The Hairy Tails of a Cat Sitter

by C H Hemington

Chapter 2 - The Pros and Cons of Cohabiting Cats

  Most of the homes I visit have more than one feline resident which isn’t surprising given how much joy they bring us, especially when the cats share a bond. My two cats Billy and Jimmy spend many hours of each day curled up so tightly together that it’s hard to tell where one of them starts and the other ends, and the sight still makes my heart melt. I’ve also whiled away many happy moments watching in fascination whilst two cats either daintily or vigorously groom each other. One of my cat clients Henrik, using both paws, would grab his brother Hans so tightly around the neck that it appeared ever so slightly sadistic, especially given the look on his face that said ‘I can reach those places that no other cat can...’ But in truth all Henrik was doing was ensuring that his lazy bugger of a brother wore an immaculate coat at all times, after all next door’s cat were always well turned out so it was vital that standards were maintained. However, as many cat owners I’m sure would agree, having multiple cats in a house can also present its own ‘challenges’ and as a cat sitter I’ve had to adopt the various strategies that owners have put in place to make life with warring cats less difficult.

  Bertha and Olive were a good example. They were two unrelated moggies each with very different personalities. Olive was a small and not very confident little cat, and every time she tried to come into the kitchen through the microchip cat flap in the backdoor, bigger and bolder Bertha would ambush her, hurtling towards the door, her long ginger locks flowing, intent on banishing her arch enemy into exile.

  So Olive would spend more and more time away from home and it was after one particularly lengthy period of absence during a harsh winter that the owners, Adam and Eva (yes, really) decided to take action. Determined to find a solution and at great expense they had a builder install a second microchip cat flap, this one being fitted into in the front wall of the house to give access from the front garden into the living room, which in turn led into the dining room via a set of double doors that were kept open. Adam and Eva programmed the new cat flap with Olive’s microchip so that she alone would be able to use it, thereby giving her the run of the living and dining rooms into which her food, water, bed and toys were placed along with a brand new hooded litter tray. The cat flap in the back door was re-programmed so that only Bertha could enter via the kitchen and from there have the run of the house, with the exception of the living and dining rooms, thus ensuring that neither cat ever met.

  Whilst this plan worked up to a point, it also presented some logistical difficulties. If both cats were in their respective indoor areas Adam and Eva would have to remember to quickly close the living room door behind them every time they entered and exited the room. This meant that I would also have to remember, a point which was hammered home to me when I went to pick the keys up from Eva before one of their regular long weekends away. Grabbing hold of my arm, she took me to one side and in a conspiratorial tone whispered

  “It’s imperative that you don’t forget to keep the living room door closed.” Then, and despite the fact that her husband wasn’t even in the house she sneaked a look over her shoulder before continuing. “Adam’s a nightmare, a couple of beers and a curry on a Saturday night and all the rules fly out the window!” I could well imagine that the opportunities for marital disharmony over the living room door were plentiful, not to mention how one would tackle the entry and exit with a tray of curry (and all its attendant side dishes) in one hand and a beer in the other.

  However, despite the potential for all manner of problems, I completed my visits to the partitioned pair without mishap, and with Adam and Eva now back at home I dropped in to return the keys. This time it was Adam who happened to be in.

  “All ok with the door situation?” he asked, not without a hint of irony. Before I could reply he was rolling his eyes and declaring “Eva’s a nightmare, one gin and tonic and remembering to keep it closed would appear to be wholly in the lap of the gods!”

  The next time I looked after Bertha and Olive I wasn’t surprised to find a sign emblazoned with the words ‘DRUNKARDS BEWARE! KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED!!’ attached to the living room door... on both sides.

  Happily, and unusually, Griff’s cats all seemed to get on very well. Griff was a middle-aged rocker with long wispy grey hair that he kept tied in a ponytail and who sported a small hoop earring in his left ear. I’d often wondered about men with long hair who kept it tied back, I mean what was the point?

