Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  The door to the main bedroom of my house is a heavy one, fitted a little too close to the carpet beneath it. Even for a human, it takes a bit of a shove to open, and for most felines it’s a lost cause, but for Shipley, at the crack of dawn, it is no obstacle. Since I don’t have a camera set up in my living room, I have no actual evidence of how he goes about getting it open, but I like to picture a scenario involving a miniature stepladder and a ten-inch battering ram fashioned from a long-out-of-date courgette. You might have thought after going to such an effort, he would want to make the most of the ample comforts of the room, but Shipley’s visits are flying ones: brief windows in his schedule where I am invited to join him in revelling in his own magnificence, before he leaves for more pressing appointments.

  ‘It’s me! I’m here!’ he will say, upon getting the door open, and quickly hiding the courgette and the stepladder before I get the chance to see them.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I will say blearily. ‘Very much like this time last morning, in fact.’

  ‘I have rain on my back!’

  ‘And in what way is that my problem?’

  ‘It’s your sodding problem because you know that if you don’t wipe it off in the next seven seconds I’m going to smear my muddy paws all over the duvet, and if that still doesn’t work, I’m going to start shredding the magazines by your bedside or find a bit of really soft flesh on your arm and pinch it between my front teeth until you do what I say.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you what kind of long-term effects it can have on people’s sleep pattern, when every morning, between five and six-thirty, they have cats shouting in their faces?’

  ‘No, that has never occurred to me. I have absolutely no concept of The Long Term or The Big Picture. I live entirely in the moment, and think exclusively about my own needs, on a minute-by-minute basis. Because of this, I will always be much happier than you. Now shut the hell up and stroke this wet shit off my back.’

  ‘Is it normal to be sworn at by a cat? I’m sure that’s not normal. Do ordinary people’s ordinary cats do that? I feel sure they don’t, you know. Could I at least have some kind of cuddle, since you’re here?’

  ‘You know what? I would love to, but I’m just a bit worried about that issue of Private Eye that’s been left in the living room. I’m not quite happy with Gordon Brown’s face on the cover, and would like to rip into it with my teeth. Best not leave it much longer, for fear it annoys someone. Sorry, but you know how it is.’

  Each of my cats has spent time cultivating their own specialist method for waking me up. There was, for example, the two-month period where, every day, between 6.30 and 7 am, Bootsy would manage to locate my favourite ring – which I always take off at night – on my bedside table, and bat it into the adjacent wastepaper basket. A more distanced onlooker might suggest that this was simply a demonstration of Bootsy’s love for shiny objects, which is a valid theory – she’s always had expensive taste – but the fact that she immediately lost interest in the ring every time my attention was roused suggests there was always more to it.

  Then there’s Janet, whose wake-up calls employ the infamous The Nice Cat/Stinky Cat method, first practised by felines in ancient Egypt who were worried about not getting the attention that, as would-be gods, they felt they deserved. First, he will burrow his head under the duvet and press his ice-cold nose into one of my feet. To be on the receiving end of this tactical manoeuvre is far from unpleasant, but, should it fail to rouse me, he will bring out the big guns, hauling his great hulking bottom up onto the bed and cleaning it two inches from my face. The other symptom of this, besides me wanting to get as far away from the bed as quickly as possible, is that, going on the rule of Simulslurp, any other cat in the room will also start cleaning its bottom at the same time. Soon, Shipley will invariably arrive, and then Ralph too, burrowing into his own rear in a manner that, were it to get any more thorough, could put him in severe danger of re-eating the previous day’s shrew. This will often lead to a kind of ‘arse chorus’, which, if it wasn’t for the fact that I feel sure someone else has done it already, I might have filmed and put on YouTube by now.

  But it’s always Ralph and Shipley who are most adamant about having their needs met. I do not think of myself as my cats’ ‘father’, but since these are the only two cats that didn’t get time to be significantly moulded by another owner before coming into my care, I find it hard not to view their behaviour as a sign of my parental shortcomings. They are milksops: toughnuts in one way, entirely needy in another. Unlike Shipley, Ralph does not have the ingenuity to open the bedroom door, instead choosing to howl his own name to get my attention. I’ve asked him lots of questions about the reasons for this over the years, ranging from ‘Have you sustained a debilitating leg injury?’ all the way to ‘Did you have that dream about being mocked by a stoat again?’ but he’s never really come up with an answer more elucidatory than ‘Raaaaaaaeeeeaaalph!’

