pubs and gigs. If you’d asked me in the year 2000 which colours I associated with different times of year, I might have named, at a push, two: the nondescript grey that signified every point between September and March and the dirty orange that signified the rest.

  In Norfolk, however, I not only associate each season with a colour but often mentally assign extra colours to different parts of a season. There is, for example, the grainy, spooky charcoal light of early winter. This is very different to the grubby browny-black that sets in two or three months afterwards. By February, Norfolk is usually so caked in mucky residue, you get the sense that if it were a white van, somebody would have written ‘Clean me!’ or ‘I wish my wife was this dirty!’ on it with their finger. Sometimes the real miracle of spring in this part of the country seems to be less that everything grows again and more that all that dirt somehow vanishes.

  When there’s not a hosepipe ban, I do my tiny, inconsequential bit in nature’s big clean-up by pressure-washing my balcony and patio. This is the annual job where, in gradual increments, I transfer all the dirt immediately outside my house to my hair, beard, nose and forehead. It takes a long time but, with enough concentration and effort, by the end I can get myself looking almost exactly like one of the semi-finalists in a bog-snorkelling contest. The pressure washer is very loud, which is why, when Geoff the gardener knocked on my front door in spring 2013, I didn’t hear him, despite its close proximity to the balcony, which I was cleaning at the time.

  ‘Thhhffff hh chthhh ghhhhthnnn mnnnnh hhh thhffff dhhhh,’ said Gemma, tapping me on the shoulder.

  I switched the pressure washer off.

  ‘There’s a crazy gardener man at your door,’ she repeated. ‘He says he’s called Geoff and wants to know if we can let him out the back for a look around. I don’t know what to say to him.’

  I placed the pressure washer’s hose attachment on the ground and made a futile attempt to wipe the mud spatter off my face. From the window, The Bear, who had been waiting anxiously for his balcony-cum-bachelor pad to be once again available for his use, watched with some curiosity. I racked my brain trying to remember if I’d booked anyone to do gardening work recently. I had the potential to become very forgetful at times like now, when I’d been a bit overworked, but it seemed unlikely that I would have asked for any paid help, given that I currently had a grand total of thirty-seven pounds and sixteen pence in my bank account. Gemma looked a little pale. ‘I’m a bit scared,’ she said. I thought she might be over-egging things, but upon opening the door, I decided that her reaction to Geoff had, if anything, been an impressively calm one. Five foot eightish, with glasses and a large bushy beard, he wore a stained sweatshirt with the words ‘Head Gardener’ emblazoned across its front. In case you were still in doubt about his profession, on his head was a baseball cap reading ‘Hardy Perennial’.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Is this YOUR garden?’ As he spoke, he bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, attempting to peer over the fence. ‘Do you go in there a LOT?’ he continued. ‘I bet it’s great for sunbathing. Does it go all the way down to the bottom?’

  His tone was that of an eight-year-old boy who can’t believe his luck to be staying overnight
in the room of a ten-year-old with bunk beds. I put him at roughly my dad’s age.

  ‘I do a bit of gardening myself,’ Geoff went on. ‘That’s my trade, in fact.’ Here he did a double point to his cap and his sweatshirt. ‘Do you mind if I come in and have a look around?’

  I loved my garden very much. Often, I could scarcely believe my luck in owning it. But I’d also seen many much bigger, tidier, more imaginative gardens, and I was sure someone who worked in the horticulture industry would have seen yet more, so I was surprised at Geoff’s enthusiasm. If you were a plumber, it’s unlikely you’d spend your day off asking to be let into the houses of people you’d heard had quite nice stopcocks. Obviously, flowers and bushes are more pleasant than the internal organs of a house, but even if overexposure to them had killed none of their mystery, you wouldn’t think there’d be any pressing need to seek new ones out during your downtime. That Geoff assured me that he was ‘not pitching for work’ made his proposal even more intriguing. So, opting to live recklessly in the moment, I opened the gate and led him down to look at my bedding.

  ‘Oh yeah, this is good,’ he said, darting down the steps in front of me. ‘It’s a bit neglected, but it’s got potential.’ I’d actually been working hard to get the garden up to scratch in recent weeks, chopping down and burning lots of foliage – even going so far as to burn some of next door’s by mistake – but I supposed it might look a bit shabby, still, to a professional.

  ‘See that?’ said Geoff, pointing behind us to an overgrown bed. ‘You want to rake all that debris from that slope and start putting this’ – he pointed to my compost heap – ‘all over it. Do you mow in horizontal stripes? Do you? Try to do that. It will help. And see these? Cut them off right down here. Near the brown bit. Oh, and you can really lay into that. Don’t be scared to be harsh. It will all be back in a month.’

  I noticed that The Bear had followed us outside, which was unusual. He’d got a bit slower over the winter, and these days, if he went out at all, he tended to stick to the balcony, or make a sharp left turn out of the bottom catflap in the direction of Biscuit’s house. None of the friends who’d been in the garden over the last six months had been sufficiently interesting to tempt him down here, and he’d not even emerged last week when I’d been talking to Deborah over the fence and Biscuit had been milling around her feet, but Geoff had evidently proved too tempting. The Bear sat examining the two of us from ten yards or so, possibly gathering more data for his ongoing analysis of human quirks and foibles.

  ‘Come over here and sit down,’ said Geoff, making himself comfortable on a rickety garden bench I’d recently sanded down, and patting the space next to him. ‘Is that cat yours? He looks wise. Tell me about yourself.’

