by Cox, Tom
Over a course of several weeks, Rory and I had gradually realised that we weren’t quite the people we’d first mistaken one another for, in those early, forced, cheerful hours of the first couple of mornings when I’d made him and his ever-rotating cast of colleagues their first nineteen cups of tea. I had realised that when he said he ‘didn’t agree’ with what George Bush was doing in Iraq, what he actually meant was he thought that the President should stop all this faffing around with ground troops and ‘nuke the whole place’. He, in turn, had realised that his assumptions about me being ‘pussy-whipped’ by my wife’s ‘cat obsession’ were not exactly true. Little clues must have given it away, like the time he looked out the window and saw me lying on the lawn, idly loading grass onto the back of a beatific Janet and feeding Shipley salt and vinegar crisps.
My relationship with Rory started to feel uncomfortably like a rerun of my pivotal second year at secondary school: the one where I won three playground fights and a place on the right wing of the under-14s football team, only to blow it all in the ‘Write your Own Will’ oral assignment in one unforgettable English lesson by announcing that, in the event of my death, I planned to bequeath my earthly possessions to my pet cat, which I sometimes called ‘The Ponce’.
As barbaric as their opinions can be, I find it useful to meet people like Rory from time to time, since they help to keep my animal-related soppiness in check. Obviously, it’s a pain to lock up your bank statements while they’re around and to grit your teeth while they make lewd comments at the female couriers who deliver packages to your house, but after a few days in their company you can’t help but shine a new spotlight on the way you behave with your cats. These moments of reflection might not make a man stop asking his moggies about their day, or shelling out to have them chipped with electronic identity tags, but they help him to refrain from passing over to the Other Side: that dreaded one from which there is no return where, once settled in with his novelty leopard animal slippers under the coffee table, he will have no compunction about referring to himself as his pets’ ‘daddy’ in formal company and dressing each of them in a £200 custom-made frilly waistcoat. I learned to keep my conversations with Shipley to a minimum around Rory, and when Dee and I had our discussion about giving Ralph female hormone therapy, we were sure to do so sotto voce.
The hormone therapy hadn’t been our idea; it had been suggested by our new vet when we’d taken Ralph to see him to try to find a cure for his depression.
When you own four cats, the cost of veterinary care can mount up frighteningly quickly. If one of those cats has a very specific flea allergy and it happens to be vaccination time and you’ve got a claw-happy feral prowling the neighbourhood, you can be looking at £400 for a month’s treatment before you know it. Unless you live in California, adding psychiatric care to this tally might seem somewhat unnecessary. On our most recent visit to the vet with Ralph, we hadn’t exactly set out to get him psychoanalysed; we’d merely noticed that he hadn’t been acting quite like himself recently and, observing that it was time for his latest flu jab, decided it couldn’t hurt to make a discreet enquiry about his state of mind with a qualified professional.
‘Cat ennui is actually quite common,’ explained the effusive Yorkshireman in the white coat (did all vets have strong regional accents, or was it just mine?). ‘Lots of different things can bring it on. A change of environment. A new cat on your cat’s territory. A change of career.’ He didn’t actually say ‘change of career’ but for a moment I was convinced he was going to.
‘The female hormones can sometimes help level the mood,’ he continued, feeling beneath Ralph’s armpits. ‘Golly. You’re a handsome devil, aren’t you?’
‘So in a way he’d be having his second sex change,’ said Dee.
‘How do you mean?’ asked the vet.
‘Long story,’ we chimed.
As is perhaps to be expected from a male cat who’d been treated as a female for the first six months of his life, Ralph had always had a touch of the pretty boy about him. If he’d been a rock star, he would have been the airheaded kind who somehow manages to be simultaneously sexy and slightly fetid. Adulthood had turned him from merely beautiful to downright magnificent. To go with his bright white bib and the tabby flame on his forehead, an imperial ruff had burgeoned beneath and to the sides of his chin. It might be thought physically impossible for a cat covered head to toe in fur to be able to possess sideburns, but there was no more apt way to describe the grandiose flaps of fur at the side of his jowls, and Ralph liked nothing better to sport them with a droopy ‘mousetache’.
