Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man (22 page)

‘Ye— Ju—,’ said Mark.

‘But he can bugger off he thinks I’m going with him. And besides, it’s too expensive. He’s better off staying here, aren’t you?’

‘Wuhhe—’ said Mark.

And then I took a proper look at him. What had I been thinking? It would be apparent to any vaguely observant moron that this man didn’t love cats. I had been so desperate for him to be what I wanted him to be that I hadn’t let myself notice the obvious signs: the droopy posture, the scratches on the forearms, the way he held the basket as if it, in itself, might be capable of puking on his Reebok trainers. This man was a picture of unhappiness. He would have rather been almost anywhere than here.

It was time to admit defeat. I slunk off back down the hall towards the Golf Show to collect my books and coat and say goodbye to Colin and the other organisers. I could have stuck around there for a little while longer, but it wasn’t really my scene either: my interest in golf was more about hitting balls than buying overpriced Day-Glo polo shirts and ogling blonde corporate promo girls. Why couldn’t there be a show that was just one big putting green, full of golf balls and free-roaming felines? The cats could even join in with the putting. It would add an interesting extra dimension.

I’d just started walking to the car and had drifted off into a reverie about this, and about how much of The Bear’s rigidly guarded dignity I could strip by giving him the catnip cigar in my bag, when I caught sight of the NEC Golf Show free-entry guest pass dangling against my chest and had a brainwave. I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me before. And then, before I knew it, I was running; hurtling down the hall, dodging in between burger-fed men clutching pitching wedges and women clutching cat igloos.

I found him just in time. Ten seconds more, and he would have slipped into the confines of the Purina One enclosure and possibly been lost to me for ever. It was Trish who noticed me first, and she seemed to know exactly what was coming. She smile-winced in my direction, but, sensing there was nothing she could to do hold on to him now, tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned around and saw me, the sag left his face. Hitherto hidden smile muscles went to work. He was a big man, probably not given to wanton public displays of emotion – the kind of bloke who probably took up golf because the other men in his five-a-side team said he should give it a go – but for that instant he was a rom-com heroine caught at the departure gate in the final reel.

‘If you hurry, you’ve still got about an hour before the Pringle stall closes,’ I told him, as I pressed the pass into his hands. I had felt his pain and, for a brief, unlikely moment, we were united. Then, handing an impractically large man-made mouse to Trish and softly mouthing ‘thank you’ in my direction, he began, very decisively, to walk towards freedom.

The Simple Life
 
 

In his poem ‘The Naming of Cats’, T. S. Eliot famously wrote that a cat must have three names. He defined these as ‘an everyday name’, a name that was more ‘particular . . . peculiar . . . dignified’ and the name the cat thinks up for himself, his ‘deep and inscrutable singular name’. I can see what he was getting at, and it’s hard to doubt the nomenclature expertise of someone who came up with cat monikers as timelessly brilliant as Skimbleshanks and Macavity, but I think many cat owners would agree with me when I say that he underestimated somewhat severely in his calculations.

What, for example, about the special name that you only call your cat when it has knocked a framed photo of your wedding off a shelf with its tail? Or the abbreviated version of your cat’s name that you call out the window when you realise that the moniker you have given it in your flight of early twentieth-century poetic whimsy (‘Shimpletybumwhisker!’) will make you look a bit of a twit in front of your neighbours?
⁷
Or the numerous other names that spring from some unspoken, instinctive place on a seemingly weekly basis?

Maybe I’m speaking as an extreme case here: as someone who works from home, and spends a potentially unhealthy amount of time communicating with his pets. But I don’t think I’m alone in having always given my cats five or more names each. By the time The Bear, for example, had entered his twelfth year on the planet, he could, for reasons not always entirely clear to even Dee and me, be referred to frequently as Pob, Boobear, The Snufflepig or Doink. And here we were talking about a rare cat who’d always seemed appropriately named from the start, completely innate in his Bearness. At the other end of the spectrum was Ralph, whose mood swings seemed to demand an ever-shifting identity and who, besides his ‘everyday name’ and his ‘deep and inscrutable singular name’ – Lord Gargon the Mighty, presumably – had, by the same point midway through 2006, been variously known as Prudence, Delawney, Dab Dab, Scruffles, Tabs, Tabber, Ralla, Ral Ral, Raffles, Tabitha, Scragpuss, Shagglepuss, Pu Pu, The Colonel and The Squiz.

You’d expect anyone who’d gone through a sex change to gain at least one new name, and some of Ralph’s extra names were simple abbreviations, but others seemed to come from somewhere more abstract; a not entirely dissimilar place, I suppose, to the one from which all language originally emerges. Asking us to pinpoint the exact date when we first used them would be as impossible a challenge as asking a person to pinpoint the hour when they got their first grey hair or eye wrinkle. Why and when had we started calling Shipley ‘Black Mouse’? We couldn’t tell you. We just knew it had felt right.

