by Cox, Tom
‘FOOKIN’ ’ELL,’ said my dad. ‘LOOK! IT MUST HAVE BEEN LONELY AND WANTED TO COME WITH US. I SAY, JO, COME UP HERE AND GER A LOOK AT THIS!’
As my mum – who’s always been a great friend to amphibians – caught the toad in her hands, and I went to fetch my dad’s gardening loafers from the box in the hallway, The Bear continued to watch from his stool. I might have been mistaken, but his eyes looked even more saucer-like than usual. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but we normally have a fairly quiet life, don’t we?’ they seemed to be saying to me.
He stayed in position, while the other three of us gathered around the toad. ‘IF YOU PUT IT IN THE HALL IT COULD BE TOAD OF TOAD HALL,’ said my dad.
Later, when we’d placed the gardening loafers, complete with toad, in a quiet corner behind the house, my mum would recall that she’d checked the shoes thoroughly before leaving the previous morning, and found them empty. ‘It must have hopped back into them between then and when your dad packed the car,’ she reasoned. My dad had decided to garden in his trainers the previous day. Had he not done so, he would have discovered it earlier – perhaps in a way that, for him and for the toad, would have been more dramatic. Even so, we would have had the same dilemma: What do you do with a toad who’s 116 miles from home, even though the toad has become a friend of sorts, when you don’t really know much about the toad, and its wants and desires, and what really makes it tick?
All I can say, looking back, is that we did what we thought best at the time. We had planned to spend that day out, and it seemed wrong to put the toad in the car or keep him locked up in the house. I knew, from my experiences at my very frog-friendly previous house, that Ralph, Shipley and The Bear had little interest in amphibians, and being back in the loafer gave the toad the choice: he could stay home, or he could explore his new environment. As it turned out, he decided to be brave. When we returned that evening, the loafer was empty, and it remained so the following morning, when my parents left. But I worried about him. Norfolk was culturally quite different to Nottinghamshire: life moved at a slower pace here and, especially towards the west of the county, there was a unique river system to contend with. What if he didn’t settle in, or found himself missing my mum and dad’s koi carp, Casper the friendly ghost cat, even the evil heron who liked to circle above the pond?
I’d expected the area surrounding my house to be at least one animal lighter by now, but the opposite had happened. Both Andrew and the toad were now out there somewhere. Who knew if their future would be here, with me, or with my parents, or elsewhere? Maybe they had already met. I hoped, if they had, that their encounter had been amicable. I certainly knew Andrew was still around. A couple of fresh streaks of urine I’d found on the blackboard and my copy of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush LP served as confirmation. But I could deal with Andrew later. There was still plenty of work to do on that front.
‘What was that?’ my mum asked, the evening before they left, when he meowed throatily outside the living room.
‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘It’s just the wind. It sometimes makes that sound when it whistles through the hole in the conservatory roof.’
Five Highly Unlikely Pet Memoirs
Dickie: A Very Special Library Toad
One snowy morning, Beverley, a librarian due to retire in a few weeks and nursing a cynicism only exacerbated by recent government cuts to funding, goes to empty the drop box at the small town library where she works and finds a diminutive toad on top of a copy of The Wind in the Willows, which it appears to have been reading to keep its mind off the cold. ‘Some people,’ Beverley tuts, thinking that the toad has probably been abandoned by cruel owners who neglected to get their original family toad neutered. Despite having little previous experience with amphibians, she names the toad Dickie, and he soon becomes a well-known and well-loved character around the library, sitting on the shoulders of children as they read, splashing about in the sinks in the gents’ toilets and building a toad nest for himself in the back of the photocopier, using old, scrunched-up, unwanted copies of church newsletters. Dickie’s happy-go-lucky approach to life persuades Beverley to delay her retirement and reach an inner peace about her estrangement from her father, who ran off with the owner of a fish and chip van when she was seven.
