Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  Once I visited the pub next to the NME office with some of the staff, and one of them put a question to the table regarding where everyone had been when they first heard Love’s classic Forever Changes album. As achingly credible answer (‘getting head in a goth girl’s flat’) followed achingly credible answer (‘getting stoned by the Thames and watching the sun come up’), I became increasingly uncertain as I thought about my own response (‘sitting in my bedroom, clearing up shrew blood and trying to get a plague of harvest midges off my pillow’), and was relieved when the subject changed before I had a chance to voice it. I was not ashamed of my bumpkin status – in fact, without really knowing it, I probably quite liked the way it set me apart – but I realised that it was time to get a little closer to the action.

  For more than a year, I’d thrown myself more or less as boisterously into London life as was possible without actually scaling Big Ben and doing the caterpillar on its roof. Like a lot of other music journalists I knew, I drank lots and lots of beer and went to four or five gigs every week. Unlike a lot of music journalists I knew, I invariably celebrated the end of those gigs by going to a nightclub and dancing my socks off to the funk and disco hits of the distant past, then – if there was an extra half an hour or more to be wrung out of the night – another nightclub, where I would do the same thing all over again. It was not a life that invited pet ownership, but I’d enjoyed it thoroughly. It was, however, always going to be little more than an interlude. If I had not rushed off in the direction of the RSPCA or the Cats Protection League in the aftermath of Monty’s death, I may have told myself it was because I was keeping my vow, but, more likely, it was because I secretly worried about the extreme acts of feline philanthropy that might ensue. I’d always loved cats: their fuck-you swagger, the art of their paws and tails and muzzles, the ageless comedy of their innate touchiness, the way they made every smidgen of affection they gave you feel like a hard-won personal victory. But now my lifelong need to be in their good books had the fuel injection of guilt. If I could not have all the cats, it seemed easier to have none.

  Well, ‘none’ is not strictly true. I did actually have one cat. Sort of.

  Daisy had never been intended for me in the first place, and while the official line was that she was my mum’s, it would be inaccurate to say that she was spiritually owned by anyone. A scraggy bundle of fully formed tortoiseshell neuroses, she’d appeared under our kitchen table one day in 1991, a present from my cousin Fay, whose friend’s cat had recently had a litter. Caught off guard, we were nevertheless pleased to welcome Daisy into our family, although Daisy’s feelings on her new domestic set-up were more ambivalent. They became more ambivalent still after being chased under the bed by Monty.

  Human nicknames are so often glibly explained, but cat nicknames tend to evolve in a more visceral, abstract manner. Why did I sometimes call Monty ‘The Ponce’? It’s hard to say. One day, for a reason known only to herself (if that), my mum decided to call him ‘Ponsonby’. I shortened this, adding the ‘The’, possibly to acknowledge some aura of aristocracy. Daisy’s transformation into ‘The Slink’, however, was less of a mystery. You wouldn’t exactly have called what Monty did to Daisy bullying; his regular chasing and rugby-tackling of her never involved flying fur, and seemed to be just his casual way of reminding her that he quite simply didn’t have time in his impeccably managed feline schedule for a shilly-shallying neurotic step-sister – let alone one with the bizarre defect of hissing when she was happy and purring when she was agitated. With each subsequent attack, her posture, which had been somewhat sausage dog-ish in the first place, became more low-slung, until it was clear that by continuing to call her by her original moniker we would have been lying to her and to ourselves.

  Since Monty’s death, The Slink had not exactly come out of her shell in the manner we’d expected – though no doubt my dad, reminded on a daily basis of the loss of the beloved, solid Monty by The Slink’s sheer nervy unMontyness, did not help with his stomping feet and foghorn shouts of ‘OY!’ every time she strayed towards his favourite armchair. I knew I had not put the effort into my relationship with The Slink that I needed to, and our contact had petered out into a series of pessimistically proffered hands, sudden shooting movements under sofas and strangely irate purring sessions.

