Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  It didn’t require a therapist to deduce that my parents were worrying about the ways in which the removal vans and change of address stationery of my childhood had left their marks on my adult psyche: was I, like my dad and his goat, fated to have a long, troubled search for that ever-elusive greener grass? Admittedly, moving house had dominated my life for the last few years, and I’d not always made the best decisions. After paying rent in Trowse, mounting an expensive legal campaign against Devil’s Cottage’s former owners and taking fifteen months to make an honest sale of the place, property had hammered our bank account, leaving me taking on twice as much freelance journalism as I’d ever taken on in the past, and Dee adding more and more of our possessions to her eBay stock.

  The beautiful rented house had been our saviour, but in the end it was more property, and property had made us harried and scrabbling. I could admit all that. But if it was lack of caution on which my mum and dad were dwelling, I felt their fears were superfluous, caution being one of the fundamental byproducts of having someone tell you to watch out for nutters at least once a week for the previous two decades. If, meanwhile, they sensed that history was starting to repeat itself, I could immediately point out a couple of obvious holes in their argument.

  First, as much as some of my recent moves had been characterised by escape, I liked househunting. I liked the manner in which a would-be home could spark the imagination, I liked the sense of possibility offered by twenty minutes surfing on rightmove.co.uk. Moreover, I was married to someone who salivated at the prospect of refurbishing houses. The way the two of us saw it, we were only going to be on the planet for – if we were fortunate – seven or eight decades, and, unless our enthusiasm for cat ownership mysteriously dissipated, we probably weren’t going to be spending much of that time going on holiday to lots of different places, so why not spend it living in lots of different places, and getting the satisfaction of reshaping them in the process?

  Secondly, when my dad had been searching for his perfect house, his primary objective had always been to find a place that was peaceful, secluded and ultra-countrified. By the time I’d been in Norfolk for three years, my primary objective was markedly different. When you boiled it right down, I wanted to find a place where my cats would be happy and safe.

  When Dee and I pulled up next to a ‘For Sale’ sign, the first question we always asked each other, upon appraising the building beyond it, was, ‘How do you think it will suit the pusses?’ When you properly thought about it, there were a lot of domiciles out there that simply weren’t all that cat-friendly. Flats weren’t great, obviously, unless they were on the ground floor and had their own garden. Inner city places on main roads were a complete no-no. As for ‘sleepy’ village lanes, we’d witnessed the problems of those only too acutely. Houses abutting small country roads were better, but then there was the problem that the cars that came down them usually did so at high speeds, and not with enough frequency for an imprudent moggy not to become gung-ho. The cottage in Trowse had been a better set-up, but during those moments when my anti-nutter training was in overdrive, I couldn’t quite convince myself that The Bear’s trips up the track and over the lane wouldn’t end up with him being run over by a member of the Norwich and District Association of Master Doggers, late for a crucial meeting.

  Clearly, you couldn’t have it every way you wanted it, but the Upside Down House seemed considerably better than a compromise. Situated on the outskirts of the market town of East Mendleham, it looked, from the road, a bit like a military bunker that someone had managed to half-build before finding out that war had been cancelled and doing their best to turn it into a bungalow instead. As a result of this, the pensioners selling it had received no end of last-minute cancellations from would-be viewers and the house had remained on the market for more than a year. The fact that this couple had also presented the place as having three studies and only one bedroom probably hadn’t helped, either.

  Anyone with a modicum of imagination, though, would have been able to see the place’s potential, particularly by the time they reached the bottom two floors and saw the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the three-acre lake at the bottom of the garden. The Upside Down House reminded me of a human head: yes, it was nondescript at the back, but its front was expressive, and its eyes were on the action.

