by Cox, Tom
He was always easily distracted – as little as a rogue gust of air could do the job, and if I so much as contemplated clearing my throat or sneezing, I could forget it – but part of what made these spells so special was their fragility. Was he healing me? Getting off on my negative energy? Both? It was no wonder that the role of the black cat in folklore was traditionally the cause of such divergent speculation. This one had been crossing my path for almost three years, and I still didn’t know what it meant.
Dee sometimes caught the thunderbolt, too. Wandering through the house wearing earplugs, fighting off a migraine and trying to think of a productive activity that would not be interrupted by the ‘thud-thud’ of idiot cartoon techno, she would hear a ‘meeyoooeey’ sound, and find The Bear shadowing her steps, with an expectant air about him.
‘I’m not sure if he’s forgiven me, but I think he might have finally decided he doesn’t completely hate me,’ she said. She may have spoken too soon, though, since about five minutes later he covertly dribbled wee on a 1960s handbag she’d just sold to a man in Singapore.
‘Now, The Bear, why did you want to do that?’ she asked gently, picking him up beneath his shoulders.
Had Ralph, Janet or Shipley done the same thing, she would have almost certainly called them a crapweasel or a nobwaffle by now and threatened to fashion them into a replacement for the soiled item, but her tone with The Bear was perennially that of the primary school teacher with the autistic maths prodigy. Eight years they’d been together now, on and off, and she still did not seem to have completely given up on the possibility of him opening up and telling her his deepest thoughts. To give her credit, I thought she might get her wish this time. For just a split second, his mouth opened and it seemed that he was forcing out the first words of a monologue about his troubled childhood, but in the end he just had an asthma attack.
Whatever The Bear’s emotional temperature, I felt certain that he’d come to unequivocally love our next house, in the ‘city village’ of Trowse, on the outskirts of Norwich. At the end of a day of futile, frustrating househunting – how were we ever going to be in a position to buy another house when selling ours was going to be so difficult? – Staithe Cottage had shimmered in front of us like an oasis in the summer heat. Visiting it had been little more than an afterthought. Two hours earlier, the notion of moving into rented accommodation had still been one that we’d not fully thrashed out, but after a single glance at the adjacent river and the enormous living room that stretched out over the water on stilts, a tiny nod passed between us that said our tenancy agreement was already as good as signed.
The picture I’d seen on the Internet of a pretty yet fairly standardised-looking two-bedroom Norfolk flint cottage really didn’t do the place justice. Set down a dusty track a hundred yards from the nearest road, together with four houses of complementary style, it was just about the most peaceful spot either of us had ever clapped eyes on, yet it was only half an hour’s walk from the centre of Norwich, our favourite city. And all this for only slightly more per month than what I’d paid not all that long ago for a tiny one-room flat in south London.
As the landlord, a gruff, bearded architect called Richard, proudly told us of how he’d found the place in near-derelict condition in the late eighties and lovingly restored and extended it, we popped our heads through the trapdoor in the living room floor and looked down into the depths of the river. Resurfacing, we were surprised to find that we had been joined by the departing tenant. She was rather hairy, and, even by Norfolk standards, her greeting was distinctly on the laid-back side.
‘Oh, this is just Tibs,’ said Richard, picking her up and smoothing a hand along her arthritic-looking spine and onto her withered tortoiseshell tail. ‘My wife and I used to live here ourselves. Now we live next door, but Tibs still likes to use it as her granny flat.’
This was useful information, in that it made my next question, regarding the precise rigidity of that ‘no pets’ clause in the homogeneous tenancy literature, somewhat less fraught. It soon became obvious that not only we, but our animals too, would be welcome here. We wouldn’t even have to use our ever-reliable back-up plan of pretending that we actually only had two cats: Ralph and an unusually chameleonic black phantom who could shrink and expand at will to resemble Janet, Shipley or The Bear.
