The Good, the Bad, and the Furry

by Tom Cox

  The following morning we received the good news that Graham was not FIV positive. This seemed to confirm that we’d finally found a fitting name for him. You sensed that a Graham would not be the kind of cat who slept around or abused drugs, and, if he did have occasional moments where he let his libido get the better of him, he would be careful to take the necessary precautions.

  I took a few snaps of Graham with my cameraphone over the next couple of days and, if you overlook the one showing him freaking out and trying to find a secret passageway to freedom behind the coats hanging up near the front door, he appears quite content in all of them. On his first night, Shipley and Ralph had slunk casually into his room and each had an exploratory sniff of him, but they otherwise continued to appear indifferent to his presence, and he to theirs. The Bear had merely stared at him soulfully through the frosted glass of the doorway, like some grief-stricken black owl.

  Andrew’s escape, on the third night, was entirely down to my complacency and overeagerness for him to be ‘ours’. We’d let him explore the rest of the house, and he’d not seemed to be in any rush to get anywhere else, so I’d suggested that we unblock the catflaps. Gemma thought this might be premature, but I reasoned that, if we didn’t unblock them, we would be plunged back into a dark, archaic pre-catflap world of repeated door openings. When you have catflaps, it’s all too easy to forget the miserable, minute-by-minute toil necessary in such a world. Nobody ever asked the question ‘Who Let the Cats Out?’ in a pop song because the answer is obvious: it was the same person who let them in again two minutes later, and out again two minutes after that. Doors are a classic example of that ‘I hate this – it’s fucking great!’ mantra that seems to be part of the permanent internal monologue of all cats. Cats hate doors for the opportunities doors deny them to do exactly what they please, but they love them in equal measure, due to the opportunities they present to make humans their snivelling slaves. I knew, given the opportunity, that Ralph, Shipley and The Bear would be no different.

  As it was, I had only moved the boxes and chairs with which I’d blocked the catflaps. I hadn’t even progressed to stage two, the unlocking of the flaps themselves, and Graham was on the case. The second Gemma and I turned our backs, he was down to the bottom flap and had jemmied the lock, the mellow persona evident in the preceding forty-eight hours suddenly looking like a very clever act. Then he was out into the cool evening air, the catflap swinging on one hinge in his wake. A distant duck quacked on the lake beyond as if laughing at my foolishness.

  I looked at Gemma. ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

  ‘He’ll be back,’ she said.

  ‘Raaaaaaaalph!’ said Ralph.

  In view of what he’d been through, it was probably quite surprising that Graham came back at all, let alone within a couple of days. If I had been homeless, and a kind stranger had taken pity on me, then put me in a glorified cage and taken me to a boxy building on a business park and had my testicles removed, I’d have made it my mission, after escaping, to put myself as far away from them as possible, and to return for ice-cold revenge, in the dead of night, long after the misdeed had slipped their mind. Instead, Graham simply made his returns more stealthy than ever, always arriving when we were in bed, shooting out the cat door the second he heard Gemma’s footsteps or mine. Once again, the ‘in-only’ lock function proved no obstacle for his dextrous paws, and the one time I reached the catflap before he had chance to work the lock, he merely smashed it to pieces. Sitting next to it clad only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, I felt a new kind of forlornness: not just for the new catflap that would soon be added to Graham’s ever-increasing bill, but because there was absolutely no way to explain what I’d done to him. I’m sure Shipley and Ralph had been feeling a little sore with me when they’d got home from neutering too, but I’d already built up a trust with them beforehand.

  Sitting on that cold tiled floor, with another of Ralph’s giant hairballs not six inches from my bare feet, I had one of those occasional moments of revelation, where you step outside yourself and realise just how far you’ve come from the person you once were. I thought of the thirteen-year-old me fantasising about playing on the right wing for Aston Villa; of the sixteen-year-old me convinced that his future would take place on the lush green fairways of the professional golf tour; of the twenty-something rock journalist me having a pepper-eating competition with the Foo Fighters or watching former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash break off from an interview with him to stand on his hotel bed and play air guitar. Was this really what I had been reduced to as I approached my thirty-seventh birthday: a man sitting on a cold tiled floor at 1 a.m. in old, severely elastic-deficient pyjama bottoms, who, instead of buying the new clothes that he badly needed, paid for random, strange cats to have their balls removed?

