I’d thrown myself into Devon life with so much zest since moving that I’d begun to forget, to an extent, that it wasn’t a country entirely of its own. In five months I’d not left the county once, nor felt any real desire to do so. Now, on my first trip out, it came as something of a shock to arrive back in civilisation – or Somerset, as it was sometimes also called – in barely over an hour. The traffic remained clear until Weston-super-Mare, when we ground to a halt. Cars moving in the opposite direction appraised our gridlock from the other carriageway, no doubt experiencing that particular smug motorway emotion that should be known as ‘Strassenfreude’. A fluorescent-striped highway maintenance vehicle zipped down the hard shoulder parallel to us: a hoverfly to the traffic police’s wasps. I looked from a bemused, alien perspective at this flustered, sighing world of slick company cars, M&S, Costa and Welcome Break outlets and well-ironed shirts on back-seat hangers. George, who had almost certainly never seen it before, was surely more bemused still. He panted slightly in the heat, and I cracked the window and put on Homecoming, the second album by the laid-back country rock band America, for him. This America album didn’t include the band’s most famous song, ‘A Horse With No Name’, but I liked it even more, and it was similarly mellow and George-friendly. It got me thinking about the most bizarre detail surrounding ‘A Horse With No Name’, which was that, despite being one of the most American songs of 1971, it was recorded in Puddletown in Dorset, about eighty miles south-east of our current traffic jam, a fact that, ever since I’d discovered it, caused me to hear the line ‘in the desert, you can remember your name’ as ‘in the Dorset, you can remember your name’.
‘Is it just me,’ said my mum, turning to check on George in the back seat, ‘or does he look like he’s smiling?’
‘Oh, George is always smiling,’ I said. ‘Also, America are one of his very favourite bands, right up there alongside Crosby, Stills and Nash and The Beach Boys.’
‘I’m afraid he’s probably not going to hear much of that at our house. Your dad’s going through quite a big Timbaland phase at the moment.’
To further pass the time, as we remained stationary, my mum told me about a troubling encounter she’d had outside her house recently involving two hedgehogs. ‘I heard a very frightening noise in the night and went outside to see if Floyd was being murdered, or was murdering something, and two big hedgehogs were slugging it out on the lawn. Then one turned on me and attacked my fluffy slippers. I was really scared!’
I suggested that perhaps, in an adrenaline-fuelled red mist, the hedgehog had mistaken my mum’s slippers for a couple of hipster hedgehogs with fancy ideas about grooming who needed to be taken down a peg or two. It went to show that the British countryside is fraught with peril, and the very objects we assume will protect us can turn against us in a heartbeat. Even a slipper – warm and reassuring, so often the shield between the cat-owning rural dweller and a cold kitchen floor or mouse spleen – could be the very thing that puts us most in jeopardy. Yet ultimately I found my mum’s story slightly comforting. All through the journey so far I’d been feeling bad for dragging George away from his cat Utopia, and it reminded me that he was travelling to another very rural area, with lots of green space and nature around him.
In the end, it took us six and a quarter hours to reach the far end of Nottinghamshire: two more than we’d anticipated. The plan was that I’d drop off my mum, who’d come down on the train from Devon a couple of days earlier, and George and then stick around for a night to help him settle in. All being well, I’d proceed to north Norfolk, where I was scheduled to speak at a literary festival. In quintessentially awkward feline fashion, George had chosen the morning of our journey to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude to Roscoe for the first time in weeks, remaining supine on the living room floorboards as she scuttled nervously past the window, but we had to stick to the plan now. ‘Once he’s settled in, he’ll probably be happier there anyway,’ Gemma and I told each other. I’m not sure I believed it, but I wanted to. The one issue was Floyd, but he seemed to get on well with other cats. His relationship with Casper had progressed from an innocent adolescent wrestling club to a rough-and-tumble adult friendship with an unhealthy controlling aspect to it, courtesy of Floyd, but it did not result in any serious physical harm to Casper. ‘It’s only rodents and humans Floyd seems to injure,’ said my mum, showing me the latest puncture wound in her nose.
‘HE’S UPSTAIRS AT THE MOMENT, PASSED OUT ON THE BED,’ said my dad when we arrived. ‘HE’S BEHEADED FOUR VOLES IN THE LAST DAY, SO HE’S REALLY TIRED. AND HE ATTACKED THE PRINTER AGAIN.’ My mum and dad’s computer printer was Floyd’s latest obsession; any time he heard it in use, he’d race towards it and jam his paw into it.
‘I DOUBT HE’LL BE UP FOR AGES.’ My dad looked at George. ‘IS THAT OUR NEW CAT? ALL RIGHT, OUR KID. BLOODY HELL, HE’S BIG, ISN’T HE?’
