Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  Founded by Dee and me and Bob Potter and his wife Rosemary, the book group represented a nebulous attempt on our part to integrate with the local community. ‘Local community’ in this case meant Bob, Rosemary, a lady called Isabelle who was married to a friend I’d made at the golf club down the road (‘the road’ being twenty-two miles long), a man called Simon who’d once interviewed me for the Eastern Daily Press, a couple called Ben and Molly whom we’d met in a record shop in Norwich, and – when she could make the sixty-mile drive from her home in Suffolk – Dee’s step-grandma, Chrissie.

  We did bravely venture into the village pub once, but it was clear from the way that the local remand centre officers regarded us over their pints that they had mixed feelings about a long-winded discussion of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn being played out next to the dartboard, and we went back to a monthly alternation between our living room and Bob and Rosemary’s.

  I’d heard all the stories about provincial book groups: the initial honourable intentions to examine exactly how intentional the feminist subtext of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is, followed by the inevitable descent into parish newsletter gossip and wife-swapping. Our group couldn’t have been more different, but it did undergo its own kind of degeneration. We all loved Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird, but when Shipley was doing the Dance of the Rushing Endorphins on the rug in front of you, it was all too easy for good intentions to get abandoned.

  Given the domestic predilections of its founders and Chrissie’s lifelong animal love, the Brunton Village Book Group’s descent into the Brunton Village Moggy Appreciation Society wasn’t exactly surprising, but I’m sure the more detailed discussions of Shipley’s and Buttercup’s dietary habits must have come as a shock to some of the other members – particularly Ben and Molly, who seemed a bit too cool and indie for animal talk. Actually, Ben and Molly seemed a bit too cool and indie for book talk, too. I’d sensed their heart wasn’t in it the week they’d announced that they’d decided to watch the film version of The Virgin Suicides because they ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to read the book, and, after the night Bob interrupted an analysis of the latter half of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules to show us how he’d taught his Siamese, Boris, to beg for Bombay mix, I knew it was unlikely that we’d be seeing them again.

  Their replacement was a serious-looking man called Nick who lived on the outskirts of Norwich, worshipped Thomas Hardy (‘only his poetry, though’) and wore black drainpipe jeans. For The Bear, who’d made himself scarce at past book group sessions, particularly when a work of comic or middlebrow fiction was under discussion, the attraction was instant. As he leaped boldly into his lap and began to vigorously pad his upper thigh, his gaze never wavered from Nick’s floppy fringe. It was difficult to know quite whether to apologise, offer the two of them temporary use of the spare bedroom, or continue pontificating over Rose Tremain’s Restoration as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Before long, The Bear was curled up on his new friend’s lap in a tightly packed ball. That Nick was the last to leave that night was, I’m sure, down largely to politeness. After two hours, I decided it was time to step in. Novel as it was for Dee and I to see The Bear sit on a human being for that long, Nick’s legs had become a worry. People had contracted deep vein thrombosis from less restricted positions than this. As I gently placed him on an adjacent pouffe, The Bear opened one resentful eye, but it was enough for me to get the message that he’d registered the transgression and added it to his bulging file.

  Like all extroverted acts from The Bear, however, that was an anomaly. More often than not, book group nights would end with Bob, Rosemary, Dee and me, together with Chrissie, sitting in front of one of our log fires, each with one of our more happy-go-lucky cats sitting on, or near, our lap. If we were over at Bob and Rosemary’s, they’d always add a couple of logs to the fire at the end of the evening – ‘for Boris and Buttercup, in case they get cold’.

  This was inarguably what people refer to with a happy sigh as The Life. Nonetheless, there are plenty of differences between ‘The Life’ and ‘a life’ and plenty of practical reasons why the former is not traditionally lived by people in their mid-twenties.

  Less than a year before this time, our social existence had revolved around pubs and gig venues and people our own age, many of whom owned guitars. Now it revolved around living rooms and gardens and people old enough to be our grandparents, many of whom owned complex and expensive barbecues. Some of them actually were our grandparents. For every occasion we looked at the situation in a ‘cocoa mug is half-full’ way, there was at least one more occasion where we could view it as half-empty. We were young! We had escaped the big city’s crime and grime and knowing nepotism! We were soulmates who’d never got on better! Our cats could run free! We drove to car boot sales on Sunday mornings and bought cool 1960s chairs! On the other hand . . . We missed our friends and Skoob Books in Holborn and the Phoenix Theatre Bar on Charing Cross Road and juice bars and delicatessen sandwiches! We were cut off from the world, got in each other’s way, and got on each other’s nerves more than we used to! Those peacocks over the road kept us awake in the early hours of the morning! The last chair we’d bought from a car boot sale had fleas, and now its base was spattered with vole blood!

  One post-book group morning in July of our first summer in Norfolk I came downstairs early to prepare breakfast and found the house abnormally empty. I’d long since been strategically coerced into putting out breakfast for the cats before I prepared the human equivalent. Usually, Brewer would be first to arrive, bolting through the cat door and greeting me with a half-purr-half-chirrup noise slightly reminiscent of a football stadium rattle, followed by Shipley, Ralph, Janet and a dawdling The Bear. But now as I whistled, only Janet appeared, batting my leg with a hungry paw.

