Brad and Tabitha

Every Tuesday evening we feed feral cat colonies in our part of San Antonio. It's a voluntary thing on behalf of our local Feral Cat Coalition, which is an official body recognised by the city. It has been established that it's better to stabilise feral cat colonies than to just round them up and gas them, as certain joyless cunts seem to think would be preferable. Stable colonies are easier to neuter and prevent incursion by wilder, un-neutered cats. Our local colonies are mostly tended by Susan and Randy, who do a lot for the local feral cats and deserve at least one night off a week, so that's where we come in.

We have seven colonies we visit, leaving food and water at each. It takes about half an hour at most. There's a colony on our route at an apartment complex which we don't touch because a local cat-hating nutcase has occasionally threatened Randy and Susan with a firearm. They didn't feel comfortable about asking us to cover that spot.

Nevertheless, we've had a similar flare up elsewhere, albeit one without any firearms. The colony is usually referred to as the double gates. It's waste ground behind a chain link fence with locked gates. The owner let us have a key so we could get in and feed the cats - one of the larger colonies, ten cats or maybe more. Unfortunately the land has been sold, so now we have to feed the cats on the verge in front of the fence because no-one seems to know what the new owner is doing; but it's a quiet street so it isn't a problem, or it wasn't.

We park on the verge and get out. Bess has milk containers filled with water. I have a bucket of dry cat food and a scoop. We stumble into the bushes to find the usual spot as black cats emerge from all around. We stumble because it's seven in the evening in November and is dark, and America doesn't seem to have gone for street lighting with quite the same enthusiasm as my country of origin.

'You shun't be feeding those cats,' we hear yelled from a house across the road, and yelled loud because he wants us to hear. He sounds drunk. 'Y'all are idiots.'

Bess and I are both shocked. We didn't expect this. I experience a sudden adrenaline rush, getting ready for a fight. 'Oh fuck off,' I call back, because it's cold, dark, and I'm not shouting the entire first paragraph across a street at someone I don't know.

'Y'all are encouraging wild animals and vermin,' he bellows with more feeling. I guess he didn't expect to be told to fuck off. Over the months, we've worked out how much food to dish out so that the cats get fed without leaving any surplus, but it hardly seems worth arguing the point.

Now his wife joins in. 'Y'all should be getting them neutered not feeding them. Y'alls are idiots!'

I can see where the house is but I'm concentrating on dishing out the food and getting out of there. Bess later tells me the two of them are hanging out of a window as they shout at us.

'We do get them neutered!' I call back.

We don't personally, but Randy and Susan handle that side of things fairly regularly. The problem at the moment is the coronavirus outbreak has limited the availability of spaces at animal clinics for those participating in the trap-neuter-return program. Anyway, the point is that the cats are neutered, even if it's not all of them or straight away.

'We do get them neutered!' I called back, in case you had forgotten.

'No y'alls don't!' bellows the male voice. It's hardly what you'd call a coherent refutation.

'Okay,' I say.

Stupidity makes me angry, because there's been too much of it on display this year, and often somehow presented as a mark of character. I shout back. My voice probably wavers and cracks but I'm past caring. 'We feed the cats. We trap then when we're able. We neuter them but it doesn't happen all at once,' I yell, or something to that effect, then add, 'it's not that fucking hard to understand, you stupid wanker.'

This is how I remember the exchange, but the moment was heated. In any case, by this point we're done. We get back into the car and head for the next colony. Later we pass the house and take their license plate. Bess engages in her usual detective work.

Their names are Brad and Tabitha. They're renting. One of them was born in 1985 but I can't remember which one. They're both sort of young, or younger than we are. Cops were recently called to a disturbance. They were both drunk, Brad sat on the porch, Tabitha out in the yard yelling about how she has the best vagina in all San Antonio - or words to that effect - and somebody had better come and get some of it, an address delivered as the kid, or possibly kids, looked on with their father. They've been yelling at Randy and Susan too, it turns out.

