Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (14 page)

After everything that eventually happened between us, it would probably be a bit too easy for me to say now that I could tell Boris was a problematic sort right from the moment I first set eyes on him. I’ll also admit that there have been times that I’ve not been the best judge of character on first impressions. But I can remember that in this particular instance the alarm bells did ring unusually loudly, right from the off. I know that there are those who were there at the time who will say that that’s rubbish, that I’m imposing a non-existent narrative on unconnected events. And if that is their opinion, I accept it. It is wrong, but I accept it. I was there, and I know what I saw and heard.

The first time I met Boris would have been in the summer of 2007, on one of those perfectly cloudless, friend-packed, not particularly goal-orientated days that are ten-a-penny in your youth but become all too precious in your thirties: a day when everyone is wrapped in a collective mood that’s lethargic, just slightly giggly, and any future or past more than twelve hours distant seems temporarily immaterial. Even though Dee and I had messed up our map-reading on the way to the stables, putting Steve and Sue and Karl and Naomi, in the car behind us, and Leo, in the car behind them, through a u-turn assault course and making everyone half an hour late, nobody seemed to hold it against us. We were set to have a picnic on Holkham beach later that afternoon, one of the most spectacularly beautiful spots in Britain, let alone Norfolk, and everyone was excited. Everyone except Boris, who, from pretty much the second we got out of the car, mainly just grumbled and dragged his feet. One thing was for sure: from the way he was acting, nobody would have suspected
for a moment
that I’d been generous enough to refrain from asking him to go halves on the olives and salami that we’d brought from the grocers in Aylsham.

Back when I was a teenager, I had a habit of pulling leaves off trees and bushes as I walked past them. I know it was wrong, and I’ve grown out of it. Such low-level vandalism is just about forgivable in a thirteen-year-old, but Boris was mature enough to know better and I’m not kidding when I say he stopped at almost every bit of foliage we passed and yanked a piece off it. We’re talking quintessential, malevolent, adolescent boredom.

Then there was the moment when Naomi pointed out the stable door which concealed the gelding called Conker, and said how it was funny because, the way his name on the door was written, it actually looked more like ‘Cancer’ and Boris just sort of snorted derisively, like he was above all of us. Even if he hadn’t thought it was funny, it wouldn’t have cost him anything to laugh, just for the sake of Naomi’s feelings.

Dee often finds excuses for that kind of behaviour on behalf of the likes of Boris, and maybe Boris, being the one true local among us, was looking at the situation from another angle, taking the environment for granted. But the way I saw it, we were in one of the prettiest parts of North Norfolk, the sun was shining, hares were leaping in the fields, and you’d have to be a singularly ungracious, stubborn individual not to give in and bask in the good vibrations.

‘I think he’s a bit of a git,’ I said to Dee, careful not to let him hear me.

‘I can’t believe you would say that,’ whispered Dee. ‘Give him a chance.’

‘He’s really truculent. And to be perfectly frank, he smells. I can’t see myself even staying friends with him after this.’

‘You never know. You might grow to like him.’

It really wasn’t that I had anything against the way Boris looked. He was pretty easy on the eye, in a hirsute kind of way, and seemed to know it. I also wasn’t really intimidated by his handsomeness. I mean, I was actually a bit taller than him, although I could tell, when I stood near him, just from the way he was carrying himself, that he’d kidded himself into believing he had a couple of inches on me.

Mostly, I just felt sorry for Steve, whose bad luck it had been to end up riding Boris. Steve is a very confident guy, with a sharp and notoriously filthy sense of humour, who’ll often be at the helm of the conversation in whatever room he’s in, but we were in Boris’s kingdom now, and Boris wasn’t going to let him get the better of him. From where I stood with Leo, we had a good view of Boris’s truculence in full effect – the leaf munching, the dawdling, the ultra-sarcastic ‘harrumphing’, the refusal to respond in the slightest as Steve pulled on his reins – and the two of them had dropped well behind the rest of the party.

The original plan had been for Steve, Sue, Karl, Naomi, Dee and me to go riding together, but then, late on, Leo had called, and it turned out the stables did not have an extra horse available for him to ride, so, rather than leaving Leo on his own, I’d dropped out, forfeiting the fee I’d paid for my own ride.

‘Are you absolutely sure?’ everyone had asked me, and I’d gladly received the sympathy, subtly playing up my martyrdom. In truth, I was ecstatic. In the handful of times I’d ridden before, I’d far from mastered it, and remained nervous around horses. Horses, meanwhile, were fully aware of this, and, I was convinced, had a habit of goading me accordingly.

I knew Dee loved horses when I first met her, but I wasn’t aware of quite how much until our second holiday together, in Devon, when she asked me to stop the car so she could say hello to some of the indigenous ponies that roam across Dartmoor. Before long, three of them were in the front seat with me, eyeing me beadily and chewing the steering wheel. The steering wheels on Ford Focuses from the 1999–2001 era are a bit rubbery and no great pleasure to pass through your hands, but that didn’t mean saliva and bite marks were going to improve their design. Dee, however, seemed unconcerned, and was standing outside the car simultaneously enclosing two of the other ponies in her arms, with a gummy, toddler-like grin on her face.

