Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (20 page)

In the period Janet’s illness had developed, there had been two major bird problems around the lake at the centre of East Mendleham. Firstly, for the previous eighteen months, the water had been infested with poisonous blue-green algae, decimating the local duck and goose population. Signs were posted on lampposts asking the public not to make the problem worse by throwing bread into the water, and even the old man who swore while throwing Hovis at the ducks had toned down his act somewhat.

Admittedly, the second bird problem was one that didn’t impact on quite so much of the locality, but to my cats, it was no less critical. In recent weeks, an avian tormentor – I have no idea what kind of avian tormentor as it kept its identity top secret – had begun to imitate the whistle I used for my cats at mealtimes.

I already had a certain amount of experience with birds that mimicked the sounds of domestic life. A previous example of this was the Telephone Bird, which, for a couple of months, had sat outside the kitchen window, replicating the ring of the house’s landline. Even more impressive, perhaps, was the Pablomeow Bird, whose cheep was a near-exact replica of the frenzied noise Pablo made at times of hunger. The Foodwhistle Bird, however, was more sophisticated than its predecessors. Its taunts were not just designed to bamboozle but to seriously mess up a cat’s diary.

My cats could probably just about distinguish between the noise I made and the noise the Foodwhistle Bird made, but it was a close call and, as it started its merry tune, Pablo and Janet could often be seen bolting through the cat flap into the kitchen, an eager look on their faces. Even at times of low-level hunger, their more unflappable peers, such as The Bear, could be seen opening one vaguely inquiring eye as it whistled. I was not sure if it was a mockingbird in any official sense, but even if it wasn’t, it probably should have been made an honorary one. One thing was for sure: if at this point my cats were to co-author a book with the same title as a famous mid-twentieth-century novel written by Harper Lee, its theme would not be racial tension in the Deep South.

I had actually come across a nascent Foodwhistle Bird before, about fifteen years previously, while living with my parents, but this latest one was far more skilled at disorientating its victims. On one hand, I had to sit back and marvel at what an amazing evolutionary step it seemed to mark for mimicry. ‘What could possibly come after the Foodwhistle Bird?’ I wondered. ‘The Really Hungry Tiger Bird? The Seinfeld Slap Bass Bird? The Jeremy Paxman Clearing His Throat On University Challenge Bird?’ On the other hand, I decided to put my awe aside and take some action, for the good of my cats’ sanity. After all, I’d been using the same whistle for the various cats in my life for three decades now, and perhaps the Foodwhistle Bird was a sign that it was time for a change.

I went over a few options. I could have experimented with an entirely new whistle, but who’s to say that, in time, that wouldn’t have been appropriated by the Foodwhistle Bird as well? There was also the option of reverting to a roll call of names, but that seemed like needless extra work. Instead, I opted for my vinyl copy of ‘My Sharona’, the 1979 American number one hit by the power pop band The Knack. I’m not sure quite how the decision came about, other than one night at jellied meatslop-dispensing time I happened to be listening to it, and its jerky, near-spastic rhythms seemed appropriate to the manic process of feeding half a dozen furry forces of nature – particularly when Pablo mistimed a jump from the chair to the kitchen work surface and dive-bombed unceremoniously into a shelf of cookbooks.

In truth, I couldn’t really tell if my cats could discern different types of music from one another. I had always felt that they had a particularly disapproving air about them when I was playing Hall and Oates’ ‘You Make My Dreams’, but maybe that was largely a reaction to the special backwards dance I liked to do to it. Whatever the case, ‘My Sharona’, with its snappy riff, seemed as good an option as any for my experiment. Certainly better that than an eight-minute epic off the second Emerson Lake and Palmer album.