I'm dreading our next encounter, but the house is dark and silent the following Tuesday, and the same the one after that. They've also left Randy and Susan alone.

Maybe it's not that fucking hard to understand shamed them into behaving themselves, although it seems unlikely.

Cat Homework

We are at the library on San Pedro, right next to the park. The park was famously the site of Yuanaguana, a Payaya village before the Europeans showed up, although being mostly nomadic, the Payaya didn't leave much behind in archaeological terms. This is possibly only the second time I've been to this park because the first visit was a bit weird due to the presence of numerous down-at-heel drag queens and the spectacle of the spring, or the fountain, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be. It's at the centre of the park and resembles a giant version of the candle made from Father Jack's earwax in the Passion of St. Tibulus episode of Father Ted.

We are at the library on San Pedro because we've been obliged to attend a class in much the same way as reformed jailbirds or recovering substance abusers. The comparison isn't entirely arbitrary because this is a class which Bess and myself have been obliged to attend so as to tick all the boxes on our having become a licensed cat colony, as recognised by the city council. Specifically it's a class for the TNR programme, TNR referring to the trap-neuter-return practice by which feral cats are allowed to remain at large without producing a ton of kittens. As joint CEOs of our own officially registered cat colony this sort of thing will soon be our responsibility.

'Let's hope they're not holding a T'n'A class at the same time,' I tell my wife as we enter the building. 'Can you imagine the confusion?'

Gratifyingly, she gets the joke and duly concedes a chortle.

'We're here for the TNR,' she says to the women at the front desk, who point us towards a side room.

We anticipated a class of three or maybe four weird old ladies bringing with them a certain aroma and probably talking to themselves, because the image is difficult to dispel even for crazy cat ladies such as ourselves. However to our surprise, the class is packed, twenty or thirty women and a few guys, mostly younger than us, clean, tidy, and not a tinfoil helmet to be seen. Three women are at the front with a table full of t-shirts and a humane trap. Behind them is a screen on which will be projected whatever is required to illustrate their testimony. Bess and I take seats at the back, there being only a few of the folding chairs still available. Our classroom seems to be the section next to the large print books. I can just see Michelle Obama's autobiography on the shelf to my left.

Our mistress of ceremonies is a regal older lady of distinctly Texan type - which I state as compliment in case there should be any ambiguity here - in so much as that a foreigner like myself is easily able to imagine her wrestling critters and ornery types and taking it all in her stride. Unfortunately this is the noisiest library I've ever been in and I have trouble hearing all that is said. Maybe the cat homework has coincided with an amateur wrestling class held elsewhere in the building.

We're there for about an hour, long enough to contract square-botty from the chairs - as the condition is understood by the medical profession. Mostly we're learning stuff we know, the wisdom of the TNR policy balanced against the usual clueless complaints traditionally made by people who simply don't like cats; but happily there's plenty of new information, not least being the operation of the humane traps which we loan from the city, where we take the cats to be fixed and so on. The hour is genuinely useful and informative, and it feels as though we've joined a secret society, which we sort of have.

The opportunity to ask questions comes at the end, and inevitably there are a few from those who just like to ask questions.

'I'd like to know, on the sheet of paper where you've given the number we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question, that number there, is that the one we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question?'

No-one actually asks that, but a few of them come close. I raise my hand and ask whether cats taken in to be fixed at the recommended clinics are checked to see whether they have an ID chip. I'm thinking about the wombat, one of our own feral regulars. He's a cat who resembles a wombat, albeit a ginger wombat. He has massive nuts and although we feed him, we otherwise can't get near him. Given his build and general disposition, I have a theory that he may have been an indoor cat who escaped and somehow ended up at our place, so we need to see whether he's been chipped.

I'm told this is a very good question, which is nice.

