by Tom Cox
I replied, asking Julie when I needed to be there. She texted back within what seemed like a second of me pressing ‘send’, announcing that the hedgehog ideally needed picking up within a couple of hours. If the traffic was fairly clear, I could get back to Norfolk from this end of Bedfordshire in just over two hours. Tempting as it was to stride back onto the green, putter in hand, and announce to Pat and Robin, ‘I have to go – a hedgehog is in trouble!’ I thought it more sensible to decline.
This, I was starting to realise, is how eccentricity works: it’s a slow drip, so quiet that you aren’t even aware of it as it gradually fills up your personality. Some people are properly unusual when they’re young, but nobody is properly eccentric. It takes time for those off-kilter hobbies and affectations you thought might be a bit unusual or fun – wearing a ridiculous hat, for example, or taking a sheep to a pub, or maybe even having a drawing of a hare in every room of your house – to mould themselves to your character and grow extra organisms. There’s also something about ageing and the concomitant awareness of the fleeting nature of existence that tends to make you less worried about being ridiculous, and less judgemental about the quality of ridiculousness in others. I remembered how, at fifteen, I’d despaired as my granddad, driving me to a golf tournament, had stopped his car smack bang in the middle of a country lane, directly behind a horse, fetched a spade, which he just happened to have in the car at the time, and shovelled its manure straight into the boot. I couldn’t quite imagine myself doing the same thing, but the episode had seemed progressively less embarrassing to me with every passing year. What was to say that, by the time I was seventy, or even sixty, I wouldn’t view it as a perfectly normal part of rural driving?
My dad had recently been scheduled to attend a big and rather fancy publishing party in London. He’d never been to an event like this before, and seemed excited, even by his standards. An hour or so after he’d left, I spoke to my mum on the phone. ‘He’s been really looking forward to it,’ she told me. ‘He’s taken a bag of courgettes from the garden. I told him it might not be a good idea, but you know how he is – he won’t listen to anybody.’ I laughed, but then I thought back to a scene a few months earlier, when I’d been foraging on the north Norfolk coast and stopped off in Norwich on my way home to visit Boots the Chemist. Upon reaching the counter, I’d realised that my wallet was at the bottom of my bag, which was still full of the day’s findings; in order to retrieve it, I had to empty a considerable proportion of them onto the counter.
In a way, we were probably looking here at the same genetic predispositions; the only difference was how far the sense of embarrassment had decayed. First the man in his thirties, visibly fumbling with some wild spinach in a shopping mall in front of a queue of people and a nonplussed sales assistant in an attempt to purchase shampoo and conditioner in the ‘3 for 2’ range. Then the man in his sixties, offering a large, phallic vegetable to a Booker prize-shortlisted author. Finally the man in his seventies, standing behind a horse with a shovel in his hand, a grin on his face and a cringing teenager watching him through a gap between his fingers.
At twenty-five, I probably would have thought the idea of genuinely considering abandoning a golf tournament to drive 100 miles to rescue a stranger’s hedgehog a fairly ridiculous one. That was my age when I’d first met The Bear. I remembered the day, because it was a busy and fairly pivotal one. I’d spent the morning writing, probably breaking off to read a couple of humorous email circulars, neither of which were about cats. Then I’d caught the Tube into town from Finsbury Park to meet with the literary agent who had just signed me up after reading the sample chapters of my first book. After that I’d told myself I would do some more writing ‘in a café’ but, as was so often the case, I actually spent it browsing in secondhand bookshops and record shops. I’d then got a bus to Camden, where I was reviewing a gig in the evening for a newspaper – a gig by a band that lots of people were predicting could be huge at the time, but whose name, if you mentioned it to anyone under the age of thirty now, would draw only a blank look – and meeting the girl I’d just started dating. From there, I’d gone, for the first time, to meet her cats, Janet and The Bear: the cats who would soon take me into a completely different life.
Even back then, The Bear had seemed like an animal with a dark past who’d lived several lives. Now here he was, twelve years later, at seventeen, still by my side. No living soul had spent more time in my company since then, and I’m sure he could tell me a lot more about myself, and how I’d changed, than I could. Sometimes I would look up from my work to find him staring at me analytically, and wonder just how long he’d been sitting there. The Bear always had the most perfect, almost balletic, posture at moments such as these, belying his old bones. He had never been a slack or sloppy cat, but when he assessed you, he almost always sat up in an especially alert manner, back straight, paws meticulously arranged in front of him, as if he didn’t just happen to be staring in your direction, but felt he was doing a job, and intended to do it well.
