Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (20 page)

Coming out of my reverie, I stepped gingerly into the run and offered a tentative couple of arms in Raffles’s direction. Languidly, he stepped into them, then began working on my shoulder with his paws, which would have been extremely pleasant, if I hadn’t come out in a rush and left my chainmail suit hanging on the chair next to my wardrobe.

‘Oh dear,’ said Dee to Gillian. ‘I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’

If we had been buying a car, this was the point where Dee and I would have moved away into a quiet corner and begun to debate the merits of the two models we had been perusing, and whether the salesman was being straight with us. I would have argued for the added boot size and masculine appearance of the Ford Cougar, Dee would have made a case for the cuter and more economical Nissan Figaro, and we would have met somewhere in the middle or, more likely, decided to put off our purchase until another day, then forgotten about it altogether.

The problem was that getting a new cat was so much easier than that. Gillian had little to gain from lying about how old Ethel (four months) and Raffles (ten years) were and the £40 donation fee wasn’t going to be an issue. Dee and I made a brief pretence of huddling together for a hushed discussion, but, really, what more was there to consider? I had found a cat I loved. Dee had found a cat she loved.

An hour later, we arrived home with one very overstuffed cat basket. Dee had recently read a book by a cat behaviour expert which suggested that the introduction of new cats into a household should be staggered, and since Ethel was due to be neutered at the RSPCA in two days’ time, we decided to wait a few days to collect her, giving Raffles a chance to mingle with The Bear, Janet, Ralph and Shipley.

I’ve seen enough cats getting used to new homes now to be able to tick off the four inevitable stages of settling in: the random sniffing; that bit where they start checking all the walls, as if believing there’s a safe or hidden entrance behind them; the sheepish dart under the bed. The creeping emergence three hours later, as bowel functions and appetite triumph over nerves. Raffles, however, was an anomaly. Never, even after a routine trip to the vets, had I seen one of my pets stroll quite so confidently out of his basket. Within a minute, he was sitting proudly on the arm of the sofa, licking a paw and nonchalantly surveying his territory. If there had been a thought bubble above his head, it would probably have said, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I like this in the suede, but personally my taste runs more to leather.’

‘Raffles!’ I said, in my deepest voice, sensing he was not the kind of cat to be treated with kid gloves. ‘Come here.’

I patted my knee, and he made his way over to me in a fashion that reminded me of the overfed boss from a mafia film I’d just seen. When I called cats that I owned and they came to me this instantaneously, it was invariably either because I was holding a meat-based snack or they had muddy paws and required a surface upon which to blot them off, but here there seemed to be no ulterior motive.

Again, the kneading started. I was glad that the surface protecting me was corduroy this time, but I was a bit worried about its proximity to some of the more tender parts of my anatomy. I was used to this sort of thing from Ralph – the main difference being a) that Ralph’s claws had little in common with Freddie Kruger’s, and b) the accompanying noise. What was coming from Raffles’s mighty muzzle probably passed for a purr of fair-to-middling strength, but only in a magical meaty land where Iams grew on trees and cats were as big as buses.

Aided by the contrast provided by my other cats, I now began to get a further sense of Raffles’s enormity. Shipley was the first to come and see what all the fuss was about. The expression on his face was the most flabbergastedly human of a life that had already contained many astonishingly person-like moments. If I’d ever thought cats were too cool to do double-takes, I now realised I was wrong. For Shipley, who had always been possessive towards me, what he saw before him perhaps constituted the ultimate insult: not just a bigger cat at large in his domain, working his claws steadily in the direction of his owner’s groin, but a bigger cat that looked quite a bit like him, only with an extra third of muscle and heft.

Raffles’s movement was a decisive one that managed to combine speed with a look of slow-motion laziness. In a panicked flick and a nervous flurry, Shipley was out the cat-flap and cowering on the patio.

Raffles returned to my feet, and looked up at me. His sleepy eyes said, ‘’T’was nothing, fine sir, but any rewards gratefully accepted nonetheless.’

‘I’m sure things will calm down soon,’ said Dee, after she’d arrived in the room to find out what the commotion was.

She was right: by 11 p.m. that night, things had calmed down considerably. This was mainly because our house now only contained one cat. When we had gone to bed, there had been none of the usual coaxing and bribing that it took to get our pets on the bed on the occasions we really wanted them there, none of the usual celebrity tantrums or walkouts when we adjusted the duvet an inch or two beneath them. Raffles simply strolled in casually behind us, then made his way onto the bed, where he lay, vibrating deeply, looking up at us with unbridled love.

‘Where the hell is everyone?’ asked Dee.

Getting up for a glass of water, I took a peek outside onto the patio. Here I found four wide-eyed animals who had put aside their squabbles and vendettas, some of which stretched back years, to become united in fear and incomprehension.

There have been countless times when I have wished I could talk to my cats and explain the ins and outs of a difficult situation, but this was not one of them. If I had been able to speak meowese, what could I possibly have said? ‘That woman you think of erroneously as your mother had not been feeling well, so we decided that, because none of you were being particularly cuddly, we would get another cat who might be more cuddly. Yes, I know his head is twice as big as a 3-year-old child’s, but try to ignore the intimidation factor and look on the bright side. If you’re lucky and don’t get in his face too much he might even occasionally let you eat’?

Or maybe: ‘I am perfectly aware we already have three black cats, and you’re all very nice, and some would say that really is enough but it’s true: we got one more. Think of it as a homage. And please don’t think it’s because we don’t love you, because we do. Oh yes: one other thing. Did I tell you there’s another one arriving in seven days’ time? But she’s grey and very small, so you’ll probably be able to take out your frustration by pushing her around’?

