The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (14 page)

There were, however, two large flaws in our thinking. First, there was Andrew’s ability, while fairly loud in exiting the house, to enter it with enormous stealth. Due to these entrances I imagined him with tiny jewel thief’s gloves on his paws, easing the catflap gently shut behind him with a grimace of pained concentration on his face. Only if the house was utterly silent and our antennae were on full alert would we hear him arrive. This was a big ask in what was a loud and rather grouchy building. The mere clink into gear of my central heating often sounded like a goblin had done something unmentionable to a robot in the spare room and the robot had found the experience surprisingly enjoyable. How were you expected to listen out for an experienced cat burglar in that kind of environment? We were asking for almost impossibly tranquil circumstances: no Ralph meowing his own name, no Ralph snoring, no Shipley – now back to full fitness, with a personal volume control that once again went all the way up to eleven – telling people to piss off, no watching TV, no ducks outside having heated discussions about duck things.

Second, we lived
in a house with two catflaps, the second having been installed on the top floor a few years earlier to give Ralph and Pablo more chance of entering and exiting the house without crossing claws. If Gemma and I blocked the top entrance, Andrew was swiftly down to the other one, and its ‘in only’ lock function was no match for a cat who had been surviving on his wits for more than year. Many, many co-ordinates had to be in place, and we weathered six weeks of near misses before, finally, the three of us found each other frozen in a stand-off in the kitchen, like hoodlums with raised guns in the closing scene of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I moved slowly towards Andrew and, as if in defeat, he accepted a gentle rub on the head. His fur had a rough quality to it, similar to Pablo’s in the early days of his retirement from feral life. His ears were spotted with even more scabs and cuts than I’d expected, and he gave off a rather pungent odour. Upon inspection, his standard man parts were, as we suspected, very much intact. He didn’t purr, but seemed to enjoy the contact, and made no attempt to run.

‘Definitely a
Sven,’ said Gemma, joining in with the head rub.

We left Andrew-Sven in the small glassed-in room on the top floor of the house. The thinking behind this was that lots of windows would make him feel less like he was being incarcerated. The next morning, I was touched to find that he had moved from the chair where I’d left him into the wicker cat igloo so disdained by the other cats. This, I told myself, is what you get from a cat who’s known hardship: a proper, non-complacent appreciation for items of furniture that have been built and purchased specifically with his or her comfort in mind. ‘Andrew!’ I called, and he woke up rather slowly, as if from a long deep sleep for which his body had been yearning for years.

Later that morning, in the vet’s waiting room, Gemma and I continued to try out names.

‘Gordon!’ I called to Andrew.

‘No way,’ said Gemma. ‘Not trustworthy enough. Bob!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I see Bob as more of a tabby name.’

‘Colin! Rameses! Ethelbert! David! Wulfric! Don! Ken! Benjamin Netanyahu!’

‘You’re being ridiculous now. Actually, Ken’s not bad.’

As Andrew-Sven-Ken sat
on the vet’s examining table, we continued.

‘Roy! Pierce Brosnan!’ cried Gemma.

‘Grant! George!’ I called.

‘Yes!’ replied George, the Californian vet, looking a little startled.

‘Sorry! We were just trying out names for the cat.’

‘Oh, I see,’ George said, clearly relieved that I didn’t want him to sit on my knee while I kneaded the skin at the back of his neck.

George broke the news that Andrew had severe ear mites, for which he would need a regular dose of treatment, as well as flea treatment and worming tablets, and a test for feline AIDS. Add this to the price of his neutering, and I was paying close on two hundred pounds that I didn’t possess for the welfare of a strange cat whose future with me was by no means guaranteed.

Herein lies one of the reasons a vast number of cats are given away, particularly in the current economic climate. It’s easy to picture cat ownership, unthinkingly, as a loose, inexpensive contract between you and a freelance employee: sure, you need to buy food, but everything else kind of takes care of itself, doesn’t it? It’s possible to be blinded by the seeming invincibility of kittens and forget that a cat’s health is your responsibility too, and it requires its own monthly stipend, whether in the form of pet insurance or a fee allocated for future health mishaps. As a cat owner who is not made of money, at some point in the future it is likely that you will stand in a vet’s surgery and ask yourself the question, ‘Can I afford to pay for this?’ Then, if you’re a decent person, you will ask yourself the natural follow-on question, ‘Can I afford
not
to pay for this?’ I knew what I was getting myself into with Andrew when we captured him and took him to the vet’s: that there was every possibility that, after he’d been through his cat MOT, he might escape or be bundled off to live with my mum and dad, or with someone else entirely. So – just as I had done a few months previously, when Shipley had been so ill – I told George to give him the works.

‘Have you
thought that maybe Andrew is Chip?’ I asked Gemma, on the way home.

‘You mean Sven? Noooo. Chip is very different. He’s much lankier, more spoilt. I’m beginning to think he’s a bit of a prat actually. Maybe we shouldn’t adopt him after all. He’ll be OK. Everyone warms to Chip at first, until they get to know him. He always lands on his feet.’

