Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (16 page)

Bleatpuppy

Derisive term for a cat who is unable to land on any surface without announcing his or her athletic prowess to the world with a small squeak or pip of self-delight.

Ficklespee

The peculiar, tickly sensation experienced whilst swallowing a particularly meaty and recalcitrant bluebottle.

Fool’s bogeys

Crunchy yet slightly moist snacks that are passed off as a ‘treat’ because they cost more and come in smaller, very slightly more lavish packaging, but essentially taste just like other more ostenstibly run-of-the-mill crunchy yet slightly moist snacks.

Mummyfur

Feeling a bit low? Looking back wistfully to that time all those years ago, when you still had testicles, and you could actually remember who your parents were? Why not stretch your claws, find some mummyfur, and get stuck in? Pretty much any soft, non-shiny, recently laundered surface will do, but slightly damp towels and sheepskin are considered the ultimate delicacies of the mummyfur genre.

Simulslurp

The mystic force that, without the need for discussion or consensus, will cause numerous cats in the same room all to clean their most hard-to-get regions at exactly the same time.

Sleeping with the fishes

The particularly contented, lengthy state of REM that occurs after one has clandestinely intercepted one’s owners’ shopping bags in the wake of their last trip to the seafood counter.

Sucking the nettle

To lick one’s tongue with distaste in the aftermath of an unpleasant or demeaning experience (e.g. a meal not to one’s liking, or a cuddle from an overbearing child).

Twhisker

Or, alternatively, a ‘half-whisker’. Frequently displayed by feral cats who have been caught in traps by sadistic farmers and cat rescue officers, or in the clutches of bigger, scarier ferals (‘I was just a twhisker away from twatting that big-tailed ginger plonker’). Sometimes, twiskers grow back, sometimes they don’t. Professors of Catology remain in the dark as to exactly why this is. Often mistakenly thought of as a sign of masculinity or ‘streetness’, the twisker ultimately signifies little aside from bad balance and potential under-mog status.

El Gato Muy Loco
 
 

‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’

‘Yeah. It’ll be fine.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘What about the neighbours?’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘They seem fine.’

‘And you say it’s detached?’

‘Yes.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No. Actually, during the three times we’ve been to view it, I’ve never quite got round to looking at the sides of the building to see if there’s another house stuck to them. Of
course
I’m sure.’

‘But I thought you wanted to be in the country and it didn’t work out when you were in a town. I thought you moved out of London because you wanted to be in the country.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘Well, this isn’t really in a town. It’s hard to explain. It’s weird.’

‘Sounds
very
weird.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘It’s great. A total blank canvas. We love it!’

‘What about noise?’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘You can barely hear a thing – not even the road outside.’

‘Damp?’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘None.’

‘Dry rot?’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘Nope, nothing. God, this is hurting my head.’

‘Carpets?’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘Well, they’re in a state, but we’ll be replacing them.’

‘So why hasn’t it sold, then? Sounds a bit suspicious to me.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW! RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘
Mum
.’

‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘Thanks.’

‘No, not you.’

The longer I lived in rural and semi-rural areas, the more I realised that there were plenty of things I didn’t miss about my brief spell as a footloose, irresponsible urbanite living in ignorance of the housing market. Ear infections, stone-hearted landlords, broken central heating systems owned by stone-hearted landlords, chronic hangovers and the estate agent’s intern who stole half my deposit on my first flat would all have been right up there somewhere in the top ten. Nonetheless, there were occasions – and they were brief occasions, admittedly, occasions that quickly popped and evaporated into the air like soap bubbles – when I felt I would have welcomed them back like old friends, just to be granted the wish of going back to a more innocent time. Actually, the time wouldn’t even have to be all that innocent, just as long as it didn’t necessitate me having conversations with my mum about buying and selling houses. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see where the lady was coming from.

I’ve never met anybody for whom moving is a greater issue than it is for my parents. When I was a kid, on the wall of our many houses hung an illustration, etched by my dad, of a goat craning its neck through a fence to munch on the turf of an adjacent field. In its margin, my dad had written the phrase, ‘The grass is always greener.’ Much as I admire the craftsmanship of this etching, it’s hard not to think of it as a kind of inverted voodoo symbol: if you didn’t harm it, bad things happened to the person directly associated with it. I didn’t pay it too much attention at the time, but in the years since, I’ve often wondered if my dad ever noticed its pulsing irony as he transported my mum and me around the north-east Midlands, looking for a bucolic utopia where he could paint, write, and leave behind his council estate past and the misery of supply teaching at Nottingham’s less reputable secondary schools.