  We’d been there for ten minutes and Dee had already knocked down about four walls in her head and restored the edifice to its 1962 glory, and it wasn’t long before I was right there with her. The fact that the Upside Down House was built into one of Norfolk’s steepest hills gave its two lower floors a quiet, cave-like feeling, making it hard to believe that a busy B road was only a matter of feet away. It also meant that, should four wingless creatures of the foot-high variety find their curiosity aroused and want to get to the road in question, they would have their work cut out. Provided we were strict about keeping the front door closed, getting to the tarmac would, for them, require either a forty-foot climb up a wall or a spiral staircase and a four-foot jump over a fence, or a circuitous walk of 500 yards. This would take them perilously close to the guffawing men of the local Conservative Club, a pub with a tendency to host bad David Bowie tribute bands, and a gaggle of geese who had developed a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Even if Ralph, Janet, The Bear or Shipley did venture over the road, they’d find little of interest, other than a branch of Kwik Fit and a 1980s housing estate: surely no match for the layered wilderness of the lake and its surrounding hillside.

  Another deciding factor in the move was that water. I didn’t feel I’d made the most of the river at Trowse, but I’d been swayed by its suggestion of an easier, more calmly flowing life. As much as my conscience was troubled by knowing I was responsible for introducing four predatory mouths to areas with large populations of birdlife, I liked that the cats liked the water too. Sitting with Shipley or Janet on the balcony, I’d loved watching the way the river could change personality so quickly, from crystal clear, to filmy-scummy, to opaque, to downright muddy. I’d have to say goodbye to that fluctuation. I’d also probably have to say goodbye to the kingfishers and swans and pikes that went with it, since the lake next to the Upside Down House was situated within view of three different supermarket logos and seemed to contain as many empty Stella Artois cans as it did fish.

  But a natural expanse of water was a natural expanse of water, and a person couldn’t afford to be fussy. That this new expanse would be situated a couple of hundred feet from our house, rather than beneath it, was also not necessarily a negative thing, if one considered the leisure habits of certain more witless felines and the terrifying moment the previous January when I’d had to spectacularly lunge to save Folk Michael from an icy fate after he’d stepped through a sliding door onto what he wrongly thought was a balcony for a ‘mystic moment’.

  As it turned out, I could hardly have been more wrong about the wildlife in East Mendleham.

  Back at Trowse, Richard and Kath had held a long-running competition among tenants and neighbours to be the first to spot an otter in or around the river, for which the prize was several litres of Richard’s home-made ale. In almost two decades, nobody had come forward to claim a sighting, and, having tasted the ale in question, I felt certain this was not owing to chicanery on the tenants’ or neighbours’ part. By contrast, we’d barely paid our conveyancing fees at the Upside Down House when I saw one poke its snout out of the lake, ten feet from the shore. It almost headbutted a Budweiser can on its way up, but didn’t seem overly concerned by this, nor by my presence a matter of feet away. Judging by its laid-back attitude, perhaps there was more to be read into its proximity to the can than I’d first imagined.

  A few weeks later, I got the fright of my life when I was getting the lawnmower out of the shed and a deer leaped out of the hedge, made a failed attempt to get through the fence into next door’s garden, then waded into the water, swam about fifty yards, and cantered away up the hillside towards the town.<
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  I’d like to say that by the time the turtle turned up, I was getting a bit blasé. But whether an Englishman’s back garden is beginning to resemble his own mini safari park or not, it’s never going to be easy for him to react with a world-weary air when he takes a breather from writing a newspaper review of that week’s episode of Top Gear, strolls down to the end of the garden and finds himself confronted by an LP-record-sized shell with a little slimy head poking out of it.

  Sunning itself on our rotting jetty, this alien presence caught the attention of Shipley and The Bear too, who were mooching around in some nearby reeds at the time. I’d come to expect Shipley to be by far the bolder of the two, but after making one tentative step behind me onto the crumbling wood, he scarpered back towards the house in a chattering, Mohican-led panic, leaving The Bear as my sole backup. I can’t quite say what the pair of us were planning to do once we got within shell-shining distance of the turtle, but, if I was completely up front with myself, I was secretly hoping that The Bear had a better idea than I did.