  I told myself I was content with this for a while: I had a lively social life, a good job, and a cat – albeit a possibly mentally disturbed one that barely seemed to remember who I was – that I could go and see every month or two. But in summer 2000, when I moved from Crouch End (borders) in north London to the leafier Blackheath (borders) in south London, began to lay off the beer, get a little more sleep and spend a little more time at home, I realised that all I had been doing was keeping my love of cats in an undersized suitcase: I could press down on its lid, but it would spring open sooner or later with renewed vigour.

  When the contents of the suitcase began their inevitable spill, it must have proved disturbing for the hard-living, bohemian men with whom I spent most of my time in those days – men who’d probably presumed that my first love was Budweiser or Fleetwood Mac – not to mention for sportier, animal-indifferent longer-term acquaintances like Surreal Ed, who’d never had cause to cross paths with my cat side before. As a 25-year-old, I could count my cat-mad male pals on the fingers of one finger.1 We might have been entering a brave new male millennium, containing such unthinkably evolved phenomena as hair serum, exfoliating face scrub and George Clooney, but for the longer-haired men working in or around the notoriously androgynous sphere of music, to witness the bonding process between man and cat could still apparently be a scary thing. I can see that it must have been odd to be walking along having a perfectly normal conversation with someone who you’d pegged as having fairly simple priorities in life, and then see him suddenly cross the street in the direction of a ball of fur and begin acting like his brain has been transplanted with that of a self-neglecting 72-year-old widow. But what was the big deal? The way I viewed it, there were lots of very ugly things in London, so, on the occasions when something beautiful with a glossy coat came along and nudged its cold nose into your hand, it seemed churlish not to take a few moments to celebrate the mere fact of its existence.

  The situation, strangely, was little better with the opposite sex. One might have thought that expressing an interest in finding a female partner who loved cats was the male equivalent of a woman saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to go out with a bloke who loved football and farting.’ Nonetheless, up to this point, all the girls I’d fallen for had either been indifferent or allergic to my favourite animals. The eyes of my last girlfriend had been apt to puff up at the mere mention of the words ‘Radcliffe on Trent RSPCA’ and while we’d managed to pretend a cat-free existence was working for a while in our Nottingham terrace, it became obvious our set-up was doomed when I began trying to win the affections of next door’s big-nosed black and white tom, Charlie, with a selection of cooked meats from the delicatessen at the nearby Co-op. You know you’re starved of feline affection when you’re in a noise pollution dispute with people and you still can’t stop yourself from feeding kabanos to their moggy. I imagine the two girls who endlessly blasted Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better with you’ through our partition wall must have muttered to their Sun-reading boyfriends about ‘the weird bloke next door’ who was so mysteriously fond of the cat that appeared to hold so little appeal for them (or significantly less appeal than Phats and Small’s ‘Turn Around’, anyway).

  Dee could not have been more different.

  I’m sure I’d already worked out that she was the girl for me prior to that September night when we went on that seemingly endless yet effortless walk through south London, but the encounter with the ginger bruiser really sealed the deal. I forget exactly what street in Blackheath we were strolling along at the time, but I still remember the feeling of acceptance when I picked him up and Dee neither fidgeted nor put her hands on her hips, but began to join m
e in praising his hirsute majesty.

  For a year, I had seen Dee at parties, at gigs, in offices: we seemed to go to all the same places, and know a lot of the same people, but always missed getting introduced by a matter of minutes. When we finally met, the bond was instant. That Dee was the most intelligent, funny and beautiful girl I’d ever met knocked me off my feet; that she liked many of the same films, books and albums as me was a bonus; that she was a cat lover too was almost too good to be true. Better still, she had two of her own.

  ‘They hate me, though,’ she said, as she began to work her fingers through Big Ginge’s scruff. ‘One of them, especially. He’s an evil genius. I only have to look at him, and I know he’s plotting my downfall.’

