The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends by Tom Cox Page A

at a time in my life when I had never had less use for one, and only stopping to fill up on petrol and read a couple of text message updates from Deborah. When I arrived home, Shipley was lying on his beanbag: the same one he’d been on nine months previously when I’d found Janet slumped on the stairs. Usually, if I arrived back after even a few hours out of the house he’d be the first cat to greet me, getting right up in my face to tell me exactly how I’d let him down and list the gifts he now required as compensation, but now he barely raised his chin as I arrived in the room. When I scrumbled him underneath it and gave the top of his head a scritch, there were none of his usual attempts to push his nose – usually so cold, now so dry and warm – into my knuckle, or engineer a way to get the same knuckle or a finger under the side of his lip (always a weird habit of his and Ralph’s: another subtle family trait). His sinewy limbs felt lifeless, and he put up little resistance as I transferred him to a wicker cat igloo that – like most purpose-built cat beds – he’d always disliked. The Bear watched all this, perhaps confused at the new domestic arrangement where he could walk around freely, without anyone dancing about in front of his face and swearing.
    I called Georgethe vet on the emergency number and we agreed that the best thing I could do was bring Shipley over again first thing in the morning. Shipley – a cat who would so often force open the bedroom door, and was normally so desperate to make the room his – now seemed indifferent to the rare privilege of being its sole feline occupant. I probably would have slept fitfully anyway, as I usually did after the drive from Devon to Norfolk, but I woke at regular intervals throughout the night, reaching out every half-hour to his igloo, to touch his flank and make sure he was still breathing. If that sounds overdramatic, it was done from the perspective of someone who’d only six months ago received a stark lesson about the gossamer thread that separates feline life from death.
    All my cats, pastand present, had different ways of reacting to a trip to the vet’s. Pablo’s check-ups had been soundtracked by a bloodcurdling war cry that didn’t let up from the moment I started the car to the moment he was unloaded onto the examining table – possibly to signal his fear that he was being transported back to the harsh feral world he had come from. At the other end of the scale, Ralph would act like he was far too fancy for the whole fiasco, then undermine himself by eating one of his scabs in front of the vet, or letting off a fart of the variety known at my secondary school as ‘silent but violent’. Bootsy had always largely seen it as another opportunity to be admired by strangers. Janet had weathered the experience with faintly wounded stoicism, and The Bear gave the impression of plotting darkly in the back of his cat basket, while periodically lamenting his existential condition with his broken-smoke-alarm
meeoop
. With Shipley, it was expletives all the way, combined with the hint of a sense that, given half the chance, he would be up and out of his basket to take on any Jack Russell, Rottweiler or giant lop-eared rabbit who happened to be in the waiting room at the time, possibly with one paw strapped behind his back.
    Today was different. That he did not utter a single profanity at me from the moment I ushered him into his basket to the moment George began to examine him was perhaps the plainest measure of how poorly he was. I was amazed at how much weight he seemed to have lost in just a couple of days of not eating. George still seemed baffled by his condition, but gave him a series of antibiotics. ‘We’ll give him the works, and see if it helps,’ he said. ‘These will take a while before they have any effect. The best thing might be for you to go out for a little while, take your mind off it, then see how he is, and give us a call if