The Unadulterated Cat Read online

  However, this ability, which most Real cats' owners will have noticed (and what about when they're missing for a couple of days, eh, and come back well fed? Have they just been panhandling round the neighbours, or did they nip along to next Wednesday to enjoy the huge relieved “welcome-back” meal you gave them?), leads on to interesting speculation about:

  The Cat in History

  The books will tell you that cats evolved from civet ancestors about 45 million years ago, which was definitely a good start. Get as much distance between yourself and the civets as possible, that was the motto of the early cats. The civet cat has been a very nervous animal ever since it discovered that you can, er, derive civetone11 from it and use it in scent. Exactly how this is done I don't know and do not wish to research. It's probably dreadful. Oh, all right, I'll have a look.

  It is.12

  So, the story goes, the cat family pushed on with the evolving as fast as possible, going in for size, speed and ferocity. There's nothing like the fear that you might be mistaken for a civet for giving jets to your genes, especially when you know it's only a matter of millennia before your actual proto-hominids start wandering around the Holocenic landscape with a bottle, a knife and a speculative look in their eyes. They also spread out a bit but missed Australia, which had just gone past on the Continental Drift; this explains why the rats grew so big. Some got stripes, some tried spots. One well known early variety developed its very own do-it-yourself can opener a hundred thousand years before cat food came in tins, and died of being too early to take advantage of this.

  And then, suddenly, small versions started toturn up and go mee-owp, mee-owp at people.

  Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new “fire” stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst ofthem wanders into the cave and starts to purr.

  More amazing yet, it didn't get et.

  Dogs you can understand. They're pack creatures, humans are just another, brighter, pack leader. Dogs are handy for helping you run down things that are faster than you are. But cats—well, from Early Man's point of view, cats are good for nothing.

  The first cat to approach the cave survived, in fact, on sheer surprise value. It was the first animal the man had ever seen that wasn't either running away or bounding towards him and dribbling. It liked him.

  And the reason it felt this way was that the cat already knew that humans liked cats.

  Here was a household in the country.

  Households in the country attract cats. It's one of the fundamental wossnames of Nature. See the point? We know that Real cats can wander at will through time and space, and this cat was probably en route between feeding bowls before it took a wrong turning.

  After all, what's the alternative? That Early Man had nothing better to do with his spare time than look at a wild cat and spot that this horizontal-headed, yellow-eyed, spitting menace was just the thing the cave needed? No, our theories demand that it went the other way, that wild cats are domestic cats that went feral thousands of years ago, probably because they were upset about something, possibly the continued non-invention of the fridge.

  Cats make ideal time travellers because they can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback of time travel—that you might accidentally shoot your own grandfather—very unlikely. Of course, you might try to become your own grandfather, but having watched a family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.

  Sex

  Well…

  …of course, it all depends how Real the cat is, ifyouseewhatimean…

  Er…

  You see, if you have a gentleman cat and a lady cat who…

  The point is…

  In short, pedigree cats breed, Real cats mate. Breeding is best left to professionals. Mating, on the other hand, is done by cats.

  Breeders seem to be invariably ladies and while totally mad are nevertheless entirely charming people, whose houses can be distinguished by the neat sheds in the garden and the fact that the cat food comes, not in tins, but in a lorry.

  Most Real cat owners seldom if ever encounter them. It may occasionally happen that they come into possession of an animal whose looks and history suggest that she shouldn't be a candidate for the vet's attentions or those of the huge mad feral tom which hangs around the garden, and after the expenditure of a sum of money which makes male members of the family fantasise about the differences between the cat world and ours, you come back with figures chiming in your head—because you've been told how much the kittens should go for. Something like: X litters per year × £Y per kitten × save some females × X more litters = ££££1111

  Real cat owners know that life isn't like that. Keeping pets for profit is never profitable, whatever the paperwork says. Life becomes full of rolls of wire netting, feed bills, alfresco carpentry and huge bills from unexpected sources, and your horizons become bounded by, well, the horizon. Who looks after the cattery so that the cattery owner can go on holiday, eh?

  In fact, breeding has all been tremendously simplified these days by simply removing the option entirely, to the extent that the “Free to Good Home” signs seem a lot rarer and a good job too, and the cat population appears to be made up of big fat neutered toms and slim, sleek females whose liberation from the joys of motherhood appears to have come as a bit of a relief. Nevertheless, every neighbourhood still has what is delicately referred to as an Entire Tom.

  It is very hard for this animal not to be a Real cat. Once upon a time it would have been a tom amongst toms, scrapping and yowling and generally being kept in line by slicer peer pressure.

  But now all its old mates are fat and lazy and just want to kip all day, whilst the girls don't seem to want to know. It stalks alone through the shrubberies. The ground trembles. Pet rabbits cower in their hutches.

