The Good, the Bad, and the Furry by Tom Cox

Author:Tom Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466868359
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

In view of what he’d been through, it was probably quite surprising that Graham came back at all, let alone within a couple of days. If I had been homeless, and a kind stranger had taken pity on me, then put me in a glorified cage and taken me to a boxy building on a business park and had my testicles removed, I’d have made it my mission, after escaping, to put myself as far away from them as possible, and to return for ice-cold revenge, in the dead of night, long after the misdeed had slipped their mind. Instead, Graham simply made his returns more stealthy than ever, always arriving when we were in bed, shooting out the cat door the second he heard Gemma’s footsteps or mine. Once again, the ‘in-only’ lock function proved no obstacle for his dextrous paws, and the one time I reached the catflap before he had chance to work the lock, he merely smashed it to pieces. Sitting next to it clad only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, I felt a new kind of forlornness: not just for the new catflap that would soon be added to Graham’s ever-increasing bill, but because there was absolutely no way to explain what I’d done to him. I’m sure Shipley and Ralph had been feeling a little sore with me when they’d got home from neutering too, but I’d already built up a trust with them beforehand.

Sitting on that cold tiled floor, with another of Ralph’s giant hairballs not six inches from my bare feet, I had one of those occasional moments of revelation, where you step outside yourself and realise just how far you’ve come from the person you once were. I thought of the thirteen-year-old me fantasising about playing on the right wing for Aston Villa; of the sixteen-year-old me convinced that his future would take place on the lush green fairways of the professional golf tour; of the twenty-something rock journalist me having a pepper-eating competition with the Foo Fighters or watching former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash break off from an interview with him to stand on his hotel bed and play air guitar. Was this really what I had been reduced to as I approached my thirty-seventh birthday: a man sitting on a cold tiled floor at 1 a.m. in old, severely elastic-deficient pyjama bottoms, who, instead of buying the new clothes that he badly needed, paid for random, strange cats to have their balls removed?

One rare glimmer of hope occurred about three days later, when I looked out the window at dusk to see Ralph and Graham curled up on separate deckchairs down on the patio. I knew Graham would run away if I attempted to catch him, so I left him there. Half an hour later, when I looked again, he was gone. As Gemma said, perhaps it was a sign that he just needed time, and would come back after all. That was, however, the last sighting for several days.

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