On CATS and the cat, in 1992

I was 11 going on 12 when it became my misfortune to have heard a song from the musical 'Cats'. My sister had gone on a school trip to England with her English teacher (who was our mother), and the class had been taken to see Cats on the last night. When I had been on the same trip the year before, we had watched Me and My Girl, an altogether more suitable entertainment, but the show had since closed and, to her dismay, my mum had had to fall back on the Andrew Lloyd Webber show.  The class loved it, because they were silly children who knew nothing about anything, and my sister and her best friend spent the next few weeks singing the infuriatingly awful songs from the show around the house.

Back then, in pre-internet days, and because my sister hadn't bought the CD, my only knowledge of the show had come through comments I picked up, and my sister's rendition of the songs. It's a... whole show... about cats? And the actors are all dressed up... as cats? And, sorry, the songs are adapted from T.S. Eliot poems... about cats? Everything about this mess was confusing, and even as a young boy I was shocked by the existence of something so trashy-sounding, knowing that it was my duty to look down on such tawdry junk. My father said something to the effect that Andrew Lloyd Webber was a twat, and my mother would have said something along the lines of, "Well, the play was absolute drivel, complete rubbish of course, but I couldn't get tickets for anything else." And my sister and her friend, even though they had enjoyed the performance, sang the songs sort of satirically, as if knowing that they were appalling: they would drag out the second syllable on "McAvity" and sing it flat on purpose to highlight the thin melody, or sing "Skimbleshanks" in a theatrical way designed to annoy. And I was sort of alarmed to think of a play that had grown-ups in it, playing cats called things like 'the Rum Tum Tugger', and couldn't even begin to imagine how this was a real theatrical production. Within a week I knew at least four of the songs from this show I hadn't seen and had no desire to see, off by heart.

We lived in a small flat back then, a cramped place where I shared a bedroom with my brother, and where our own cat, who had always had somewhat frangible nerves, had begun to show signs of having a breakdown fairly early on. We had moved from a house with a garden to this apartment three floors up, and the cat would occasionally go completely pyschotic from being cooped up, and tear around the flat, skidding into carpets and leaping about the place like a dervish. She always seemed to be standing just behind you at any given moment, perhaps during a phonecall, or while you were eating cereal, so that when you stepped back you would tread on her tail and she would emit a blood-curdling yowl. Or she would sit under a chair and try to scratch your feet, or simply disappear for a few days. When you opened a door for her she would make a pert little sound, a patronising kind of BBC period-drama noise of disapprobation when passing through, which sounded very much like a feline version of "about fucking time."

She was a somewhat sour and unloving cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell creature who was rather contemptuous - when my friends came to stay they would unfailingly remark what a cunt the cat was. I had a fractious relationship with her, being by some distance the least favourite of the five people she lived with and disdained - and I suppose I was not especially kind to her. At times she would condescend to sit on me, if nobody else was available, and my whole body always tensed up as she padded about on my legs, testing the territory, trying to find the most comfortable sitting position - knowing that her claws would come out to help her steady herself if I moved, sinking into my thighs or dick. At such times I would shove her off me, and she looked offended but not at all surprised at such low behaviour from the vermin she was forced to share time with. On car journeys to Normandy at weekends, we initially allowed her to roam about, and she would dig her claws in on sharp bends, or quietly pounce on you from the boot.

The cat was supposed to be called Lucy, but she went by the name 'pussy' most frequently in our household. My father had for some reason adopted an ear-splitting shriek of "PUSSY" at times when he was calling for her to be fed - a sort of very loud, high-pitched scream that leapt out of nowhere with its startling plosive, taking you by surprise. I was always of a rather nervous disposition, and would leap in the air with fear if, while I was reading peacefully in the sitting-room, my father should suddenly shout "PUSSY" near me. The cat would come haring along in the flat for her food - and this became the common cry to get her to arrive. In Normandy at the end of weekends, when we couldn't find her to get back in the car and return to Paris, as night fell and we began to dread the long drive home, we would all clang bowls with spoons and shout "PUSSY" outside the house in the dark until she contemptuously strolled back, and someone then had to catch her and bundle her in. Looking back, I can't say for a fact that my father's violent daily screams for pussy were responsible for turning me gay, but it seems highly likely.

We lived in times - and a country, France - where there was wasn't a great deal of respect for animals, and people generally smacked them and got them to do stupid shit the whole time, or mistreated them. The very idea of "animal rights" was viewed with scorn and hilarity, not least by me. A young girl in my class had cut her cat's whiskers once, just to see - an act of horrendous cruelty, when I recall it now - and the cat had gone totally loopy, losing all its spatial awareness and literally walking into walls. Another schoolfriend had once famously held his cat above a classmate sitting on a sofa, and squeezed a tiny shit out of the animal onto him.

In our village in Normandy, a woman called Madame Benard, who had lived in our house just before my parents bought it, was a famous cat-lady - a sullen scarecrow of a woman, who was said to have killed some of her unwanted kittens by banging their heads against a barn wall. My sister and I, bored senseless because we didn't have a TV in the countryside, used to adapt nursery rhymes:

Ding-dong-dell, pussy's in the well
Who put her there? Madame Benard. 


Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I went up to London to visit the queen
But unfortunately I didn't get far
Because an old lady ran me over with her car


Madame Benard's husband died not very long after we had bought the house that the Benards had been renting, and he was buried in the churchyard at the end of our garden. "Il surveille sa maison," Madame Benard told my parents, darkly.

In later years, when the internet arrived and I moved to Britain for university, it turned out that more people than three in the world had seen Cats, and it was astonishing to look it up, or talk about the show, and discover that this shit was famous, beloved even. Two university friends told me that Sarah Brightman had said Andrew Lloyd Webber had an enormous dick - a horrifying thought. At the end of phone-calls home to my parents in the evening, when they were both a little sozzled after dinner, my father would say, "Pussy wants to say goodnight", and there was a pregnant pause while he put the phone down and went to grab the cat, and eventually a muffled sound of the receiver being picked up once again, and the sounds of a light scuffle, followed by another pause as my dad was evidently giving the cat a bit of a squish, and then eventually there would be a terse "mrow" down the line, and another pause, and then my dad back at the phone again: "Did you get that? The cat said goodbye", and my mum would be laughing in the background.

Our cat died a horrific death while I was away at university. She simply went missing one day, and nobody thought too much of it. But my mum opened up our cellar several years later - a room we didn't use at all - and found a rotting old cat skeleton in there - and said, "Oh god, I've just seen there's a horrible old dead cat in the cellar!", and we all said, "Mum... that's probably the cat! Pussy!" I don't know how or when she had got trapped in there and died, but it seemed in retrospect a miserable, terrible end for the poor animal. I still have no real affection for cats - they live their lives, I mine - but look back with a slight sadness on this hard-to-love animal who was in our house for so long. My parents have a new cat now, a far more amenable creature, but perhaps a little more shallow, a bit less interesting - I have a grudging respect now for Pussy, that distant and cantankerous animal who never compromised, who never gave in, who never courted sympathy.

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