Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  No, it would have been much more simple if I’d felt that The Bear plain didn’t like me. What really made me uncertain were the intense displays of affection with which he seasoned his domestic terrorism. The Bear’s rage scared me, but isn’t it always actually the way with supervillains that they’re at their most terrifying when they’re being friendly? The Bear’s fur was stubbly and porcupine-like when he was feeling misanthropic, but when he was in one of his spasmodic good moods it was as adhesive as Velcro. With him purring deeply and chillingly in my arms, I would feel as if he was trying to cleave himself to me permanently: it reminded me not so much of an overclingy girlfriend, more of a needy male friend whom you suspect, with a bit of encouragement, could start carving your name into his forearm.

  These bouts of passion might have seemed spasmodic and irrational, but on closer inspection, they had a pattern. The Bear was always at his clingiest when I was feeling a bit under the weather, when Dee and I had exchanged testy words, or when I was nervously close to deadline with a piece of work.

  I’d enjoyed writing about music for a living for the last seven years, but, almost as soon as I’d begun to be paid well for it, I’d began to get a lot more interested in writing itself, in the broader sense, than in being a breathlessly trend-conscious part of the music universe. I still got a lot of pleasure out of music, but I wanted to carry on getting a lot of pleasure out of it, and the way to do that, it seemed, was not to be a full-time music critic, so when the man from the glossy magazine with the big circulation called and asked if I’d like to write a guest slot in a regular column about domestic life, I immediately said yes.

  ‘It’s quite last minute, though,’ he warned. ‘We’d need you to make a decision in the next couple of hours. Something quirky about your day-to-day existence. The trivial stuff that runs through our brains and we often don’t talk about. Any ideas?’

  ‘Well there is something,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit of an odd one.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s just: I’m starting to think my cat is my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend in disguise.’

  In retrospect, ‘Living with the Enemy’ was possibly not the most chivalrous piece of prose I have ever written. However, names were changed to protect the innocent and I tried to keep the gruesome detail to a minimum (I had the restraint not to mention the dressing gown pocket incident). I showed Dee the piece for her approval before sending it off, and, while not entirely comfortable with having her favourite pet’s personality deconstructed in a national publication, she had to admit that my argument added up. It was she, after all, who had told me that The Actor and The Bear had ‘unnervingly similar’ personalities, and she found it difficult not to admit that, if you were a human who’d been placed in a cat’s body with the express purpose of sabotaging a relationship, with all the physical powers and limitations of your new species, you probably would have acted quite a lot like The Bear had during his fortnight in our care.

  As for The Bear himself, he appeared during my final couple of proofreading sessions, settling down into my lap and beginning to purr wetly and powerfully, his gaze alternating between my face and the computer screen. This was unsettling, particularly as Dee had told me adamantly that he didn’t ‘do’ laps, but I suppose it was exactly the kind of behaviour you’d expect from a jilted bloke pretending to be a cat.

  In truth, I had never met The Actor. From what Dee had told me, he sounded like a decent sort of bloke, if a bit on the intense side. Dee no longer socialised with him, if you discounted conversations regarding pet custody, and by all accounts he was now in a new relationship of his own and had no knowledge of Dee’s love life. On the other hand, we had heard suspiciously little from him since his hospitalisation. And was it just me, or did I see The Bear’s face darken when I typed the phrase ‘failed thespian’ before reconsidering and deleting it?

  I went to bed that night with more on my mind than in it. Would we ever hear from The Actor again? What did the future hold for me and the small, scheming cat for whom I was starting to feel a strange amount of love? And if The Bear wasn’t really The Actor in disguise, and was just an unusually sensitive, perceptive animal with advanced reading skills, would he view my latest act against him as the ultimate betrayal?