That evening, having brought him home again in his new testicle-free state, we finally agreed on a name for Andrew that we both liked: Graham. It was a moniker that had all the trustworthiness of Ken but also brought to mind the wearing of a quality wool cardigan. A Ken, I felt, might have an intrepid side, a list of outdoorsy life goals he’d want to tick off on his bucket list, but a Graham would ultimately be happiest at home in front of a fire. I didn’t actually
have
a fire any more, as I’d paid an angry builder a few years ago to knock down the wall that my house’s chimney was attached to, but we could cross that bridge when we came to it. The first thing was to see if Graham liked living here.

The following
morning we received the good news that Graham was not FIV positive. This seemed to confirm that we’d finally found a fitting name for him. You sensed that a Graham would not be the kind of cat who slept around or abused drugs, and, if he did have occasional moments where he let his libido get the better of him, he would be careful to take the necessary pre cautions.

I took a few snaps of Graham with my cameraphone over the next couple of days and, if you overlook the one showing him freaking out and trying to find a secret passageway to freedom behind the coats hanging up near the front door, he appears quite content in all of them. On his first night, Shipley and Ralph had slunk casually into his room and each had an exploratory sniff of him, but they otherwise continued to appear indifferent to his presence, and he to theirs. The Bear had merely stared at him soulfully through the frosted glass of the doorway, like some grief-stricken black owl.

Andrew’s escape, on the third night, was entirely down to my complacency and overeagerness for him to be ‘ours’. We’d let him explore the rest of the house, and he’d not seemed to be in any rush to get anywhere else, so I’d suggested that we unblock the catflaps. Gemma thought this might be premature, but I reasoned that, if we didn’t unblock them, we would be plunged back into a dark, archaic pre-catflap world of repeated door openings. When you have catflaps, it’s all too easy to forget the miserable, minute-by-minute toil necessary in such a world. Nobody ever asked the question ‘Who Let the Cats Out?’ in a pop song because the answer is obvious: it was the same person who let them in again two minutes later, and out again two minutes after that. Doors are a classic example of that ‘I hate this – it’s fucking great!’ mantra that seems to be part of the permanent internal monologue of all cats. Cats hate doors for the opportun ities doors deny them to do exactly what they please, but they love them in equal measure, due to the opportunities they present to make humans their snivelling slaves. I knew, given the opportunity, that Ralph, Shipley and The Bear would be no different.

As it was, I had
only moved the boxes and chairs with which I’d blocked the catflaps. I hadn’t even progressed to stage two, the unlocking of the flaps themselves, and Graham was on the case. The second Gemma and I turned our backs, he was down to the bottom flap and had jemmied the lock, the mellow persona evident in the preceding forty-eight hours suddenly looking like a very clever act. Then he was out into the cool evening air, the catflap swinging on one hinge in his wake. A distant duck quacked on the lake beyond as if laughing at my foolishness.

I looked at Gemma. ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

‘He’ll be back,’ she said.

‘Raaaaaaaalph!’ said Ralph.

In view of what
he’d been through, it was probably quite surprising that Graham came back at all, let alone within a couple of days. If I had been homeless, and a kind stranger had taken pity on me, then put me in a glorified cage and taken me to a boxy building on a business park and had my testicles removed, I’d have made it my mission, after escaping, to put myself as far away from them as possible, and to return for ice-cold revenge, in the dead of night, long after the misdeed had slipped their mind. Instead, Graham simply made his returns more stealthy than ever, always arriving when we were in bed, shooting out the cat door the second he heard Gemma’s footsteps or mine. Once again, the ‘in-only’ lock function proved no obstacle for his dextrous paws, and the one time I reached the catflap before he had chance to work the lock, he merely smashed it to pieces. Sitting next to it clad only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, I felt a new kind of forlornness: not just for the new catflap that would soon be added to Graham’s ever-increasing bill, but because there was absolutely no way to explain what I’d done to him. I’m sure Shipley and Ralph had been feeling a little sore with me when they’d got home from neutering too, but I’d already built up a trust with them beforehand.

Sitting on that
cold tiled floor, with another of Ralph’s giant hairballs not six inches from my bare feet, I had one of those occasional moments of revelation, where you step outside yourself and realise just how far you’ve come from the person you once were. I thought of the thirteen-year-old me fantasising about playing on the right wing for Aston Villa; of the sixteen-year-old me convinced that his future would take place on the lush green fairways of the professional golf tour; of the twenty-something rock journalist me having a pepper-eating competition with the Foo Fighters or watching former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash break off from an interview with him to stand on his hotel bed and play air guitar. Was this really what I had been reduced to as I approached my thirty-seventh birthday: a man sitting on a cold tiled floor at 1 a.m. in old, severely elastic-deficient pyjama bottoms, who, instead of buying the new clothes that he badly needed, paid for random, strange cats to have their balls removed?

One rare glimmer
of hope occurred about three days later, when I looked out the window at dusk to see Ralph and Graham curled up on separate deckchairs down on the patio. I knew Graham would run away if I attempted to catch him, so I left him there. Half an hour later, when I looked again, he was gone. As Gemma said, perhaps it was a sign that he just needed time, and would come back after all. That was, however, the last sighting for several days.