The Unadulterated Cat

Sex

Well…

…of course, it all depends how Real the cat is, ifyouseewhatimean…

Er…

You see, if you have a gentleman cat and a lady cat who…

The point is…

In short, pedigree cats breed, Real cats mate. Breeding is best left to professionals. Mating, on the other hand, is done by cats.

Breeders seem to be invariably ladies and while totally mad are nevertheless entirely charming people, whose houses can be distinguished by the neat sheds in the garden and the fact that the cat food comes, not in tins, but in a lorry.

Most Real cat owners seldom if ever encounter them. It may occasionally happen that they come into possession of an animal whose looks and history suggest that she shouldn't be a candidate for the vet's attentions or those of the huge mad feral tom which hangs around the garden, and after the expenditure of a sum of money which makes male members of the family fantasise about the differences between the cat world and ours, you come back with figures chiming in your head—because you've been told how much the kittens should go for. Something like: X litters per year × £Y per kitten × save some females × X more litters = ££££1111

Real cat owners know that life isn't like that. Keeping pets for profit is never profitable, whatever the paperwork says. Life becomes full of rolls of wire netting, feed bills, alfresco carpentry and huge bills from unexpected sources, and your horizons become bounded by, well, the horizon. Who looks after the cattery so that the cattery owner can go on holiday, eh?

In fact, breeding has all been tremendously simplified these days by simply removing the option entirely, to the extent that the “Free to Good Home” signs seem a lot rarer and a good job too, and the cat population appears to be made up of big fat neutered toms and slim, sleek females whose liberation from the joys of motherhood appears to have come as a bit of a relief. Nevertheless, every neighbourhood still has what is delicately referred to as an Entire Tom.

It is very hard for this animal not to be a Real cat. Once upon a time it would have been a tom amongst toms, scrapping and yowling and generally being kept in line by slicer peer pressure.

But now all its old mates are fat and lazy and just want to kip all day, whilst the girls don't seem to want to know. It stalks alone through the shrubberies. The ground trembles. Pet rabbits cower in their hutches.

Dogs—and, let's be honest, the average dog can be out-thought by even an unReal cat—are so unnerved by its air of make-my-day belligerence that, when they see it coming, they think of dozens of pressing reasons for trotting nonchalantly away. Unpruned and yet unsatisfied, its monstrous Id prowls with it. The milkman complains, the postman starts leaving your letters with the house next door…

There was one that took a fiendish delight in fighting all the other local cats. Not over matters of territory, just for the hell of it. It'd creep up while they dozed in the sun, and pitch in. But we had just got a Real young female at the time. Spayed and scarred, she came from a thriving colony of farm cats so hulking great toms with nothing on their mind except sex and violence, possibly both together, were just part of the scenery as far as she was concerned.

The first couple of times the crazed idiot chased her she ran away out of sheer amazement.

Then we were privileged to watch the showdown.

It started with the normal attempted mugging and the usual chase and much skidding round corners with binka-binka-binka leg pedalling (see “Cartoon Cats”; every cat has a bit of Cartoon cat in it). Then Real cat scrambled on top of the waterbarrel, waited until the pursuer had his front claws on top and his back legs scrabbling for the purchase necessary to lever his trembling, pear-shaped body the rest of the way, and then with great deliberation hit him across the nose. It was the kind of blow a Cartoon cat would have been proud of; it travelled through 300 degrees, I swear, making a noise like tearing silk.

Then she sat looking at his shocked face with the expression that said he should ask himself whether there was any more where that came from, and was he feeling lucky? Matters were eventually resolved quite amicably by both animals pretending, as is so often the case when you meet something you can't do anything about, that the other one didn't exist. This was quite a feat. The tom was a Schrodinger cat who, before being adopted by a neighbour, had come wandering in from whatever hyperspace Schrodinger cats move around in, and for some reason considered that our house was his natural home. Real cat was not going to hiss at him though, because this meant recognising his existence and was therefore against the rules. So the two of them, by, some sort of telepathy, made certain that they were never in the same room. It was like those farces when one man is playing twin brothers and is forever running out of the French windows to look for himself just seconds before he walks in via the library door, in a different blazer, cursing at having missed meeting him.