  It must have been about 3 a.m. by the time I finally drifted off, and it must have been about 3.05 by the time The Bear made the first of his patented, incessant broken smoke alarm noises, and about 3.09 by the time Janet began to headbutt me on the nose: an action in which I delighted, despite the repeated way it interrupted my sleep, and the knowledge that it was really just his way of explaining to me in no uncertain terms that it was time to go out and hit the town and there was nothing I nor any other stinkin’ human could, like, do about it, man. Being the only human resident of the flat who didn’t tend to sleep as soundly as a character from an Anne Rice novel, I could see that it was perfectly logical that I should be the one to tend to nocturnal feline needs, and, after two weeks, I knew the drill: put The Bear in kitchen. Lock kitchen door. Go back in kitchen to check window is locked and all other escape routes are barred. Open sash window in bedroom. Watch whilst furry bottom exits sash window. Listen whilst furry bottom lands with thump on roof of living room window of stuffy retired colonel downstairs. Shut window. Check window. Open kitchen door. Offer The Bear appeasing snack and try to reason with him about the drawbacks of a nomadic life.

  The difference was that today had been the first really hot day of the year. I’ve always been a poor sleeper in warm weather, and now I wondered what harm it could do to reopen the window. Surely just a couple of inches couldn’t hurt?

  ‘Do you mind if I let a bit of air in?’ I asked Dee.

  ‘Calculus, I think. Or probably Thomson and Thompson.’

  Dee often talked about characters from the Tintin comic books in her sleep; it was one of the innumerable things I loved about her.

  ‘I said, “Do you mind if I let some air in”?’

  ‘He is in, isn’t he? You’re talking about Snowy, aren’t you?’

  Taking this as a ‘yes’, I moved towards the window, thinking, ‘Just an inch and a half – that would be okay, wouldn’t it?’

  He couldn’t have timed his move more perfectly. I’d sunk, finally, deliciously, to the bottom of sleep’s well, so I didn’t see the escape itself, but I heard it. It even woke Dee up. It was the sound of a rare kind of urgency: the noise of a small soldier charging over the top, the noise of a rat up a drainpipe, a Bear down a drainpipe . . . the noise of all or nothing. By the time I’d registered it, my body was at the window, even if my head was still on the pillow. But by then all that was left was the hum of traffic, the distant scuttle of paws, and the tiny, yawning gap into the night air.

  I often wonder where The Bear went for the five and a half weeks that followed. Four days after his escape, The Actor called to say he was ready to collect him, and Dee gave him the bad news. Thankfully, she had the tact not to add ‘It was all my new boyfriend’s fault’ and ‘By the way, I should also point out that he thinks The Bear isn’t a cat at all, but actually you in disguise . . .’ If The Bear did make it back to The Actor’s place, The Actor wasn’t telling.

  It’s possible, of course, that The Bear just got stuck in a shed or garage, or a troubled pensioner smelling of catnip temporarily kidnapped him, but, when I think of that period, I like to think of a collection of littlest hobo-type images, perhaps soundtracked by The Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’: The Bear setting off into the early dawn; stopping at the all-night garage for a packet of Benson and Hedges; getting the tube to Central London; posing for snapshots pretending to bite the heads off pigeons in Trafalgar Square, busking outside St Paul’s; moving into a flat-share with some crusties in Camden; falling in with the wrong crowd; getting embroiled in a bungled heist in an aviary; then, finally, being forced to sell his body among the strays of Canning Town in order to raise the funds to get the Docklands Light Railway back to B
lackheath.

  There was, however, no time for such romanticism back then. I was distraught. For more than an hour every morning and evening, I would walk the neighbourhood, feeling false elation at every flash of distant tail or black bin liner. Suddenly, the embarrassment of shouting ‘Bear, Bear!’ at the top of my voice in front of a gang of Lewisham teenagers in hoodies seemed unimportant.

  My apologies to Dee were profuse but, of the two of us, she was able to deal with The Bear’s disappearance more philosophically. She’d realised by now that he was a cat who beat back his own path and there was little she could do about it. I’d begun to realise this too, but I missed our capricious relationship. Certainly, I loved Janet. You could level few complaints at a cat that would crumple into an obedient heap at your feet with the mere Vulcanish touch of a finger to a spot on the left side of his neck, but sometimes I couldn’t help yearning for a challenge. Why had I not taken more time to appreciate those hard-won sessions with the clingy alter ego known as ‘Koala Bear’, or the way one of his ears would crinkle slowly down at my touch when he was in one of his better moods?