  As I listened to Geoff’s torrent of advice, spluttering only the odd half word or two in response every few seconds, before he moved onto the next bush or bed, I wondered what some of my more cautious acquaintances – those who’d accused me of being ‘too trusting’ in the past – might make of my current predicament. I had plenty of experience conversing with a loud, excitable man in late middle age, so Geoff’s enthusiasm did not faze me, but it suddenly occurred to me that over the last fortnight there’d been reports of a few burglaries in the neighbourhood. Now here I was, trapped on my own property, in the company of a stranger of wild appearance, possibly dangerously under the influence of caffeine, who probably now knew the combination code to the padlock on my gate. In the end, though, I was glad I went with the voice in my head that said Geoff meant well.

  ‘You looked like a couple of wild men sitting out there when I checked on you from the living-room window,’ Gemma said later. ‘I was a bit worried at first that he was going to hurt you, but it was actually quite cute.’

  Geoff, I found out, was a Buddhist. During the eighties, he’d worked as a bank manager in Cambridge but in his mid-forties, after the break-up of his relationship, he’d quit his job and moved to a rented house – ‘more of a glorified shed, really’ – on the north Norfolk coast, and started working as an assistant to a well-known local gardener. He’d earned a fraction of his previous salary, but was surprised at how little it bothered him. ‘You know when you go out on the first sunny day of the year without a coat and you feel really light?’ he said. ‘It felt like that, but like a much bigger version of it, all the time.’

  More recently he’d set up as an independent landscaper. ‘I’ve still got hardly any stuff in my house. A few books. I don’t even own a TV. I know I can’t take it with me, y’know.’ Most of what he ate came from his vegetable garden or his neighbours’ chickens.

  I noticed that The Bear had not yet moved, save for a brief wander to have a disrespectful wee against Janet’s apple tree. There had been an Internet conspiracy theory going around recently claiming that cats were actually aliens, sending information about humans back to their home planet to aid it in taking over our world. I’d had my doubts about this: appraising Ralph and Shipley, they seemed too interested in their own needs to be taking notes on the habits of my species, and Roscoe was just so damn busy all the time. Looking at The Bear, though, it didn’t seem so far-fetched. Whatever his long-term project was, I felt sure the chance to examine Geoff was aiding his research.

  ‘I’m going to Glastonbury!’ Geoff announced. ‘Are you going too? Punch that!’ he said, lifting up his Head Gardener sweatshirt. ‘Go on! Don’t be afraid. Punch it!’

  I did as he asked. ‘It does feel very firm,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t come from the gym, my friend. That comes from walking up and down all day with a wheelbarrow.’

  Half an hour ago, I hadn’t even known Geoff existed, but now, if anyone had seen us together, they might have thought we were old friends: two dishevelled and hirsute yet reasonably fit men, fooling about on a bench. While I had warmed to Geoff, I was still a little confused by his choice of clothing. As someone who wrote for a living, I took my job around with me on a full-time basis, but it had never occurred to me to wear a sweater with the word ‘Author’ on it. Perhaps, though, being a gardener was a bigger commitment. Maybe that was why so many horticultural types had names with garden words in them, such as Bob Flowerdew and Alan Bloom. Also, as someone who was wearing a mud-spattered Allman Brothers T-shirt, and whose hair – beaten into submission by wind, water and filth – could be reasonably described as an injury, I was in no position to criticise regarding matters of appearance.

  ‘You say you were born in 1975?’ asked Geoff. ‘That’s the Year of the Rabbit. That means this will be your year! The year it all happens for you. Stuff.’

  ‘Really?’ I would have preferred the Year of the Hare, but as that didn’t actually exist, I’d take the Rabbit in lieu.

  ‘Oh, no, actually that was the year before last. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Before Geoff left, he wandered over to give The Bear a scritch under the chin. ‘You’re the dude, aren’t you?’ Geoff said.

  I’m not sure that The Bear had ever quite considered himself a ‘dude’ – that was more Ralph’s role – but he accepted Geoff’s attentions very willingly, and I was once again reminded how much more sociable my oldest cat – now not far from his eighteenth birthday – had become; so distant from that black cloud on legs looking for somewhere to rain who I’d met in London all those years ago. I led Geoff out. He gave me his number on a scrap of paper – a lack of business card was another thing the two of us had in common, to add to beards and a flirtation with Buddhism – and I promised him that, in the rare event that I did find enough money to pay someone to smarten my garden up between now and when I put my house on the market, I would be straight on the phone to him. I honestly got the impression, though, that he hadn’t been hustling for work, and just liked meeting new people.

  * * *

  That, then, is what I have decided to do: sell up. It’s not been an easy decision, but, in terms of its pull on my time and my finances, the house has been a huge struggle for a long time.
A few years ago, I changed it about a bit and made it my own, began to love it and my life with my cats in it a new way, but ultimately, its size and its cosmetic needs were always tailored to a previous life and a more economically stable era for the industry I work in. I can barely remember what that life felt like, and I’m ready for a change, for a domestic set-up that’s more relevant to now. Additionally, Gemma misses Devon a lot when she’s here, and the 360 miles that separate us when she’s not have become more and more painfully palpable.

  I suspect I will especially miss Norfolk at this time of year, if I am to leave it behind completely: the way spring seems to erupt here, and the curious human behaviour that often goes with it. We had to wait longer for it than usual this year, which has made its arrival all the more explosive and revelatory. There were times during the biting wind, snow and sub-zero temperatures of early April when I thought the cats might completely lose the plot. You could see them getting progressively more antsy, as if preparing themselves to write a strongly worded complaint to the Weather Board on headed cat notepaper. Shipley’s swearing and taunting of The Bear had reached an all-time high, and in late March he took out his frustration on my friends and me by striding into the living room and kicking down a Giant Jenga tower at a crucial moment in the game. Roscoe, meanwhile, seemed frustrated at the number of meetings she’d had to cancel due to adverse transport conditions, and the Bear could be found staring out the window, depressively, his chin flat to the ground.