Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  Mostly, our decisions regarding which cat would live with who revolved around more practical concerns. It could be said that, since Dee had owned Janet before she’d met me, perhaps she should have taken him with her. On the other hand, she had the lower income of the two of us, so it would have been unfair of me to expect her to pay the sizable vet bills that were needed to keep his hyperthyroidism at bay. Dee’s new house had only a small garden, and it would have been wrong to relocate wanderers such as The Bear, Janet and Shipley from the lush hillside where they lived and foraged to cramped suburbia. And then there was Ralph: in 2001 Dee had handpicked him from the same litter as Shipley – the one cat who could very much be counted as mine from the start, and whose destiny required no lengthy discussion – but he and Pablo were the two cats we most needed to separate.

  Do I think the two thirds to one third split we eventually decided upon was fair? No, but only in the sense that I don’t think pet custody cases can ever be fair. It was also clear that we had sorted the situation out more amicably than most. During our break-up, a friend of a friend, Steven, told me a story about the two expensive pedigree Bengal cats he and his ex-girlfriend had owned. Steven saw himself as the main cat owner in the couple, chiefly because he had been responsible for nursing one of the Bengals to health when, as a kitten, it had suffered from a rare virus from which his local vet had told him it would not recover. One day, a few weeks after his girlfriend and he had split up, he had got home late at night to his isolated cottage after being away on a business trip and found that she had been back and taken both cats. That had been over a year ago, and he hadn’t seen either cat, or his ex, since.

  Perhaps the one area of contention might have been The Bear: a cat that had been Dee’s companion since she was nineteen. Some might have assumed we’d end up in a courtroom with him, each of us, unbeknown to the other, hiding Tesco Finest Shetland Isles Smoked Salmon in the lining of our jackets in order to convince a judge that we were more worthy of The Bear’s affection. In truth, there was very little to debate. This was not fundamentally about Dee’s greater history with The Bear, the fact that he had once been her former boyfriend’s favourite cat, or about her frequent claim to me that ‘he likes you better’. It was mostly about the fact that neither of us wanted this survivor cat – this veteran of fourteen house moves – to have the trauma of moving again.

  Once, early during my attempt to catch Winston the stray, I’d gone out to check the trap, and been elated to find him in there, disorientation all over his muzzle. A bigger surprise came when I realised that his enormous, ugly neck wound had completely healed. It had taken almost a full minute before I realised that I was actually looking at The Bear, and, by mistaking him for Winston, I’d momentarily been able to see him through the eyes of an outsider, and realise his true plump, lavish healthiness. The rejuvenating effect that five and a half years of being in the same place had had on him was plain and radiant to see.

  Over the following months, I would occasionally visit Pablo and Bootsy, and Dee would report back to me on how they were settling in to their new home. They had been thrust into a far less rural habitat, but it was a cat-friendly one nonetheless. I knew this from two frustratedly catless friends in the area, Drew and Jecca, who had set up their own ‘Cat Stock Market’ on the Internet in order to keep track of the ups and downs of the endless moggies who visited their garden, including the mighty Gingersaurus and the near-iconic Crybaby Hedge Cat, a creature I’d sadly never crossed paths with on my visits to the area and who sounded, from all descriptions, like Ralph’s lost soulmate.

  Not that Bootsy and Pablo’s world of two allowed for much furry networking. Their relationship had reached a new, intimate intensity, the highs and lows of their dry humping sessions respectively higher and lower than ever before, their post-semi-coital cuddling now undisturbed by the malicious whims of Ralph and Shipley. Due to the lack of space outdoors and an evil tortoiseshell cat that liked to stare in through the window at her, Bootsy had taken to emptying her bowels in Dee’s fresh laundry pile, leading Dee to succumb to the purchase of a litter tray. Pablo himself had refrained from exploiting this but in a spirit of generosity, perhaps to atone for all the times he had bitten her neck overzealously while frotting with her, would follow Bootsy into the litter and bury her wares for her.

