Pablo hops into my lap and regards me with a certain disdain.
‘What?’ I ask. ‘What’s your problem?’
He says nothing, just blinks softly as if to say, ‘What kind of loser sits home alone on New Year’s Eve talking to his cat?’
‘Oh, piss off,’ I snap. ‘You’re no better.’
Again, his eyes do the talking. ‘Ah, but cats don’t celebrate the passage of time,’ they say. ‘We have better things to do.’ And, as if to prove his point, Pablo pads three tight circles, then curls up and closes his eyes.
On television, this year’s celebrities are prancing and gurning, all shrill glibness and crass, forced jollity. There is less than a minute to go. Thirty seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. And so on, till another exhausted year takes off its timeworn hat and with a wildly over-theatrical gesture, replaces it with another, identical hat. Which is not to say that this year will not be different, because this year most certainly will. Recent events have brought change, and the course of True Love is one on which I am suddenly very eager to enrol. I know what must be done, and it shall be done, but not just yet. Tomorrow is another year, but for now I make myself comfortable and listlessly pleasure myself to the familiar grunts and slaps of online pornography.
After which, as I’m removing the sock I have used as a cotton catcher’s mitt, I inadvertently knock Pablo awake with a loose knee. As he eyes me with thinly disguised contempt, I flash back, with shame and confusion furrowing my brow, to my sweaty adolescence, and a sweet little kitten called Mavis.
Mavis was no more than six months old at the time, and one afternoon I was home alone, much as I am now, watching TV in my room and eating toast with Dairylea triangles and too much Marmite. Inadvertently, some of the Marmite found its way on to the back of my hand. Rather than wash it off thoroughly, I merely licked it off lazily with a Marmitey mouth. Then, later that afternoon, still in my room, Mavis began licking the back of my hand with unusual attentiveness. One might even say passion. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought. ‘Interesting.’
A few days later—hours, minutes, whatever—I decided to conduct a little research. I popped down to the kitchen, returning moments later with the lidless Marmite jar. I undressed myself, lay on the bed and smeared a tiny trail of Marmite on—at first—my nipples, which are particularly sensitive, then later, when that proved an enormous success, on the end of my burgeoning boyhood. I’m not proud. But I’m not ashamed.
When I imagine the scene objectively—a teenage boy with a bulbous head lying naked on an unmade bed in a rank and rancid bedroom, the dying summer sun trying and failing to squeeze its fingers through permanently closed curtains—I feel bewildered and amused by what I regard as innocent, albeit slightly bizarre experimentation. Much like the time I pranced in front of the bathroom mirror wearing nothing but my mother’s brassiere and lipstick, or the time I tore my dead uncle’s penis from a photograph and carried it around in my jeans pocket for weeks.
At the time, as I lay on my side, holding myself in my right hand, a tiny black kitten lapping at the tip of my youthful johnson with its tiny, sandpapery tongue, I remember suddenly feeling baffled and incredulous.
As it happens, the experiment didn’t last very long. Not because I discharged myself in poor Mavis’s tiny, startled eyes, but because at some stage—more or less exactly the same time that she began to get a little bitey—I guess I saw what I was doing, objectively, as if watching a documentary about bestial teens, and I felt alarmed, and not a little dismayed. So I stopped. Then I went and washed myself, took Mavis downstairs and gave her some proper food. We said no more about it. Least said, soonest mended.
I remember all this as I pull up my pants, with Pablo curled up close by. I remember it every time I pleasure myself when Pablo’s in the room, and I always feel just a little bit guilty. But not ashamed.
Pablo cocks his head and looks at me now as if he knows all about Mavis. But he doesn’t. I never told him and I never will. This is why he relents at my touch, closing his eyes and purring when I scratch his neck, rather than hissing at me and calling the Cat Protection People. There is, however, a note of distrust in his eyes. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still on probation after the distressing behaviour he witnessed only weeks ago, when I flapped around the dark flat helplessly, shamelessly flailing in the jaws of a giant, inertia-induced doldrum.
After not leaving the house for eight or ten days, maybe more, I’d reached a legendarily low ebb. Pablo had enough food to last him a few more days, but I was completely out. The last thing I wanted to do was leave the house, but I was becoming painfully hungry. My gut was screeching like dolphins. Which is when it happened.
I was feeding Pablo, spooning fish-flavoured meat from a tin to his bowl, when I wondered, ‘How bad would this taste if I heated it up?’
Minutes later, I stood with a single chunk of meat before me on a spoon. It was every bit as succulent, I’m sure, as meat one might find in the guts of a Goblin Meat and Gravy Pudding, for example, but that didn’t stop me retching slightly as I moved it closer to my open mouth.
Pablo was watching me. His head was hovering above his bowl, his eyes focused on mine as if to say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
I turned away, stuffed the meat into my mouth and gobbled it down. It wasn’t so bad, but still my face was twisted with disgust. Suddenly I saw myself objectively, and I despaired. I felt the kind of despair that only a man spooning cat food into his mouth can truly feel. Thankfully the despair seeped into disgust, and the disgust slapped me hard across the face and prompted action.
I apologised to Pablo and immediately went upstairs to get dressed. Then I left the solitude and hopelessness of the sanctuary of my home, because they were making me unwell, and I forced myself on to the street which marched me swiftly, slightly too swiftly, into bustling Brixton.
Brixton is generally a fairly easy place to feel anonymous, but on that day I was feeling unusually conspicuous. I felt that people were staring, more so than usual. There was disapproval in the air. Condemnation. Despite the cold, which I felt intensely, my skin was clammy with sweat. I was feeling paranoid. Then someone offered to sell me a skunk called Charlie and I freaked out and ran into the Ritzy Cinema, where a young lady with a sleepy face let me hide in the bathroom for ten minutes.
I hadn’t had a panic attack in over ten years. Not like that.
When I got home that afternoon, I sat myself down and gave myself a good, stiff talking-to, if not more of a shouting-at.
My life was a mess. I was spending most of every day smeared across the futon like a rash, like bed-sores, propped up in front of bad TV and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on unruly piles of pillows and cushions, incapable of finding the impetus to move. The curtains were permanently closed to keep the day at bay, and my waking hours, mostly at night, were filled up with DVDs and packet after packet of Sugar Puffs, Jaffa Cakes and chocolate HobNobs. I rarely left the house. My weight was inching up to the 20-stone mark. My flesh was the colour and consistency of yesterday’s gruel, and although I was pretending to be dead to the fact, I was well aware that I was about to turn thirty. And I had never had a girlfriend. In the conventional sense of the word.
I had even stopped self-pleasuring, which is a very, very bad sign. When you can no longer take even the most fleeting physical pleasure from your own body, and your own brain, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
I realised that, unless I acted, by the time I was thirty-two I’d be one of those tragic souls who has to have the walls of their house removed so they can be lifted by crane to the nearest hospital for gastric-bypass surgery. Libido would be a thing of the past and I would neither remember nor care. I would survive on a diet of puffed wheat, sugar and cat food. Pablo would long ago have left home.
I had to do something. There had to be change.
And on the night of my thirtieth birthday, there was.