Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (14 page)

‘Och! You’re nae to worry about that! He’s just got saggy boobies!’ exclaimed his latest vet – a very camp, and very Scottish, lady who seemed to be fixing to take him home with her – as she injected his VIP flea treatment. Nonetheless, one only had to see the new wariness to his watchful waddle to realise that he was a cat with a weight on his mind, and convinced that at any moment another, heavier one – possibly in the shape of a cartoon anvil with ‘10 Tons!’ chalked across it – could descend from above.

But what made me the expert? Who’s to say that in those moments just before we left Devil’s Cottage, when he scuttled into the living room, looked deep into my eyes, and proceeded to squirt a fountain of steaming fluorescent urine onto the rare books of East Anglian folklore that I had just carefully packed away, he wasn’t experiencing a moment of exquisite, untrammelled happiness? Having spent much of my late teens and early twenties with fans of indie rock and maudlin beat literature, I’d met plenty of people who claimed that depression was their own personal, twisted form of happiness, and there was nothing to say that The Bear wasn’t their moggy equivalent.

As morose as The Bear was, I could not help but notice that in the six months we spent at Devil’s Cottage, I received more frequent affection from him than ever before. At Brunton, I’d never quite cemented the intermittent bond I’d made with him at Blackheath, largely because I’d been too busy dealing with the killing, shitting, wailing twelve-legged typhoon that was Brewer, Shipley and Ralph. But alone in my study on the tiny attic floor of Devil’s Cottage – or ‘the turret’ as I’d begun to think of it – trying to work on my Norfolk ghost novel and shut out the shuddering metronome on the other side of the wall and plan our escape, I’d find myself the subject of a single-minded Bearline. As he jumped on my lap and I ran my hands along his flanks, I’d feel pleasure pulsate through him and he’d begin a tweeting falsetto purr. If I got lucky, this would evolve into a series of gentle nips to my forearm.

He was always easily distracted – as little as a rogue gust of air could do the job, and if I so much as contemplated clearing my throat or sneezing, I could forget it – but part of what made these spells so special was their fragility. Was he healing me? Getting off on my negative energy? Both? It was no wonder that the role of the black cat in folklore was traditionally the cause of such divergent speculation. This one had been crossing my path for almost three years, and I still didn’t know what it meant.

Dee sometimes caught the thunderbolt, too. Wandering through the house wearing earplugs, fighting off a migraine and trying to think of a productive activity that would not be interrupted by the ‘thud-thud’ of idiot cartoon techno, she would hear a ‘meeyoooeey’ sound, and find The Bear shadowing her steps, with an expectant air about him.

‘I’m not sure if he’s forgiven me, but I think he might have finally decided he doesn’t completely hate me,’ she said. She may have spoken too soon, though, since about five minutes later he covertly dribbled wee on a 1960s handbag she’d just sold to a man in Singapore.

‘Now, The Bear, why did you want to do that?’ she asked gently, picking him up beneath his shoulders.

Had Ralph, Janet or Shipley done the same thing, she would have almost certainly called them a crapweasel or a nobwaffle by now and threatened to fashion them into a replacement for the soiled item, but her tone with The Bear was perennially that of the primary school teacher with the autistic maths prodigy. Eight years they’d been together now, on and off, and she still did not seem to have completely given up on the possibility of him opening up and telling her his deepest thoughts. To give her credit, I thought she might get her wish this time. For just a split second, his mouth opened and it seemed that he was forcing out the first words of a monologue about his troubled childhood, but in the end he just had an asthma attack.

Whatever The Bear’s emotional temperature, I felt certain that he’d come to unequivocally love our next house, in the ‘city village’ of Trowse, on the outskirts of Norwich. At the end of a day of futile, frustrating househunting – how were we ever going to be in a position to buy another house when selling ours was going to be so difficult? – Staithe Cottage had shimmered in front of us like an oasis in the summer heat. Visiting it had been little more than an afterthought. Two hours earlier, the notion of moving into rented accommodation had still been one that we’d not fully thrashed out, but after a single glance at the adjacent river and the enormous living room that stretched out over the water on stilts, a tiny nod passed between us that said our tenancy agreement was already as good as signed.

The picture I’d seen on the Internet of a pretty yet fairly standardised-looking two-bedroom Norfolk flint cottage really didn’t do the place justice. Set down a dusty track a hundred yards from the nearest road, together with four houses of complementary style, it was just about the most peaceful spot either of us had ever clapped eyes on, yet it was only half an hour’s walk from the centre of Norwich, our favourite city. And all this for only slightly more per month than what I’d paid not all that long ago for a tiny one-room flat in south London.

As the landlord, a gruff, bearded architect called Richard, proudly told us of how he’d found the place in near-derelict condition in the late eighties and lovingly restored and extended it, we popped our heads through the trapdoor in the living room floor and looked down into the depths of the river. Resurfacing, we were surprised to find that we had been joined by the departing tenant. She was rather hairy, and, even by Norfolk standards, her greeting was distinctly on the laid-back side.

‘Oh, this is just Tibs,’ said Richard, picking her up and smoothing a hand along her arthritic-looking spine and onto her withered tortoiseshell tail. ‘My wife and I used to live here ourselves. Now we live next door, but Tibs still likes to use it as her granny flat.’