  Ralph has always been a bit of a nighttime howler, and his low spells in hot weather long ago led me to conclude that he suffers from a summertime version of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but in the late summer of 2007, not long after the men attacked the house with the gardening implements, the frequency of his vocal pronouncements of his name and the proximity of them to Dee’s and my sleeping quarters and the street above made them an extra cause for concern.

  In an age when cats seem to be gradually taking over the Internet, one might assume that, using half-decent research skills, it might be possible to find out a diagnosis for any kind of curious feline behaviour online within a matter of seconds. However, having Googled ‘your tabby’ ‘a’ ‘becomes’ ‘when’ and ‘massive prat’ I found nothing. Dee’s suggestion was that his unease could be down to the all-white, fluffy cat we sometimes saw flicking her tail about on the stairs leading to the back garden, and had christened The Whore. But, as astute as Dee is on 99 per cent of other-worldly matters, she’s always had a weak spot when it comes to second-guessing Ralph’s woes, going right back to his kittenhood, before we realised he was a boy, when she mistook his midnight howls for mating calls.

  From what I could see, the only negative thing you could say about The Whore was that she had an unusually flicky, flirty tail. From my limited knowledge of catiquette, this hardly seemed a crime worth meowling about around the neighbourhood, stating your identity at the top of your voice. It wasn’t as if she’d invited one of her mates in for a fight behind our living room curtains, as a giant neighbourhood tabby had done in the summer of 2002.1

  If we were honest, the two of us probably knew what the problem was quite early on, and, by looking for other causes, and scapecats such as The Whore, were merely trying to find a way not to face up to it.

  In the past, our cats had always got on with one another fairly well. Certainly, there was the annual punch-up between Ralph and Shipley where Ralph would pound Shipley’s head against the concrete patio just to confirm who was still Top Cat, or those moments where Shipley would sneak up onto the bed and play the timeless game of ‘Clappy Paws’ with The Bear’s inert, sleeping form, or that occasion that Bootsy knocked The Bear flying against the patio doors with one of her tiny, legendary right hooks. But this was ultimately play fighting, with no serious grudges behind it. For a while, I’d convinced myself that the standoffs between Ralph and Pablo fitted into a similar category. I suppose, though, when one of your cats pounces on one of your other cats with such force that he snaps your cat flap door off twice in one week, you have to accept that you might be dealing with a slightly more serious problem.

  Before he came to us, Pablo had been living as one of dozens of feral cats in a giant, abandoned house, where he would regularly impregnate various close members of his family. I picture it as a kind of cat version of a 1960s hippie commune, except with a slightly less overpowering smell of urine. His background meant he came to us with three fundamental needs: a) to eat as much food as felinely possible; b) to make friends with any other cat in
the vicinity; and c) to dry hump something soft at least once daily. Bootsy provided a willing outlet for needs b) and c) and Dee and I did our best to satisfy need a), but the other cats remained sceptical of the new wiry ginger simpleton in their midst. To an intellectually superior cat, such as The Bear, Pablo’s condition presented no problem: Pablo did not even feature on The Bear’s radar. But to a narcissistic, troubled, yet not particularly bright cat such as Ralph, the ginger newcomer’s outlook on life must have seemed nigglingly simple. This seemed to me to be more of a war of species than anything else: the eternal battle between the sunny ginger and the tortured tabby. That was my theory, anyway. But one thing was for certain: as summer turned into autumn, Ralph was feeling threatened by Pablo in an additional, more physical way.