  I waited a couple of moments and whistled again and saw Ralph emerge from a bush in the garden and make his dejected way in the direction of the house. It took a couple of minutes for the normally hyperactive Shipley to follow him in a similarly downbeat fashion. This was odd behaviour from two cats that would usually fight their way across snow, stream or Alsatian-guarded garden at the vaguest rattle of a biscuit box. Perhaps, like me, they were feeling slow and cotton-wool-headed after an unusually deep sleep.

  Our cottage was situated only a matter of feet from the village’s lone through-road and our bedroom was situated on the road side of the house. As a light sleeper, it would usually only take the slightest screech of tyres or squawk of the peacocks at the old folks’ home across the road to wake me up. A ‘slight’ squawk, however, had, over the last few months, become an unrealistic fantasy: I might as well have been asking for the soothing snap of a grasshopper’s wings in downtown Detroit. Who knows which genius first had the thought that it would be a good idea to install the noisiest birds available to man to add to the ‘calming’ atmosphere of a home for Alzheimer’s patients, but over the last few years, their population had grown in a manner inconsistent with Brunton birdlife.

  At four o’clock on a spring morning, it could often feel like we had five fancy-feathered versions of the cawing woman from Monty Python’s spam sketch sitting on the wall opposite our house.

  For Bob Potter, who’d had to put up with their unholy racket and conspicuous excrement for almost a decade, the birds had become something of an obsession. Arriving home one day the previous summer, he’d found one of them dead on the road outside his front gate. Checking to see that nobody was around, he’d dragged the corpse into his store cupboard. That weekend, he’d barbecued it and served it to several members of his extended family. ‘Didn’t taste bad, actually,’ he told me. ‘Bit chewy, though.’ I couldn’t see my retribution manifesting itself in such eccentric behaviour just yet, but it must be said that when I saw Brewer eyeing up one of their plumes in the back garden, I wasn’t struck with the same feelings of melancholy that accompanied his other birdwatching.

  Was that why I’d slept so
well last night? Had Brewer finally taken his Serengeti dress rehearsal to the next level and, in the process, solved our ‘little feathery problem’ for us? Were he to have had a life coach, I’m sure they would have described peacocks as ‘a logical next move’ for him. I’d seen him lying in the lane on his back, sizing them up: a gesture that seemed to suggest not just that birds five times his size had been added to his list of potential quarry, but that those shiny, cocksure metal animals that zoomed along the tarmac so blithely had better watch their step, too.

  He’d been spending a lot of time over at the old folks’ home recently. From my bedroom window I would often see him or The Bear rooting through the bins for leftovers. They were our wanderers and there was nothing I could do but accept it. That acceptance, though, was somehow easier where The Bear was concerned. As far as we knew, the nearest he’d ever come to hurting another living creature was the time that, with a self-conscious look over his shoulder to check that no mocking contemporaries were watching, he’d savagely bitten into the ear of a felt mouse we’d bought him from Pets at Home. The wayward pull of testosterone, meanwhile, had long been out of the question. We knew he fought with other cats, since he’d often return from his little trips covered in bites and scratches, but it was hard to imagine him starting a fight. His nomadism was something mysterious and pressing and spiritual. Brewer’s, on the other hand, seemed more like an act of adolescent defiance.

  Half an hour had now passed since I’d first whistled, and I still only had three cats in my eyeline. I’d looked in all The Bear’s favourite resting places, not to mention those that used to be his favourite resting places that other, less pioneering cats had since co-opted: the gap above the living room ceiling, the gap behind my records, the warm spot behind the kettle on the kitchen work surface.

  When not out slaughtering pheasants, Brewer could frequently be found kicking seven shades of crud out of a stuffed toy otter left over from Dee’s childhood, but now the otter lay alone on the spare bedroom floor, in need of a bit of patching up, but probably glad of the rest. I was already mentally putting my shoes on, planning my route around the village, and rehearsing the speech I’d give to the neighbours in order to persuade them to let me search their sheds.

  It was my mind’s habit at such moments to scroll manically through its library of cats-in-danger paraphernalia: an episode of Inspector Morse involving a cat being hanged from a tree that had brought a tear to my eye when I was twelve, a newspaper story about illegal fur trafficking, a horrifying picture I’d seen on a placard held by some animal rights protesters outside Tottenham Court Road tube station. Dee had gone a long way to quelling such alarmism, but when the doorbell rang I already knew that something terrible had happened. In fact, that’s not true. When the doorbell rang, I sensed deeply, on a level that had nothing to do with irrational pessimism, that something terrible had happened. I knew that something terrible had happened when I opened the door and saw the expression on the woman from next door but two’s face.

