by Tom Cox
‘Wow!’ said the checkout operator to the woman with the eel. ‘Is it the cat’s birthday?’
‘No,’ replied the woman.
Terrorist Canoes
That night, after devouring several of the chicken slices, my female cat Roscoe slept on my bed, burrowing purposefully into my side. She’d been doing this a lot since the arrival of Uncle Fuckykins: a period when she’d become a noticeably more clingy indoor being and a noticeably more distant outdoor one. On our way back home to Norfolk in spring 2012, after picking up our new kitten from west London, my girlfriend and I listened to the song ‘Roscoe’ by the bucolic, 1800s obsessed rock band Midlake. We decided to name the kitten in honour of it. It also seemed vaguely fitting: early signs suggested that the kitten, who had the appearance of a cartoon masked feline supervillain, boasted a scrappy tomboy character, and, having adopted a couple of male cats with female names in the past, it seemed only fair for me to even the score. But it had turned out to be more apt than I could have ever imagined. In the song, Midlake talk about what a ‘productive’ name Roscoe is, and Roscoe soon turned into the most industrious of cats: an animal who, when not asleep, had a permanently businesslike air about her, always seemingly involved in some important hedgerow admin or undergrowth-based clerical work. When I was lucky enough to be greeted by her in the garden, her white paws gave the impression that I was talking to someone very industrious who wore running shoes in order to move more quickly to and from meetings. When in the house, during periods when my clothes were drying on radiators, she would go around the upstairs rooms, efficiently pulling each item onto the floor with her stretched-out paws until she found a garment that she deemed sufficiently comfortable to sleep on.
The first six months of our new life in Devon had been a tough time for Roscoe. A dumb, sunny, ginger stray called George, who I took pity on, divesting him of his testicles through a third party and allowing him to live with us, made it his devout mission to dry-hump her at every available opportunity. Horrified, Roscoe – renowned in the past for her take-no-shit attitude with male cats almost twice her size – began to make a series of uncharacteristic escapes. I knew matters had reached crisis point when, one day outside the local pub, my girlfriend and I saw her sitting at one of the other tables, ignoring us and socialising with some rough-looking strangers. George was shipped off to live a life of room-service bliss with my parents that autumn, and a ten-month period followed in which Roscoe really got back on top of her work, cuffing my much larger male cat Shipley into line, crunching on mouse skulls in a practical, unshowy way and patrolling the perimeters of the garden in a manner that couldn’t have looked more systematic and industrious if she’d had a tiny carpenter’s pencil behind her ear. But since the beginning of the reign of Uncle Fuckykins she’d been nervous and unsettled – even more so perhaps than when George lived here. The only room she was any longer comfortable in was my bedroom. She now appeared to have two modes: asleep next to me or as far from home as possible. Returning from a party on Halloween, I’d been startled to hear a familiar meow behind me on the river path over a mile from my front door and turned to see her scuttling out of the bushes in pursuit of me. Roscoe had always had an unmistakable, panicky sort of meow, which seemed to have never quite fully developed. Here, so far from her usual territory, near main roads and Devonshire techno hippies, the meow seemed doubly insufficient. Shaken to see her in this foreign area, I picked her up, held her tight inside my coat and walked her back to my house, moving off the lane a couple of times to hide in the undergrowth when Halloween revellers came the other way, lest she freak out and escape back towards town.
Something had to be done. But what? Uncle Fuckykins had become just the wrong combination of elusive and ubiquitous: I could no longer get near him, yet he was always around. Ralph, the most alpha of my cats, had chased off other intruders in the past, but he was in early old age now and knew better than to mess with a young hooligan, particularly after that nose injury. As he and I sat on the porch step one day and watched Uncle Fuckykins nonchalantly cleaning a paw beside the garden gate, a sense of helplessness set in, as if all that was left to do was for one of us to call the police. Twice in the four days after my walk on the moor with Billy I had heard Roscoe’s anguished alarm cry in the bushes behind the house and found her pinned against walls and fences by the marauding Fuckykins. As she ate, she looked nervously over her shoulder in the direction of the back door, before retreating to my room for periods of up to thirteen hours.
