21st-Century Yokel

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