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

empty her bladder. At least it gave us a distraction from the fungus growing in the haemorrhoid-pink shagpile carpet in the upstairs bathroom.
    ‘Er. We have a slight hitch,’ said Dee, returning from the phone. ‘How do you fancy going to London to pick up a package?’
    The way he’d told it to Dee, The Actor had not had much choice in the matter: his work opportunity in Australia was a last minute one, and involved an immediate flight. Nonetheless, demanding that his ex-girlfriend, a non-driver, travel 120 miles to collect The Bear the very same afternoon seemed a mite inconsiderate. Did he know when he’d be back? He didn’t. Would he be coming back at all? Er, he wasn’t sure, actually.
    ‘Anyway, that’s it,’ Dee explained to me. ‘No more toing and froing. This is the last time. He’s our cat now.’
    Considering my dual ear infection and cough, it is obvious that the decision to zoom down to London at 8 p.m. that same night was made by a man who’d been rendered senseless by spending too long in the Relocation Zone. If I was being truthful, I’d first noticed the slight unbalanced feeling in our Ford Fiesta the previous night, but I’d quickly dismissed it from my mind. It was just another thing on a long list of jobs, something to think about after I’d found the kettle and been to the hardware store to get the stuff to block up the hole in the porch where the water was coming in and been to IKEA to buy six replacement reserve duvets for Prudence to soil. I’d barely reached the Norfolk–Suffolk border by the time everything started wobbling and I heard the ‘ftt-ftt’ sound coming from the front left of the car.
    My dad did once show me how to change a tyre. I was thirteen at the time, and probably busy checking out my bad eighties quiff in the wing mirror, but I’m sure I was half-listening. If I really tried, I could probably have dredged some of the information back up from the cobwebbed recesses of my brain, but in view of the fact I didn’t much fancy getting my upper body jammed under a Ford Fiesta in a dark Norfolk layby, I did the same thing a lot of other bookish, cat-loving men of Generation X would have done: I phoned the RAC. While I waited for them to arrive, I called Dee, and the two of us put her original plan back in place: the one that involved calling our friend Michael and asking if The Actor could drop The Bear with him for a couple of days, until we would be in a fit state to make it back to Blackheath.

    I couldn’t say I’d been looking forward to meeting The Actor, but neither could I pretend that the encounter didn’t have its supernatural appeal: a bit like meeting Batman and Bruce Wayne in the same room at the same time. Once again, it was hard not to feel there was a higher Bear power at work here: The Bear did not want this, so it had not happened.
    But if my pointy-eared nemesis was in a mystical frame of mind, he might well meet his match later that night. A folk musician with a penchant for magic herbalism and lyrics about burning scarecrows, Michael’s many very spiritual, very 1971 beliefs included the one that animals could not be ‘owned’. In spite of this, he enjoyed sharing the big dribbling love of a gigantic, wandering ginger cat called Ramases with an old man in the flat above him.
    For safety’s sake, Michael had made sure that Ramases wasn’t around when The Actor dropped The Bear off, but he’d neglected to check behind the horse’s head mask – a favourite prop of Michael’s, often worn on stage during his songs ‘Power to the Pixies’ and ‘Reality is a Fantasy’ – on the shelf above his bed. As soon as The Bear had crept fearfully from his travelling polymer prison onto the bedspread, the more established cat had wasted no time in pouncing, landing on the bed with a ‘Browwwaaagh’ noise. His vision engulfed by flaming fur and bright green eyes, The Bear had scuttled away, eventually making himself comfortable at the back of