by Tom Cox
‘MONTY WAS A BRILLIANT CAT,’ my dad would often say in his extremely loud voice. ‘THERE’LL PROBABLY NEVER BE ANOTHER ONE LIKE HIM.’ My dad’s tone seemed to imply that if you were a cat, you faced a choice early on in life: you either knuckled down, got a job and bettered yourself, or you lazed around and became one of society’s drop-outs.
Monty, who died in 1998, was not my parents’ last cat. Daisy, a tightly wound ball of tortoiseshell neuroses who’d served as Monty’s whipping girl, had survived for nine further anxious years after his death, running from the sound of my dad’s thunderous footsteps, occasionally offering my mum morsels of affection but arguably finding true companionship only with an old feather duster that my parents had bought in the Mansfield branch of Wilkinsons in 1990 (our theory was that she thought it was an uncommonly accommodating parrot). It was, though, Monty’s gold standard of feline behaviour that mostly explained the catless state my mum and dad had lived in for the last three and a half years. He was the kind of supremely confident, outdoorsy, no-nonsense cat you might find in a Victorian children’s story, and I could understand why you wouldn’t want to try to replace him. In more recent years, though, there’d always seemed to be something missing when I visited my parents’ house, and I saw it as my job to campaign for change. It had been six years since I’d last had a kitten in my life. With Janet’s passing still so recent, I wasn’t quite ready for another of my own, but that wasn’t to say I wasn’t ready for another of their own.
‘I think it’s time,’ I would say to my mum.
‘Neh,’ she would reply. ‘I’m really enjoying how clean the house is at the moment.’
‘I feel you could really benefit from it.’
‘Maybe. But, if I get one, how will I know it’s a good one?’
‘Most of them are good ones, as long as you treat them well.’
‘Hmm. Maybe. But, no, I’m fine.’
I could see the cracks beginning to show, though, especially on the occasions when she visited my house. ‘You’ve got too many cats. You need two, at the most. I’ll have this one,’ she’d say, picking The Bear up. The Bear, having long since deemed my mum of sufficient intellect to be worthy of his affection, could not resist a stand-up cuddle. He would begin to purr, and cling to her with his koala-like claws. ‘He’s a good one. And Shipley’s always bullying him.’
It was true: Shipley did give The Bear a hard time, but I could never quite convince myself it was a hard enough one to justify a permanent separation. Shipley would sometimes donk The Bear on the head, but mostly his specific brand of cowardly aggression involved turfing The Bear off a warm spot he quite fancied himself, or dancing about in front of him, pulling the obnoxious faces of a feline punk. Being a cat who believed strongly in non-violence, The Bear never once retaliated, instead relying on his sole defence: the ability to make the noise of a small dragon gargling with lighter fluid.
‘Eweeeeegggghhh!’ Shipley would say to The Bear, dancing about in front of his face in the kind of way that, were he human and in a nightclub, would probably soon result in someone punching him in the neck.
‘Aaaargle baaargle aaargle,’ The Bear would reply, and scuttle behind the sofa.
It wasn’t pretty to watch, but normally their exchange of opinions escalated no further.
That was, however, immaterial. This was The Bear we were talking about, for goodness’ sake. He was the best cat in the universe. Of course, there were times when I thought all of my cats were the best cat in the universe, but, from a purely objective point of view, The Bear really was the best. Yes, he might have peed on my curtains a couple of times recently, and there had been, in the dark early years, the incident with the turd and Dee’s dressing gown pocket, but on the whole, no cat had a sweeter nature. As if to underline this, he even had a white patch on his chest in the shape of a wonky heart, like a permanent badge of his sensitivity. He was a complex, superior being, and it took time to understand him. My mum might have thought she was ready for that, but she would probably feel different when she’d spent a couple of days being followed around by him, with those deep, watery pupils making a thousand pressing queries of her. It took nerves of steel to cope with that kind of thing. Even after more than a decade of knowing him, it would often be all I could do not to pop down the local park with a crate full of extra-strength lager after seeing him materialise out of nowhere next to my chair, his question-mark eyes boring deep into me. Besides, for my parents to adopt The Bear would be breaking the unspoken law that surrounded him. The next person to own The Bear would have to be my next ex-partner. These were the rules, and they were now very firmly established.