However, as anyone who has been in the publicity team for a Warren Beatty press junket will probably attest, such magnificence requires its own special kind of sustenance. When The Bear permitted Dee or me to stroke his flanks and treated us to his special falsetto purr, or Shipley sang us ‘The Chicken Song’, or Janet headbutted us, the sense that we were partaking in an exchange of mutual respect may have been an illusion, but at least we had that illusion to cling to. When Ralph jumped onto our stomachs and began to knead us with his claws and dribble ecstatically, there was no illusion: we were there purely to remind him of his splendidness. This didn’t actually feel like such a raw deal, since being in such close proximity to an animal so in touch with his own magnificence felt like something of a gift in itself.
You can see his shining, self-revelling Ralphness in our photos of him. Either these shots all just happened to be taken at times when he has just broken wind in an unusually satisfying manner, or that glint in his eye is the glint of an animal who knows that he is being worshipped and, as the descendant of Egyptian gods, such worship is his birthright.
When you see something as self-absorbed as that captured on film, it’s difficult to resist the urge for sarcasm, and, as I stuck the photos in our albums, I would often add my own slightly derisory captions (e.g. ‘I yam Ralph. Narcissism pleases me, but I have a girl’s voice’). I knew, however, that his self-image was far from robust.
When people tell me that cats are independent animals unrequiring of attention, I can’t help but immediately wonder if they’ve actually owned any. If they have, you can guarantee they’re the kind of people who spend half their life moaning that their cats aren’t as friendly as other people’s. Cats might seem remote and self-sufficient, but it’s all a great big front. Thousands of years of living with humans has taught them that by playing hard to get they can best shape us into what they need us to be, which is somewhere a cross between a cleaner, a chef, a masseur, a nurse and a supportive, ego-free friend to use as a sounding board for their greatest fears and darkest desires.
I’d always noticed how talking to my cats and stroking them made them calmer and more sociable. In Ralph’s case, this applied tenfold. If we went a few days without being around to stroke or pet mitt him, or tell him he was a rock star, he could fade away so completely into the background that we half-expected to look at those beaming photos of him and see bits of them vanishing like the ones of Michael J. Fox’s family in Back to the Future.
On the morning of our move itself, ten minutes before the removal men arrived, I’d had to make a last-minute dash to the vets, having found Ralph cowering in the kitchen, suffering from what can only be described as a very nasty rear-end blockage. The problem had cleared up after a few days (‘Very unusual– it may just have been down to stress,’ said the vet, a nice Swedish lady), but, for Ralph, the weeks that followed had been little more than an existentially futile, high-pitched journey from buddleia to laurel to hole in boiler room wall to pampas grass back to buddleia. I had no idea what was especially significant about the hole in the boiler room wall, but it must have had something going for it for him to spend an hour a day howling to be let in to stand and stare into it.
Ralph could skip and prance and trot when he wanted to, but he’d always had something a little doleful about his prowl. It was the gait of an animal seemingly forever slightly resentful that he cou
ldn’t walk on two legs. Now, though, as the summer stretched on, the mere act of moving from one bit of foliage to another at all looked like a genuine effort.
Picking up on his self-neglect, parasites would mark him out as an easy target. ‘You look like you’ve slept in a hedge!’ is hardly a wounding accusation to level at a cat, but, arriving indoors, he’d look like he’d slept in five, all at once. Even Janet, always the unbeaten master when it came to bringing shrubbery into the house via the rear of his body, was starting to look a little bit awestruck by the sheer variety of mixed media stuck to his kid step-brother’s fur.
