The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (11 page)

‘Why does he
keep doing that squinting face?’ Gemma asked.

‘Have you washed your hands recently?’ I said.

‘Yes, I did it as soon as we got in.’

‘That’ll be it, then. He can’t stand that. He’ll be better in half an hour or so, when the skin’s natural oils start to return.’

‘Raaaaaaalph!’ said Ralph.

Twenty minutes later, The Bear arrived. I say ‘arrived’; it was actually more like he materialised. It had been raining, and, without warning, there he was not three feet away from where we sat, drenched, wide-eyed and glistening, in a ray of fresh sunlight that seemed to be shining just for him – seemed, even, to be what had transported him here – peering at us as if looking simultaneously into Gemma’s past and our future. In so many situations, The Bear eschewed the vulgarities of everyday feline behaviour, but he had the same reaction to rain as my other cats: it seemed to imbue him with extra confidence. Mostly the confidence to find a human and wipe the rain on them as quickly as possible. As he went about his work of using various parts of me as a towel, his eyes burned into Gemma.

‘I feel like he knows all my secrets,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure
he does by now,’ I said. ‘He’s obviously not too upset by them. Otherwise he’d have been out of here by now.’

‘I can’t believe he’s a cat. It’s like there’s a little person in there, behind his eyes.’

She reached beneath The Bear’s chin to give him a scrumble, and he accepted it. He then made one of his rare forays onto my lap, and began his gradual, meticulous routine of getting settled.

‘Why does he keep going round and round like that?’ asked Gemma.

‘That’s just his ritual. This is nothing. Sometimes he’ll do it sixteen or seventeen times before he finally plonks himself down. His all-time record is thirty-six.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘It’s good that you seem to get on, because when we split up, he’ll be yours.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘That’s just the way it works.’

In the evening, the final furry member of the household arrived, his stealth in creeping through the cat door too quiet for his entrance to be audible, although his heft on the conservatory roof had given him away a couple of minutes before that. ‘Be very quiet,’ I told Gemma, as we crept up the stairs and poked our heads around the corner to see Andrew munching from the biscuit dispenser.

‘Oh, he’s beautiful,’ whispered Gemma. ‘He definitely doesn’t look like an Andrew to me, though. Much more like a Sven, I reckon.’

‘Hmm. You could
be right. But isn’t he a bit too big for Sven? I think of Svens as being quite fitness-conscious.’

Andrew-Sven was looking a bit chubbier of late, which didn’t surprise me. Since his visits had increased, my cat food bills had too, by no small amount. I also had to bear in mind that, even when you were buying in bulk, the cost of replacement protective polythene sleeves for records could mount up. I found myself torn: on one hand, I wanted to get to know him and find out what made him tick, and I wanted my mum to have a cat. On the other hand, I still wanted to be able to afford to feed myself. As usual, though, the side of the scales weighted towards feline needs seemed to be triumphing.

Later that night, I woke to the sound of Gemma wheezing next to me. Her mum was severely allergic to cats, but she’d never previously had a problem herself, and had lived with at least one cat for most of the last six years. It made no sense, but in another way it made complete sense: the reinstatement of the old clause in my romantic life stating that I could only be properly attracted to women who either didn’t like, or were physically incompatible with, cats. We opened more windows, and Gemma huffed on her asthma inhaler, but it was no help.

The following night she found herself in a similarly breathless, uncomfortable state. Then I noticed an odd thing: Gemma was also wheezing slightly when she sat on the sofa in the living room, but seemed completely fine when she was upstairs in the kitchen. The sofa cushions were filled with goose down, just like my duvet. That night I swapped the latter for the synthetic duvet from the spare bedroom and mercifully Gemma’s respiratory problems were no more.

‘I’m so
relieved,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be allergic to The Bear. How can anyone be allergic to The Bear? He’s The Bear!’

