Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  I found him lying flat on his stomach beneath the Cypress bush, a few yards from the back door. He had his chin pressed lethargically against the ground, and didn’t even have the energy to wail at the empty Wotsit packet behind him. At my first touch, he fart-hissed, but it didn’t have the passion of previous fart-hisses, giving the impression that, in fart-hiss terms, he was phoning it in somewhat. When I picked him up and carried him inside, I got the feeling he might have liked to have put up a fight, but didn’t have the strength. He’d never felt lighter or more rag-like and, when I put him down, he slunk immediately behind the sofa.

  Three hours later, with no sign of improvement, I helped hold him still on the examining table as the vet poked a thermometer up his bottom then filled him with antibiotics, professing an uncertainty as to what was the problem but saying that he was sure it wasn’t connected with Janet’s hyperthyroidism. Just four days previously, Janet had already been here for more blood tests, to determine whether he needed the dose of his hyperthyroid medication upped. That was not to mention my visit a week before that, when Shipley had scratched his retina and was forced to wear one of those lampshade-like collars. I was starting to wonder if, the next time I visited the surgery, it might be practical to pack not just my cats, but my toothbrush and pyjamas. I would be back again in three days for a progress check. All I could hope was that it was the same vet, so I didn’t have to have the conversation about why Janet wasn’t a girl for the third time in a week.

  I had no idea whether cats could get blue-green algae poisoning. Considering the amount of stagnant water that had gone into Janet’s mouth on his wombling trips of recent months, though, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that he’d caught something nasty. But despite his already weak state, it was a surprise, and it floored me. For the next two days, no amount of meat, no matter how high or low quality, I waved in front of his face caught his interest. Old, slightly comical habits of his – his penchant for bringing twigs in on his tail, or the break-dance he did immediately before vomiting – now just seemed desperately sad.

  There was another factor that was making Janet’s demise even more difficult to watch: a few weeks earlier, in February 2009, Dee and I had split up. On one level, the two of us still laughed a lot together and had much in common. On another, deeper one, we’d become a small planet apart as people, wanted to do very different things with our time, and, after much deliberation, we’d realised that our relationship could not sustain this. We’d decided to live apart as a temporary measure, postponing thoughts of what might happen to the cats until a later date, but all the evidence pointed to the situation becoming permanent. For the moment, I was living alone in the house we’d shared, with the six cats that had been the crux of our life together, one of which was seriously ill.

  You could say that, as Dee’s ex-boyfriend’s favourite cat, The Bear had cast his spell on the early months of our relationship, nine years earlier. But I’d never really felt The Bear was mine – or, rather, had felt he was even less mine than any other cat – in those days, and there had, initially, been some doubt whether he would live with us on a permanent basis. Janet, by contrast, was the first pet we’d shared: the cat that had brought me back to feline ownership after the one catless spell of my life. He’d been full of energy, shooting across the laminate floors of our first flat together in pursuit of ping-pong balls and catnip mice, his footfalls so heavy that the downstairs neighbour had requested that I walk around the place more quietly. Those feet were still heavy now, so much so that I would often hear him on the stairs and call out to Dee, mistaking him for her. Except what I was thinking of as ‘now’ wasn’t ‘now’ at all: it was a few months before, when Janet still had enough meat on his bones to be heavy-footed, and there was still another person living here to mistake him for.

  There is never a convenient time for a marriage to end, but it would have been doubly tragic if Janet’s death marked the conclusion of my relationship with Dee. And even when, the morning before our return to the vet, I offered Janet a pouch of Sheba, and, very slowly, he slunk over and took a couple of tentative bites of it, I continued to dwell on an image that had been troubling me for weeks: of me with the other cats, alone, in the space where he and Dee used to be. I’ve never considered myself a morbid person, but I have to confess that I woke up more than once from a nightmare about me burying him, alone, in the garden. I was thirty-three, but was I really grown-up enough to cope with this? I suspected not.

  These animals that shared our house were domestic only to their own ends, nobody’s actual cats in spirit, but if they were anybody’s, they were ours, not mine. Dee and I were still very much on speaking terms, and I kept her up to date with Janet’s progress every day, but the point was: she wasn’t here. ‘He is twelve,’ said Dee, ever the pragmatist. ‘That’s not a bad age for a cat.’

  When people say, ‘That’s not a bad age for a cat’, they don’t mean that it’s an age when a cat comes into his own, consolidates his finances, finally gets to drive the automobile that becomes him, and learns to be comfortable with his foibles; they mean the cat has done well to reach that age. I was surprised that Dee said it, but I also sensed she was distancing and protecting herself from the possibility that, at some point in the not too distant future, Janet might not be in her life at all. I also tried my best to see her point. Even now Janet was eating again, he was an underweight, nervous, unhappy cat with a heart condition and a tumour on his thyroid gland. On that evidence alone, it was best to be prepared for the worst. But was twelve really all that old? The Bear was fourteen and positively sashaying – albeit with a bit of a paranoid wiggle – into his prime.