  I found this extremely hard to believe, particularly looking at Big Ginge, who, if he got more putty-like in her hands, could probably quite easily have been talked into a game of ‘Fetch!’ on one of south London’s numerous commons. Dee was clearly exaggerating. As a stalwart of cat ownership, I knew how easy it was to feel that a feline was giving you the cold shoulder. Living with a cat was sometimes a bit like being at a media party and talking to an unusually carnivorous F-list celebrity: the kind whose eyes never left you in any doubt that they’d dump you in the blink of an eye for a tasty canapé or a former cast member of a daytime soap opera. The disdainful looks, the hot and cold moods, the ‘talk to the tail’ gestures . . . you got hardened to all this after a while. And while I didn’t like to boast, I felt that Dee’s problems would soon come to an end, once my magic touch was introduced to the equation. After all, it wasn’t just anyone who could walk down a street in Blackheath and coax thirty-pound furry ginger ruffians to sit on their shoulder and purr. That sort of thing took a rare combination of animal cunning, patience, studied nonchalance and intuition – qualities that I had worked hard on attaining, while in the company of my cats, and countless more belonging to a mixture of relatives, friends, enemies and indifferent strangers.

  Nonetheless, Dee was insistent and, as we began to spend more time together, her reports of the betrayals of her eldest cat, The Bear, become increasingly extreme.

  The Bear’s story was an unremittingly traumatic one, beginning in a plastic bag on the hard shoulder of the M23, where he was found, huddled together with six of his brothers and sisters, by a south-east London pet shop owner. Upon getting him home for the first time, Dee had watched, impotently, while his tiny, coiled black form had made three unsuccessful attempts to run through a closed window, finally sliding down it and retreating to a scowling position behind the sofa, where he would stay for the next fourteen hours. Overlooking one grudgingly proffered ear for a tickle (The Bear’s, not Dee’s), the first sign of affection did not come until a week or so later, although Dee was somewhat surprised to find it aimed not at her, but at her friend Neil, a kohl-eyed singer in a gothic rock outfit whose pastimes included tracing inscriptions from gravestones and locking himself in his room to compose poetry on a 1950s manual typewriter.

  ‘I think from that point on, I started to realise something about his taste in men,’ she explained. Fortunately, as she was the bassist in an artsy garage rock band at this point, Dee tended to fraternise with a fair few males of intense disposition. It was these artistic men who were on the receiving end of The Bear’s infrequent yet frighteningly zealous padding and wrist-nipping sessions, but it was Dee who was left to clear up his violently scattered cat litter and gently bathe the hole torn in his throat by an East End alleycat.

  The Bear had a way of looking at you, Dee said, that made you feel directly responsible for his hardship. This look only grew more intense after Dee, her actor boyfriend of the time and The Bear had contracted carbon monoxide poisoning in their east London flat. After a trip to hospital, Dee and The Actor soon recovered, but the effects on The Bear were more permanent. Asthma could be added to a list of ailments that already included a permanently perforated neck, a winky eye, a torn ear, a sight defect, a crooked tail and an inferiority complex roughly the size of Wales. He also now had the fluffy, frustatingly lowbrow presence of Dee’s new kitten, Janet, to deal with.

  The beginning of 2000 had seen a rare mellow period for The Bear. Not only had he begun to break down The Actor’s lifelong antipathy towards cats and form a strong, moody bond with him, he had also, for the first time in his life, managed to go four months without a visit to the vets. Dee and The Actor’s split that summer, however, had changed all that. The subsequent house move and the accompanying separation from The Actor would have been stressful enough for The Bear, even if it had not coincided with him developing a new flea allergy that made all his hair fall out. The fact that the treatment for the flea allergy also made his hair fall out seemed to have silenced any doubts that The Bear had had about Dee being anything other than his ultimate foe. From that point on, it had been full-scale warfare. Or, at least, the kind of full-scale warfare in which one army uses all the physical and psychological weaponry at their disposal while the other army cowers in the trenches, periodically offering their tormentors overpriced parma ham and attempting to boost their fragile self-esteem with comments like, ‘You’re beautiful – people don’t always see it, but you really are.’

