by Cox, Tom
Shipley managed another 500 yards and seemed enthusiastic, but turned back after hearing some raucous teenagers boating on the broad on the other side of the field. As I saw his raised Mohican recede into the distance, I could hear him soundtracking every hurried step of his journey back to the cat-flap. I told Dee later that I was sure that, in between the meeyaps, I’d heard the phrase ‘I’moutofheretogetsomechicken’, but I probably imagined it. As she very rationally pointed out, ‘I’m sure when you have a repertoire of noises as eclectic as that, the law of chance says you’re bound to come out with the odd proper word every now and again.’
Seeing my disappointment, she went straight to her computer search engine, with the help of which she managed to track down a cat lead. What she was proposing seemed ambitious, but I decided to roll with it, remembering a childhood image of a brace of Siamese strolling imperially around a campsite alongside their owners. Dee had long argued that Shipley had a bit of pedigree in him. True as this might have been, it turned out that it was not the specific bit of pedigree that makes a cat predisposed to relinquishing its independence and agreeing to be treated like a toy fox terrier. You might have imagined he would have mistaken the lead for an unusually stretchy collar, but we hadn’t even pulled on it, and his Mohican was already up higher than ever, telling us that it would be unwise to take the experiment any further.
Chastened, I returned to my routine with Nouster, Richard and Kath’s dog: a circuit of the nearby broads and the country park, up the hill past Whitlingham Hall, down through the woods, then back through the meadow, where Nouster would round things up with a ten-minute woozle (named by Richard and Kath, this downright confounding activity involved Nouster watching the ground intently with a raised paw then pouncing on invisible creatures scurrying about far beneath the earth).
I made sure our yomping was completed before dusk, since that was when the country park – like any patch of countryside unusually close to a city centre with a public right of way – began to quickly take on a less salubrious character. Away swam the swans, home went the cyclists and hale and hearty sexagenarian couples with Labradors, and in came the prostitutes, drug dealers and adulterers. In fact, you could say that Whitlingham Park had a rare distinction in that it was not only the regional hot spot for dogging but also the regional hot spot for, well . . . dogging. However, I imagine if I had the tough, unquestioning mind of a true Dog Man I would have been less liable to let such notoriety bother me.
Being able to borrow your neighbour’s dog at a moment’s notice on a 365 day per year basis is a terrific arrangement. You get fresh air and the glowing feeling of an animal’s respect, without the hassle of having to hose the muddy broad water off him afterwards and put up with his needy, fetid, baited breath as he eagerly waits until your next sojourn, his mind unable to focus on anything else.
If Nouster had been The Bear, he would have been able to suss me out in seconds flat. One look at me nervously holding onto a bit of rope the time that Richard had asked me to help him moor his sailboat would have told him he was face-to-face with a faker. If that didn’t do it, one sniff of my odour – surely so different from the one of pipe smoke, outdoor grind and linseed oil that lingered permanently around his true master – should have given him all the information he needed to know. But, the way Nouster saw it, from the moment I got hold of his choke chain, I was the closest thing to God.
I liked the ego boost that this gave me, but what kind of person would one become, if that sort of behaviour started permeating their expectations elsewhere in their daily existence? A dog might be for life and not just for Christmas, but it serves as a much better primer for the latter than the former. The Bear might not have used those unfathomable North Sea eyes of his to inform me that I was brilliant and clever because I could throw a stick or a squeaky rubber bee for him to chase, and shout ‘Keep in!’ when a car was coming, but at least I could not accuse him of ever having raised my expectations unrealistically. He would never have led me to believe that life was a walk in a country park where people did what you said when you barked instructions at them and, even if he had, he would have been careful to convey that that park was an equal mixture of light and dark, good and evil.
Like all cats, The Bear knew about nuance and subtlety and grey areas and indecision: I could see it all in his tail every time he moved, and numerous times when he didn’t. But sometimes it seemed that his wisdom was even more refined than that of the rest of his species. If I studied Janet or Ralph or Shipley, I would have been required to severely stretch my metaphors to conclude that life was about whining in echoey rooms or having your dignity removed in a neck harness or underestimating the size of waterfowl. What I learned from The Bear, by contrast, was that life was about going from home to home without really meaning or wanting to and not quite knowing if you loved it or hated it, that it was about trying to keep your head above water and fending off illness, that it was about ambivalence, that it was about an eternal search – and not one that would end with a lovely cottage by the river that, sadly, you could never own outright – for something that was unattainable, that it was about pressing your snotty nose against the glass of the skylight. If I ignored the bit about the snot, the echoes were obvious. There really was no getting away from it. The two of us had a lot more in common than I’d once imagined – and quite a bit more than I would have liked to admit.
SOME RANDOM SELECTIONS FROM
THE CAT DICTIONARY: PART III
Bleatpuppy
Derisive term for a cat who is unable to land on any surface without announcing his or her athletic prowess to the world with a small squeak or pip of self-delight.
