Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (27 page)

A Pallas cat was more manageable, but would I really fancy trying to get one into a cat basket? Perhaps most enticing of all was Artem, the snow leopard I’d fed, who would without question look great on Ralph’s favourite sheepskin rug. By adopting one of his future cubs, I could avoid being accused of plagiarising Ace and John.

But one WHF snow leopard had recently had to have part of his bowels removed, having eaten an unusually tough bit of horse’s mane by mistake. The corpse-filled shed it had come from, which Vicky and Sarah had given me a fetid peek into, seemed to be an essential part of big-cat ownership, and I didn’t have room to erect such a thing in my garden. It had been hard enough watching an ill Janet slinking around the place recently, and I wasn’t sure I could really deal with a grouchy snow leopard slumped in the corner of the room complaining about stomach pains. I’m sure there would be good times to offset it, but I didn’t need that sort of emotional rollercoaster right now. Ultimately, it would not make life better, only more complicated. Besides, big-cat ownership just wasn’t very ‘me’. This, anyway, is what I tried to convince myself, as I made the long, safe drive back to the place I’d come to call home.

Fruzz

Many cat owners spend literally hours puzzling how, in the course of one small tussle with a fellow member of its species or an energetic cleaning session, a feline can shed what appears to be its entire body weight in fur yet appear more or less physically unchanged. The answer lies with fruzz: a miraculous expanding substance often mistaken for ‘fluff’ and the other less intriguing, hair-related waste produced by more pedestrian animals. Fruzz cannot be truly categorised as Fruzz until it has left the surface of the cat in question, at which point it immediately begins to grow at a rate both violent and imperceptible. This means it is incredibly hard to describe to those who’ve never come into direct contact with it. You can instruct them to picture a protein filament version of a just-add-water instant pudding, but even then you’re only scratching the surface of its true nature.

Fruzz is far from the most unpleasant kind of cat filth, and environmental scientists believe it has hitherto untapped potential for recycling
⁷
, but complacency about its existence remains one of the most frequent reasons that moggy slaves tend to underestimate when budgeting for electronic cleaning devices. It is also one of the major unacknowledged elements that separate cat owners from normal civilians in embarrassing ways. This is evinced by conversations such as the following:

Cat owner (fondling Miele Aquarius S5580): ‘So, how does this baby perform when it comes to fruzz?’

Vacuum cleaner salesman: ‘Mr Babbidge, can you call security, please? I think we’ve got one of those people from the special hospital in the shop again!’

Crunk

A dangerously adhesive, bitty, saliva-like substance not dissimilar to regurgitated digestive biscuits. Manufactured in an alarmingly large range of colours including Devil’s Night Black, Off Grey and – most popular of all – Carrot Vomit Orange, crunk is most often found on cats’ chins and surrounding areas. Much murky confusion surrounds this enigmatic cat detritus, especially in the case of those unfortunate souls who have been known to mistake it for the energy drink of the same name pioneered by the Atlanta-based rapper Lil Jon.

The first genuinely disturbing crunk moment often comes when, having assumed that what you’re dealing with is mere spit, the realisation dawns that it is, in fact, crunk, and any resemblance between the colour of it and your cat’s fur is mere coincidence. The second comes about two minutes later when, having turned your back on said feline for a matter of seconds while searching for some kitchen roll, you realise that the crunk has vanished. In one way, this is good news. Any cat without crunk on its chin is a more pleasant cat to be around! In another way, it is the worst news possible: you can bet your bottom dollar that that crunk didn’t just disappear into thin air, and its final destination will be a mystery guaranteed to haunt your very soul into the midnight hour and beyond.

Mair

While the phrase ‘I’ve had a “mare”’ does not signify anything pleasant when uttered by a normal citizen, it always gives rise to an extra shiver among cat owners. Nightmares are one thing, but walking into a kitchen in the stark light of day and finding beloved woks, floors, bowls – woks, floors and bowls that you’d scrubbed to within an inch of your life – flecked liberally with mair is another entirely.

Those who’ve accidentally rested their hand on a shagpile rug or a passing donkey after using Pritt Stick will have a generalised idea about mair’s fuzzy, sticky horror. But at least with Pritt Stick and a donkey, you know where you are. With mair, you’re always on your toes (although thankfully not literally, since that would
truly
be a sod to remove). ‘Is the sticky bit in the middle regurgitated wet cat food, or some of last night’s sticky toffee pudding that Janet accidentally got caught in his tail while illegally roaming the kitchen counter?’ I might ask myself, as I examine some mair. And while you tend to assume that the hairy coating on the outside of the mair in question comes from one of the cats themselves, who’s to say it isn’t actually the product of a vole they killed last night, or a combination of both?

