Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (2 page)

‘What are you doing up here?! You’re not supposed to be up here at this time of night! This is a different door to the one I normally come through. It’s not the regular door! That excites me! Why does it excite me?’

‘Well, it’s technically my house, so I can go where I like, but I’m up here primarily because I was worried about you. You’re going to come in now, aren’t you, and then, just as I’ve settled back down and closed my eyes, you’re going to go out again, and go back over the fence.’

‘Yes, of course I am. Mainly because I’m a cat, and therefore inherently stubborn.’

‘Also, where’s that reflective collar I bought you?’

‘I ditched it. Do I look like the kind of soppy twit who would be seen dead wearing baby blue and glitter? What do you think I am, a sodding Burmese?’

There are a number of quiet hours on a Friday, following the moment when the final few locals bring their arguments to a drooling, incoherent impasse and stumble off the wall at the front of the house, but these come to an end when Shipley and Ralph announce their arrivals back from their midnight wanders.

When I enter a house, I tend to do so with decorum and humility, not expecting congratulations. But for Shipley, the mere act of safe passage through a miniature door is an achievement to be greeted with a fanfare halfway between what one might expect on the hometown leg of a sell-out stand-up comedy tour and a victorious Olympic run.

Originally, Shipley was very much an ‘extra’ cat: a runtish black goblin whose puckish energy stood out, prompting me to beg Dee to be able to take him home with his brothers Ralph and Brewer, (sadly no longer with us.) To his credit, that first night he managed to very impressively stifle his gobby, all-consuming need to be the centre of attention every second of every day, snuggling down quietly at the end of the bed as Dee and I slept with Brewer and Ralph respectively curled up in the crook of our arms. This was his one concession to good manners, before making it perfectly clear that, from that day on, his entire existence would require a soundtrack, of which he would be the writer, arranger and singer. The voice came first, a sort of
meeyap
that seemed to belong only one third to a cat, with the other two thirds split between a petulant lapdog and the kind of overzealous spider monkey who, as you admired it at the zoo, might run off up a tree with your purse. This was soon followed by a growth spurt leading to obstinate sinewiness that somehow seemed to complement the noises emerging from it.

Shipley looks muscular, but retains the appearance of a slim cat, and friends who visit gasp as they pick him up. ‘What weighs so much?’ they wonder. The answer, I would wager, is the sheer heft of self-belief. I’ve had short, reedy school-friends in the past who’ve seemed to will themselves into muscular adulthood, but Shipley is the first cat I’ve known to achieve something similar.

The door to the main bedroom of my house is a heavy one, fitted a little too close to the carpet beneath it. Even for a human, it takes a bit of a shove to open, and for most felines it’s a lost cause, but for Shipley, at the crack of dawn, it is no obstacle. Since I don’t have a camera set up in my living room, I have no actual evidence of how he goes about getting it open, but I like to picture a scenario involving a miniature stepladder and a ten-inch battering ram fashioned from a long-out-of-date courgette. You might have thought after going to such an effort, he would want to make the most of the ample comforts of the room, but Shipley’s visits are flying ones: brief windows in his schedule where I am invited to join him in revelling in his own magnificence, before he leaves for more pressing appointments.

‘It’s me! I’m here!’ he will say, upon getting the door open, and quickly hiding the courgette and the stepladder before I get the chance to see them.

‘That’s nice,’ I will say blearily. ‘Very much like this time last morning, in fact.’

‘I have rain on my back!’

‘And in what way is that my problem?’

‘It’s your sodding problem because you know that if you don’t wipe it off in the next seven seconds I’m going to smear my muddy paws all over the duvet, and if that still doesn’t work, I’m going to start shredding the magazines by your bedside or find a bit of really soft flesh on your arm and pinch it between my front teeth until you do what I say.’

‘Has it occurred to you what kind of long-term effects it can have on people’s sleep pattern, when every morning, between five and six-thirty, they have cats shouting in their faces?’

‘No, that has never occurred to me. I have absolutely no concept of The Long Term or The Big Picture. I live entirely in the moment, and think exclusively about my own needs, on a minute-by-minute basis. Because of this, I will always be much happier than you. Now shut the hell up and stroke this wet shit off my back.’

‘Is it normal to be sworn at by a cat? I’m sure that’s not normal. Do ordinary people’s ordinary cats do that? I feel sure they don’t, you know. Could I at least have some kind of cuddle, since you’re here?’

‘You know what? I would love to, but I’m just a bit worried about that issue of
Private Eye
that’s been left in the living room. I’m not quite happy with Gordon Brown’s face on the cover, and would like to rip into it with my teeth. Best not leave it much longer, for fear it annoys someone. Sorry, but you know how it is.’

Each of my cats has spent time cultivating their own specialist method for waking me up. There was, for example, the two-month period where, every day, between 6.30 and 7 am, Bootsy would manage to locate my favourite ring – which I always take off at night – on my bedside table, and bat it into the adjacent wastepaper basket. A more distanced onlooker might suggest that this was simply a demonstration of Bootsy’s love for shiny objects, which is a valid theory – she’s always had expensive taste – but the fact that she immediately lost interest in the ring every time my attention was roused suggests there was always more to it.

