Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man Read online

  Under the Paw

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2008 by Tom Cox

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Tom Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  Africa House

  64–78 Kingsway

  London WC2B 6AH

  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  Illustrations courtesy of Edie Mullen

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84737-141-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47110-270-7

  Typeset in Goudy by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Mackays of Chatham plc

  For Dee, my loving wife, and Flump,

  a cat I met on the Internet.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Dee, Simon Trewin (uber-agent), my excellent editor Angela Herlihy, who could hardly have had a worse time to be working on a cat book, Jo and Mick, Trowse Jen, Simon and Carolyn, Bob and Rosemary, and to all the readers of http://littlecatdiaries.blogspot.com. I must also express particular gratitude to The Bear, who, in a quiet moment when Shipley and Bootsy aren’t trying to muscle in on his Certified Reconditioned box, will no doubt read this and file it away for future reference. The rest of you know who you are. Or maybe you don’t. Whatever the case, you’ve been treating this house like a hotel for too long, and it’s high time you started pulling your weight.

  ‘Thrown, as you must be, incessantly among loose and immoral bohemians, you will find in this cat an example of upright conduct which cannot but act as an antidote to the poison cup of temptation.’

  – P. G. Wodehouse, ‘The Story of Webster’

  ‘Who’s the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?’

  – Isaac Hayes, ‘Theme from Shaft’

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Cat Man Cometh

  Beneath the Undermog

  Out of the Bag

  Life in the Fast Lane

  Black Cats and Englishmen

  El Gato Muy Loco

  Crouching Puma, Hidden Bear

  Golfing for Cats

  The Simple Life

  Eight and a Half Lives

  My Cat Timeline

  Puss (1971–5)

  Felix (1972–89)

  Tabs (1986–7)

  Monty (aka The Ponce) (1987–98)

  Daisy (aka The Slink) (1991–2007)

  The Bear (1995–present)

  Janet (1997–present)

  Brewer (2001–2002)

  Ralph (née Prudence) (2001–present)

  Shipley (2001–present)

  Pablo (2005–present)

  Bootsy (2005–present)

  Prologue

  First of all, the facts. My name is Tom, I am crazy about cats, and, just under thirty-three years ago, I was almost certainly responsible for the death of one.

  Everyone knows about Mad Cat Lady. She’s a social cliché, a cautionary tale, a character that, when she started to pop up in cartoon form on The Simpsons, was so instantly resonant that she didn’t have to be named or introduced. She is the childless woman who lets her cat obsession take over her life, to the detriment of domestic and, finally, personal hygiene. In truth, as a stereotype she seems a little unfair. After all, there is no firmly established Mad Dog Man to counterbalance her. The subtext of all this seems to be that a Man’s Best Friend will help him see out the autumn of his life with dignity, while a woman’s will help her see out hers alone in a supermarket, giving off a slightly mildewy odour, pushing a trolley containing only a malt loaf, some hairnets, a packet of wafer thin ham and twenty-four cans of Felix. Mad Cat Man is a less widely reported phenomenon, but I am here to tell you that he exists, and has the capacity to be at least as obsessive as his female counterpart.

  Of course, I am not really crazy. My house might get a bit smelly when I haven’t vacuumed or checked under the sofa for a few days, but it is by no means a health hazard. I did once put a necktie on one of my cats when he was asleep, but I have never bought one of them an item of clothing and I don’t call them ‘fur babies’. I do, however, currently own six of them, which, in maintenance terms, can be a little bit like living with half a dozen miniature versions of Mariah Carey. No doubt, by the time you’ve read this, another little bundle of narcissistic fur will have wandered in off the street, decided it likes what it sees, and parked itself on one of the purpose-made hammocks that hang from the radiators in my house. I will probably even learn to ignore the obscene snorty scronking sound it makes while it cleans its bottom. It has happened before, and I’m sure it will happen again.

  Telling you this feels more taboo than it ought to. What is it about cats that makes so many men suspicious of them, and so many people suspicious of the men who like them? What do they think their cat-fancying brethren are doing: hatching little furry plots for the downfall of our gender?

  Being a heterosexual man and admitting to another heterosexual man that you like cats can feel a little like telling him that you still sleep alongside your childhood collection of teddy bears, or that you think his knitted waistcoat is ‘cute’. Yet the statistics simply don’t match up to the popular image of the Cat Man as society’s outcast: there are currently more than 9 million cats in the UK, probably over a billion in the world itself, and it would be foolish to believe that, even as we speak, a sizeable portion of them are not currently being fed overindulgent snacks and tickled under their chins by men as well as women.

  Who are we Cat Blokes, then? Are we real-life Dr Evils? Pensioners in long johns with hair in our home-made ginger nuts and urine on our sofas? Transvestite second-hand bookshop owners? Are we (claw, hiss, spit) metrosexuals? Maybe we are, but we are also great American novelists (Mark Twain), demon-fighters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Anthony Head), mathematicians (Isaac Newton) and world leaders (Winston Churchill). You can try to put us in a box, but, much like our four-legged allies, we’ll escape, insouciantly shake ourselves down, and do our own thing. Some of us hide our cat love from the world. Some of us take things a little too far. Some of us are just normal blokes who see nothing emasculating about wanting to spend time with the world’s most popular household pet, and our cat love does not serve as a metaphor or a crutch.