  Griff lived in a ground floor flat on the outskirts of Tonbridge. He was kind and gentle and it was difficult to imagine him thrashing around on stage with his Guns ‘n Roses tribute band ‘Grunts ‘n Posers’.

  “Griff by name, Griff by nature,” he said cryptically when he first introduced himself to me, accompanying the statement with a brief blast of air guitar. My blank expression forced him to point out that Griff was in fact a nickname based on his reputation for annihilating some of the better known Guns ‘n Roses songs with his improvised screaming guitar riffs.

  Griff had five cats: Meatloaf, Slash, and BJ (which, given the other cats’ names I was sincerely hoping stood for Bon Jovi), The Edge and Axl Rose. On our first meeting Griff told me that their mother had come to him as a pregnant stray. He’d never owned a cat before but had taken pity on her and decided she could stay. He looked after her throughout the remainder of her pregnancy and, with watery eyes, described how he’d watched her give birth to her five tiny kittens, all of them completely helpless and depending on their mum and on him for their survival. He’d taken his new parental duties seriously, doing lots of research so he knew what to feed the mum and how to socialise the kittens. He even borrowed the dogs, wives and children of some helpful friends so that the kittens would grow up being afraid of as little as possible.

  I was full of admiration for this man. Over the years I’d met many blokes that would simply refuse to admit their true feelings when it came to their resident feline. “He’s alright,” they would say in a very non-committal way if, I made any type of complimentary remark about the cat. However their wives and girlfriends would often report that behind closed doors not only was it all “come and give daddy a cuddle Snowy,” but that they’d also go into a major sulk if the cat chose to spend the evening sitting on someone else’s lap rather than theirs. By contrast Griff had no problem in this respect and I had to fight the urge to give him a big hug. I’d made that mistake before.

  Sadly, once the kittens had begun to grow up their mum no longer wanted to know them and she started getting increasingly aggressive towards them. From the moment they were born Griff had been completely smitten with the five little bundles and couldn’t bear to part with any of them. So, for the sake of them and their mum he found her a new home with one of his band-mates and from what I gathered it was a match made in heaven.

  I’d had the pleasure of being cat-sitter to ‘The Mob’, as I affectionately called them, for just over a year, and whilst their coats were mostly a similar mix of white and ginger, they all had very different personalities. Meatloaf, the largest, was a gentle giant who had never worked out that he could use his size to his advantage. I’d often see him asleep, uncomfortably balanced on the edge of a shared cat bed whilst one of the others took up the lion’s share of the available space on which to stretch out, change position and generally luxuriate. Slash was so-named because as a kitten he’d been the one who made the most frequent trips to the tray for a wee, a trait that had continued into adulthood. He was a clumsy cat and the only one I knew that could somehow trip over the side of a box whilst trying to jump into it. BJ was endearingly cocky, despite being the smallest of the quintet. He would swagger around the flat, his little nose in the air making his presence felt. At mealtimes he would speed through his bowl of food so that he could then pinch the food belonging to the cat next to him. He would do this by hooking his paw over the side of the bowl and pulling it towards him and away from its unlucky former owner, which was usually Meatloaf who would sit there, a
hapless look on his face, waiting for someone to intervene. The Edge was mischievous, always hiding and always the one to climb up to the highest perch possible. He liked nothing better than a good game of hide and seek and I would often spend great chunks of time sitting on the floor, next to the door of the under stairs cupboard whilst he sat inside it. The idea was that we both kept completely still and the one who showed their face to the other first lost the game. It grew into a real battle of wits and I became ridiculously competitive. So it was always The Edge who would dash out of his hiding place first with a real ‘Ta Da!’ flourish before rolling over on his back so that I could give him a tummy tickle.

  Axl Rose was the only girl. She was a confident dark ginger cat and was always able to keep the boys in check. One steely glare from her and they would back off with looks that seemed to imply that they weren’t sure what they’d been doing wrong in the first place. I kept telling them “that’s women for you.” But they never learnt.

