by Cox, Tom
But if my pointy-eared nemesis was in a mystical frame of mind, he might well meet his match later that night. A folk musician with a penchant for magic herbalism and lyrics about burning scarecrows, Michael’s many very spiritual, very 1971 beliefs included the one that animals could not be ‘owned’. In spite of this, he enjoyed sharing the big dribbling love of a gigantic, wandering ginger cat called Ramases with an old man in the flat above him.
For safety’s sake, Michael had made sure that Ramases wasn’t around when The Actor dropped The Bear off, but he’d neglected to check behind the horse’s head mask – a favourite prop of Michael’s, often worn on stage during his songs ‘Power to the Pixies’ and ‘Reality is a Fantasy’ – on the shelf above his bed. As soon as The Bear had crept fearfully from his travelling polymer prison onto the bedspread, the more established cat had wasted no time in pouncing, landing on the bed with a ‘Browwwaaagh’ noise. His vision engulfed by flaming fur and bright green eyes, The Bear had scuttled away, eventually making himself comfortable at the back of the wardrobe, amidst Michael’s collection of medieval capes.
‘He’s been there ever since,’ Michael told us two days later, when Dee and I arrived to collect him. ‘Actually, no, that’s not true. He did come out once, when I was boiling some broccoli.’
‘Ooh yes,’ said Dee. ‘That’s one of his vices.’
‘I thought you said the only thing he ate apart from cat food and cold meats was curry,’ I said.
‘Well, yeah, that is sort of true. But there was this one day when he freaked out and ate some broccoli and then a Pop Tart. Or maybe it was the Pop Tart first. I can’t remember.’
‘Well, he was very affectionate,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it from a cat. It scared me a bit. I actually had to have a sit down afterwards. Oh yeah, another weird thing, as well. I thought the battery had run out on my smoke alarm because it kept making this weird noise. It was ages before I remembered I didn’t even have a smoke alarm and realised it was The Bear.’
Thanking Michael for his good deed, we made our way back to the car. Dee had coaxed The Bear into the cat box on her own this time. I couldn’t see him through the gaps, but I sensed he knew I was there. To help the journey pass, Michael had loaned us a tape of The Garden of Jane Delawney, a folk album made in 1970 by a group called Trees. The first line on the album is, ‘Country air, wrap yourself around me.’ You wouldn’t exactly have called it driving music, but it was perfect for travelling to a folklore-rich place like Norfolk on a misty autumn night: all ghostly whispers, elfin melodies and creeping vine guitars. It was easy for a fanciful, overoptimistic person to get carried away about his new rural life and start thinking about the country horror novel he would write, to which this would provide the soundtrack.
For a while, the unrelenting ‘meeyeeooop’ noise from the back seat added an extra layer of spookiness to the melodies, but by about track five it started to sound a bit psychotic, so we turned it off and decided to listen to The Archers instead.
That had been almost six months before, and in the intervening period, Dee and I had taken one reality check after another about country life. We had done nothing as tedious as ‘research’ before moving to Brunton: our original feeling had simply been that it was in Norfolk, and Norfolk was all lovely, wasn’t it? Well, yes, to an extent, but moving to a village ten miles from the nearest supermarket, the bulk of whose employment was provided by a nearby remand centre, with only one driving licence between the two of you, was always going to be a culture shock after living in a city where all your materialistic desires were on tap, day and night. Clinging to our idea of a rural idyll, we often couldn’t even find a rural Lidl. And why had nobody thought to tell us that in the Norfolk countryside winters last eight times as long as they do in London? I’m sure I’d been reading too many of those ‘Life in the Day’ columns in the back of the Sunday Times Magazine where successful rustic creative types talked about getting up with the dawn chorus, working for five hours, then spending the afternoon going on country walks and pottering about their herb garden, but back in Blackheath I’d begun to kid myself I would be moving not just to a whole new place, but a whole new time zone, where days lasted three times as long.
These real days dragged on in an entirely different way. There were still deadlines to meet and email to keep up with and a mortgage to pay, just as there had been in Blackheath, but there was also DIY to do, and mud – most of it brought in on twenty small but surprisingly absorbent paws – and no pub or club containing half a dozen friends where you could forget about it all, and driving, endless driving, and tiny Victorian cottage windows with the dark, dark, interminable night beyond them. In five months, I don’t think I’d pottered once.
