Now forgive me for splitting hairs here, but—do I look like a tabby?
Further evidence, if any were needed, that journalists hate to let the facts get in the way of a good pun. (And, for the record, it would take more than a tag to make me adhere to any curfew.)
Inaccuracies aside, I took this newfound notoriety in my stride. I did occasionally suspect that my owners might have regretted their decision to get the press involved. I heard one of them muttering that he was feeling like “bloody Amy Winehouse’s dad” after he had spoken to yet another news agency asking for quotes about my tearaway behavior.
The effects of my new media profile reached beyond NHQ and Team Nancy could not help but get caught up in some of the surrounding hysteria.
Brambles was, predictably, concerned about the increase in visitor numbers to the street once tourists started coming to do the “Nancy Tour,” fretting about the impact on air pollution.
Pip seemed to find the whole thing faintly amusing, letting slip the odd barbed comment.
“Well, this is your fifteen minutes of fame, Nancy. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“It’s more than you’ve ever had,” I hissed back.
Molly, of course, remained impervious. She refused to read any of the cuttings (which Murphy had helpfully started to compile in an album), or, at least, she claimed not to have read them.
The biggest change was in Dennis’s behavior. Out of the blue he started hanging around the garden at NHQ and yowling outside the house if I was in at night.
I admit I was flattered by the attention, and so we went on a few romantic walks around the neighborhood (albeit interrupted every five minutes to allow him to spray).
One evening when I returned from such a walk, Pip cornered me in the kitchen.
“Where’ve you been, Nancy?”
“Out with Dennis. Why?”
He looked concerned.
“You do know he’s got something of a . . . reputation, don’t you?”
I looked at Pip, waiting for his face to break into a smile.
“Pip! I do believe you’re worried about me!” I said, starting to laugh. “Is this like a big-brotherly chat? Are you going to tell me to be careful and take precautions?”
I was laughing out loud now, enjoying Pip’s evident discomfort.
“No, well, yes, well . . . Look, all I’m saying is, you’re not the first cat Dennis has done this with. So don’t come crying to me when he’s got bored of you and moved on to the next one.”
And with that he stormed out, no doubt wishing he’d never broached the subject in the first place.
It was probably mean of me to make fun of Pip’s concern for my emotional well-being, but I did so because I already knew there would never be a future for Dennis and me.
It was partly because, as Pip had pointed out, monogamy was not one of Dennis’s strengths, but also because I had already realized that, macho bluster aside, Dennis was actually quite boring.
First of all there was his habit of glazing over if I talked about anything other than him, and then there were the endless stories of fights he had had with other toms (and always won, of course) or adventures that had involved a combination of superfeline strength and dexterity.
After a while I found it difficult to stifle a yawn when he launched into an anecdote with, “Have I told you about the time when . . .”
In addition to his narcissistic tendencies was the rather more pressing issue of him spraying the downstairs of our house at night. This did not bother me particularly, but my owners were not amused, and I could tell Pip was furious.
Another nugget of advice that my mother had given me came to mind: “Don’t shit on your own doorstep” and when, for the fifth morning in a row, the little people’s first words upon coming downstairs were “Ugh! What’s that smell?” I came to the conclusion that it was time to bring my romantic entanglement with Dennis to an end.
“What do you mean, you don’t want to see me anymore?” he said, looking genuinely dumbfounded.
“I just think we’re better off as friends,” I explained, aware that it sounded flimsy.
“Hmm. Whatever. Let’s call it a mutual decision.”
“Okay, Dennis,” I said, unable to resist adding, “you seem heartbroken.”
He looked at me, not sure how to respond, then turned his bottom to face me and sprayed the tree behind, narrowly missing my face. Then he walked off without a backward glance.
“Whatever to you, too,” I muttered, although he was already through the trellis and into the next garden.
A more fragile cat might have been hurt by his apparent indifference, but I didn’t take it personally. I knew that Dennis had only shown an interest in me because he thought I made him look good—a celebrity girlfriend being the ultimate trophy for an alpha male.
My heart remained intact, and I was happy to chalk this one up to experience.
The phone calls from journalists eventually fizzled out, but thanks to the newspaper coverage, my profile around town was now officially that of “famous cat.” The pubs were known to be my hangouts, so it was impossible for me to pop into any of them for a swift saucer of milk or restorative nap without being greeted with a cheer from the staff or customers.
So this is celebrity, I thought.
There were occasional inconveniences, but overall it was a pretty enjoyable experience. On balance, it was something I thought I could get used to.
One cold rainy afternoon in early February I was on the sofa, just coming round from a postlunch nap. As I twisted onto my side to stretch, my eyes came to rest on the television.
On screen was a commercial in which a young, attractive woman was getting ready for a romantic date.
She set the table for a meal, putting out gleaming silver dishes for two, lighting a candle, then applying lipstick in the mirror. The woman dimmed the lights and looked at the clock.
