The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (3 page)

There were those – Dee being amongst them – who’d suggested in the past that what Shipley really needed was the cat version of Borstal, or at least National Service, but I preferred to believe that he was mis understood. Following me around and profanely assassinating my character was just his way of telling me he needed love. All anyone had to do was pick him up and turn him upside down and he was putty in their hands. This was a view shared by my neighbour, Deborah, who adored him.

‘Shipley came over again this morning,’ she would tell me. ‘He used some pretty awful language and had some very hurtful things to say to me, but we had a cuddle anyway. He seemed OK after that.’

It was fine for
Deborah, her husband David, and me: we were humans, and knew how to turn Shipley from a grade-one gobshite into a purring lovebundle in ten seconds flat. If you were a fellow feline, though, especially one of a quiet or geriatric disposition, and didn’t have the physical capability to turn him upside down, having him constantly in your face talking trash must have been quite tiresome. Ralph, who was so strong he probably
could
have turned him upside down if he’d really wanted to, suffered his tomfoolery, but when the avalanche of attitude got too much would assert his dominance by calmly bashing Shipley’s head against the nearest hard surface. The Bear, who abhorred all straightforward forms of violence, did his best to keep out of his way. Janet had once welcomed his advances, in a boisterous way, but now would often slink irritably away into a quiet corner.

Snow arrived the following month, which was a shame, because, for the previous few weeks, taking Mary’s advice, I’d been deliberately neglecting to clear up the sick Janet had deposited outside the back door. This had resulted in a bet with Mary and Will: my £10 said that some remnant of the sick would still be there at Easter. I was genuinely intrigued to know long a heap of sick could survive on its own in the wild. My initial reason for leaving the sick, however, had been my desire to meet a fox, then to possibly become friends with it, learning to take the good with the bad and to overlook the flaws in its personality, such as, say, the fact that it liked to eat other animals’ puke.

It had been a
while since I’d had a regular local fox. You had to go back a full decade, when Janet had befriended one in the communal garden of my old flat in south-east London. This was a truly sorry-looking creature, about as near as a real fox could come to looking like an empty fox costume that had been left in a gutter, but Janet would sit happily alongside it on the lawn for long periods, simply watching the day go by. To me this always seemed an impressively non-ageist gesture from a cat who was in the prime of life and could easily have won the respect of far more robust, up-and-coming alpha animals, if he’d wanted to.

These days Janet had a lot more in common with that old fox, who had no doubt long since trotted off to the great den in the sky. I still sometimes heard Janet outside, nobly defending the house from intruder cats, but his spine felt weak when I stroked it and he was far more skittish than he’d ever been, especially at mealtimes. Sometimes he’d hang back and not eat at all. I wished I could have explained to him somehow that I was giving him the pills for his own good. Towards the close of 2010, ‘I give you these because I love you and I don’t want you to die’ was probably top of the list of sentences I would have liked to be able to translate into felinese for my cats – above even such other classics as ‘Please stop hurting me with your eyes’ and ‘It’s a carrot. You wouldn’t like it.’

Janet had always
seemed less keen than The Bear, Ralph or Shipley to impress his eccentricities and hang-ups on me: if it is possible for a cat to be angst-ridden – and I think it is – that was a trait he’d been spared. When you compared him to The Bear, though, what you saw was the cat world reversing all the clichés you’d ever heard about worry acting as an ageing device. At thirteen, Janet was the younger of the pair by three years, but The Bear, who’d looked not unlike a wizened Gremlin when I’d first known him, now appeared far more youthful.

‘How old do you reckon he is? Go on, have a guess!’ I’d encourage people who were meeting The Bear for the first time.

‘Five?’ they’d say, more often than not. ‘Six? Definitely not more than eight.’

I had to face facts, though: I lived with two elderly cats, and two others who were well into middle age. At the end of January, I took the second oldest for his regular blood test at the vet’s. The new vet, who had a strong Swedish accent – all the vets who’d ever looked after my cats seemed to have strong regional accents – said Janet had lost a little weight but that it was probably nothing to worry about. As I drove home from the surgery, the rain bucketed down and washed the snow off the streets. By that afternoon, the last remaining slush had gone from the path near the back door, but, amazingly, the vomit was still there. Except now it had a green tint around its edges that seemed to be oozing outwards, and a cat – probably Shipley or Ralph, the resident mousers – had left a couple of rodent corpses next to it. These foxes were really missing out on a treat now. Where on earth were they?

Since becoming
a single person with these cats, I found that my life could be viewed from two different angles. From Angle One, I was still young(ish), with none of the financial or emotional trauma of children from a previous relationship, had a nice house of my own, in a very beautiful part of the country, and a job I loved (I COULD DO ANYTHING!). Then there was Angle Two: I had little money, having bought my partner out of a mortgage, the two industries in which I earned a living – publishing and journalism – were in crisis, and I spent a lot of my days cleaning up small dead animals and looking after a bigger, poorly one, whose condition severely limited how long I could spend away from home (I COULDN’T REALLY DO THAT MUCH, IF I WAS COMPLETELY HONEST!).