Ficklespee
The peculiar, tickly sensation experienced whilst swallowing a particularly meaty and recalcitrant bluebottle.
Fool’s bogeys
Crunchy yet slightly moist snacks that are passed off as a ‘treat’ because they cost more and come in smaller, very slightly more lavish packaging, but essentially taste just like other more ostenstibly run-of-the-mill crunchy yet slightly moist snacks.
Mummyfur
Feeling a bit low? Looking back wistfully to that time all those years ago, when you still had testicles, and you could actually remember who your parents were? Why not stretch your claws, find some mummyfur, and get stuck in? Pretty much any soft, non-shiny, recently laundered surface will do, but slightly damp towels and sheepskin are considered the ultimate delicacies of the mummyfur genre.
Simulslurp
The mystic force that, without the need for discussion or consensus, will cause numerous cats in the same room all to clean their most hard-to-get regions at exactly the same time.
Sleeping with the fishes
The particularly contented, lengthy state of REM that occurs after one has clandestinely intercepted one’s owners’ shopping bags in the wake of their last trip to the seafood counter.
Sucking the nettle
To lick one’s tongue with distaste in the aftermath of an unpleasant or demeaning experience (e.g. a meal not to one’s liking, or a cuddle from an overbearing child).
Twhisker
Or, alternatively, a ‘half-whisker’. Frequently displayed by feral cats who have been caught in traps by sadistic farmers and cat rescue officers, or in the clutches of bigger, scarier ferals (‘I was just a twhisker away from twatting that big-tailed ginger plonker’). Sometimes, twiskers grow back, sometimes they don’t. Professors of Catology remain in the dark as to exactly why this is. Often mistakenly thought of as a sign of masculinity or ‘streetness’, the twisker ultimately signifies little aside from bad balance and potential under-mog status.
El Gato Muy Loco
‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’
‘Yeah. It’ll be fine.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘What about the neighbours?’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘They seem fine.’
‘And you say it’s detached?
’
‘Yes.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No. Actually, during the three times we’ve been to view it, I’ve never quite got round to looking at the sides of the building to see if there’s another house stuck to them. Of course I’m sure.’
‘But I thought you wanted to be in the country and it didn’t work out when you were in a town. I thought you moved out of London because you wanted to be in the country.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Well, this isn’t really in a town. It’s hard to explain. It’s weird.’
‘Sounds very weird.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘It’s great. A total blank canvas. We love it!’
‘What about noise?’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘You can barely hear a thing – not even the road outside.’
‘Damp?’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘None.’
‘Dry rot?’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Nope, nothing. God, this is hurting my head.’
‘Carpets?’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Well, they’re in a state, but we’ll be replacing them.’
‘So why hasn’t it sold, then? Sounds a bit suspicious to me.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW! RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Mum.’
‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’
‘Oh, shut up!’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, not you.’
The longer I lived in rural and semi-rural areas, the more I realised that there were plenty of things I didn’t miss about my brief spell as a footloose, irresponsible urbanite living in ignorance of the housing market. Ear infections, stone-hearted landlords, broken central heating systems owned by stone-hearted landlords, chronic hangovers and the estate agent’s intern who stole half my deposit on my first flat would all have been right up there somewhere in the top ten. Nonetheless, there were occasions – and they were brief occasions, admittedly, occasions that quickly popped and evaporated into the air like soap bubbles – when I felt I would have welcomed them back like old friends, just to be granted the wish of going back to a more innocent time. Actually, the time wouldn’t even have to be all that innocent, just as long as it didn’t necessitate me having conversations with my mum about buying and selling houses. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see where the lady was coming from.
I’ve never met anybody for whom moving is a greater issue than it is for my parents. When I was a kid, on the wall of our many houses hung an illustration, etched by my dad, of a goat craning its neck through a fence to munch on the turf of an adjacent field. In its margin, my dad had written the phrase, ‘The grass is always greener.’ Much as I admire the craftsmanship of this etching, it’s hard not to think of it as a kind of inverted voodoo symbol: if you didn’t harm it, bad things happened to the person directly associated with it. I didn’t pay it too much attention at the time, but in the years since, I’ve often wondered if my dad ever noticed its pulsing irony as he transported my mum and me around the north-east Midlands, looking for a bucolic utopia where he could paint, write, and leave behind his council estate past and the misery of supply teaching at Nottingham’s less reputable secondary schools.
My dad made some bad moves back then and he’s the first to admit it, but few of them were anything like the luck that went with them. Looking back at a nine-year period, beginning in 1985, which took in – among other things – a subsiding semi, the sale of an elegant Edwardian villa at the most unwise moment in twentieth-century UK property history, some meddlesome open cast mining, the discovery of a malignant melanoma in one of my mum’s retinas and the unearthing of a mine shaft in a back garden, it strikes me that a person could probably repeatedly drive a bulldozer into one’s own house and come away in better shape.
