Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  Not long after that, a butch but ailing black stray turned up at my back door, looking up as I came to the window and beseechingly, almost ghoulishly, meowing at me. The stray did not let me near enough to stroke him but did let me near enough to see the cavernous open wound on his neck. For two minutes, before I collected myself, called at neighbours’ houses to ascertain that it didn’t belong to any of them, and telephoned the RSPCA, I descended into a squeamish panic, flailing around for answers in the space Dee used to occupy, the force of her absence suddenly so much more apparent. From then on, with the help of my neighbours, Deborah and David, who named the stray Winston, I kept a vigil, hearing his haunted-house mewling, sometimes spotting him, but not managing to lure him into our houses.

  It was clear from the state of Winston’s neck and his weeping eyes that if he didn’t get treatment soon, he would not survive. The RSPCA paid us a visit, but could not find him, and left me with a cat trap of somewhat medieval appearance and a code number to give to my local vet when we caught Winston. On the fourth evening of our stakeout, Deborah and David and I set the trap on my patio. That night I kept my cats indoors: a task that I’d long ago decided was approximately as easy as containing Houdini in balsa wood. The six of them liked to give the impression that they got on one another’s nerves, but when the occasion demanded it, they could happily work together, so I was surprised the next morning to find that they had not made a team effort to tunnel through the wall of the spare bedroom. Sadly, when I checked the trap, I found that it was Winston-free. I was also disappointed to have my secondary hope dashed: that, if Winston hadn’t fallen for it, it might at least have now been playing host to a confused polecat who’d taken a wrong turn at the end of a heavy night. I proceeded to let Shipley, Janet, Ralph, The Bear, Bootsy and Pablo out. I then spent the rest of the day freeing each of them from the cat trap, as they took turns to sample its contents, which, despite containing exactly the same ingredients, were clearly far more interesting than the slap-up mechanically recovered meat feast they’d ignored first thing that morning.

  Deborah, David and I continued to look for Winston that day beneath the foliage in our gardens, and came charging out of our bedrooms at the first sign of a foreign meow, to no avail, and again the following day, and for several days after that. I feared the worst, but I also hoped that, just maybe, another cat-lover in East Mendleham might have come to his rescue. He was a nervous cat, but his particular kind of nerves seemed to suggest a domestic past in recent memory, and it wasn’t impossible that his owner might have found him.

  When Deborah called to say he’d returned, it had been a fortnight since we’d seen him and we’d almost given up hope. I was in Norwich with friends at the time, and, though I rushed home, by the time I arrived Winston had vanished again, in the aftermath of his usual routine of pleading, meowing and affectionate patio rolling just out of arm’s reach. But that night, using Deborah and David’s supply of tinned salmon, we managed to lure him into the trap, and not long after dawn the following morning I rushed him to the emergency vet.

  As I carried a hissing, pacing Winston through the house in the heavy trap, The Bear appeared as if by magic from one of his innumerable hiding places. His face could not have been more expressive if he’d found some white gloss and painted a fat question mark on it. I moved away from the trap a few steps towards The Bear, and stood halfway between the two of them: these two black cats, both of which had found me more than I’d found them, and who now seemed to bookend the most significant relationship of my life.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told the uncaged one. ‘We’re at capacity already.’ For once, I was not facing another test of pet owner’s willpower: if Winston could not be re-homed, Deborah and David had said they would be willing to take him in.

  I only left Winston in the entrance hall for five minutes, while I called the vet and put my jacket on, but his wound was so pungent that, four hours later, the room still reeked of it. However, I was assured by the vet that despite its horrific appearance, most of the damage had been caused by excessive scratching. A call the following day informed us that he was recovering well, and had been transferred to the RSPCA re-homing centre in Norwich.

  It had been my first cat crisis as a single person. Amazingly, I had weathered it without crumpling into a ball and hiding under the stairs. But what if I experienced another crisis, involving one of my cats? Anything, it had occurred to me as I worried about Winston, could happen to Janet, Shipley, Pablo, Bootsy, The Bear or Ralph while I was out. Now, when I left the house, they would have nobody else to turn to in a time of trouble. And, as Winston proved, cats, despite their lone-gun hype, did need someone to turn to, sometimes. From this point on, when I left, I did so even more carefully than ever before, checking there was no flame on the hob, sometimes making one final journey back inside to ‘say goodbye properly’ to whichever cat happened to be around, and then one further final one, to switch the radio on.