The day we moved in was one of hottest of the year. After Don had finished helping us unload our furniture from his van and let his black Labrador – Don did slightly resemble a Labrador, now I came to think of it – splash about in the river, we settled down for lunch on the balcony next to it. Our property problems were far from over: already both of us were upping our workload, two-thirds of my beloved collection of rare vinyl was on eBay in order to help us out of our jam, and we knew that being candid about Devil’s Cottage to potential buyers was going to mean that it could take a long time to sell, and even then probably at a price significantly less than its market value.
For the moment, however, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ rule applied. As we said hello to a passing pair of canoeists and watched Shipley and Janet make their first snuffling forays into the meadow opposite the house, I couldn’t help but think of that overused property phrase ‘living the dream’. It was not a phrase I liked, partly because if I was really going to live one of my dreams it would probably involve me resitting my GCSEs and realising I hadn’t got any pens whilst simultaneously walking through a series of endless doors watched by various friends and former Blue Peter presenters, all of whom would suddenly develop the faces of wolves. Nonetheless, I supposed that when people used that phrase, they were talking about something like the scene before us.
It was such a cliché, and so damn good with it, Dee and I couldn’t help but chuckle. That said, with hindsight I probably did take my elation a bit too far by jumping in the river, particularly in view of what one of our neighbours told us later about her friend who contracted Weil’s disease after doing the same thing.
I knew enough about The Bear now not to second-guess his moods, so when, two days later, he disdainfully licked the butter off his paws and vanished, I wasn’t surprised. I had by now developed a theory that with every new place we moved to, he would view it as his duty to walk and walk until he was sure that The Actor’s old flat was not somewhere in a ten-mile radius.
We had not heard from his former soulmate since his move to Australia two years previously, but The Bear did not know that and, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing not to say that the two of them were not wandering the countryside in matching states of emptiness, biding their time by performing unreasonable acts with cardboard until their exalted reunion. Given that a person could not walk more than two miles in any direction without being confronted by one of two rivers, a dual carriageway, a dry ski slope or the Norwich branch of the Big Yellow storage depot, Dee and I reasoned that it would not be long before he decided to turn back, but a week later, when our reasoning was getting a little shakier, we received an intriguing telephone call from our estate agent, who’d been showing a couple of pensioners around Devil’s Cottage.
‘How did the viewing go?’ I asked her, impressing myself by resisting the temptation to add: ‘Please say they wanted to buy it and then I might not have to sell my original copy of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left!’
‘I think they liked it, but the husband was a bit worried about how narrow the staircase was,’ she said. ‘Actually, that’s not the reason I’m calling. What I wondered was, when I show the house in future, would you like me to let your cat out, or would you prefer it if I kept him locked inside?’
‘I’m sorry. Could you say that again?’
‘Your cat. The black one. At least, I assume he’s yours. He was sitting in a cardboard box when we went into the upstairs bedroom. He looked very pleased with himself.’
It was his most confounding masterstroke yet. I mean . . . I knew we’d been a bit lenient in letting him out of his carrier on the ten-mile drive from Holsham
to Trowse, and he did have a look of uniquely intense concentration on his face as he stared out the back window, but this was remarkable. How, we wondered, as we hurried to the car, had he found his bearings, known to take the third exit at the Heartsease roundabout and not the one before it that looks a bit like it, negotiated the A47 bypass?
About half an hour later, we got our answer. You could have said the jet black cat that greeted us so cheerily at the front door of our house of pain looked a bit like The Bear, but probably only if you were extremely short-sighted or the feline equivalent of a racist. I had no idea where this overweight, flirty-tailed creature came from or to whom it belonged, but from the dark glaze of fur covering every carpet, it was obvious that it had been making itself at home. One might have hoped it would have offered us some form of token rent payment by, say, undertaking some pest control in our molehill-strewn garden or – better still – shimmying its ample behind up to the exhaust pipe of next door’s Subaru and filling it with a giant turd, but it was clear that there was only one kind of squatting going on here.
‘You know that The Bear is probably going to be curled up on the bed when we get back,’ said Dee, after we’d deposited the cat in the garden and finished taping the cat-flap up.
