21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Some might argue that today I had chosen to look winter a little too squarely in the face. Leaving farmland behind and approaching the Beacon, what I saw ahead of me was a dreary, drenched otherwordly landscape of gradually fading visibility. This was by no means the highest, most remote bit of Dartmoor, but when hard-bitten veterans of the national park told me that there was a certain kind of weather you shouldn’t be out on your own up here in without an experienced companion and a compass, the scene ahead of me was pretty much what they were talking about. I knew that visibility would only reduce as I climbed, and the already somewhat nebulous paths would become less defined still. You couldn’t even call the moisture whipping diagonal lines across my face rain any more; I was walking through the middle of that occult cloud I’d seen earlier. It turned out it was even more occult when you were inside it. In three miles I had not yet seen another human, but ahead of me I spotted two black dogs near a dead tree. Before I got closer and made them out for what they actually were – sheep – my heart skipped a beat; not because I believed they were the Devil’s wisht hounds of Dartmoor legend, but because since the attack on Roscoe the sight of any dog had triggered a new unease in me. I could easily have brought Billy out with me today but had chosen not to. With every step of the way I felt more helpless, more angry towards the owner of the dog who’d mauled Roscoe, whose guilt – unless his conscience got the better of him – I would never be able to prove. I hated to think of Roscoe alone, in pain, not knowing why she was where she was. As I pressed on through the mist I was gripped by the conviction that I was walking purely for her. Yes, it might be safer for me to turn back in view of the weather, but this was not about me.

  TV’s ALF

  With each step the cloud around me was getting thicker. Another even more indomitable wisht hound moved across the path ahead of me: a horse this time. That’s if it was still the path? At this stage I had only the trickle of water running down it as a guide. I was aiming for Squirrel Cross, surely one of the most sarcastic names on the moor, since there could be few less squirrely places in rural Britain than this. I gave thanks for the compass my parents had bought me last Christmas to aid my moorland walks. That brilliant useful compass, sitting back on my desk at home. The cross loomed out of the gloom like an alien totem: half a cross, really, at best, with a worn stone face that reminded me partly of Zardoz, partly, incongruously, of TV’s ALF. Four paths diverged from the cross and I took the first left-hand one, at a slight diagonal. After less than a minute the path vanished. For the next mile I used some kind of path instinct that’s probably very primal but also tied to a trust that had perhaps grown out of seven years of completing at least one rural walk per week. I could not have definitively said what I was on was ‘footpath’, only said that what surrounded it was fairly definitively ‘not footpath’. Prehistoric bird shapes swooped in the gloom ahead and a medium gale shrieked its character assassination in my ear.

  I’d seen the Beacon scowling at me so many times, dominating the landscape and the A38 between South Brent and Ivybridge, but I’d never imagined it could be this otherworldly and ominous on top, like that one planet people talk about in a sci-fi film which nobody actually goes to because it’s nearly devoid of life. The path began to go downhill, a sign that I would be out of here soon. I was surprised to feel a marginal tickle of relief. Earlier I’d had the passing, accepting thought that it wouldn’t be such a bad place to die, Ugborough Beacon. But in this lower-altitude spot the mist cleared and the turf around me widened out into what looked oddly like a golf fairway. This was because what I was on was a golf fairway. I knew the golf course. I planned to play it in a couple of months, in another bout of self-punishment. I was almost back. I still had not seen another human.

  I drove home, opened my front door, instantly peeled off most of my sodden clothes. Other clothes – clean, warm – hung on radiators, still unvandalised. The phone rang. It was Dermot. Roscoe had woken up from her anaesthetic. He’d done his best for her and she seemed reasonably bright, but there was a long way to go and only the coming days, again, would reveal if the operation had truly been a success. I had been on walks of at least four miles every day since her accident. I remembered the toothache and backache I’d been suffering from for the last fortnight – mysteriously absent for just a few hours but now back with interest. I ran a hot bath, thinking that it was time to rest for a day or two, and also of all the work I had been postponing.

  Early the next morning though I set off again, through long narrow crevices in the hills a few miles from my house: red earth paths and water lanes where you could be quiet and alone. Places where silence has a different kind of depth. I knew where I was going, which was to the village of Stoke Gabriel, but it was only when I got to the churchyard in the centre of the village that I realised why I had truly gone there.