  That said, some of us also have what a psychoanalyst might call ‘a cat history’. To trace mine, you really would have to go right back to the beginning. And I mean the very beginning.

  When I ask myself how my life became so completely dominated by cats, I repeatedly come back to two pivotal moments. One occurred in a dark rural garden in 1998 and seemed pivotal in a different way at the time. The other occurred in early 1975, in an even darker place, at a time when ‘pivotal’, like all other words, was meaningless.

  Not having been blessed with the ability to see through amniotic fluid and skin, I never got to meet Puss, the first cat in my life, in person. From my parents’ recollections of her, I tend to picture her as half Pac Mog, half gremlin, chomping and clawing everything in her path in a furious plume of smoke before retiring to the eves to make tiny cackling noises and plot her next move. ‘SHE WOULD HAVE HAD YOUR HAND OFF IN A SECOND,’ my dad has frequently explained. For many years it
did not occur to me to question the veracity of this, or the wisdom of my parents’ decision to have her put to sleep in the fifth month of my mum’s pregnancy.

  When I was growing up, The Legend of Puss was an indelible part of Cox mythology, right up there with The Legend of the Time I Almost Died of a Burst Appendix and the Time My Dad Bought A Morris Minor for a Tenner. It has only been recently that I’ve looked at the photographs depicting an undersized, sandy-coloured cat, and noticed that they don’t quite seem to tally with the oft-repeated stories of shredded wrists and fleeing postmen. And what, I wonder, of Felix, my parents’ other not stupendously originally named 1970s moggy, an animal best known for her gentle, pliable nature and pillow soft fur? According to my feline family tree, Felix was born in 1972. How did such an innocent creature manage to not only survive Puss’s iron rule for two full years, but give birth as well? Wouldn’t Puss have chewed her kittens to pulpy masses and spat them at the milkman?

  As my mum remembers it, Puss had always had a mile-wide mean streak, but after my parents found her on the road outside their house, her back legs crushed in a hit and run, she became a cat out of hell. While Puss would walk again, her rear half never fully recovered from the accident, leaving her pained and furious. In the end, though, it was my impending arrival that was responsible for booking her final trip to the vets.

  ‘You would have done the same thing, if you were getting ready to give birth for the first time,’ says my mum. I find this hard to believe, but, since I don’t plan to get knocked up any time soon, I am unlikely to find out.

  Whether the millstone of Puss’s death was responsible for my lifelong need to be around cats – to invite them in to soil my furniture, to spoil them, to let them push me around – I cannot say for certain. It is entirely possible that, had Puss survived my gestation, I would be sitting here writing this with one less eye and a Dobermann pinscher curled up at my feet. Whatever the case, when you grow up burdened with the knowledge of having been the catalyst for an animal’s death, it’s probably going to help to shape who you are, whether you like it or not.

  Add to this an appropriate first name and initials – I’d been at primary school all of twenty minutes when one of my classmates started singing the Top Cat theme tune (‘close friends get to call him TC!’) – and the die is well on the way to being cast. Another theory regarding why I love cats so much is that I have always liked a challenge. There is also the possibility that, when you live in the back-of-beyond, ten miles from your nearest schoolfriend, you take what company you can get, even if the most positive feedback you can get from that company is a grudging half-purr and a disdainfully proffered chin.

  A typical summer day in 1978 at our three-bed semi in the north-east Midlands countryside would have found the 3-year-old me eating soil in the back garden, trying to befriend Gordon Witchell’s cows in the back field, or practising my before-their-time homoeopathic massaging techniques on Felix. My mum’s child substitute must have breathed a sigh of relief when Puss mysteriously ‘went to the furry retirement village’ and never came back, but her respite was brief. If Felix looks nervous in many of the photos of her from my toddlerhood, it does not take a Zoology PhD to work out why – at least, not once you have spotted the small, clammy pair of hands frequently reaching out into the edge of the frame.

  Not long after my fourth summer on the planet, she decided she’d had enough of being chased under furniture and treated like a pre-school stress-relief ball and went to live next door with a nice old lady called Flo, whom my dad claimed was just approaching her 134th birthday. There she stayed for the next three years, until Flo died and her house was bought by a retired alcoholic doctor: a man more likely to mistake the long-suffering Felix for an unusually furry black and white beer towel than ply her with titbits.

  By the time Felix came back to live with us, I’d found other interests to occupy my time – making dens in the woods by the newly closed neighbouring coalmine, performing stunts on my BMX, and having my one, precious Star Wars figurine liquefied by a terrifying 9-year-old from three doors away called Ian Saw. But Felix remained circumspect around me, particularly at times when I happened to have haircare equipment upon my person.

