Free Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man by Tom Cox Page A

they would look at me with increasing sympathy, as if to acknowledge the strain it must have been for me to put up with their daughter’s evergrowing self-indulgent collection of filthy carpet shredders. Happy to be cast in the role of the evolved, understanding husband, I would raise my eyes and smile in a way that I hoped offered no firm opinion on the matter, but suggested an overall patience and gave no hint that I had just recently inaugurated our very own household Cat of the Month award. 4 It was the kind of subterfuge you learned a lot of when you lived in close proximity to whiskers.
    Dee’s mum, Oriel, is one of the most philanthropic people you could hope to meet: unfailingly conscientious about the environment, a nurturer of disadvantaged birdlife, constantly involved in a dozen different forms of charity work. Her compassion, however, tends to peter out rather dramatically when the subject is four-legged and kills sparrows for sport. When Dee had first sheepishly admitted to her that we’d got some new kittens and made the mistake of mentioning they were proving a bit of handful, Oriel was quick to put forward the helpful suggestion that we ‘drown them in a bucket’. Dee had been so worried about her mum’s reaction to our new hairy lodgers that she’d actually fudged the figures slightly.
    ‘So how many cats is that now?’ Oriel had asked.
    ‘Oh, just the three,’ replied Dee.
    When I questioned Dee on her deception and expressed concern about the potential repercussions, she explained that, during future visits from her mum and dad, our three all-black cats could be passed off as one. I remained sceptical, but, sure enough, over the course of three days in Oriel and Chris’s company, no questions were asked. The only extra precaution we’d needed to take was to make sure a maximum of three of our five moggies were in one room at any given time. After a while, we didn’t even bother doing that. If you overlooked the time that Shipley clambered all over Chris’s first run edition of James Thurber’s, The Thurber Carnival and tried to put his bottom in his face, felines quite simply didn’t feature on my parents-in-laws’ radar.
    Did I say five cats? I did. Did I mean to say four? I did not. Did I say three black cats? I did. The Bear’s surprise arrival back in our lives came at a typically choice moment. At the moment The Actor called, Dee and I had been very carefully trying to carry a duvet from our bedroom to the bathroom without allowing the pool of Prudence’s urine in the centre of it to tip onto the floor. We’d been living in the village of Brunton for five days by then and each of those days had revealed another dozen or so defects in our perfect cottage. We’d got on very well with the people who sold it to us, taken them for rational human beings and fussed over their cats, so when, we wondered, exactly had they had the bad acid trip that led to them deciding it would be a good idea to paint the light switches into a permanent ‘off’ position using bright yellow paint? Had the stainless steel kitchen sink been painted in dark blue gloss in some kind of schizophrenic panic the last few weeks of their residence, or were we just too dazzled by our fantasies of country life to notice it?
    While Dee had gone to work on the gaping hole in the bedroom floor, I’d started on the garden, where the compost heap soon turned out to be nothing more than a front for a minor nuclear waste dump containing old golf bags, half-filled cans of oil and nameless bottles of bright purple fluid with big pictures of skulls with crosses through them, broken glass and what we realised, in retrospect, was almost certainly the asbestos roof of an ancient aircraft hangar. It was almost a relief when Prudence decided that, much as she could see the litter tray made a lot of practical sense, she felt, on the whole, the enveloping embrace of goose down provided a much more relaxed environment in which to