At eight p.m. exactly, the cat flap swung open and in rushed the Kit-e-Licious cat, his eyes gleaming, wearing his most dazzling smile. The woman stroked his ears, delighted. He jumped up onto the dining chair and looked expectantly at his place setting.
The woman took his dish into the kitchen and reappeared a few moments later, setting his meal down in front of him with an indulgent smile.
He glanced at the food, sniffed it, then looked up at her, his face a mixture of disappointment and disgust.
She looked horrified, but before she could say anything he had turned tail and run out through the cat flap, leaving it swinging in the breeze behind him.
Over a close-up of the woman’s distraught face, the tagline rolled across the screen: “Serve him Kit-e-Licious this Valentine’s Day. Because he’s worth it.”
Damn it, I thought. Who is that cat? He gets all the best jobs.
I could have been in that advert! I’m worth it, too!
I could have pulled off “disappointed and disgusted” just as easily as I can do “inquisitive yet mischievous.”
And another thing—my internal rant was now in full flow—I’ve been in the houses of a lot of women who go crazy for their cats, but I’ve never come across one as attractive as her! Where were the hand-knitted cardigans, the threadbare furniture, the bird’s-nest hair?
As I sat ruminating on the commercial’s shortcomings, it dawned on me: why couldn’t I be in a commercial like the Kit-e-Licious cat?
There must be a way of getting from where I was, fuming on my sofa, to being on-screen.
Even the Kit-e-Licious cat must have started somewhere. How had he gone from being a mere pet to being spokescat for the country’s number one cat food brand?
And would I be able to do the same?
I didn’t yet have the answers. But thanks to the local papers, I had made a start on my career as a celebrity. Now I was going to have to take it up a notch or two.
CHAPTER 10
Mog Blogs
A cat must have a room and a laptop of her own if she is to write.
Put yourself in my shoes. (I know I don’t have shoes. It’s a metaphor.) I was a cat. A talented one, I grant you, but a cat nonetheless.
Thanks to my appearance in the newspapers I was what you could call a “local celebrity.”
But as a cat, what could I do to take my career to the next level? I could hardly phone up MTV and pitch a no-holds-barred reality show about my life.
How the Kit-e-Licious cat had launched his career was a mystery that consumed my every waking moment.
I tried to share my frustration with Murphy, but he couldn’t understand why I wanted a career in the first place.
As far as he was concerned, what more could a cat want from life than a nice home, good friends, and food on demand?
“But, Nancy, what else do you need?” he asked.
“It’s not about what I need, Murphy, it’s about what I want. Aren’t you curious about what’s out there? There is a world beyond our town, you know.”
I could tell he was hurt, that he had taken my dissatisfaction with life as a criticism of him.
There was an awkward silence until I took pity on him and said, “Shall we go and scare the birds?”
He smiled and jumped up. “Great idea!”
So we spent the rest of the morning lurking near the bird feeder, taking turns to leap out at the few unsuspecting avians who had not migrated for the winter.
I did my best to hide it from Murphy, but my heart wasn’t in it. What had been one of my favorite leisure pursuits had lost its appeal.
It sounds silly to put it all down to the Kit-e-Licious commercials, but I felt as if I had glimpsed another life and would not be happy until I had taken my best shot at achieving it.
I was starting to feel like I had more in common with Bish, Bash, and Bosh, the caged pet rats on my street, than with my cat friends.
Like them, I had become aware of the limitations of my condition, my imprisonment by the circumstance of having been born an animal.
But unlike them, I could not embrace my fate. It was not enough for me to sit around intellectualizing about my dilemma. I wanted to do something about it.
I had plenty of ideas about what I wanted to do, but when it came to how I would start, I drew a blank.
A voice in my head whispered, “You’re just a cat. Forget it.”
It was my owners who gave me my first breakthrough.
Unbeknownst to me, since my appearance in the papers they had also been thinking about my future.
I had kept up my usual antics around town, visiting, among others, the air cadets, the school, and the old people’s home, and it would seem that my owners had started to tire of the phone calls and pajama-clad pickups at all hours of the night.
One afternoon my owner called me into the upstairs study. She sat down at the desk and turned on the laptop computer.
“Look, Nancy,” she said.
I sat on the desk, watching her fingers as they tapped the keys. Then I looked up at the screen. There was a photo of me, my name, and some personal information. At the side of the screen was a list of “friends,” including my owners and some people whose faces I recognized from the neighborhood.
I looked at her, bemused.
“I’ve put you on Facebook, Nancy,” she said, as if that were sufficient explanation. “You’ve got eight friends already. This way, you can keep in touch with people and they won’t have to ask me what you’re up to all the time. And, hopefully, it might even keep you off the streets for a bit.”
A cynic might say that she had her own interests in mind rather than mine, but I was too intrigued to be cynical.
She gave me a brief tour of the Facebook site, and then left me to it.