  In retrospect, performing a search on YouTube, in a tired and emotional state, for ‘old cats’ might not have been the best move. I came particularly close to being rendered to a globule of living blancmange by the moment in the home video of Cookie, a 26-year-old tabby from the American Midwest, shot a few months before her death, where the star looks up at the camera and lets out a croaky meow of such powerful abiding love, I feel faint just thinking about transcribing it. On the other hand, my virtual travels did lead me to Crème Puff, reportedly the oldest cat ever. Crème Puff lived with a man called Jake and, when she died in 2005, was thirty-eight years and three days old. If you’d spoken to Crème Puff not long before she left this mortal coil and she’d been able to speak, she would have been able to tell you about a world before the Manson family murders, Led Zeppelin and the three-day week, a world when the JML pet mitt and the Happy Paws Bungalow were nothing more than the dreams of some crazy-haired feline-loving science fiction writer.

  In the video, Jake, a man in his sixties in a baseball cap, took us around his Austin, Texas, shack, introducing us to his endless cats, which had names such as Red Dog and Jean Claude Van Damme. I especially liked the bit where he talked in his casual Texan way about having ‘adopted over five hundred cats’ over the years from his local shelter, as if he was talking about how many times he’d bought cigarettes from the 7-11 down the road. Jake attributed the longevity of so many of his cats to the bacon, eggs, broccoli and coffee breakfast he fed them every morning. I was tempted to try a similar menu but, combined with ‘My Sharona’, I felt it could be the first step on the road to an eccentricity I wasn’t yet ready to embrace. The Bear had enjoyed broccoli in the past, but any time I’d tried to give it to Janet he’d looked at me with abject horror. However, slowly but surely, he was beginning to regain his appetite.

  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Janet started to get slightly better. One answer would be ‘around the same time I did’. There was no sudden epiphany or recovery for either of us, but by late summer 2009, you would have noticed a slight change in our demeanour: a lifting of our spirits. The upping of the dosage of Janet’s pills had – when I could actually get them inside him – worked. In the vet’s words, he was ‘never going to become Arnold Schwarzenegger’ but he had regained a considerable amount of weight. I’m sure
a part of him would hold a grudge against me forever for what I’d done to him, but I noticed him softening to my touch, once again rubbing a cold nose against my dangling hand to wake me up in the morning, and asking me for one of his favourite chest massages. I also noticed that his wrestles with Shipley had resumed, and he seemed to be holding his own. Perhaps he’d lost his position as Top Cat, but if Shipley got too full of himself, Ralph would soon put him in his place with a swift headlock, like the crybaby psychopath he was.

  Another side effect of Janet’s resurgence was the curbing of his litter habit. The drying up of the supply of empty Rizla and Chippy Chips packets in the garden was gradual, and seemed to occur in direct correlation to the improvement in his health. This seemed to confirm my suspicions that the main root of Janet’s wombling had not been a wish to be part of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, or some bizarre autistic attachment to inanimate objects, but a mysterious conviction that they contained a cure. But what? I felt that, if The Bear could speak, he would have been able to tell me. He’d so often been around during the hard times with Janet – his most violent vomiting sessions, those moments when he gargled and clawed at me as I tried to push the pill into the back of his mouth, and the time when I found him sprawled out in the kitchen, whining mournfully next to an algae-coated monstrosity that, many waterlogged years ago, had probably had another life as a small swing-bin liner. At these times, The Bear would usually be found observing us from some high perch, wryly. As Janet faded, he’d become almost preposterously plush, as if he was sucking the life force from his fluffier companion. One day, a newspaper photographer arrived at the house, looked at The Bear, and said, ‘I assume this is one of the younger ones?’ I asked him to guess his age. ‘Three?’ he said.

  There would still be much pain in the aftermath of my split with Dee. And with it loomed the spectre of Jake from Texas: the single man in late middle age, with no cat boundaries. I can’t say it was an appealing future. On the other hand, I had always quite fancied living in a shack, so it wouldn’t be without its upside. Soon, Dee would be moving into a flat with a garden, and we would have to go through the agony of dividing our cats. The exact vagaries of who ended up living with whom had not been decided yet, but it looked very much like The Bear and Janet – the cats I’d inherited from her – would be living with me. ‘Those two have always liked you better than me anyway,’ she reasoned.

  But did The Bear and Janet like each other? I’m not sure ‘like’ was quite the right word. Fate would often look like splitting up their Odd Couple relationship, then throw them back together, usually to The Bear’s chagrin and Janet’s brief, dumb excitement. They were slightly jaded by one another, perhaps not as interested in one another as other cats in their vicinity, but it was surprising how often they ended up on the same bed or sofa, just a matter of inches from touching tails. They were very different characters, but they were different from my other cats too: a little less demanding, a little less spoilt. And then there was their strange pacifism: I still had no evidence that either of them had ever slaughtered another living thing.

  Was that what Janet had been doing, during the early days of his thyroid troubles, when he’d been so hungry? Looking for nourishment in litter? I liked to think so: that, despite being ravenous, it was his way of doing all he could and not let his resolve crumble and go and pick off a sickly field mouse or tired jackdaw. And I also liked to think that this was why, despite the odds, he had earned The Bear’s respect. It was a rather colourful, imaginative theory, admittedly, but perhaps no more so than the other ones I clung to, to sustain my belief that my cats were higher beings, cogitators and plotters: superior animals worthy of a special respect, and the deferment of our own, slightly inferior lives.