  Perhaps even more eccentric was Pablo and Bootsy’s new drinking regime. Both had always been fussy drinkers, in their own personal ways. Bootsy, while stopping slightly short of demanding her own water filter, liked to have the cold tap in the kitchen slowly dribbled in order to get the water at its freshest, while Pablo’s preferred receptacle was a glass that had been placed in the sink the night before. Now, walking into Dee’s kitchen, I noticed a full water glass in the cats’ drinking bowl. ‘It’s the only thing that seems to work,’ she told me. ‘I’m hoping it might encourage them.’

  When I arrived, Pablo still bounded towards me as soon as I came in through the front door, but Pablo would probably have bounded towards Hannibal Lecter if he’d also come in through the front door. In Bootsy, by contrast, I could see genuine recognition, and critical appraisal. I thought I saw a hint of the resentment of the unfairly abandoned, but Bootsy had never been a fan of facial hair, and any shrinking away from me she did was probably just a reaction to my latest beard. After fifteen minutes, she’d thaw out, and then, when it was time to leave, I’d find it hard to prise her off my chest. I could have really milked it, claimed this was evidence that she obviously couldn’t bear to let me go, but the truth was that she’d always had trouble retracting her claws.

  Back at The Upside Down House, I was noticing changes in my cats too, many of them arguably less subtle. The Bear’s contentedness had now become so extreme it could, in a certain light, have been looked upon as smug, and he had been experimenting with a new ‘advert dog’ head movement during the times he caught me alone in the kitchen: a slight tilt of the chin, coupled with widened eyes, followed by a just-perceptible nod towards the food drawer. Ralph certainly seemed happier for Pablo’s absence, but I wondered if his war against ginger had defined his reason for existing for so long that he felt like half a cat without it. My hopes that he would stop shouting ‘RALPH!’ outside the window at five in the morning had come to fruition, but only for him to begin shouting ‘HELLO!’ outside the window at five in the morning instead. This was impressive enough, something I could boast about to friends, but in the end it was a little like the man on the other side of the lake who swore at the ducks: on the four hundredth listen, the eccentricity started to peel away, and you started to realise that you were just hearing the sound of someone going about, what to them, was the fundamental, mundane business of the day. We all had a job to do. In my case, that meant sitting in front of a computer and writing. In Ralph’s case, it meant repeatedly shouting oddly human greetings at the top of his voice until someone came outside and gently nudged him in the direction of the cat flap while calling him an irritating cock puppet. It wasn’t much of a living, but someone had to do it.

  When I’d lived with Dee, I had always been the person the cats had harassed most fervently for food and attention, but I was not imagining it when I noticed that, without her there, they began to redouble their efforts to gang up on me. I have no idea what tipped the balance. It wasn’t as if Dee acted like a Victorian schoolmistress with them; she’d simply been better than me at ignoring them when they were at their most demanding. Did they see a hint of defeat in my eyes? Or was it a kind of natural selection: the strong preying on the weak, as they have done in animal and human life for time immemorial? Whatever the case, without Dee there, they had never been so loud and demonstrative regarding their needs.

  Sometimes, I got the sense that Janet and Shipley had got together and decided that, if they tried hard enough, they could physically bat me from my study on the ground floor all the way up two flights of stairs to the fridge. I had always thought ‘ankle biter’ was a term exclusively applied to d
ogs and small children until Shipley began obsessively following me around the house in late 2009. ‘How would one go about putting a restraining order on one’s own cat?’ I wondered to myself, as, in the midst of a conversation with the postman, I felt a pinch and looked down to find a small black muzzle fastened neatly yet insistently onto the bottom of my leg.

  Of course, one advantage of having four, instead of six, cats is that there are marginally fewer cleaning duties to perform. Pablo and Bootsy were champion shedders and sometimes when I missed watching Pablo hooking a paw into the back of the biscuit dispenser or the ballet of a Bootsy jump up to the arm of the sofa, I could at least try to convince myself that there was compensation in now once again owning two dark blue sofas, instead of one orange one and one grey one. Despite this, I continued to employ a cleaner for two hours a week.