You can evaluate this behaviour one of two ways. Either it says a lot about the personality that a cat owner projects onto their pet, or it says a lot about the way a cat will throw off the shackles and forge its own inexorable identity, whether its owners like it or not. A child will often grow into its name (and I speak as a case in point here), but a cat will invariably transcend it. Much of this transcending will be done in the first two years of its life: the period that, according to popular pusslore, is supposed to count as the equivalent of twenty-four years of human development, before a cat starts maturing at a more sedate four years for every person year.

We felt we’d done a pretty good anticipatory job with Bootsy, whose name emerged as much out of Dee’s hopes for the spunky, funky character she would become as from the hints of moxie she’d displayed at the RSPCA. Her intellectual development, however, had been frighteningly, wrongfootingly rapid. Either that, or her initial getting-to-know-you period, when she’d been clingy and meek, had been one great big, carefully planned act of subterfuge.

Back when she’d been Ethel – a name that seemed anathema to everything about her character, even at a point when she barely seemed to have one – we’d been told by Gillian that she needed to be separated from her brother so she could ‘find a personality of her own’. And it was true: she’d come across as pretty humble and slight in those early weeks – empty, even. When she sneaked out onto our top floor balcony and mewled to be let back in, pathetically unable to make the three-foot jump needed for safe passage back to ground level, or when Dee found her hanging knotted up in the string to a window blind, only one struggling paw saving her from certain doom, her puniness of mind and body seemed pitiable.

‘When I look at her, it’s sometimes as if there’s nobody really in there,’ said Dee.

‘Perhaps it’s because when you’re that small, your brain isn’t actually big enough to contain a personality,’ I speculated.

What amazes me about the change in Bootsy’s character is that all the facts show that when it came, it came quickly, but my memory is of it being a very gradual thing. This in itself is further testament to the degree of skill with which she manipulated all seven of us. Lulled into complacent sympathy by her diminutive stature, we gave her special dispensation to stroll over the kitchen worktops, switched taps to a perfectly balanced trickle in order to give her delicate little insides a less stagnant class of irrigation, moved aside and let her at our food. When she continued not to grow, we chose to focus our attention on that, rather than her steadily improving right hook, her first-to-the-food-dish despotism or that new noise she had started to make when I stopped her climbing inside the dishwasher or Ralph got his sideburns in her personal force field – a noise that could make someone think about the roots of the word ‘sourpuss’ in a whole new way.

Dee and Pablo had been well and truly under her command from the start, but the other five of us soon fell like a line of dominoes. Certainly, it was annoying that she timed her babbling endorphin rushes precisely to coincide with the most difficult, brain-straining parts of my working day, and it was frustrating when – having excitedly chased the mouse cursor on my computer screen – she trod on my keyboard, deleting 300 words of text, but the sheer ludicrousness of getting mad with a creature this tiny and twisty-limbed made it impossible to see it through with a straight face.

As she jumped out on them like a tiny karate seal pup and saw off Janet, Ralph and Shipley, they must have known exactly how I felt. ‘I realise that by rights I should kick the crud out of you,’ their crinkled, bemused noses said, ‘but what exactly would I gain from it?’ When The Bear made the mistake of getting in her eyeline and she savaged him with a playgroup punch, he stood uncharacteristically still, slowly blinking, apparently impressed to have come across a feline manipulator who came up to his standards, if not quite up to his chin.

The observation that ‘people don’t own cats, cats own people’ is a moggy-watcher’s cliché, but Bootsy provided a new twist on the theme: she was a cat who owned people
and
other cats. A name like ‘Bootsy’ seemed to cover her behaviour to an extent, but there were times when nothing less than ‘The Pewter Generalissimo’ would suffice.

I’m sure that somewhere in her walnut-sized brain she had convinced herself that without her, all seven of us would have all been out on the street, begging for our supper. Yes, I might have been able to go about my day-today business under the illusion that the seventies armchair that I’d rescued from the local tip and had reupholstered was my property, but we both knew that ultimately it was hers. Sure, Dee and I could try to stop her from going to sleep in the cleft on the top of it by covering it with an issue of
Grazia
or the
New Yorker
, and, when Bootsy pointedly nudged the magazines onto the floor with her bottom, we could try again, but we all knew who would triumph in the end. Equally, The Bear could convince himself that his favourite computer box – that same one that we’d caught the chicken in, with ‘Certified Reconditioned’ written on the side – was his very own ‘special place’, but he and Bootsy both knew that all she had to do was give the nod, and it would be hers indefinitely, to use for whatever purpose she pleased.

