Flupocalypse

I have a sore throat and I'm short of breath for a couple of days, following which I spend a couple of weeks coughing up dockyard oysters. My wife gets it too, about a day behind me, and then the kid. I've noticed something or other called coronavirus bubbling away at the corners of the media but I haven't been paying it much attention.

Two weeks later, it's the only show in town. Social media is divided into panic stricken statistics about how this is the big one and we're all going to die; calmer statistics about how it's serious but it's simply that we need to be careful and no, we aren't all going to die; and then - riding in on the crest of a righteous wave surfed by those who just need to set the rest of us straight - crazed statistics about how it's true that we won't all die, but the hospitals will be full of corpses so actually we are definitely really going to die and should upscale our panic levels accordingly, but don't panic because that will make it worse, so actually do panic, but don't.

I don't panic. I just find it a bit depressing - apart from all sporting events being cancelled, which is quite cheering.

I phone my dad because I'm flying back to England to visit in April, and I really should have picked a better time to call. As usual, he's turned into a one man Daily Express opinion column. I need to cancel my flight because the airport will be full of dirty foreigners coughing and spluttering, and anyway, Donald Trump was on the telly and he said there won't be any flights to England because everything has been cancelled.

'He didn't say that,' I suggest.

'Yes, he did.'

'No, he didn't. He specified flights to mainland Europe, not flights to the United Kingdom.'

'No. He was on the telly and he said flights to the United Kingdom were suspended.'

'No. That wasn't what he said.'

'Yes, it was.'

My dad is not having anyone take his righteous terror away from him. I probably should have said something like, 'oh - so you've rejoined Europe, have you?' but you only ever think of these things afterwards. I try to explain how I'm kind of tired of scare stories, recalling him having warned me about all those Mexicans flooding north across the border, heading directly for my wife's underwear whilst drooling and making lustful grappling gestures with their hands; but it's difficult to convey my disappointment without actually calling him a twat, which I would prefer to avoid doing; and so frustration forces my voice to an incoherent upper register rant. Strangely, I find it reminds me of when my parents were still married, and I sound like my mother used to sound when arguing with him, usually with some justification as I recall.

I've had a moderately depressing couple of months in some respects, and it would be nice to at least be able to mention how I'm still a little devastated by the loss of Fluffy, our cat, but as ever, conversation with my father is on his terms, and will be about what he read in the newspaper this week, or what he saw on the television. If there's nothing proposed as the apocalypse in the newspapers this week, he'll simply give me a minute by minute account of a recently viewed episode of the Hairy Bikers. They visited Texas on one of their shows, and my dad spent the call describing the sort of thing that people who live in Texas like to eat.

I should have seen it, he suggested.

The call ends, and I wonder about cancelling my flight but assume it's most likely to be cancelled for me, or at least rescheduled. If I do fly in April, maybe I'll just see my mother and tell my dad it was cancelled.

Life continues, except the local supermarket runs out of bog roll, but our household collectively produces only an ordinary quantity of poo so it's difficult to regard our having only six rolls left as a problem. I see a few people wearing face masks, including one woman whose entire head is bandaged beneath her hat, complete with sunglasses in the style of the invisible man. I wash my hands and try not to touch my face, which is actually fairly easy. I think my capacity to panic has been broken at least since Brexit, so what will be will be.

Who fucking knows?

Big School

My final year of junior school ran from September 1976 through to the summer of 1977, during which I assume I must have been the oldest kid in the whole place. There were only ten children in my year, including myself, and my birthday was in September. Having taken up half of my entire life by that point, it felt as though junior school had lasted forever, and it felt like it had been a long, hard journey getting to the age of eleven; but it had been worth it, now that my bunch were Lords of the playground. We'd done the time. We'd put in the hours. We had the experience. The only cloud on our horizon was big school. Big school would send us all back to square one, reducing us to the smallest fish in a bigger, more violent pond.

Actually, it wasn't the only cloud. There was also the end of the world to consider, or to do one's best to avoid considering. Old Mother Shipton had predicted that it would come in 1980, just three years hence. Paul Moorman told me this and I absolutely believed him, having heard of Old Mother Shipton and her predictions. She had been a sixteenth century witch who had foreseen all sorts of stuff according to something or other which had been on the telly. Our school was Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, Warwickshire, at the edge of the Cotswolds, a locale with a rich history of witchcraft and the like, and none of us were entirely sure of that epoch having fully passed. There had been a witchcraft related murder in the fifties over in Quinton, and I never quite summoned the courage to climb Meon Hill, which is where it had happened. It was said that one could only cross Meon Hill from east to west, or possibly west to east. If you attempted it the wrong way around, whichever way that was, you just wouldn't be able to do it, or you would die, or you would meet the devil. All of that stuff was still pretty close to the surface, so I spent the last three years of the seventies really, really wishing that Paul had never told me about Old Mother Shipton.