  When I tell people I pay someone to clean my house, I always hear the same voice in my head. It’s not the voice of anyone specific, more an amalgam of that of old, forgotten school friends and elder family members who grew up in poverty. What the voice says can be clearly discerned as ‘OOH, get you’ but it actually sounds more like an insistent, piercing fire alarm of the kind that might wake you in the middle of the night in a hotel room and lead to some kind of embarrassing naked episode. Despite the voice’s disapproval, every Monday, when my cleaner, Melissa, leaves, I feel purged and secure in the sense that I have fought off a nightmare future vision of cat ownership for another week. Quite simply, a small amount of professional cleaning feels to me like a mandatory part of not becoming the super villain known as Bad Multiple Cat Owner. This has been pretty much the case since the day in 2005 when The Bear was going through one of his darker phases, and Dee and I used a UV light to perform a rather troubling forensic examination of the substances on our curtains and cupboards.

  Melissa has been working for me for eighteen months now, and with that comes a certain pride. I might not have successfully sustained a relationship, but I am, finally, finding the formula to successfully sustain a cleaner: something I’ve found surprisingly hard in the past. I know Elaine loved my cats and left only because she retired, and, for Grace, cleaning was just a stopgap between other jobs, but Valerie, who simply did not turn up one week and was never heard from again, remains a mystery. As for Michelle, the company she worked for told me she’d left to pursue ‘other options’, but I can’t help thinking back to the packet of condoms Dee and I once left out by mistake on cleaning day. And as regards the handcuffs on the kitchen table the following week, the truth is that they were a promotional item, sent by a DVD company promoting a police-themed TV show I was reviewing for a newspaper, and I never even troubled to unlock – let alone use – them. I suppose, though, that Michelle wasn’t to realise that. Who knows? Perhaps she simply got a better job, or didn’t like cats, but I do wonder if Gay Talese’s book Love Thy Neighbour’s Wife might have had just a little to do with it. It’s really a very intellectual and sober examination into the 70s’ sex industry, but a person might not necessarily assume that from the racy cover of my paperback copy of it. I hadn’t really thought twice about leaving it open on the bed, but arriving back home and seeing that it had been tidied to the bedside table, and remembering that the handcuff episode was still fresh in the memory, I began to re-evaluate my decision not to put it out of sight.

  I don’t leave my collection of 1970s Playboys lying around when Melissa cleans and, even if I did, I doubt I’d feel the need to explain that I read them for the high standard of investigative journalism and short fiction within. Also, I know Melissa likes cats – none more so than Janet. The two of them have cultivated a close and rather unique bond over the last year and a half. When she arrives, she will go and find him, and scruff his chest: his favourite manner of being stroked, ever since his heart began to murmur. Then he will follow her around as she cleans, inspecting her work. Most cats are scared of vacuum cleaners, but Janet views Melissa’s as an opponent more than an enemy, and, in order to vanquish it, he will leave large clumps of fur in the exact places it has just cleaned.

  I’ll generally tidy up quite thoroughly for Melissa before she arrives, and carry out a thorough vole scan, but sometimes, during her two hours here, Shipley and Ralph will leave her little offerings. As someone raised deep in the countryside, Melissa is not fazed by these. Sometimes, she will tell me about the ferret one of her friends keeps near-permanently in his pocket, or her early childhood, living in a house with two dogs and a fox called Penny that her dad had found abandoned as a cub and raised as a canine. Hearing these stories, I’ll realise how fundamentally unadventurous I am as an animal owner, and begin to get ideas. ‘How easy,’ I muse to myself, ‘would it be to transport a goat down the spiral staircase outside my bedroom?’ Or: ‘When people say that, in owning donkeys, a person can never keep just one donkey, and must keep a donkey pal to keep the first donkey company, do they exclusively mean “ donkey” when referring to the second donkey, or do they actually also mean “cat with some extremely donkeyish aspects”?’