Bartholomew and Me (and the Awkward Space Between Us)
One snowy night, Bartholomew, a cuddly marmalade cat with ‘whiskers that won’t quit’, rolls up, as if out of nowhere, at the door of Kenneth, a lifelong bachelor who has never quite learned to love and has instead retreated to a tumbledown cottage on the North Devon coast and a solitary life of boatbuilding. Before Bartholomew arrives, for reasons largely down to a secret, repressed childhood trauma, Kenneth has begun to view wood with the affection that most people reserve for the living, and his few friends worry gravely about him. ‘What’s your name?’ says Kenneth, upon Bartholomew’s mysterious arrival. But Bartholomew doesn’t answer, since he is a cat, and therefore can’t speak English. Kenneth feeds Bartholomew some evaporated milk, and, with an almost human sigh, the feline beds down on the sofa for the night on an old blanket given to Kenneth by his beloved late grandma. The next day, Bartholomew leaves, and Kenneth’s life resumes in precisely the same fashion as before.
Smug Puppies
Three rescue puppies arrive in Britain from Afghanistan and proceed to heal a broken family. Unfortunately, the broken family gets irritated with their do-gooding ways and gives them away to a friend of the completely intact family who live next door but one.
John: A Pretty Sodding Ordinary Owl
John, a snowy owl, moves in with Martha, a bereaved schoolteacher. Together, they set off on a road trip around America, visiting historical spots and meeting other birdlife. John, however, turns out to have very little personality, and mostly just stares off into space, or refuses to get out of Martha’s Honda Civic. Things reach crisis point when, faced with the world’s biggest giant redwood, all he can do is emit a pellet whilst looking shirty.
David, the Massive Satanic Goat
Jim, a writer who has has experienced success on the bestseller list with his books Walking My Dog in North Yorkshire, Walking My Dog in South Yorkshire and Walking My Dog in West Yorkshire, but a dip in sales with the fourth book Walking My Dog in East Yorkshire and Some of the Parts of North, South and West Yorkshire I Didn’t Quite Get Around to Covering Before, is persuaded by his publishers to buy a goat, solely so he can write a book about it. This is in preference to his early idea of buying a bird of prey and getting his family to teach it tricks, purely so he can write a memoir about it called Our Kestrel Manoeuvres in the Dark. Mayhem ensues, as he spends all of the advance he has received from his publishers on building a shed for the goat and goat-proofing his garden, falls out with his editor, claiming it was all his fault, and then makes up with him, as they realise their arguments will contribute greatly to the narrative. Finally, while still having trouble with David’s size and the fact that everyone who meets him claims he has ‘Satan eyes’, it looks like his fortunes will turn around when he meets Marissa, a spellbinding, earthy fortune teller of gypsy extraction. But they don’t.
Size Matters
By the summer of 2011, I had developed an evening routine that probably wasn’t dissimilar to that of many single men in their mid-thirties who live under the rule of cats. I spent a bit too much time watching epic HBO DVD box sets with my attention span compromised by Facebook, Twitter and text messages, stopping every now and then to rescue a vole inside an old coffee mug or gently remove a small set of jaws from my ankle (actually, maybe that wasn’t something other single men in their thirties who lived with cats did; just single men in their thirties who lived with Shipley). I ate quite healthily, if a little lazily, piercing a few more film lids than I would want to admit. If I also spent a bit too much time talking to my pets, then at least I could reassure myself that it was better than talking to myself and that I had an active social life.
My most animated c
onversations were generally with Shipley and Ralph, neither of whom had ever quite understood that not everything in life has to have a soundtrack. I could have blamed myself for allowing their rowdiness to get out of control over the years, but sometimes, as I knew only too well from the time I had spent in the company of my dad, my granddad and my dad’s uncle Ken, loudness runs in a family and there’s nothing you can do about it. Volume was the common ground reminding you that Ralph and Shipley came from the same litter, on the occasions you wondered how it was possible for two cats to be related when they looked approximately as different to one another as an undersized lion and a spider monkey.
An entrance was always cause for fanfare. Had either of them owned a small trumpet, I’m sure they would have sounded it when they came through the cat door. I hoped that, just once, when they rushed through it, meowing at the top of their voices, they might lead me to an injured animal or a child trapped down a well, but it never happened.
‘RAAAAAAALPHHH!’ Ralph would shout.