Then there’s Janet, whose wake-up calls employ the infamous The Nice Cat/Stinky Cat method, first practised by felines in ancient Egypt who were worried about not getting the attention that, as would-be gods, they felt they deserved. First, he will burrow his head under the duvet and press his ice-cold nose into one of my feet. To be on the receiving end of this tactical manoeuvre is far from unpleasant, but, should it fail to rouse me, he will bring out the big guns, hauling his great hulking bottom up onto the bed and cleaning it two inches from my face. The other symptom of this, besides me wanting to get as far away from the bed as quickly as possible, is that, going on the rule of Simulslurp, any other cat in the room will also start cleaning its bottom at the same time. Soon, Shipley will invariably arrive, and then Ralph too, burrowing into his own rear in a manner that, were it to get any more thorough, could put him in severe danger of re-eating the previous day’s shrew. This will often lead to a kind of ‘arse chorus’, which, if it wasn’t for the fact that I feel sure someone else has done it already, I might have filmed and put on YouTube by now.

But it’s always Ralph and Shipley who are most adamant about having their needs met. I do not think of myself as my cats’ ‘father’, but since these are the only two cats that didn’t get time to be significantly moulded by another owner before coming into my care, I find it hard not to view their behaviour as a sign of my parental shortcomings. They are milksops: toughnuts in one way, entirely needy in another. Unlike Shipley, Ralph does not have the ingenuity to open the bedroom door, instead choosing to howl his own name to get my attention. I’ve asked him lots of questions about the reasons for this over the years, ranging from ‘Have you sustained a debilitating leg injury?’ all the way to ‘Did you have that dream about being mocked by a stoat again?’ but he’s never really come up with an answer more elucidatory than ‘Raaaaaaaeeeeaaalph!’

Ralph has always been a bit of a nighttime howler, and his low spells in hot weather long ago led me to conclude that he suffers from a summertime version of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but in the late summer of 2007, not long after the men attacked the house with the gardening implements, the frequency of his vocal pronouncements of his name and the proximity of them to Dee’s and my sleeping quarters and the street above made them an extra cause for concern.

In an age when cats seem to be gradually taking over the Internet, one might assume that, using half-decent research skills, it might be possible to find out a diagnosis for any kind of curious feline behaviour online within a matter of seconds. However, having Googled ‘your tabby’ ‘a’ ‘becomes’ ‘when’ and ‘massive prat’ I found nothing. Dee’s suggestion was that his unease could be down to the all-white, fluffy cat we sometimes saw flicking her tail about on the stairs leading to the back garden, and had christened The Whore. But, as astute as Dee is on 99 per cent of other-worldly matters, she’s always had a weak spot when it comes to second-guessing Ralph’s woes, going right back to his kittenhood, before we realised he was a boy, when she mistook his midnight howls for mating calls.

From what I could see, the only negative thing you could say about The Whore was that she had an unusually flicky, flirty tail. From my limited knowledge of catiquette, this hardly seemed a crime worth meowling about around the neighbourhood, stating your identity at the top of your voice. It wasn’t as if she’d invited one of her mates in for a fight behind our living room curtains, as a giant neighbourhood tabby had done in the summer of 2002.
¹

If we were honest, the two of us probably knew what the problem was quite early on, and, by looking for other causes, and scapecats such as The Whore, were merely trying to find a way not to face up to it.

In the past, our cats had always got on with one another fairly well. Certainly, there was the annual punch-up between Ralph and Shipley where Ralph would pound Shipley’s head against the concrete patio just to confirm who was still Top Cat, or those moments where Shipley would sneak up onto the bed and play the timeless game of ‘Clappy Paws’ with The Bear’s inert, sleeping form, or that occasion that Bootsy knocked The Bear flying against the patio doors with one of her tiny, legendary right hooks. But this was ultimately play fighting, with no serious grudges behind it. For a while, I’d convinced myself that the standoffs between Ralph and Pablo fitted into a similar category. I suppose, though, when one of your cats pounces on one of your other cats with such force that he snaps your cat flap door off twice in one week, you have to accept that you might be dealing with a slightly more serious problem.

Before he came to us, Pablo had been living as one of dozens of feral cats in a giant, abandoned house, where he would regularly impregnate various close members of his family. I picture it as a kind of cat version of a 1960s hippie commune, except with a slightly less overpowering smell of urine. His background meant he came to us with three fundamental needs: a) to eat as much food as felinely possible; b) to make friends with any other cat in the vicinity; and c) to dry hump something soft at least once daily. Bootsy provided a willing outlet for needs b) and c) and Dee and I did our best to satisfy need a), but the other cats remained sceptical of the new wiry ginger simpleton in their midst. To an intellectually superior cat, such as The Bear, Pablo’s condition presented no problem: Pablo did not even feature on The Bear’s radar. But to a narcissistic, troubled, yet not particularly bright cat such as Ralph, the ginger newcomer’s outlook on life must have seemed nigglingly simple. This seemed to me to be more of a war of species than anything else: the eternal battle between the sunny ginger and the tortured tabby. That was my theory, anyway. But one thing was for certain: as summer turned into autumn, Ralph was feeling threatened by Pablo in an additional, more physical way.