  It had all taken place at just after midnight, while we were sleeping our peacock-free sleep. The remand officer claimed that it wasn’t his fault and the cat had come out of nowhere, but our neighbour, who’d been standing by the window trying to get her baby back to sleep at the time, had heard the four-by-four and the whinny of its brakes and could tell that it hadn’t been keeping to anything remotely resembling the speed limit. She’d roused her kind husband, who’d rushed the cat to the vets, five miles away – the remand officer had left the scene by now, explaining that he was late for work – but it was in vain. She was almost certain, she said, that the cat was one of ours, since she’d seen it in and near our drive.

  ‘It had a white patch on it, just here,’ she said, pointing to her chest.

  ‘W-w-was it small, or big?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of big. Or maybe medium-sized. It was hard to see, in the light, and you’d have to ask my husband to be sure, but he’s out at work.’

  My brain was now no longer my own. In the seconds it had taken to open the door and digest the information, a manic, mystic force had taken its reins: it had become a faster, more impressive organ, using parts of itself that normally lay dormant, but also a more erratic one. It seemed to feel that if it could create a new cat – a cat from far away that it did not care about, that fitted this description, a cat that nobody had ever really loved and wasn’t particularly nice – then it could save this situation. When that didn’t work, it started frantically processing the information on hand. The quicker it worked, it seemed, the more chance there was of avoiding disaster. ‘A white patch? On the bib? Well, that would be Brewer, wouldn’t it? But The Bear had a bit of white on his bib as well – just a light dusting of hair, really, but it could be called a distinguishing feature. Brewer had white bits all over his body. If it was him, you wouldn’t say he had a white bit on his chest; you’d say he had white bits on his socks and his back and his chest, wouldn’t you?’ These weren’t thoughts; they were sentences spooling across a computer screen gone haywire.

  I woke Dee and told her the awful news. We knew The Bear was not invincible, but in that he’d survived the mean streets of south and east London, carbon monoxide poisoning, the hard shoulder of the M23, asthma, allergies, scabs, a hole in the throat, baldness, domestic upheaval and travels to who knew where, it seemed unlikely to us that something as mundane as jaywalking would be his undoing. When I phoned the vet, she told me that the cat that’d been brought in during the early hours of the morning had ‘a really amazingly silky coat’. When I related this to Dee, a traumatised look passed between us. The Bear was never short on surprises, but in that instant we were 99 per cent sure which of our cats we had lost.

  Lying in the box in the back room of the vets, wrapped in a towel, Brewer did initially seem to look as immaculate as ever, but when I studied him more closely, what I saw was not the face of one of my pets. It was something much more brutal: a mask of animalistic shock. I actually had to take a step back, almost tripping on a cat basket as I did. And at that moment, I experienced a revelation: my memory of seeing Tabs lying at the side of the road when I was twelve was not real. What my mind had done at some point several years ago was create a picture out of what my dad had told me and turn that picture into a memory. The truth was, I had never before seen one of my cats when it was not alive. I had always been protected.

  I suppose I’d always expected that this day would arrive, but what I hadn’t expected was that when it came, I’d still feel like I needed protecting. Somewhere along the line I had begun to believe in another one of the great lies of adult life: the one that said that because you could grow a beard and fell a tree and fill out a mortgage application, you would naturally begin to care less than you used to about small innocent animals that you’d opted to put in your care. It really was a preposterous piece of propaganda, its subtext seemingly being that animals were just elaborate children’s toys that you’d grow out of.

  ‘It’s an awful thing,’ said the sympathetic lady vet. ‘It’s amazing how often they get hit on the village roads. People think it’s the big busy roads where it’s most dangerous, but it’s not. It’s nearly always the young ones, too.’ As she said it, I noticed the big dark bags under her eyes.

  A person living in the East Anglian countryside could be reduced to a blob of human jelly if he let himself brood over every bit of roadkill he set eyes on, but if I saw a dead cat at the side of the road, the image would always stay with me for days. It was not just the innocence of the creature itself that haunted me, but the knowledge that, as long as it remained uncollected on the verge, there would still be a family out there hoping that little Moopsy or Mr Winks had just gone on a very long walk, and would soon be back.

  The tired vet was right. Eight out of ten of these cats had a youthful, skinny muscularity about them that hinted that they were at the make-or-break, loose cannon stage of their adolescence: a stage whose other side one either comes out of as a more circ
umspect animal, or doesn’t come out of at all. It is unlikely, however, that their traffic play extended to actual sunbathing in the road, and, with this in mind, it could certainly be said that Brewer lived closer to the edge than most of his peers. Perhaps a near miss would have made him approach the road with more care and wisdom. On the other hand, it might have made him feel even more untouchable than he already did, and urged him on.

  In as much as a ‘live fast, die young’ philosophy can be applied to a cat, he had embodied it. You could see it in his early, savage attacks on Dee’s otter, but that was just the start and, perhaps, if he’d lived, there would have been no stopping him. James Dean spent his leisure time driving speedy cars; Brewer, who would have looked absolutely ridiculous at the wheel of a Porsche, chose to spend his sitting on the road in front of them.