The autumn of 2001 was a seductive time for a London resident to be nurturing a small-scale Back to the Land fantasy. Moving to the country and getting it wrong has become a cliché now, but back then early evening television was newly inundated with programmes seemingly telling city dwellers that all they needed to do was look fifty miles or more beyond the M25 and buy a giant farmhouse and they would never need to work, get in a traffic jam or have their vision sullied by a branch of Sock Shop ever again.
These shows were not the catalyst for our move, but they acted as a form of affirmation – and the fact that the houses in them always seemed to feature a contented sleeping cat on the bed helped, too. When we’d stood on the pavement outside the bar where we’d had our wedding party that October night, friend after friend had told us that, what with the attack on New York a few weeks ago, they didn’t feel safe in London any more, and they’d probably be hot on our tails in a few months’ time. We knew this was largely the drink and the occasion talking, but that did not mean we didn’t like the sound of it. We felt less like we were embarking on a new life and more like we were the team leaders of an unusually domesticated outward bound expedition, scouting out the territory before the rest of our group made their way through the brush to join us. If friends did not ask us to reserve them a seat in the local pub, they talked to us as if we were pioneers, setting off for nineteenth-century Montana to set up camp amongst ignoble tribes and cowboys.
‘You’re so brave,’ I remember a couple of people saying.
Were we? Really? That probably depends just how wussy and middle class your criterion is for bravery. It wasn’t as if we were off to trade in all our earthly possessions and follow the Bhagwan Rajneesh with a new loosely clad surrogate family. We weren’t starting our own smallholding and making our own yoghurt, or renovating a dilapidated monastery. We’d even chickened out of our original plan to buy a goat for the back garden. We were about to move to a small, slightly neglected detached house in a cut-price area of Norfolk to raise some cats, with a view to writing a few books (me), selling some old things on the Internet (Dee), and, if we got a chance, enjoying a bit of golf and horse riding in our spare time.
Both of us had done this before, anyway, hadn’t we? We’d lived in the countryside for the majority of our childhoods. But living in the countryside under the shelter of your parents’ roof is very different to living in the countryside in your first house in your mid-twenties with no friends or relatives within a sixty-mile radius. I may have lived in London for less than three years in total, but the place had been shaping my social habits for a lot longer than that, and Norfolk’s particular pace of life required some acclimatisation. When you’re used to getting most of your mail franked a couple of hundred yards from Oxford Circus tube station, walking into your village post office and listening to the following ten-minute conversation – and I mean ten minutes – playing out is always going to throw you off balance:
Man 1: ‘Keeping well, John?’
Man 2: ‘Keeping well, Mick.’
Man 1: ‘Keeping well. That’s the way you doos it.’
Man 2: ‘Certainly is, bore. Certainly is. How about yourself?’
Man 1: ‘Ah, not so bad. Not so bad.’
Lengthy pause.
Man 2 (pulling face of intense concentration suggestive of Mathematical Olympiad): ‘Not so bad, eh? That’s the way you doos it. Lovely job.’
Man 1: ‘Certainly is. Certainly is.’
Man 2: ‘Making much money at the moment?’
Man 1: ‘Ah, not so bad, not so bad. Just taken on a little job for my sister’s bloke.’
Man 2: (squinting into middle distance in manner of someone who has seen a squirrel in a top hat on the other side of the road breaking into his car): ‘Hmmm. Well, you gots to sometime, haven’t you?’
Man 1: ‘You can say that again, my friend.’
Man 2: ‘Easy does it.’
Lengthy pause.
Man 1: ‘Easy does it. You got that right, my friend.’
Another lengthy pause in which both parties make ‘hmm’ and ‘nnn’ noises at one another.
Man 2: ‘All right, Mick. Best be getting on. Take it easy, bore.’
Man 1: ‘Will do. You yourself too, my friend. Steady as you go now, bore.’
Man 2: ‘Ooh yes. Steady as I go. You know me. That’s the way you doos it.’
Man 1: ‘Ha. You can say that again, John.’
