The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (8 page)

Maybe I could find another house
like this, but it would not be easy. It was obvious to me that the main reason for the recent improvement in The Bear’s health and happiness was that he had gone seven years without moving house. He’d been forced to move umpteen times in his sixteen or so lives and had always loathed it, often staging magical disappearances just as contracts were exchanged or tenancy agreements were signed. I didn’t want to put him through that again. He’d shown early on in our friendship that he was a fiercely independent cat, perfectly capable of upping sticks if a situation wasn’t to his liking, but after his early vanishing acts, somewhere along the way he seemed to have put his complete trust in me to dictate his future. Because of that, it seemed the least I could do to make him my priority. But could I cope, in a house I couldn’t afford, needing more maintenance than I could manage?

One of the good things about hard physical work is that it makes you so tired you stop worrying about all these things, and that night, not long after my mum and dad and I stumbled in from the garden, I fell into a deep sleep. Andrew might have thumped down onto the conservatory roof in the early hours, but if he did, I was too comatose to be aware of it.

‘I’VE FED THE CATS,’ my dad told me the next morning, as I arrived in the kitchen. On the counter were three empty food sachets: three times as much as I normally gave The Bear, Shipley and Ralph in the morning as an addition to the biscuits in their dispenser. On the floor were a variety of dishes, only three of which were actually intended for cats. ‘THE BIGGER ONE OUT OF THE TWO BLACK ONES TRIED TO EAT THE OTHERS’ FOOD.’

‘Thanks. Yes, that
happens quite a lot.’

‘NOT THIS ONE.’ He pointed to The Bear, who was sitting on his favourite step stool, looking a little bemused. ‘HE’S A GOOD ONE. IS THAT THE ONE YOUR MUM WANTS? YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM TO US. I THINK I’VE LEFT MY CHOCOLATE UNDER THE CUSHION ON YOUR SETTEE. I HIDE IT FROM MYSELF UNDER SETTEE CUSHIONS SO IT’S FUN TO FIND LATER. SORRY IF I’VE MADE THE SETTEE STICKY.’

I inspected the coffee pot on the kitchen counter: in the bottom of it was a thick slick of coffee, suggesting that my dad had ground approximately the amount of beans I do in, say, a fortnight. I knew the caffeine wouldn’t make much difference to him. In the comic-book series, Asterix’s best friend Obelix has no need for the magic potion that Asterix’s tribe drink; having fallen into a cauldron of it when he was a baby, he has since been permanently under its spell. My theory had long been that something similar had happened to my dad in his childhood with an unusually large urn of coffee, meaning that he now operated permanently on the level that most people attain only after six or seven cups of the stuff.

‘I’VE BEEN UP SINCE FIVE,’ he said. My dad tells me he’s ‘BEEN UP SINCE FIVE’ a lot, but in this instance the information was superfluous. I already knew he’d been up since five, as I’d been up since five too, having been woken by the sound of him loudly clucking at next door’s chickens.

‘HAVE YOU SEEN THE GARDEN TROWEL ANYWHERE?’

My dad often drinks
whisky before bedtime, but this never seems to have any effect on him the next day, and he’s at his most garrulous early in the morning. I’m a morning person, but I’m slower to get my head together. When he stays over, I can sometimes find it a bit much.

‘CAN YOU PUT ROLLING NEWS ON THE TELLY FOR ME?’ he continued. ‘I ALWAYS WATCH ROLLING NEWS AT THIS TIME IN THE MORNING WHEN I’M AT HOME. EITHER THAT, OR I LISTEN TO SOME BLUES OR JAZZ REALLY LOUD. DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT WHAT MY MATE JEFF WOULD DO IN THE SIXTIES? AFTER A BATH HE’D PUT ON HIS ELECTRIC BLANKET AND LIE ON IT SMOKING AND LISTENING TO HOWLIN’ WOLF SONGS UNTIL HE WAS DRY. WHEN YOUR MUM FIRST CAME TO MY HOUSE I BORROWED PHIL DAY’S COLLECTION OF JAZZ LPS AND PRETENDED THEY WERE MINE. SHE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE. DOES THAT TOASTER WORK? I COULDN’T GET IT TO MAKE TOAST.’

This would all have been discombobulating enough, but seeing, in the middle of it, a small toad hopping across the kitchen floor in the direction of the cat biscuit dispenser, made it more so.

‘FOOKIN’ ’ELL,’ said my dad. ‘LOOK! IT MUST HAVE BEEN LONELY AND WANTED TO COME WITH US. I SAY, JO, COME UP HERE AND GER A LOOK AT THIS!’

As my mum – who’s always
been a great friend to amphibians – caught the toad in her hands, and I went to fetch my dad’s gardening loafers from the box in the hallway, The Bear continued to watch from his stool. I might have been mistaken, but his eyes looked even more saucer-like than usual. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but we normally have a fairly quiet life, don’t we?’ they seemed to be saying to me.

He stayed in position, while the other three of us gathered around the toad. ‘IF YOU PUT IT IN THE HALL IT COULD BE TOAD OF TOAD HALL,’ said my dad.

Later, when we’d placed the gardening loafers, complete with toad, in a quiet corner behind the house, my mum would recall that she’d checked the shoes thoroughly before leaving the previous morning, and found them empty. ‘It must have hopped back into them between then and when your dad packed the car,’ she reasoned. My dad had decided to garden in his trainers the previous day. Had he not done so, he would have discovered it earlier – perhaps in a way that, for him
and
for the toad, would have been more dramatic. Even so, we would have had the same dilemma: What do you do with a toad who’s 116 miles from home, even though the toad has become a friend of sorts, when you don’t really know much about the toad, and its wants and desires, and what really makes it tick?

