Tales from the bunker - felines and felons

Purrfect Houseguests

I’ve learned that, when you steal a neighbour’s cat, you can’t give it back.

              P and I have form when it comes to cat-stealing. Three years after we moved to our current house, we were befriended by two stunningly beautiful kittens who were doing the rounds of all the neighbouring gardens. They would stare into living rooms through the patio doors, looking pretty and holding in their sides as if they were starving, and they soon discovered which houses contained pushovers. The young couple next to us on one side were easy-going mugs, but they had two expensive pedigree cats specially bred to be ‘indoor cats’ and so they didn’t want someone else’s cats letting them know about the wonders of the outside world. Our neighbours on the other side owned canaries and the woman of the house hates cats. So it was down to us to say the fateful words: ‘Oh, look at the lovely little things! I wonder who they belong to? Let’s give them some food and make friends with them’.

Asbo, doing his famous impression of a furry cushion

If I’m going to be accurate, it was in fact only the black and white kitten, a cat who resembled the cartoon cat on the Felix advertisements so perfectly that his owners had bafflingly called him Dusty (!), who stared in through the patio window, or came up to us when we parked our cars after work. His brother, a black cat who was at that time called the entirely inappropriate name of Fluffy, was much more cautious and tended to remain in the shadows, under cars or behind bushes, just mewing loudly. For several weeks, we actually thought that Dusty was throwing his voice, until eventually this drop-dead gorgeous black kitten emerged shyly from his hiding place and we realized there were two of them.

              We had no idea where they were from but they started popping round regularly. We didn’t often give them food, but we played with them and cuddled them, and then they would run off home till next time. It was a good arrangement.

              Then, one day, Fluffy turned up and collapsed on our rug. He was clearly in a bad way so P went off round the local houses trying to find his owners. He discovered a house on the next street which had a cat basket in the porch, but no one was home, so he left a note for them. An hour later, their owner, Adrian, turned up, very apologetic and concerned, and took Fluffy to the vet. Once he recovered, however, Fluffy had clearly decided that our house was the better bet in times of need, and he started coming round more frequently and even trying to stay overnight. We used to have to throw him out at closing time, like a lazy drunk In a bar.

Asbo, wriggling is bum in preparation for a pounce

This led to his owners asking us to look after the cats while they went on holiday, and this led to the cats deciding they were moving in with us. After a lengthy period of cat-sharing, Adrian finally gave them up to us and bought a Yorkshire terrier instead. Eight years later, Dusty was hit by a car and killed, and it was Adrian who found him lying by the roadside. He was very upset, though not as upset as us. And not as upset as his brother, who by that time we’d renamed Asbo (which suited him much better). He spent weeks staring out of the patio windows towards the gate where Dusty would usually come in. There are few things more poignant than an animal grieving for its best friend, and before the cats moved in with us I hadn’t realized that they could feel such loss. You can’t explain to an animal what has happened. Do cats have a sense of death? They certainly don’t seem to feel any mercy for the headless mice they leave on your patio. But they do seem to grieve for their brothers. Asbo did anyway, for many weeks.

              Asbo himself lived until he was about fourteen, and then had to be euthanized due to bowel cancer. Taking him to the vet for the last time was a learning experience for me, as I had expected to feel relieved that his suffering would be over, but in fact we both burst into tears and cried like babies all the way home. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I’d been very distressed when, in my early twenties, my childhood dog had been euthanized, but I wasn’t there when it happened (she was operated on and the cancer from which she was suffering was deemed by the vet to be so widespread that it seemed kinder to euthanise her without bringing her round from the anaesthetic) – but actually being with an animal you love in his final moments feels overwhelmingly sad.

Dusty, shocked by what he's just seen on TV

Dusty was energetic, mischievous, friendly and brave-to-the-point-of-recklessness, which is probably why he died the way he did. He used to hare about the house like a maniac, climbing on everything he could (which was basically everything). I’m sure he visited other houses as he often came home smelling of other people’s perfume and after-shave. He loved to be cuddled and was very tolerant of belly-rubs and paw-pats. He was extremely friendly and gentle with humans, but a determined and highly successful hunter. He once turned up on our patio carrying a dead rat half his own size, and looking immensely pleased with himself.  Asbo, on the other hand, was much more cautious. He was physically bigger and was always getting into fights with other male cats, despite having been ‘done’ as a kitten, and he was as magnificently agile as most cats, but his extra weight sometimes made him less speedy than his brother. I remember once watching him from my bedroom window, when he was still a very young cat, trying to climb up a silver birch sapling after a bird - the tree was bend under his weight, swinging from side to side like a pendulum, and the stupid animal clearly had no idea what to do. He was clinging on tightly, looking slightly desperate, until at last he lost his grip and somersaulted to the ground, landing on his feet and strolling off nonchalantly, as if that's what he'd intended all along. Cats hate to lose face.

