What they fail to tell you when you get a Cat is that Cats come with Lines. It was the Petting Line that I first became aware of.
Dig, if you will, as my hero Prince once intoned us to do and as I am fond of quoting, the picture. It’s a Sunday morning as easy as The Commodores could ever wish for. I’m in bed, a cup of tea cooling pleasantly on one side to be drunk later with a stoic and stony determination after the temperature has dropped a good 11 or 12 degrees below optimal, for we English do not waste tea, and for the sake of imagery please assume that I’m reading a good book although in all actuality I was probably half-heartedly dragging my finger around the screen of one Internet-enabled device or another. As Good Heavens Gwendoline once said, in matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing and as this passage has neither grave importance nor sincerity it may as well have a modicum of style. Please picture me reading a book but let’s be co-conspirators in the lie that I was probably just doomscrolling.
I often think, “I should read more” but the fact is I read all the time. The phrase itself is shorthand for, “I should read more books”, as though books are somehow the apex predicator. Of course they are not; Nadine Dorries writes books. Graham Hancock has sixteen of the buggers on his LinkedIn profile and it was somewhere around ‘The Sign and The Seal’ that he should have taken up cricket or croquet or parquet flooring, anything as long as it wasn’t his pen. Books do not have a monopoly on taste (although I have read some funny recipe books. Innocent Smoothies do a brilliant recipe book and the section about failed recipes for smoothies is hilarious). David Sedaris is great but have you ever just wasted an hour guffawing at comments from strangers on the Internet riffing off a ridiculous phrase like ‘30 to 50 feral hogs’? That’s probably what I was doing when I crossed the Petting Line.
So, Ginge, whose name is Catbert although really it’s Bertie even though it was Cyril to begin with – he looks nothing like a Cyril – likes to sleep on my bed. I use ‘on’ in the same way that we may say the Great Fire of 1666 had an effect on London (I just fact-checked myself to make sure that I got the year right and underneath the heading ‘People also ask:’ on Google, one of the questions is “Is the Great Fire of 1666 still burning?” so ruminate on that and decide for yourself whether the human race is worth saving). His presence on the bed is as that of the Monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’; unsatisfactorily explained but large and looming throughout. He walks around in a circle, mimicking that of his ancestors who used to do it to flatten the ground before sleeping but here’s he just portraying contempt for the fact that the throw covering the bed came from Primark or possibly Dunelm Mill.
He settles comfortably with his back to me and momentarily I flashback to many parties that I have been to. This is just a ploy and I meant to stroke him. He likes very much to have his shoulders massaged, especially between 8:30am and 9am. When I stroke him, he presses backwards into my hand. He begins to purr.
I like the sound of his purring, but not his snoring. At the moment – you know how Cats are wont to switch their sleeping places around – he likes to sleep underneath my bed during the night and on top of it during the day. Although the storage area under my bed resembles Manchester Ship Canal Port he has discovered that right in the middle of the junk there is a soft oasis in the form of a photographic reflector, used for bouncing illumination onto a subject, a bit like Wikipedia but without the constant appeals for donations. It is on here that he likes to curl up at night.
The problem is that he’s an elderly chonk now, and the reflector is exactly underneath where I myself lay. Of late my sleep has been disturbed by his snoring. I am a very light sleeper, in fact I can be awoken by someone laying next to me thinking loudly. What floats up through the mattress with the picture of the comedy hippo in pyjamas is not so much snoring as a horror sound effects reel. Imagine Emperor Palpatine as he appears in ‘The Rise of Skywalker’. Now imagine it’s he chained to the bed and possessed by a vacationing Old Testament demon in ‘The Exorcist’. Now give him laryngitis and make him snore. That is the sound that rumbles around the room ominously like dry ice at a funeral. It does not do wonders for my sleep. I’m just waiting to hear, “Your mother kills Sith in hell” from him and my terror will be truly complete.
So, I am stroking him, massaging his shoulders, speaking gently to him, and in return he’s leaning into it and purring loudly. I am fulfilling one of my three legally-required duties (the others are to feed him and open the back door for him, because cat flaps are demeaning. Two legs good, four legs better, one flap a disgrace) adequately. Animated birds alight on my shoulder, chirruping brightly. Downstairs an army of syncopated mops slop merrily at all-too-real muddy footprints on every flat surface.
Suddenly, the mood changes. Ginger rises violently. It’s like the scene from ‘An American Werewolf in London’ where Jack is attacked on the moors and Ginger is snarling, clawing viciously, trying to tear the very flesh from my bones with his teeth. In seconds I am bleeding from lacerations and puncturations too numerous to describe. His attack is as savage, unceasing and unnecessary as a conservative attacking a drag queen.
I take my hand from his shoulder and the massacre stops.
He settles back down contentedly and resumes purring, slowblinking me. I have located and crossed the Petting Line, one of the unseen ley lines used to navigate life with a Cat. Now I am back on the right side of the line, we’re back to our regularly programmed Sunday morning cold tea and anthropomorphised Disney kitchen implements and I have learned a valuable life lesson. Cats come with Lines, and Lines are not for crossing.
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