My dad made some bad moves back then and he’s the first to admit it, but few of them were anything like the luck that went with them. Looking back at a nine-year period, beginning in 1985, which took in – among other things – a subsiding semi, the sale of an elegant Edwardian villa at the most unwise moment in twentieth-century UK property history, some meddlesome open cast mining, the discovery of a malignant melanoma in one of my mum’s retinas and the unearthing of a mine shaft in a back garden, it strikes me that a person could probably repeatedly drive a bulldozer into one’s own house and come away in better shape.

If you’ve been through an experience like that, it’s only natural to want to pass on what you’ve learned to those closest to you. My parents are settled in a house they love now, and their housing market disasters have bonded them in shared wisdom. But while my dad’s advice on the subject broadly involves telling me to watch out for nutters or announcing ‘MOST STRESSFUL THING IN THE WORLD, MOVING HOUSE!’ as he watches Dee and me struggle to get a mattress through a doorway, my mum can now consider herself the hard-bitten owner of a set of property antennae. She knows all the warning signs, and she knows that the old aphorism about life being what happens while you’re making other plans never rings truer than when you’re moving house.

Nonetheless, when I spoke to her about moving from Trowse to the town of East Mendleham, in south Norfolk, in the summer of 2004, I could sometimes start to feel like the offspring of reformed alcoholics who thought they’d caught him red-handed in necking his first full bottle of Jack Daniels when in reality he’d only been examining the label. Daisy’s voluble contributions to these discussions did little to lower the stress level.

My last remaining childhood cat had always been jumpy, but, since she’d crossed the threshold into old age, her eccentricities had hardened into something more unique. For my mum, who still hoped that one day The Slink might become like other cats and decide to purr when she was happy, as opposed to when she was livid, this was a daily source of frustration.

My mum had tried pretty much everything over the years: prawns, pilchards, a dozen different types of brushes, a selection of hand-woven cushions, those expensive brands of cat food that have the adverts with the women in silk dressing gowns who look poised to get down on all fours and tuck in to the meaty goodness themselves . . . None of it had worked in any lasting way, and any minor progress would always be swiftly nullified by my dad who, perhaps in tribute to his favourite ever pet, had taken Monty’s old mantle as The Slink’s tormentor and made it very much his own.

‘HEY? WHAT DID YOU SAY? ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THAT CAT?’ my dad would say, picking up the other receiver, after overhearing my mum tell me about The Slink’s latest psychotic purring fit. ‘BLOOMIN’ THING’S DRIVING ME CRAZY.’

When you’re a small, bony tortoiseshell cat with nerve problems and an overactive thyroid, it cannot be easy to coexist alongside one of the six loudest men in northern Britain. When that person is not particularly fond of you, it must be harder still.

Never let it be said that my dad is not an animal lover, but his taste tends to run to the wild rather than the domestic. We’re talking here about a man who has been known to spend a whole afternoon sketching a goat’s chin hair, a man who once got so involved in looking at a bull in a field by the side of the road that he drove his Morris Marina into a ditch and had to get the AA to winch it out. But when he is faced with the more high-maintenance members of the natural world, talk quickly becomes cheap and time tight. This perhaps explains why Monty’s sturdy self-reliance was so appealing to him, and why The Slink has never been able to come remotely close to living up to it.

He never exactly shared her worldview in the first place, but since I’d left home, the battle lines had been much more clearly drawn. What my dad failed to see, however, was that every time he stomped down the stairs, colourfully and loudly assassinated The Slink’s character or firmly removed her from his favourite armchair, he was only exacerbating his problem. As he upped the volume of his attacks, she upped the volume of her schizophrenia.

By the time of The Slink’s thirteenth summer, none of the one- and two-syllable letter formations traditionally employed to suggest cat sounds could any longer be used to evoke the noise that came out of her mouth. Even ‘RGGGAAAEEOWW!’ is a mere hint of the true gargling horror of it. As the owner of two unusually vocal cats, I knew what it was like to have a large portion of your daily conversations interrupted by cacophonous gibberish, but we were talking about something from another realm entirely here. There truly was no more delicate way of putting it: when I’d read Stephen King’s
Pet Sematary
, and the main character’s cat had come back from the dead, this was the noise I had imagined it had made.

