Making the Cat Laugh (3 page)

As I stood in the ticket queue at Leicester Square I preened myself by licking the back of my hand and rubbing my forehead with it. I flexed my painted claws. Meeeeow, I thought. How perceptive of this male acquaintance to realize that while I portray myself in this column as a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, in reality I am a lithe, crazy, dangerous feline-type animal who prowls the moonlit rooftops after dark, purring to the sounds of the night-time city.

But alas, no sooner was I embarked on my second vat of popcorn than I noticed that the Michelle Pfeiffer character in
Batman
Returns is a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, instantly recognizable as Single Life material at its most abject and pitiable. Damn. Her name is Selina. Each evening she bursts into her apartment with a ritualistic shout of ‘Honey, I’m home!’ followed by ‘Oh I forgot, I’m not married.’ She kicks
off her shoes, listens to the answering machine, pours milk for the cat, talks aimlessly to herself. Evidently it was Selina, not Catwoman, that my friend had been talking about. I put my head in my popcorn tub for a moment, and screamed with the minimum disruption.

No wonder Selina escapes this paltry existence by assuming the identity of Catwoman (‘I am Catwoman, hear me roar’). It is a sensible decision. The only problem is that, before it can happen, she must suffer a brutal death from defenestration – which gives pause to all the would-be Catwomen in the audience who are fed up with shouting ‘Honey, I’m home’ to an empty flat. I mean, is it worth chucking yourself off the Shell building on the remote chance it might turn you into Catwoman? Well, it’s tricky. I am still weighing it up.

But if it boils down to clothes, I am sunk. You see, in order to become Catwoman it is important that you can rummage in your wardrobe for an old patent leather coat; you then rip its seams and magically re-fashion it into the appropriate figure-hugging costume. Imagine your disappointment, then, if having flung yourself from a high roof (and become a glassy-eyed un-dead) you opened your closet, snapping your expectant pinking shears, to find only a brown calf-length fun-fur, with no patent leather in sight. You would have to become Teddywoman instead, and it would not be the same.

‘I am Teddywoman, hear me not make any aggressive noise,’ you would say lamely, as you sat with your arms out in front of you, unable to bend your elbows. It would be dreadful. While chaos overtook your city, you would just sit there looking stiff and fluffy and hoping that your eyeballs didn’t fall out. There would be no opportunity for Batman to fall in love with you during exciting bouts of single combat, either. At best, he might pick you up by the ear and trail you on the ground behind him. And admit it, this would make you feel quite stupid.

I don’t suppose Batman’s creators needed to think very
hard about the animal identity of his female counterpart. Dogwoman would not draw much male interest. Spiderwoman has been done before. Elephantwoman would look like a rip-off. And Ferretwoman is too suggestive. So Catwoman was the obvious answer. However, lots of potential kitty-joke plot-devices were disappointingly left untapped by
Batman Returns
. For example, just as Batman is summoned across Gotham City by a special Bat-design searchlight shone on to solid cloud, couldn’t Catwoman have been summoned from miles distant by the shaking of a little box of Miaow-mix?

I liked
Batman Returns
. The one thing that really worried me, though, was the role of the Gotham City populace, who are required repeatedly to turn up in grey hats and coats for Yuletide speeches outside the City Hall. Each time they do this, a dastardly attack is launched against them, entailing multiple explosions, car chases, punch-ups and deaths. At one point, this passive crowd is sprayed with machine-gun fire from a trick umbrella. So why on earth do they keep turning out, these people? Imagine, if you lived in Gotham City, and somebody said ‘Are you coming to hear the new mayor address us this evening?’, wouldn’t you pause momentarily before limping off to another apocalyptic pasting? A twinge of pain from your latest shrapnel wounds would surely nudge your decision one way or the other.

I suppose one should not be surprised. Only a city of fools relies on a man in a bat-costume to protect it from evil. But perhaps the Gothamites deliberately expose themselves to extreme danger in the hope that they will be transformed, like Michelle Pfeiffer, into a new superhuman chimera. In which case, you have to admire their pluck. The only trouble is, you can’t imagine a movie called
Lemmingman,
can you?

The bit that always stops me dead is where it says ‘Photo appreciated’. Up to then I am fine, almost excited. I can even entertain the pathetic notion that I am being singled out personally.

‘Intellectual Andre Agassi look alike with steady job’ (it says) ‘seeks lonely cat-fixated Teddywoman for evenings of mutual squeaks. Extensive knowledge of
EastEnders
an advantage. My dream lady has clean TV licence, an interest in the fashion potential of household fluff, and a Jeff Bridges video collection. Please write to Box 213. Oh, and I nearly forgot. Photo appreciated.’

‘Damn,’ I yell, and head-butt the bath-taps. Bleeding from the brow, I stab wildly at the Lonely Hearts column, speechless with frustration. There he is! Mister Dreamboat himself! But he wants a photo! And now we can never meet because I don’t have any pictures. What a personal disaster. ‘Perhaps you could send your Single Life picture?’ ventures a passing cat, sort-of telepathically. ‘Hah!’ I shout. ‘How can I send a newspaper clipping, you fur-faced poltroon! Besides, this picture gives most people the impression I am 93!’

I clamber from the bath, press a towel to my head, and go through the usual frantic motions of searching the flat for a suitable picture. But while I rifle my home with all the gusto of the professional burglar, I know there is no chance whatever of success. In the end, in desperation, I grab my passport and some pinking shears and tussle with the temptation to cut out the picture forthwith. But luckily I remember in the nick of time that a) it was taken seven years ago; and b) some of the proffered squeaking might take place abroad.