All I can say, looking
back, is that we did what we thought best at the time. We had planned to spend that day out, and it seemed wrong to put the toad in the car or keep him locked up in the house. I knew, from my experiences at my very frog-friendly previous house, that Ralph, Shipley and The Bear had little interest in amphibians, and being back in the loafer gave the toad the choice: he could stay home, or he could explore his new environment. As it turned out, he decided to be brave. When we returned that evening, the loafer was empty, and it remained so the following morning, when my parents left. But I worried about him. Norfolk was culturally quite different to Nottinghamshire: life moved at a slower pace here and, especially towards the west of the county, there was a unique river system to contend with. What if he didn’t settle in, or found himself missing my mum and dad’s koi carp, Casper the friendly ghost cat, even the evil heron who liked to circle above the pond?

I’d expected
the area surrounding my house to be at least one animal lighter by now, but the opposite had happened. Both Andrew and the toad were now out there somewhere. Who knew if their future would be here, with me, or with my parents, or elsewhere? Maybe they had already met. I hoped, if they had, that their encounter had been amicable. I certainly knew Andrew was still around. A couple of fresh streaks of urine I’d found on the blackboard and my copy of Neil Young’s
After the Goldrush
LP served as confirmation. But I could deal with Andrew later. There was still plenty of work to do on that front.

‘What was that?’ my mum asked, the evening before they left, when he meowed throatily outside the living room.

‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘It’s just the wind. It sometimes makes that sound when it whistles through the hole in the conservatory roof.’

Dickie: A Very Special Library Toad

One snowy morning, Beverley, a librarian
due to retire in a few weeks and nursing a cynicism only exacerbated by recent government cuts to funding, goes to empty the drop box at the small town library where she works and finds a diminutive toad on top of a copy of
The Wind in the Willows
, which it appears to have been reading to keep its mind off the cold. ‘Some
people
,’ Beverley tuts, thinking that the toad has probably been abandoned by cruel owners who neglected to get their original family toad neutered. Despite having little previous experience with amphibians, she names the toad Dickie, and he soon becomes a well-known and well-loved character around the library, sitting on the shoulders of children as they read, splashing about in the sinks in the gents’ toilets and building a toad nest for himself in the back of the photocopier, using old, scrunched-up, unwanted copies of church newsletters. Dickie’s happy-go-lucky approach to life persuades Beverley to delay her retirement and reach an inner peace about her estrangement from her father, who ran off with the owner of a fish and chip van when she was seven.

Bartholomew and Me (and the Awkward Space Between Us)

One snowy night, Bartholomew, a cuddly
marmalade cat with ‘whiskers that won’t quit’, rolls up, as if out of nowhere, at the door of Kenneth, a lifelong bachelor who has never quite learned to love and has instead retreated to a tumbledown cottage on the North Devon coast and a solitary life of boatbuilding. Before Bartholomew arrives, for reasons largely down to a secret, repressed childhood trauma, Kenneth has begun to view wood with the affection that most people reserve for the living, and his few friends worry gravely about him. ‘What’s your name?’ says Kenneth, upon Bartholomew’s mysterious arrival. But Bartholomew doesn’t answer, since he is a cat, and therefore can’t speak English. Kenneth feeds Bartholomew some evaporated milk, and, with an almost human sigh, the feline beds down on the sofa for the night on an old blanket given to Kenneth by his beloved late grandma. The next day, Bartholomew leaves, and Kenneth’s life resumes in precisely the same fashion as before.

Smug Puppies

Three rescue puppies arrive in Britain from Afghanistan and proceed to heal a broken family. Unfortunately, the broken family gets irritated with their do-gooding ways and gives them away to a friend of the completely intact family who live next door but one.

John: A Pretty Sodding
Ordinary Owl

John, a snowy owl, moves in with Martha, a bereaved schoolteacher. Together, they set off on a road trip around America, visiting historical spots and meeting other birdlife. John, however, turns out to have very little personality, and mostly just stares off into space, or refuses to get out of Martha’s Honda Civic. Things reach crisis point when, faced with the world’s biggest giant redwood, all he can do is emit a pellet whilst looking shirty.

David, the Massive Satanic Goat

Jim, a writer who has has experienced success on the bestseller list with his books
Walking My Dog in North Yorkshire
,
Walking My Dog in South Yorkshire
and
Walking My Dog in West Yorkshire
, but a dip in sales with the fourth book
Walking My Dog in East Yorkshire and Some of the Parts of North, South and West Yorkshire I Didn’t Quite Get Around to Covering Before
, is persuaded by his publishers to buy a goat, solely so he can write a book about it. This is in preference to his early idea of buying a bird of prey and getting his family to teach it tricks, purely so he can write a memoir about it called
Our Kestrel Manoeuvres in the Dark
. Mayhem ensues, as he spends all of the advance he has received from his publishers on building a shed for the goat and goat-proofing his garden, falls out with his
editor, claiming it was all his fault, and then makes up with him, as they realise their arguments will contribute greatly to the narrative. Finally, while still having trouble with David’s size and the fact that everyone who meets him claims he has ‘Satan eyes’, it looks like his fortunes will turn around when he meets Marissa, a spellbinding, earthy fortune teller of gypsy extraction. But they don’t.