Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man

by Cox, Tom

  Cageless, leadless and boundary-less, cats are vulnerable to extramural danger in a way that’s almost unique among domestic animals. They have autonomous spirit, certainly. Unusually good survival instincts, maybe. But they are, in the end, ten-pound combinations of fur, bones and soft, squishy bits who spend much of their existence subject to the elements, nature, technological progress and the not always entirely praiseworthy whims of mankind. You can look at them chasing a dried noodle around the living room or kicking your magazines off your favourite chair and rubbing their rear end deep into the folds of its fabric, and you can laugh despairingly, but their taste for life on the edge means that you never know when genuine despair will be on the horizon. The more of them you have, the more you heighten your daily joy and entertainment, the more heartache you know you’re going to get sooner or later, the more important it seems to make every second count.

  So, yes, in summary: six of the little pillocks, for the time being, would suit me fine.

  A NOD AND A WINK TO A SLINK:

  AN UNCHARACTERISTIC EXCURSION

  INTO VERSE TO COMMEMORATE THE

  PASSING OF DAISY COX (1991–2007)

  Goodbye The Slink

  My friend

  I never felt I really got to know you

  But I’ve been places you’ve been

  A couple of Nottinghamshires more picturesque villages, for example

  One of which where car burning

  Seemed to be a local sport

  And that coal shed at my mum and dad’s house where you used to hide from Monty

  When he was feeling particularly feisty

  You sort of perked up in your later years

  Particularly when you went deaf

  And could no longer hear my dad’s heavy feet

  Or his shouts of things like

  ‘JO! WHERE’S THE YOGHURT!’

  ‘THAT CAT’S CRAPPED UNDER THE PRINTER’

  And ‘I BLOOMIN’ HATE ALAN TITCHMARSH!’

  That must have been nice for you

  And it proves that, like Tom Petty says

  Even the losers get lucky sometimes

  Not that you knew who Tom Petty was

  And even if you had

  You probably would have been scared of the beard

  That he has sported in more recent years

  Almost as scared as you were when I took you and Monty for a walk

  It was a sunny day

  In the time before I’d really noticed that you looked a little like Hitler

  And before the website catsthatlooklikehitler.com

  Which proved that, in the grand scheme of things, you didn’t look that much like him after all

  You’d been carrying that feather duster around in your mouth

  The one that you must have thought was the world’s most docile cockatiel

  You seemed in a good mood

  And I thought it couldn’t hurt

  A stroll along the lane

  Through D. H. Lawrence country

  With two furry pals

  All was going well

  For about 200 yards

  Until you saw that Norfolk terrier

  And decided for some Slink-like reason

  To run straight at it

  The little fella didn’t know what had hit it

  But then not many of us ever did

  Eight and a Half Lives

  I thought Notes on a Scandal was a brilliant film and I knew my mum would like it as well. Nonetheless, I told her to give it a miss.

  ‘I’d leave it six months or so if I were you,’ I said. ‘Actually, make it a year. No great rush.’

  ‘But I heard it was brilliant.’

  ‘No, no, it is. I just think there might be things that you might want to make more of a priority. Have you checked out The 40-Year-Old Virgin?’

  ‘Er, no. Hasn’t it got Judi Dench in it?’

  ‘No, it’s got the bloke from the American The Office in it.’

  ‘I mean Notes on a Scandal. That’s got Judi Dench in it, hasn’t it? Isn’t she supposed to be really good in it?’

  She had me in a tight spot now. There was no denying it: I could hem and haw, but the truth was that Notes on a Scandal did indeed have Judi Dench in it. What was more, she had been indisputably the best thing about it. Like a lot of young men, I’d spent my teens and twenties ignoring Dench, as one might ignore an ever-present national monument, but watching her performance here as a lonely spinster interfering with a love affair between a fellow teacher at her school and an underage pupil had been an epiphany. She was also at the centre of what, for me, had been the film’s two most harrowing scenes. These involved Dench, who looks a little bit like a cat and has over the years played many characters of cat-like imperiousness, taking her sickly tabby to the vets to be put to sleep.

