‘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