  You would have thought that having five cats in a small flat would have been asking for trouble, but not in this case. What Griff lacked in musical talent (I’d attended one of his gigs) he made up for with his carpentry skills. He was in fact a master joiner and had his own carpentry business which he ran from a rented workshop not far from where he lived. Not only did he supply wonderful pieces of bespoke furniture to the well-heeled of Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, but he also put his skills to good use in his own home.

  With the exception of the bathroom and loo, carpeted floating shelves ran up the walls of almost every other room in the house. These led up to a long wooden shelf that ran along the middle section of the wall. Once the cats had traversed the shelf they would find another set of floating shelves at the far end to take them down the other side. They were amazing! Even Meatloaf, with all his bulk would heave himself up there, lumber along for a few paces then flop down on top of the shelf which often made me fear for its stability.

  Seeing little Slash ineptly trying to clamber up and down the steps at either end was a difficult watch. His clumsy little back legs would often end up dangling in mid air as he jumped from one shelf to another and generally missed. Whilst I worried about his safety I also couldn’t stop myself from chuckling at his awkward gait, reminding me of the feeling of guilty pleasure I got when watching videos of cats ‘doing the silliest things’ on the internet. BJ, The Edge and Axl Rose could handle the steps with grace and dextrous ease whilst Slash sat at the bottom, his big eyes watching intently and with awe as he no doubt wondered how on earth they made it look so easy.

  Griff’s home-made cat furnishings didn’t stop at the snakes and ladders based design theme indoors. Outside his back door was the most enormous garden erection I’d ever seen. Now I favour some kind of outdoor activity centre for cats and have got what I would like to think of as a modest two-level frame at the top of my garden, from which my cats can survey their empire, however, Griff’s was in a different league. Although his garden was on the ‘small but perfectly formed’ side, his garden erection was an absolute whopper. It ran from one side of the small garden to the other, but what it lacked in width, it made up for in height and it was obvious that Griff was very proud of it.

  The premise of the design was not dissimilar to that which Griff had used indoors. A high horizontal top shelf attached at either end to two planks of wood that rose steeply from the ground and were overlaid at intervals with small blocks of wood that acted as steps, not unlike ‘sleeping policemen’. There was a second shelf, nearer the ground that the cats could jump straight onto if they wished. Both platforms were covered in textured rubber, mainly so that Slash wouldn’t lose his footing and fall off if it got wet. To give the erection further stability, Griff had attached cylindrical wooden legs to the four corners and had covered each in sisal twine so the cats could either use them as scratching posts or as another means of climbing up onto the top platform. This latter choice was obviously only for the more adventurous feline and I often saw The Edge nimbly using them as his climbing method of choice.

  I must admit, when I first saw it my jaw hit the floor, which had made Griff laugh.

  “Yes, that’s the reaction I usually get” he chuckled.

  Luckily for me Griff spent more weekends in the summer on the road with ‘Grunts ‘n Posers’ than he did the winter months, which allowed me to spend much of my visiting time in the garden watching the cats using the frame, their individual character traits being wonderfully exaggerated as they tackled the monster installation. Given their respective heftiness and ineptitude, Meatloaf and Slash would only go as far as to use the lower platform. Despite having just about got the hang of the floating shelving indoors, at around three feet higher and much steeper, getting up to the top of the outdoor frame was simply a step too far for them.