I’d seen a version of this before from The Bear himself, of course: the exaggerated fondness for cardboard and polystyrene, those big hurting pupils, that special way of sitting on your lap that slightly resembled the staking of a territorial flag, those kitchen worktop glances that were so powerfully suggestive of conspiracy involving you, him and some dubious canned tuna. Perhaps, in fact, in her first few ‘subdued’ weeks, Bootsy had been watching him and learning (‘Note to self: cat from original batch with biggest eyes and most weedy physique seems to be reprimanded more lightly than peers when digging his claws into sofa.
Interesting
’). In many ways, he was still the master, but, by having the cutesy appearance one might find on a cheap Christmas card or poking out of the pocket of an overindulged heiress’s mink coat, she had a physical advantage that he did not. It gave her a certain air of unpredictability. You could look at her hiding in a container filled with polystyrene beads and think, ‘Ah, isn’t that lovely?’ whilst simultaneously thinking, ‘I wonder if she has a miniature machine gun secreted in there with her.’

So who was the most intelligent out of the two? In terms of questions I spent too much time thinking about, this was right up there alongside ‘Who would win in an Ultimate Fighting Champion contest featuring my cats, Bagpuss and the cast of
Top Cat
?’ and ‘If my cats were the Rolling Stones, who would be whom?’ Most likely, they were very evenly matched, and the difference was not so much in the intellect itself, as in what it was striving for.

Clearly, they both Wanted It All but, if you overlooked their general fondness for liking things just so, they defined ‘All’ in sharply contrasting ways. For The Bear, it meant moments of undisturbed, frighteningly intense one-on-one affection, private sleeping quarters, space to cogitate and countless other, more enigmatic things. For Bootsy, it meant being a priority in every possible way. Going against all feline tradition, she had even trained herself to be non-nocturnal, just so she could spend the maximum amount of time keeping her eye on Dee and me – or, rather, spend the maximum amount of time making sure we were keeping our eyes on her.

I can see how, in the human tabloid world, such an addiction to attention can be destructive, but when you’re a pygmyish grey cat with cute boss-eyes and Bambi legs who can’t get enough strokes and cuddles, there really is no downside to it. When guests came to our house, the plaudits flooded in, and Bootsy was only too happy to accept them.

‘Oooh, I’d like to put her in my handbag and take her shopping!’ said our friend Grace.

‘She’s like a toy cat!’ said Phyllis the postwoman.

Even my dad – usually so reluctant to give his time to a creature so obviously domesticated – could not help taking an interest. ‘SHE’S SORT OF EXPENSIVE-LOOKING, ISN’T SHE? MAKES YOU WONDER WHY PEOPLE DON’T GET UNUSUAL-LOOKING CATS AND MAKE THEM MATE TO MAKE MORE EVEN MORE UNUSUAL-LOOKING CATS.’

‘Good point,’ I said. ‘You should suggest that to some cat breeders some time. I’m sure they’d be very interested.’

‘HEY?’ he said, suddenly distracted by a sparrow hawk passing by the window.

For my mum, Bootsy presented no small quandary. On the one hand, she’d fallen in love with her at first sight: she was exactly the kind of physically delicate, sociable cat she’d always wanted, and probably wanted more than ever now, with The Slink’s feline dementia becoming more obstinate by the day. On the other hand, when she looked at her, she obviously didn’t just see an adorable, boss-eyed companion; she also saw a downy-grey stopwatch displaying the time still left for her to be provided with grandchildren.

She’d always been a calm person, consistent in her opinions, but observing her getting acquainted with my two newest cats was probably the nearest I’d ever get to watching one of my relatives fighting a battle with a split personality. ‘Oh, please can I take her home?’ she would say, stroking Bootsy, before quickly countering with, ‘I don’t know how you can keep the house clean with so many of them!’ ‘Isn’t that sweet, the way his tongue keeps sticking out?’ she would chuckle, appraising Pablo, before hitting back frowningly with, ‘Six really is too many, you know!’ I might have put up an argument, had she not been doing such a sterling job herself.

Dee and I had both entered our thirties by now and neither of us had felt the urge to have children – even if we had felt it, our lives had been so chaotic for the last five years there probably wouldn’t have been time to properly consider it. However, we had to face up to the fact that, among our friends, we were now in the minority, and that our recent feline expansion had socially distanced us from many of them. I’d always thought of myself as being fairly comfortable around kids, but as we went to visit yet another little bald miracle and the onslaught of nappy talk began, I found that I needed to keep a strict mental checklist, in order to maintain standards of etiquette. This included such key pointers as: