Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (11 page)

3. The Rotting Pampas Grass Leaf

‘The pampas grass is a double-edged sword – and I mean that literally. Given a patient, play-happy owner to hold the other end of the blade, there’s nothing better for playing “Clappy Paws” with. It’s hard not to appreciate the craftsmanship, as you watch it slide across a freshly mown lawn. Squint and you can even convince yourself that it’s an unusually pointy-headed snake. But beware: get over-enthusiastic, and those sharp edges can sting. Not recommended for kittens under 10 weeks old.’ –
Ralph

4. The Bootsy

‘Small but perfectly formed, the Bootsy comes in one colour (grey) and is extraordinary lifelike – both in the pained squeaks it emits as you scrag its neck, and in its habit of lying in catlike positions in the crevices of armchairs and duvets. Terrific for indolent neck-biting, back-sitting or – my personal favourite – “The Castrato Hump”.’ –
Pablo

There were
some
purpose-built, man-made toys my cats still liked. A black, dusty mouse that Dee and I had bought from our local pet shop in 2001 was now in its seventh year of duty, its squeak sometimes vanishing, but then reappearing and reigniting the bloodlust of its users every time I was poised to retire it from service. There was also ‘Camden’: a game devised by Dee which involved draping a feather-on-a-stick toy around the neck of Bootsy, feather boa-style, as she tried to chase it, and which proved very popular with its participant, whose tastes have always run to the glitzy. Then there was the toy known only as The Thing: a small, purple item that had arrived unbidden with a package of overpriced German cat food a month or two after the Panic Mouse.

The only real merit I could discern in The Thing was that the fur stuck to it seemed extremely – some would say disturbingly – lifelike, yet it was soon to take an unassailable lead in the race for the title of Most Mauled Cat Toy of 2008: a lead that ultimately, despite the efforts of the toy otter from Dee’s childhood that Bootsy liked to kick off her favourite chair, it would never relinquish.

By this point, the Panic Mouse had been all but forgotten. I relocated it outdoors at one point, with the thought that context might be its main problem, and The Bear minced up to it quite perkily and promisingly, but in the end he just turned around, lifted his tail and unleashed a hot jet of urine into its face, while looking passionately and committedly into the furthest recesses of my eyes. Dee and I began to ask cat-owning friends if they’d like to take it off our hands, but they all had either tried a Panic Mouse before and had similarly dismal results, or were unconvinced by its merits.

I began to feel worryingly like the toy’s unofficial marketeer, scouring the Internet for pictures of multi-coloured cats with it in mid-air action poses, then sending them to friends. While its batteries lived on, I couldn’t quite bring myself to consign it to a cupboard, so had taken to leaving it on at night. I actually had two motives in doing this. On the one hand, I was doing an artificial version of what I’d done in the past with the real rodents my cats had hurt and discarded, and which I’d been so afraid to kill: if the Panic Mouse was somewhere else and out of its misery, then I could move on cleanly with my life. On the other hand, part of me was trying to catch the furry schemers out.

Like a lot of cat owners, I was convinced that, when I was asleep, my cats lived an entirely different life: a mixture of the downright unexpected, and the activities they stubbornly shirked in daylight. So one night about a month into the Panic Mouse’s unappreciated life, having got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, I was pleased to hear what sounded unmistakably like a paw being thrashed against its artificial fur pouch. As I crept towards the sound, I felt bad to have doubted Panic Mouse’s manufacturers. The furry pouch
was
‘the much meowed for illusive object of cat curiosity’ after all!

I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to see that the cat enjoying the illusive object of cat curiosity was Pablo. Pablo has never had the duplicitous nous of my other cats, to say the least, and his attitude to the Panic Mouse from the beginning had been terror rather than indifference. Clearly he’d just needed time to work out its merits.

I padded carefully towards him but something looked a bit odd about Pablo. The Panic Mouse was supposed to make cats thinner, but if I wasn’t mistaken, Winter Pablo looked even larger than usual. Lying upside down, he was a veritable puddle of cat, spilling across the floor. For all his intermittent bulk, Pablo had always had a pointy sort of face, compared by many to that of the celebrity chef and smallholder Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but now his jowls looked hideously stretched, his expression blank and moonlike. As he spotted me at the periphery of his vision, I saw none of the usual eagerness or nerves in his countenance, just something dopey and dazed.

There’s a familiar moment when you taste some crisps you’ve picked out of a bowl at a party that you thought were one flavour, but are actually another flavour, and momentarily baulk at them. It doesn’t matter if you actually like the flavour of the crisps you have in your mouth; merely because you’ve thought they are a different flavour, the world momentarily spins on its axis, and everything you have ever believed turns upside down. Looking at Pablo, I experienced a similar moment. Of course, when you’ve realised your mistake, and that the crisps in your mouth are actually harmless, and, possibly, even a flavour you liked just as much as the flavour you mistook them for, the world stops spinning. It was an equivalent moment to this that I subsequently experienced, as I realised that Pablo was in fact Samson, the ginger cat owned by Ruby, the old lady who lived across the road.