  In 2007, when friends would ask me how many cats I had, I would tell them ‘six’, but I was actually lying – I had seven. It was just that all seven never lived in the house at the same time. There was The Bear, Shipley, Janet, Ralph and Bootsy, and Summer Pablo. Then, around September each year, Summer Pablo would vanish to be replaced by another cat, known as Winter Pablo. Winter Pablo was ginger, had many of the same habits of Summer Pablo, and cultivated a similarly intellectually challenged look by leaving his tongue permanently protruding from his mouth, but that was pretty much where the resemblance ended. I tend to chalk up Pablo’s vast, terrifying accrual of winter weight to his feralness, but I’ve never known another cat to do it in such exaggerated fashion. It must have been disturbing, being Ralph, the joint biggest of all my cats, to suddenly see one of your skinnier contemporaries transform himself into a giant red pom-pom as the weather got colder.

  Did Ralph actually think it was another ginger cat altogether – equally as much of an annoying bum onion as the other one, but even fatter – coming in through the cat flap? Maybe an out-and-out moron like my second oldest cat, Janet, might have made that mistake, but I credited Ralph with more intelligence. Although maybe not enough intelligence to remember that Pablo’s weight gain had occurred the previous two winters as well and, come March, Summer Pablo would begin to return.

  So what was responsible for tipping the balance and creating Ralph’s vendetta? Now, as I happened upon the pair of them in mid-scrap, I noticed a new intensity to their wrangling. In the human world, to get two individuals at such loggerheads, one of them would have probably had to have slept with the other’s spouse, stolen their job, or taken out a hit on a close member of their family. But for Ralph and Pablo, all these possibilities seemed moot, apart from maybe the first, and I was certain Ralph had no real romantic, or dry hump-based, designs on Bootsy, nor Pablo on the sheepskin rug draped across the back of the living room sofa that Ralph often turned to for physical comfort in his more carnal moments. The couple of times Pablo had had a tentative go on the sheepskin, it had only made him sneeze.

  I’d initially thought that what we were dealing with here was a simple aggressor–victim situation, with Ralph in the aggressor role, but it soon became apparent that Pablo’s happy-go-lucky veneer was beginning to crack. Pablo might have been a big soft pom-pom when bounding onto the bed and asking to have his chest scruffed, but he was also one with scalpel-deadly talons. I found this to my cost one day, when I reached through the cat flap tunnel and readjusted the door, only for Pablo to mistake my hand for Ralph and punish it accordingly.2

  Soon, the exits and corners of the house became places of fiery red trepidation for Ralph. The top of the small staircase leading from the bottom floor was a particular danger point. Once, I arrived here to find Ralph and Pablo both simultaneously suspended upside down, in mid-air, three feet off the ground. From what I could work out, no string, rope or pulley system was in place. It was my usual habit to hurl myself in between them during their scraps, but this time I held back just momentarily, unable to stop myself admiring the ballet of the performance. I will not be persuaded that a full three seconds didn’t elapse before both their heads hit the ground. It was like something from The Matrix, the main exceptions being that, post-fight, characters from The Matrix don’t a) violently shed fur all over the floor and b) go and sulk behind the sofa.

  There was always far more fur to clean up in the aftermath of Ralph and Pablo’s tussles than there was following the recreational wrestling bouts between Janet and Shipley. If I’d had the foresight to save the stuff, it probably would have only taken about half a dozen fights before I had enough to make a whole new cat: a tabby-ginger half-breed named Rablo who might go forth and spread peace, putting an end to racial tension in the cat universe once and for all.

  But it seems doubtful Rablo would have succeeded where ‘mellowing’ Feliway plug-ins, valerian drops and pep talks had not. My own interventions certainly weren’t doing much good either. Perhaps the most calamitous of them was the occasion when, in whisking Pablo out from Ralph’s reach and closing the bedroom door, being careful not to shut it on Pablo’s tail, I suddenly realised I was holding a furry ginger air raid alarm whose off switch I could not locate. I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound coming from a cat and an interminable twenty seconds went by before I realised that it was not a continuation of Pablo’s battle cry I was hearing but his way of informing me that, in going to such an attempt not to trap his tail in the door, I’d trapped it in the hinge of the door instead. It took me quite some time to apologise for that one, with the extensive use of pâté – always a dangerous move with Pablo, a cat who, once given a taste, can never quite be convinced that a human is incapable of producing spreadable paste on demand.