  One rare glimmer of hope occurred about three days later, when I looked out the window at dusk to see Ralph and Graham curled up on separate deckchairs down on the patio. I knew Graham would run away if I attempted to catch him, so I left him there. Half an hour later, when I looked again, he was gone. As Gemma said, perhaps it was a sign that he just needed time, and would come back after all. That was, however, the last sighting for several days.

  To add insult to injury, a text from Deborah arrived the following week. ‘Want to come and meet our new cat?’ she asked, attaching a picture of Graham.

  ‘That’s Graham!’ I said, when she opened her front door to me half an hour later.

  ‘Who’s Graham?’

  ‘I mean Andrew. Well, he’s Graham now. We changed it after we caught him and got him neutered, but then he escaped again. It’s a long story. Anyway, why does he love you, and not us? I mean, obviously, we had his balls cut off, but apart from that.’

  ‘No, as I said, this isn’t Andrew. I mean Graham. This one’s very friendly. He’s not around all the time and he’s popped out again at the moment. I suppose it takes a bit of time for ferals to get adjusted. But he’s coming in for food every day. Biscuit’s very suspicious of him, but he and David get on like a house on fire. He’s been all over him today, jumped on his lap and everything. We’ve decided to call him Alan.’

  ‘But have you seen Graham close up?’

  ‘No, but I’ve seen him around. He’s different. Definitely a different cat.’

  Back at home, I made a mental list of the facts:

    1. Both cats were ginger.

    2. Both cats had personas that had led their new wannabe owners to give them names evoking men who might work as financial advisors.

    3. In exactly the same period when Graham had been getting to know Deborah and David, he had been absent from our house.

    4. Gemma and I had taken Graham to meet a man from California who had spoken in tender, reassuring tones to him, then drugged him and removed his bollocks.

    5. Deborah and David had not taken him to meet a man from California who had spoken in tender, reassuring tones to him then drugged him and removed his bollocks.

    6. The picture Deborah had shown me of Alan was actually of Graham.

  It all seemed extremely suspicious, and over the following nights I would find myself lying awake, turning it over in my mind, much as a conspiracy theory fanatic might do with the specifics of the plane crashes in America on September 11th, 2001. With Shipley and Ralph’s night-time rowdiness in full flow, I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, and wondered if it might be time for me to take down the sign on the bedroom door that said ‘CAT SERVICE STATION – OPEN 2am–5am’, since it didn’t seem to be working out for me.

  ‘It’s probably best if we just try not to think about him,’ said Gemma, but it was easier said than done. On the evening before my birthday, it rained hard, and water thundered into the conservatory through the hole in the roof made by Graham, which I’d thought I’d had mended. I couldn’t help imagining him out there somewhere, soaked and shivering, wondering what that vaguely empty feeling towards the rear of hi
s body was – that is, if Deborah was to be believed, and he wasn’t curled up contentedly at this very moment in her and David’s front room. I was being irrational. Since when had I seen a cat shiver just because of a bit of rain? But I had slipped into defeat mode again. I felt defeated by the house, defeated by cats.

  As Gemma passed me another old towel to soak up the damage, though, an amazing thing happened: a friendly pink nose appeared in the crack in the conservatory window. Attached to it was a familiar ginger face.

  ‘Sven!’ said Gemma.

  ‘Andrew!’ I said.

  ‘Graham!’ the two of us chorused.