On being released from his carrier, George made an immediate beeline for the space behind the wood burner, where he retrieved a dead mouse covered in dust. The move was carried out with stunning determination and precision. It was almost as if at some point during the car journey George had clandestinely received a text on a tiny cat phone from a secret agent cat, which read: ‘Your first mission on arrival will be to retrieve a deceased rodent. This is located in the fireplace and has been deceased for four days. Your mission is to be carried out in no longer than twenty-seven seconds. Over.’
‘FOOKTIVANO!’ said my dad. ‘HOW DID HE KNOW THAT WAS THERE? THAT MAKES IT FOURTEEN THAT FLOYD’S KILLED THIS WEEK.’
As George mooched about and familiarised himself with the remainder of the downstairs of the house, my mum, my dad and I sat down to eat. Among other dishes, my dad had made a delicious-looking mackerel salad. I explained that I had been vacillating between a vegetarian and pescatarian diet recently, and was currently in a fish-free phase. My dad waved this suggestion away. ‘GERRIT DOWN YOU. DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. ANYWAY, MACKEREL DON’T HAVE FEELINGS. THEY’VE PROVED IT.’
Twenty minutes later, while my mum and I cleared the dishes away, we heard a telltale jingle and Floyd appeared on the stairs, with a sleepy-eyed but suspicious look. I’d never thought of Floyd as having a harsh face in the past, but, thanks to the time I’d spent looking at George’s beatific, kind one, there seemed something a little cruel about it now. This was emphasised a few minutes later when Floyd, seeing George, immediately pounced on him and lamped him repeatedly on the head.
I’m aware that there are specific guidelines it’s wise to follow when introducing a new cat into a household where another cat already lives. Experts believe you should keep the cats apart for a lengthy period of time, using clothing or blankets to get them gradually accustomed to one another’s smell. But I’d brought George a long, long way, very reluctantly, and I wanted to get a sense that he was OK before I left him. After a small break, a second introduction was even less successful, with Floyd pouncing on George in much the same way as a fascist policeman with his blood up might have pounced on a peaceful hippie protesting the Vietnam War. How had I not noticed in the past just how long and sharp Floyd’s claws were? A third introduction, the following morning, was an almost exact replay of the scene where Bruce Lee fights Han and his terrifying metal claw, the only difference being that, in this case, instead of doing spectacular kung fu kicks on Han, Bruce Lee cowered in a corner looking scared, confused and alone.
‘Perhaps this isn’t going to work,’ said my mum.
‘IT’S BREAKING MY HEART,’ said my dad, picking George up. ‘I’VE GOT AN IDEA: WHAT IF WE KEEP GEORGE AND YOU TAKE FLOYD BACK WITH YOU? IF HE DOESN’T LIKE IT THERE HE CAN ALWAYS GO UP AND LIVE ON HIS OWN ON DARTMOOR. HE’D BE OK, AND HE’D HAVE NO PROBLEM FINDING FOOD. IF HE GOT HUNGRY HE’D JUST BRING DOWN ONE OF THE PONIES UP THERE.’
It was with extreme reluctance later that morning that I said goodbye to George and set off for Norfolk. ‘Maybe things will improve,’ said my mum. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll keep you informed of how it’s going. Try to relax and have a good time.’
‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES,’ said my dad. ‘AND FOR SNAKES.’
‘You haven’t still got that one in your car, have you?’ I asked.
‘YEAH. IT’S REALLY SHRIVELLED FROM THE HEAT NOW, THOUGH. THERE’S ALMOST NONE OF IT LEFT. I MIGHT THROW IT AWAY SOON.’
‘No need to rush these things, though, is there? Why not wait a few more months?’
‘YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT.’
* * *
Norfolk had its own colour in the August heat: a sandblasted yellow, sharply in contrast to Devon’s endless greens. Driving in from the north coast, where I’d done my spoken word event, Norwich felt as familiar and welcome as a tasty pizza slice you’ve forgotten you’ve left in the fridge the night before. In its Golden Triangle district, the cats were typically out in force.
‘We saw Gingersaurus last week,’ my friends Drew and Jecca told me, ‘but it’s been ages since we saw Crybaby Hedgecat.’ Though not cat owners themselves, Drew and Jecca were careful to track the comings and goings of the cats of the neighbourhood, giving them their own names. Walking from their Victorian terrace back into town, I was pleased to see a familiar, cowlike cat I’d tried to befriend the previous year sitting in his customary position in the middle of the pavement, watching traffic. But witnessing these confident city cats, at one with their environment, I could not help thinking of George, anything but at one with his, sitting bewildered on my mum and dad’s sofa before I left.