I tried to dispel his sponsorship of the prophecy by inventing a load of other events she'd predicted which hadn't happened, predictions which Paul could hardly refute, not having heard of them.

'What about the flying saucer invasion that she predicted would happen in 1975?' I scoffed, but my laughter rang hollow. I was fooling no-one but myself.

Still, a year - September to July or thereabouts - was one hell of a long time, so there didn't seem much point in worrying about the end of our era. My friend Matthew had gone to the big school in the nearby town of Shipston, and Mark McFarland had gone to the one in Stratford-upon-Avon. I spoke to Matthew and he seemed to be getting on okay, although it nevertheless sounded terrifying to me. There were hard kids at Shipston High School, like you saw on the news. They got into fights. Shipston was a town, and towns had gangs. Worse still, Old Mother Shipton was buried under the drinking trough at the end of Telegraph Street, although I much later discovered that not only was this untrue but that she had lived in Yorkshire and had no actual association with Shipston aside from a similar name.

We went swimming at the big school every Wednesday morning, all piling onto a coach which took us the three and a half miles to Shipston. I was crap at swimming, but eventually mastered a version of the breast stroke which was mostly just floating, for which I was duly awarded a swimming certificate dated to the 9th of March, 1977. I didn't actually see any fighting in the vicinity of the swimming pool, so maybe it was going to be okay.

We had an American boy in our class during that final year, Jamie Keating. He had an older brother, Sean, and an American father who lived in the village for no reason I was able to discern. More recently I learned that Jamie and Sean's father was Charles Keating, an English rather than American actor who had moved back, having grown up on the other side of the Atlantic, and who presumably chose Ilmington because it was handy for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Stranger still, when I moved to America I discovered that he was fairly well known over here, and had played my wife's favourite character in a long-running soap opera called Another World.

I didn't know Sean or Jamie too well, but recall Sean as being pleasant, funny and laid back. This was in contrast to Jamie who was kind of lively, as I suppose younger brothers tend to be. He always seemed to be getting into confrontational situations with other kids who took exception to his being American, or with one other kid who was a bit of an all round pain in the arse, If I'm to be honest. The confrontations mostly took the form of red-faced yelling with heavy emphasis on the terms yank and limey as pejoratives. I don't think anyone really won, and Sean seemed thankfully too elevated to involve himself with such foolishness.

I gave Jamie a wide berth, mainly because I was a bit withdrawn and he was fairly loud, or so it seemed to me. The only conversation I recall having with him was on the way back from a book fair at the big school. We were back on the coach and somehow ended up sitting together.

'Did you see the life-sized Doctor Who cut-out?' he asked me.

'No,' I said bewildered, because I definitely would have noticed something like that.

'Oh man,' he said, wide-eyed. 'I can't believe you didn't see it.'

'Where was it? I was only in the big hall.'

'Yeah, that's where it was. There was a competition too.'

'A competition?'

'Yeah, if you won you could be in Doctor Who. I can't believe you missed out.'

He invented a whole load of other non-existent Doctor Who things which I really should have seen. He'd really honed in on my weakness and kept on pushing that button all the way back to Ilmington. I knew that his testimony couldn't be true, but at the same time I understood that he wouldn't tell a lie or make something up, so whatever he'd seen must have inhabited some sort of potential reality, perhaps the same one in which Dan Dare had lived as an actual historical figure, possibly. I was trying to get my head around it but not doing very well.

On the other hand, we'd been right inside the school and still hadn't seen any shootings or stabbings or however it usually went down.

I took the eleven plus, failed, and didn't get to go to Stratford-upon-Avon like Mark McFarland. Only after taking the test did I understand that this had apparently been desirable. I was therefore destined to attend big school in Shipston with all the other farmhands and labourers of tomorrow, but Matthew insisted that it would probably be okay, and that he himself hadn't been in a single fight that whole year. I wasn't reassured because Matthew was more worldly than me, and knew, by way of example, where his older brother kept his stash of bathroom magazines. Also I suspected I was probably a bit more punchable and would have to keep my head down. Nevertheless I tried to keep myself from worrying over what was still an unknown.

My final idyllic year at Ilmington came to an end, opening onto a long hot summer of garish pop music and mucking about on bikes. It was the last good thing for a while.

On the other hand, it turned out that Old Mother Shipton had got her dates wrong, so swings and roundabouts...

Leave It to Shiva

One day, Shiva came in from the yard. He ran to his mother and said, 'Gee, Mom. I sure am hungry.'