The following morning I was in the living room cleaning up the spleen of a vole killed by Ralph when I heard the bang of the cat flap and saw Roscoe hurry past me and up the stairs. Like many of us, Roscoe yo-yos in weight between the seasons: she’s svelte in summer, but in winter takes on the appearance of a black and white bowling skittle, waddling a touch when she picks up speed. But she was moving more awkwardly than usual and I noticed she was drenched, which was odd as, although the ground was wet, it hadn’t rained for several hours. I deposited the vole’s spleen outside, where it would be soon devoured by jackdaws, and went upstairs, where I found Roscoe beneath the bed in the spare room. I did not look at the large wound on her left side for long, but what I saw was enough to propel me to the cupboard where I stored a couple of large plastic cat carriers, bundle her into one of them and drive to the vets’ as fast as possible. In the surgery a junior vet shone a torch into the gash, which I now realised was extremely deep. Roscoe appeared calm, but the junior vet asked me to leave her at the surgery so one of the senior members of the practice could investigate whether there’d been any damage caused to her abdominal wall. Further investigation revealed two more wounds, closer to her tail.
Returning home, I blamed myself. By not acting decisively and trapping Uncle Fuckykins, I had permitted this to happen. I stamped out furiously to the garage, where I found that both of the bowls of food I’d put out were empty, but there was no Fuckykins. Just over an hour later, one of the senior vets at the surgery, Trevor, called. Roscoe’s abdominal wall had been severely damaged, and an operation would be needed to repair it. When I told him about Uncle Fuckykins, he sounded doubtful. ‘The main wound has all the hallmarks of a bite, probably by a large dog,’ he said. ‘I don’t think even a very big cat could have caused this much damage.’ As Trevor said these words, a memory – strangely repressed until now – returned: me waking that morning to the thump of fast, heavy footsteps and a man’s impotent, frantic voice behind my garden hedge. ‘Oscar! Oscar!’ the man had been shouting breathlessly. The meadow beside my house is one where dogs are not permitted, let alone permitted to roam off the lead: an instruction very clearly signposted. I had not connected the two events before but now they seemed too much of a coincidence: the extent of the injury, the wet fur. My undersized, sweet cat had been dragged through the grass in the jaws of a dog belonging to an irresponsible owner. An irresponsible owner too cowardly to come forward and admit what his dog had done. A hit-and-run. How on earth could I find him? I didn’t even know what he looked like. And what if I did? How could I prove what his dog had done?
The following day I waited for the results of Roscoe’s surgery in a state of total helplessness. Going into the spare room for the first time since I’d taken her to the vet, I saw what I’d not had time to see before: a large bloodstain on the bedding, where she had clearly sat before retreating under the bed. My clothes dried on the radiators in the other upstairs rooms, unvandalised. I set off down towards the river and walked a few miles through the countryside, not knowing what else to do. Late in the afternoon I received a call to say Roscoe had made it through the surgery and was just coming round from the anaesthetic. Now it was a matter of waiting to see if the operation had been a success.
There was one decisive thing I could do while I waited. If Roscoe was going to recover and return home, I wanted to ensure her life was as stress-free as possible when she did. After a few phone enquiries, I drove to Newton Abbot and borrowed a metal cat t
rap from a lady who worked for Cats Protection. A couple of days later, using some of the brand of cat food I think of as Posh But Stinky, I managed to lure a frantically meowing Uncle Fuckykins into this knee-high prison and transport him to the vets’. Up close he was even more impressive: two thirds tabby, one third tiger. I had never met a more solidly built cat. Upon seeing him, even Sarah, one of the receptionists at the vets’, who saw hundreds of cats over the course of the year, was visibly taken aback. In the examining room Fuckykins jumped on my lap and the nurse ran a scanner over him. No price flashed up for him as she did, but I sensed that, if it had, it would have been extortionate. The surprising news that came back from the scan was that his home was eight miles away, in the seaside town of Paignton.