  Depending on whether I’m feeling self-pitying or upbeat at the time, I can look upon my early childhood as either a classic example of only-child rural isolation, or a classic example of pass-the-parcel, post-hippy urban utopia. I always liked the look of the place my parents referred to in slightly scornful tones as ‘suburbia’, but as I remained unfamiliar with its inhabitants, I knew it only as the place where my mum and dad’s jalopies sometimes broke down on the way back from the inner city school where my mum taught and I was a pupil.

  Claremont Primary School was an institution that seemed to embody a lot of the best things about the hippy era without being self-consciously progressive or predominantly middle class. Here, I churned butter and played ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ with kids called Aseef, Esme, Danny and Sorrel, before going home to read Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr Fox and Dick King-Smith’s The Mouse Butcher for the umpteenth time, and hunt for water beetles for my DIY garden pond. The gummy, idyllic class pictures of me and my multi-ethnic, socially diverse friends from Claremont, with our straggly hair and towelling sweatshirts, tell one story of the first ten years of my life, but the photos from my back garden in Brinsley and my holidays from the same period probably tell the more accurate one. ‘Ooh yes!’ I say to my mum, as she gets the old albums out. ‘Here’s me with that boxer dog, Billy, that I befriended on that campsite in Dorset – the one whose owners took me to the funfair in Weymouth . . . And those Muscovy ducks that came in the kitchen when we stayed in Bath . . . And there’s that black and white pair of kittens we met on the campsite in Italy, the ones we called Evil and Knievel . . . And that German kid who I played table tennis with, the one who got rushed to hospital when he banged his head on the bottom of the swimming pool.’

  These photos speak of a socially active childhood, but one where all new acquaintances were greeted with equal enthusiasm, whether they happened to be human or animal. I would estimate in about 40 per cent of them I’m holding, or somewhere in the nearby vicinity of, a cat.

  Given my alarming aptitude for remembering the names of other people’s pets from over two decades ago, I’m somewhat abashed to say that I recall relatively little about Tabs, my second cat. I am certain this owes nothing to lack of care or affection, just as I am certain I had never before experienced anything approaching the gut-wrenching devastation I felt when, while making her way across the road to meet us in her customary, enthusiastic early-evening way, not long after her first birthday, she was hit by a car.

  Her death was mercifully instant, leaving her looking peaceful, with just a single, tiny spot of blood beside her on the kerb. I still have a clear image of a wobbly lipped 12-year-old me explaining to Mrs Deeth, my maths teacher, about the tragic event that had prevented me from doing my homework (Mrs Deeth had a stern reputation, but Wayne Smith and Beau O’Dowd on the back row really were very unfair to call her ‘Mrs Death’ – she was actually very understanding).

  My parents decided the best remedy for my grief was a visit to the Burton Joyce Cats Rescue Centre, where I formed an unmistakable bond with Monty, a sinewy, white and sandy-coloured chap – and I use the word ‘chap’ pointedly – with a look of mischief in his eye.

  On the way home, as the smell of Monty’s first bowel evacuation of the evening mingled with that of our takeaway curry, I began to feel like a traitor. Choking back the tears, I explained to my mum that I might be making a mistake trying to ‘replace’ Tabs so hastily. Much as they tore at my innards, these sentiments somewhat started to dissipate later that evening, when Monty started making gargling noises and running up and down the living room curtains.

  Monty was one of those animals who come along every so often that seem a little more patrician than the rest of their species. He was the kind of cat that even lifelong cat
ophobes could not bring themselves to loathe. Wild animals smaller than a pheasant feared him, other cats wanted to be him, divorced book group members with hennaed hair wanted to be with him. When I looked into his eyes, I saw something wild, yet controlled.

  If Monty had had his own theme tune, it would either have been ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ by Carole King, or ‘Theme from Shaft’ by Isaac Hayes. He’d once prowled across the roof outside my bedroom while I’d been listening to the latter, and its funky string arrangements and lyrics about ‘a complicated man’ and ‘the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about’ had seemed apt. Not, of course, that Monty would, in the words of Hayes, ever have been ‘the man who would risk his neck for his brother man’. He was, after all, a cat, and wasn’t going to transcend the self-absorbed limits of his species. But if he could have done, I’m sure he would have given it a go, provided it didn’t involve venturing anywhere too damp.

  After his initial, uncharacteristically unrestrained and alarmingly literal curtain raiser, Monty soon got down to business, outlining his primary requirements as a member of our household. These ran as follows:

  1. The promise that I would not, on any account, attempt to transform him into a lap cat.

  2. A strict ‘No Hairdryers within fifty Feet’ policy.

  3. Thrice-weekly – at the very least – helpings of chicken breast (uncooked).

  4. Permission to drink freely from the well of life – and the upstairs loo – without any snide comments regarding hygiene.

  5. A promise that I would not react jealously or possessively, should his affections stray elsewhere, and know that, no matter how many milkmen/schoolfriends/members of the medical profession he rubbed himself against, I would always ultimately be the Important One.

  6. That I would stick to the classic ‘one-two’ format – a high ‘wee’ followed by a low ‘woo’ – whilst whistling him, and refrain from experimentation or creative hubris.