This was useful information, in that it made my next question, regarding the precise rigidity of that ‘no pets’ clause in the homogeneous tenancy literature, somewhat less fraught. It soon became obvious that not only we, but our animals too, would be welcome here. We wouldn’t even have to use our ever-reliable back-up plan of pretending that we actually only had two cats: Ralph and an unusually chameleonic black phantom who could shrink and expand at will to resemble Janet, Shipley or The Bear.

The day we moved in was one of hottest of the year. After Don had finished helping us unload our furniture from his van and let his black Labrador – Don did slightly resemble a Labrador, now I came to think of it – splash about in the river, we settled down for lunch on the balcony next to it. Our property problems were far from over: already both of us were upping our workload, two-thirds of my beloved collection of rare vinyl was on eBay in order to help us out of our jam, and we knew that being candid about Devil’s Cottage to potential buyers was going to mean that it could take a long time to sell, and even then probably at a price significantly less than its market value.

For the moment, however, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ rule applied. As we said hello to a passing pair of canoeists and watched Shipley and Janet make their first snuffling forays into the meadow opposite the house, I couldn’t help but think of that overused property phrase ‘living the dream’. It was not a phrase I liked, partly because if I was really going to live one of my dreams it would probably involve me resitting my GCSEs and realising I hadn’t got any pens whilst simultaneously walking through a series of endless doors watched by various friends and former Blue Peter presenters, all of whom would suddenly develop the faces of wolves. Nonetheless, I supposed that when people used that phrase, they were talking about something like the scene before us.

It was such a cliché, and so damn
good
with it, Dee and I couldn’t help but chuckle. That said, with hindsight I probably did take my elation a bit too far by jumping in the river, particularly in view of what one of our neighbours told us later about her friend who contracted Weil’s disease after doing the same thing.

I knew enough about The Bear now not to second-guess his moods, so when, two days later, he disdainfully licked the butter off his paws and vanished, I wasn’t surprised. I had by now developed a theory that with every new place we moved to, he would view it as his duty to walk and walk until he was sure that The Actor’s old flat was not somewhere in a ten-mile radius.

We had not heard from his former soulmate since his move to Australia two years previously, but The Bear did not know that and, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing not to say that the two of them were not wandering the countryside in matching states of emptiness, biding their time by performing unreasonable acts with cardboard until their exalted reunion. Given that a person could not walk more than two miles in any direction without being confronted by one of two rivers, a dual carriageway, a dry ski slope or the Norwich branch of the Big Yellow storage depot, Dee and I reasoned that it would not be long before he decided to turn back, but a week later, when our reasoning was getting a little shakier, we received an intriguing telephone call from our estate agent, who’d been showing a couple of pensioners around Devil’s Cottage.

‘How did the viewing go?’ I asked her, impressing myself by resisting the temptation to add: ‘Please say they wanted to buy it and then I might not have to sell my original copy of Nick Drake’s
Five Leaves Left
!’

‘I think they liked it, but the husband was a bit worried about how narrow the staircase was,’ she said. ‘Actually, that’s not the reason I’m calling. What I wondered was, when I show the house in future, would you like me to let your cat out, or would you prefer it if I kept him locked inside?’

‘I’m sorry. Could you say that again?’

‘Your cat. The black one. At least, I assume he’s yours. He was sitting in a cardboard box when we went into the upstairs bedroom. He looked very pleased with himself.’

It was his most confounding masterstroke yet. I mean . . . I knew we’d been a bit lenient in letting him out of his carrier on the ten-mile drive from Holsham to Trowse, and he
did
have a look of uniquely intense concentration on his face as he stared out the back window, but this was remarkable. How, we wondered, as we hurried to the car, had he found his bearings, known to take the third exit at the Heartsease roundabout and not the one before it that looks a bit like it, negotiated the A47 bypass?

About half an hour later, we got our answer. You could have said the jet black cat that greeted us so cheerily at the front door of our house of pain looked a bit like The Bear, but probably only if you were extremely short-sighted or the feline equivalent of a racist. I had no idea where this overweight, flirty-tailed creature came from or to whom it belonged, but from the dark glaze of fur covering every carpet, it was obvious that it had been making itself at home. One might have hoped it would have offered us some form of token rent payment by, say, undertaking some pest control in our molehill-strewn garden or – better still – shimmying its ample behind up to the exhaust pipe of next door’s Subaru and filling it with a giant turd, but it was clear that there was only one kind of squatting going on here.

‘You know that The Bear is probably going to be curled up on the bed when we get back,’ said Dee, after we’d deposited the cat in the garden and finished taping the cat-flap up.

She was almost right: the following morning, back in our lovely rented house, we came downstairs to find him on the bean bag, sleeping off his bender with an apparent vengeance. I opted for the nonchalant approach, strolling straight onto the balcony with my cornflakes without stopping to pet or fuss him, but I’m sure we both knew it was an act. If he’d been fully conscious – and was that one soulful eye I saw opening just a crack as I went past? – I’m sure he would have been able to look at me and see beyond my skin to the relief that was flooding through me.

It was preposterous to think that he’d been the one pulling the strings to our emotions for the last twenty-four hours: the kind of supernatural speculation that even Folk Michael would have written off as poppycock. Still, there was nothing to say that, somewhere during our final days at Devil’s Cottage, either as a practical joke or as an innocent act of generosity, The Bear hadn’t tipped off a dumb, fluffy-tailed friend about the empty house. There were all sorts of messages being passed between cats all the time: a hidden, finely nuanced language seething with miniature power struggles, unfinished business and abiding vendettas.