As I pulled leeches off Ralph’s flanks and briars out of his feet and burned swollen, Satanic-pincered ticks off his neck, I was careful to be gentle, but it appeared to make little difference. I’d expected him to at least walk away from my grooming sessions with a bit of energetic indignance, blaming me for his pain, but his expression just said, ‘Whatever, dude – it’s all the same sticky outdoor crap to me.’ Ten minutes later, he’d be back in a bush, killing us softly with his high-pitched song. If this had happened a couple of years previously, Dee and I would simply have said, ‘Oh dear, Prudence is calling!’ and gone back to our business. Now, all we could do was get him injected with girly drugs and hope for the best. But what if they took too much of a hold and made his sideburns disappear?
Our theories about the cause of his depression accumulated, both in number and hysteria. Was he belatedly missing his old pal Buttercup, or the other tabby from his litter: the one we’d been thinking about taking home, only to change our minds after seeing it fall asleep in its crud tray? Was he suffering from a rare summer form of seasonal affective disorder? Could his state of mind – and his new nervousness around garden tools – be the result of being chased out of a shed by one of our new neighbours? And, if so, why did he still persist in hiding in their gardens and whining?
Who knew what kind of experiences contributed to a cat’s anxieties and phobias while it was out of your sight? DIY diagnosis was probably futile, and it was hard to tell if the female hormones had any effect, but I felt I could at least prescribe one home-grown remedy of my own – and one whose benefits would stretch far wider than Ralph’s increasingly corpulent, forlorn form – and that was an intensive course of not moving or hacking into our home for at least the next couple of years.
It took almost six months for the builders to finish their work. The moment that they did so might have had its bittersweet aspects for the cats: they’d enjoyed licking those bits of leftover meat pie off the parquet floors, and living in a house entirely full of dirt, because we’d decided cleaning was futile, was not without its advantages. Janet, who had always timed his ample fluff deposits to perfection in the old days when we’d lived in places without two-inch layers of gunk all over their floors, visibly bristled as that indomitable metal foe of his, the vacuum cleaner, began to regain its self-respect and growl to life once again. The Bear, meanwhile, could not have been happy to see his favourite stair relieved of the seven different types of detritus stuck to it, including a pair of dried-up, hair-covered leaves which he probably had by now begun to regard like a couple of crinkly-skinned, wig-wearing relatives. He, more than any of the others, had weathered the latest round of upheaval stoically. But it was obvious to see how positively the departure of our temporary, pickaxe-wielding family affected each and every member of its permanent, four-legged counterpart.
The whole point of the building work had been to quickly reach the state of calmness that we’d been looking for ever since we first moved out of the big city. The problem was that in trying to achieve that, we’d trained ourselves to be anything but calm.
Maybe I did sometimes go outside and put grass on Janet’s back or rescue a turtle, but, as soon as I had, I was instantly back inside having a discussion with Dee about steel joists or writing like the wind. Just like my cats saw bags of food miraculously appear as a result of me sitting at my computer and doing that odd thing with my hands, Rory and his cohorts must have thought the whole process was simple. The way they saw it, they handed me an invoice, and I went downstairs to cover it by writing another article – in the same way that someone might write a shopping list. ‘I wish I had an easy life,’ they would say to us, after quizzing us about our jobs, supping their tea, not realising that the moment their banging stopped, Dee and I would rush to our respective posts – me in front of the brick dust-fogged computer screen downstairs, she upstairs packing antiques or contributing what she could to the building work in order to keep costs down – and work into the early hours, before being woken up by their drilling and banging.
It was a means to an end, we knew, but there comes a point when you realise that, whatever the joys that end you’re working towards might promise, six months is a long time to be chewing dust and living in limbo amidst rubble. When we finally calmed down and gave ourselves a chance to breathe, it was Janet, Shipley, The Bear and Ralph who provided the most potent reminder of how bad we’d been at living in the moment. Was it really six months since we’d given out the Cat of the Month award? Since we’d bought The Bear a slightly unbecoming, emasculating fluorescent collar from Pets at Home? Since I’d seen a warm-furred Ralph sitting in the sun and sung him his own special version of Foreigner’s ‘Hot Blooded’ (‘Hot tabby! Check him and see! He’s got a fever of a hundred and three . . .’)? Where had we been?