  Dogs—and, let's be honest, the average dog can be out-thought by even an unReal cat—are so unnerved by its air of make-my-day belligerence that, when they see it coming, they think of dozens of pressing reasons for trotting nonchalantly away. Unpruned and yet unsatisfied, its monstrous Id prowls with it. The milkman complains, the postman starts leaving your letters with the house next door…

  There was one that took a fiendish delight in fighting all the other local cats. Not over matters of territory, just for the hell of it. It'd creep up while they dozed in the sun, and pitch in. But we had just got a Real young female at the time. Spayed and scarred, she came from a thriving colony of farm cats so hulking great toms with nothing on their mind except sex and violence, possibly both together, were just part of the scenery as far as she was concerned.

  The first couple of times the crazed idiot chased her she ran away out of sheer amazement.

  Then we were privileged to watch the showdown.

  It started with the normal attempted mugging and the usual chase and much skidding round corners with binka-binka-binka leg pedalling (see “Cartoon Cats”; every cat has a bit of Cartoon cat in it). Then Real cat scrambled on top of the waterbarrel, waited until the pursuer had his front claws on top and his back legs scrabbling for the purchase necessary to lever his trembling, pear-shaped body the rest of the way, and then with great deliberation hit him across the nose. It was the kind of blow a Cartoon cat would have been proud of; it travelled through 300 degrees, I swear, making a noise like tearing silk.

  Then she sat looking at his shocked face with the expression that said he should ask himself whether there was any more where that came from, and was he feeling lucky? Matters were eventually resolved quite amicably by both animals pretending, as is so often the case when you meet something you can't do anything about, that the other one didn't exist. This was quite a feat. The tom was a Schrodinger cat who, before being adopted by a neighbour, had come wandering in from whatever hyperspace Schrodinger cats move around in, and for some r
eason considered that our house was his natural home. Real cat was not going to hiss at him though, because this meant recognising his existence and was therefore against the rules. So the two of them, by, some sort of telepathy, made certain that they were never in the same room. It was like those farces when one man is playing twin brothers and is forever running out of the French windows to look for himself just seconds before he walks in via the library door, in a different blazer, cursing at having missed meeting him.

  Hygiene

  Cats have always had the same well-meaning but shaky grasp of hygiene as humans, viz, if you've covered it over, it isn't there. The important thing is not actually to have achieved Hygiene, but to have been seen to have made the effort—as in, for example, trying to claw the lino into the dirt box.

  What's so hygienic about having a wash in your own spit?

  However, the Real cat scores over other domestic pets in one unusual respect: Real cats know what the bathroom is for.

  We returned one day to find that the incumbent Real cat, by means of the usual hyperspace travel, had been in when we thought she was Out. Thus no dirt box had been provided. Real cat, we thought, had a rather shifty expression, although this particular cat has a shifty expression all the time and even breathes as though it is stealing the air. A perfunctory search of the usual resorts of desperation—dark corners, the fireplace revealed nothing unpleasant that wasn't nor until, much later, we went to the bathroom. More specifically, the bath… You get mixed feelings at a time like this. There is, of course, the feeling of mild admiration that, in a house full of carpets, Real cat has chosen one of the few places that can easily be cleaned by gallons of hot water and an escalation of cleaning fluids (curiously, our book of household hints is definitely reticent about the whole, well, business of cats in the bath). On the other hand, there's the feeling that this is the bath, for God's sake, I was really looking forward to a soak and now I will never ever have a bath again as long as I live…

  What was intriguing was the reaction of other Real cat owners. They said: oh, first time it's happened to you, is it? And went on to tell me about this cat someone heard about who knows how to use the lavatory.

  It's bluetits and milk-bottle tops all over again, I tell you. Leave the lid down, that'll fox 'em.

  The Real cat on wheels

  It's a simple choice. The cat travels either in:

  a) a box, or

  b) a stupor.

  It's strange that dogs can take a car ride in their stride and still bounce out at the other end, more than ready to widdle, dribble, dig, bite small children and all the other things dogs are good at, while cats find the whole business terribly trying.

  Research indicates, however, that a small proportion of Real cats actually like car travel, provided it is on their terms. One of ours was quite at home with the whole thing provided it could sit on the driver's shoulder and watch the road ahead, which is probably against the law.13

  Animals loose in a car are never a good idea. Goats are generally the worst, but until you realise there's a tortoise stuck under your brake pedal you've never known the meaning of fear, and possibly not the meaning of “old age” either.

  An object lesson in the perils of travelling with a cat was provided by friends who took theirs with them when they moved house. It was the last journey—you know, the one where you leave the final key with the neighbours, promise to keep in touch, dig up a few prize plants and set off up the road for the last time with all the things the removal men couldn't or didn't or wouldn't put in the van, like the kids, strange items of kitchen ironmongery, and the cat.