  Although it was clear that The Edge loved everything about the frame, his antics were very often curtailed by Axl Rose, who had established the top platform of the frame as her personal space, like a queen holding court. So when she was on her throne she would only give the boys an audience up there if she was feeling charitable, and even then only one at a time. This meant that The Edge, in his eagerness to scale the dizzy heights, would quite often find himself on the sharp end of Axl Rose’s paw whenever his head bobbed over the top. So he developed a strategy that he thought would help him. He would sidle down the garden, using the bushes and plant pots for camouflage, until he reached his favoured sisal-entwined frame leg, and then creep ever-so slowly up the leg until he reach a point where he was near to the top shelf but still far enough away to be out of paw’s reach. At this point he’d adopt a very strange ‘stretched-neck’ stance as he strained to see the location of Axl Rose on the top shelf to determine how easy or difficult it was going to be to climb on top of the summit and plant his little bottom on it. If Axl Rose was at the far end he’d carefully creep onto the shelf and sit right next to the near-end edge, so as to be able to make a quick getaway should it be required. Quite often his plan would be thwarted by his own method of ascent. He sometimes spent so long clinging onto the leg whilst considering his options that the claws on his front paws would become deeply embedded in the twine and he’d struggle to get them out. All attempts at an undercover operation would then go haywire as he’d thrash around, trying with all his might to find an effective way of releasing his claws before Axl Rose got to him.

  Strangely enough it was cocky BJ who was the more successful at winning Axl Rose over. Perhaps there was something about his hot-shot and flagrantly presumptuous manner that, like me, she couldn’t resist. But whatever it was that made her so fickle when it came to allowing or disallowing any of the other cats up there, when she did it was a wonderful sight to see her and either BJ or The Edge sharing the view and warding off any feline interloper without having to move a muscle.

  With the frame taking up most of the available space in the garden there was little room left for anything else except a few pot plants. However, there was something in one sunny corner near the back door that I’d been coveting ever since I’d first seen it. It was an old, but nevertheless fantastic hanging swing-chair, just what every garden needed! It brought back some wonderful childhood memories of the large swinging seat in my parent’s garden. I vividly remember lying on the long cushion which was covered in brown fabric, emblazoned with huge orange and yellow flowers and swinging to my heart’s content underneath the fringed canopy which was made from the same garish material.

  Griff’s chair was a single-seater and looked like an enormous suspended egg that had been cut in half. The chair itself had been crafted out of rattan and coated with a waterproof resin. It was suspended from a wooden frame that reminded me of a giant banana hook. Strangely, the frame had been painted white which meant that when you looked at it in certain lights it would get lost against the background of the wall behind, which made The Egg look like it was floating in mid air. A large comfy cushion had been thrown casually onto the seat and I
was aching to give it a go.

  So one fine day after I’d attended to my duties, I went outside and prepared myself for a wonderful sensory experience, swinging languidly in the chair whilst watching the shenanigans of ‘The Mob’. Backing into the chair was the easiest way to enter and once my behind was in position I found there was enough space to curl my legs up too. Bliss!

  In my eagerness to get myself into the chair, what I’d forgotten was that although the cats all had very different personalities, they did have one thing in common, and that was their love of human contact. Whenever I sat down on the living room sofa, as many of them as could manage it, including Axl Rose would clamber onto my lap, chest and shoulders in what looked like a massive hippie ‘love-in’. But even if I had remembered this fact, being outside meant that the cats’ focus was usually on other cats, insects, birds, the twirling wind spinner that twinkled when it caught the light, and the waving branches from the tree in next door’s garden that hung over Griff’s hedge; so I’d have been surprised if my presence could distract them from these essential activities.

  I was wrong. No sooner had I curled up in The Egg than BJ and Axl Rose flew down the steps of the garden erection and hurtled onto my lap, followed by The Edge who’d been busy picking his claws out of the sisal twine, and then Meatloaf who came lumbering towards me like a hippo on go-slow. Slash was the last to make it, although he had actually got to me quite quickly, but it had taken a few attempts before he made it into the chair.

  Once again, I found myself wearing a furry garment on a hot day, this time a waist-length, large collared jacket. Not having any earplugs on me to muffle the sound of five cats purring loudly in my ear I instead attempted to create a little breeze by extricating one of my legs and pushing it off the ground to initiate a bit of gentle swinging (a former boyfriend had once suggested this but in a completely different context).

