The Ginger Man

One of the writers on the internet who tell people what they need to do to be a proper writer recently said you should write about what keeps you awake at night so I thought I should write about the noise of my cat Jim crunching mouse bones a few inches from my face, which is what has been keeping me awake at night lately. Jim can’t help it: he used to do this for a living. It’s less than a year since our other male cat, Charles, went to fetch Jim from the barn he slept in at the farm where he worked and invited him to lodge permanently with us instead, so perhaps he’s not quite reconditioned yet, or more likely he just really likes mice. He ate four last night, considerately separating their acidic gizzards for me to step on a few hours later en route to the kitchen, where I’d left my slippers. Google says that after your cat has consumed a mouse you should monitor them closely for any changes in behaviour so last night I did, four times, and I did definitely notice some changes. One was that Jim appeared more keen than usual to rub his face on mine. Another was that he seemed on the whole more excessively complacent about his achievements in life.

A cat was killed by a car in our village last week and that is something else that has kept me awake at night. After we learned that the cat had been killed, we hugged all three of our cats, Charles and Jim and Roscoe, tight, but especially Jim, since he’s the one who appears least embarrassed by that sort of behaviour. As we hugged Jim, he looked at us with that easy, beatific expression of his which seems to say, “Man, it blows my mind that I, a big-boned agricultural labourer in my early 30s, mildly addicted to marijuana, have climbed into this 75 inch fake fur orange bodysuit and managed to convince you that I am a cat who deserves to sleep on your bed, free of charge.” Afterwards he wandered off to clean Charles, which he does, very thoroughly, to the blatant beaming pleasure of Charles, at least three times every day. I also recently caught Jim beginning to clean my friend Ben after Ben and I had been on a walk during which Ben had got especially muddy, due to his shoes falling apart. Jim is not like other cats but I’m aware I’m the kind of person who will often single out a cat and claim that they’re “not like other cats”, so you’ll have to take my word for it. As others have discovered, you need to meet Jim to know precisely what I mean. “We are missing Jim so much already,” some friends texted, in summer, after they’d stayed at our house. It was not much more than an hour after they’d left and they were still far from home. My suspicion is that they’d stopped at a service station just to get the news over as quickly as possible. “How does this cat even come to exist, in our actual house, on a planet that he is so so much too good for?” I’ll often wonder, gazing at Jim’s big soppy blokeface. We did in fact on several occasions meet Jim’s mum, who turned out to be an air-padding Siamese whirlwind of hunger and affection. Often, keen to create the missing piece to the puzzle, I’ll speculate about who his dad might have been. One hypothesis I come up with is an unusually calm ginger horse who, though lacking the acumen and drive of the true entrepreneur, has for many years managed to run a solidly remunerative chain of salons.

“How many hours did you get last night?” my partner, who could sleep a deep sweet sleep inside an industrial shredder, asks me. “About six, maybe seven,” I’ll say. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she’ll reply, misunderstanding my report as one of hardship, rather than of what it is to me, which is a triumph against the odds that will set me up soundly for the day ahead. Even if I was not being kept awake by Jim grinding his mice into digestible form, I would be kept awake by Jim’s Mouse Meow, which accompanies each mouse that’s brought back to base camp and is not at all like the small enthusiastic revving noise he typically uses to communicate his enthusiasms to us. There’s this moment when you’ve woken up from a dream when you are able to reach back in and catch the subject and narrative of the dream but very quickly they are often gone and you can’t quite get there and that’s what happened last night, the third time I was woken by Jim’s Mouse Meow. I could not remember what I had been dreaming about, only that, even in the nonsensical anything-goes realm of dreams, Jim’s Mouse Meow had seemed a noise preposterous and anomalous enough for everyone in the dream to stop what they were doing. I listened to Jim eat every bit of his mouse apart from its gizzard then, as he climbed onto my chest, I avoided his breath and dried his rainlogged fur with the palms of my hands, and allowed my thoughts to drift to the other things that often keep me awake at night. I thought about an old friend I’ve neglected who I should have called months ago - called, not texted, because a text would be a cop out - but haven’t called and I decided I will call him this week but then thought about the phone ringing, in his house, and how he’d be doing something, because people always are, and how the phone is always an intrusion. I thought about my tax return, which I haven’t done early, like I promised I would, and know I will feel much better when I’ve completed, but also know I won’t prioritise over writing, and when isn’t there writing to do? I thought about the short essay I’d planned on what to me is a new subject and thought about it being potentially read by a person who knew the subject well and viewed what I’d written to be glaringly obvious and possibly even packed with truisms and I thought about the Oxbridge-educated man who edited a piece of my writing when I was 20 and spoke harshly and dismissively about it and told me something in it was a truism and I remembered how, after listening quietly to his comments, I pulled a dictionary from the shelf above the writing desk in my bedroom and discovered for the first time what “truism” meant. I thought about the rain that had caused Jim’s fur to be rainlogged and how it just keeps coming and, briefly forgetting that I no longer live in a house that threatens, at any moment, to be entirely consumed by water, felt my body tense up as the fat splashy hammering noise against the roof redoubled. I thought about other things, too many to list here, most of them beyond my control. I thought about them because it was just after 3am. “Nothing good happens after 3am” they say. But that’s patently not true if you happen to be Jim. You’re only two rodents in and the night is young. Besides, that phrase has its smallprint for everyone, which we tend not to read in our preoccupied state at 3am itself. One of the things that happens after 3am is 7am and sometimes, when it happens, a shaft of low sneaking sun curls from your kitchen through your half-closed bedroom door, activating a sleeping paw, and that paw awakens and stretches to graze your cheek, and you realise that when all the facts are calmly weighed with the benefit of daylight the most undeniable one, looking you right in the face, is often that it’s the beginning of another day living in the transcendental company of an excellent orange cat.

This is my latest book. You can reserve a signed hardback of the next one for next year here, and contribute to the funding in the process.