  Beside the lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard stands a yew tree estimated to be a thousand years old. Its gnarly limbs, some of them held up by wooden struts, twist down around and on top of gravestones, attempting to re-root, as yews tend to, given enough time. In the places where the exterior bark has flaked off, the underlayer is the colour of dried blood. It’s a tree of glorious, wise chaos, associated, like all yews, in folklore with everlasting life or at least longevity. I had a couple of much much younger yews in my garden beneath which my oldest cat, The Bear, loved to sleep. The Bear was approaching twenty-one now and almost entirely deaf. I’d become properly aware of the severity of his impaired hearing the previous August when I was sorting myself some cheese on toast and set my kitchen smoke alarm off, causing the other three cats to scatter but The Bear to merely sit at my feet, looking up at me in a way that seemed to say, ‘Hello! Erm, did someone call?’ I’d felt he was slowing down before my move to Devon, becoming more of an indoor cat, but since being here he’d loved to be outdoors again, and our two years here so far had seemed like a miraculous extension of his long life, during which rain, clear air and sun appeared to be performing a natural spa treatment on his brittle old body. Beneath the yew, he fell into inordinately deep sleeps and woke from them wide-eyed, as if freshly amazed at the grass and trees and hilltop air. I sometimes told myself the yews had a hand in the fact that he was still with me. They’d been associated with all sorts of magic in the past after all, some of it unexplained, some of it debunked. Until the 1800s their branches were laid in coffins and graves for good luck. In the churchyard at Painswick in Gloucestershire during the first half of the twentieth century nobody could understand why there were always ninety-nine small, clipped yews, and any time a hundredth was planted, it would die, until in the 1960s it was revealed that a local scientist was sneaking into the graveyard and repeatedly poisioning the hundredth yew after it was planted. Fanciful non-pragmatic people like me like to think that the reasons yews are often found in churchyards might relate to some kind of earlier pagan, Druidic activity, but there is no historical evidence to substantiate this. Of course the contradiction of yews is that their sap is extremely poisonous; they are killers who double as dark green saints of life.

  Local legend states that if you walk backwards around the yew in Stoke Gabriel churchyard seven times without stumbling ‘one true wish will come to thee’. It’s the kind of thing I might not have done alone when I was younger, for fear of looking silly in front of a potential passing stranger, but I cared less about looking silly these days, and about who saw me doing it. With the ground bumpy and the late-afternoon, end-of-year light gloopy, the avoiding-the-stumbling bit was surprisingly tricky – especially if, like me, you’d swiftly downed a pint of ale immediately beforehand, at the Church House Inn next door, which was built in 1183, and in whose walls during renovations a few years ago a three-century-old mummified cat was discovered. After I’d completed the seven circuits I decided not to speak or think my wish, being of the opinion that the yew tree, or its supernatural guardian, would be wise and intuitive enough to know, and would feel patronised by having it spelled
out in neon. I walked the seven miles home frontway around, aching, with night chasing me all the way. I called Dermot the vet again when I arrived. Roscoe was eating well, her temperature down a little. She was still very sore and weak, but with luck she might be home by Christmas, which was now just six days away.

  In a way a vet giving you an estimate on rebuilding part of your cat is a little bit like a builder giving you a quote on renovating your house. A vet can have a good look around your cat, let you know a rough idea of how much your cat might cost to repair, but the vet can never be definite and can’t really predict how costs might escalate when the structural composition of your cat is properly investigated. Roscoe’s intestines had already been threaded back inside her body and large amounts of muscle tissue cut away. In the second operation more muscle tissue still was cut away. ‘There isn’t a lot left to work with if we have to operate again,’ Dermot’s colleague Trevor admitted to me. I had been hesitant about saying anything about Roscoe on the Internet, but I did decide to write something, as she had been a big part of my last two books, and I was aware that lots of my readers felt like they knew her and would want to know how she was faring. Soon after I uploaded my piece I received a message from a stranger who told me that, if Roscoe was to recover, she should on no account be permitted to go outside again. I wondered if the stranger had a rabbit who had got ill from eating cheese and whether I should write to the stranger, at her postal address in the middle of America, with a written warning that I would not allow her rabbit to eat cheese again. But at the same time a miraculous gesture of love occurred: an example of the way the Internet can unnerve you by being dark and weird then instantly show the astonishing kindness of people. Unprompted, several of my readers clubbed together to create a fund for Roscoe’s surgery. More readers of the two books featuring Roscoe found out about it and the fund grew. Without it the following few months would undoubtedly have been very difficult for me to survive financially.

  As a teenager, the people I most admired were first professional sportsmen, then, as I hit my twenties, they were replaced by musicians and comedians and novelists. Nowadays, the people I most admire tend to work in the medical professions, often for pitifully little money. This feeling was reinforced following the attack on Roscoe. I was aware not all veterinary clinics were as conscientious and kind as my local one and felt blessed to live near it. Another good thing about the clinic was that it was based in the same building as a local brewery, which had a pop-up bar. I did not quite turn to drink during my visits to check on my sick cat, but it was comforting to know the option was available close at hand.

  In the fortnight that Roscoe spent in this warm and caring cat hospital the vets and nurses got to know her stubborn yet affectionate character, and became a little more attached to her than they did to the cats who passed through the place more briefly. They became familiar with her passionate headbutts and the special low rumble she made from her nose when she was being especially stubborn. Steph the nurse admitted that, after their works Christmas drinks get-together on the 22nd, a group of the surgery’s employees had sneaked off back to the surgery purely to say hello to Roscoe. She had always been by far the most independent of my cats, and I had often taken the view that she was ‘usually off happily doing her own thing’, but I was surprised how keenly I felt her absence in the house: the little spaces she occupied so resolutely. The way, despite being barely more than half his size, she would smack Shipley in the face with a karate paw when he stepped out of line, and quite often when he didn’t. Her low-key love affair with The Bear, which was sometimes expressed on her part by sleeping on his back. Her tendency to walk on her hind legs when she was particularly elated or hungry and wave her paws around as if celebrating a strike in a tiny cat bowling alley. Her unfathomable obsession with damp towels. Her habit of burrowing into my side as I slept, then, when I moved away to try to get more comfortable, doggedly pursuing me to the other side of the bed and burrowing into my side even more forcefully – once even to the extent that I fell off the mattress. I missed all this keenly and clung to the hope offered by her headbutts when I visited her: the hope that it would all happen again.