  It was one of those perfect moments that you’d retell later, when asked by friends about how you and your cat came to live together, with embellished details to make it seem a little more heartwarming and lovely. Except this time there was no need to embellish, because it was as heartwarming and lovely as you could hope for. Graham sauntered into the conservatory, pushing his cold nose first into my hand then into Gemma’s, sniffing about in a relaxed fashion, accepting our strokes, looking into our eyes with hope and – this was the really amazing part – trust. It was amazing, I thought, how a mere animal had the capacity to go away, assess his situation, and come back with a complete adjustment of attitude. He did smell a little more pungent than usual, but I thought it was the least we could do to invite him into the bedroom. He waltzed happily in, with Gemma trailing him.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘He’s got balls.’

  I inspected the area in question. ‘But … how … what … That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘They’ve grown back! They can’t do that. Can they?’

  As I looked in more detail at the cat in front of me, taking in his bulk and the patch of white on the top of his nose that was just a bit too big, I realised quite how blind I’d been. And then all the details I’d missed began to hit me, one after another, like objects falling out of a cupboard I’d hastily, carelessly filled weeks earlier. I had been alarmed at how big Graham had looked the other day, when he’d been sitting on the deckchair next to Ralph, but I hadn’t really thought to question it.

  I thought back to a night a couple of months earlier, not long after Shipley had been ill: another period where I’d not been getting much sleep, due to Graham’s early-morning break-ins. Shipley had been making up for the valuable three or four days he’d lost, going on all sorts of mini-nocturnal adventures, and popping back after each one to tell me about it. I’d woken to the sound of cats fighting and worried it might be him, but, stumbling outside and up the stairs leading to the front of the house, I’d seen two ginger cats squaring up to one another, fur mohicans fully erect. I’d shooed them off with a sleepy, half-hearted ‘Oi! Take it elsewhere!’ and I’d identified one as Graham (or Andrew, as he was then known), but I’d been half asleep at the time, and summarily forgot about the incident. I had heard the noises of other cat fights in the night recently. But none in the last fortnight: the fortnight since Graham’s balls had been removed.

  This, then, must have been the battle that had played itself out for the last few months, beyond our awareness, in the pathways and nooks and undergrowth surrounding the Upside Down House: the story of two ginger cats, possibly even siblings, both of whom were looking for a home. There were two homes for them: homes owned by people who loved cats. Sadly, though, only one cat could ultimately stay in the locality. The smaller, less confident cat had been the original settler, and he’d fought bravely for his territory, but then he’d lost two vital things: small things, but things that made him feel like a man, that made him want to fight.

  After that, it was all over. There could be only one victor, and we were looking at him.

  ‘Hello, Alan,’ I said.

  ‘Hi, Alan,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Meeooop,’ said The Bear, who’d come into the bedroom to see what all the fuss was about.

  ‘Hi everyone,’ said Alan, not with words, but with a powerful jet of urine, some of which sprayed the bedroom wall, but most of which landed on the curtains.

  * * *

  It seemed that Graham was lost for ever. A week became a fortnight, then a month. I looked for him outside every night, asked amongst neighbours, but there was no sign. I left food by the door, but it was snaffled by Alan, who – though never quite as friendly as he had been the night he’d pissed on the curtains – was now carrying on where Graham had left off, in terms of coming in through the catflaps and weeing on my Bill Withers records. I blamed myself, not Alan, for Graham’s departure, but in a way it had been Graham’s own decision: we had made it clear he had a home here, and if he’d really wanted it, perhaps he would have taken it. I’d been wrong to assume all ferals want a home. Some of them probably just want to eat.

  ‘Of course, Chip’s got his faults, but he would never have done any of this,’ said Gemma, as we sat together on the floor, putting new protective polythene sleeves on the W–Z section of my albums for a second time.

  I wondered what all this spelled for The Bear, who was often still seen by Deborah and David, staring in at Biscuit through the windows of their house. That candle he held for her may have flickered somewhat of late, but it was not about to go out just yet, and I couldn’t imagine him feeling good that she now shared her house with a large, roughneck male cat from south Norfolk’s mean lanes. I was glad that Alan had found a home with two cat lovers, though, and I enjoyed the comedy of hearing Deborah call ‘Alllannn!’ every evening. It brought to mind the pleasing mental picture of her and David adopting a small, rather naughty insurance clerk who ran free in their garden, buried his own faeces and batted for the local village cricket team at weekends.