  It had made no odds in these scenes that Dench’s character was an old crone whose craven need for creamy-skinned companionship manifested itself in spite and prurience: it was impossible not to sympathise as she was led out of the surgery, blubbing, or, later, as she dug a rudimentary hole in the garden to put her only friend to rest. You didn’t have to be a cat lover to appreciate how these moments tapped into the universal human fear of dying alone, but if you were, you would have felt the force of the grief all the more.

  ‘What about Molière?’ I said to my mum. ‘That’s very funny. It’s not out on DVD yet, but it’s well worth a trip to the cinema to see.’

  There was a time – about nine and a half days in March 1996, if I remember rightly – when my mum’s taste in films and mine briefly and perfectly intersected. In more recent years, our mission to find common cinematic ground has been plagued by a fundamental problem. The problem boils down to this: my mum likes films where French people smoke and stare a lot, whereas I like films starring Steve Carell with jokes about condoms. Nonetheless, with Notes on a Scandal, I would, under normal circumstances, have picked her a winner. Here was the kind of serious intellectual entertainment that my mum would appreciate, with the added bonus of Cate Blanchett, easily the most mum-friendly of actresses from the generation that, when speaking to me, my parents referred to as ‘about your age – little bit older’. No references to Internet porn. No Will Ferrell getting shot with a donkey tranquilliser and falling in a swimming pool. No Jim Carrey sucking on a lactating mother’s breast. If The Slink hadn’t been so inconsiderate as to die the day before, I’m sure it would have been my first successful cinematic recommendation since Spellbound in 2002.

  ‘What about Die Hard 4? You like Bruce Willis, don’t you?’

  ‘Er, no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘One of the baddies is French, I think! Well, European, anyway.’

  It was the arrival of the cat known as Big Black Smoke that finally did for The Slink. Him, and the cancer that, for the last six months, had been gradually rendering her a perma-vomiting, matted, punctured caricature of her former self. I imagine that The Slink’s first look at Big Black Smoke, in the summer of 2007, could be equated with the moment the herbivorous dinosaurs of the early Jurassic period clamped eyes on their first T-rex. Nobody in my parents’ neighbourhood seemed to know whom the devil beast belonged to, but in the month since sightings of it had initially been reported, it had cut a swathe through the north-east Nottinghamshire village of Kalterton.

  Normally, calling a halt to a cat fight involves nothing more than a few ‘shoo!’ noises or a carefully aimed cup of water, but the way my mum described pulling Big Black Smoke off The Slink’s scrawny neck, it sounded more like she’d been breaking up a scrap in one of Nottingham’s rougher school playgrounds. She showed me the resulting scar on her wrist, and it appeared redolent of heavy industrial machinery. She’d more or less made her mind up by then that it was Time. The cold-blooded murder that shook the population of Kalterton to its core the following week – the same week that I saw Notes on a Scandal – gave her the final push.

  ‘I mean, what kind of cat does that
?’ she asked me. ‘Rips another animal’s throat out. Can you imagine? Coming home and finding your pet dead on your doorstep?’

  Normally, I enjoyed playing Know-It-All when faced with my mum’s feline queries. Angst and urine? ‘Have you tried Feliway?’ Fleas? ‘Check out Frontline.’ But hearing about the death of Froggy, her next-door neighbour’s cat, I was speechless. This was same-species murder, and, as experienced as I was as a witness to mog warfare, I had never come across that before. True, what with only possessing three legs, Froggy had been easy pickings, but faced with a bloodthirsty larynx-ripper at the brittle end of a nervous life, it is doubtful that an extra, spindly limb to flee on would have provided much solace for The Slink.