'Why, honey, I have a sandwich for you right here,' Ambikā replied, and she reached out, but found that in her hand there was not a sandwich, but a crescent-shaped sword.

'Goodness,' she exclaimed to herself, 'the sandwich must then be in my other hand.' So she reached out, but found that in her other hand there was not a sandwich, but a trident.

'Goodness,' she exclaimed to herself a second time, 'the sandwich must then be in my other hand.' So she reached out, but found that in her other hand there was not a sandwich, but a severed head.

'Goodness,' she exclaimed to herself a third time, 'the sandwich must then be in my other hand.' So she reached out, but found that in her other hand there was not a sandwich, but a cup fashioned from the skull of an enemy from which blood did spill upon the kitchen floor.

'I'm hungry, Mom,' said Shiva sadly.

'What seems to be the trouble?' smiled Lord Vishnu as he entered, setting his golf clubs next to the back door.

'Oh dear,' said his wife. 'Apasmara the dwarf who causes forgetfulness has given me to mislay the sandwich I made for Shiva.'

'I'm hungry, Pop,' said Shiva sadly, but the Lord Vishnu had now noticed the blood which had spilled upon the otherwise clean kitchen floor from the cup held in his wife's fourth hand.

'Say honey, don't you think you'd better clean that up before one of us slips and has an accident?'

'I'm hungry!' Shiva cried and ran out of the door.

'You had better go and talk to him,' said Ambikā as she went to the closet for her mop and bucket.

Lord Vishnu did then go outside, but he could not see his son in any place. Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out his pipe and lit it. 'Now where did that little scamp get to?' he said out loud to himself.

Just then he noticed the Kali Yuga transpiring just on the other side of his beloved picket fence. Mr. Johnson's house was all gone, and in its place he saw spiritual bankruptcy, mindless hedonism, breakdown of all social structure, greed and materialism, unrestricted egotism, afflictions and maladies of mind and body.

'Well dash it all,' he exclaimed, immediately understanding that Shiva had been up to his Destroying antics yet again. 'Shiva!' he called.

'Yes, Pop?' said the boy, a little breathless as he appeared before Lord Vishnu.

'Oh Shiva,' said Lord Vishnu, shaking his head. 'Have you been eating apples from Mr. Johnson's tree once again?'

'No sir,' said Shiva, clearly uncomfortable.

'Mr. Johnson's yard just happens to have succumbed to Kali Yuga, I suppose,' sighed the Lord Vishnu, gazing thoughtfully over to where the tree would have been were it not for the sudden occurence of spiritual bankruptcy. 'How very convenient, I don't think!'

'I guess,' said Shiva, not quite understanding.

'Let me see your hands,' said Lord Vishnu.

'I didn't take any apples, honest injun!' said Shiva, showing his hands, and that they were both empty.

'Now the other six,' said Lord Vishnu with a frown.

Much later, both Ambikā and the Lord Vishnu had a talk with Shiva, specifically a laboured sermon about not stealing apples just because you're hungry and somehow unable to wait five fucking seconds for your mother to make you another sandwich. It seemed to go on forever, but there was a joke at the end. Unfortunately it wasn't a very good joke, but everyone laughed anyway.

Farewell to Fluffy

Back in 2010, my wife had a miscarriage. The child would have been our daughter and she would have been nine by now, had she lived. The event was more upsetting than can be quantified by words, and one of the ways by which my wife attempted to bring something positive back into her life was by getting a kitten. She already had a female cat called Gus, and took on a small feral kitten found by someone on the internet and who clearly needed a home. He was fluffy and loud. By the time he was grown it became clear that he had some Maine Coon in him, as distinguished by his size, and his big fluffy paws with fur growing from between his toes.

He still seemed a little bit wild and it took him some time to get used to me when I showed up. He wasn't like other cats. He remained wary of people and disinclined to displays of affection towards anyone he didn't know; but as those first weeks passed, we became friends.

Reductionist Cromwellian types will dispute that it is possible to be friends with a member of a different species, but that's their tough shit. Fluffy and I may never have discussed our favourite science-fiction authors, for example, but we nevertheless communicated within certain limits and he evidently came to trust me; and the trust of an animal is not something to be taken lightly. During my first decade in Texas, I probably spent more time in the company of Fluffy than I did with any other person, possibly including even my wife; and for what it may be worth, I don't think he was keen on Olaf Stapledon.