  Once again, I thought of those anonymous ferals and their gossip about me, picturing their reaction to all this, and the events that had led up to it.

  ‘So Ginger Ron’s called Alan now, and given up travelling to settle down? That’s weird. Never saw that one coming.’

  ‘Yeah, and the guy in the weird sixties house with the hole in the roof got Ginger Dave’s balls cut off.’

  ‘What? Man, that’s harsh. I thought you said this guy was a pushover. Ginger Dave could be a bit annoying, with that throaty meow of his, but he didn’t deserve that.’

  ‘I think it was done with good intentions, actually. It’s like this guy’s a charity, just for cat balls. I was thinking I might get mine done, actually. I’m tired of wanting to mount everything with a pulse. I feel like I’m chained to an idiot. I need some down time.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m not the only one. Give up the sex life for an inexhaustible supply of free food – that’s the way to go. Word’s out on the lanes. I’ve got some of my old gang coming over from just outside Stowmarket next week. They’ve been living in this derelict farm, but it’s being redeveloped and they’re looking for a simpler existence. One that’s not so dramatically governed by their hormones.’

  ‘I can’t believe this. You’ve changed, dude.’

  * * *

  We make a large proportion of the big decisions in our life in a weakened state. This is one of the reasons why, unless you’re a person of extreme, calculated rationality, life rarely follows a straightforward pattern: big stuff more than often follows on directly from big stuff, like falling dominoes. A career change might come about as a reaction to a bad job experience. A relationship might well have more chance of getting off the ground because of the failed relationship that preceded it. A house will be bought in tribute to, or as a reaction to, a previous house.

  Cat ownership is often similar. I was yet to make any very carefully planned decision regarding the adoption of a cat. The adoption of Ralph and Brewer had been inextricably linked to the chaotic excitement of a whirlwind marriage and a reckless move to a new county; the adoption of Shipley had been inextricably linked to the chaotic excitement of adopting Brewer and Ralph, combined with the chaotic excitement of seeing a nine-week-old Shipley jump over a small ornamental pond. Pablo and Bootsy had com
e into my life largely because of a failed mission to get a beagle and a rough calculation that its weight might compare to that of two small cats. Janet and The Bear had wandered into my life without any planning at all, leaving me no real choice in the matter. That’s just the way it works, a lot of the time. But maybe I’m making excuses for Gemma and myself, hoping that the weakened state in which we found ourselves after the disappearance of Graham accounts, in some way, for the careless haste of our subsequent actions. Forgive us: the first thing we did, after realising he was not coming back, was to go straight out and get a kitten.

  It was my birthday, after all.

  Advice for New Kitten Owners

  Procuring your kitten

  All proper kittens grow on small furry trees. Some people purchase kittens from shops and supermarkets, to which the kittens are transported in cramped lorries, alongside other cute animals such as pygmy goats and puppies. Try to get your kitten straight from a furry tree if you possibly can, as it will be fresher and less likely to be bruised.

  Make your kitten stand very still

  When you get your kitten home, take it out of its basket, place it on a smooth, flat surface and ask it to stand very still and not make a noise. The kitten will be very disorientated in its new environment, so if it manages to heed your advice and not move for over twenty minutes, it’s a good sign that the kitten has a stoical character and will be equipped to withstand life’s setbacks with equanimity. After ninety minutes or so, tell the kitten it can relax, and reward it with a small snack: some muesli, perhaps, or three or four organically grown leeks.

  Your kitten’s first headache

  Kittens are often plagued by headaches in the first three months of their lives, and can become irritable and monosyllabic as a result. Do not on any account try to treat one of your kitten’s headaches with medication. Instead, make your kitten very comfortable in a darkened room, and sing softly to it. Try, maybe, one of the early love songs of David Gates and the band Bread, or ‘Summer Breeze’ by Seals and Crofts. If your singing is up to scratch, your kitten will be cured in less than an hour, and ready for its next adventure.