Sinking on the debris, I sob quietly. If I say I always look lousy in photographs, there is one large, obvious inference which I would naturally rather not contemplate. But there is another reason, honestly, for my despondence. It is that I find it really hard to pose. In front of a camera I just smile in a ‘this
is it, there’s no more’ kind of way, and trust that ‘being myself’ will do the job. This is utterly wrong-headed, of course, because for a successful photo you must seize the moment, choose your statement, and go for it. Whereas I invariably look as though the statement I have chosen is ‘I am simple-minded. Please don’t mind me. Children are safe.’

For this reason, book jackets depress me. I am amazed by the intensely serious faces adopted by authors on the backs of books. It is as though they have been subjected to some weird voodoo practice, where all the personality and humour has been pulled out in strings through their nostrils. Look at the pictures of the Booker shortlist people (the men, anyway) and you will see they seem to have memorized a list of permitted authorial qualities – a list that is unfortunately rather short. It goes: Brainy, Moody, Mad, Sincere, Sensitive, Anxious, Supercilious, Dangerous, Grumpy. On this list, you will observe, Harmless is notable by its absence.

Evidently authors may choose three (not more) of these qualities and put them together in subtle combinations. Thus, taking a random selection from the bookshelves, one finds that the Ian McEwan of
Black Dogs
, say, has opted for brainy, anxious and mad; that Martin Amis, formerly brainy, supercilious and dangerous (
London Fields
), has now daringly regrouped as brainy, sincere and anxious (
Time’s Arrow
). And Nigel Williams (
They Came from sw19
) has achieved an amazing triple – of brainily sensitive, sincerely sensitive and sensitively grumpy.

For women the range is smaller and doesn’t include Brainy. That’s just the way it is. Traditionally women could choose from Clever, Nice, Shiny, Well Made-up and Pet-owning, but usually said to hell with it and took the lot. To this list a few new elements have been added recently. For example, Jeanette Winterson (famously self-effacing author of
Written on the Body
) has added Challenging, Bloody-Minded and
Eyes that Follow You Around the Room. Pictures of women authors sometimes have a verge-of-tears quality, reminiscent of Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous picture
Despair,
which was achieved by locking the juvenile sitter in a cupboard for a couple of hours beforehand. Jeanette Winterson does not look like someone recently emerged from a cupboard. She does, however, resemble a person who has just locked someone else in a cupboard, and put the key down the lav.

Meanwhile, what do I do about the Andre Agassi man? If I don’t send a picture, he will smell a rat. Perhaps I should get a heap of coins and take residence in a Photo-Me booth for the afternoon, trying out statements. Think moody. Think mad. Think grumpy. But what I don’t understand is this. Given that the mad, brainy, sincere look is only a pretence, why not go for something a bit more dramatic? Such as Livid, Amnesiac, Paranoid, or Escaping from Wolves? Unfortunately I shall have to settle for Concussed by Bathroom Appliance. Which probably means that my photo won’t be appreciated very much, after all.

A man friend who lives in California recently phoned me at great expense from a Santa Barbara call-box and asked me what clothes I had on. Not having read any fashionable American novels about sex-by-phone, I found this rather unsettling. It came out of the blue. I mean, we observed the usual preliminary greetings, such as ‘What time is it where you are?’ and ‘Have you seen
The Player
yet, isn’t it great?’ But we had barely touched on the elections and the earthquake forecasts before he posed this extraordinary question about my attire, leaving me all perplexed and wrong-footed.

Was this a dirty phone-call, I thought, or was he simply concerned to conjure up an innocent mental picture of his faraway
pal? Should I give him the benefit of the doubt? Playing for time (and angling for clues) I asked what
he
was wearing, but his answer didn’t help. Evidently his outfit consisted of a T-shirt and trousers, some trainers and a beany hat. ‘Sounds very nice,’ I said non-committally, wondering whether the beany hat was a code for something. Either way, I was still completely in the dark about whether to confess to the old grey army socks and the jumbo dungarees.

Fran Lebowitz once said that the telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. Personally, I see it as a good way of talking to people without having to dress up in a high-cut Kim Basinger costume, or apologize for your paltry wardrobe of seductive gear. In the end, I decided to ignore the overtones, and acted dumb. I said that actually my clothes were so thickly matted with cat-hair and household fluff that I could no longer identify them with any confidence. A smart evasion, which seemed to do the trick, because the subject turned to the Richter scale forthwith.

I was more disturbed by this conversation than it really merited, perhaps. But I hold the telephone in reverence as an instrument of pure verbal communication, and I don’t like to see it messed about. Surely this is the only form of talk in which you can convince yourself that the other person is really engaged in a flow of words entirely undistracted by the extraneous. Which is precisely why it always comes as a shock to discover that for the past ten minutes the other person has been keeping an eye on
Northern Exposure
, or marking exams, fitting a new flea-collar on a resistant pet, or reading a funny bit from
Tristram Shandy
.

Saying ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’ does not eliminate this problem, I find.

YOU
: Have I caught you at a bad time?

THEM
: No, not at all. How are things?
(Tap, tap, tap.)

YOU
: Are you sure you’re not busy?

THEM
:
(Tap, tap, tap.)
What?