The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (24 page)

When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, most women I knew had cats. I don’t remember that it signified anything other than that they liked cats, and were probably quite kind and nice. Certainly, I saw a couple of people who had more cats than was healthy either for them or the cats, but that didn’t seem anything to do with the fact that the animal they were projecting their unhappiness onto was feline: they could just as easily have been living with too many weasels or parrots.

Nowadays, though, Crazy Cat Lady is entrenched in our psyche. Like all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth to her, but she’s a million times more present in that flippant but damaging thing ‘Internet banter’ than she ever could be in real life. Jokes about Crazy Cat Ladies seem harmless enough, but at their core is a disturbing echo of the hysterical witch superstitions of the late Middle Ages. I’ve known several women who have wanted to get a cat, or an additional
cat, but have hesitated, or decided not to, because of ‘what it might say about them’.

Personally, I’d like to see Crazy Cat Lady’s name never mentioned again: for the good of male–female relations, for the good of feminism, for the good of human self-esteem, for the good of cats – particularly rescue cats. That’s clearly not going to happen, though, so instead a large faction of women have started embracing the Crazy Cat Lady title as a subversive way of drowning out the negative assumptions that go with it. In 2009, you might not have seen ‘Crazy Cat Lady, and proud of it’ in many Twitter biogs, but by 2012 it had become far more common, along with a flaunting of cat tattoos and cat-related furniture and clothing. This not just from single, childless women over the age of thirty-five, but from women of all ages and appearances, in many different careers, with varying romantic statuses.

Admirable as this proud attempt to turn the tables is, and support it though I do, I’m not sure if I’d be bold enough to join in, if I were of the opposite gender and had been put in the Crazy Cat Lady box. I think the chief problem is, as much as I love cats, I don’t love many cat-related
things
. It’s another stipulation of my contract with myself as a cat owner. I’ve got two T-shirts with cats on them: one was sent to me by a cat charity I supported, and the other was bought as a present, less because it had a cat on it and more because it was funny. I don’t have any cat jumpers, or an armchair with a cat print on it. I currently have some form of drawing or sculpture of a hare in every room of
my house, yet I only have one cat-themed wall hanging: a montage of photographs of an upside-down Janet, to remind me what an adorable nutcase he was.

I’ve never seen the
musical
Cats
and have no desire to do so. I accept that friends and family will often send me birthday cards with drawings or photos of cats on them, but I’m always quietly pleased when they opt for another theme. A reader of my first book on cats once sent me three tiny cardigans as presents for The Bear, Ralph and Shipley, each with an individual name tag, and, feeling I’d be somewhat ungrateful not to, I started coaxing each of them to try them on. But I found myself stopping in the middle of the process, feeling rather uncomfortable about it. The way I view my cats is not that they’re a hobby, or child substitutes, but a bunch of friends who just happen to be smaller and furrier and more self-obsessed than most of my other friends. There are certain things you do with friends, and certain things you don’t. Will and Mary, for example, are friends, but I don’t feel compelled to get a tattoo on my arm dedicated to them, or hang framed woodcuts of their faces all over my house.

My slight aversion to items featuring cats meant that, by my mid-thirties, I had seen what many cat aficionados might have viewed as a pitiful number of films from the feline canon. I’d watched the original 1942 film noir version of the horror movie
Cat People
, but that’s probably clutching at straws. 1988’s
Heathcliff: The Movie
, 2001’s
Cats and Dogs
and 2004’s
Garfield: The Movie
had always been way off my radar.

One day in late summer 2012, I came upstairs from my office to find Gemma singing to The Bear, ‘Ev’rybody wants to be a cat.’

‘That’s a nice song,’ I said. ‘Did you make that up?’

‘You’re kidding me, right?’

‘No. It’s nice. I mean it.’

‘Surely you know that song. It’s from
The Aristocats
. The Disney film.’

‘Nope. Never seen it.’

‘But everyone’s seen that film.’

‘Not me. Is it good?’