  Despite not having the rational voice of Dee around to tell me why I can’t follow through on any of these ideas, I’ve surprised myself with my self-restraint. For now, instead of filling the house with animals, I’ve filled it with people.

  I always used to think I was very bad at hosting parties. I would get too worried that I wouldn’t get to speak to everyone there, too concerned that everyone was having a good time, but recently, I seem to have got myself on a good run. I still have more than my share of neglectful moments as a host. I probably should have told the comedian who stayed at my house that I had four cats before, without the help of Piriton, he spent a wheezing sleepless night here, rendering himself ill-prepared for his spoken-word event in Norwich the following day. Also, looking back, leaving thirty leftover chicken wings on the dining table, uncovered, overnight, with four sets of whiskers in close quarters, while guests slept on the same floor, was something of an oversight.

  I also have a lodger now, Katia. She’s a Dog Person, but seems to be coming round to cats – especially now she has realised the fundamental rule that, in a house containing four of them, it’s best not to walk across a room barefooted in the dark. There are also signs that she is starting to gain a fundamental understanding of mine. ‘I’ve started to realise,’ she told me recently, ‘Ralph is like the guy I fancy, but The Bear is the guy I love. The other two are cats.’

  I have done my best to make this house my own, but there have been times when everything in it has seemed to lead me back to Dee. Beyond the décor we chose together and the remnants of the furniture we bought, I have walking reminders of us around me on a daily basis, and even they bring their own, other, half-walking reminders: the moor hen that I chased around the room that made me think of its predecessor whose legs the two of us found sticking out comically from behind the sofa when it was ‘having a rest’ from a somewhat Benny Hill-style chasing episode with Pablo and Shipley; the heartbreaking teenage rat Shipley maimed, which reduced me to tears even before it reminded me of the story Dee had told me about Dylan, the rat she used to keep as a teenager, which would pick up a tiny brush between its teeth and bring it to her so she could stroke him with it. Inevitably the passing of time will make me – is making me – miss her less than I once did, but in my cats I have a lasting connection to her. When I answer people’s questions about them, she is an indelible part of the story. There is, after all, no way to explain that one of your cats was your ex’s ex’s favourite pet, without mentioning your ex.

  I sometimes start answering one of these questions with the word ‘We . . .’, then check myself for a moment, having an instinct to change it to ‘I . . .’ At the time, my house will frequently have various people milling round it. Downstairs, my new lodger Katia will be telling a guest about Ralph’s sideburns. In the kitchen, four or five conversations might be going on at once, and in the midst of them might be found Shipley, concerned about not being the loudest indivi
dual in the room and making his yapping, swearing demands like some kind of proletarian Siamese with Tourette’s syndrome. It’s unlikely The Bear will be around, but just occasionally he might be spotted looking deep into the eyes of a rare melancholy guest, or surveying the room from beneath the stairs, while perched on top of his Kitty Boutique Disco Scratching Pole. Janet will often not be far away – either suffering from the debilitating condition known as ‘sour cream chin’ having raided the dips, or playing a game of ‘Prison’ with a couple of guests between the bars of the stairs. I’ll look around for a moment, considering my options. The word ‘we’ does feel odd on my tongue, and my throat catches as I play around with it. But would it be a lie, or a complete delusion, to use it in these circumstances? I decide it wouldn’t.

  Then, pressing forward, I’ll tell the story.

  1 This had been a pain at the time, but over the years I’d come to miss it.

  2 The bleeding stopped after a couple of hours, and I suppose I could forgive him the error: my hands, while not remotely tabby, are quite oversensitive and narcissistic.

  3 Samson’s favourite brush, that is; I didn’t know if Daniel had a favourite brush and, if he did, it was none of my business.