Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (18 page)

It is quite possible that, during the 1980s, there was not another man in Britain more worried about the possibility of his house exploding than my dad. Setting off from Nottinghamshire for our annual summer holiday, the routine would always be the same. We’d be about ten miles down the M1, the car weighed down with camping gear and back issues of the
Beano
, when he would turn to my mum, worry etched across his face. ‘AH SAY, WE DID SWITCH THE HOB OFF, JO, DIDN’T WE?’ he’d ask.

My mum would do her best to offer reassurance, but her response would essentially be immaterial. Sometimes we’d manage to get as far as Leicester Forest East service station while the two of them tried to convince themselves that flames were not licking their way malevolently up their woodchip, but with my dad’s question, the seed of doubt had been irrevocably planted, and we would eventually, inevitably, turn back. Upon arriving home, of course, my parents would find that the hob was not on at all, though this would not prevent the following thing happening next year, and the year after that (the purchase of a family coffee machine in 1993 only complicated matters further).

I used to sigh at such neurotic behaviour back then, but the older I get, the worse I find I get at leaving the house. The main difference is that when I return through the front door to check that I haven’t, for some unfathomable reason, suddenly, without noticing, developed a penchant for candles and left one burning in the living room, I am not worrying primarily about losing my material possessions; I am worrying about losing my cats.

I would like to think that, were my house to begin to fill with smoke, the furry degenerates I live with would have the wherewithal to quickly get out of one of their two cat flaps, but how can I know that for certain? A couple of them aren’t even bright enough to remember to put their tongues back in their mouths after they’ve finished licking themselves. Others can’t get through a day without getting one of their legs trapped in their collar, flicking one of those cat flaps into a permanently locked position, or scalding themselves by experimentally placing their front paws on an electric heater. Do these animals really sound wily enough to distinguish ‘everyday warmth’ from ‘potentially life-threatening blaze’? And what if it happened to be snowing when the house caught fire? Faced with the choice between that horrible cold white stuff and the gentle, sparky simmer of an overfed multi-socket adaptor, I sense that the decision would be a no-brainer, in more ways than one.

Just before Christmas 2008, I read a news report about six Buckinghamshire felines being revived after a house fire. It was simultaneously sad and uplifting, and resulted in one of the sweetest cat photographs of the year, depicting a fireman fitting a ginger and white moggy with a baby-sized oxygen mask. However, it also suggested that the first instinct of a cat, when faced with a room full of smoke, might not be to evacuate the premises, but simply to hide.

It’s not just the image of a neglected flame that lights the touchpaper of my travelling imagination. Often, having already returned to the house once to confirm that Pablo or Janet have not accidentally switched the gas hob on with their tails, I’ve been known to unlock the door one more time, just on the off chance that, while going about my daily business, I have left the sink running, with the plug in, and a live socket has been clandestinely fitted next to it without my knowledge.

When Dee and I went on a rare holiday, to Somerset, in 2007, it was not a conflagration that I became convinced we had left behind us, but a forlorn Bootsy, trapped behind the radiator cover in the entrance hall. On one hand, this was a perfectly valid concern: Bootsy, being so minuscule, had a habit at that point of somehow slithering underneath the wooden radiator cover in question, then not being able to get out, and the entrance hall was the hottest room in the house by some distance – especially in June.

On the other hand, it was absurd to imagine that, even if Bootsy had ventured into the entrance hall, she’d not scampered back into the main part of the house as I loaded the back seat of the car with heavy bags, and traffic whizzed by on the road beyond. Even if she had got stuck, it was also hard to picture a scene in which a cat as vocal as her would not let us know at the earliest opportunity, but I somehow managed to conjure up the necessary imaginative powers to do so. From the moment we left the M25, I drove Dee towards Swindon, and also towards distraction, by repeatedly replaying my final moves in leaving the house, until I became convinced that at that very moment Bootsy’s tiny, grey, dehydrated form was croaking fruitlessly for help. Had we not happened to be paying a lady called Sarah to do some garden maintenance for us on the day in question, and been able to telephone her to ask her to look through the letterbox and confirm the entrance hall was feline-free, I have no doubt that I would have turned the car around and added another four hundred miles to our trip with little compunction.

I have not really had a break long enough to merit the word ‘holiday’ since then. On top of my reluctance to ask friends or neighbours to feed my cats and my belief that if I put my cats in a cattery they would hold a grudge against me forever, there is an additional problem: in early 2009, Janet was diagnosed with an overactive thyroid gland.

I’ve tried various methods of administering the two small pink pills that Janet must be given to keep his thyroid steady. These have included The Towel Wrap, The Throat Rub, The Pâté Treat, and The Pea Shooter. Perhaps the most successful method has been burying the pills in the trays of terrine-style cat food that can be found in some shops. This is not infallible, though. And while I have some very good friends I feel I can count on in times of trouble, I have to ask myself the question: can you ever really know a person well enough to ask them to spend a week dipping their fingers inside mechanically recovered meat?

The Bear and Janet are now officially old cats, but their aging processes have varied markedly. When I first met The Bear, he was already a wizened survivor, an ornery old gentleman of strange, powerful dignity. If he vanished for a few days, you could guarantee he would return with some new ailment or battle scar. Yet, since then, he has become visibly younger.

