The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (4 page)

I carried Janet across the lawn – his weight, more than restored, in death, to what it had been in the prime of his life, came as a shock – and buried him under the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. It was one whose branches he and Shipley used to like to race up and down in pursuit of one another. In my tear- and rain-stained grief, I still found a second or two to wonder if a previous owner of the house had ever buried a pet here before, and thought of a story my friend Jackie had told me about her cat Martha, who’d died the previous year. While burying Martha, in similarly sodden conditions, on the hillside where she lived in Pembrokeshire, poor Jackie had accidentally dug up the skeleton of Martha’s brother, Arthur, who’d died seven years earlier after being hit by a car. ‘I must have looked a right state,’ she told me, ‘standing in the rain, covered in mud, bawling my eyes out, holding the corpse of one cat and the skeleton of another. It’s a good job nobody was walking along the footpath at the time.’ I thought with horror and sympathy about the people out there who are
truly
alone when an animal dies – who, unlike Jackie and me, don’t have the comfort of loving family, or the knowledge that, even though they live a bit out of the way, before long they’ll see friends who’ll help them feel better.

So: my cat had
died, it was raining, and I was momentarily isolated, but part of me still knew it could be worse. ‘It could be worse’: I couldn’t remember having said that very much in my first twenty-five years on the planet, but it is so often the reassuring mantra of adulthood. And what I was experiencing now really was adulthood, in a more extreme way than I’d ever experienced it.

People have a lot of different definitions of what makes you a proper grown-up. Some claim it’s getting your first car or losing your virginity. Others think it’s buying your first house or having your first child. For me, it was the moment when alone, in the pouring rain, far from nearly all of the people I loved, I buried my cat, twenty minutes after holding him in my arms and watching him die.

As I tramped back up the steep garden towards the house, I saw The Bear staring down at me from the living-room window. With his huge saucer eyes and the rain running down the glass, you could have set the scene to music as the climactic montage in a heartbreaking Hollywood movie. If you’d never met him before, you’d have been sure he was in mourning. But The Bear always looked like that. He was the only cat I’d ever seen who appeared to be almost permanently on the verge of tears. He’d never exactly disliked Janet, but had suffered him as the painfully intelligent have always suffered the trivial and frivolous. Would he be sad without him? Perhaps. But in his deep, mysterious, faintly omniscient way, I imagine he probably had known it was coming.

I arrived inside
and sat beside him. I was struck, as so often, by how well he had aged. His ears looked a bit like they’d been nibbled by a large rabbit who’d mistaken them for a couple of small black lettuce leaves, but, even if his eyes were impossibly sad, they were bright too, and his fur was much shinier than it had been when I’d first met him. I picked him up and he clung tightly to me, as if holding on for dear life. Again, probably nothing to do with the circumstances of the moment. The Bear always clung tightly to the chests of those he liked as if holding on for dear life. ‘Wow, man,’ Michael the folk musician with the cape, who’d looked after him for a while, had once said. ‘That was intense when I first cuddled him. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like that from a cat before.’ That was a decade and a marriage ago, but I still felt the same thing, every day.

‘Just the four of us now, then,’ I said, and he began to purr.

The following
day, after an evening spent with my supportive friends in Norwich, I noticed something odd: the sick outside the back door was gone, leaving no trace of its long and clinging tenancy. Mary and Will would be pleased and vindicated to find out. Had it already vanished yesterday? I couldn’t say, as I’d been too fogged by grief to notice. You could say the rain was probably responsible, but there had been heavy downpours several times during the last few weeks and they hadn’t succeeded in shifting it. To me it all seemed a bit suspicious. One day, I’ve got a load of vomit outside my back door and no willing, hungry foxes in the neighbourhood. The next day, my cat, who once happened to be best friends with a very thin, old fox, badly in need of sustenance, dies. The day after that, I’ve got absolutely no vomit outside my back door.

Alongside the
one that involved me telling myself that Janet did not suffer for long, it became one of the positive thoughts I tried to focus on, in the days that followed: maybe he had finally been reunited with his old (not all that) bushy-tailed friend from London? I pictured the scene: Janet’s immortal soul leaving his body, climbing into the apple tree and spotting the fox’s immortal soul trotting across the lawn.

‘You certainly took your time,’ says the fox’s immortal soul.

‘I was busy. What can I say? We moved house a lot. There was a break-up to deal with. Life gets in the way, you know,’ says Janet’s immortal soul.

‘I just found some really tasty vomit by the door, on my way here,’ says the fox’s immortal soul.

‘That came from me!’ says Janet’s immortal soul.

‘Ooh, thanks! Very good of you,’ says the fox’s immortal soul. ‘There were a couple of voles, too, but they were a bit wet and chewy, and one was technically just a vole’s bottom.’

‘Yeah,’ says Janet’s immortal soul. ‘Shipley likes to eat their faces. Don’t ask me why. He’s a massive weirdo.’