Actually, I could see one good reason why my mum and dad were reluctant to get a new cat, and might only want a special, pacifist one, such as The Bear: their garden had become more of a wildlife haven than ever in recent years. I may have had moorhens and muntjac in mine, but I had not quite managed to cultivate a close personal relationship with either, as my mum and dad seemed to have done with the fish, frogs, toads, blackbirds and woodpeckers living at their place. Barely a day seemed to go by without a text update from my mum of another intense brush with wildlife. Sometimes, the action was not even limited to the outside of the house.
Not long after I’d most recently arrived at their front door, my dad had taken me to one side. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he’d said.
When my dad says ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ it usually means one of three things: a) he’s about to ask me if I’ve completed my tax return, b) he wants to know if I’ve got my car ready for winter yet, or c) he wants to warn me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND NUTTERS’ next time I go out. This time, though, his agenda was different. He led me into the porch and pointed at a rack that contained various gardening footwear – some of which, from what I could gather, dated from as far back as 1946.
‘I’VE GOT A TOAD LIVING IN MY SHOE,’ he said.
I bent down to look at his slip-on gardening loafers: the same gripless shoes he’d worn, in defiance of my mum’s wishes, to climb and prune a tree in the pouring rain fifteen months ago, as a consequence of which he had fallen to the ground, several feet below, and broken his spine. Sure enough, tucked up cosily inside the left shoe was a small, greeny-brown toad. It looked very content – complacent, even. Stuck to the toe of the loafer was a Post-it note with the words ‘TOAD IN SHOE!’ scrawled upon it.
‘I WROTE THAT SO I DON’T FORGET AND TRY TO PUT THE SHOE ON,’ my dad explained.
We strolled around the garden, and he showed me some courgettes he’d grown recently – one of which he was especially proud of, due to its bendy shape – and the netting he’d put over the pond to keep a meddling neighbourhood heron from stealing his koi carp. ‘IT’S AN ABSOLUTE BASTARD,’ he told me. ‘IT’S STILL HANGING AROUND EVEN NOW.’ Last week, he explained, the heron had caught his favourite fish, Finn, then dropped his lifeless body from the air. I sensed from the chalk outline he’d drawn in the exact shape of Finn’s body on the flagstones next to the pond that he was taking the loss hard, and I found it difficult to come up with the right words of comfort.
‘He’s in a better place now.’
‘WHAT? IN THE GROUND UNDER YOUR MUM’S CORDYLINE PLANT?’
‘No, I mean fish heaven, or wherever it is they go.’
We moved towards the shed. ‘THERE WAS ANOTHER TOAD, TOO,’ he said. ‘THAT ONE USED TO LIVE OVER HERE IN THE COMPOST HEAP. I USED TO PUT A BLANKET OVER IT AND TUCK IT IN AT NIGHT. HAVE YOU FIXED YOUR CONSERVATORY ROOF YET? DON’T GO UP THERE YOURSELF. KEITH HARRIS AND HIS DUCK ORVILLE DIED DOING THAT.’
Later that evening, my mum fed me a stupendously tasty meal, combined, apparently, with at least three other stupendously tasty meals to compensate for all the times I hadn’t visited her recently. Meanwhile my dad talked about the writer Martin Amis, who was the same age as him, and the different opportunities the two of them had in their lives, due to their contrasting roots.
‘WHEN MARTIN AMIS WA
S EIGHT, HE SAW HIS DAD SHARING PROFOUND THOUGHTS WITH PHILIP LARKIN,’ my dad said. ‘WHEN I WAS EIGHT, I SAW MY UNCLE KEN SHARING SOME CHEESE WITH HIS ALSATIAN, BRUCE.’
Somehow, in the way that these things can when my dad is speaking, this led into an anecdote about the walk he’d been on with my mum in Leicestershire last week. ‘WE STOPPED FOR A NAP IN A FIELD BUT I WOKE UP BECAUSE A COW WAS LICKING ME,’ he said. ‘I THOUGHT IT WAS YOUR MUM KISSING ME BUT IT WAS A COW LICKING ME.’ As we cleared away the dirty plates, the door knocker sounded. I’d expected it to be Roger and Bea, the extremely lovely, extremely elderly couple next door who would often drive the forty yards from their back door to the end of their garden to eat their tea in their greenhouse, and sometimes take a detour to see my mum and dad on the way. I was surprised, however, to see the white ghost of a kitten, sitting in the porch at head height, and peering in at us.