I could have said this was
perhaps another small measure of the gap between me, as someone born in the seventies, who’d grown up with only three channels of kids’ TV, and Gemma, a member of the more culturally saturated generation below me. In truth, the main reason I hadn’t seen
The Aristocats
was that I’d spent most of my childhood outside, riding my bike or playing football or golf. I sensed, though, from Gemma’s review and a few I read on the Internet, that if I was going to watch one film about cats, I could do a lot worse.

As luck would have it, that weekend
The Aristocats
happened to be on TV, and five of us – Gemma, me, Shipley, Ralph and The Bear (but not Roscoe, who’d seemed a bit anti-films ever since her attack on Mark Wahlberg during
Contraband
) – sat down to watch it. Shipley only lasted about five minutes before wandering off swearing, and The Bear bowed out at around the airing of the theme song, apparently in disagreement at its generalisations (not
everyone
wanted to be a cat – The Bear obviously didn’t want to be a cat; he wanted to be a poet, or a diplomat), but the rest of us lasted the course, and I surprised myself by quite enjoying it.

The story revolves around a mother cat called Duchess and her three kittens,
who belong to the wealthy former opera singer Madame Adelaide Bonfamille. Had she existed in the Internet age, Madame Adelaide might have been branded a Crazy Cat Lady, and perhaps gone on to write self-abasing confessional pieces about her life in the
Daily Mail
, but this is 1910, so she’s just a somewhat eccentric old lady. Learning that Adelaide’s cats will inherit her fortune when she dies – but that in the event of their death, the money will pass into his hands – her evil butler Edgar drives Duchess and her kittens into the remote French countryside and releases them. Here they meet Thomas O’Malley, a con-man Lothario moggy from the wrong side of the tracks with a good heart, who shows amazing restraint around Duchess, given that he is attracted to her and clearly hasn’t been taken to the vet’s to have his balls cut off by interfering strangers. We learn that O’Malley is an alley cat, which seems a little strange, as the area of rural Burgundy where he happens upon Duchess and her kittens has a notable dearth of alleys. Soon, though, they are all making their way back to Paris to avenge the wrong that has been done to them, aided by some British geese who are by some distance the most annoying part of the film, and made me look with new fondness upon a particularly stroppy Muscovy duck who’d been spending time in my garden recently.

Ralph sat on my lap the whole way through
The Aristocats
, padding my chest and dribbling lightly in some of the more frantic earlier stages, then falling into a deep, snoring sleep during the climax. Witnessing the high life of Thomas O’Malley, its dalliances with well-bred female cats and its all-night feline jazz parties, I couldn’t help looking at Ralph, in his magnificent
sideburned glory, and feeling a little wistful about his lot in life. If any of my cats had been a born ladies’ man, it was him, yet all I’d done throughout his life was emasculate him. Having been called Prudence for the first few months of his life, by the time he had been given a name becoming of his rugged manliness, he was missing a couple of vital components. This was a necessity, in a world where there are too many unwanted kittens: a straightforwardly responsible act that didn’t require any debate, but, with Ralph’s looks and irrepressible good nature, it was also a little like slapping God in the face. I couldn’t help feeling I’d been slightly cruel: as if I’d gone up to Kurt Russell during his role as MacReady in the 1982 film
The Thing
, stroked his magnificent beard and hair, then gently broken it to him that for the rest of his life he was not allowed to touch a member of the opposite sex.

Oh, there had been love affairs, of sorts, in Ralph’s life. During his kittenhood, he’d seemed to idolise Brewer and had fallen into a year-long slump after his death. After that, his attentions had moved in the direction of a sheepskin rug, which he could often be found padding and thrusting on, whilst staring with determination at a distant and invisible, yet apparently very attractive, object. In another heartless gesture, though, I’d recently got rid of the rug. It dated from my previous relationship, and I’d become almost oblivious to it in the last three and a half years, but one day recently I’d caught sight of it and realised:
‘I have part of a dead animal in my house. I do not want part of a dead animal in my house.’ Additionally, it still had just a trace of Ralph’s dried sick on it from 2010 that I could never quite remove.