When Dee and I did eventually get served that day, the postmaster looked at Dee’s six variously shaped, flawlessly packed inland eBay packages like she’d just handed him half a dozen unpackaged, unaddressed slices of pizza and asked him to personally hand-deliver them to the Bronx.
‘You up at the Murrays’ old place?’ he said, as he began to violently shake a package containing a 1930s chandelier that Dee had sold to someone in Loughborough.
‘That’s us!’ we said, our grins freezing to our faces.
‘The ones with the cats, aren’t you?’ he asked.
We answered, once again, in the affirmative.
‘Stayed on the market a long time, that did.’
It was important not to be scared, we told ourselves. I’d grown up in a couple of ostensibly sinister villages in north Nottinghamshire, after all, and I had never had my body encased in a giant pagan structure or chopped up and served in a hot dog at a local fundraising event, had I? We were not characters in Straw Dogs or The Wicker Man. Just because the taciturn, vaguely intimidating manner of the postmaster had now been rendered the stuff of cliché by 100 horror films and comedy sketches, that didn’t mean he was going to care enough to stop being taciturn and intimidating. This was real English life – the dominant kind. Sleepy. Local. And, okay, just a little bit unsettling. And if it was a little disturbing that he’d heard about us on the village grapevine so quickly, we were learning that ‘The Ones with the Cats’ wasn’t always such a bad label to carry around with you.
We’d first met our next-door neighbour, Bob Potter, when he’d been over to welcome us to the village two or three weeks after we’d moved in. A man in his late sixties with an aura that was simultaneously businesslike and slightly woollen, he wore his former profession – that of secondary school headmaster – across his brow. Any semblance of gruffness, however, soon evaporated when a perky Shipley greeted him on his way into our kitchen.
‘Ah, cats,’ he said, instinctively seeing that Shipley was angling for a gentle pat on the bottom of his spine. ‘Love ’em, I do. Proper pets. You get back what you put in. If you go away and want them feeding, just give me or Rosemary a shout.’
It’s always nice to have a feline ambassador when you have guests over. That role had traditionally fallen – and still did fall, to an extent, to Janet – but from the moment Shipley had first skipped confidently out into the flat in Blackheath and sniffed the bigger black cat’s bottom, he’d made mimicking his step-brother his full-time occupation. There was something very Scrappy-Doo about this. Shipper was already beginning to lose that Yoda look he’d had at eight weeks old, and his newfound gregariousness had already stretched to encompass everyone from Dee’s stepgrandma to the heavily tanned man – at least, I hoped it was tan – who’d cleared out our sceptic tank.
‘You’re very friendly, aren’t you?’ said Bob, upping the pressure of his pats, to Shipley’s delight. ‘I haven’t met this one before, but I think I’ve met a couple of your others. Another bigger short-haired black one and a little tabby. They both come and stare in through our kitchen window. The black one clears off very quickly, but the tabby one just keeps staring at our Buttercup. She’s the youngest of our three. He sometimes presses his nose up so close to the window that he leaves a smear.’
As we got to know Bob better and he continued to report back on the secret lives of our cats, it did not surprise me that The Bear and Prudence were usually the main focus. The Bear had been in a particularly wilful mood since his arrival in Brunton, and, having found a hole in the back of a cupboard in the living room, he’d spent much of the time keeping himself to himself – with the exception of the odd scratching or ‘argle’ noise – in the esoteric airspace between the living room ceiling and the floorboards of the spare bedroom. But I knew he was not one to take a narrow view of his surroundings and that he would have been careful to take the time to scope out the neighbourhood.
As for Prudence, we’d been wondering why she had a lovelorn air about her, and her nasal functions had been a touch on the leaky, snuffly side since our first week in Brunton, when she’d fallen out of a tree in the garden and cut her nose. Obviously making your first contact with your neighbours through the medium of cat snot was not an ideal scenario, but it was good to know that, in Buttercup, she had a new playmate. It also explained the somewhat forlorn wailing noise that was becoming an increasing part of her night-time ritual. Actually, in view of the fact Buttercup was a boy cat, it probably explained it a little too well.
‘I’ve been reading about this,’ explained Dee. ‘You’re supposed to have them spayed when they’re five or six months old, but sometimes they can come into heat a bit early. Do you think she’s, y’know, calling?’