My mum’s theory regarding The Slink’s habit of joining in with her phone conversations was rational enough. The Slink, she claimed, had made the quite obvious mistake of thinking that my mum was talking to her, rather than to the banana-shaped plastic thing with the buttons on it in the corner of the room. This didn’t, however, explain why, on the occasions when my mum
did
want to talk to The Slink, The Slink remained frustratingly mute, or retreated under a table to purr spitefully.

Now, with the new levels of amplification, the most elementary of my mum’s phone calls to a colleague or plumber had the potential for a myriad of mix-ups (‘No, there’s nothing blocked in the waste disposal, it’s fine; that’s just my cat! What? No, my
cat’s
not blocked in the waste disposal; she’s very happy . . . Oh yes, I’m sure; I can tell because she just spat at me’). Knowing The Slink’s habits, I had long since worked out how to circumvent such misunderstandings, but her howling sessions infused my mum’s endless worries about my low-level nomadic lifestyle with an extra serum of negativity. If she’d employed a shrunken, demented elderly relative to sit in the background and wail ‘Doom!’ every time she voiced one of her concerns, the effect could not have been more extreme. When, as a finishing touch, my dad made his customary contribution of bellowing ‘’EY? WHAT DID HE SAY, JO?’ and ‘TELL HIM TO WATCH OUT FOR NUTTERS!’ from a semi-adjacent room, the three-way assault often became a little overwhelming.

It didn’t require a therapist to deduce that my parents were worrying about the ways in which the removal vans and change of address stationery of my childhood had left their marks on my adult psyche: was I, like my dad and his goat, fated to have a long, troubled search for that ever-elusive greener grass? Admittedly, moving house had dominated my life for the last few years, and I’d not always made the best decisions. After paying rent in Trowse, mounting an expensive legal campaign against Devil’s Cottage’s former owners and taking fifteen months to make an honest sale of the place, property had hammered our bank account, leaving me taking on twice as much freelance journalism as I’d ever taken on in the past, and Dee adding more and more of our possessions to her eBay stock.

The beautiful rented house had been our saviour, but in the end it was more property, and property had made us harried and scrabbling. I could admit all that. But if it was lack of caution on which my mum and dad were dwelling, I felt their fears were superfluous, caution being one of the fundamental byproducts of having someone tell you to watch out for nutters at least once a week for the previous two decades. If, meanwhile, they sensed that history was starting to repeat itself, I could immediately point out a couple of obvious holes in their argument.

First, as much as some of my recent moves had been characterised by escape, I
liked
househunting. I liked the manner in which a would-be home could spark the imagination, I liked the sense of possibility offered by twenty minutes surfing on rightmove.co.uk. Moreover, I was married to someone who salivated at the prospect of refurbishing houses. The way the two of us saw it, we were only going to be on the planet for – if we were fortunate – seven or eight decades, and, unless our enthusiasm for cat ownership mysteriously dissipated, we probably weren’t going to be spending much of that time going on holiday to lots of different places, so why not spend it living in lots of different places, and getting the satisfaction of reshaping them in the process?

Secondly, when my dad had been searching for his perfect house, his primary objective had always been to find a place that was peaceful, secluded and ultra-countrified. By the time I’d been in Norfolk for three years, my primary objective was markedly different. When you boiled it right down, I wanted to find a place where my cats would be happy and safe.

When Dee and I pulled up next to a ‘For Sale’ sign, the first question we always asked each other, upon appraising the building beyond it, was, ‘How do you think it will suit the pusses?’ When you properly thought about it, there were a lot of domiciles out there that simply weren’t all that cat-friendly. Flats weren’t great, obviously, unless they were on the ground floor and had their own garden. Inner city places on main roads were a complete no-no. As for ‘sleepy’ village lanes, we’d witnessed the problems of those only too acutely. Houses abutting small country roads were better, but then there was the problem that the cars that came down them usually did so at high speeds, and not with enough frequency for an imprudent moggy not to become gung-ho. The cottage in Trowse had been a better set-up, but during those moments when my anti-nutter training was in overdrive, I couldn’t quite convince myself that The Bear’s trips up the track and over the lane wouldn’t end up with him being run over by a member of the Norwich and District Association of Master Doggers, late for a crucial meeting.