Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (12 page)

I’d pretty much fallen in love with Samson from the first moment he’d trespassed on our property, three years earlier, and there would have been a good chance I might have stolen him had I not been just slightly uncomfortable with the idea of depriving elderly widows of their life companions. Since those days, Dee and I had realised that, for the sake of our bank account and Samson’s gut, it was a good idea to put the biscuits on a different floor to our original cat flap, and Samson hadn’t been around so much, although I still saw him at Ruby’s house when I went there to swap books with her, or to pick her up before driving her to the occasional classical music recital in Norwich.

When Dee and I had moved into the Upside Down House, in 2004, Ruby had been the first neighbour to introduce herself to us and make us feel welcome. When I thought of the phrase ‘perfect neighbourhood’, the picture that came into my mind was essentially a dozen versions of her, trotting industriously along a quiet street, grey hair immaculately coiffed, umbrella in hand. Ruby, a former physiotherapist, was eighty-five when I first met her, but her hands, feet and mind were lively. She read
The Times
from cover to cover every day, expressing her dismay at the paper’s newfound obsession with celebrity, and at least one thick novel every week. Her husband had passed away over two decades earlier and her three sons lived far away, but her life was a full one, and I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone so frustrated by the limitations of old age.

Ruby raged with particular force against her failing hearing. This did not mean she conquered it, but you could tell she was having an almighty go at doing so.

‘Dee saw Samson over by our bins again the other day,’ I might say to her. ‘She was a bit worried about him crossing the road so she brought him over and put him in your garden.’

‘What? The black one? I wondered if that was yours,’ she would reply. ‘It comes over quite a lot.’

‘No, Samson,’ I would say. ‘He was across the road again.’

‘I’m sorry. This blasted hearing aid isn’t really working. Dreadful thing. Tell me again.’

‘Oh, sorry Ruby, I’ll speak up a bit. I said, “Dee saw Samson by our bins again the other day. She brought him back over the road, though, to make sure he’s safe.”’

‘OH, I understand now. Yes, well, it’s dreadful what they’ve done to the fountain. If I was the Petersons at number eighteen, I’d complain.’

Despite these occasional misunderstandings, an unlikely, not-quite-close daytime bond grew between Ruby and me. She was an octogenarian church group regular with a passion for Debussy and Marks & Spencer thermal wear. I was a thirtysomething bloke with unruly hair and stubble and a large collection of prog rock LPs. Yet, somehow, in our cats, we found common ground leading us to other topics.

Ruby was extremely good at keeping me up on local gossip, none of which she delivered maliciously. That some of this gossip was three decades or more out of date somehow added to its intrigue. I was absolutely scandalised, for example, to hear of a rumour that the hospital that had been next to my house’s to-be-built-on plot in the late 1950s had been closed down because ‘all of the doctors and nurses were having their wicked way with one another’. For Ruby, time had evidently not dimmed the impact of either this, or a more contemporary scandal – in 1973, I think she said it had happened – about a man at a local garden centre who, when out of his overalls, liked to wear his wife’s tights, knickers and lipstick.

As Ruby relayed this information to me, or interrogated me about my latest piece of journalism for her favourite newspaper, Samson was always in close attendance, sitting on one of our laps or on the Axminster in front of Ruby’s log fire, in a pose that brought to mind the phrase ‘Beached Mammal: Miscellaneous’. He was a model of placid gingerness, and it was owing to this that, when Dee and I decided to get our own ginger cat, we headed directly to the same rescue centre where Ruby had acquired Samson.

Pablo turned out to be a sunny simpleton, but Samson was something more: a simpleton who appeared to be permanently, hopelessly stoned. When you called or stroked him, he would look at you in apparent slow motion, with something that only bordered on interest, yet was not in any sense disapproving. He was a silent creature, but had he been talky, like Shipley, I’m sure an inordinate amount of his sentences would have ended with the word ‘dude’.

