My Life in Cats (Part III: 1986-1988)
First kisses, Chernobyl, and Bagpuss
Missed Parts I & II? Read My Life in Cats (Part I) and My Life in Cats (Part II) before diving in.
1986, Halley’s Comet is coming, the USSR melts a nuclear power station, AIDS enters mainstream awareness, referred to as “African bum disease” at the time. The Challenger explodes after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts instantly. The kids in the playground joke that NASA stands for “Need Another Seven Astronauts.” Glasnost and Perestroika enter modern parlance, even though no one knows what these words mean. Rock Hudson dies. I start secondary school, and a new cat is welcomed into our house.
An elderly woman from up the road comes one day, trying to give away cats. She’s collected so many pets in her house that the council have come to give her a warning regarding health hazards and such. Upon ringing our doorbell, my big brother answers. Immediately, he calls one cat, “Oh, it’s Bagpuss,” a famous and beloved pink cat from the 1970s children’s show Bagpuss. We take two cats from her. The other is sick and terrified and spends all the time shitting, vomiting, and hiding under the cupboard in the dining room. Bagpuss becomes a member of the family. He is a long-haired blue Persian with the grumpiest-looking face you’ve ever seen.
The street back then feels calm and safe, and we grow secure within our neighbourhood. Lots of the cars have stickers with CND logos. The Cold War is in our minds like a disease, as the government prepares us for potential nuclear annihilation with absurd, meaningless advice on how to prepare for this looming disaster. We catch butterflies and ride our bicycles. Chernobyl melts, and none of us die.. yet. Although we are all a little scared by it.
Despite attacks on our innocent, young, moldable minds, life is beautiful. We are free. We roam the empty buildings that are all boarded up just off Queen’s Road, smashing windows and being a nuisance generally. Sometimes we set fires on the West Hill to see if the fire brigade will come. We have awesome fun.
Bagpuss becomes not just our cat, but a part of the street. He has a habit of appearing permanently hungry. We learn later that he is getting fed by half of the street, with his sharp ability to manipulate humans and fake starvation. Impressive for such a chubby-looking fucker.
Primary school is over for me that summer. There is a school disco to celebrate. I kiss a girl for the first time. It’s awkward, awful, and weird as fuck. Open mouth, no tongue; after all, we are not French. If you want to know how awful that is, I recommend you try eating face for ten minutes: specifically, open mouth, no tongue. Mortifying. But the taste of it was nice.
Society at that time is in a panic about AIDS and not capable of understanding a child with HIV
My friend Jamie, a haemophiliac, is given a free dose of HIV from the NHS in his factor eight. Society at that time is in a panic about AIDS and not capable of understanding a child with HIV. Some parents stop their kids from playing with him. I struggle to understand what it means, and expect him to die within weeks. We agree not to do the blood brothers thing we have seen on TV. I still remember crying in the toilet of St Helen’s Hospital, trying to get the nerve up to see him. When I finally get up enough bottle, I find him happy as Larry, propped up on the bed with a new radio-controlled car, with which he terrorises the children’s ward. He tells me he’s going to Disneyland.
I am terrified to start secondary school, after being assured multiple times by many sources that I will get turned upside down and have my head flushed down a toilet. This turns out not to be true. But the bullies in secondary school are bigger and more violent. Plynlimmon Road is my sanctuary, my safe place. My neighbourhood. With my beautiful and exceptionally affectionate cat.
Hillcrest sits on the crest of a hill, entirely unsurprisingly. That’s my secondary school, a place I still remember as being a source of unspeakable horror. At first, I have no friends and am brutally bullied on a daily basis. My lisp and stutter don’t help, and I develop a tic in my nose as a defensive mechanism to keep people away. My older brothers are forbidden by my parents to mention it. I live in hell in these months, alone within myself. Until I meet Maggot. He has all the tools I need to learn to fight for myself, and he fights for me when the cunts come.
We do everything together, and I love him in my own way. We ride bikes, we fish, we steal, we create our own entertainment. One morning, when we are around eleven or twelve, we steal vodka from his mother’s liquor cabinet and get a little drunk before going to school. It’s the best fun. It tastes like shit, but I love the feeling of it. Back then, when it rained, we would stand underneath broken gutters and go to school soaked to the skin. The Deputy Head would send us home to get dry; his mum had a tumble dryer, which seemed very modern at the time. After a while, the Deputy Head wised up and changed to, “You have two hours. I expect you back in two hours, after you tumble-dry your clothes, not one minute longer.” School was essentially a meaningless experience for both of us.
Bagpuss, for his part, has taken up the curious habit of occasionally shitting behind the sofa. Sometimes you smell it, sometimes you find it later. Either way, it makes my father quite furious.
My Life in Cats is a series, part memoir, part observation, part nostalgia, told alongside the stories of the cats I have lived with.