  Working from home takes strict discipline. That discipline can easily be fractured when a person spends half his day serving as a peacemaker between his cats. Now, with Dee out at her new job at a local horse charity, I found myself devoting large amounts of time to trying to placate Ralph and Pablo and soothe their bruised egos. Ralph is a cat who can twist his way inside your chest like a rusty screwdriver with his repertoire of hurt looks, and I found myself being particularly diligent to make sure his feelings weren’t damaged. Outsiders might think the logical thing to do, having run for the doorbell, fallen over on the stairs, lightly trodden on your cat, bruised your shin and scraped a chunk of skin off the palm of your hand, would be to attempt to stop the courier driving off with the package containing the DVD you need to review in your newspaper column that afternoon, or sit down and recover with a calming cup of tea. Instead, I chose a third option: chase after the cat in question, telling him how profusely sorry you are, and promising never to do it again, not once considering that it might be his own stupid fault for sitting on the stairs in the first place.

  Sometimes, as I found myself singing my alternative version of Billy Joel’s ‘Vienna’ to Pablo (‘Slow down/You ginger cat/You’re so ambitious for a . . . ginger cat’) and Ralph walked into the room, I would quickly switch to ‘Tabby Lover’, a rewrite of Phil Collins’ and Philip Bailey’s 1985 chart-topping duet ‘Easy Lover’ that I would be the first to admit needed some work (‘He’s a tabby lover/He’ll do a fart and you won’t hear it’). ‘Pablo’s coat is looking extremely plush today,’ I’d say to Dee, who would tighten her lips and point with her eyes at Ralph, sitting behind me on his sheepskin lover, causing me to add, ‘. . . And then there’s Ralph’s sideburns. Have you seen how thick they are right now? Magnificent!’ It would probably be going too far to say I got more careful about eating oranges and carrots while Ralph was around, but I won’t deny that it crossed my mind.

  I spent a lot of time checking Pablo was okay too, but it seemed clear that the ginger was slowly getting the upper hand. If Ralph could have backed down, he probably would have, but the battle had gone beyond that stage – there was too much pride at stake. Shipley joined in the goading of Pablo occasionally, but that was clearly for his own amusement. There was no amusement about this for Ralph or Pablo by now: the battle had progressed somewhere newly senseless. But isn’t that always the way with war? That the individuals most liable to get hurt by it can
no longer remember what they’re fighting for?

  Ralph began to avoid the cat flap altogether, instead standing for periods of up to three hours outside the bedroom window, shouting. ‘Raaalph!’ he would howl, and I would sit up in bed, debating whether to let him in and encourage his neediness or attempt to sleep through it. ‘I yam Raaalph!’ he would sometimes add after half an hour or so, just in case we’d been left in any doubt about exactly who it might be out there, acting like an absolute tool.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Dee. ‘If you let him in, he’ll realise that he’s got you wrapped around his little finger, and he’ll never come in through the cat flap ever again.’

  I could see the logic of her advice, but I had two problems with it. Firstly, Ralph didn’t actually have a little finger; but he did have paws, and it did not take much for me to conjure up the image of one of these paws, cold and forlorn, scraping against the window of a next-door neighbour’s kitchen window, asking for love, having finally given up on me.

  Secondly, I knew the advice was coming from a somnolent being of rare powers. I only had to think back to one of our first arguments as a domestic couple to remember this. I forget what the argument was about now, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t cleaning, but it ended with Dee falling asleep and me having the brainwave that, if I scrubbed, hoovered and dusted the flat from top to bottom, it would somehow prove that I was right about everything in the entire universe, for ever. Whatever the warped logic that made me think this, my plan clearly didn’t work, as Dee slept soundly through my vacuuming, and the main upshots were that I had time to realise I was wrong about whatever we were arguing about, and she woke up, well rested, to a blissfully clean flat. I’ve learned since then that she can sleep through louder sounds than the one a vacuum cleaner makes when it’s on full power three feet from your head, so, even though I applauded her pragmatism and took into account her wisdom, I had to also take into account that the sound of hopped-up, hyper-sensitive cats has never disturbed her. (The hopped-up, hyper-sensitive cats seem to know this too, which is why they have never bothered to try to wake her up, knowing that there is someone far more gullible and malleable nearby.)