  We got about two yards away before it plopped back down into the lake and swam serenely away. I turned back to The Bear and shrugged, but he seemed reluctant to retreat, as if what he was really expecting was for me to take off my trainers and dive in after it. I could only surmise that he felt a kinship with its wise, wisened demeanour and card-carrying loner status.

  Considering that turtles aren’t indigenous to Norfolk, the obvious conclusion to draw about our new friend was that it was an unwanted household pet, abandoned long ago. It appeared to be surviving okay on the lake’s plentiful supply of sticklebacks and lager dregs and the mouldy bread that East Mendleham’s notoriously fussy ducks left behind, but as I thought in more detail about its life, a cloud of melancholy descended. What was its sex life like? What did it do for conversation? After entertaining a few fantasies of rescuing it, or at least finding it a mate, I put it out of my mind until about a fortnight later, when I looked out of the window and noticed a strange shape next to the jetty.

  At first, I mistook the shape for a heron that sometimes visited the same area. I’m a touch short-sighted, and from the living room window I thought I could make out a torso-shaped blob with something thinner underneath, which I took to be the bird’s legs. I was on deadline with another piece of writing at the time, so it wasn’t until three or four hours later that I looked out again and noticed it was still there. I had to get almost all the way to the bottom of the garden before I realised that what I’d took to be a torso was a shell, and what I’d assumed was a pair of legs was actually a turtle’s head and neck.

  As soon as I saw its leg trapped in the wire mesh on top of the jetty I thought it was dead, and not just in a cut-off circulation way, but as I arrived on the wood, the leg twitched. By this point I’d gone into panic mode and all kinds of irrational thoughts were skating through my head, such as ‘What if its shell falls off and it turns into Britain’s biggest slug?’ It was my habit at times like this to turn to Dee, who would be sure to offer a practical solution to the situation, but, having just passed her driving test, she was out enjoying her new automotive freedom, so I switched to my backup plan of getting some kitchen roll. It was a slightly sketchy plan. Nevertheless, it was one I’d come to rely on in the last three years, upon encountering wild animals. I now recalled the phrase ‘snapping turtles’ and a story my dad had once told me about someone he’d known as a kid who – for some reason I’d long since forgotten – had to have his leg amputated after stroking a terrapin, but the apprehension in me that this created was no excuse for the truly pathetic exercise in limb-flicking that followed.

  The turtle was now slowly blinking in that same way wise, aged reptilian extraterrestrials do in sci-fi films thirty seconds before they die. Gathering my senses, I hurried back indoors, discarded the kitchen roll, picked up an old pair of scissors, came back outside and carefully cut the mesh, freeing the leg and allowing the turtle to drop into the water. A moment later, I saw it re-emerge on the other side of the jetty, swimming smoothly out towards the centre of the lake. As I walked back up to the house, I saw The Bear come out from behind our pampas grass and do one of his effeminate, there’s-a-demon-on-my-tail runs in the direction of the cat-flap. Was this intended to serve as some form of commentary on the events that had just transpired? Perhaps. On the other hand, it could have just been that time of the afternoon.

  Since our move, The Bear had become more visible than I’d ever known him to be. In our three previous houses, his favourite sleeping places were invariably cupboards, boxes, hidey-holes or deep, dark parts of the building known only to him and about 400 woodlice, but now he could often be seen curled up on the second-to-top stair leading to the Upside Down House’s kitchen or the wicker footstool next to our book shelves. One only had to witness the care he took settling down in these spots – that third-to-top stair just didn’t have the same cachet, and woe betide me if I gently moved the footstool eight inches to the left so I could get at a paperback – to realise that ‘location, location, location’ was one of his all-important mantras.

  Noting that he’d only relieved himself on cardboard boxes two or three times, rather than the usual two or three dozen times, I took his new higher profile as a sure sign that he’d given the house his stamp of approval. While still a little bald around the eyes, his fur had steadily improved in the last year, and as far as I knew, his wanderlust had yet to take him further than next door’s garden.