‘He’s called Mittens,’ announced the nurse.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said.
‘Nope. Well, that was his original name, and what we have him down as. But he went to live with a neighbour, and she renamed him Mogs. He’s been missing since May. She’s had posters up all over the neighbourhood and had just about given up hope.’
Uncle Fuckmittens, as I had now already begun to think of him, was of course by no means unusual in being apparently quite young yet already having had several names. That happened a lot with cats, I found, even when the cat didn’t get passed between multiple humans. Cat names have a tendency to evolve like avant-garde jazz. It is unlikely that, by the time of its fifth birthday, the name by which a cat is most regularly known will have any resemblance to its original name. The proud white cat I lived with during my adolescence was called Monty, which begat Ponsenby, which begat the Ponce, which begat Pompous Cat, which begat the Pompidou Centre. Similarly, Roscoe, who was still only three, had become Rosc, then Roscins, then Ruskin, and had often recently been addressed as Anglia Ruskin College. I’m sure Fuckmittens would not have remained Uncle Fuckykins had I adopted him, and I had to admit, as I listened to his traction-engine purr and he padded my thighs, as if trying to extract seven months of missing love from them, I did briefly picture a scenario in which I had and fantasised about some of the new names that might emerge from such a union. It was pure fantasy now, though. He would be incarcerated here for the night before his original owner came to collect him, then, unless he regained his wanderlust, I would never see him again. Thoughtfully, Steph the nurse housed him on the opposite side of the building to Roscoe, who was in no state to be reunited with her former tormentor, even in a purely aural and olfactory fashion.
After I’d said bye to Fuckmittens, I was taken by Steph to say hello to Roscoe in the cage where she was recovering. I’d prepared myself to be shocked by her state, so my shock at seeing the mess her side and rear were in, no longer protected by all that fur, was a fortified kind of shock, but it was still shock. Steph told me the vets were happy with her recovery so far, and I might even be able to take her home in a couple of days. As if to confirm this, a druggy-eyed Roscoe staggered over to me and nutted my knuckle like a loving but essentially violent wino. Two days later, armed with a bag full of cooked chicken slices and a small hospital’s worth of medication, I transported her back home, the two drains the vet had placed in her side to take the fluids from her wound still present. I was glad and slightly amazed to have her back in the house, but something didn’t feel right. She still seemed like a very ill cat and overnight refused the food I put out for her, sitting plaintively inert beneath the chest of drawers in my bedroom. In the morning I took her back to the surgery, and another vet, Dermot, found that her temperature was very high and the infection had re-entered her abdomen. She would need a repeat operation, and it would be expensive, costing significantly more money than I had in my bank account. Was I sure I wanted to go ahead? Of course I was sure. I would find a way to cover the cost, no matter what it meant for my own future.
What do you do while you are waiting for a phone call to tell you whether an operation to save your cat’s life has been successful? I certainly wasn’t going to get any work done, so, as before, I walked. It was no sane weather to be out on Dartmoor, but going there felt like the right thing to do. I plotted a route hastily on an OS map still dog-eared and a little soggy from my last walk: six and a half miles, rising steeply from the flat land, past the appealingly named village of Owley, then around the back of the desolate expanse of Ugborough Beacon, returning over its peak. A short hike by my standards, but by no means an easy one.
I entered the edgelands of the moor via one of its most Gothic gateways, beneath the tall Victorian railway arches supporting the London-to-Plymouth line. By my reckoning, by the time I returned the surgery would be finished, and the vet would be due to call. Ahead of me the Beacon was hidden in plumes of occult-looking cloud. Gloopy churned mud slowed my progress, arable winter Devon encapsulated in each footstep. I looked forward to getting onto the high part of the moor, which though much wetter would have better drainage that would make the going easier underfoot.