  ‘I suppose that’s a security measure, is it?’ my friend Will asked, as the two of us left the house for Norwich and I flicked a switch, filling the room with the hectoring sound of John Humphrys on the Radio Four Today programme.

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Got to keep the burglars away.’ I was telling only a half-truth: for the gargantuan six hours I wasn’t going to be around, I wanted to make sure the cats had some company.

  It took some effort, but that July I finally did build up the courage to leave the cats for a few days. My trip was for work purposes, but I extended it in order to visit my friend Jackie in Wales. Jackie is an illustrator, and resides on the Pembrokeshire coast in the kind of rural artist’s paradise that makes any claim I’ve ever made to live ‘in the middle of nowhere’ seem like the deluded boasting of a jumped-up rural fantasist. While St David’s, the closest town, has its share of tourists, Jackie’s hamlet of Treleddyd Fawr is near-untouched by overflow; finding it, even by car, feels like a small explorer’s victory. When, on my way back from it, I asked Jackie if she could recommend anywhere I could buy a nice sandwich ‘nearby’, she suggested a deli in Narberth which, at 23 miles away, she clearly perceived in the same way that many people perceive the newsagent at the end of their road.

  To a more cynical, city-dwelling outsider, it might seem overblown when Jackie writes on her blog, ‘Over the house this evening, a new moon, a copper bear and an ocean of air’, ‘In the high hill top ponies grazed and had cleared spaces beneath dry twisted trees’ or of feeding her teenage children on nettles. But what becomes apparent upon visiting her ramshackle cottage, with its animal-shaped weather vanes and watercolour dragons, is that if everyone else lived here, they would talk like this too. It’s the kind of place where having a conversation about whether a stuffed weasel is tax deductible seems entirely commonplace. Outside, it’s often so quiet that Jackie can hear the sheep chewing in the adjacent meadow as she paints. Up the hill towards the sea, amid the standing stones and lichen-covered rocks, there is a genuine feeling that one might bump into not just the seal pups, hares and herons from Jackie’s paintings, but the dragons and fox-riding sprites too. Here, on an average evening, Jackie can be found strolling for inspiration, with her three dogs and some – and just occasionally all – of her six cats.

  ‘Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash,’ Mark Twain wrote. ‘That one is the cat.’ Twain said many profound things about felines in his lifetime, but this particular slice of wisdom seems to say less about his knowledge of moggies and more about his lack of exposure to puffins, white rhinos and capybaras. My and Dee’s sole attempt attach a lead to Shipley six years previously had led to a kind of voluntary cat paralysis and one of the most impressive Mohicans I’d seen since Howard Jones was in the Top 40. The accompanying stare is not one I have forgotten, and appeared to promise retribution: maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives. Yet I’ve spotted plenty of moggies happily trotting about on leads. Just the day
before I arrived at Jackie’s place, in a car park just off a Cambridgeshire motorway, I’d seen a Norwegian Forest cat strolling around with its owner, displaying more of a look of haughty squireship than one comes to expect within the boundaries of a Welcome Break service station. Also, I had a fundamental belief, fostered by the long walks I’d undertaken with my childhood cat Monty, that a large number of cats actually liked walking with their humans, especially when there wasn’t a lead involved.

  Jackie and her cats don’t see many people on their walks. ‘Most of them say, “Those . . . are cats!” as if they think I haven’t noticed,’ she told me.

  Treleddyd contains less than a dozen houses, perhaps most remarkable of which is that of Jackie’s friend Glyn, which, not entirely unlike Glyn himself, looks like it was hewn straight from rock at some point in AD346. Partially blind, 86-year-old Glyn is, according to Jackie, ‘the ultimate Cat Man’ and has marked out his life in cats with his own moggy graveyard in his back garden. On our way past his house, we met Nadolig, his black and white moggy, whom I estimated to be around two hundred and forty years older than his owner. There is no through-road here, and in the narrow paths that run between the wonky cottages a scattering of dried vole and shrew corpses could be spotted. Essentially, add a few trees made of tuna, and you have Cat Paradise.