‘Casper!’ said my mum, opening the door, picking up the ghost and peppering his head with kisses. ‘How are you? You’re beautiful, aren’t you? Yesyouare.’
The kitten seemed to enjoy the kisses, which suggested he was a corporeal, living form after all, and could actually feel this stuff. As he received them, he beamed in a way that seemed to say ‘Because I’m worth it’.
I looked at the two of them quizzically.
‘Oh, erm, yes,’ said my mum. ‘This is Casper. He lives next door. He’s learned to climb up and tap the door knocker with his paw.’
I gave Casper a scratch on the head. He looked up and assessed me lazily. It was a very different look to those soul-piercing ones The Bear gave me. This look was full of sleepy entitlement, as if, to Casper, my face was just another blurry, unspecific, adoring mass of skin. He seemed like a big softy: a cat full of trust, who was very assured of his place in the world. There was something familiar about him. I couldn’t quite place it at first, but then it hit me: if you added a few sandy patches, what you would have was an almost exact replica of a four- or five-month-old Monty. It was all there, from the confident aura to the sense that, if he was a person, his wardrobe would probably have favoured britches.
My mum poured a tiny bit of crème fraîche into a bowl for him, and he lapped it up enthusiastically. ‘I know I’m not supposed to,’ she said. ‘I just give it him very occasionally. Oh look, he’s left a heart in it just for me.’
She was right: where Casper had lapped at the crème fraîche, it had separated to make almost exactly the shape of a picture-book love heart. It was impressive, but, living with a cat who had a fur heart on his chest, I was perhaps a little less overawed than many others might have been.
Over the next few weeks, various photographs from my mum arrived via email, chronicling Casper’s adventures in their garden: Casper strutting across their lawn, as if slightly behind schedule on his way to give an important PowerPoint presentation; Casper in the foreground, casually cleaning himself, as my dad chopped logs, shirtless, in the background; Casper in a tree, looking down on my mum and dad’s vegetable patch as if certain he had planted and tended the potatoes in it himself. My mum sent me other photos, but sometimes even these had a subliminal Casper theme. When she emailed me a picture of a lovely, new, log-cabin quilt she’d been sewing, it took me a while to evaluate the needlework and colour scheme, as I’d been distracted by the white cat sprawled contentedly upon it.
After a month of this, I decided it was time to telephone her and have a serious chat.
‘I’LL JUST GET HER,’ my dad said. ‘SHE’S OUTSIDE WITH MONTY. I FELL ASLEEP IN THE COMPOST AGAIN.’
‘Hold on. What did you just say?’
‘I SAID I FELL ASLEEP IN THE COMPOST AGAIN.’
‘No, not that bit. The other bit.’
‘SHE’S OUTSIDE WITH CASPER.’
‘Yeah, but that’s not what you said, is it? You said “She’s outside with Monty”.’
‘DID I? OH, THAT’S WEIRD. HE’S A GOOD CAT, THAT ONE. YOU DON’T GET MANY LIKE HIM.’
‘It works out well,’ my mum told me a few minutes later. ‘He pops along every so often and we have a cuddle, but I don’t have to spend money on cat food, or spend my life cleaning up paw prints or other cat mess.’
I wondered if my mum was being honest with herself. When she’d visited my house the previous week I’d noticed a distinct glaze of white fuzz on the black jumper she was wearing.
‘Are you sure it wouldn’t just be best to get a cat of your own? There are lots of lovely homeless ones out there, just waiting to put a heart in your crème fraîche.’
‘Oh, it would be nice. But I’d only want one if it was as nice as Monty. Sorry, I mean Casper. And how would I know he was? I could never be sure.’
* * *
I was worried about the potential repercussions if my parents got too attached to their neighbours’ cat – it seemed likely to end in tears, one way or another – but I had a plan. It was a long shot, whose many elements might take a little time to put properly in place, but I was working on it.
