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

there’s no improvement.’
    As instructed, havingplaced Shipley on the bed, with a plate of turkey chunks easily within reach, I left the house, striding deep into the Norfolk countryside: so often my saviour in times of trouble. As I walked, I thought about all the times I’d said mean things about Shipley to my friends – the occasion last week, for example, when Katia had asked after his well-being, and I’d described him as ‘a crocodile-faced thug’. I thought about the cats’ mealtimes, when I would purposely put his food out last. This was a mandatory measure, due to the speed and greed with which Shipley ate, but I still felt bad about it. Had I ever singled Shipley out for a special turkey treat while the other cats were asleep, in the way I did with The Bear? A few times, but maybe not enough. Because Shipley was so demanding, so completely, constantly in your face, there never appeared to be any need to make sure he got enough attention. But there was nothing to say he wasn’t just like Ralph and The Bear: nurturing his own little dream of being my only cat. Perhaps even more so, in a way. Maybe Shipley’s attacks on The Bear came about because he heard what I said about The Bear – my comments about how intellectual and gentle and special he was – and felt lonely and neglected. During my last relationship I’d always been the one who saw the good in Shipley, but maybe I hadn’t been seeing enough good in him. He was still the same kitten who’d waited at the end of the bed that night in 2001: wanting to be close to the action, and thinking of ways to get there, ahead of the prettier or more intellectual cats.
    ‘He’s anamazing cat,’ Gemma had told me. ‘I’ve never known a cat like this, who’s so patient when you wobble him about and stuff. I mean, I know he comes across like a bit of a hooligan at first, but he never seems to go off in a huff, like other cats.’
    Shipley’s default mode might have been ‘potential ASBO’, but when you were actually giving him attention, no cat could match him for tolerance. If Ralph was sleeping on my chest and I adjusted position, he’d usually storm out of the room, like a rock star waltzing off stage in a tantrum because the sound man hadn’t quite got the level of his vocals correct. If I did the same thing while Shipley was sleeping on or near me, he didn’t mind, as long as I was planning to stick around. There was none of the finessing you had to do with other cats; he wanted you to stroke him, ruffle him, jiggle him and turn him upside down, and he wanted you to do it as vigorously as possible. Or, to put it slightly differently, in the words of a friend who’d been massaging his neck at one of my parties: ‘Essentially, he’s a massive sado-masochistic perv.’ Shipley was so muscular and strong and resilient, and there was so little sadness about his demeanour, you never stopped to consider that he could ever be frail or ill. But his body was vulnerable to the same diseases, the same chance mishaps, as any other cat. Something had invaded his system, or had misfired, or broken for good, and all that invincible boisterousness I’d taken for granted suddenly seemed impossibly fragile.
    In the last twoand a half years, I’d been repeatedly told by friends that I’d ‘done well to hold it together’, considering I’d been through a divorce, paid a large sum to buy someone out of a mortgage, and had to significantly rethink my future. But a lot of the things holding my life together still seemed very brittle: my ailing house, the fact that I was earning less than half of what I’d once earned and spending much of that on sustaining a new, long-distance relationship. I had doubts about how well I might cope if another of my cats died: another cat whose history was inexorably intertwined with a part of my life that I’d had to abandon.
    Returning from my walk, I opened the front door with a lump in my chest. The house seemed eerily