  Meeting a group of felines for the first time is much like meeting a group of humans in a way: as you spend more time with them, their faces change shape and soften. On first impression, it seems that Jackie owns five identical, smallish ginger cats. Actually, that’s incorrect; on first impression, it seems like she owns about thirty identical, smallish ginger cats. The truth is she owns four gingers, all of who are related, yet very different. Maurice is the tough guy, slightly standoffish; Pixie and Elmo, his siblings, are very much Jackie’s cat ambassadors. That said, Jackie pointed out that Elmo is often led astray and told to do naughty things by an evil doppelganger who looks up at him when he stares into puddles. Martha is, in Jackie’s words, ‘the matriarch, a storytelling cat’. In my time with Jackie, I failed to hear any of the stories in question, but, noting Martha’s dignified aura, I sensed they would be somewhat more poetic and far less profane than the ones Shipley liked to tell me about getting rain on his back and ‘nearly knocking out’ a massive crow.

  The latest addition to Jackie’s furry tribe, the sociable and bright-eyed Kiffer, was, on closer inspection, not really ginger at all, but sandy and white, and nowhere near as stupid as he looked. An ear infection in kittenhood meant that he now walked and stalked with his head tilted to one side. This gave him the look of a creature with a compulsion to hunt everything in his path – including, it seemed, me, and a nearby curious heifer. Max, a tabby that Jackie described as ‘dark and dangerous’ and who has starred in her illustrations for several children’s books, is the sole one of her cats who almost never comes on walks.

  When Jackie walks with her cats, she tends not to call or whistle them: she simply sets off, and, instinctively realising she is leaving the house, even from the depths of a five-hour nap, they trail along beside her. This is a version of the same telepathy that makes Ralph and Shipley immediately appear in my garden when I go out there, no matter how quietly and surreptitiously I slip out of the house.

  ‘It’s always felt very natural to me,’ Jackie told me. ‘The first time was about twenty years ago, when I lived near Bath, with my old cat Comfrey. I just walked up the hill behind the house and he followed me. He would come to the shops with me.’ One element a cat-walker has to be prepared for is the pursuit’s unique, stop-start rhythm. As we strolled up the pollen-filled green lane that led from hamlet to the coast, almost all of Jackie’s cats dropped off the pace at some point. Maurice was an early straggler. After stalking, then kissing, his bovine friend, Kiffer vanished, not to be seen again for several hours.

  Had Kiffer kissed a cow before? ‘Oh yes. That happens a lot,’ said Jackie. I nodded phlegmatically, surprised at how unsurprised I was. In this fairytale habitat, the idea of a powerful love between cat and cow transcending species limitations and echoing down the years seemed entirely feasible.

  A few miles up the coast to the north, we could see the Preseli Hills, where it’s said the original stone from Stonehenge came from. Over to our left, in a dip, hid another hamlet, entirely comprising abandoned houses. As we walked to the highest point on the cliff, Jackie told me about a book she was planning about a love affair between two pirates. Had another of my friends, even one who wrote books for a living, told me this, I would have been a little sceptical, but, here, I had no doubt that Jackie could bash the whole thing out in a week or two in a moleskin notebook while sitting on some moss.

  ‘This is my other office,’ she said, as we stood on the stones above the sea and Pixie, Elmo and Jackie’s three dogs, Bella, Floss and Rosie, sniffed around us. This was a precious, primal, wind-beaten place, a retreat from a retreat. I could feel it soothing me, the sea wind blowing away my worries and keeping at bay the electronic forms of communication that so often seemed to exaggerate them.

  As we started back for home, I carried a contented Pixie around my neck for over a mile. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Pixie, as Jackie had told me, had been suffering from a cold and wasn’t finding it quite as easy to walk as far as normal while, from my point of view, the temperature had dropped, and the girly cotton scarf I’d recently bought from H&M wasn’t quite cutting it. But being so close to a ginger cat, being so close to so many ginger cats, and their inherent sunny outlook, I could not help being reminded, heartbreakingly, of Pablo. It was looking very much like, in a matter of days, he would no longer be living with me.