I must admit it took a while to get used to the keyboard and mouse, which, in spite of its cat-friendly name, was not very cat-friendly to use.
But once I had mastered the mechanics, I was away.
My first status update read, “Nancy iS HUngrY” (damn that caps lock button—I didn’t notice my mistake until I’d already pressed “share”).
Then I sent a message to my owner: “MORE FOOD” (caps lock had its uses, I realized).
I sat back and waited. What now?
Suddenly a tiny thumbs-up symbol appeared beneath my status. One of my friends had “liked” what I had written!
Then a message appeared on the screen from my owner:“Later! Or, feed yourself.”
I smiled and typed in a new status update:“Facebook: where have you been all my life?”
Within minutes I had four thumbs-up symbols.
I must have spent the next two weeks practically glued to the laptop. Acquiring friends proved surprisingly easy, and it was much quicker online than the old-school approach of pounding the streets.
Just a few clicks and new friends would appear from the ether: “You have received 6 friend requests” or “8 people confirmed you as a friend.”
Unlike Team Nancy, these weren’t just friends in my hometown. They lived all over the country, from Bournemouth to Chesterfield, and they would suggest me to their friends, so that soon I was spreading like a virus across the nation’s computers.
Pip sauntered past the study door one afternoon as I tapped away on the keyboard.
“Hey, Pip,” I called out, “check out how many friends I’ve got!”
He rolled his eyes and headed into the bedroom.
“You’re just jealous,” I called after him.
“It’s not real!” came his muffled response from inside the laundry basket.
The best thing about Facebook was that, for the first time in my life, I was able to communicate with humans as an equal. Not having to rely on a human’s ability to translate my mews and chirrups into English was liberating.
I had finally found my voice, and my human friends loved it!
In fact, they couldn’t get enough of me. It was as if they had never realized that a cat could be witty, urbane, and erudite.
My friends tally was growing—in a matter of weeks I had gone from having eight friends to having seventy. And I had started to acquire friends abroad. First I picked up one in South Africa, then a couple in Australia, then a few in the United States, Indonesia, and Thailand.
My status updates had started as straightforward accounts of where I had been and what I was doing, but I soon began to tire of this approach. (How many times can you type “eating Kit-e-Licious for lunch” and expect people to be interested?) So I started trying out different material: jokes, recipes, even romantic advice, analyzing which posts got the biggest response from friends.
One morning when I had worked my way through a stack of friend requests and messages, I came across a link to a page called Online Felines.
“What the . . . ?” I murmured. “Are there other cats out there on Facebook?”
Scrolling down the page, I could not believe my eyes.
There were page after page of cats, each with its own Facebook profile just like me. I clicked on a few to see what they were like and my jaw dropped. These cats had friends numbering in the thousands, not dozens.
Where were all these cats? I wondered. Did any of them live near me?
I scrutinized their personal information and a pattern started to emerge. These were all American cats. There was I, thinking that I had broken the mold, being the first and only cat on Facebook, but no—quite the reverse was true.
In America, it seemed, it was harder to find a cat who was not on Facebook than one who was.
I sent friend requests to as many as I could, only stopping when a message popped up warning me not to send friend requests to people I didn’t know.
“How come there are so many of you on here?” I asked one of my American friends.
“I’m an only cat. It’s the only way I can meet other cats,” she messaged back.
“Don’t you have friends in your neighborhood?”
“I can see other cats from my window but I’m not allo
wed out so I don’t know them.”
“Have you been to the vet?” I typed, assuming that she was recuperating from an operation.
“No, I’m a house cat. I never go out.”
“What do you mean you never go out? You’re a cat. What do you do all day?”
“I have a perch. And a catnip mouse.”
“You have a what?! Did you say a perch? Like a bird?”
“Kind of. My owner says it’s safer this way.”
I had thought I had it bad, living in a small town on the outskirts of nowhere, but this was something else!
I inquired of my other Stateside friends whether they were allowed outside and almost all of them replied in the negative.
“I live in an apartment on the thirtieth floor.”
“My sister was killed by a coyote.”
“My owner paid a fortune for me and is worried I’ll be stolen.”
“Well, no wonder you’re all on Facebook,” I typed back. “You must be bored senseless!”
“Yes, but at least we’re safe,” one commented.
A fair point, I suppose, but it did not strike me as much of a consolation.
“You should check out my blog,” said one. “It’s called the Secret Diary of a House Cat.”
So, just when I thought I’d made enough shocking discoveries about cats on the Internet, here was something else to stop me in my tracks.
Some cats had blogs!
I spent a couple of days delving into the cat blogging community and quickly realized that, like their human equivalents, cat bloggers were a mixed bunch in terms of ability. For the most part, their entries were humdrum—the banalities of day-to-day feline life, illustrated by a photo or two.
“This is me asleep on the couch.”
“Here I am with a paper bag on my head. LOL.”
Sex and the Kitty Page 8