In the three months that the sick had been present I’d swung from being a breezy member of the Angle One camp significantly towards the Angle Two school of thought. The rural winter had begun with an enchanting kind of darkness, but now the weeks had begun to drag and it felt more engulfing. My dad – who’d broken his spine thirteen months previously – was unwell. It was starting to feel like such a gargantuan aeon since I’d been in love that I wondered if it would ever happen again. I’d never had more friends who were ill or out of work. And, to compound all this, in early February, while DJing at a bar in Norwich, I’d burned a sizeable chunk of my hair off by setting fire to it on a tealight candle.

It’s a difficult
one, setting fire to your own hair by accident. First of all there’s the fact that you lose some of your hair, but there’s also the fact that, if you’re in company while it happens, you have to put on a brave face and be kind of jovial about it. I’d laughed in front of strangers and friends as, bending down to find the groove marking the beginning of ‘We’re An American Band’ on a Grand Funk Railroad album, in a booth illuminated only by that tealight, I’d begun first to sizzle and then to slap my own head furiously to put out the blaze. I’d continued to chuckle and joke about it for the next hour, as I wandered around with my own brand new signature smell. But, later, when I examined the damage in the mirror, I was horrified to find a considerable portion of the hair on the front of my head gone. I began to regret all those times I’d laughed at Janet for catching his tail on a candle or joss stick.

It was with this in mind, as well as a general mission to make him more comfortable and happy at mealtimes, that I headed to the pet shop down the road the following day and bought him some Applaws – a cat food so upmarket it’s slightly surprising that it doesn’t come with its own croutons and miniature bag of parmesan. He wolfed this down enthusiastically, then sat beside me on the sofa, purring loudly, though if pushed I would probably say he was purring more at me than with me: his way of saying, ‘Now, see: how do
you
like it?’

The day after
that, I got up late, having travelled down to London and back in the evening. For the journey I’d worn a smart, wide-brimmed hat, which covered my frazzled patch. A couple of friends had complimented me on the hat, but I’d also seen a small child in my train carriage look across at me then ask her mum a question about a circus. If I was being honest, I had my doubts about whether it was a look I’d stick to on a permanent basis.

As I emerged from the bathroom, wincing as I caught sight of my frazzled patch in the mirror, I heard a loud, wrenching sound from a couple of rooms away. I would compare it to the sound of a long-unoiled door being ripped from its hinges, yet it was too animal and visceral for that.

I hurried into the living room and saw Shipley standing up, alert, looking in the direction of the staircase that led to the lower floor of the house. I think, even then, that I knew, because I approached the stairs in a wide, cautious circle. To a bystander it probably would have looked like I was preparing for the world’s most apprehensive high jump. My thoughts weren’t clear or ordered, but perhaps there was a part of my brain that wondered if the noise had come from a creature brought in by the cats. Shipley had clearly been sleeping before he heard it, though, and Ralph, the other homicidal maniac, remained fast asleep on the top floor. I turned the corner onto the stairs and found Janet slumped awkwardly across two of them.

He looked deflated, like a furry cat balloon, and as I ran to him and held him I saw the last glimmer of life fade from his eyes. A small trickle of blood seeped from his mouth onto the stair, and I gently lifted his paw, asking myself if he could be in some kind of temporary paralysis, but I knew – even though I’d never previously been with anyone, pet or human, at the moment of death – that he’d gone. He had suffered a heart attack, and the best thing I could say about it was that he clearly did not have to endure for long whatever terrible pain had wrenched that noise from him.

The summer before
last, when Dee and I had been dividing our possessions, I’d had a recurring nightmare in which I buried an old black cat, unaccompanied, in the rain. I’d told her about the nightmare, and she’d assured me that it was something I’d never have to do. Janet had been Dee’s cat long before she’d known me, so, having wrapped his body in a blanket, the first thing I did was call her. But there was no answer. I left her a tearful voicemail, explaining what had happened to Janet.

As it turned out, she did not reply until that evening. When she did, with a voicemail of her own – I was driving at the time, on my way to meet Katia and our friend Jamie, who had offered to buy me a consoling drink – I was surprised that her message, while sympathetic, did not sound more upset, or particularly inviting of a return call. But I rationalised the situation. During our first few months apart, I’d missed our other two cats, Pablo and Bootsy, terribly. Every time I saw the cover of the hardback edition of the first book I’d written about my cats, they were there, staring adorably and wonkily out at me, but they were far away, and it was highly likely I’d never see them again. To mentally remove myself from them had been a matter of survival. I’m sure Dee had done the same with the other four. She lived more than a hundred miles away now, and our existences had become entirely separate.

When my second
childhood cat, Tabs, was run over, in 1986, my dad had sprung into action and protected me, making sure I was locked inside the house as he took her body from the side of the road and buried her in the garden. In a way, when one of our animals dies in a vet’s surgery, the vet performs a minor version of the role my dad played that day: they’re parents, for just a few minutes. But when a cat dies at home, we’re alone – even more so when we live on our own, and none of our closest friends are within twenty miles of us. I can honestly say that in the next two hours I felt more isolated than I had in my entire life. I wondered about going over to see Deborah and David next door, who’d both loved Janet and had even recently shot a home video of him on their decking, running away from a pheasant. But they would probably both be at work. ‘Should I call the vet?’ I’d wondered when I found Janet. ‘No,’ I chided myself. ‘That would be ridiculous.’ What did I expect them to do? My local surgery didn’t have paramedics, or its own ambulance. I called my lovely mum, who was terrific and calmed me down, even though, being several counties away, she probably felt a bit helpless herself.