She was almost right: the following morning, back in our lovely rented house, we came downstairs to find him on the bean bag, sleeping off his bender with an apparent vengeance. I opted for the nonchalant approach, strolling straight onto the balcony with my cornflakes without stopping to pet or fuss him, but I’m sure we both knew it was an act. If he’d been fully conscious – and was that one soulful eye I saw opening just a crack as I went past? – I’m sure he would have been able to look at me and see beyond my skin to the relief that was flooding through me.
It was preposterous to think that he’d been the one pulling the strings to our emotions for the last twenty-four hours: the kind of supernatural speculation that even Folk Michael would have written off as poppycock. Still, there was nothing to say that, somewhere during our final days at Devil’s Cottage, either as a practical joke or as an innocent act of generosity, The Bear hadn’t tipped off a dumb, fluffy-tailed friend about the empty house. There were all sorts of messages being passed between cats all the time: a hidden, finely nuanced language seething with miniature power struggles, unfinished business and abiding vendettas.
With dogs, it just wasn’t the same. As we got settled in Trowse, I started to walk Nouster, Richard the landlord’s Border collie, over to the nearby country park, and I closely observed his encounters with other members of his species. The difference between watching these and watching, for example, Shipley’s encounters with Spooky, the big black tom owned by our neighbour Jenny, was the difference between watching two boozed-up football hooligans rowdily greeting each other on the street, and watching two college professors – one of whom had previously slept with the other’s wife and given his book a scathing review in an academic journal – size each other up over the crème de menthe at a dinner party.
Even Nouster’s relationship with his ultimate nemesis, a darker-hued, permanently chained-up Border collie who lived at the other side of the meadow behind our house and went by the nickname ‘Black Fang’, had none of the gradations of The Bear’s relationship with Janet. And this was Janet we were talking about: no cat genius, and certainly not an animal who you’d frequently find yourself using a word like ‘gradations’ about.
The secret dialogue of cats, the esoteric catiquette that they thrash out and mould between them, is one of the great fascinations and frustrations of owning them. The greater the number you own, the more amplified such fascination and frustration becomes.
What, for example, was currently the beef between Ralph and Shipley? A matter of months ago, they’d still been sleeping together in a classically kittenish ‘pile of paws’ formation and cleaning one another’s ear gunk, but now each regarded the other with caution and the punch-ups, while still brotherly, could get vicious. Did this all stem from the time that I’d given them both a going over with our JML Pet Mitt and Ralph had got just a bit more time than his brother? Did it go back to when Dee bought that extra-strong black market catnip from the online herbalist and Shipley got a bit bug-eyed and greedy?
Or had it all simply started one day when one of them looked at the other one’s bird in a funny way? Irritatingly, nobody could tell me, though I sensed that, in Shipley’s case, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In two years, that little meeyap had developed into something much more garrulous and strident. Dee loved him, and could still reduce him to beatific state by spending three minutes deftly stroking his forehead, but she was the first to confess that she sometimes found him obnoxious, loud and grasping. Since both were highly opinionated, particularly on culinary matters, it was inevitable that they would sometimes lock horns.
‘When you’re cooking chicken,’ I’d hear Dee say to Shipley, ‘do I start jumping around and clawing the back of your legs and singing “The Chicken Song” to you?’
‘The Chicken Song’ wasn’t really a song about chickens any more than Genesis’s ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ was a song about a lamb lying down on Broadway. It was really more of an abstract a cappella number Shipley sometimes liked to toy around with upon being confronted with raw poultry. It drove Dee mad, and she viewed it as one might the antics of a particularly tiresome office joker, but I always had an impulse to applaud every time it started up.
I swelled with pride at the assertiveness and increasingly impressive physical presence of the runt I told myself I’d rescued from Romford obscurity. The understanding was that Shipley was ultimately my cat, in much the same way as Ralph was ultimately Dee’s cat. And, as Shipley’s supreme guardian, I enjoyed hearing such varying reports on his day as ‘Ekwwwekaarapplle!’ (‘It’s bloody raining out there again – please dry my paws off with a tissue immediately!’) and ‘Eeeymeewikiwikeeyapeeeymekweeeekeyap!’ (‘IwentoutsideandtherewasagooseitmadeanoiseatmeIcan’te atitliketheotherflyingmice’). When I was too busy to pay full attention to his news, he usually resorted to more extreme measures, tearing with his front teeth into whatever document happened to be lying on my desk with no regard for its bearing on the following month’s household income.