A bucket is passed around and we all chip in a few dollars towards cat food and similar supplies. Our own cats occasionally benefit from a free bag of the dry stuff which has been sent our way by the Feral Cat Coalition, the voluntary organisation which has arranged this meeting.

We seem to be done so I pop outside for a smoke, seeing as I'm back to smoking at the moment, because the year 2020 has thus far been a bit of a twat, even though it's still only January, and I only smoke in response to stress. Some young black dude approaches me and asks if I have a spare. I roll one for him. He has a strong African accent and seems a bit lost. He's trying to get somewhere, he tells me, but I can't work out why, so I say sorry because I'm not much help. He goes to sit on the bench outside the library to smoke his cigarette.

I look around for my wife but she's nowhere to be seen. I guess she's gone back into the library.

Back inside the library, she's talking to one of the Feral Cat Coalition people. We tell her about our neighbour who hates cats.

'I had one of those,' she tells us, and describes a scenario much worse than our own with a neighbour getting pissy over the slightest feline incursion into his precious yard which, according to our narrator, resembled a tip and was full of all sorts of junk he'd found at the side of the road.

'He was a pyschiatrist,' she tells us, rolling her eyes.

'It's always the way,' I say. 'How many cats do you have?'

'It was fifty at the time.'

I can actually hear Bess thinking holy shit! and that's what I'm thinking too. We don't have anything like as many. Our colony is pretty sane by comparison.

The woman describes how she was fined, and how she had the bad luck to be up before a judge who hates cats.

'You had a cat colony license and you were fined?' I'm trying not to panic. 'How can that happen?'

'It was a couple of hundred dollars, but that was before I had the license.'

Bess and I share a huge sigh of relief.

We go home, and it feels as though we're now part of some mysterious strike force.

Feud

Since moving here, I've done more or less all of the Texan things which establish oneself as part of the San Antonio landscape. I've eaten chicken fried steak. I've experienced the music of both Selena and George Strait. I've been to a Spurs game, even though I found it massively underwhelming. The only thing left seemed to be feudin' with hornery types, and now I've ticked that one off the list as well.

It was a routinely horrible morning at the beginning of 2020, routinely horrible because the year didn't really get off to a great start with three deaths amongst friends and family, one relative sent into something of a tailspin by the same, the demolition of the house in which my wife used to live - apparently because the new owner just wanted something in a different colour - a traffic citation, and the aforementioned wife suddenly finding herself obliged to work from home because the company decided it could make great savings by giving the office space to someone else. Then, as I take out the trash I happen to notice Squidward out in his yard.

'Good morning,' I call.

I won't remember the reply but it's something testy about how he's engaged in the activity of gathering turds produced by our cats which have been deposited upon his property, or at least his landlord's property.

Okaaay, I think, and get back inside.

Squidward has lived here since before we moved in. He used to star in a popular children's cartoon series and I believe he worked in seafood retail but is now retired.

Ten minutes later he rings our door bell.

'Sorry about the snide comment,' he says, 'but you've got to understand my problem. I'm asking nicely, so what are you doing about all the cats?'

We have a number of cats, although not all of them belong to us. Most of them are feral or stray cats which we feed because someone has to. The population is fluid, more than ten, but not too much more. Some of them roam into Squidward's garden from time to time because they're cats and it's cruel to keep them cooped up inside.

We work with people from the San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, which is recognised by the Animal Control Services of the city council, to make sure all of our ferals and strays are spayed or neutered, which usually reduces the nuisance factor unless you just plain hate cats. I've told him this before, suggesting I'm fine with him hosing any that wander into his yard so as to deter repeat appearances. I bought him a bag of something called Silent Roar, which is also supposed to deter feline incursions.

I've heard his objections before and I still don't know what he wants me to say. Maybe he wants me to concede and get rid of them or have them all put down in accordance with what is presumably his idea of a good neighbour.