  The Bear going AWOL presented a much bigger problem for our future – one that neither of us wanted to think about, but that we could not put off indefinitely. That spring, we had been on our first holiday together, to Norfolk: a place I’d always loved and where Dee had spent the first decade of her life, which, we could not help but notice, even in the booming market of 2001, had some very reasonable property prices. We’d both fallen head over heels for it once again, and formulated a crazy plan: in the autumn, Dee would quit her job and we would get married; then, very shortly afterwards, we would head up the M11 to set up home in a rural part of Britain where we knew not one living soul.

  Dee and I have always been impulsive, and this has often been our downfall, but there was plenty of logic behind our decision. Not long before meeting me, Dee had been hit over the head with wirecutters and had her wallet snatched by two prostitutes whilst walking down a street in east London at 8 a.m. The encounter had left her with permanent head injuries, and, ever since, she had not felt completely comfortable walking around the capital. Every morning when she set off for work, I worried about her terribly. One day, an idiot stockbroker pushing his way onto a too-full tube swung his hard briefcase onto the side of her head. The same afternoon I received a phone call from one of the editors at the magazine where Dee worked, wondering why she hadn’t returned after lunch. Half an hour later, she arrived at our front door, a dreamy, concussed expression on her face, not remembering that, when she had decided to take the afternoon off, she had neglected to tell any of her fellow employees.

  Both of us had fond memories of growing up in rural areas, yet simultaneously felt that we’d not quite appreciated country life as much as we should have. For my part, my recent decision to take a metaphorical foot out of the sometimes fetid waters of the music industry somehow was not enough – I wanted to get away physically as well. Having recently been commissioned to write my first book, I liked the idea of tapping away at my keyboard in a place where I could be alone with my thoughts with only the sound of a distant sheep and the burble of a nearby stream in the background. If not that, then at least somewhere without too many Starbucks coffeehouses or second-hand bookshops to distract me. The move was still several weeks away, but if by then The Bear hadn’t returned, we both knew we wouldn’t be able to leave without him. We were haunted by visions of him returning to an empty flat: the saddest, wettest nose and eyes in south London pressed to the window.

  That the idea of kittens would eventually be postulated by one of us, as an extra part of our country plan, was inevitable. Put two well-suited cat lovers, neither of whom has any immediate wish to procreate, in a whirlwhind romantic situation, and give them the promise of a garden of their own, and how could it not? That the suggestion first came up during The Bear’s long vacation, however, probably had a lot to do with my continuing need to atone for my mistake with the window. It was that feeling of Wanting to Save All the Cats again – that same one I’d been experiencing ever since that day almost three years before when the Monty Whistle Bird mocked me outside my parents’ house. If my suspicious, meddling behaviour and neglect had added to Britain’s overflowing population of strays, a bit of compensatory adoption was the least I could do.

  When our cat-mad friends, Steve and Sue, came home with a winningly insouciant tabby called Molly and told us that her mum was about to give birth to a second litter of kittens any day, a few more tails around the house became an intrinsic part of any discussion about our new home. We told ourselves in no uncertain terms that these would and could not be ‘new’ Bears. Neither were they going to usurp Janet in any way. That said, Dee was excited, and I was too – and not, I assured her, for the reason that I was planning to use water to spike our new little friends’ hair into mohicans in the way that Steve did with Molly when he was bored.

  ‘Kittens,’ Dee would turn to me and say, out of nowhere, as the day came closer.

  ‘Kittens,’ I would reply.

  We were worrying about The Bear, and I was not quite back in Dee’s good books, but we were also beginning to relax and look forward to our new life. That relaxation, however, was our big mistake.