So what did that leave? There was Shipley, but, although something of a brotherly bond still remained between the two of them, the way Ralph viewed Shipley tended to drift between irritation and indifference. Roscoe had recently got into the habit of attempting to jump on Ralph’s back from a variety of lofty surfaces, and he’d weathered this in a fairly mellow manner, but you wouldn’t exactly say she was
interesting
to him. Then there were the slugs, but that was a bit of a one-sided romance, too.

‘Ralph only really loves you,’ Gemma told me, perhaps accurately. I’d hurt Ralph so often in the time I’d known him. There had been the neutering, and the removal of the sheepskin, and the time in his youth I’d thrown an empty cardboard box quite near him in frustration after he’d maimed a heavily pregnant rat and left it on the staircase. To add insult to injury, there were my dietary decisions of the last few years. Now, when he ran to my cereal bowl and food plate to check for leftovers, as his brain had trained him to do, following years of excitement, he found only soya disappointment or leftover falafel woe. Yet Ralph continued to love me. Even though Gemma was around Roscoe, Shipley and The Bear for not much more than half the time that I was, it could be argued that they were as much her cats as mine. But not Ralph. His enthusiasm
for being around me was such that it could virtually be considered that most unfeline of traits: obedience. I now bore the brunt of the sheepskin’s absence, many of the softer parts of my body having to withstand the pummelling that it had once endured.

It seemed a shame that Ralph’s love could not be more liberally spread around, since he had so much to give. He’d always been a mellow cat, and – if you overlooked the moments when he meowed his own name at the top of his voice – had only grown more mellow with age. Of course, he’d had his ginger-tabby race war with Pablo a while back, and knew how to put Shipley in his place with a nonchalant body slam, but the idea of him growling these days seemed as unlikely as the Dalai Lama suffering from road rage. When Ralph was in a good mood, which was most of the time, he turned the mythical grin of the Cheshire Cat into reality. There was always a sense that there was a thought bubble above his head saying ‘I know: majestic aren’t I?’ When he lay in a patch of sunlight, you got the feeling that it was a case of the sunlight finding him, not him finding the sunlight.

But, like any rock star, he had his ego problems and his secret hang-ups. He remained nervous around new people, in a way that Shipley, Roscoe and even The Bear weren’t. ‘What does this person want from me?’ he always seemed to be thinking, when a stranger or semi-stranger came to the house. ‘Are they just interested in me for my effortless shaggy good looks and giant sideburns?’

Ralph had also always
experienced something of a problem with summer. His relationship with the sun seemed to dance around the line separating love from hate. He loved to recline in a sunspot, but during prolonged periods of heat he could often be found yowling in heavy foliage, as if in pain, or looking dishevelled and glum. I’d come to view it as his own special form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Since 2012 didn’t actually feature a summer, it had turned out to be a good year for him. He could often be found sleeping under the pampas grass, with one eye open, as I gardened, or taking a dust bath in one of the flower beds. One day in early September I was building a fence out of brushwood where a tree had fallen down and came back up the garden with the wheelbarrow to see him sitting happily next to a hedgehog. It was hard to tell from the expression on the hedgehog’s face, but I sense that there was nothing accidental about their coupling.

Over the next quarter of an hour, not wishing to butt in on whatever the two of them had going on, I observed them from twenty or so feet away. Whenever Ralph moved a yard or two, so, very quickly afterwards, did the hedgehog. As it did so, Ralph beamed, in his best ‘I didn’t ask to be beautiful’ way. I’m not sure if the hedgehog beamed too, or even if it’s possible for hedgehogs to beam, but it didn’t seem unhappy with the situation. I had a closer look at the hedgehog and it had a few ticks stuck to it, which I assumed might have been a bonding point, given Ralph’s history with parasites. As if to confirm this, Ralph reached up a paw and gave his neck a violent scratch, but the
hedgehog didn’t flinch. It was nice to see the way the two of them seemed able to be totally themselves around one another, without any need to put on any airs or graces or pretend to be better than they were.