From the time of Janet’s death, I’d been noticing some very strange goings-on upstairs in the Upside Down House. In the morning, arriving in the kitchen, I would find that many of the cat biscuits I’d left out had vanished – far more than my cats would normally eat. If you were an imaginative sort of person, you might even say that it was as if they had been magically moved from their place in the dispenser to a giant, invisible stomach. Reaching for a loaf I’d bought the previous day, I’d find its seal broken and one of the corners nibbled off. Later, moving across to my vinyl collection to pull out Still Bill, the 1972 album by Bill Withers – which, despite purchasing a whole twelve years earlier, I never felt I’d given the love it deserved – I would find it freshly covered in sticky, yellow liquid. Another morning, I found a similar liquid on the blackboard where I wrote my weekly shopping lists: a critical wet streak going diagonally through the words ‘fabric conditioner’.
Even if I had been a devout believer in the spirit world, I could not have suspected that any of these were the acts of Ghost Janet. He had never been the most creative pisser, and, if he had to come back and soil any of my records, I think it would far more likely have been something which had regularly troubled his eardrums in his lifetime – Deep Purple’s Fireball, perhaps, or the first Uriah Heep LP. My doubts were confirmed a week later when, coming upstairs to get a drink of water, I found a ginger cat sneakily munching from one of the biscuit dispensers. You might argue that ‘sneakily’ is the wrong word to use about any activity that involves making the noise ‘ORRGOBNRRROMGOBNROMMGOBBLEGORBLE’, but he’d certainly been stealthy upon entering the house and he made his getaway in a blur of streetwise determination.
Since then, I’d been keeping an eye out for the ginger intruder, but he was always very careful, timing his raids to coincide with the occasions when I was asleep or watching television downstairs. If I caught him in the act, he’d shoot past me, hurdling banisters and other cats, not letting me get a proper look at his face. I began taking photos of him when I saw him from a distance, poking his head around the corner of the house’s lower staircase, or stopping to stare back at me, seemingly with regret, as he scuttled off down the garden steps, but these cameraphone snaps always came out blurry. I began to wonder if it had nothing to do with the photographs at all and he was just a very blurry cat.
My plan was going to take a bit longer than I’d anticipated. If I was to befriend this cat, rehabilitate him and turn up on my mum’s doorstep and present him to her as an irresistible reintroduction to cat ownership, to take her focus away from Casper, it was going to be a matter of baby steps: a sort of ‘softly, softly, catchy thieving furry urchin’ approach. Finding out what his face looked like would be a start. I had observed enough of his behaviour to know that, if my plan came to fruition, I wouldn’t be stealing someone else’s cat, though – or that I would at most be stealing someone else’s very neglected cat. He must have been hungry, since every night he began to meow outside the door pathetically. H
e had one of those throaty Rod Stewart meows that ginger cats often have, except in this case it was more like the kind of noise Rod Stewart would make if he was being forced to sing while suffering from the recent swine flu bug.
‘Andrew!’ I’d call, gently opening the door and offering him some biscuits. From a distance, he seemed like an Andrew to me: he had that same aura that a lot of Andrews have of knowing a lot of people and being very punctual.
‘Eweeeeaaaggggh,’ Andrew would say again, from somewhere in the darkness, and vanish.
Andrew clearly wanted to do this on his terms: he desired my food, but didn’t want the damage incurred to his pride if he admitted that he was taking a handout. However, we both knew the score. If I was absolutely determined for him not to eat my cats’ food, I could have done something about it. Andrew needed to be frank with himself: this was charity, whichever way he looked at it.
I’d had quite a few such visits from feline intruders in the past, and I wondered if word tended to get out about me in the feral community. I could picture the scene: two mangy tomcats sitting by some bins. ‘I’m telling you, dude,’ says one. ‘This guy is a pushover. I heard he gave an old velvet jacket and a lamp to the PDSA last week that he could have got at least twenty quid each for on eBay. No magnetic lock on the catflap. His ex didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she’s not there any more, and he suffers fools extremely gladly. Lives all on his own. Leaves biscuits out all night in huge dispensers. Often has some rubbish Deep Purple album on really loud, so he probably won’t even hear you come in. You can gorge yourself to your heart’s content.’