The two of them had already formed a significant bond. Being from a working-class background and a natural worrier, Gemma ticked two of his biggest boxes. The fact that she liked the music of sensitive, melancholic singer-songwriters, rather than the overblown seventies rock and power ballads I was partial to, almost certainly helped, too.

‘Does he always follow you around like that, staring at you?’ she asked.

‘Almost always,’ I said.

It was true that The Bear had been more reluctant than ever to let me out of his sight in the last few months. I’d got to know a fair bit about black cats in the last decade – about that certain kind of intensity and magic they often seem to have, which other cats don’t – but being followed around like this by one without quite knowing what it meant had a way of making me feel a bit like Britain’s most useless witch. In many of the pictures I took of my other cats during this period, The Bear was often there, in the background, stealing the limelight with his own kind of photobomb, all based on magnetic soulfulness rather than bolshy physical one-upmanship. If he had an anthem for his twilight years, it would have been ‘Alone’ by Heart. I was aware that I was overly partial to anthropomorphism and I knew that when he
did
get me alone, much of his agenda was about cooked meat, but it wasn’t as if his gaze diminished in purpose when his appetite was satisfied. It
had
to be about more than that. Had he been stalking me in order to ask, ‘So if God is nice, why do children get ill and are men always at war?’ or, ‘So if so many people love the music of Nick Drake, why did he die depressed and unappreciated at the tender age of just 122 cat years?’ I could not have felt his sweet, beseeching bewilderment more acutely. When you added the fact that the customary camp wobble in his walk as he followed me was more of an arthritic wobble now, the daily heartbreak was only exaggerated.

Whenever I went to
visit Gemma, I felt slightly guilty. Not only was I leaving The Bear, whose habit was to sulk in the aftermath of any slightly prolonged period I spent away from home, I was foisting his melancholy on Deborah and David, who had kindly and innocently offered to feed him, Shipley and Ralph. But, having known him for a while, they were getting used to it, and I even felt I was doing The Bear a favour. There was always the chance they could put a word in for him with their ageing cat Biscuit, for whom he seemed to hold a candle even after seven years of stony rejection.

I remembered, a decade earlier, talking through the routine of cat feeding to Bob, my first ever next door neighbour as a home owner, and feeling very adult as I did so. ‘The kettle’s just here,’ I’d announced, ‘and feel free to have a sit-down and watch TV if you like.’ It only occurred to me later what a ridiculous thing it had been to say. Why on earth would Bob, a retired headmaster, want to have a cup of tea and watch TV in a virtual stranger’s house instead of his own, sixteen yards away? But suggesting such a thing to Deborah and David wouldn’t have been quite so preposterous. Not only were they happy to feed the cats, they were also happy to stick around and give them a cuddle, particularly Shipley, whose relationship with Deborah continued to be close – if somewhat foul-mouthed, on Shipley’s side.

After one visit
to Devon I returned to find each of my cats’ names, and Biscuit’s, written on the kitchen blackboard, alongside an arcane set of measurements. I puzzled over these for a while. I knew Biscuit was a small cat, but I was sure she must be more than seven inches long. Only after an hour did I have a lightbulb moment and realise that the figures related to the cats’ tails. It said a lot about Ralph and Shipley’s relationship that Shipley’s pointy, slightly curly tail, even though it looked the longest, was actually only runner-up; coming in at ten and a half inches, it was a full half-inch behind Ralph’s. That said, I would not have put it past Ralph to add a bit of length with some crafty back combing. I hoped it would not intensify The Bear’s aura of melancholy that his came in second last, at nine inches. Shipley would probably be most troubled by the measurements, and this was arguably confirmed when I found him next to the blackboard, his tail in the air, seemingly trying to straighten out the kink at the end of it.

