Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond Read Online Free Page A

to Pablo (‘Slow down/You ginger cat/You’re so ambitious for a . . . ginger cat’) and Ralph walked into the room, I would quickly switch to ‘Tabby Lover’, a rewrite of Phil Collins’ and Philip Bailey’s 1985 chart-topping duet ‘Easy Lover’ that I would be the first to admit needed some work (‘He’s a tabby lover/He’ll do a fart and you won’t hear it’). ‘Pablo’s coat is looking extremely plush today,’ I’d say to Dee, who would tighten her lips and point with her eyes at Ralph, sitting behind me on his sheepskin lover, causing me to add, ‘. . . And then there’s Ralph’s sideburns. Have you seen how thick they are right now? Magnificent!’ It would probably be going too far to say I got more careful about eating oranges and carrots while Ralph was around, but I won’t deny that it crossed my mind.
    I spent a lot of time checking Pablo was okay too, but it seemed clear that the ginger was slowly getting the upper hand. If Ralph could have backed down, he probably would have, but the battle had gone beyond that stage – there was too much pride at stake. Shipley joined in the goading of Pablo occasionally, but that was clearly for his own amusement. There was no amusement about this for Ralph or Pablo by now: the battle had progressed somewhere newly senseless. But isn’t that always the way with war? That the individuals most liable to get hurt by it can no longer remember what they’re fighting for?
    Ralph began to avoid the cat flap altogether, instead standing for periods of up to three hours outside the bedroom window, shouting. ‘Raaalph!’ he would howl, and I would sit up in bed, debating whether to let him in and encourage his neediness or attempt to sleep through it. ‘I yam Raaalph!’ he would sometimes add after half an hour or so, just in case we’d been left in any doubt about exactly who it might be out there, acting like an absolute tool.
    ‘Leave him,’ said Dee. ‘If you let him in, he’ll realise that he’s got you wrapped around his little finger, and he’ll never come in through the cat flap ever again.’
    I could see the logic of her advice, but I had two problems with it. Firstly, Ralph didn’t actually have a little finger; but he did have paws, and it did not take much for me to conjure up the image of one of these paws, cold and forlorn, scraping against the window of a next-door neighbour’s kitchen window, asking for love, having finally given up on me.
    Secondly, I knew the advice was coming from a somnolent being of rare powers. I only had to think back to one of our first arguments as a domestic couple to remember this. I forget what the argument was about now, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t cleaning, but it ended with Dee falling asleep and me having the brainwave that, if I scrubbed, hoovered and dusted the flat from top to bottom, it would somehow prove that I was right about everything in the entire universe, for ever. Whatever the warped logic that made me think this, my plan clearly didn’t work, as Dee slept soundly through my vacuuming, and the main upshots were that I had time to realise I was wrong about whatever we were arguing about, and she woke up, well rested, to a blissfully clean flat. I’ve learned since then that she can sleep through louder sounds than the one a vacuum cleaner makes when it’s on full power three feet from your head, so, even though I applauded her pragmatism and took into account her wisdom, I had to also take into account that the sound of hopped-up, hyper-sensitive cats has never disturbed her. (The hopped-up, hyper-sensitive cats seem to know this too, which is why they have never bothered to try to wake her up, knowing that there is someone far more gullible and malleable nearby.)
    Suggestions flooded in from family and acquaintances close and distant about what to do about the problem with Ralph and the cat door. My friend Vicky, who works as a cat behaviourist, echoed Dee’s suggestion that a