  I should have realised that The Bear had an instinctive, telepathic understanding of our schedule, and that geography would prove to be no obstacle to this. Another four weeks on his Orwellian tramp trail, and he would have been returning to an unpleasant twelve-legged surprise. Another eight, and we would have been gone, meaning that, if he were looking for warmth, processed meat and succour, he would have been having to make nice with a raucous Greek family and their vociferous beagle. That the day of his return was also the day of the belated publication of my article, ‘Living with the Enemy’, was uncanny. I’d just returned from the newsagent when I saw the small, paranoid creature scuttling across our communal garden. At first, I mistook it for some kind of ferret or weasel. I am pretty sure that both would have given off a more appealing odour than the one The Bear did when, a few seconds later, I arrived at the front door to let him in.

  For the next three hours, he barely let me out of sight nor sticky grasp – proof of a long-held theory of mine that the amount of love a cat is able to offer at any given time always stands in direct proportion to how dirty it is. His entire body communicated his relief, all the way to that ever-expressive tail of his (see below): an instrument that so often before had seemed like the punctuation mark to his doomy internal monologue. Every few minutes, I would feel overcome by relief and affection and bend down to give him a kiss, then, getting a whiff pitched somewhere between death and cabbage, think better of it.

  After so long being the bad guy, it was an additional relief to be able to call Dee and give her the good news. I had not braved a journey to one of London’s seedier alcoves and rescued The Bear from the clutches of an evil underworld employer. I had not dived in front of a moving car to save his life. I had not even climbed a ladder and coaxed him down from the high branches of a tree. But when he had scuttled across that lawn, desperate for a bowl of food and a clean, warm human on which to subtly deposit the strange viscous green substance stuck to his left flank, I had been there. And that meant something.

  Dee was, of course, elated, but her happiness was tempered with ambivalence. Now The Bear was back, it simply meant that he would be gone again all the sooner. Was this how it was going to be for ever: The Bear shunted between homes like an unwanted child? Would she ever be able to fully lavish the love she wanted to on him, in the knowledge that he was truly her cat? Another tense phone call between her and The Actor followed, and it was decided that it would be kindest for all concerned to do the deed quickly. Dee had just one hour to lavish her grudgingly received affection onto The Bear before he was packed into his luggage.

  We had long since realised that the merest sight of a conventional cat basket would send him fleeing for the nearest nook or cranny, so our tac
tic was to use the pyramid-topped biodegradable equivalent that our Norwegian vet had given to Dee and in which The Bear had been transported to us, two months previously. I volunteered for the task, knowing that he would view it as yet another betrayal. The ensuing struggle proved that, while you might not be able to put The Bear in a cultural or social box, you could definitely put him in a cardboard one, given dexterous enough hands and a skilfully placed bowl of evaporated milk.

  Some people think the look of a dog that’s been wronged is one of life’s most crushing sights. These people have never known true heartbreak and are clearly labouring under the misapprehension that the spectrum of animal emotion can be summarised by drawing a frown, then turning it upside down. Throw Spot or Chutney a ball or a squeaky rubber chicken, and move on – you’ll be back in the big panting simpleton’s good books in no time. But when you’ve wronged a cat, you know you’re going to be hearing about it for some time. It’s doubtful that last look The Bear gave me as I closed the cardboard flaps will ever quite leave my memory bank. I can still see the eyes now: simultaneously wide and beseeching, yet slitted and scheming. That inimitable ear curled down again, but its fold seemed to signify something different: a resolute internal tightening. Cats’ mouths don’t communicate much, but if there was a way of shaping your muzzle to convey the sentiment ‘One day when you’re asleep, I’m going to creep into your room and cut you’, this was it.

  But I was not viewing The Bear as my adversary now. Far from it. The last time I’d opened that box I’d been a Cat Man. I had my cat history, cat issues, even. But now, something had tipped. I had surrendered. I had no idea whether The Bear and I would meet again, but I hoped we did. And if we did, I knew we would do so on his terms. I could call it my gaff, because I had taken out my first mortgage, but we would both know I was kidding myself. We could say that I provided the food, so I made the rules, but that would just be merely a front we would put on to curry acceptance in the wider world. I was going to be his.