  Dee had finally found a course of flea treatment for The Bear that was slowly restoring his fur, but, the week before I made my first visit to her flat, he’d begun to shed, bafflingly, furiously, once again. Now gardenless, he had also decided that the litter tray – seemingly permanently full with Janet’s titanic cargo, no matter how frequently Dee emptied it – was the domain of a more uncouth, less intellectually tortured kind of cat. It’s always a bit of a shock when, thirty seconds after setting foot in your new partner’s home for the first time, you’re confronted with excrement, but any squeamish feelings I had about coming face to face with my first Bear turd were stifled by my fascination regarding just how he’d squeezed it into the pocket of Dee’s freshly laundered dressing gown. ‘He must have . . . squatted sideways,’ I said, evaluating the evidence.

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Dee, reaching for a wet wipe and a swing bin liner. ‘Put it this way – if I were you, I wouldn’t leave your wallet hanging about while you’re here.’

  Two hours later, the perpetrator still had not emerged. ‘Do you think he’s escaped?’ I asked Dee.

  ‘No. How could he? The windows are all locked. He’s around here somewhere. I can feel his gaze. He’s probably looking at us disapprovingly right now and we don’t even know it.’

  Dee’s flat only had one bedroom and a living room barely big enough to gently rock a cat in, let alone to swing a very nervous one, but four years of studiously dodging mankind meant The Bear was well schooled in the art of camouflage. The same could not be said for Janet, who, moments after we had entered the flat and found the soiled dressing gown, had bounded into the living room like an overenthusiastic Labrador and very narrowly avoided trampling the crime scene with devastating results. I found this great galumphing creature hard to reconcile with the small black furball Dee had described as being brought to her door by two East End urchins, one Dickensian-sounding night the previous winter.

  ‘Our dad’s died, miss, and we were wondering if you wanted our cat,’ the children had pleaded. Since a) Janet was being held upside down by one of the urchins, and it looked like one of her appendages might fall off if she was suspended there for much longer and b) a crucial episode of Friends was on TV at the time, Dee made a snap decision, accepted the challenge, and whisked Janet into her life, where she had resided in a state of vacant happiness ever since – the one minor upset being the moment when Dee took her to the vets to be spayed, only to find out that she’d been misinformed regarding ‘her’ gender.2

  By the time we’d been to collect an Indian takeaway and got settled on the sofa with Janet sprawled at our feet (my magic touch had worked: as soon as I’d started tickling him on the side of his head, he’d melted into the cushion next to me), I’d almost forgotten about The Bear. I
’d expected that, if he was going to emerge from his hiding place, it would be a gradual process: a tentative nose poked out from behind a cupboard or wardrobe, a nervous paw, a step back, a step forward, a suspiciously twitching nostril. It was more than a bit of a surprise to turn my gaze away from the TV and see him no more than two inches from my chicken bhuna, sitting pertly upright and staring straight into my eyes.

  ‘Aha,’ said Dee. ‘That’s something I forgot to tell you. The Bear loves Indian food.’

  I’d heard so much about him for so long now that it came as a little bit of a shock to find that he was, after all this, only a cat. I’d been half-expecting some sort of cross between Gollum and the suicidal kid from Dead Poet’s Society. What I saw looked more like a Tasmanian devil. In fact, it looked like two Tasmanian devils melded together: the crazed, big-headed, skinny-limbed sort from the Looney Tunes cartoons, and the somewhat more ursine real-life model. His face was round and Paddington-like, and went a certain way to justifying his moniker, but the forlorn, balding pipecleaner body that slunk behind it was anything but bearlike. I’d seen piglets with thicker pelts on them. Only his tail, still but crooked at a slightly inquisitive angle, seemed to speak of any kind of vitality.

  ‘I know. It’s awful, isn’t it? Whenever he meets a new person, I always feel terrible,’ said Dee. ‘I ask myself, “Am I a bad owner?” But I really have tried to make his life easier. When you’re taking home £150 a month after rent, it’s not easy paying that many vet’s bills. He’s just a cat who seems to find trouble wherever he goes.’