A particular liability to habitual finger-lickers, mair can, with a little effort, usually be removed from skin – one of the stronger types of hand wash associated with the medical profession will normally do the trick. The problem is as much one of ‘When?’ as it is one of ‘How?’ Do you clean your hands now, or when you’ve finished sitting on the kitchen floor, crying, and fantasising about a world where there isn’t always at least five cat dishes stained with gribbly bits in your immediate eye line? Do you do it before you’ve started drying that painstakingly de-maired bowl, with that tea towel that might have more mair on it, or afterwards? And even when that’s done, there are the fixed objects around you to think about. Those surfaces might look clean from a distance, but look again. It is a rare occasion, worth celebrating, when a cat owner’s kitchen doesn’t showcase at least one cupboard with a strip of mair stuck to it.

Spottle

‘Like Wee, but Even More Long-Lasting and Orange!’ might not seem like the most irresistible marketing slogan to most of us, but those who use spottle to disorientate and subjugate their minions will no doubt disagree. Unlike a cat that has flagrantly and expansively urinated on, say, a curtain or a particularly irritating section of skirting board, the spottling cat cannot be so easily singled out as an offender. This is not to say his aim is any less deadly. Quite the contrary: spottling is such a fine art, it has even led some humans to speculate whether their cats have tiny little paint brushes concealed beneath their tails.

‘Did that cat just spottle?’ you will often find yourself asking, as the culprit gently shimmies backwards into a corner of the living room. ‘Or is he just unusually fond of our new lava lamp?’ Since it can take up to five hours for spottle’s virulent, mocking hues to fully materialise, laying blame is rendered harder still. By the time you’ve concluded that, yes, your cat did spottle on the cover of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2001 novel,
Empire Falls
, the culprit is long gone, lazing happily somewhere beneath a fig tree in the garden or spottling on the freshly unwrapped packaging of next door’s new petrol-powered strimmer. Some spottle, in fact, remains invisible forever, and in such cases the only way to detect it is to insert another cat nose first into the suspected area. If the cat looks up from the spot in question with its mouth half-open and a slightly deranged expression on its face, not unlike that of Anthony Hopkins when he smells something that awakes a bad part of him in
Silence of the Lambs
, you know that you’re dealing with spottle. Hence the well-known phrase: ‘Is that some spottle that cat has just sniffed, or is it just not remotely pleased to see me?’

Seven forty-five am is not a time I generally associate with my friend Simon. For someone like me, who works best in the earlier part of the day and has spent much of his life being woken up by a series of ever-more-insistent furry alarm clocks, that’s virtually lunchtime, but Simon is an actor and, like many in his profession, he moves at a more controlled pace. Unless there’s a shoot or a casting call to get up for, his day tends not to truly start until most normal people are leaving work and does not hit its full stride until last orders are announced. So when I heard him out in the garden, not long after the dawn chorus, loudly kissing his girlfriend, I was surprised.

The party the night before had been a lively one: my first, for almost nine years, as a single person. Simon, one of my regular golfing partners, had hosted it to coincide with the final round of the United States Masters tournament and, after the winner had been decided, the guests who were there to watch the golf and the guests who were there to stare disapprovingly at the guests who were there to watch the golf had set aside their differences and come together in raucous unison. My main fuzzy memory upon waking up in Simon’s spare room had been the image of a hirsute, irrepressibly cheery man called John repeatedly hugging me, and shouting, ‘You like music! And you’re really thin!’ while, across the room, Simon simultaneously held his girlfriend Kerry and her best friend upside down by their ankles.

Still, as good a time as I’d had, I could not help viewing proceedings through the prism of my recently acquired single status. Whether I was or was not technically in a room full of laughing couples in airtight relationships built to withstand the test of time was immaterial; it was inevitably going to feel that way. Hearing Simon kissing Kerry outside was just more evidence that not one other person in the entire universe was on their own. My guess was that the two of them were so utterly ensconced in each other, they hadn’t been able to yet bear the pain of going to bed and being parted by sleep. Ideally, I would have liked to have gone down to the garden and seen if I could befriend one of the numerous neighbourhood cats who regularly drove Simon to distraction by soiling his freshly planted herb garden. But I had no wish to disturb a lovers’ tryst, so kept away from the window, and sat for a while, rubbing my eyes and taking in my surroundings.