  His affection was still capricious, but he had permitted me to add a new move to my repertoire of strokes, which Dee had termed ‘Glove Puppet’. This involved him rolling half onto his back, and allowing me to place a hand on his still semi-hairless chest and gently rub it, causing him to fold his front paws over and curl up like a happy prawn. It was an uncharacteristically vulnerable position for a furry elder statesman to put himself in, and I considered my exposure to it an immense privilege.

  If the Upside Down House had cast a positive spell on him, I could see why. Standing in the part of its garden from which the Tesco and Kwik Fit logos weren’t visible, it was possible to convince yourself that you were in the ultimate rural cat paradise. Add our garden to the five or six others around it and the untamed hillside beyond them, and a cat had both sides of its bread buttered: the hiding places of the countryside, combined with none of the traditional accompanying worries about animal traps, and all the luxuries of cat suburbia.

  As someone who had lived in plenty of towns, and plenty of bits of country, such an odd mix of the two was new to me. By day, the birdlife created its own symphony, broken only by the sound of roadworks and a strange old man in a suit who stood on the other side of the lake and shouted, ‘Fuckin’ come on then! Let’s be ’aving you!’ at the ducks while they took his bread. By night, the ducks cackled loudly at the questionable cover versions of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’ coming from the nearby pub. I was glad they were able to see the funny side of life, since with East Mendleham’s thriving population of amateur teen rally drivers, the longevity of that life could never be counted as a given.

  Seeing the bloodshed on the road, I was reminded of Brewer, but not without a new ambivalence, as I considered the destruction and heartbreak we were probably avoiding by not having him here with us. Fortunately, Shipley and Ralph, though sometimes liable to kid themselves otherwise, remained predominantly mice and vole men. The one time they did catch one of the lake’s coots and bring it into the house, the bird was unharmed, and they immediately lost interest in it. If Dee and I were being paranoid, we could convince ourselves that they’d carried out the whole exercise purely for the comedic value of us chasing the bird around the living room like participants in a non-sexist, waterfowl-themed Benny Hill sketch. The humour of the situation was also not lost on Rory, the builder we were paying unreasonable sums of money to knock down several of our walls, who took a break from a cup of Tesco Value tea to watch the show.

  After he had watched me
perform five circuits of the rubble dividing our new kitchen from what used to be our bathroom, his face turned grave. ‘Do you want me to finish if off for you?’ he said, stepping forward with his pickaxe.

  I assured him that I had the situation under control. While we both knew this wasn’t remotely true, the fear of a potential beheading prompted me to redouble my efforts, and I grabbed a red bedspread off a drying rack and used it to steer the coot outside. I was relieved to see the bird sprint to freedom, but, standing at the back door, fabric in hand, I felt like the world’s most inept matador.

  Shipley and Ralph lost quite a bit of their hunter’s instinct after that and entered a more supine phase, elucidating a confusing statistic I’d once read about cats spending 70 per cent of the day asleep and 30 per cent of it cleaning themselves. The same, however, could not be said for Rory.

  Ever since he’d banged his head on our living room light shade and retaliated by ripping the top two buttons open on his shirt and shaking his fist at it, I’d been noticing how tightly wound he was. Hammering away at our surprisingly sturdy 1960s walls just didn’t seem to be enough to satisfy his appetite for destruction. I hoped our new rooms would be finished before he finally burst his clothes and turned green, but the project was dragging on, so it seemed unlikely.

  Living with builders is a bit like having to adopt an entirely new extended family for an extra-long Christmas, only to find that they piss on the floor, and say even more tactless things than your real extended family, there aren’t any presents, and the turkey is actually not a turkey at all, but a quarter square of cold, leftover meat pie, welded to your new parquet floor. You try the best you can to exist in this artificial situation, ignoring the fact that the top floor of your house is now a rubble pit with a toilet in the middle, surrounded by orangey brown stains and copies of The Sun, but eventually matters get strained.