Certainly, his walk does not speak of youthful vigour: it’s the paranoid scuttle of a cat who believes he has a hellhound – or at least a bored Shipley – on his tail. But his face and demeanour actually seem to be making a bid for the youth he never quite had. His eyes have always looked directly at me in a manner matched by no other cat, but their stare has got brighter, and his fur – at least in the period when he’s not due another jab for his flea allergy – correspondingly plusher. He’s sometimes mistaken for Shipley – no doubt much to his chagrin – by those who don’t know him well, but his features are far more exotic: strangely foxlike, but also unignorably evocative of the word ‘snufflepig’.

At fifteen, The Bear has still never, to the best of my knowledge, killed another living creature, but he’s become more playful than ever. When he bats and chews one of his many extra-strength catnip cigars, he takes periodic, nervous looks over his shoulder, as if aware that what he is doing is fundamentally beneath him, and keen that other, intellectually inferior cats do not catch him indulging in such lowbrow pursuits. He still mostly keeps himself to himself, and knows all the best hiding places, but is newly prone to isolated moments of exhibitionism. Not long after I purchased the cats a new toy on which to sharpen their claws, the overexcitably named Kitty Boutique Disco Pole, I found him perched, with perfect balance, on top of the central podium: his own version of the Fourth Plinth, a place above all the riff-raff where he could cogitate over the meaning of life. When guests are over at the house, he will emerge more frequently than he once might have, and walk determinedly, with his signature wobble, towards the most intense or melancholic of them, his eyes never leaving theirs.

Old age has also brought a love interest for The Bear, in the form of Biscuit, the aging, plump ginger lady cat that lives next door. I’m assured by my neighbours, Deborah and David, that their
Last of the Summer Wine
romance does not extend much further than over-the-fence chats, longing looks through Deborah and David’s kitchen window (The Bear’s) and flirtatiously grumpy rebukes (Biscuit’s), but after a couple of years, the flame shows no sign of blowing out.

This is all in sharp contrast to Janet, who, in his youth, was always a hulking good-time cat, but, by 2008, had become more prone to crotchety eccentricities, and was visibly fading as a physical specimen. Right from the moment that the young Shipley had first set eyes on him, the two of them had always made time for at least one wrestle per day. This was strictly play fighting, in which Janet’s supremacy was challenged but never quite questioned, a far different contact sport to Ralph’s tussles with Pablo. Occasionally, heads bounced against furniture and chunks of fur flew, but nobody ended up growling and hissing in a corner. But now when Shipley instigated an encounter, I noticed Janet slinking away, flustered, and retreating behind a chair or table, where he could be found panting nervously. Simultaneously, his appetite became greater, and his habit of tripping me up on the stairs or batting me through the bars of the balustrade more frequent. He had long been perfecting a special ‘fart hiss’ during times of trouble. In the past this had caused confusion as to its point of origin, but as it became more vehement and heartfelt, there was no doubt which orifice it was emerging from.

During a routine examination in May that year, the vet held a stethoscope to Janet’s chest and looked up at me gravely.

‘I’m afraid she has a heart murmur,’ he said.

I opened my mouth to do what I always do when I take Janet to the vet, which is explain exactly why he’s not a she – a story which usually involves a shrug and the use of the phrase ‘it’s very fluffy down there’ – but thought better of it. Instead I asked, ‘So what exactly does that mean?’

‘Well, it doesn’t mean too much right now,’ said the vet. ‘We use a scale of one to six to measure the intensity of the murmur, and she’s a three, which means she’s not in need of medication at this point. Do you ever notice her panting?’

‘Yes, quite often.’

‘The important thing is to keep her away from activities that get her overexcited.’

After packing Janet back into his extra-large cat basket and enduring a couple of particularly fervent fart-hisses, I began to ponder the vet’s advice. Precisely what activities
did
get Janet overexcited? And how would I keep him away from them? It wasn’t as if I could sit him down quietly and break it to him that the time had come in his life to give up his pentathlon ambitions and stay away from Norfolk’s many tempting topless bars. Much of his energetic life took place far away from me, in an unknown nocturnal world. The best I felt I could do in the circumstances was intercede when Shipley made a beeline for him and keep him away from uncut catnip. I also began to feed him in a separate area to the other cats. Yet no amount of food seemed to satisfy Janet. He always seemed skittish, weaving around my legs asking for more, asking for something, but not, evidently, affection.

In addition to constant hunger, Janet’s illness manifested itself in another, more unexpected way, too: tidying.

As anybody who owns them knows, cats are remarkably clean animals. This is because they are uniquely skilled in wiping the dirty parts of themselves on other things and people. Possessing a particular talent for this is Janet, who, after a journey outside, will leave approximately a third of his loose unwanted body mass on the carpet and duvet cover. He’s always been a thorough groomer, but after he became ill, his cleaning sessions gained a new intensity. The vet told me that this was a symptom of stress. I’m not sure, however, that you could put his new, rather curious style of extracurricular cleaning down to the same thing.