Though sparsely attended, the literary festival at which I’d read had been fun, and turned out to be the springboard for a weekend of much bigger fun: one of those rare periods where the sun is shining non-stop, you’ve got nothing arduous arranged and have managed to gather many of your favourite people in the world in one place. Sitting in beer gardens and flicking through shelves of second-hand books and records, though, I found that George was never far from my thoughts. When I woke up in Drew and Jecca’s spare bed, his plaintive meow – ‘Geeeeeoooorge’, the meow that had greeted me at the bottom of the stairs every morning, without fail, since the day I’d brought him back from the vet’s – rang in my ears, with just the hint of a guilt-inducing question mark on its final note. Text updates arrived from my mum’s iPad but they were not promising (‘Another meeting, Floyd scratched George’s nose, George back locked in bedroom, looking depressed…’) and all the time here I was, drinking ale and eating chilli-coated chips and having the weekend of my life. ‘What a heartless bastard I am!’ I thought.
I’d rescued cats before, winning the trust of a cat who was living wild and inviting him to live in your house brought with it a slightly different set of emotions to adopting a cat from a shelter. Being away from George in another place highlighted what a unique bond I’d forged with him: not something better than the one I’d forged with any of my other cats, but something close and trusting in an entirely different way. I thought about the way George followed me; the possessive way he thwacked his tail against me when we went on walks together; the way seeing his gentle, peaceful face every morning gave me a sense of well-being; a feeling that, despite the world being a messed-up place, and life being full of struggle, everything was intrinsically OK.
I’d owed Roscoe a break from his attentions, but I felt I owed George more than this. Being out at work in the day, Gemma had not forged the same bond with him, but, after I called her from Norwich and explained the situation with Floyd, she shared my opinion: maybe the course of action we’d taken wasn’t the right one after all. The decision was made, but perhaps it had truly been made a couple of days earlier, when I first arrived at my mum and dad’s house with George. So, when I’d said goodbye to my friends in Norwich, I did not point my car in a south-westerly direction, as originally planned, but back in the north-westerly one I had arrived from.
I would not precisely have described George as ‘happy’ during our trip back to Devon, and the stretch of the journey between Walton on the Wolds and Leicester Forest East Services was characterised by some frantic Geeeeoooorgeing, but he seemed to calm down when I put Jackson Browne’s debut album on, and his overall equanimity through his four-day ordeal had been amazing to behold. Released back into his former home, he sauntered into the living room and flopped on my battered old leather sofa as if he’d been no farther than his favourite local meadow. ‘I don’t mind,’ his attitude seemed to say. ‘It’s all better than being homeless.’ His attitude was notably more humble than Shipley’s, who, arriving in the living room and seeing George’s return, let out a profanity so loud and obscene I found myself wanting to attach a parental advisory tag to his collar in addition to the two bells that currently hung there.
George’s return came with a strict proviso, which I assured Gemma I would remain diligently responsible for: that it was my job – even above any of my actual jobs, which paid the rent and bills – to go to every length possible to keep him and Roscoe apart. My routine was the same every morning: feed George, The Bear, Ralph and Shipley, shut George in the dining room, head up to the undergrowth behind the house, call Roscoe, find Roscoe in a bush, take Roscoe back home, feed Roscoe, wait for Roscoe to head up to the bedroom to sleep, let George out of the dining room. If I was determined and disciplined enough and limited my trips out of the house, I could almost create the illusion for George and Roscoe that each other didn’t exist. It was hard work, and it wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘a Life’, but I tried to look at it from a George kind of perspective: at least it was better than being homeless.
There was no period of readjustment for George: he was instantly back to his old ways here, following me on walks, languidly chasing butterflies and purring at the hillside’s thriving bumblebee population. That was perhaps unsurprising, since this place had been his home before – perhaps long before – it had been ours. His one baffling fear had always been the cupboard beneath our stairs. Each time I opened it when George was around, his face became a mask of bug-eyed terror and he’d flee to another part of the house. I wondered if this was because it was where I kept my old metal clothes horse – a contraption that had been a nemesis of Ralph’s for well over a decade – but on the occasions I took the clothes horse out of the cupboard, George was entirely nonchalant about it. I sensed there was another, much more deep-seated story here. With the exception of Floyd, the cupboard was the only thing I’d ever seen George genuinely terrified of. Perhaps the house’s previous occupants had kept George locked in the cupboard, like a feline Harry Potter? Maybe the cupboard had its own ghost? I gave the latter theory most credence: so much so, in fact, that once when I went into the cupboard to get the vacuum cleaner, and the ironing board fell over behind me, briefly wedging the door shut, I went into my own George-style panic.