He’d been gathering data on human weakness for a long time now. He’d watched me become a tiny bit more rumpled with every passing year, a new crease or wrinkle burgeoning here, a few more hairs lost or gone slightly salty there. Sure, due to the battles he’d had when he was younger – which I was sure were defensive rather than aggressive – his ears looked like they’d been clipped by an overzealous ticket conductor on the Norwich to Liverpool Street line, but I couldn’t even blame fighting for my physical deterioration. He’d witnessed my bad decisions and my good ones. He’d met me while I was living a very metropolitan life. Maybe he’d known even then that, ultimately, it was an aberration? He’d seen me in the middle of the last decade, feeling a little trapped, a little bruised from a property mishap, and becoming a workaholic to sustain a life that was more materialistic than I’d ever really wished it to be. He’d probably known that the things that would ultimately make me happy were the same ones that had always made my family happy: animals, walking, books, music, nature. I sensed he probably could have told me all this in advance, but I doubted that, given the ability to speak, he would. He might even have been able to tell me my future, but I don’t think he’d want to. Because that would defeat the object, and undermine the value of life. As John, the lovely chap who’d fitted the microchip catflap, had observed, The Bear did seem to know things, but he knew them ‘in a good way, in a kind way’.
* * *
‘HOLD ON,’ said my dad when I telephoned him a few days later. ‘I’M GOING TO CHANGE PHONES. I CAN’T HEAR YOU ON THIS ONE. FOOK! THE KITTEN’S GONE UP THE CHIMNEY.’
‘Oh no! Is he OK?’
‘THAT’S BETTER. YEAH, HE’S FINE. HE KEEPS STARING AT IT, THOUGH. HEDGEHOGS, YOU SAY? CAN YOU REMEMBER WHEN I USED TO WORK AT THAT EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE CENTRE. THE TAXIDERMIST THERE WOULD LET BABY HEDGEHOGS RUN ALL OVER THE STAFF ROOM. YOU’D OFTEN FIND ONE ON YOUR CHEESE SANDWICH. NEXT DOOR’S DOG’S BEEN IN AGAIN.’
I knew by now that, for every story I told my dad about an animal, he would have another, much weirder one with which to upstage me. Cats had been the one exception to this rule in the past, but since the advent of Floyd, I no longer even had that on my side. As Floyd had grown, he’d only become more of a match for my dad’s irrepressible energy and propensity for rule-breaking. My mum had banned Floyd from the bedroom, due to his habit of tipping the bin over, spreading mud over the bed and eating bits of her sewing equipment, but she would often find him and my dad in there taking an afternoon nap together. ‘I’ve got this thing that I do when Floyd’s naughty, like when he steals the shower plug. I put my finger on his nose and say “No!”,’ she had told me. ‘I’ve actually started doing it to your dad too now.’ I couldn’t quite see myself doing the same thing, but I did think back to the time, a couple of years earlier, when my dad had broken my shower by turning the temperature dial too violently, and wondered if, with this method in place, everything might have been different.
> ‘How did the courgettes go down at the party?’ I asked my dad.
‘PEOPLE SEEMED TO LIKE THEM, BUT THEN I DROPPED THEM ON THE GROUND. THE PARTY WAS OUTDOORS, SO IT WAS VERY DARK WHERE I DROPPED THEM. IT WAS OK, THOUGH, BECAUSE I’D BROUGHT MY HEADTORCH. ARE YOU GOING OUT TONIGHT? IF YOU ARE, WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES. AND NUTTERS. ESPECIALLY NUTTERS, IN FACT. THIS WEATHER BRINGS THEM ALL OUT.’ I looked out of the window: it was an overcast, but reasonably pleasant autumn day of middling temperature. I was about to ask what it was about this weather that brought nutters out, but he’d moved on. ‘I JUST HAD A WEE AND THE KITTEN CAME INTO THE BATHROOM AND JUMPED UP ONTO THE TOILET AS I DID AND NOW IT’S GOT WEE ON ITS EAR.’