We were back now, but it was another new year, a new spring – our fourth in Norfolk, already. We were here a bit later – and with a couple more bank loans – than planned, there was a rather ominous clanging in the pipes in our new bathroom and we were still finding bits of the builders’ chewing gum stuck to the fridge, but on the plus side we seemed to have some contented cats, none of whom appeared to be crossing any roads, and our garden was once again coming to life in slightly unexpected ways. The turtle had taken the winter off, but by the first sunny day in April it was back on the jetty, and a couple of days later I looked out the window and saw a small brown hen pecking about on the lawn – a sighting which seemed relatively unspectacular, until you considered the problematic edifices it must have negotiated to get there and the fact that none of our near neighbours kept hens.
Though often very, very fond of chicken as a delicacy, the cats I’ve owned have always appeared uninterested in it in its animated form, making me wonder if, somewhere within the labyrinth of catiquette, there exists a special Poultry Code. Monty could have picked off any of my parents’ bantam hens without breaking a sweat, but he made it clear such slaughter was beneath him. Daisy’s desire for them, on the other hand, never really went further than a tendency to crouch low to the ground in their presence: an ostensibly predatory stance that became considerably less so once you realised her tendency to crouch low to the ground in the presence of pretty much everything from windfall apples to her own reflection.
Similarly, as Dee and I cornered this hen, the celebrated composer of ‘The Chicken Song’ seemed entirely preoccupied with some heavy-duty paw-cleaning. This proved to our advantage, since it meant that, by skilfully deploying the box that Dee’s new computer had arrived in and a large plastic plant pot, we – well, I say ‘we’, Dee was responsible for the all-important dive – could capture it with a minimum of extraneous fuss. Nonetheless, it was a little bit of a workout. The perspiration on my forehead, combined with the hair that had accrued earlier on my somewhat adhesive black jumper while I’d been testing out a new pet mitt on Ralph, must have created a rather odd impression when I rushed upstairs to answer the door to our new postlady. However, seemingly unperturbed by meeting a man who looked like he’d been interrupted in the middle of an illegal shearing experiment, she barely raised an eyebrow.
She seemed equally composed when I told her about the witless feathery animal currently locked in our bathroom.
‘Chicken, you say? Hmm. I know a bloke who might be able to help you out. Fella lives a couple of doors up from me. If it’s not one of his in the fir
st place, I’m sure he’ll be happy to take it. Just let me finish my round and I’ll be back. I’m Phyllis, by the way.’
By this point in the day, the sun was shining brightly into our new open-plan dining room. It would be downright rude to hope for such a nice day in April usually, and Dee and I were savouring the prospect of a rare Saturday afternoon off. As we waited for Phyllis to return I was already rehearsing the phone conversations that would result from the day’s events: my response to my mum the next time she asked me if I still liked my house (‘Yeah, it’s fine and the other day I gave a member of the Royal Mail a hen, which she drove away in her van, so I suppose it can’t be that bad’) and the rejoinders of our London friends (‘Don’t they have stamps in Norfolk?’). Sure enough, half an hour later, Phyllis returned, this time with a wooden carrier, replete with air holes.
After being assured that the package would be going to a loving home, we handed it over. By this time Shipley had joined us at the door. Fearing that he was having wistful thoughts of his Royal Mail-funded adventure in Trowse and poised to make a beeline for the van, I whisked him up into my arms and he offered Phyllis his Mohican to stroke.
‘He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘He’s not scared of anybody, is he? Do you have another black one? A bit smaller than this one? My husband and I sometimes see him up near the road when we’re coming back from the pub. He won’t come near us but he looks right at us with these big adorable eyes. He’s got ever such a cuddly round little face. We gave him a nickname, actually.’
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘Teddy,’ she said.
IN MEMORIAM: A TRIBUTE TO A FEW OF THE OTHERS WE HAVE LOST