Overlooking the diligence and time that was required to keep him and Roscoe segregated, George remained an effortless cat to be around. When he was on my lap, he made none of Ralph or Shipley’s wriggling, possessive demands. He was calm and still. His plush coat was now a pleasure to stroke, smoothly radiating good health. When he looked up at me with a question in his eyes, it was always one that seemed to call for a simple answer, as opposed to the complex, moralistic one demanded by The Bear on similar occasions. Yet he had his mysterious side, too; his easy domestication masked some ingrained, clandestine feral habits. Driving away from home one day, Gemma and I were shocked to glance over a hedge five or six hundred yards from the house and see him prowling purposefully through a field in the direction of some barns belonging to our local farm. This suggested that the obedient imminence of George’s arrivals when I whistled him in for food was less down to his proximity to the house at the time and more to the acuteness of his hearing and speed of his strong legs.
On another occasion I opened the back gate and found him behind the hedge, shyly crunching through the last vestiges of a mouse. This was so different to the approach of Shipley and Ralph, who invariably brought their mice in, played volleyball with them then left them quarter-eaten or whole. There was something very feral about the ideology behind it: rodent purely as sustenance, rather than present or plaything. I hoped this wouldn’t change, since Shipley and Ralph had really been putting the work in, rodent-wise, recently. Their new bells had put a stop to the rabbit slaughter, but the fact that when in pursuit of prey each of them made the noise of a small upbeat church seemed to make no difference to the mouse and vole kill count. At certain times of the night the area around the dining room resembled a vole racetrack. I managed to catch and free most of the voles, but it was starting to cut severely into my free time. Then there were those I failed to spot, such as the one rotting behind the fridge and another I found crushed as flat as a pressed flower beneath a fallen picture frame.3
By far Shipley’s most alarming kill of recent days was a full-sized adult hare. Shipley was an astonishingly deft and speedy sprinter for his advancing years, but hares can really put a clip on, and I concluded the poor thing must already have been very ill, if not dying, in order for him to catch it. There was something far more shocking about seeing him arrive in the garden with it than seeing him earlier in the year with rabbits in his mouth. It left me feeling like I’d just watched a friend I thought I knew gun down a kindly wizard in cold blood.
Back in June I’d been talking to a yoga instructor in the village called Sue, who was closely connected to someone who ran something she called a ‘touring taxidermy peep show’. I wasn’t sure of the exact details, but the gist of it seemed to be that dead animals dressed up in, then took off, a range of Victorian clothes in front of a small crowd of people who’d tired of regular ways to have fun. I thought now of Sue, who often stored badgers, rabbits and foxes for her friend in the large fridge in her garage, but I could not bring myself to phone or text her. This dignified creature in front of me on the lawn surely deserved a less tacky afterlife than being repeatedly cracked onto by a horny fox in a top hat. Yet somehow leaving it in a quiet place beneath the bracken and nettles behind the garden, as I usually did with rabbits and voles, didn’t seem quite distinguished enough, so instead I fetched a spade from the garden shed, dug a small hole in the same area and buried it there. The whole procedure took around an hour, which, going on usual cat schedules, left me about forty-five minutes of working time before George made his next attempt to sexually harass Roscoe.
Early evening was always a danger time in terms of the George and Roscoe situation: Roscoe would have asked to come out of the bedroom by this point. George too would be waking up, and we’d often be off our guard, busy with the preparation of dinner and other jobs. One night in August as Gemma and I sat down to eat, I heard a commotion outside and exploded out of the back door, expecting to discover George arched over Roscoe, only to find The Bear and George watching a badger run industriously across the lawn. I’d lived almost my entire life in the countryside, but this was the first badger I’d ever seen up close, and I was excited. I was also interested to note that badgers don’t run like the other wild, four-legged animals of Britain; they run a bit like a garish 1970s footstool might run if it suddenly realised it had the power of functioning limbs. I got the impression this one had been hanging around a fair bit recently, and the sight of it came as a relief, suggesting to me that some of the ‘knocking over bins and plant pots’ noises we’d heard in the night over the last two weeks had not actually been down to an alcoholic hobo, as I’d previously feared. The Bear, George and I watched the badger as it scuttled past its hole and then, perhaps seeing that the hole was still occupied by the same wasp who’d been there last month, vanished into the hedge.
The Bear and George continued to spend a lot of time together. When they slept on the sofa or the bed, George would gradually edge closer backwards towards The Bear, until The Bear appeared to be more or less spooning him. ‘Aren’t you both sweet!’ I’d say, finding them like this, and The Bear would look up at me with the tired, long-suffering eyes of someone doomed to live for ever in the company of simpletons.
