Cat Wars

I had been planning to write an email about the dust storm but my current situation is a little more tense.  You can never beat correspondence from the battlefront so this is what you’re getting instead.

 We have two cats.  Nip is a ginger streetfighter with saggy bellies from long ago.  The vet thinks it was a botched abortion but Ginger (as she prefers to be known) doesn’t like to talk about it so we tell everyone she’s got short legs.  Tuck is black and was born in captivity.  He’s a timid pussyboy who never grew up and thinks his balls are living happily on a farm in the countryside somewhere.  

Tuck and Ginge arrived at our place in the city within a week of each other, both rescued from death row at the local dog’s home.  Seriously, charity is hardcore over here and the website is clear that Unless This Cat Finds A Home It Will Die.   Tuck’s too stupid to grasp the concept (his best friend is that little black cat in the mirror) but Ginge is pretty grateful.  She knows how tough it is out on the streets and, whilst she misses the fags and booze, she’s more than happy to stay indoors.

Until now.  

Oliver and I have just bought a place up the coast and in our naivety (oh happy, distant days) we thought we’d just take the cats up at the weekends.  Let them explore slowly and get used to the one-hour journey.  And at first everything went much as we thought: Ginge strode out the front and bullied next door’s dog out of his lunch money whilst Tuck hid in the linen cupboard saying ‘there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’.  Then, after a few weekends, Tuck too started to explore.

He really is too much of a pussy to go anywhere by himself but Ginger gently led him outdoors and showed him the grass and the pavers and the sky.  And then, we don’t know what, but something happened.  

The best way to describe it is to imagine a feline Hannibal Lecter.  The noises coming out of Ginger’s mouth were bizarre, a deep, long growl akin to caterwauling but much more evil than that.  I managed to grab Tuck before she did and threw her into the house and close the patio door behind her.  Have you ever seen a cat throw itself against glass so it can do you harm?  It’s almost as much fun as holding a cat that thinks its life is in danger.  And by the way, those long red scratches aren’t the ones to worry about.  It’s the little red dots where the claw has gone cleanly into your flesh that you really want to avoid.

She attacked him four more times that day (scratches, red dots etc) until timid little Tuck was a quivering and somewhat patchy ball of fluff.  Our Paul, my lovely vet brother-in-law, took a drunken midnight call to offer his advice.  Mine would have been “Don’t call me at midnight when I’m drunk” but he, and subsequent vets, have shed some light on our situation.  

It’s about domination, territory marking, rules changing as environments change.  Your average marriage basically but with regular fights to the death thrown in.  And, just as with trying to save a marriage, there are a number of things we have to try before we give up and give away.  

So now I’m sitting in our living room with Ginger under an upside-down shopping trolley and Tuck barred from running out of the room.  Their mutual cries of fear and imprisonment are breaking my heart. 

And on that last point, if you’re reading this and thinking ‘For goodness sake, it’s just a cat!’ then I in turn am thinking three things about you.  One: you won’t want to hear when we give up on this option and move onto cat family-counselling (three hours, both owners, both cats) or cat prozac.  Two: you don’t have cats.  Or three: you have children, or may one day have children, and you fail to see that even without them the onset of middle-age is beset by pouring your love into ungrateful, heartbreaking and endlessly-expensive little animals.

It’s a wonderful world.