The cat was not one of the four who each sublet a room from me for a non-existent payment delivered on the first of every month but an enormous tabby stray who’d been hanging around in and near my garden for the last few months, spitting cusswords at my three male cats and periodically trying to mount the female one. Going on his tumble-dryer-soft fur and athletic good looks, I’d at first assumed that he was what those who know felines well tentatively call ‘owned’, but time had proved otherwise: none of my neighbours knew who he was and, as the weeks passed, his 3 a.m. meowing sessions outside my bedroom window had become more keening and forlorn. Despite a vertical white warpaint stripe on his nose he was almost approachable when I first met him, but, mistaking him for a spoilt thug, I’d chased him off a few times, waving the bill for the damage he’d caused to the nose of my own tabby, Ralph. Since then he’d become less sociable but no less ubiquitous.
You can live a relatively lavish life in summer and autumn in this somewhat utopian part of rural Devon if you’re a stray cat with a modicum of resourcefulness. After you’ve picked off one of the endless supply of unuspecting local rabbits you can wash its innards down with some fresh stream water then conk out for a few hours under a hibiscus while a person clad in sackcloth soothes you to sleep with their biweekly flute practice. But now it was early December. With the temperature dropping and the wind raging, I was glad my feline intruder had found a sheltered place to sleep among rusting golf clubs, old magazines and hardware.
Even at its worst, the wind in the South West never makes your eyes, cheeks and chin sting in that way a winter wind on Britain’s east coast will. That said, it had been blowing with the breath of a hundred-headed Celtic demon recently. Branches tapped furiously on my dark office window as I wrote, and the thick granite walls of my draughty single-glazed hilltop house seemed to be all that was stopping it from being whipped up from its foundations and blown over the valley towards Newton Abbot. In the midst of this cacophony, a small alien meow could have the effect of a tiny person sitting in your ear, playing one of history’s saddest melodies on the planet’s smallest harp.
On the morning that I opened my garage and discovered the stray cat – to whom I’d given the draft name of Uncle Fuckykins, because there was nobody around to stop me and, since he was unlikely to ever be mine, I probably wouldn’t be forced to live with the long-term ramifications – the wind was at its most heinous. It was the kind of undignifying wind that makes you hope that nobody you admire sees you while you are standing in it. Only a total idiot would spend any time in such a wind that wasn’t totally necessary. So, having left a bowl of food in the garage for Uncle Fuckykins, I got in the car, collected my friend’s dog and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-mile walk on a particularly exposed part of the moor. I’d read a bit about the section of the moor in question the night before in a nineteenth-century book. ‘This area is sometimes referred to as the Valley of the Thunderstorms,’ it announced. Brilliant! I thought. Let’s go.
I had first met my friend’s dog, who is called Billy but sometimes referred to as the Blackberry due to his resemblance to a blackberry, a couple of years earlier on the Internet, which in our amazing modern world is now often the way that dogless men looking to borrow dogs and dogs looking to be borrowed find it convenient to meet. This had been made possible by a site called BorrowMyDoggy. It had taken me a little while to be totally comfortable about admitting I had met my part-time dog on the Internet, but I was OK with it now, and so was Billy. Of course others might have a problem when they found out how we got together, but in the end it was their problem, not ours. Back during the previous decade I’d borrowed dogs from people I had met in real life. There was Nouster, a proud birthday-card Border collie who lived with my landlord and who I’d walk around the two broads near my house in Norfolk. Then there was Henry, my neighbour’s cocker spaniel, who liked to roll around in pheasant carcasses and steal chips. But that was a different era and a different universe. Since then the lives of humans and dogs had become more virtual, and different ways to meet dogs had become more acceptable. Every Tuesday I picked Billy up from his owner Susie’s eighteenth-century cottage on the edge of the moor. Turning the back-door handle of the cottage was like a trigger that operated an invisible piece of elastic connected to Billy, who would twang towards me from wherever he was in the building, making a series of noises that shouldn’t by rights emerge from any animal not made out of rubber by a large