‘Give them a hug,’ she said. ‘Don’t be scared.’

‘But they’ve got such big teeth,’ I replied.

‘They’re not going to bite you.’

‘How can you tell? I mean, look – this one’s just about to start gnawing on the handbrake as we speak.’

‘I can’t believe you’re so scared of a few little ponies.’

The time must come in any honest relationship when a person must reveal the secrets from his past, so that night in the cottage we were renting for the week, I told Dee the truth: that, as an eleven-year-old, playing football in the back field behind my parents’ house, I had been chased by a giant black mare, only managing to dive over the fence, into the garden of a derelict neighbouring abode, a second before the horse crashed into the railings behind me. I thought I’d made a pretty good job of conveying the true, permanently scarring horror of the experience, even adding a bit of steam coming out of the black mare’s nostrils, but she seemed unmoved.

‘That sounds very odd,’ she said. ‘Horses don’t often chase people. At least, not for no reason.’

‘Of course they do!’ I said. ‘You see it in films. Like that one with John Wayne, where he has to round them all up with the hippie cowboys, who he doesn’t get on with, and then they all make friends.’

‘Were you kicking the ball near the horse?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘How far away is “not at all”?’

‘Twenty-five yards? I can’t remember. It occurred in the early part of 1987!’

‘That’s way too close. You must have scared it.’

‘But it was the field where I always used to play football. I staged reruns of the 1986 World Cup Quarter Final in it, but with Lineker’s last-ditch attempt on goal going in instead of missing, and me playing Lineker. There had been horses in the field before.
They’d
never had any problem with me. This horse was totally new. It wasn’t even its field.’

‘It’s always the horse’s field. That’s the rule. You should know that.’

Over the following years, in sporadic bursts, Dee did her best to help me get over my mild equine phobia. ‘Once you’ve actually been on a horse,’ she said, ‘you’ll feel completely different about them.’ Trusting her word, one day in 2004 I followed her into the darkest recesses of the Norfolk country side, to a riding school behind a campsite. I’m not sure quite what I’d expected my first proper foray into the horsey world to consist of – perhaps a big buck-toothed greeting from a bossy lady in jodhpurs called Sarah and a selection of stables, each bedecked, in perfect calligraphy, with names like Huffle Puffle and Big Mr Jones, with a neat row of long noses poking over their doors. If so, this was definitely not it. We spotted a couple of horses some way off in the distance, but other than that all we could see was a garden that had last been weeded around the time Lester Piggott won his final Derby, a rusting caravan, a couple of large sheds, and a cottage, whose once white walls were flaked and weather-beaten.

Not really knowing where else to go, we headed for the cottage, past a wooden sign with ‘Strawberry’s: 80p per pound!’ handwritten on it, that had fallen to the ground, and which presumably belonged to Strawberry, who, if you asked me, was going to have trouble selling such a tatty piece of wood, even at that cut-down price. The front door of the cottage was wide open and, after a couple of knocks, I stepped nervously a foot or two inside and called a tentative, ‘
H-ello
?’ A moment later a paunchy man with a comb-over, a perspiring brow and rolled-up polyester shirt sleeves appeared. We told him we’d booked a ride, he grunted, and receded once again into the dark bowels of the building. A stringy woman with sunken eyes and at least five teeth missing who could have been any age between twenty-three and forty then appeared, grunted in similar fashion, pulled on a pair of black boots, and, with a barely perceptible nod, directed us to one of the sheds. Here we were handed a pair of riding hats, then introduced to our horses: a couple of cobs called Bob and Bess.

Dee and I thought by now it was time we introduced ourselves, and we learned that our guide was called Sharon, but further information was slow in arriving. Bob the cob, who was assigned to me, was particularly furry around the ankles, even for his breed, and I’d hoped that my comment about being pleased to get a horse with flares would lighten the mood, but it failed to crack Sharon’s hard shell of indifference. ‘So,’ I thought to myself, ‘this is the woman responsible for keeping me upright on the fine line between life and death for the next two hours.’

I’m sure it’s extremely uncool to ask any questions regarding safety among rural horse-loving gypsies, and I know that Dee had explained over the phone to Sharon that I was a beginner, but I couldn’t prevent myself from blurting out some questions that might ensure my safety.

‘So, just checking: you know this is my first time, don’t you?’

‘Hmyerp,’ said Sharon.

‘And I’m guessing you’re going to tie something to Bob, which you’re going to hold, to make sure he doesn’t do anything dramatic?’ I said.

‘Hmyerp,’ said Sharon.

‘And I just put my foot in here and pull myself on?’

‘Hmyerp. Hmyerp,’ said Sharon, in a rare display of emotion.

I’ve spent much of my adult life defending Norfolk against prejudicial comments about incest, bestiality and farming disseminated by the kind of East London hipsters who have only ever left the capital to go to some trendy Greek island and have gained their entire knowledge about the county from a few episodes of
I’m Alan Partridge
. But if these hipsters had seen what had transpired so far on this afternoon, I doubt they would have had any of their preconceptions stripped away. However, at least my worries about making conversation were a temporary distraction from the fact that I was now sitting on top of a hot, heavy living creature, who was moving, and could, if the whim took him, decide to move quite a lot faster at any moment.