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 trap 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