Had The Bear ever truly had a friend of his own species: a cat fully on his level? I remembered hearing rumours of playmates in his early years, back when he lived with my ex’s ex in the suburbs of east London, but I’d never seen evidence of them. I liked to imagine that the answer to his solitude would be to forge a bond with one of the owls who lived in the hills around Totnes. There was certainly no shortage of them. Sometimes there were so many woo-woos in the area immediately beyond the garden it felt like being in the middle of an illegal rave. There were tuneful owls and more discordant owls, perhaps in the middle of working on their difficult second owlbums. The tuneful owls dominated, which suggested that the number of male tawnies in the area heavily outnumbered the number of females. Surely an elderly, slightly asexual one of these single owl gentlemen could find something in common with The Bear? I pictured the two of them reading poetry to one another, then turning in to sleep the sleep of the learned and wise on separate bookshelves, each equipped with their own nightlight.
I’d always suspected that, along with ‘academic’, ‘poet’ and ‘diplomat’, ‘owl’ must have been one of The Bear’s jobs in a previous life. Owls, I felt, were one of the few types of animal who shared his quiet, watchful intelligence. However, I was swiftly disabused of this notion by Jordan, one of the owl handlers I met on a visit to Totnes Rare Breeds Farm. ‘They’re actually one of the world’s thickest animals,’ he told me.
‘So all that stuff you hear about owls having their own offices in important universities and being able to read Ulysses all the way through in one weekend is nonsense?’ I asked.
‘Yep, I’m afraid so. They’ve got big eyes and a very small head, which leaves very little room for brain.’
‘Their hearing is amazing, though,’ added Sam, the farm manager who worked with Jordan. ‘Many of these owls can hear a mouse’s heartbeat from two metres away.’
I’d decided to visit the Rare Breeds Farm after chatting to Pete, the man I frequently saw walking a European eagle owl around Totnes. The owl, an exquisite creature with a wingspan big enough to carry a dozen hardback books it would never read, was called Wizard, and was in fact one of three owls from the farm who Pete regularly took out for a walk. The other two were a Siberian eagle owl called Merlin and Pete’s own winged companion, a great grey owl named Lady Jane Grey. Pete had once owned a haulage firm in Yorkshire, but, having visited a friend in Devon and really enjoyed looking after some donkeys for a fortnight, went straight back home, sold his company, moved south-west and began to volunteer at the Rare Breeds Farm, which is also home to alpacas, red squirrels, pot-bellied pigs and angora goats. A good example of the amazing hearing of the owls, Sam told me, was that Lady Jane Grey could always hear Pete’s fourteen-year-old Rover 75 pull into the car park, and would get ‘very excited at the sound of the engine’.
‘I get all sorts of reactions walking around town with the owls,’ Pete told me. ‘One time I was out with Merlin and a lady asked me what kind of owl he was. I told her he was a Siberian eagle owl, and she immediately burst into tears. It turned out that she was from Siberia too, and missed it a lot. The owls seem to love coming out with me. Wizard especially likes the attention. The only problem is that it’s difficult for me to go out into town on my own now without somebody stopping me and asking, “Why haven’t you got an owl with you?”’
On the second occasion I’d stopped to chat with Pete on the outskirts of Totnes, not far from the ‘Twinned with Narnia’ town sign, which had since been amended to ‘Twinned with Area 51’, he’d asked Wizard to ‘wave’ goodbye to me, which Wizard duly did, using his wings. A couple of weeks later, I’d accompanied Pete and Lady Jane Grey on a wander around the town on market day, and we’d been stopped every three steps by people of all shapes, sizes, genders and nationalities. At one point, a flock of Spanish tourists mobbed us in a shop doorway, Lady Jane perched on Pete’s arm, high on some steps above the throng, proudly posing for their iPhone photos like a newly acquitted defendant before a slathering media scrum after a high-profile court case.
At the Rare Breeds Farm, Sam let me into the enclosure and I had a circumspect cuddle with Wizard, being careful to keep clear of his talons, which, she told me, could go through nineteen-gauge steel. European eagle owls vanished from Britain for a while but have recently returned to the wild in small numbers. Forced to fend for himself, Wizard could easily spear himself a calf, a sheep or a small deer for dinner, but subsisted quite happily here on a slightly less adventurous diet.