‘Did that big crow say something derogatory about your sideburns again?’ I would reply.
‘RALLLRALLLRALLPH.’
‘Don’t worry. You’re fine. The metal clothes horse isn’t coming out today. All my laundry’s completely up to date. And I promise that if I do wash my hands, I’ll wait at least half an hour before I stroke you.’
‘RAAAAAAALPHHH!’
‘It’s Obama, isn’t it? You’re wondering if he’ll be the subject of a Republican smear campaign and not get in for a second term. I’ve told you, it’s too early to be worrying about that. We’ve still got the best part of a year and a half, so just try to relax.’
‘RAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLOOOOOO.’
‘Oh God. Don’t tell me. You went for a long walk and someone was playing a Lily Allen song in their kitchen nearby with the windows open. I knew it. I’m sorry. Nobody deserves that. I should have been more sympathetic.’
My conversations with Shipley were frequently more caustic, particularly on his part. ‘You shouldn’t really say stuff like that,’ I’d remonstrate with him, as his heavy mortar fire of cat swearwords began. ‘It’s very hurtful, and some people are less thick-skinned than me.’
On that evening way back a decade ago, when Dee and I and our friends Steve and Sue had collected Ralph (who, at that point, before we’d been informed of his gender by a reliable source, had been known as ‘Prudence’), Brewer and Shipley from their original home in Essex, Shipley had been the ‘extra choice’: the cat Steve had called ‘the ugly one who looks like Yoda’, but whom I’d been swayed into taking home by his adorably awkward, runtish exuberance. That first night Ralph and Brewer had curled up in the respective crooks of my right arm and Dee’s, but Shipley had slept quietly alone at our feet, in an ‘It’s OK – I know my place!’ sort of way. As it turned out, though, he didn’t know his place at all, and had only been preserving his energy before bursting into action the next day. Since then, the backchat had rarely stopped, except on the occasions when he was asleep or I turned him upside down. Even when I had parties, he could often be found in the centre of a group of my friends, disagreeing with them just for the sake of it, or making outlandish, boastful claims about his recent achievements.
If The Bear was the quietly beating heart of the household, and Ralph was its face, then Shipley was its notoriously volatile public relations man: its very own version of Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It. Nothing got past him, and his adrenaline was a constant presence in my life. I was so used to gently removing his claws from my posterior when sitting at the computer in an open-backed chair, or stopping him climbing up my leg when I was near the fridge, I often didn’t know I was doing it: each action had become just another humdrum, unconscious thing I did with one of my limbs, like sweeping my hair out of my face, or scratching behind one of my ears. While Ralph and The Bear seemed in completely different ways to be assured about their status as the most important cat in the house, with no need to boast about it, Shipley was on a constant self-publicity drive, keen to explain to everyone that he was the real important cat around here. He didn’t seem to mind whether his audience was me, his furry housemates, my friends, a man who had come over to cut the ivy out of my boiler or a mallard who wandered into the conservatory one day by mistake.
There was never any malice to it. His uncouth behaviour always stopped short of nastiness, and that was why, despite their long-term animosity, I never got to the point of permanently splitting him and The Bear up. Turn Shipley upside down, and he was fine. Jiggling him about a bit helped, too. I’d never seen any animal, or human, able to go so quickly from petulance to docility. The only feline mood swing I’d seen come close to it was a few years ago when I’d offered Ralph a piece of leftover chicken balti then immediately washed my hands and assembled the metal clothes horse.
When I arrived home with heavy shopping bags, Shipley was invariably the first to greet me. Though I might be tired and desperate to eat, I followed the logic of all gullible idiots, putting my shopping bags to one side and feeding the cats first. If I’d bought bread, I knew I had to be quick getting the cat food into the bowls, as experience had taught me that the absolute maximum you could leave a sliced loaf unattended before Shipley would eat it was twenty-seven seconds. Had I placed a slice of bread in Shipley’s food bowl, he would have sniffed at me in the manner of an ungrateful heiress who’d never known suffering, then walked away, but if the bread was packaged and ostensibly out of bounds on the kitchen counter, it was different. This was yet another example of the fact that cats don’t just make haste for the Munchies taste, but for the sweet taste of nonconformism.