On the wall I could see promotional posters from a couple of the TV shows Simon had starred in, and an Edinburgh Festival stand-up gig from a few years earlier, but dominating the room were two giant wall charts, depicting popular breeds of dogs: one focusing on larger breeds, one on smaller. The age-old canine versus feline debate was one in which Simon and I had reached a grumbling impasse. Having grown up on a farm in Yorkshire, surrounded by spaniels, Simon quite simply didn’t have time for cats’ idle nonsense. For the first two years we’d known each other, the subject of my own moggy ownership hadn’t come up, and when it had, he’d appraised me over his pint with a raised eyebrow, as if I had suddenly become a stranger to him. Since then, he’d learned to accept it, in the manner one might learn to accept someone who, while otherwise a regular kind of bloke, had a penchant for occasionally going out in public with a clutch purse. I knew it wasn’t precisely what he was looking for in a friendship, but I sensed the way he viewed it was that, by your mid-thirties, we all had our baggage, and, as a result, one sometimes had to compromise.

My mouth was a bit dry, so, after a few minutes reorientating myself, I crept downstairs for a glass of water. I kept away from the window, in an attempt not to disturb Simon and Kerry, but, as I was turning away from the sink, I caught Simon’s reflection in the glass, his arm gently and amorously offered. On the end of the arm I expected to see Kerry, but instead saw a small chunk of sausage, left over from the previous night’s barbecue. And on the end of the sausage was a black and white cat of quite magnificent fluffiness.

‘Morning,’ I said, opening the back door.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Er, morning.’ He could not have looked more guilty if I’d caught him writing ‘golf is shit’ on a wall.

‘I thought you didn’t like them,’ I said.

‘Well, perhaps I went a bit far in saying I didn’t like them. I’m just indifferent to them. I do like to say hello to them, though. I call this one Princess.’

‘You have nicknames for them?’

‘Yeah. That one’s The General.’ I looked up toward the garden fence of the house to the rear of Simon’s, on top of which sat another cat, this time black and short-haired, observing us phlegmatically. ‘There’s also Whiskers, but she isn’t here at the moment. She likes to wander more.’

I’ve known many men who profess to dislike cats, but a surprising amount of the same men, if pushed, will admit that they at least ‘don’t mind’ them; the dislike is a masculine façade, like a workbench you keep clearly visible in your shed but don’t intend to use. Simon, it seemed, could now be added to their ranks. For me, this was a relief – not just because it gave me a glimpse of an extra, unsuspected soft side to one of my best friends, but because, for the previous twenty-four hours, I had been experiencing a new kind of solitude in my status as a cat lover. Again and again, I had explained to Simon’s friends that I owned six cats, and they had looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Oh, right,’ they’d said. ‘How do you cope with the . . . hair and stuff?’ As they narrowed their eyes, I could almost see myself reflected back in their pupils, changing shape until I morphed into a 74-year-old Polish widower at war with the local council over his hoarding habits and the mysterious tang emanating from his shed.

Of course, part of my feeling was just down to a rare set of circumstances: the fact that the people at this party, owing partly to the fact that Simon was a Dog Person and partly to sheer chance, happened to be exclusively cat-indifferent. Yet I was also aware that what I was feeling had a greater significance: that it was a part of a mutation I was undergoing, as an owner of cats.

After just over two months, I was finding that being single was not without its perks. I was now my own person, and I made my own decisions. Keen to take advantage of my situation to the full, throwing caution to the wind, I would sometimes throw a wet towel on the bathroom floor and leave it there a whole four minutes before picking it up. But in many other ways singleness was a bewildering phenomenon. I’d been single before, but since that had happened in 1647, it didn’t provide any true frame of reference. ‘What do I want to do today?’ I would ask myself on a free morning. Or, upon watching a TV programme or picking up an item of clothing in a shop, ‘Remind me: what do I think of this, again?’ I would then experience the mystification of not being able to come up with a satisfactory answer. There was also the additional bewilderment that, the last time I was single, I was not living alone with six cats.

I’d joked frequently about the slippery slope of cat ownership: my fears of becoming the sort of person who talks about nothing but his cats, who can’t tell that his house smells strongly and off-puttingly of his cats because he’s too accustomed to the strong and off-putting smells his cats produce. But I’d never
really
thought of myself as having the potential to be a Crazy Cat Man, or anything close, or even that owning cats was ‘my thing’ any more than a handful of my other main passions were ‘my thing’. Had I never met Dee, or another person who loved cats as much as Dee, I am certain I would have never ended up with as many as six cats. The cats were the product of our bond, and that bond had provided a kind of social insulation for me. But I was realising that owning six cats as a single person – whether you be male or female – is different to owning six cats in a long-term relationship. I wasn’t ashamed of liking cats, and Dee would soon be taking a couple of our moggies off my hands, but I had to face the facts: the removal of one element had abruptly changed my domestic set-up from one perceived as fairly normal to one that, in a certain light, could be viewed as rather odd.