All the owls at the Rare Breeds Farm were either rescue owls or owls born in captivity. After Wizard, I met Flitwick, a little owl who preferred to sit on the fence of the enclosure due to ‘liking to be stroked’, and Queenie, a nervous barn owl rescued from some Harry Potter fans who’d kept her shut in a wardrobe for two years. On the list of awkward conversation topics to avoid with a barn owl, J. K. Rowling is right up there with Hooters restaurants, rodenticides and the episodes of the TV show Grand Designs that have centred around the conversion of draughty old farm buildings.
‘Harry Potter has a lot to answer for,’ said Sam. ‘People buy barn owls over the Internet for their kids because they’ve watched the films, but they don’t have any idea how to look after them. They’re not pets, and shouldn’t be treated that way.’
Sam had her own barn owl, Jake – whose impressively choreographed flying skills she later demonstrated for me – but Jake lived at the farm in his own aviary, not at her house, and Sam did not kid herself that he looked at her as anything more than a source of food.
I told Sam and Jordan about the wild owls I’d witnessed nearby: the little owls I’d seen sitting on fence posts in the morning, judging me as I emptied the recycling, and the rodent slaughter in the trees and scrub behind my house: a tawny version of the Totnes Good Food Market with the added bonus that it was held every night, not just the third Sunday of every month. Neither of them seemed surprised, and they told me that these same local wild tawnies were often known to bring ‘presents’ to the tame show owls at the Rare Breeds Farm: a shrew here, half a rat or two there. The consensus among the Rare Breeds staff was that these gifts were either sex bribes or a manifestation of the tawnies’ worries that Wizard, Merlin and friends weren’t eating properly.
I preferred to believe the second of these explanations, just as I preferred to continue believing that owls were bright creatures, and that the many who had congregated in the hills around Totnes had come here for a reason. I could picture it clearly: an owl from a humdrum place who feels a bit misunderstood is flying around, feeling a bit rootless. She sees the ‘Totnes: Twinned With Area 51’ sign. ‘Hmm, interesting,’ she thinks, flying on, past a group of retirees on a wild food walk, a poster advertising a ten-week evening class exploring Woman’s relationship with the moon and the Harlequin bookshop, run by Paul, who used to go out with Joan Baez. The owl swoops down and lands at the Rare Breeds Farm where, after saying a tentative hello to one of the angora goats that look like Roger Daltrey from The Who, she arrives at the aviary housing Wizard, Merlin and Lady Jane Grey and gives them the once-over. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says to herself. ‘There are some strange-looking folks who live here. But I like it.’
* * *
It might be said that the owls who had settled near our cottage had made an even wiser property decision. Due to the proximity of Roscoe, Ralph and Shipley, these nocturnal predators had a whole extra food supply they didn’t even have to go to the effort to kill themselves: a twitchell’s worth of quarter-chewed voles, shrew faces and half-rabbits. They no longer even had to compete for these offcuts with the jackdaws on top of the chimney, who’d long since moved on. Sometimes, of course, these mangled body parts ended up indoors, out of the owls’ reach, but, having cleared them up and scrubbed the carpet, I’d always place them behind the fence in what I’d come to think of as ‘Owl Alley’.
Life must have been so simple for people without cats who got other people to look after their houses. All they had to say was stuff like, ‘the shower is playing up a bit’, ‘the heating comes on at six in the morning and again at five in the evening’ and ‘make sure you give the umbrella plant in the dining room extra water’. There was no ‘try to stop the foul-mouthed wiry black cat stealing the other cats’ food’, ‘keep the drinking bowl in the bathroom topped up and don’t be freaked out when the other black one meows at it as if he’s in love with it’, or ‘if you find a mouse’s bum on the carpet, just use some kitchen roll to pick it up, then pop it behind the back fence’ for them. My mysterious river disease, which had escalated into prostatitis a few weeks earlier, and the increasing demands of my part-time job as a bodyguard for Roscoe, had left me more homelocked recently. Now I was feeling a bit better I needed a break, and Gemma and I were due to attend Drew and Jecca’s wedding at the far end of Cornwall at the end of August. Asking any of our friends to look after our house, though, seemed a huge imposition: effectively the equivalent of requesting that they perform a short stint as unpaid janitors at a tiny abattoir. Then on top of that there was the Roscoe and George problem, the resurfacing of Shipley’s predawn bin-kicking sessions and Ralph’s increasingly loud and abrasive snoring, which, despite my countless hints, he refused to seek help for.
Fortunately, my dad, who offered to look after the cottage for us while we were away at the wedding, lived with Floyd, and had plenty of recent experience of dead rodents. But, for all the blood spatter he left around the house, Floyd rarely discarded actual body parts on the floor, and my dad was not known for his care and stealth when walking around the house in the early hours. I could not help thinking here of the incident a little more than a year ago, when, staying in my old spare room and allowing my mum and dad the use of my (much comfier) bed, I’d been woken in the night by an almighty crash. The next morning I’d asked my mum if she’d heard it too.