Three days later, I did something that I thought I’d never do, and that I hope I will never do again, as long as I live: I returned a cat. There are the usual bonding and territory marking problems you get when adding to your feline family, and then there is outright tyranny, and Dee and I would not have been able to live easily with the knowledge that our out-of-control cat love – and, more specifically, my preposterous macho cat fantasy – had led us to alienate our gang of long-serving four-legged friends.

I gave Raffles a Raffles-size hug when I arrived back at the RSPCA with him, knowing that, two weeks later, I’d still have the chest scars to prove it. He didn’t look upset. He was a big man, and he could take rejection. But the bewilderment would surely kick in sooner or later, like that of a wrongly convicted prisoner who had been rescued from Alcatraz and been given his own Bel Air mansion with butler service, only to be hurled back into the clink, without explanation, as soon as he had made himself at home. He didn’t even get the privilege of being transferred to one of the more prominent runs. It was back to his old spot in the relegation zone – a place reserved for old cats and black cats, but primarily a place reserved for old black cats. I couldn’t shake my conviction that, in his big, stolid, philosophical way, he would spend the days that followed resting his comedy-sized chin on the edge of his treeless treehouse, wondering what he had done wrong. Leaving Kentford, close to tears, I made Gillian promise that she would let us know as soon as he had been rehomed.

Those three days had been difficult ones for all of us. Shipley hadn’t let his Mohican down past half mast the whole time, and Janet stuck his tongue out in a manner suggestive of utter incomprehension that there could be a black cat in the house more hulking than he was.

Ever since Phyllis had told us about ‘Teddy’ hanging about near the road, we’d been telling ourselves that she was talking about another, less well-behaved bearish black cat, but just before I’d finally given up trying to persuade everyone to come back into the house on Raffles’s first night, I’d seen a small black bottom make a telltale journey over the fence. The only sighting of The Bear in the sixty hours that followed was a flash of two big furious green eyes beneath the pampas grass. Most sad of all, perhaps, was the case of Ralph, who seemed to have fully shaken off last year’s summer affective disorder and had been enjoying the rainy late winter and spring. In a particularly chirpy mood the day after Raffles’s arrival, he somehow contrived to forget all about his new enemy’s presence in the house, and burst happily into the bedroom only to be cornered by a huge black mass of claws and dribble. In the past, we’d often called Ralph himself by the nickname Raffles. Obviously he didn’t know that he’d had his name stolen along with his territory – come to think of it, he probably didn’t even know he was called Ralph either – but it somehow seemed to highlight the aching ignominy all the more.

If Raffles had been a bad cat – a cat who behaved aggressively towards us, as well as towards his own kind, a decision could have been made much more easily. As it was, however, everyone was helpless. Ralph, Shipley, The Bear and Janet couldn’t help the fact that they suddenly had as much chance of getting a quiet sleep in our living room as they had of surviving in the jungles of Vietnam. Raffles couldn’t help the fact that he liked us so much that he wanted us completely to himself. And, as fond as we were of him, we couldn’t help the fact that such fondness could not be put above the more binding kind that has been developed with our pets over many years.

In just one way, perhaps, we could have made the situation very slightly easier.

In the flurry of Raffles’s arrival, Dee and I hadn’t had a chance to check our answerphone. It wasn’t until the following morning that we’d found the message from Dorothy, the woman at Suffenham Parva Cat Rehoming Centre, a few miles south of East Mendleham. This was in response to the enquiry Dee had made with them about their current residents before our trip to the RSPCA. It explained that they had a ‘beautiful ginger boy’ who was a little bit timid, but extremely keen on the company of other cats, and looking for a good home.

At such a juncture, most sensible people might have surveyed the four animals quivering outside their back door and the zoo-worthy exhibit languidly stretching its back legs in their living room and declared that enough was enough. But, Dee and me being Dee and me, we reached straight for the car keys.

‘It can’t hurt to go and have a look at him, can it?’ we asked. ‘Haven’t we always said that ginger cats have sunny personalities?’ we asked. We did not ask, ‘What if Raffles tears off his head and uses it as a pillow?’

Dorothy, from whose rambling Elizabethan house the Suffenham Parva Cat Rehoming Centre operated, had mentioned on the phone that Beautiful Ginger Boy had been found living in a derelict farmhouse with more than a dozen of his brothers and sisters. Before she rescued him, it had been the RSPCA’s intention to put him to sleep.

‘Of course,’ she thought to add, as she met us at the end of her drive, ‘you do have to understand that he is feral.’ I could see why she might not have wanted to mention the ‘f’ word until she’d got us captive. I’m sure I wasn’t in the minority of cat owners in viewing ferals in the same way as a protective parent might view a gang of hoodlums who regularly stole his or her offspring’s packed lunch. These were the feline outlaws who shunned my outstretched hand, left their scent on my pot plants and could almost certainly be held responsible for the lamentable state of The Bear’s right ear. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help them learn to love and be loved, more that I’d long ago come to the understanding that trying to do so would be as futile as attempting to teach a crab algebra.

‘Of course,’ said Dorothy, ‘the thing about ferals that a lot of people don’t know is that most of them actually get on very well with other cats. They’re actually very easygoing. I’ve got eight of my own. I’m telling you, once you go feral, you don’t go back.’

Intrigued as I was to hear this, I can’t say that my first glance inside the cage in her garage went further towards shattering my preconceptions. The cat lurking there was undoubtedly ginger, and the acrid waft of testosterone that surrounded him pretty much confirmed he was a boy, but easygoing? And beautiful? Beauty was a hard thing to get a handle on, when an animal was this obviously petrified and underweight. Dorothy’s decision to hold his scruff and present him to us on his hind legs, so as to highlight his bulging eyes and protruding tongue, did little to detract from the aura of wildness.