In the weeks following my split with Dee, I was told by cat-loving female friends that being a man who owns multiple felines marked me out as ‘solid boyfriend material’. But, I reasoned, they
would
say that: they loved cats, and were being nice to me, because they were my friends, and knew I’d just been through arguably the major upheaval of my adult life. Their suggestion was that I was more ‘sensitive’ because I owned cats. But I was also aware that there was a flipside to the perception: that there are also women, even women who like cats, who will immediately start asking themselves questions about a man living alone with that many sets of paws. Why half a dozen – or even, as was looking to soon be the case, four – moggies and not just one? On a deeper level, what did the cats ‘represent’? If I had that many animals, did it mean I couldn’t relate to humans?

Were I to answer these questions, I would have said it was simple: I liked cats, my ex also liked cats, so we ended up getting a lot of cats, then, when we split up, due to practical reasons, I kept slightly more of the cats than her. But, as I knew all too well, that kind of explanation might not cut it in the real world.

Another single friend had recently signed up to one of the more wholesome Internet dating sites. She showed me her profile and asked me whether there was anything I thought she should add.

‘You haven’t mentioned that you like cats, have you?’ I said.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘That’s because you don’t. It’s The Rule.’ I noticed that in one of her photos she had cropped out Clive, her tabby. I felt sorry for Clive. Had he had any say in the matter?

‘You wouldn’t want to go out with someone who doesn’t like cats, though, would you?’ I asked her.

‘No!’ she replied, horrified.

I was a long way from even thinking about dating, but, if the time came, such was the minefield I might have to face. For the time being, I was having enough trouble dealing with the sheer logistics of living alone with six cats, never mind the social implications. A month or two after Simon’s party, without assistance, I had taken them en masse to the vet to receive their annual booster jabs. I performed the task in two shifts, and, if you overlook the moment when Ralph sat on the examining table and ate a scab the vet had picked off his forehead, they went largely without incident. Even so, I could not shake the perception of myself as the eccentric master of some kind of miniature furry travelling circus.

Not long after that, a butch but ailing black stray turned up at my back door, looking up as I came to the window and beseechingly, almost ghoulishly, meowing at me. The stray did not let me near enough to stroke him but did let me near enough to see the cavernous open wound on his neck. For two minutes, before I collected myself, called at neighbours’ houses to ascertain that it didn’t belong to any of them, and telephoned the RSPCA, I descended into a squeamish panic, flailing around for answers in the space Dee used to occupy, the force of her absence suddenly so much more apparent. From then on, with the help of my neighbours, Deborah and David, who named the stray Winston, I kept a vigil, hearing his haunted-house mewling, sometimes spotting him, but not managing to lure him into our houses.

It was clear from the state of Winston’s neck and his weeping eyes that if he didn’t get treatment soon, he would not survive. The RSPCA paid us a visit, but could not find him, and left me with a cat trap of somewhat medieval appearance and a code number to give to my local vet when we caught Winston. On the fourth evening of our stakeout, Deborah and David and I set the trap on my patio. That night I kept my cats indoors: a task that I’d long ago decided was approximately as easy as containing Houdini in balsa wood. The six of them liked to give the impression that they got on one another’s nerves, but when the occasion demanded it, they could happily work together, so I was surprised the next morning to find that they had not made a team effort to tunnel through the wall of the spare bedroom. Sadly, when I checked the trap, I found that it was Winston-free. I was also disappointed to have my secondary hope dashed: that, if Winston hadn’t fallen for it, it might at least have now been playing host to a confused polecat who’d taken a wrong turn at the end of a heavy night. I proceeded to let Shipley, Janet, Ralph, The Bear, Bootsy and Pablo out. I then spent the rest of the day freeing each of them from the cat trap, as they took turns to sample its contents, which, despite containing exactly the same ingredients, were clearly far more interesting than the slap-up mechanically recovered meat feast they’d ignored first thing that morning.

Deborah, David and I continued to look for Winston that day beneath the foliage in our gardens, and came charging out of our bedrooms at the first sign of a foreign meow, to no avail, and again the following day, and for several days after that. I feared the worst, but I also hoped that, just maybe, another cat-lover in East Mendleham might have come to his rescue. He was a nervous cat, but his particular kind of nerves seemed to suggest a domestic past in recent memory, and it wasn’t impossible that his owner might have found him.