‘Oh, er, yes,’ she replied. ‘That was your dad. He was on his way to the bathroom but ended up trying to get into your wardrobe instead.’
Then there was George. Could I reasonably expect my dad to repeat even half the complex drill I performed every day to keep him from dry-humping Roscoe? The brief locking of George in the dining room. The vigilant listening out for Roscoe by the living-room windows, and the particular times of day when it was most important to do so. The places where she would and wouldn’t comfortably eat. The patches of undergrowth and parts of the pub where you were most likely to find her when she went missing.
‘I’m sure it will be OK,’ said my mum. ‘Just make sure you leave lots of instructions. Your dad could really do with the break. He’s been spending far too much time composting recently. He brought some really old compost back from next door’s garden yesterday. He calls it “black gold” because it’s so good. He smelt like a guinea pig after he’d used it.’
On the night he arrived, my dad decided to have a bath, and emerged from the bathroom half an hour later wrapped in all four of the remaining clean towels in the house. ‘I’VE JUST SPRAYED MY HAIR WITH CONTACT LENS CLEANER,’ he announced. ‘I THOUGHT IT WAS MY HAIR SPRAY, BUT IT WAS CONTACT LENS CLEANER.’
This didn’t fill me confidence for the three days to come, but there was no changing our minds now: we’d confirmed our presence at the wedding, booked our room at the venue and bought booze and presents to take with us. There would be no phone reception or wi-fi at the big old Gothic house where the wedding was being held, which was tucked away on a secluded cove a few miles outside Penzance, and if my dad needed to contact us, he’d be required to call the one phone there: an old 1960s dial-it-yourself contraption far away from any of the main rooms in the building, suggesting that hearing its old-fashioned tring would be impossible.
Once we were in Cornwall, though, these concerns soon melted away into a mindful, other-worldly weekend of sea swimming, rocky coastal path walks, food, drink and dancing. It was only on the third day when I scrambled a mile back up the hill to the road to buy a pasty that my phone buzzed to life, revealing an email my dad had sent the previous evening. Written entirely in his customary capital letters, the message was direct and to the point:
WENT FOR A WALK AND FELL OFF A WALL AND COULDN’T GET UP ’CAUSE MY BACKPACK WAS SO HEAVY. MISTOOK A SHEEP TRACK FOR THE SOUTH DEVON COASTAL PATH AND NEARLY WALKED OFF A CLIFF EDGE. WENT FOR ANOTHER WALK WHILE THEY WERE DOING MY TAKEAWAY THEN COULDN’T FIND MY WAY BACK TO THE FOOKIN’ PLACE. ALSO SHIPLEY PISSED IN MY SHORTS WHEN I WAS ASLEEP* AND GEORGE TRIED TO NOB ROSCOE BUT I WAS BETWEEN THEM IN A FLASH.
*LUCKILY I WASN’T WEARING THEM AT THE TIME.
I suppose he might conceivably have had a better time, but I was relieved to hear that there had been no major disasters. The biggest relief of all was that Roscoe had not done another of her vanishing acts. On arriving back at the cottage, we found it mostly intact, overlooking a few towels and chocolate wrappers strewn around the place and a text from my mum that popped up on my phone later that day informing me that my dad had ‘brought four of your pillowcases home by mistake’. George bounded down the garden path to greet us, thumping his tail against my legs in typically possessive fashion. Shipley, The Bear and Ralph followed, at a somewhat grudging distance, and Roscoe arrived an hour later, low to the ground, watching all the angles for a potential ambush.
I’d missed George while we were away – missed him as much as I could miss any cat of my own – but in the days that followed it became clear that his enthusiasm for Roscoe was not, as I’d hoped, cooling; in fact, quite the opposite. I still mostly succeeded in keeping them apart. However, as long as I was in the house and making any attempt to get on with my life, it would never be long before I heard her banshee alarm noise. Rushing to the rescue, I’d usually find him arched over her at the entrance to her favourite sleeping cupboard, or near the bookcase in the spare room. She managed to contort her legs and torso into an impressive upside-down thrashing rotor blade position that prevented him from being able to do her actual physical harm, but she was clearly terrified – so much so that on one occasion when I separated them, I found a small turd in the place where she’d been cowering.
Although I shied away from facing up to the reality, it was becoming obvious that there was only one course of action, and it was getting harder to convince myself that Roscoe and George ‘just needed time’. Gemma kindly suggested that perhaps we might be able to find Roscoe another home, but in my mind that could never be an option: it had to be a case of first come, first served. Roscoe was the priority. Also, she was the one cat of the five who could be deemed to be more Gemma’s than mine. Neither of us, especially Gemma, wanted to lose her.