Within a week, results were visible. Usually, by the time The Knack had sung the opening refrain of ‘Ooh my little pretty one’, Bootsy and Pablo were weaving around my feet and by the point of the first ‘my-my-my-my-Sharona’ all six cats were filling their faces, but after two weeks I still couldn’t tell if it was the new-wave guitars they were responding to or the clunking of food dishes. The experiment was still in its infancy, and had not yet proved to be an instant way of getting the cats’ attention, so on the morning that Janet didn’t turn up for his breakfast, I wasn’t initially concerned. But because I’m a born worrier, knew how permanently hungry Janet was, and knew my cats had it too good these days to wander far from home, I eventually decided to stroll outside to see if I could locate him.

I found him lying flat on his stomach beneath the Cypress bush, a few yards from the back door. He had his chin pressed lethargically against the ground, and didn’t even have the energy to wail at the empty Wotsit packet behind him. At my first touch, he fart-hissed, but it didn’t have the passion of previous fart-hisses, giving the impression that, in fart-hiss terms, he was phoning it in somewhat. When I picked him up and carried him inside, I got the feeling he might have liked to have put up a fight, but didn’t have the strength. He’d never felt lighter or more rag-like and, when I put him down, he slunk immediately behind the sofa.

Three hours later, with no sign of improvement, I helped hold him still on the examining table as the vet poked a thermometer up his bottom then filled him with antibiotics, professing an uncertainty as to what was the problem but saying that he was sure it wasn’t connected with Janet’s hyperthyroidism. Just four days previously, Janet had already been here for more blood tests, to determine whether he needed the dose of his hyperthyroid medication upped. That was not to mention my visit a week before that, when Shipley had scratched his retina and was forced to wear one of those lampshade-like collars. I was starting to wonder if, the next time I visited the surgery, it might be practical to pack not just my cats, but my toothbrush and pyjamas. I would be back again in three days for a progress check. All I could hope was that it was the same vet, so I didn’t have to have the conversation about why Janet wasn’t a girl for the third time in a week.

I had no idea whether cats could get blue-green algae poisoning. Considering the amount of stagnant water that had gone into Janet’s mouth on his wombling trips of recent months, though, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that he’d caught something nasty. But despite his already weak state, it
was
a surprise, and it floored me. For the next two days, no amount of meat, no matter how high or low quality, I waved in front of his face caught his interest. Old, slightly comical habits of his – his penchant for bringing twigs in on his tail, or the break-dance he did immediately before vomiting – now just seemed desperately sad.

There was another factor that was making Janet’s demise even more difficult to watch: a few weeks earlier, in February 2009, Dee and I had split up. On one level, the two of us still laughed a lot together and had much in common. On another, deeper one, we’d become a small planet apart as people, wanted to do very different things with our time, and, after much deliberation, we’d realised that our relationship could not sustain this. We’d decided to live apart as a temporary measure, postponing thoughts of what might happen to the cats until a later date, but all the evidence pointed to the situation becoming permanent. For the moment, I was living alone in the house we’d shared, with the six cats that had been the crux of our life together, one of which was seriously ill.

You could say that, as Dee’s ex-boyfriend’s favourite cat, The Bear had cast his spell on the early months of our relationship, nine years earlier. But I’d never really felt The Bear was mine – or, rather, had felt he was even less mine than any other cat – in those days, and there had, initially, been some doubt whether he would live with us on a permanent basis. Janet, by contrast, was the first pet we’d shared: the cat that had brought me back to feline ownership after the one catless spell of my life. He’d been full of energy, shooting across the laminate floors of our first flat together in pursuit of ping-pong balls and catnip mice, his footfalls so heavy that the downstairs neighbour had requested that I walk around the place more quietly. Those feet were still heavy now, so much so that I would often hear him on the stairs and call out to Dee, mistaking him for her. Except what I was thinking of as ‘now’ wasn’t ‘now’ at all: it was a few months before, when Janet still had enough meat on his bones to be heavy-footed, and there was still another person living here to mistake him for.

