-15

i remember jim the cat.
jim was annemarie’s cat. we seemed to arrive in her life about the same time. he was a stray who somehow decided that he quite liked the flat and the people who lived there.
i have no idea if jim was a typical cat.
there was a morning when i was more than half asleep, so much so that i wasn’t going to move even if there was a bomb in the flat. jim came over to me and made it perfectly clear that he wanted to go out. i tried to ignore him. the result was that jim just turned around squatted and dropped the largest sloppiest shit i have ever seen.
jim would go out on the prowl; he was a bloke after all. sometimes he would come back with a number of cuts. we took him to the vet. stitches in and bandage on. the vet told us we would have to keep jim in for a couple of days while he healed. it took jim less than 60 seconds to remove the bandage. the cat houdini.
sadly that led to the unkindest cut of all. another scrap. another trip to the vet. annemarie had arranged it. i just took him there. i was expecting to be told that his cut would be stitched instead i was told he was having the snip. ‘the what’ i screeched? my ball sack shrinking back in horror. the vet explained that jim was going out and getting into fights and this was dangerous for him, removing his testes would save him a lot of trouble in the future. jim looked at me as if to say ‘yeah right’ and as much as i needed to believe he vet all i could think of was ‘yeah right’.
jim’s look told me all i need to know – as far as he was concerned i was a traitor to him and to all males. i sat in the waiting room feeling like judas.
within a week of coming home jim was back out on the prowl. bolockless but proud.
it was the dead of winter and very late at night. annemarie and i were in bed canoodling, and maybe moving on to something a bit more raunchy. the bed was warm, the flat was cold. all was well with the world. or it was until jim started the meowing by the front door. meow meow meow, at first plaintive then angry. then came the scratching at the front door. it almost said ‘let me out’ in morse code. all of this was strange as we had only recently let jim back in from his nightly wander.
we ignored him and got on with the kissing and cuddling.
jim decided to come upstairs and padded into the room. he made his presence known by pouncing on the bed. normally he would have just found an inconvenient spot for us and decided he was going to go to sleep. not this time. he purred. he pawed. he bit toes. he did anything to get attention. frankly he was a passion killer.
as was the way with anything that involved one of us getting out of bed in the middle of the night to deal with it i was nominated. i thought about it. flat cold. me warm. short run to the door, short run back to bed. be quick. no need put any clothes on.
‘c’mon then jim’ i said, ‘if you want to go out let’s let you out’. jim was a clever cat and i am sure he understood every word i said. i dashed out from under the duvet. jim followed. he was quicker than me and like a black streak of lightning he was down the stairs.
now i have to stop the narrative here just to add a little colour to the tale. remember i had said that i had been engaged in some snogariffic action that was moving towards rumpy pumpy. the effects of this could been seen by the very full, very rigid hard-on i was sporting. as i rushed down the stairs it swung around like a demented divining stick hunting for water.
my woody didn’t impress jim; he was waiting at the door. pawing it. i pushed him away so i could open it and let him out.
an arctic blast greeted me when i opened the door, i should mention we were several floors up and the door opened up on to a view of the roofs and backs of the shops of the holloway road. sometime after we had gone to bed it had snowed.
it had snowed quite heavy/
it was freezing.
the cold moon glared down.
the snow was thick and gleamed virgin bright in the moonlight.
it was beautiful.
it was freezing.
i was naked with a boner standing motionless in my front door.
the only things that saved me from being a public spectacle was that it was the middle o the night and that it was too cold for anyone sensible to be standing around.
i could feel my balls contacting from the cold. i could feel my nipples turn to icy pebbles. i could feel the cat rubbing up against my ankles.
what the cat?
i looked down. jim was like me standing looking out at the snow. he was making no effort to go out in it. i pushed him. i shooed him. he wouldn’t budge. i think i lost feeling in my extremities. the cat wasn’t moving.
i turned my gaze on him and said i thought you wanted to go out. jim gave me a look that said ‘in this weather are you fucking mad?’ (i have no idea where the cat learnt such language). at that he turned and walked back into the flat and buried himself under a pile of clothes to sleep.
i took one last look at the snow. went back to bed.
i did take some delight in the squeal of anger from annemarie as i pressed my cold body against hers.