  Jackie described ginger cats as ‘Buddhists, living in the now’. To be frank, it was something of a stretch to picture Pablo kicking off a pair of sandals, lighting a joss stick and getting into the lotus position, but I could partly see what she was getting at. Where my other cats each had their hobbies and plans for the future, Pablo’s life was really lived on a moment-to-moment basis. It could be said that Bootsy had a little bit of ginger in her – possibly quite literally, sometimes, if Pablo got his wish – but Pablo was the only one of my cats who had that true ginger sunniness. It could be a good influence on a person, being around that kind of optimism. So often my cats made me feel intellectually inferior, but watching Pablo getting overexcited and self-defeatingly closing the cat food drawer with his paw, forgetting to put his tongue away or doing his Tigger-like bounce into the kitchen and crashing feet-first into a dish full of milk, I had concrete, reassuring proof that I was not the most stupid person in my household. I’d miss that. But then I asked myself a question: ‘Which of my cats wouldn’t I miss just as much?’

  I came up with a giant, gaping blank.

  For the last few years of my marriage, without really intending to, I’d relied upon a stock response for the moment when strangers asked me if I had any kids. ‘No,’ I would tell them. ‘Six cats, though!’ In all honesty, it was a defence mechanism. I knew all too well how easy it was for a childless couple in their thirties, who’d been married a few years and had a house full of felines, to be perceived as employing their cats as child substitutes. I viewed the term ‘fur babies’ about as appealingly as the prospect of eating a tasty pouch from the Sheba Fine Meat Dining Collection, but I had come to the conclusion that I might as well pre-emptively get it out in the open: my domestic life was dominated not by nappies or trips to adventure playgrounds, but by the whims of several furry dictators kind enough to let me share my house with them.

  I would not be so presumptuous to claim that dividing cats in the aftermath of a relationship involves one tenth of the pain that dividing kids in the aftermath of a relationship does, but, in some ways, it at least provides an insight into the latter process. It also marks a similarly painful final curtain to proceedings, an admission that you are at The End, which was another reason Dee and I chose to defer it for some time.

  How do two
people share between them six animals that they both love to an equal extent? Looking back, it was astonishing to think that at the close of a previous relationship I’d worried about who would get which DVD, book or LP. Put into perspective, next to what was going on now, these matters were immaterial to me: the petty schoolyard concerns of quarter-formed children.

  Neither Dee nor I would have liked to think that we had a ‘favourite’ among our cats but some of the bonds we had with them were undoubtedly more poignant and adhesive than others, and our separation highlighted them, often agonisingly. Bootsy was the cat that we’d got when Dee was ill a few years ago, the cat that, in many ways, helped her recover – the one cat that, even though I was the household’s designated Cat Feeder, would always make an unconditional beeline for my wife’s lap. I couldn’t take her away from Dee, could I? No. But I also found it hard to picture a time when my working days would not feature Bootsy matching me step for step as I paced the house looking for writing inspiration, or trying to muscle her way onto the warm keyboard of my laptop, as she had done almost every day for the last two years while Dee was out at work.

  But if Bootsy had to go with Dee, so did Pablo. I’d looked at him as our project cat – the wretch we’d saved from euthanasia who now would happily sleep on my chest without moving for the space of time it took me to read an entire novella – and I wanted to follow the project through, see him continue to gain in confidence. But he and Bootsy were the only two moggies I’d owned who’d ever been inseparable. If I ever needed confirmation, I only had to look at the picture of them in their cat igloo on the cover of the hardback version of my last book; a photograph illustrative of the two ends of the cat intelligence spectrum. It summed up the dynamic of their relationship: the happy idiot and the she-minx who very cleverly made him believe he had her under his control while safe in the knowledge that, all the while, she was calling the shots. Pablo very conveniently served Bootsy’s main two wishes in life: to play the puppet-master, and to be physically worshipped. But Pablo genuinely seemed to need Bootsy. She was not only ever so soft and comfortable to sleep on, but fulfilled that shadow carnal need in him left over from when he had balls and strutted his stuff in his free-loving cat commune. And what kind of annihilator of fun would I have been to take that away?