I searched my artillery of recent Roscoe incidents for something to match this, but found nothing. She’d been pretty aloof recently: utterly delightful in the process, but mostly just getting on with her own business. I had seen one gap where we might have got one up on Floyd, in that his meow was so far virtually non-existent. ‘Oh, Roscoe has the most amazing meow EVER,’ I’d been hoping to be able to tell my mum and dad, but it wasn’t quite coming on as quickly as I’d hoped.
‘Have you learned to meow properly yet?’ I’d asked her the previous week, as she trotted into the kitchen, requesting food.
‘Eeeagreowweh,’ she’d replied.
A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed, but I tried to look at it in a ‘meow half full’ way: at least she was making an effort.
But, perhaps, in one sense, I was winning the Kitten War. As she passed into adolescence, Roscoe was causing us relatively little trouble. She was out a lot, and seemed vaguely embarrassed by my or Gemma’s presence at any time we were in the garden, but that was normal teenage stuff. As Floyd grew, all the energy that had been so sweet when he’d been the size of a girl’s ankle boot became more of a liability. Several more household objects had become casualties of his attentions since I’d last seen him – including my mum’s computer printer, whose paper tray he’d broken by jamming his paw into it – whereas Roscoe had cost Gemma and me nothing in breakages for several months. Floyd had already slaughtered his first couple of birds, confirming the fears that had made my mum and dad so apprehensive about getting a kitten in the first place, while Roscoe remained kill free. Roscoe had filled out slightly, particularly on her bottom half, but it was obvious that she would not become a big cat. Floyd, by contrast, was thundering towards giant bruiser status, visibly gaining a few inches every time I saw him. What kind of mayhem would he cause when he finally hit full size? Maybe a more pertinent question was: What kind of mayhem wouldn’t he cause?
‘He keeps hurtling through the catflap and breaking the door,’ said my mum. ‘He’s completely hyperactive. I feel like I need to cut out the E numbers in his food. If he was human, he’d be all red and sweaty all the time.’
‘HE’S TURNED FROM A FLUFFY BALL OF FUN INTO A TYPICAL SEX-CRAZED TEENAGER, OBSESSED WITH LICKING HIS OWN GENITALS,’ added my dad.
Mercifully, Floyd had been neutered by now. ‘HE CRIED WHEN THE VET WAS CHECKING HIS NUTS,’ my dad had said. ‘I SAID TO HIM “I DON’T KNOW WHAT SHE’S DOING TO YOU, FLOYD, BUT I’M GLAD IT’S NOT ME”.’ With the knowledge that Floyd was now a eunuch, though, came another fearsome question: How big and hyperactive would he be now if he hadn’t gone under the knife?
The main victim of Floyd’s boisterous ways was Casper. My mum had felt awful in Floyd’s early weeks in the house, seeing Casper’s forlorn ghost face peering in at the kitchen window, but the two cats had soon become friends, wrestling and grooming one another on a daily basis, and sleeping in a fashion that Gemma – who had always insisted that cats had distinguishable upper and lower limbs, just like humans – called ‘arm in arm’. Early on, there seemed to be a big element of hero worship to this from Floyd’s side, but as he’d grown, he’d turned into the dominant party. Casper suffered his lusty attacks with complete equanimity, never complaining, and always retaining a beatific facial expression that would have given even Ralph a run for his money.
There’s a photo of me with Floyd, taken on Christmas Eve 2012. Gemma called it a ‘Cat Whisperer’ photo. I’m not sure that such a person as a Cat Whisperer could truly exist (far more likely to exist would be a Human Whisperer: a cat with his own TV show on which he whispered stuff like ‘I own your soul’ to misbehaving humans), but I can see what she was getting at. Floyd is on my mum and dad’s sofa, looking fairly laid back and pleased with the way life is treating him, and I’m leaning over him, appearing to pass some covert information into his ear that might help him in his future endeavours as a cat. In truth, what I was actually telling Floyd at the time was ‘Santa Claus is not real’.
I know: it seems cruel. But I worried about Floyd, and I felt it might be time for him to learn some of the harsh facts of life, purely for his own protection. People said that my cats had a perfect life, but compared to his, it was as if they were doing a strict period of feline community service. He had a pliant best friend and owners who were completely under his paw. On tap, he had only the finest quality wet food. He lived well away from main roads, surrounded by tasty walking and flying snacks. When he trotted outdoors, he was encircled by tall, exciting trees, and would begin each day by bolting to the top of one of them. As if all that wasn’t enough, my mum and dad’s postwoman kissed him on the nose every morning. His life might carry on being wonderful, but it was unlikely to ever be quite this Utopian ever again. I was glad that The Bear had never gone to live with my mum and dad and subsequently had to make the acquaintance of Floyd, as I think he would have found him a touch on the rambunctious side. But at the same time, Floyd could have benefited from the presence of an elder statesman such as The Bear who could pass on a bit of wisdom and explain that he should use his nine lives wisely.