Fluffy was officially named Scarface by my stepson, who had been learning about a Native American culture hero of the same name at school. By peculiar coincidence, this was as I was still living in England, and contemporary to writing my novel, Against Nature, which featured a talking dog also named Scarface. The dog belongs to a character named Todd, who argues with his mother because she insists that Scarface is a terrible name for a dog. I maintain that this likewise applies to cats, so it was a relief that Scarface had picked up the boldly descriptive nickname of Fluffy by the time they stamped my card and let me into the country.

As we began to accumulate cats, Fluffy was the one of whom we all remained a little wary. He could be friendly, but he was big, strong, and it was a nightmare getting him into a cat carrier to take him on the occasional trip to the vet. Sometimes he braced himself against the door of the cat carrier as we tried to get him inside, and it would be like wrestling a fully grown man. Initially we tried to keep him away from any new kittens who turned up, as they did from time to time, fearing he'd send them flying with one disgruntled bat of his mighty paw, but as time passed we realised he actually didn't mind kittens, ignoring them just as he more or less ignored the other cats. This was fortunate, because they were as one fascinated by his huge Fluffy tail which flicked this way and that, regardless of whether the cat at the other end was actually awake, yielding running jokes about the tail being its own autonomous entity, and that playing with Fluffy's tail was a traditional part of a kitten's upbringing. They would watch the tail, pounce upon it, roll around with it clutched between their paws as Fluffy let out a loud meow of protest, but would never retaliate, or even take his business elsewhere. We couldn't decide whether he enjoyed the attention or was simply unable to work out what was going on.

Bess and myself had different views as to the extent of Fluffy's intelligence, and the debate began when we noticed his apparent inability to negotiate a door left only part of the way open. Cat's whiskers are supposedly evolved so as to allow the feline in question to make an informed decision as to whether he or she will be able to effect passage through whatever he or she has just poked his or her head into, and we've seen this demonstrated by a few of ours. Most of them learn to push the door open, and Jello has even worked out how to bash open a properly closed door like a small orange DEA officer. Fluffy, on the other hand, would simply sit in front of a partially open door, even with a gap of four or five inches, and stare at it. Bess's theory was that he lacked the intelligence to simply walk though, being unable to recall previous occasions of having done so without anything disastrous happening on the far side, a failing for which he compensated with his beautiful, regal appearance. My theory was that he understood the mechanics of opening a door under his own steam very well, but his regality was such that he simply believed it to be beneath him, and that opening the door all the way was our job.

In case it isn't obvious from the photographs, he really was regal, and we occasionally referred to him as our mini-lion. Excepting visits to the vet or the occasion of my cooking anything involving bacon, he spent most of his time sat around looking beautiful with what appeared to be a gentle smile on his face. In his more overtly affectionate moments he'd cuddle up with his forehead pressed against my arm, or present himself for grooming, which my wife performed with a brush under his chin and around what was, I suppose, his mane; and he clearly loved such attention.

He never fully mastered the litter tray, as did our other cats, and was occasionally prone to marking his territory, which was a pain in the arse; the former we assume may have been down to his being slightly too big to fit in the litter tray, with the latter usually committed only in protest, and once we'd worked out what was pissing him off, he generally behaved. On one unfortunate occasion he rendered my copy of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men unreadable by using it as a urinal for a good month or so before I discovered what had been going on, but I probably shouldn't have left the book where I'd left it, and it was difficult to stay mad at such an otherwise gentle, good natured cat.

Last June, or possibly July, we noticed he'd taken to peeing on the floor, and that there was blood in his urine. We took him to the vet who told us that a growth in his bladder was almost certainly cancer. We had the option of treatment we couldn't really afford, which wasn't guaranteed to extend his life by much, and which would probably be miserable for him; so we opted to do nothing, instead concluding that we'd simply have to see what happened, and if at any point he was in pain, we'd have him put down. He was ten, not so old as we'd hoped he would live to be, but he'd had a good life and was loved.

The next eight months were more or less business as usual. The blood no longer turned up in his urine, and although he clearly began to have some difficulty with peeing, he was otherwise happy until the final week or so. He stopped eating and drinking and was unsteady on his legs. He was fine sitting on the sofa as usual, but everything else had become difficult and we knew it was time. We weren't going to subject him to the cat carrier at this point, so I wrapped him in a towel and we took him to the vet. I'm still too upset to go into the details, but the ones which matter are that he died in my arms, without pain, and he knew that he was loved.

We buried him in the garden, and bought a plant called a lion's tail for the spot, which seemed appropriate. Some days I talk to him as I water the plant, telling him that I love him and miss him, and I don't care how that sounds. Three people have died on me in the last month, but this hurt a lot more than the three of them added together, and it continues to hurt. He was a constant presence in my life since I arrived in America, and sat at the heart of our household. He was like my son, or the child we didn't have. He was the best cat in the whole world.