His only real concessions to animation were the fierce but well-meaning bites he would administer to his strokers. These must have been hell on Ruby’s hands, but she never reprimanded him for them, which meant the paper-thin skin over her knuckles was permanently covered in purple bruises. Another measure of her love for him was the state of her seating. Ruby’s big Georgian house never resembled the hideaway of an infirm person, always having an immaculate appearance and a fresh airy smell about it. The exceptions were her sofas and armchairs, which were so violently slashed, one might have imagined a special task force of inept policeman had recently cut them open in a drugs raid. I was well aware of what kind of damage sharper-clawed cats such as The Bear and Bootsy could do to my own sofas, but each of them would have had to buy their own Swiss Army knife and work non-stop for a month to have achieved anything even close to this.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of Samson immediately when I was trying to find a taker for the Panic Mouse. Maybe, because of his somnolence and sheer bulk, I unfairly wrote him off. The morning after I caught him playing with it, I excitedly told Dee that I had finally found a good home for it. But she explained that she had forgotten to tell me that, the day before, she had promised it to a work friend, Louise. I wanted to campaign on behalf of Samson, but I knew Louise and her boyfriend Daniel had recently acquired a new, playful, young stray kitten, Garvey, and stealing a toy from an orphan didn’t seem any more ethical than stealing one from a grown adult. I was also secretly confident that the Panic Mouse would be returned.

I saw Ruby a couple of times in the month after that: first when she asked me for a copy of my latest book, and then again, a couple of weeks later, when she and her friend Gaynor knocked on my door to tell me she’d lost Samson.

‘How long has he been gone?’ I asked.

‘Oh, at least three and a half hours now!’ replied Ruby.

I’d been known to start worrying myself into circles after as little as twenty-four hours without a sighting of The Bear, and always been told by Dee that I was overreacting, but Samson was clearly a more homely companion. I joined the search party, combing my house and garden, and alerting a couple of other neighbours, then, after a final look behind the back of our wheelie bin, where Samson had often been spotted in the past, loitering with a confused expression on his face, I headed over to Ruby’s to give her my glum news.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Gaynor, answering the door. ‘We’ve found him now. He’d gone to sleep under the duvet. He doesn’t normally put his head all the way under. Ruby’s gone up there for a nap with him now.’

I was away on work trips quite a lot in the time immediately after that, and there were no more sightings of Samson around the bins, or on the bottom floor of the house. Ruby was almost ninety, and had looked tired and been less talkative when I’d seen her, but it was an enormous shock to receive a phone call a month later from her son, Charles, announcing that she’d died. Ruby had only found out she had cancer a couple of weeks earlier, probably around the time Samson had done his disappearing act, but its progress had been swift. Having given Charles my commiserations and told him what a wonderful neighbour she’d been, my thoughts turned to Samson.

‘Oh. He’s still here,’ said Charles. ‘Moping about. Would you like to take him off our hands?’

When people ask me how I end up with so many cats, I often shrug and tell them, ‘I’m not sure. They just seemed to keep wandering in off the street.’ It’s an answer that’s served me well, and which manages to conveniently sidestep a large amount of flaws in my character, but it’s also a fabrication. To a greater or lesser extent I’ve sought out all of my cats. Had I lived in houses where strays had actually wandered in off the street, I might not even be writing this now, since my laptop would probably be so bunged up with cat hair the keyboard would no longer function.

Now I was facing a major test of the kind I’d managed to avoid. On one hand, how could I not want Samson to be part of my household? He’d had me at ‘meow’. Quite apart from the fact that he looked great on a sofa, his vacant, laid-back aura could, I felt, only have a calming influence on all eight of us. In my anthropomorphically inclined mind, I saw it as a little bit like having a Bodhisattva move into our spare room. But Dee and I had told each other that half a dozen cats was our absolute limit. Sometimes six could already feel like sixteen, and, with Pablo and Ralph’s race war continuing apace, it would surely be perilous to add another ginger element. Recently, both Pablo and Ralph had begun to spray drops of some form of dark orange substance around the cat flap. I couldn’t be sure, but instinct told me it wasn’t a special peach and rum punch they’d mixed on the quiet in the kitchen in happy unison. Much as I would like to deny it, were we to take on Samson, it’s possible that the question ‘How much piss is in our basement?’ would only fully be answered by another question: ‘How much piss is in our cats?’