'I mean I wouldn't mind if it was just one or two,' he says, and I immediately recall that he clearly did mind when it was just one or two. He's been at us since we moved here, not often but just enough to form a pattern built up from just about every conversation I've ever had with the man.

Our first encounter was him welcoming his new neighbours across the chain link fence which divides our respective yards. The welcome was a detailed account of how terrible the previous tenants had been, three young guys who partied hard all of the time. This one always puzzled me because the mail we still get for the previous tenant is all addressed to Maria Ramos, a young single mother who lived on her own with just her kid. This is how everyone else in our street remembers her. No-one remembers the three party dudes. Not even the landlord was able to remember the three party dudes, because we asked when we bought the house from him.

Then Squidward wanted to know whether we were leaving food out for vermin - raccoons and opossums. We weren't, but he established the theme of the great interest he takes in what happens in our yard, the one we now own. I find this odd because generally I've never given a shit what other people do in their own yards, so I find it difficult to imagine that sort of mindset.

Yet here he is again.

He tells me that he's just sold one of his three cars - which I presume would have been the one with the personalised licence plate. The buyer complained about the paintwork having been scratched by cats. Online research suggests that this is actually impossible. Cat claws lack the necessary density to make a mark on automotive paintwork just as I'm unable to scratch the paint of a car with my fingernail, excepting obviously shitty paint jobs where some hillbilly has brought a can of emulsion back from the hardware store in hope of recreating the vehicle from The Dukes of Hazzard. Casual scratch marks left upon vehicles almost always turn out to be from trees, so it is generally believed.

As we have our conversation, such as it is, he takes a call from the disgruntled buyer so I have to stand and listen, wondering if he actually does want me to promise to have them all rounded up and euthanised. He clearly believes it's an option.

The city of San Antonio has a no kill policy regarding feral or stray cats, instead having opted for TNR - trap, neuter, vaccinate, and then return them to wherever they were found. The policy was adopted on the basis of it being better to manage stable cat populations which aren't going to produce a ton of kittens, for without stable cat populations, unstable cat populations tend to move in, bringing with them all the fucking, fighting, disease, and territorial marking you get with un-vaccinated, un-neutered cats.

Squidward gave me a heads up as I was heading out on my bike about a year ago. 'Hey, just a heads up,' he said. 'There's been an Animal Control truck seen in the area. They've been picking up any cat they find and euthanising them on the spot, so you might want to keep your guys inside. I'm telling you this as a friend.'

Even at the time it sounded a little like the five-year old who has definitely just seen a real dinosaur.

More recently he suddenly had a daughter who was going to get rid of her two beautiful cats after ten years, and did we know anyone seeing as how we're obviously cat people and all?

It was a weird question. The daughter was living hundreds of miles away, and it seemed odd that someone in San Antonio had been picked as the potential solver of this apparently knotty problem. It seemed odd that she somehow lacked the ability to seek adoption in her part of the country; and the description of beautiful cats sounded very much like the words of a man trying too hard to impersonate someone who has no problem with cats. It felt as though the answer he was rooting around for was, hey - we'll take them, we love cats, we need as many cats as we can possibly get our hands on.

The thing is, we actually don't want that many cats but here they are, and there were at least five already hanging around when we moved to this street. When it's practical we find homes for them, as we have done over and over. We didn't bring the raccoons or opossums with us either.

Back in the here and now, he ends the call and says the same stuff all over again. I still don't know what to tell him. We can't do anything we're not already doing.

'That guy who lives next to Donna shot someone in the head a few years ago, right inside their house,' I tell him. 'You remember that? I mean with all due respect, while I'm sure we're not the most amazing neighbours in the world, I don't really see how we can be the worst.'

'I think very highly of you.' He seems slightly stunned and is pulling back, trying to be the nice guy again. 'We're very fond of the both of you,' he adds to no obvious purpose, then leaves.