One day in
November, heading inland to pick Gemma up from her day job in her dad’s shop, feeling battered and windswept from a rainy early-morning walk on a remote stretch of Devon coast, I found an answerphone message from Deborah. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said. ‘But it’s Shipley. He’s been refusing to eat for the last day, and seems very lethargic. Every time I go to check on him, he’s just sitting on the beanbag in the same position, and he barely reacts when I touch him.’

Finding themselves
in a situation that all pet sitters dread, Deborah and David had faced a difficult decision. Considerately, they hadn’t wanted to worry me when I was so far from home, but they’d also not wanted to leave matters too late. After I’d called Deborah back and talked it through, she and David kindly rushed Shipley to see George, the Californian vet down the road, who seemed rather stumped as to exactly what the matter was, but gave him an injection of antibiotics, and said he should be brought back the following day if there’d been no improvement in his condition.

Later that afternoon, I called Deborah back to find out if Shipley had improved. ‘There’s no change,’ she said. ‘I’ve been sitting with him, but he seems very limp and sad. He’s not even swearing at me.’ With seven counties separating us, Gemma working two jobs, and my own weekly writing commitments to consider, it had already been difficult for Gemma and me to find time to see each other as much as we wanted to. Now here I was, doing the only thing I could do in the situation, and leaving, not much more than a day after I’d arrived.

I raced back across the country in record time, incurring a speeding ticket along the way at a time in my life when I had never had less use for one, and only stopping to fill up on petrol and read a couple of text message updates from Deborah. When I arrived home, Shipley was lying on his beanbag: the same one he’d been on nine months previously when I’d found Janet slumped on the stairs. Usually, if I arrived back after even a few hours out of the house he’d be the first cat to greet me, getting right up in my face to tell me exactly how I’d let him down and list the gifts he now required as compensation, but now he barely raised his chin as I arrived in the room. When I scrumbled him underneath it and gave the top of his head a scritch, there were none of his usual attempts to push his nose – usually so cold, now so dry and warm – into my knuckle, or engineer a way to get the same knuckle or a finger under the side of his lip (always a weird habit of his and Ralph’s: another subtle family trait). His sinewy limbs felt lifeless, and he put up little resistance as I transferred him to a wicker cat igloo that – like most purpose-built cat beds – he’d always disliked. The Bear watched all this, perhaps confused at the new domestic arrangement where he could walk around freely, without anyone dancing about in front of his face and swearing.

I called George
the vet on the emergency number and we agreed that the best thing I could do was bring Shipley over again first thing in the morning. Shipley – a cat who would so often force open the bedroom door, and was normally so desperate to make the room his – now seemed indifferent to the rare privilege of being its sole feline occupant. I probably would have slept fitfully anyway, as I usually did after the drive from Devon to Norfolk, but I woke at regular intervals throughout the night, reaching out every half-hour to his igloo, to touch his flank and make sure he was still breathing. If that sounds overdramatic, it was done from the perspective of someone who’d only six months ago received a stark lesson about the gossamer thread that separates feline life from death.

All my cats, past
and present, had different ways of reacting to a trip to the vet’s. Pablo’s check-ups had been soundtracked by a bloodcurdling war cry that didn’t let up from the moment I started the car to the moment he was unloaded onto the examining table – possibly to signal his fear that he was being transported back to the harsh feral world he had come from. At the other end of the scale, Ralph would act like he was far too fancy for the whole fiasco, then undermine himself by eating one of his scabs in front of the vet, or letting off a fart of the variety known at my secondary school as ‘silent but violent’. Bootsy had always largely seen it as another opportunity to be admired by strangers. Janet had weathered the experience with faintly wounded stoicism, and The Bear gave the impression of plotting darkly in the back of his cat basket, while periodically lamenting his existential condition with his broken-smoke-alarm
meeoop
. With Shipley, it was expletives all the way, combined with the hint of a sense that, given half the chance, he would be up and out of his basket to take on any Jack Russell, Rottweiler or giant lop-eared rabbit who happened to be in the waiting room at the time, possibly with one paw strapped behind his back.