If you’ve been through an experience like that, it’s only natural to want to pass on what you’ve learned to those closest to you. My parents are settled in a house they love now, and their housing market disasters have bonded them in shared wisdom. But while my dad’s advice on the subject broadly involves telling me to watch out for nutters or announcing ‘MOST STRESSFUL THING IN THE WORLD, MOVING HOUSE!’ as he watches Dee and me struggle to get a mattress through a doorway, my mum can now consider herself the hard-bitten owner of a set of property antennae. She knows all the warning signs, and she knows that the old aphorism about life being what happens while you’re making other plans never rings truer than when you’re moving house.
Nonetheless, when I spoke to her about moving from Trowse to the town of East Mendleham, in south Norfolk, in the summer of 2004, I could sometimes start to feel like the offspring of reformed alcoholics who thought they’d caught him red-handed in necking his first full bottle of Jack Daniels when in reality he’d only been examining the label. Daisy’s voluble contributions to these discussions did little to lower the stress level.
My last remaining childhood cat had always been jumpy, but, since she’d crossed the threshold into old age, her eccentricities had hardened into something more unique. For my mum, who still hoped that one day The Slink might become like other cats and decide to purr when she was happy, as opposed to when she was livid, this was a daily source of frustration.
My mum had tried pretty much everything over the years: prawns, pilchards, a dozen different types of brushes, a selection of hand-woven cushions, those expensive brands of cat food that have the adverts with the women in silk dressing gowns who look poised to get down on all fours and tuck in to the meaty goodness themselves . . . None of it had worked in any lasting way, and any minor progress would always be swiftly nullified by my dad who, perhaps in tribute to his favourite ever pet, had taken Monty’s old mantle as The Slink’s tormentor and made it very much his own.
‘HEY? WHAT DID YOU SAY? ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THAT CAT?’ my dad would say, picking up the other receiver, after overhearing my mum tell me about The Slink’s latest psychotic purring fit. ‘BLOOMIN’ THING’S DRIVING ME CRAZY.’
When you’re a small, bony tortoiseshell cat with nerve problems and an overactive thyroid, it cannot be easy to coexist alongside one of the six loudest men in northern Britain. When that person is not particularly fond of you, it must be harder still.
Never let it be said that my dad is not an animal lover, but his taste tends to run to the wild rather than the domestic. We’re talking here about a man who has been known to spend a whole afternoon sketching a goat’s chin hair, a man who once got so involved in looking at a bull in a field by the side of the road that he drove his Morris Marina into a ditch and had to get the AA to winch it out. But when he is faced with the more high-maintenance members of the natural world, talk quickly becomes cheap and time tight. This perhaps explains why Monty’s sturdy self-reliance was so appealing to him, and why The Slink has never been able to come remotely close to living up to it.
He never exactly shared her worldview in the first place, but since I’d left home, the battle lines had been much more clearly drawn. What my dad failed to see, however, was that every time he stomped down the stairs, colourfully and loudly assassinated The Slink’s character or firmly removed her from his favourite armchair, he was only exacerbating his problem. As he upped the volume of his attacks, she upped the volume of her schizophrenia.
By the time of The Slink’s thirteenth summer, none of the one- and two-syllable letter formations traditionally employed to suggest cat sounds could any longer be used to evoke the noise that came out of her mouth. Even ‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’ is a mere hint of the true gargling horror of it. As the owner of two unusually vocal cats, I knew what it was like to have a large portion of your daily conversations interrupted by cacophonous gibberish, but we were talking about something from another realm entirely here. There truly was no more delicate way of putting it: when I’d read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and the main character’s cat had come back from the dead, this was t
he noise I had imagined it had made.
My mum’s theory regarding The Slink’s habit of joining in with her phone conversations was rational enough. The Slink, she claimed, had made the quite obvious mistake of thinking that my mum was talking to her, rather than to the banana-shaped plastic thing with the buttons on it in the corner of the room. This didn’t, however, explain why, on the occasions when my mum did want to talk to The Slink, The Slink remained frustratingly mute, or retreated under a table to purr spitefully.
Now, with the new levels of amplification, the most elementary of my mum’s phone calls to a colleague or plumber had the potential for a myriad of mix-ups (‘No, there’s nothing blocked in the waste disposal, it’s fine; that’s just my cat! What? No, my cat’s not blocked in the waste disposal; she’s very happy . . . Oh yes, I’m sure; I can tell because she just spat at me’). Knowing The Slink’s habits, I had long since worked out how to circumvent such misunderstandings, but her howling sessions infused my mum’s endless worries about my low-level nomadic lifestyle with an extra serum of negativity. If she’d employed a shrunken, demented elderly relative to sit in the background and wail ‘Doom!’ every time she voiced one of her concerns, the effect could not have been more extreme. When, as a finishing touch, my dad made his customary contribution of bellowing ‘’EY? WHAT DID HE SAY, JO?’ and ‘TELL HIM TO WATCH OUT FOR NUTTERS!’ from a semi-adjacent room, the three-way assault often became a little overwhelming.