  The cats appeared to enjoy the motion as they continued to whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears, and in mine. So I decided to up the ante and pushed a bit harder with my free foot. Granted, The Egg had been creaking a bit on its banana hook, but I just assumed that rattan was a naturally creaky material so carried on. I was interested to see how much swinging it took before the cats and I got chair-sick but the harder I swung the more they seemed to like it, and if truth be told so did I, so much so that I honestly never anticipated what would happen next.

  As The Egg swung forward in an extra large arc, and with a final groan, it came completely off its hook mid-swing and catapulted its occupants in the direction of the erection. It wasn’t so much humpty dumpty but a human-cat cannonball. Axl Rose, BJ and The Edge were able to right themselves in mid-air so they landed, ruffled but otherwise unscathed. Poor little Slash hadn’t ever quite got the knack of this and ended up doing a couple of roly-polys before coming to a stop. Meanwhile Meatloaf had the softest landing of all, on me. Once more I ended up on my posterior, although never before had I managed to do it in quite such a spectacular way.

  Winded and undoubtedly with a bruised coccyx, I plucked Meatloaf off my stomach and placed him on the ground before carefully getting up, checking the cat, and hobbling back to the chair-less banana hook. The chair hadn’t actually got very far before it ejected us and I looked at it, a mix of annoyance and dread building in me. Should it have come unhitched so readily? I was a literal lightweight and was sure that the average man would weigh more than me and all the cats put together. Mind you, one of those cats was Meatloaf. And what would I tell Griff? I imagined he used the chair often whilst composing the alternative guitar riffs for which he’d become famous.

  I dragged the broken Egg back to the banana hook where I left it, looking like some sad homage to the 70s. It was clear that the coiled spring hook that attached the chair to the frame had simply come loose, and it seemed likely that if it hadn’t happened to me, it would have happened to the next person to use it. However it had been me in the chair, and not wanting Griff to arrive home to see the wreckage of what was probably a much loved piece of furniture, there was nothing for it but to come clean to him immediately and offer to pay for a replacement.

  It was a Sunday and Griff was returning later that evening. So I took a deep breath and dialled his mobile.

  “Hi Griff, its Kat,” I said in a tone of voice designed to imply bad news. To my shame I figured that his immediate thought would be that something had happened to one or more of the cats, so any news that didn’t involve them would be relatively favourable by comparison.

  “Kat babe, what’s happened? Is it the cats?” I quickly confirmed that the cats were all fine, news which prompted the biggest sigh of relief I’ve ever heard, followed by a few seconds of silence whilst Griff composed himself.

  “I’m afraid I’ve broken your Egg,” I said before realising that Griff would wonder why I was ringing him up to report such a trivial matter.

  “You’ve broken an egg? That’s fine babe, I’m sure I’ve got plenty to keep me going, and if not I can always pop down the road to Maureen’s, her chickens lay more eggs than she knows what to do with.” Being a big fan of freshly laid eggs I made a mental note to pay Maureen a visit before putting him right.

  “No, I mean your swinging egg chair. I was on it with the cats and it came away from its hook...” (I omitted the bit about me being rather vigorous with the swinging) “...and we all fell out and it broke,” at which point Griff interrupted my rambling.

  “The cats fell out? Are you sure they’re ok? What about you? You’re not hurt are you?” I was glad to see that Griff had got his priorities right, after all what was a damaged coccyx between friends? Having reiterated the fact that the cats were indeed fine and that I was more or less ok too, I waited for Griff’s actual reaction to the fact that his garden chair was now a broken piece of weatherproofed rattan, unfit for human occupation. What I got instead was a long wheezy guffaw. Before I could tell Griff that he should be cutting down on the fags he chortled

  “Oh dear babe, I’m so sorry, I knew that chair was on its last legs.” Whilst I wondered at the irony of this statement he continued “I should have warned you not to sit on it, it’s really only there for the cats.”

  Of course! How could I have possibly imagined that there’d be a piece of furniture in Griff’s house and garden that would be for the sole use of humans? And with a final chesty chuckle he added “For an awful moment babe, I thought you were going to tell me that my erection had come down.”