A few days later we get a letter from Animal Control Services. Someone in our neighbourhood has registered a complaint about property damage and nuisance animals, but it's a form letter naming no names, adding that we should ignore it if it doesn't apply to us.

We talk to Susan from the Feral Cat Coalition. She works with Animal Control and warns us that we should expect a visit, and also that Squidward has filed a claim against us with the small claims court for property damage, a claim which didn't go anywhere due to lack of evidence seeing as he'd already sold the car, despite it having apparently been reduced to scrap by cats.

We spend a couple of days shitting ourselves. We've all seen Animal Cops Houston.

Animal Control turns out to be one young woman who turns up in the truck. She's a cop and actually very helpful. The city is mainly concerned that strays are subjected to the TNR process, which all of ours have been, and that we're demonstrably making efforts to reduce potential nuisance - for example leaving sandboxes around the yard to draw the production of cat poo from adjacent properties, which we do. Having been satisfied that we're not the sort of people who end up on episodes of Animal Cops Houston, she leaves and puts in the necessary good word by which we are able to apply for a cat colony license. This means that providing we TNR and otherwise stick to the established rules, we can have as many cats as we fucking well want.

I never had a strong opinion regarding Squidward, beyond thinking there was something a bit unpleasant about him. Now, however, he's pretty much revealed himself for who he is behind the unconvincing nice guy persona. Donna has told us he once called the cops on her son who was playing his radio too loud, so loud that the walls of Chez Squidward were apparently quite literally shaking. Everything about him seems fussy, suggestive of a privileged upbringing which failed to segue into the riches and status he probably believes to be his due, which is why he's reduced to living around here. He'd clearly rather live in Terrell Hills surrounded by doctors and dentists, prissy older women with face lifts, a better standard of person, people who touch base or give you a heads up, somewhere with a neighbourhood association to prevent scumbags such as ourselves moving in.

I've seen our cats in his garden, but they mostly stay away, and I find it difficult to believe in the hundreds of steaming turds with which they supposedly bespoil his beloved driveway on a daily basis. I suspect it's more likely that he simply hates cats and is too finely attuned to how others may impact upon his existence. Anyone living in a town or a city will probably have neighbours, and one has to make allowances for the same or else fuck off and live on a private estate with a high wall around it.

Our cats are all neutered, excepting the Wombat whom we have as yet been unable to catch. There's not much fighting, not even much bird destruction going on - contrary to the received wisdom - and not much, I would argue, to get all snitchy about. It's not like we have a fucking meth lab in the garage.

The next day, a tiny grey cat turns up on our door, a living skeleton who has been seen up and down the street for weeks, getting  more and more emaciated by the day. We haven't been able to get near her, but hunger has evidently overridden her fear, and here she is. We get her to eat, although she can't handle much at first, and over the next couple of days she gets stronger and begins to fill out a little. Once she's up to it, we'll get her neutered and take it from there, maybe see if we can't find a good owner as we've done with previously rescued kittens. Once inside our home, she's friendly, and too friendly to have been just a stray. Most likely she was dumped by some arsehole.

I've never been the sort of person who can simply walk on thinking fuck it - someone else's problem, and I don't understand anyone who is, at least where animals are concerned. I don't understand anyone who sees a cat, raccoon, opossum, stray dog, or any form of wildlife, domesticated or otherwise, and whose first thought is that had better not shit in my yard. On days such as today I tend to think such persons lack empathy and are as such incomplete human beings who probably shouldn't be allowed to raise children.

I am resident in America thanks to a green card and my whole life is here. I'm reliably informed that criminal convictions of any kind don't look great when reapplying for a green card, or even seeking citizenship, and I live next door to a man who calls the cops because he can't get along with others.

I don't think I'll be having much to do with him for a long time.

Tra-la-la Tra-lala-la

There are six of us, and we've met at La Fonda. It's been organised through a website called Meetup which allows you to find persons who share your interests living in the same area, and so Bess and myself are meeting persons who share our love of cats living in the same area. I had my usual reservations on the grounds that I'm not especially sociable and I don't experience any particular excitement at the possibility of meetings with strangers, but I went along anyway.