‘Anyway, let’s not hang around,’ says the fox’s immortal soul. ‘I’ve got lots to show you.’

‘Great!’ says Janet’s immortal soul. ‘I’m excited.’

‘Just watch you don’t set fire to your tail when you pass through the fiery vortex separating this dimension from the next,’ says the fox’s immortal soul. ‘I did that in 2002 and the fur I lost took ages to grow back.’

‘Gotcha,’ says Janet’s immortal soul.

Just before they leave, Janet’s immortal soul pauses. It has a worried look on its face. ‘Shit!’

‘What’s wrong?’ asks the fox’s immortal soul.

‘You just
cost him a tenner.’

Thou shalt have no other gods before thyself.

Thou shalt not kill, or at least if thou art going to kill, thou shalt have a game of football with the thing thou is going to kill before thou properly finishest it off.

Thou shalt repeat the internal mantra ‘I hate this! It’s fucking great!’ about the majority of life experiences.

Thou shalt not drink the water put out for thee by thy humans. Thou shalt instead demand to drink the freshest water in Christendom straight from the tap, although if that is not forthcoming, thou shalt protest by drinking any old rainy, algae-spattered crap thou might find in next door’s garden.

Thou shalt ignore any
toy thy human has bought for thee, especially the really expensive ones, but thou shalt dearly cherish the packaging of said toy, and have hours of fun with it.

Thou shalt forget thy mother and father quite quickly when separated from them, and, if thou happens to see them again, thou shalt sniff their bottoms then hiss at them intimidatingly.

Thou shalt snack voraciously, stealing at least one fish before the age of three, always remembering to leave something black and hard to remove behind after every meal, and getting irrationally excited when thy biscuit dispenser is topped up, even though thy new biscuits are just the same as those underneath.

Thou shalt not commit adultery, except in a kind of ‘dry hump’ way, with thy owner’s cleanest knitwear and bedding.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s cardboard box.

Thou shalt never
forget the rule that thy affection towards thy human should rise and fall in direct proportion to the amount of miscellaneous crap stuck to thy fur at the time.

‘In retrospect, perhaps
I didn’t quite think it through,’ said Jamie.

He, Russ, Amy and I were sitting in our favourite pub in Norwich. On the table in front of us was a mousetrap. Jamie and Russ, who’d been best friends for more than two decades, were born only a day apart, and over the years they had developed a tradition of buying useful, unromantic birthday presents for one another – of which this was the latest.

‘No, no. It’s great,’ protested Russ. ‘I just wonder if there’s a way of catching her
without
severing her spine.’

Three weeks ago, Russ’s hamster, Baboushka, had escaped beneath the floorboards of his house. Now, with only a fortnight to go before he was due to move to the other side of the city, he was losing hope of finding her. In theory, Jamie’s gift, which described itself as a ‘humane, alternative’ trap, was typically thoughtful and practical. It was only when you looked more closely – examined, for example, the drawing on the base of its packaging, depicting a mouse being hanged from a steel noose – that you began to wonder how well it would really work out in the long term for Baboushka.

‘What about
Tom’s cats?’ asked Jamie. ‘Couldn’t you borrow one of them? I hear they’re very gentle.’

I hadn’t told Russ and Jamie about my cats’ recent fall from grace as mousers, but I wasn’t surprised that word had reached them. Norwich is a small city, where gossip travels fast, and the transformation of Shipley and Ralph from habitual vole chompers to a kind of reliable family-run rodent bus service had been fairly spectacular. It was now three months since Janet’s demise: precisely the period since I’d last seen a mouse’s spleen on my carpets, let alone trodden in one. In a way, it was rather touching: their own special fourteen-week silence in memory of a cat who had never been truly interested in killing anything, with the exception of empty Frazzles packets.

It wasn’t that Shipley and Ralph had stopped catching mice; they just seemed to have lost all their urgency in savaging them, instead leaving them unharmed behind sofas and cupboards, with what appeared to be a ‘just in case’ mentality. No longer did the patio resemble their own special mouseoleum. Always careful to keep a complete one around for later, their approach to rodents had become a little bit like a
Blue Peter
presenter’s to cardboard dioramas.

I wouldn’t have been entirely confident about lending Ralph or Shipley to Russ. Even with their new approach to prey, there was still the odd mishap: a broken leg here, a miniature heart attack there. Mostly, however, I would manage to catch and free the victims early enough, using an oversized coffee mug I’d got free from the hi-fi shop Richer Sounds and an
All the President’s Men
DVD case, while a reclining Shipley or Ralph raised a wry eyebrow in the background. I had no great sentimental attachment to the Richer Sounds mug, but I hadn’t intended to use the case of
All the President’s Men
, which was one of my favourite films of all time. It had, however, been the first item available on an occasion about six months ago when I’d successfully rescued a mouse Shipley had left by my DVD shelves, and I thought it best not to monkey with the formula. I performed these capture routines so often now, I’d begun to look at them in the way one might look upon an unpaid evening job for a local charity.