There is never a convenient time for a marriage to end, but it would have been doubly tragic if Janet’s death marked the conclusion of my relationship with Dee. And even when, the morning before our return to the vet, I offered Janet a pouch of Sheba, and, very slowly, he slunk over and took a couple of tentative bites of it, I continued to dwell on an image that had been troubling me for weeks: of me with the other cats, alone, in the space where he and Dee used to be. I’ve never considered myself a morbid person, but I have to confess that I woke up more than once from a nightmare about me burying him, alone, in the garden. I was thirty-three, but was I really grown-up enough to cope with this? I suspected not.

These animals that shared our house were domestic only to their own ends, nobody’s actual cats in spirit, but if they were anybody’s, they were ours, not mine. Dee and I were still very much on speaking terms, and I kept her up to date with Janet’s progress every day, but the point was: she wasn’t here. ‘He is twelve,’ said Dee, ever the pragmatist. ‘That’s not a bad age for a cat.’

When people say, ‘That’s not a bad age for a cat’, they don’t mean that it’s an age when a cat comes into his own, consolidates his finances, finally gets to drive the automobile that becomes him, and learns to be comfortable with his foibles; they mean the cat has done well to reach that age. I was surprised that Dee said it, but I also sensed she was distancing and protecting herself from the possibility that, at some point in the not too distant future, Janet might not be in her life at all. I also tried my best to see her point. Even now Janet was eating again, he was an underweight, nervous, unhappy cat with a heart condition and a tumour on his thyroid gland. On that evidence alone, it was best to be prepared for the worst. But was twelve really all that old? The Bear was fourteen and positively sashaying – albeit with a bit of a paranoid wiggle – into his prime.

In retrospect, performing a search on YouTube, in a tired and emotional state, for ‘old cats’ might not have been the best move. I came particularly close to being rendered to a globule of living blancmange by the moment in the home video of Cookie, a 26-year-old tabby from the American Midwest, shot a few months before her death, where the star looks up at the camera and lets out a croaky meow of such powerful abiding love, I feel faint just thinking about transcribing it. On the other hand, my virtual travels did lead me to Crème Puff, reportedly the oldest cat ever. Crème Puff lived with a man called Jake and, when she died in 2005, was thirty-eight years and three days old. If you’d spoken to Crème Puff not long before she left this mortal coil and she’d been able to speak, she would have been able to tell you about a world before the Manson family murders, Led Zeppelin and the three-day week, a world when the JML pet mitt and the Happy Paws Bungalow were nothing more than the dreams of some crazy-haired feline-loving science fiction writer.

In the video, Jake, a man in his sixties in a baseball cap, took us around his Austin, Texas, shack, introducing us to his endless cats, which had names such as Red Dog and Jean Claude Van Damme. I especially liked the bit where he talked in his casual Texan way about having ‘adopted over five hundred cats’ over the years from his local shelter, as if he was talking about how many times he’d bought cigarettes from the 7-11 down the road. Jake attributed the longevity of so many of his cats to the bacon, eggs, broccoli and coffee breakfast he fed them every morning. I was tempted to try a similar menu but, combined with ‘My Sharona’, I felt it could be the first step on the road to an eccentricity I wasn’t yet ready to embrace. The Bear had enjoyed broccoli in the past, but any time I’d tried to give it to Janet he’d looked at me with abject horror. However, slowly but surely, he was beginning to regain his appetite.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Janet started to get slightly better. One answer would be ‘around the same time I did’. There was no sudden epiphany or recovery for either of us, but by late summer 2009, you would have noticed a slight change in our demeanour: a lifting of our spirits. The upping of the dosage of Janet’s pills had – when I could actually get them inside him – worked. In the vet’s words, he was ‘never going to become Arnold Schwarzenegger’ but he had regained a considerable amount of weight. I’m sure a part of him would hold a grudge against me forever for what I’d done to him, but I noticed him softening to my touch, once again rubbing a cold nose against my dangling hand to wake me up in the morning, and asking me for one of his favourite chest massages. I also noticed that his wrestles with Shipley had resumed, and he seemed to be holding his own. Perhaps he’d lost his position as Top Cat, but if Shipley got too full of himself, Ralph would soon put him in his place with a swift headlock, like the crybaby psychopath he was.