On one occasion, when I’d ignored an overlong anecdote he was trying to tell me about the biscuit dispenser being empty and callously nipped off to get a cup of tea, he laid devastating waste to a short ghost story I’d been trying to write about a man who lives by a river and walks his neighbour’s dog. I suppose it was his way of telling me that the dialogue was cloth-eared, the non-autobiographical elements didn’t ring true and my narrative voice was woefully undeveloped. If so, as a piece of literary criticism, it was both incisive and exacting. I can only think that when, a month or so later, during one of his ritual Daily Mirror-chewing sessions, he ripped the word ‘pants’ out of the paper and dropped it at my feet, he was offering a postscript.
A time that I was particularly glad of Shipley’s word-smithery was in January 2004, when he managed to smuggle his way into our local mail van. The postman – a gentle man called Dave, with a strong Norfolk accent and a habit of inviting himself into my living room to soliloquise on the early albums of Deep Purple – had got almost a mile down the road towards Norwich before he heard the yapping coming from behind his seat. His first thought was that Jenny-from-across-the-track’s terrier-spaniel cross, a beautiful little piglet of a dog called Tansy, had stowed away in there. Turning round and seeing the sharp, inquisitive features of a sinewy black cat was a momentary heart-stopper, but Dave said he wasn’t really all that surprised, and neither were we. Shipley had always had a soft spot for members of the delivery trade.
‘He’s been after me parcels for months now,’ said Dave. ‘I’ve already shooed him out of here twice this week. Good job he’s got a loud voice. These diesel engines aren’t exactly quiet.’ From what I could work out from Dave’s retelling, the noise Shipley had made had held n
o terror or apprehension. It was more of a polite, overexcited enquiry regarding the destination of their little adventure together and whether, when they got there, there would be any chicken-flavoured snacks available.
I’d known from very early on that Shipley had some serious cattitude. He did not have Ralph’s ruffled beauty, or The Bear’s cunning, or Janet’s ability to take the good with the bad, but when it came to pure energy, he outshone them all. Keen to make the most of my new, rambling-friendly habitat, and taking note of his hound-like qualities and fondness for travel, it was perhaps only logical that my thoughts would turn back to Monty, and I would invite Shipley on a walk with me through the meadow across from the house. I wouldn’t have insulted The Bear’s intelligence by proposing that he joined in with such a flippant activity, and by that point he was far too busy with his new obsession: climbing onto the roof of the converted stable where Richard the landlord and his wife Kath lived, pressing his face against the skylight, and staring longingly down at them. Janet was also absent – probably busy trying to befriend a fox. However, not wanting to show favouritism, I invited Ralph to join us.
To be frank, I didn’t have high hopes for Ralph’s capabilities as a power-walker. This was not just because I was worried that the remotest brush with a Shetland pony or Jack Russell could result in one of his prolonged whining sessions. Since Brewer’s death, he seemed to feel, in killing terms, that he had some kind of obligation to take up where his brother left off. Fortunately, his homicide had not yet become excessive, nor had it confirmed some ominous thoughts I’d had after finding out Staithe Cottage’s original incarnation had been as a staithe where local meat traders would hang their carcasses to cool.
Lately, however, he’d been taking a more than passing interest in the two swans who circled the living room every morning, waiting for my toast crusts. The whole thing was obviously a misunderstanding. From where Ralph sat on the riverbank, two-thirds of the swans’ bodies remained obscured by the water or the stone ledge leading down to the river. That still made them big birds, but not nearly as big as they actually were, and Ralph – his memory of Brewer and the pheasant presumably undimmed – must have frequently told himself he could take them, no sweat (see below). Sure enough, before we’d reached the stile at the end of the track leading to the meadow, he’d scuttled off in the direction of the river, having spotted a bright white wing in his peripheral vision.