  Animals I Have Not Really

  Been That Bothered About

  Stealing. Number One:

  ‘Street’ Moorhen

  NAME:

  Mo’hen

  OCCUPATION:

  Scampering, generally being coot-esque

  HOME:

  South Norfolk, UK

  BRIEF CV:

  Moorhen was like, ‘You wanna piece of me?’ And I was like, ‘No, you’re a moorhen.’ And moorhen was like, ‘I’m just gonna cross this road, just you watch me.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll slow down to 15mph – in many ways North Lopham should be a 20 zone anyway.’ And moorhen was like, ‘That’s what I’m talking about – how do you like me now?’ And then we both passed safely on our way, without further incident.

  Oh, Whistle and There’s a Vague

  Chance I Might Come to You

  m’lad: The Diary of an

  Amateur Dog Walker

  14 January 2009

  Today Dee and I went for a walk with Hannah, Dee’s friend from work who has just moved in up the road, and Hannah’s cocker spaniel, Henry. ‘Hannah might even let you walk him, if you’re lucky,’ Dee told me, as we waited outside Hannah’s front door. It’s been a few years since my regular walks with Nouster, the Border collie owned by our former neighbours Richard and Kath, so I was thrilled at the prospect of having a new dog in my life.

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Are you . . . panting?’ said Dee.

  ‘No,’ I protested. ‘I’m just a bit wheezy, what with the cold.’

  The four of us set off down the hill, leading out of East Mendleham past the old fairground site, Henry pulling Hannah along at quite a pace. ‘He’s not fully trained yet,’ she said breathlessly. Henry is a cocker spaniel, but he is so big he is usually mistaken for the next breed up: a springer. He is black with white splotches and has mischievous, red eyes that seem to glow even redder as he makes a dastardly beeline for ducks and pedestrians carrying freshly wrapped chips.

  ‘You’ll be okay,’ Hannah said. ‘He likes men.’ One of the men Henry showed a liking for on this occasion was a hobo, living in the woods beside the heath, where the river cuts in, about a mile from East Mendleham. ‘Henry! Come back here! No! Leave that man alone!’ Hannah shouted. She and Dee seemed nervous, but I was impressed as the hobo came out from beneath his tarpaulin to see what all the fuss was about. His weather-beaten hawkish face looked startled, with no evidence of the usual jumpy smile of the person who gets accosted by a dog in the British countryside.

  East Mendleham is not without its colourful transients. The man with the overalls and the David Crosby hair who sits beside the town lake all day and reads nineteenth-century French literature has long intrigued me, and I suppose, if you like that kind of thing and don’t have to make a living from writing in the nearby vicinity, the old man with the badge-covered blazer who shouted, ‘Fucking come on then! Let’s be having you!’ at the town ducks every morning has his pluses. But, whatever terrible tragedy had put you there, however down on your luck you were, choosing to bed down in the middle of the countryside was something else: the act of an iconoclast.

  I didn’t want to get too close and disturb the hobo’s business – and he definitely looked like he had some – but I found myself peering over, curious about the paraphernalia of his life. What were those papers next to his campfire? Old pamphlets of some kind, containing the wisdom of previous hobos from many years before? Or just his special Hobo’s Diary? Actually, getting a bit closer, they looked more like the last couple of issues of GQ magazine. But what did he cook? What did he spend his days thinking about? Did his voice taste odd in his mouth on the rare occasions he communicated with another human being? Hannah and Dee looked relieved as Henry trotted back over to us, but I was thinking forward to my and Henry’s mutual future, uncovering the eccentrics of the East Anglian countryside.

  I took Henry’s lead as we turned for home. He was smaller than Nouster had been, but I was struck by his strength, particularly when he found the rotting ribcage of some sizable road kill on the verge of the road, and decided he would like nothing better than to wriggle on top of it on his back. This kind of animal communion with the deceased was new to me
. My cats have killed plenty of creatures, of course, but after a couple of scissor kicks and a bit of juggling they usually lose interest in their rodent victims. You might find them neatly severing a shrew’s spleen and placing it on the carpet outside my bedroom, as a child might leave the crusts from his bread for a parent to clean away, but you wouldn’t have caught them using it as a pillow later.

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s happened before,’ said Hannah. ‘He sat on a dead pheasant the other day.’

  Before heading home, we stopped at the local pub, and I congratulated Henry on being a good boy – I wasn’t actually sure that he had been a good boy, not being aware of the previous standards set, but it felt like the polite thing to do – and ordered us each a pint of Guinness and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. I was about to dip my hand into the latter, but remembered just in time to go to the bathroom, lest I fatally mix rotting ribcage with cheese powder, vegetable oil and salt. As we drank, Hannah and Dee taught me some spaniel terms, from the spaniel-heavy office of the horse charity where the two of them work. A tail, apparently, was known by insiders as ‘wagstick’. The curly scribble of hair on Henry’s dome was officially termed his ‘dogwig’.