  Big Black Smoke’s final act of terror and the image of poor Froggy on next door’s doorstep had confirmed that my mum was merely putting off the inevitable. If The Slink did not die indoors, evacuating her insides under my dad’s desk, she would be slaughtered outside. One or the other would happen before long, and there would be precious little happiness to be dredged from life in the interim.

  I could have gone into the finer details to my mum about why it would not have been prudent for her to watch Notes on a Scandal, but it somehow didn’t seem fair, particularly in view of the scene she’d not long before recounted to me about her final moments with The Slink. My mum was, and still is, a happily married woman, several years younger than Dench’s character, who packed her social life brimful with book group nights, village dinner parties, antique fairs and car boot sales. Nonetheless, when one of your closest relatives has just told you about being in floods of tears ‘like a crazy woman’ in a vet’s surgery, the last thing that will cheer her up is you telling her about a film in which a crazy woman cries in a vet’s surgery.

  I hadn’t seen the The Slink as much as I’d liked to in the final years of her life and, though we’d had some good times – one particularly pungent bag of dried whitebait I’d purchased from the pet shop in 1992 sprung to mind – ours had never ranked in the list of all-time closest relationships between man and cat. We had enjoyed a rare moment of camaraderie about four weeks before, when I’d been staying at my parents’ house and she’d jumped up on the sofa next to me, let me stroke the greasy bit of fur behind her ears and hissed approvingly, but it had been an all-too fleeting moment, and the last time I ever saw her she’d been heading for her cat-flap at a rate of knots, spooked by some mystic and – judging from the volume of her purr, thoroughly terrifying – force.

  My mum, I think, was the nearest thing The Slink had to a confidante, and it’s a tribute to my gentler parent’s good nature that even towards the end, when The Slink’s notoriously fussy eating habits came to resemble high society anorexia, she continued to keep the diet of her one remaining pet varied and of an unerringly high quality. It takes a special sort of patience to repeatedly buy Sheba and Waitrose tiger prawns that you know will go largely uneaten, particularly when the animal that is ignoring them is periodically puking under your work desk and ruining your phone conversations.

  My mum perhaps didn’t find the common ground with The Slink that she’d hoped to, but it was a relationship not without love, from both sides. She’d surprised herself with just how thick and fast the tears flowed in the vet’s surgery. My dad was also more cut up about her demise than he’d anticipated. ‘I’VE GOT A PAIN IN MY HEART,’ he said to my mum when she returned from the vets, though he probably wouldn’t thank me for broadcasting that. As for me, I was sad too, but I knew that jumbled up amongst that sadness was the sadness of not being more sad, of knowing that I could not be distraught in the way that I would be if any of my six other cats had died.

  A cat lover cannot build a special bond with every cat he gets to know. I was lucky in that I had built six, all of which were running concurrently. Every one of these was different, and each enhanced my life in its own peculiar way, but one in particular had developed a special intensity over time. The Bear and I had come a long way since that first night together, seven years before. On appearance alone, comparing the animal that had stolen my chicken bhuna, and demonstrated his unusual uses for sleepwear, all that time ago was almost like comparing a horror movie extra with a lovable character from a children’s storybook.

  Round-faced and verdant of fur, he had never looked better than he did now, and there was no denying the suitability of that ‘Certified Reconditioned’ stamp on his favourite box, but he still had his moments of deceit and torment, and it was perhaps to be expected that I’d start dwelling on his mortality more than usual in the aftermath of The Slink’s death. He was, after all, getting on for thirteen now – somewhere in his mid-sixties, if cat years theorists are to be believed – and no cat in my care was more perilously wilful.

  Just a month ago, Dee and I had a bit of a scare when he’d developed an abscess on his left ear and the vet had talked of him losing the ear if he wasn’t quickly and properly medicated. I thought I’d done a clever job of secreting the tiny pink pills in his food, but each time he would somehow manage to eat neatly around them. The more candid method of putting the pills straight into his mouth, holding it shut and gently rubbing his throat for twenty seconds worked more successfully, until he realised that all he had to do to avoid swallowing them was foam them up into a kind of space dust, then gradually spit them out in a serious of gestures that would have made most quarantine authorities sit up and take notice. Nonetheless, like always, he’d recovered.