  But this was all okay because as far as the cat was concerned a car was just a load of sleeping areas on wheels, and off they went up the motorway, you know the sort of thing, “Are we nearly there yet?”; “No you don't feel sick it's just your imagination.”

  And then they stopped at a service area.

  Really, you don't need to know the rest of the story. You can guess it. But for those who need it spelled out…

  They forgot about the cat. They got out, they got fed, they got in, they drove another seventy miles, they got out, they started to unpack, there was no cat. Cat must have got out.

  Midnight. Car screams into service area car park. Near-hysterical man staggers out with plastic bowl, spoon, lurches around the car park trying to look as nonchalant as is possible concurrent with banging a bowl with a spoon and shouting “Pusspaws!” in a strained falsetto (he was not, at that time, a paid-up member of the Campaign; if he had been, he'd have been wise to this sort of event and would have changed the cat's name to something like “Wat!” or “Zip!) An hour goes past. Leaves telephone number with least unsympathetic of the waitresses, drives back, visions of family pet laminated to fast lane…

  Cat leaves it until he's almost home before coming out onto the back seat and yawping for food. With the elderly car so crowded, it'd found a way via the arm-rest hole into the back of the boot, where it had settled down comfortably behind the spare tyre. But you knew that, anyway.

  The Campaign for Real Cats recommends a way to cut through the whole problem of taking cats with you to new homes. It gets rid of all that business of hiding under the bed, peering suspiciously out of the back door, looking betrayed, etc.

  The thing is, you see, that your average Real cat becomes attached not to human beings but to routines and territory. It's fashionable to agonise about wives or husbands giving up happy careers to follow the spouse across country, but no one thinks twice about the fact that the family cat may have spent years breaking in dozens of sleeping nests, working out best prowling routes, pouncing places, etc.

  The human beings around the scene are merely things provided by Nature for, eg, opening fridges and tins. The cat becomes quite attached to them, of course. You can become quite attached to a pair of slippers, for that matter. But it is much easier to become attached to new blobs than new sleeping areas. In short, the Campaign for Real Cats believes that when you move house the kindest thing you can do to the cat is leave it behind, where it will grieve for .003 seconds before sucking up shamefully to the new owners.

  As for you, as a catless catlover you will find that a stray turns up outside your new door within days. We think some sort of agency sends them.

  The Real cat and other animals

  Remember. From the cat's instinctive point of view, the animal world consists of:

  1) things that eat it

  2) things it can eat

  3) things it can eat but regret immediately;

  and

  4) other cats.

  But we then expect it to be perfectly at ease when faced with:

  a) Meals On Treadwheels

  b) meals in cages (the Flying McNuggets)

  c) mad quivering meals in hutches, which in the worst cases may be forced to join our Real cat, plus two dolls and a teddy bear, for a back-lawn tea, party consisting of water and crumbled biscuits

  d) feathery meals which are actually encouraged to come onto the back lawn for breadcrumbs

  e) meals in ponds

  f) large grubby barking things

  g) miscellaneous.

  It's a wonder they stay sane. In fact, as all Real cat owners know, cats get around most problems caused by all of the above by pretending that they don't exist. Just like us, really.

  The only household pet I have ever known actually faze a Real cat is a tortoise. This may be because a cat has problems coming to terms with the fact that a tortoise is a fellow fauna. It appears to be a small piece of scenery which inexplicably moves about.

  These days you don't shove a tortoise in a box to tough it out for the winter, since no one makes tortoises any more and they change hands, people keep telling us, for zillions of pounds. We used to let ours doze the winter away in front of the fire, lurching awake every day or two for a bit of lettuce. A peaceful, untroubled existence, but one which did not appeal to Real cat because a tortoise is impossible to frighten. Tortoises
don't know the meaning of the word “fear” or, indeed, any other word. Oh, they nip into their shell at a passing shadow out of common sense, but as far as they are concerned the presence of a cat in front of the fire just means that here's a pile of fur that is nice and warm to burrow under.

  They sneak up on it, because for tortoises there's no other way, and the first the cat knows is when the edge of a shell is purposefully levering it off the carpet. The cat goes and sits in the corner and looks worried. And then one of them develops an unnatural appetite for cat food. The Real cat sits looking gnomically at a shell seesawing madly on the edge of its dish, and sighs deeply.

  The Real cat and the gardener

  Peas, greens, parsnips, rhubarb… these are, the concerns of your average gardener.

  Black thread, twigs, wire netting, incendiary mines… these are the concerns of your average gardener who has a Real cat. Or, rather, whose neighbour has a Real cat.

  It is possible to cultivate your garden when there are Real cats around, but the price of celers, is eternal vigilance. As one exasperated Real gardener14 remarked, “It's not just what they Do, it's what they do afterwards”, viz, the conscientiously clawed conical heaps, out of which the little yellow shoots of what would have been beans poke pathetically.