When the cat food itself was placed on the floor, Shipley tore through it at twice the speed of his peers, and – if I didn’t stay vigilant – would swiftly move towards Ralph or The Bear, nudge them out of the way and start on theirs. I’d seen Ralph casually pummel Shipley when his sleek black brother got out of hand in other situations, but when it came to dining matters, he was willing to move aside. Surely food was important to Ralph, as a cat approximately the size of a sports utility vehicle? Maybe it was, but clearly not so important as it was to Shipley, whose metabolism somehow managed to transform all that meaty sustenance into pure muscle: the kind that allowed him to be the only one of my cats who could force my bedroom door open in the middle of the night using his sheer wiry strength.
The Bear had a very different approach to mealtimes. When the other cats were around, he hung back, watchfully. He was the only feline I’d ever met who signalled his hunger not by cursing, meowing or using my leg as a scratching post, but by nodding subtly towards the food cupboard. He usually bided his time before doing this; having waited until the other cats were out tormenting a squirrel or vole, he would then quietly creep into the kitchen and catch me on my own. Bafflingly, he seemed to be able to distinguish, before the shopping bags were open, the times when I’d bought him turkey from those when I hadn’t. His most vocal request, at times like this, would be a tiny, persuasive meeoop – never anything more.
Similarly, The Bear was always at his most affectionate and playful when there were no other cats around. He still wrestled with a five-year-old squeaky toy mouse far more enthusiastically than you’d expect from an old age pensioner, but if he thought another cat was watching him, he’d abruptly bring a halt to proceedings. The times when he sat on my lap were rare; they involved a vast amount of nervous circling for position, and only occurred when Ralph and Shipley were well out of sight. Since I’d been living on my own, I had worked my way up to a point with Ralph where more or less all I had to do to get him to sit on my lap was look at him with a raised eyebrow. The Bear needed much more encouragement, but, once in position, there was no doubting his commitment. I’d never known a cat to purr for more lengthy, sustained periods. His purr had a high-pitched quaver to it, as if, just as he seemed to experience hurt in an exaggerated manner, he experienced happiness that little bit more acutely than other cats. I also
felt he was trying to explain something to me. ‘OK,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘This is just a taste of how things could be, if you ditched those two other losers. I’m leaving it up to you, but to my mind there’s only one way to go here. We’re both men of the world. Well, me more than you, obviously, but I think it’s demeaning both of us to live with creatures of lesser intelligence.’
It was during one of these intense one-on-one moments with The Bear that, in July, I finally got a proper look at Andrew. He’d been visiting ever more frequently, and was gradually working his way backwards through my LP collection. I’d put all the albums in protective polythene sleeves, but I was still very concerned: the Jimmy Webbs had already got it in a major way and all the signs pointed to my original copy of Scott Walker’s seminal 1969 album, Scott 4, being next. More troublingly still, I’d caught The Bear following his example. It had been a while since The Bear had soiled anything indoors, and I’d forgotten just how hard it was to be angry with him when he did. As I watched him spraying a small jet of urine over Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, he gave the nearest approximation of a carefree smile that I had ever seen on his features. I placed him firmly outside on the balcony, remonstrating ‘This is beneath you, The Bear!’ and attempting to reason with him in other ways I felt might appeal to his intellectual vanity, but within half an hour, he was back inside, eating cooked turkey out of my hand and doing his most ecstatic chirrup-purr.
As this exchange occurred, I could hear a loud munching from the corner where I kept the biscuit dispensers. I assumed that the animal making the noise was Ralph, who ate with the same slobbery gusto with which he snored and purred, so it was an even bigger surprise, a minute later, to see Andrew emerge from the alcove, stop dead in his tracks and stare straight at us. I was amazed at the softness and sweetness of his face up close. This was not the face of a predator or a thief. It was not even the face of an Andrew. It was a dreamy, moony face: the kind of face you wouldn’t be surprised to find at twilight wandering in a daze around a foreign campsite, looking for its tent.