I noticed that, on the track leading to my mum and dad’s house, was a new sign that my dad had crafted, in the shape of a cat, for any drivers who happened to be passing. ‘PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY,’ it read. ‘CATS PLAYING IN TWITCHELL. thank you.’
In my head, I read the capitalised bits of the sign in my dad’s voice and the ‘thank you’ bit in my mum’s. ‘You’ve done a really good job with that,’ I told my dad. ‘But what if you get people who aren’t from around here driving down the twitchell and they don’t know what twitchell means?’
‘EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT TWITCHELL MEANS.’
I liked his idealism, but I wasn’t convinced that it tallied with reality. Having grown up in Nottinghamshire, I would like nothing better than to think that the whole world referred to a narrowish rural path between hedges or buildings as a twitchell or, at worst, a jitty. (In fact, if we were being strictly accurate, Thomas O’Malley from The Aristocats should have been referred to as a twitchellcat, not an alleycat.) But I knew, from my travels, that there were strange folk who thought otherwise, believing such a passageway to be called a ‘ginnel’ or a ‘twitten’ or a mere ‘path’.
‘ANYWAY, I’M NOT GOING TO CHANGE IT NOW,’ said my dad. ‘IT’S A SIGN WARNING DRIVERS TO BE CAREFUL AROUND CATS. IT DOESN’T NEED TO BE EDITED FOR POPULIST APPEAL.’
Casper had snuck through the door when we’d returned to the kitchen, and I leaned over, unthinkingly, and fed him one of the anchovies my mum had left out on the table.
‘DID YOU JUST GIVE THAT CAT ONE OF THOSE SMALL FISH? YOU’RE AS BAD AS THAT PORTUGUESE EXCHANGE KID WE HAD STAYING WITH US WHO PUT YOUR MUM’S SANDWICHES ON THE ROOF THAT TIME.’
Floyd arrived in the kitchen and leapt onto Casper’s back, then proceeded to start biting his neck. I’m an only child with a smallish family who had never done Christmas in a big way, but there was something about having two male cats tenderly humping in the corner of the room that made the occasion a little more festive. Gemma and I were spending a second Christmas in succession apart, due to the logistical difficulties of our families living in entirely separate parts of the country and our own home being in another entirely separate one. Ralph, Shipley, Ro
scoe and The Bear, meanwhile, were amusing themselves, with intermittent visits from Deborah and David. Feeling so spreadeagled – not to mention broke – at the festive season prompted more thoughts that it might be time to move on from the Upside Down House, but I shelved them just for now. For a start, there were other things to look at, such as another toad, which had taken up residence in my dad’s running shoe in the porch.
On Boxing Day, my extended family filed in, saying hello to the toad on the way. I noticed that my cousin Jack’s girlfriend Jade had brought her dog, a chihuahua called Pom. Floyd had met dogs before – he’d been born in a house containing a spaniel – but his reaction to Pom suggested otherwise. We’d been making a cautionary effort to keep the two of them in separate rooms, but everyone had been a little distracted by my dad’s speculations about how difficult it must have been for the toad to make its way along the A14 and the A1 back from my house, and in the meantime, Floyd had snuck into the kitchen. He reacted to Pom in the obvious manner of any small furry creature, meeting for the first time in a room that happens to be full of people a slightly larger furry creature that it is absolutely terrified of: he scrambled on top of a cupboard, then ran at high speed across the tops of the people’s heads until he found one with hair big enough for him to hide in.
My cousin Fay used to straighten her hair in her late teens and early twenties, but these days she’s at peace with its tight, thick curls and tends to let it grow out with a fair bit of freedom. Disentangling Floyd thus turned out to be a three-man job lasting several minutes. After that, he sulked in the spare room for a while, but made his way back downstairs about an hour later, when Jade and Pom had left. By this point, my dad had got his new supersoaker out, and he and my cousins Jack and Jeff were taking turns to spray each other with it. I noticed that my dad was now wearing a laminated sign around his neck featuring my uncle Paul’s face.