  37 Boobs

  On Christmas Eve Dermot the vet called and said Roscoe could come home for a trial period. I had not expected such a privilege yet. Dermot said that although the infection seemed to be clear and the surgical drains in Roscoe’s skin had now been removed, there had been a major breakdown of tissue around one of her bigger wounds. I was warned by both him and the nurse who handed Roscoe over that with the stitches out the wound looked ‘very gory and gruesome’, but they assured me they were happy with the way it was healing. It was not until I got home with Roscoe that I properly had the chance to inspect it, and I was instantly convinced that she had sustained an extra, life-threatening injury in the ten minutes we’d been in the car. It was so much worse than I’d expected: a deep, gouging hole into her interior. I was supposed to rub manuka honey and gel into this hole several times a day. Surely, if I did, I would injure her further? On Boxing Day, when I took Roscoe back to see Trevor, he said he was pleased with the way she was healing. She was healing? The last time I saw something like this, I had been watching a Wes Craven film.

  Here, then, was my festive period, 2015: finding stealthy ways to con Roscoe into taking four antibiotics a day, squirting a carefully measured quantity of painkiller over her meals, rubbing ointment into her wounds, getting out – but not for very long – for walks, sitting in her room (which had previously been my office) and watching her wobble over to me – a little more steadily each day – look into my eyes and let out a piercing, bargaining meow. Taking pity on her, I let her sleep on my bed, even though the wound left unsightly stains on the duvet cover. I watched as she stretched herself along the bottom of the radiator and pressed the wound against it, and I worried she would glue herself to it with her own blood. When she moved, the wound made a wet, unpleasant noise. As if in sympathy, I burned myself, sustaining a painful wound of my own – though no doubt not half as painful as Roscoe’s – and got ill in a couple of other minor ways. This wasn’t ideal, but at least it imbued our time of incarceration together with an extra feeling of solidarity. We went through another honeymoon period: she looked at me in a different way to how she had done before her accident, chatted to me more, appeared to want me for more than my cooked chicken slices and damp towels.

  She returned to the vet’s, again, three more times, and they told me the wound had shrunk, but I could not quite convince myself it was true. As other cats in the waiting room let out their eclectic meows – stuttering meows, guttural meows, yob meows, spoilt-boarding-school meows, meows that sounded like Morrissey might, if Morrissey meowed – Roscoe remained silent and newly philosophical. Shush your whining, her cartoon button eyes, viewed from between the bars of her wicker prison, seemed to say. You don’t know what hardship is. I freakin’ live here. On her final visit she was shown off by Dermot to the whole team, like a rosette that, while technically only attached to one individual, was ultimately for everyone. By this point she had already been showing a new brightness: tumbling across the living-room floor after a catnip mouse, dancing out of my office on her hind legs when I opened the door in the morning, ready to greet the day head on. But it was only a few days after she’d been signed off by Dermot for the final time, antibiotic-free, that I looked at the main wound and let myself believe how much it had healed. I had permitted myself to believe before, when I thought Roscoe’s first operation had been a success, then been crushed by the news of reinfection, so I’d wanted to keep my psychological guard double-solid. Now, though, the evidence was incontrovertible: the wound had scabbed over. Her skin had done the last part of this more or less all on its own. Isn’t skin amazing? I kept thinking. The fur on her bad side would not grow back properly until the spring. For now it was a patchwork of bare skin, stubble, black tufts and scars which, viewed from a distance, gave her an odd look: part Holstein, pa
rt cat. But Roscoe had never been vain; she’d always been far too focused on her career.

  That nine lives folklore about cats that everyone has heard about doesn’t come from nowhere, but I did wonder if a particular single-minded feistiness in Roscoe had been responsible for her recovery. Our honeymoon period of closeness could not last. A new all-indoor Roscoe was not the future. She was a free-spirited cat who thrived on fresh air, grass, hedgerows, small rodents and giving Shipley comprehensive and regular arse-kickings. Roscoe – steel-willed inside and favouring laconic dialogue – was the chalk to Shipley’s cheese. A soft-hearted potty mouth from kittenhood, he had got more profane and chatty with age, to the extent that anyone who knew him soon got into the habit of transposing his yob meows into human swearwords. He’d experienced an easy ride recently, not suffering any repercussions for his cussing sessions, but now, back in the garden, back on business and entirely unselfconscious about her new undercut hairstyle, Roscoe zoned in on him and began to make up for lost time.