A person might imagine that by writing about cats professionally, he would suddenly be in the know regarding people who were in the market for a new cat. In fact, the opposite is true: I tend to be
very
in the know about cats needing homes, but rarely aware of anyone willing to offer them one. Dee and I thought long and hard about potential new owners for Samson, and made a few enquiries, but came up with a blank. We’d just about started to make plans to rearrange our domestic surroundings specifically to cater for ginger-tabby apartheid and abandon ourselves to a future of shredded sofas when Dee remembered Louise and Daniel.

It was a long shot. Louise and Daniel owned two cats, Ellie and Daisy, but until a few weeks ago had owned three. Garvey was, in their words, ‘a gorgeous long-legged tabby and white kitten’ who’d wandered in to the technical college where Daniel worked and immediately won over the pupils and staff, none more so among the latter than Daniel. Daniel had made extensive enquiries in the local area in an attempt to find his owner, left information at local rescue centres, to no avail. Meanwhile, he and Louise had taken Garvey home, where he had quickly secured the approval of Ellie, Daisy and their West Highland Terrier, Rosie, and attacked his new Panic Mouse toy with an enthusiasm belying some of the bad press the contraption was receiving elsewhere in the locality.

Garvey wasn’t actually called Garvey at this point, but Daniel, in particular, had developed such a soulful, masculine bond with him that he felt it was only right that he should name him by the surname of the lead singer of his favourite soulful, masculine indie rock band, Elbow. He’d been living with Louise and Daniel for a whole week – enough time for them to think of Garvey as theirs, or, rather, themselves as Garvey’s – when Garvey’s original owners arrived at Daniel’s workplace to claim him, having been alerted by the RSPCA. Daniel and Louise then had to cope with the distress of transporting him back to a council flat and watching him being roughly scragged by the owner’s three-year-old son. ‘It turned out his name was really something rubbish like Fluffy,’ Daniel recalled.

I sensed Daniel and Louise’s dynamic as an animal-loving couple was not dissimilar to that of mine and Dee’s: on the surface of it, Louise, as the female, and an employee of an animal charity, was the soppy one, but penetrate that surface, and it was Daniel who was the most cut up about Garvey’s departure. Not long before that, the couple had lost another cat, Murphy, to jaw cancer, and hearing Daniel talk about him made me wonder if I had encountered the ultimate clandestine Cat Man. Murphy’s scraggy, moth-eaten mum had come out of nowhere one day, and sat on Daniel’s chest when he was on his back, working on the undercarriage of his Alfa Romeo, and never left, giving birth to Murphy a few months later. As Daniel put it near-tearfully, he was with Murphy ‘for his first breath, and his last’. That Daniel and Louise took a while before deciding to come and meet Samson was almost certainly down to the question of whether Daniel could let himself in for any more feline-related heartache.

I met them at the door of Ruby’s house. The place felt as warm and congenial as ever, and it was hard to believe we wouldn’t find the owner in the living room on her favourite armchair, deeply ensconced in a well-thumbed copy of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. As Charles showed us in, I immediately found myself assuming a role somewhere between estate agent, cat PR officer and museum tour guide. ‘This,’ I almost said, ‘is the kitchen. As you can see, it’s a good size, and there’s room to extend. Over there you’ll see the top of the fridge, where Samson used to sit and look down on Ruby, as she tried to solve
The Times
’ Sudoku puzzle.’ As we passed by the stairs, I had half a mind to turn up them, to show Daniel and Louise the bed where Samson had hidden on the day Ruby lost him, before remembering it wasn’t my house.