Dusty, disapproving of P's shoe display

 

            Asbo received so many wounds over the years – he’d drag himself home, bleeding and mutilated, reminding me of the cat who fights the devil every night to protect his human family in Neil Gaiman’s short story 'The Price'. He also had several life-threatening illnesses over the years. He cost a fortune in vet bills. Despite this, he significantly outlived his brother. Asbo had a reputation for being anti-social, though he was very affectionate with us, and he never showed any aggression towards our great-nephew who was born about eighteen months before Asbo died. But he was large, with huge claws and teeth (for a domestic cat), and he didn’t like strangers. He once scratched a friend of ours who happens to be gay. Our friend was just sitting at the other end of the settee, minding his own business, when Asbo suddenly spun round and scratched his arm. Our friend was remarkably sanguine about the experience, and P commented, ‘Well, I've heard there’s a lot of homophobia in the black community!’.

Asbo, feeling rather smug because he's higher than everyone else

After Asbo was euthanised, we decided not to get another cat, or at least not to do so for some years. We thought we’d get a rescue cat sometime in the future. However, we didn’t take Tilly into account. Tilly is another black cat who lived at another neighbour’s house. She’s about two years younger than Asbo, and, being a very small animal, she was terrified of both Asbo and Dusty, who bullied her frequently, Despite this, for reasons unknown to us, she has always been obsessed with getting into our house. She would watch until our cats had gone out, then come to the patio doors to try to inveigle her way in. We never fed her and didn’t encourage her at all for many years. In fact, we both used to consider her to be a weird little thing who was slightly bonkers, because she was very unpredictable and would bite at any sign of imaginary danger. She was well-looked-after in her own home, with kind owners who were used to cats, but her owners adopted a baby and also bought a little West Highland terrier – I think it was the terrier that finally convinced Tilly to move out, though even now she goes home every so often to play with the little dog, according to the neighbours.

Early morning call, courtesy of Tilly Alarm Clock LTD

It didn’t take her long to realise that Asbo was no longer around, and she started to come over every day for about twenty minutes, just to say hello. We didn’t feed her at all, but we weren’t unfriendly either.  Last year, her owners went away on holiday and left her at home on her own with an automated food dispenser and a cat flap. She immediately came over to ours and clearly wanted to stay here. At the end of the first day, she ‘hid’ behind an armchair, clearly hoping we wouldn’t realise she was there, so, knowing her owners were away, we let her stay. That was our big mistake. She stayed with us for the rest of the week and by the time her owners returned, she’d clearly decided that our house was a suitable retirement home for eighteen year old bones. Fortunately, her owners were happy for Tilly to stay with us and in fact they have been nothing but helpful about it.

Asbo, wishing he didn't have to have handmade play furniture

You can’t expect to get sane behaviour from a cat. At least, not sane behaviour by human definitions of ‘sane’. Tilly has always been a bit batty, and now she’s elderly she’s even more bonkers. She still bites people randomly for no reason whatsoever (must be a black cat thing, though Asbo never bit or scratched us, just people he didn't know, whereas Tilly bites the nearest person, if she’s spooked - and she can be spooked by anything). Her bite is feeble, however, as she’s very tiny and old. She is literally about half the size of Asbo. In my opinion, Asbo was the most beautiful cat who ever lived, so Tilly can never live up to him in beauty or strength, but she makes up for it in weirdness. She doesn’t mew, just opens her mouth as if she’s mewing. Despite her miniature size, she snores louder than a human. She is startled by things you’d think she was familiar with, like that Catherine Tate character who started screaming whenever she heard a sudden noise. She will be lying asleep on Philip’s knee and will suddenly scramble to her feet and rush to the door. She goes through patches of weird behaviour when we start to wonder if she has cat Alzheimers’ (or some equivalent), but then she returns to what counts as normal for a few days.

Tilly, trying to work out why she's ended up on the wrong side of the door

There has been a gorgeous long-haired ginger cat in our street for several years. He resembles Bagpuss. I don’t know who he belongs to but he’s well-looked-after. Like most cats, he won’t come near us outside – if he sees people, even neighbours he's been seeing all his life,  he immediately darts off into the undergrowth and cowers behind the shrubbery as if they're armed with bows and arrows and are out looking for a new ginger hunting hat to keep their ears warm in the coming winter. However, a few years back, he did a weird thing. He came into our house via the open patio doors, strolled casually upstairs (I followed him, astonished and impressed by his chutzpah), walked into our great-nephew’s bedroom, as if he had a blueprint of the house in his brain, leapt gracefully onto the windowsill and took a long, long look at the street outside, then turned back to me, allowed me to scratch his head once, then jumped off the windowsill and strolled back out the way he’d come in. He then returned to his usual stand-offishness for several years, leaping into the bushes every time he spotted me, as if we'd never shared that brief and strange encounter..

However, last week he came in again, still casual and relaxed, rubbed up against my legs and mewed with a surprisingly deep mew, then gobbled up the bit of stale food Tilly had left in her saucer that morning before she went out to her day-job (sunbathing on top of her original owner’s wheelie bins). While he ate, he looked over his shoulder nervously several times as if expecting an ambush, though what teeny tiny Tilly could have done about it I'm not sure. She would probably just have jumped onto the relative safety of the garden table and given me a disapproving hard stare. Satisfied, he then strolled out into the garden  and vanished. 

Well, you can forget it, mate. You’re not our cat, however gorgeous and clever you are. You’re not moving in here. There’s no room at the inn. We already have one crazy cat, and we don’t need another. Our days of cat-rustling are over.

I mean it…

Ginger, looking like he knows which side his bread's buttered