Max the Fat Cat

I swore I'd never do this: join the columnists who write about their damned cats.

Our cat has gone mad. He sits in the front hall and cries to be let out. Once outside he runs around to the back of the house and cries to be let back in. As soon as he's inside again he runs to the hall and cries to be let out. Round and round and round. Does he think he's a goldfish?

His name is Max and I think he suffers from a depressive illness of some kind. He looks like he bears the problems of the world on his furry shoulders: as though he is in charge of Middle Eastern peace talks or responsible for the compilation of a British Rail timetable. He wears a permanently miserable expression. He has never looked happy, even as a kitten. Perhaps he was taken away from his mother at too early an age, but he never played. If you waggled a ball of wool in front of him, he would gaze at it with a bleak expression, like an actor in an Ingmar Bergman film, and then walk away. He was the most joyless kitten I have ever known. He is now ten. One look at his face and I start to question the point of animal and human existence. Why are we here?

He has a serious eating disorder; this is because he is also a pathological liar. People come and go in our house all the time, and Max manages to convince each resident and each visitor that he has been starved of nourishment for a week. He has got the loudest and most irritating cat voice I have ever heard. I'm surprised the council's environmental health people haven't been round before now with their decibel counting machine. Sometimes he is fed as much as six times a day. As a consequence he is grossly fat; I've seen motorists slow down and goggle at him as he waddles along the pavement.

He is also stupid. Our house is chock-a-block with sofas and beds. There is even a cat basket, yet the fool chooses to sleep in the centre of the bottom step of the stairs, exactly where the humans need to walk. Naturally his sleep is constantly being disturbed by stumbling, swearing people. If I'm ever found at the foot of the stairs in a crumpled heap, with a fading pulse, you'll know who to blame – Max. And will he mourn for me? I don't think so. I'm just the schmuck who shells out for his cat food.

Another example of his stupidity: he once fell asleep with his head so close to an open fire that he burnt his whiskers off. Consequently, without these aids to width and distance, he was unable to pass through open doorways or yard-wide gaps in hedges until the whiskers had grown back.

I think he hates me. I sometimes turn my head and catch him looking at me with a contemptuous, judgemental expression on his face. He always looks away quickly, but not before he's left me feeling disturbed, anxious and, for some reason, guilty.

I have a friend who is a fanatical cat lover. (You know the type: they visit you in hospital and enquire after your cat's health.) When this cat lover visits our house, Max goes into Orphan Annie mode. He shivers in the corner and whines pitifully. He even manages to make himself look thin. And, of course, he has managed somehow to remove his collar and name tag and to tangle his fur up and play host to millions of fleas.

‘Poor Max,’ she cries, and she swoops him into her arms and kisses his face before feeding him and grooming him and talking to him as though he were a person.

‘All he needs is some love and attention,’ says the friend reproachfully as she carries the turncoat upstairs to the guest bedroom, where he will sleep with his traitorous head on her pillow. There is no point in protesting to her that the cat is acting in an attempt to discredit me. My friend is convinced that the cat is emotionally and physically deprived. When I complained recently about cat hairs on my clothing, she snapped, ‘Then stop wearing black.’

Another thing I've got against Max is how badly he treats his cat friends. In particular a pathetic creature with three legs and a sulky face. Sometimes he beats her up in the garden. At other times he invites her to share his dinner. But I don't think Three Legs and Max are having a sexual relationship. He is sexually confused. When he was an adolescent the vet ventured the opinion that Max was homosexual, but in my opinion Max is asexual. Three Legs will never bear his kittens.

Sadly, Max was run over recently. I phoned home with the news. ‘How badly was he hurt?’ asked my husband. ‘About two hundred pounds' worth,’ I said, looking at the vet's bill.

Do they prescribe Prozac for cats?