My phone rang when I was barely halfway to the summit, before I reached the part of the moor where the signal provided by the network became merely a figment of a new planet’s imagination. Dermot the vet was on the other end of the line. He was part-way through surgery and wanted to tell me that the infection from the dog bite and the resulting internal damage was even worse than he’d suspected. He felt it best to warn me now, due to the risks involved and the even greater expense. I listened carefully, learning even more about the inside of Roscoe than I had already since last Monday, which was a lot. As I heard about all the damage done to my small sweet cat by the large jaws of a dog let off its lead by a thoughtless owner in a place where it wasn’t permitted to be, the rain rat-a-tatted more heavily on my anorak. The two largest segments of darkness in the sky looked like a pair of bullies edging in on what pathetic slither of daylight there was. I looked up towards the moor, two fat droplets of rain ran down my cheeks and I felt like I was in a film scene put together solely to labour the point of what a relentless, remorseless monster winter can be.
I am someone who sometimes struggles with the lack of light in winter, and the more rural you get, the more that lack of light can overwhelm the senses. For many people the tough time is January and February. I can see why: January can feel like fumbling about for comfort in a big unlit hall and feeling only bones, and February tends to come across as an unnecessary extra encore that winter does to please its hardcore fans. But for me it’s always December that’s been toughest: that sensation, growing more acute as the solstice approaches, of nature locking itself up, of each day being a narrowing wedge carved out of cold black slabs of nothing. This is why we invented Christmas, but Christmas has its limitations as an anti-depressant. I am fond enough of the day itself but am not a fan of forced jollity or environmentally harmful gluttony, which doesn’t make me especially well disposed to the build-up to it. Once New Year arrives my spirits begin to turn gradually in a better direction, all the way to April and May, by which point I’m so giddy in the sweet humming air that I want to climb every tree and kiss every bumblebee I lay eyes upon. I’ve been the same all my adult life, although it took me a while to properly recognise it. I was perhaps more aware than ever of the darkness approaching this year, more conscious of my need to look after myself at the end of a tough year. I’d not been doing too badly until Roscoe was attacked, but the incident spun and tumbled into my recent past and knocked loose a few other bits of pain that I’d tightened up. It is at times like this that you realise just how precarious you are in the depth of winter. What if several other awful incidents happened too? Who was to say they wouldn’t? How do people survive through that?
At the end of autumn when these dark wet days were first flexing their limbs I’d visited a pub on Dartmoor with a friend and, apropos of nothing, a man had inflicted upon us an offensive impromptu lecture about the UK’s current terrorist threat. We listened to his tiny misinformed viewpoint about the Muslim faith and what he repeatedly referred to as his ‘Christian Country’ and di
d our best to change the subject, realising that saying what we actually thought – that he was a dicksplash of medium-large proportions, for instance – would change nothing for the better. I wondered what had made the man obsess about Muslim terrorists on one of the highest parts of the South West Peninsula, surrounded almost entirely by sheep, ponies and moss. Was it those Muslim terrorists you often witnessed sitting about looking shifty in the Bronze Age hut circles at Grimspound, plotting the downfall of Western civilisation? Or perhaps it was the Muslim terrorists you constantly saw paddling down the River Dart these days, in their terrorist canoes, from the river’s hard-to-locate source at Cranmere Pool? It was clear that it was the man’s very insulation and separation from terrorist attacks that had made him so irrational and fearful. I could not relate specifically to this, but I could in the sole sense that I do often fear winter more irrationally when I’m slightly insulated from it. When I’m at home, protected from winter by a roof and central heating, it seems much more frightening, plays on my mind far more malevolently. This is part of why my method of conquering it is to face it head on. I walk through its gaping jaws, voluntarily, spontaneously, when I should be doing other stuff. When I do, the rain and wind somehow don’t seem as scary as they do when they’re hammering on my bedroom window at night.