  People talk about Liz Taylor being the ultimate survivor, and you’ve got to give her credit; she’s weathered more marriage trouble than virtually any other living celebrity, and, like The Bear, had to deal with the indignity of having all her hair fall out. But has Liz ever been chastised by an irate muscovy duck, or had to be rescued from a small spider-filled hole above her own ceiling, or suffered the humiliation of having a furry impostor half her size paw her into her own French windows so her skull reverberates on the glass? The Bear has taught me something about real survival that goes beyond soppy human endurance, with its grief and property difficulties and divorce and psychological ‘hardship’.

  Three or four years previously, I had added up just how many of his nine lives he’d used up. It was hard to work out what exactly qualified as a full ‘life’ – I was pretty sure the time he got carbon monoxide poisoning counted, but what about the time I looked out the window at Trowse and saw him sitting on the other side of the river, cleaning his paws nonchalantly, even though there wasn’t a bridge within a mile, had a life somehow been spent in the process of getting there? I came up with a total of eight and a half. He’d surely gone way beyond that now. What made his survival all the more impressive was that it had been achieved out of what was, to all intents and purposes, a pacifist ethos. He wasn’t one of those cats who went out looking to kill or rumble. To date, I had never seen him lay a paw on another cat in anything but defence. The state of his body told us he had fights, but these remained the stuff of nocturnal legend: screeches in the night.

  The Bear lived by a different moral code to my other cats – to any other cat I’d known. Just because he was deceitful and scheming, it did not mean he did not have principles. Rodents – even the helpless ones that my more bloodthirsty cats left around after they’d become bored – held no apparent interest to him, birds were his fluttering wallpaper, and the nearest he’d ever come to doing harm to anything with fins was when he used to gently lap from the tank of Bev Bevan, Dee’s old goldfish. His bodily emissions, though often destructive, were never casual or slapdash. When he was required to control his bowels, and had no grand dissatisfaction to broadcast, he had no trouble doing so, such as the time we returned from a three-day break to find the cat-flap locked and him sitting in the bath meeyooping, clearly in the last stages of holding something monumental inside him, where other, weaker beings had failed to. He never muscled in loutishly at mealtimes and when it came to sleeping locations, he was always the innovator, never the bandwagon jumper or usurper
.

  It had taken me a while to understand him, and for him to fully trust me. I’m sure that, ultimately, he probably still viewed me as bit frivolous for his exact tastes. But a relationship between a person and a cat is about compromise. I’d also done my bit to come a little closer to his aesthetic needs over the years: some of it intentional, some of it not so intentional.

  When I had my own minor health scare towards the end of 2007, it did not come as a major surprise: I’d been working myself like a computer-literate packhorse for several years, ignoring the advice to slow down of nearly everyone close to me, and it was always going to be a matter of time before it took its toll. When it did, I was lucky, in that my affliction was nothing overly serious, but it was serious enough to keep me bed-ridden for just over a month. Not long before I got ill, there’d been a report in several newspapers about Oscar, a usually stand-offish cat who lived at a nursing home in America, whose habit it was to become uncharacteristically friendly with patients in the final hours of their life, curling up on their bed and watching over them as they took their last breaths, and I tried not to think about that as The Bear padded my stomach and stared deep into my eyes.

  Perhaps he did get off on strife and distress. On the other hand, he was probably just glad to see me staying still for once, and it was just another lesson that cats give you back what you put in. During this period, it struck me harder than ever just how much you could miss about this cat if you rushed into a relationship with him, just how much was truly unique and refined about him, from his falsetto purr to his uniquely articulate tail. Had I ever met a cat who was so in tune with the two-legged universe? Had I ever got to know a pet so well, or been through so much with one? It was debatable.