When we’d chosen the kittens, making sure that one of them was female had been an important part of the process for Dee. If she had indulged me in my campaign for the wild card that was Shipley, it was perhaps partly because she knew that she’d been granted the privilege of first choice. The choosing hadn’t taken long, and the deal was sealed when Prudence immediately fell asleep in the crook of her arm. Eschewing gender, my selection criterion had been a little different: I wanted two cats that looked like they would chase a hacky-sack around a room for periods of up to an hour without getting cynical. It’s more difficult to tell the gender of a cat from their behaviour when they’re very young and I’d already chosen Brewer and Shipley before I was told they were boy cats. That I wanted to name them after a beardy, all-male 1970s stoner folk rock duo was moot: if they had both been girls, I would probably still have named them after a beardy all-male 1970s stoner folk rock duo.
Now, though, it seemed obvious who the blokes around the house were. Brewer’s signature throaty exclamation – more of a ‘eweow’ than a ‘meow’ – might have been more redolent of a human crèche than the prowling fields of his ancestors, but at five months old, he was already bigger than The Bear and showing a leaning towards wanderlust. Shipley, meanwhile, was getting more sinewy by the day and, if his garrulous meeyapping was not entirely masculine, his deep throat purr gave him the aura of the undersized, geeky kid who can already mysteriously grow sideburns in the fourth year of primary school.
Prudence was not only less muscular and boisterous than her brothers, she was also a bit more high-pitched and high-maintenance (it was a constant source of fascination to me that three cats from the same litter could have such aggressively eclectic voiceboxes). If she was permitted the odd bit of special treatment – an extra bit of wafer thin ham here, an extra soiled duvet there – it was, I was reminded by Dee, only right, since Pruders was the only other woman in a house containing five blokes. I was careful to agree with this at all points and not bring up the subject of women’s lib in the cat universe. I could have done wi
thout the 2 a.m. wailing sessions in the echoey spare room, though.
‘You want to get her done,’ said Bob one day, leaning over the fence, as we observed Prudence shinning up a tree in his garden in pursuit of Buttercup.
If I’m completely frank, I have to admit that, had Dee pushed for a Prudence litter, my resolve would have been quick to crumble. Nonetheless, while my feeling on the subject of kittens remained of a fundamentally ‘Bring them on!’ nature, I could not see any logic to adding to the UK’s population of cats, when there were still so many out there that needed rescuing. And much as we’d enjoyed the synchronised wacky races around the living room and the ping pong ball football and the way Prudence and Shipley and Brewer fell asleep afterwards in a perfectly arranged triple-decker pile, the mentally taxing game of Hide the Litter Tray had not been quite so enjoyable, and we were not looking forward to a second heat. Only by moving the box full of granulated clay by increments of an inch every eight hours or so had I finally convinced the three of them that there was nothing inherently primitive about evacuating one’s bowels in the open air.
Even now, with the box gone and the ‘tray’ just a heap of intermingled soil and litter in an unused flower bed at the back of the garden, Brewer didn’t seem to quite grasp the age-old tradition of burying your wares: the useless scrape-mime he did over his increasingly virulent packages was a sort of post-excretion cat equivalent of air guitar. Me? I was just glad that none of this was happening indoors any more and taking time to relish the once seemingly unachievable luxury of going to bed without finding tiny bits of clumped grit stuck between my toes. I planned on making it last.
It’s always a significant moment in a man’s relationship with his cat when he takes it to get its sexual organs nullified. In view of the fact that The Bear could shoot me daggers for the mere crime of getting in his light while he was cleaning his paws, I was thankful that the loss of his testicles was one of the few misdemeanours for which he could not hold me responsible. Brewer and Shipley didn’t have his chronic oversensitivity, but the day I picked them up from the local vets – and by ‘local’ here I mean ‘would have taken you half a day’s journey on horseback to get to in the nineteenth century’ – I could tell from one look in their drugged eyes that there would never be quite the same trust between us again. Their throaty, thankful mewls might have been a way of expressing superficial pleasure that I was there to collect them from the bad place with the knives and the cage, but they disguised something else. That something was the wariness of those who can never go to asleep again entirely certain in the knowledge that something near and dear to them won’t be stolen.