There was also Ralph and Shipley to think about. More and more I was noticing how they hung back, a little unhappily, while George was around. Every day he looked stronger and healthier and seemed to improve visibly at the art of being a cat. For us, this was heart-warming and magical to watch, but for them it must have been sickening. Shipley’s swearing sessions started to sound less like anti-establishment war cries and more like surly, muttered asides. It had been weeks since Ralph had hurled himself at my lap, padded me and sneezed in my face, and recently the Ralarm had been conspicuously unplugged. As I doled out affection, trying to reassure them that, despite George’s easy ways, they were still more important than him, I was reminded of a conviction I’d first had a decade or so before: four cats was a lot of cats to have but it was also a safe, sane limit … for me, at least. If you were a working person, once you went over that limit an imbalance was often created, for you, but, more crucially, for the cats themselves.
I continued to kid myself that there was a solution. Roscoe had always been so fearless in the past. Why was she scared of this sunny idiot who, in every other way, seemed to be an outright pacifist? Perhaps if we shut them in a room together, she could get to know the real him and find she’d been scared of nothing all along. To my knowledge, George had never actually hurt Roscoe, but their relationship mirrored relationships between bullies and victims the world over: the more fear the victim showed, the more it egged the bully on. In the past, I’d seen the same dynamic, in much less serious form, between Shipley and The Bear. Had The Bear just stood up to him near the beginning, got right up in his face and called him a cockwomble, it probably would have defused the situation and broken the pattern, but it was never going to happen.
If my neglect to take action caused George to chase Roscoe down onto the lane and one or both of them were hit by a car, I knew I would not be able to live with myself. One wild, stormy night in late September, when they were both out of the house and I lay awake in bed worrying about this, I heard an almighty crack of thunder: the loudest I’d ever heard. It sounded as if all the thunder I’d previously witnessed had just been sensitive, acoustic thunder, and that now thunder had plugged in for the first time and formed its own rock band.
‘I hate to think of her out in that,’ said Gemma, who’d been woken by it.
I wandered outside and whistled a few times, but all I heard in response was the sound of branches thrashing to and fro and a small gothic owl hoot, thinned and compressed by a tunnel of wind. The only cat in evidence was The Bear, staring back at me from his perch by the pond with bright, shocked, satellite eyes.
The following morning I walked out into the dripping countryside to look for Roscoe, and discovered that the deafening crack we’d heard wasn’t thunder at all but a towering red oak, a hundred yards from the house, being ripped from its roots. It lay on its side like a stunned, formerly complacent giant. A cat – particularly one as nimble as Roscoe – would surely have been able to get out of its way, but trudging through the wet grass I saw our craggy, windblown hillside through the eyes of a cat who no longer had a comfortable, relaxing home to go to, and it appeared more perilous.
When I opened the back door, the landline was ringing. This probably meant that the person on the other end was either one of my parents or one of the telesales people who often called asking for a ‘Mr M’, an occurrence that had, over the months, painted an image in my head of the house’s former tenant as an unusually gullible secret agent.
It was my mum.
The first thing I usually say to my mum when I pick up the phone to her is, ‘Hi. How are you?’ But this time for some reason, perhaps her tone of voice, I said, ‘Hi. Are you OK?’
It’s easy to get a bit cynical about questions like ‘Are you OK?’, ‘Are you all right?’, ‘How are you?’ or ‘How are you doing?’ People often ask them knowing they won’t get an authentic answer, and don’t really want one, which seems to render them meaningless. But when you think a bit more deeply about these questions, they’re actually a really nice part of being human. Ultimately, asking somebody how they are, even if you’re not looking for an entirely truthful and detailed answer, is much nicer than not asking, and the impulse that makes people give a not entirely truthful and detailed answer is typically a kind one: a wish not to waste someone else’s time with what you perceive as your own minor troubles. And, despite what we might think, asking someone if they’re OK does perform a function. It’s a bigger, more significant kind of well-being check. What it often means, though we don’t admit it, is, ‘Is everything generally OK, and you are not desperately sad or in trouble?’ especially when we put the question to somebody we truly care about. I thought about this a lot in the hours after the phone call with my mum, because, in the shaky, short silence between me asking, ‘Are you OK?’ and her answer, I knew what she was going to say; knew it perhaps, even, from the tone of her ‘Hello’ when I’d first picked up the phone.
‘No, I’m really not,’ she said. ‘Floyd is dead.’