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, part 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.
‘Lick my bellstick!’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, punching him in the face.
‘Sweaty furbollocks!’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, chasing him across the garden until he cowered under a salix bush.
‘I kissed a squirrel while it was pissing and I liked it,’ said Shipley.
‘Mewew,’ said Roscoe, knocking him sideways into one of the yew trees, in the process waking The Bear, who as always looked startled to still be alive.
Shipley was easily the most doglike of the four cats: he was yappy,