How bad could it be?

'I thought there would be more of us,' I say, noting how we're around a table with seating for sixteen.

'This is about average for a Meetup group,' explains Fleegle, because I'm naming those in attendance after the Banana Splits so as to preserve anonymity and reduce the possibility of anyone getting pissy. 'There were only the four of us at the Barn Door last month.'

'We were both ill,' says Bess. 'I wanted to come but it was a really rough weekend.'

'I went to this writers' group a couple of times,' I say. 'It was a few years ago and that was through Meetup, but it was always oversubscribed. There were usually about twenty of us, which seemed like too many to me.'

Nevertheless here we are, two men and four women, although one of the women isn't yet here so we're presently five in number. I'm seated next to Drooper, who is a little older than I am with a sort of mullet and as such resembles Ben Dover, the famed auteur producer of independent art cinema. He's very quiet and I don't think he likes me. He introduces himself as a former mailman from Virginia, or one of those states. I tell him I did the same job in England but he doesn't seem to find this interesting.

'I was doing it since 1975,' he says. 'Now I'm mostly a cat sitter. I retired a couple of years ago.'

'What brought you to San Antonio?'

'They were cutting back and they said there was an opening down here so I followed the job.'

Fleegle asks what we do, Bess and myself.

'I work in healthcare,' Bess says, 'and he's a writer.'

'Oh! What do you write?'

I hate this question. 'I write science-fiction,' because it's as good an answer as any.

'That's great! I love Robert Heinlein, and Asimov too!'

'Yeah, I like some Heinlein.' This is a diplomatic concession to a couple of Heinlein books which I enjoyed. I hated his Stranger in a Strange Land possibly more than anything else I've ever read, and have come to associate his name with far-right conservatives on social media, those who genuinely seem to believe that white people are an oppressed minority

'Have you had anything published?'

'There was a novel. It didn't sell a whole lot but, you know, it did a job. People seemed to like it.'

'What was it called?'

I tell her and she spends the next ten minutes fiddling with her phone, trying to find my novel on Amazon. Eventually she tracks it down on the publisher's website. I'm trying to discourage a sale because I don't think she would enjoy it.

Snorky is saying something, but she's three seats away at the end of the table, and her voice is quiet so I can't hear. Her testimony is interrupted by the call of a gruffly voiced moose head mounted high on the wall behind us. 'Uh oh! Chongo! It's Danger Island next!'

Snorky has three cats, she explains. It's the same for the other two, which probably means that Bess and myself are more the sort of people one might expect to meet at a gathering of cat lovers. Neither of us can remember what it was like to have just three cats.

'Where are you from?' Fleegle asks me.

Christ, I think, not this shit again?

I tell her I was born on the farm upon which they eventually filmed Teletubbies, near Stratford-upon-Avon, but lived most of my life in London. I tell her this because I'm trying to keep myself entertained, but even I'm beginning to get bored of this story.

I wonder how long it will take for us to be served. Maybe the waiter doesn't realise we're all here, or as many of us as are likely to turn up. Glancing across to the parking lot I can see a colourful six-wheeled buggy draw up, spinning around in circles before coming to a juddering halt. It is driven by a smiling orange gorilla wearing sunglasses and a fireman's helmet. Minutes later, Bingo has joined us at our table. All of our people are now here.

I order a Dos Equis and we all examine the menu.

'The fish tacos are good,' I suggest to no-one in particular.

'What's an enchilada?' asks Fleegle.

We all stare.

'I've never eaten one.' She shrugs. 'I don't like Mexican food.'

'How long have you lived in San Antonio?' Bess asks.

'I moved here in 1985, but I like the Red Barn. They serve a good steak.'

Bess and I share a look amounting to, well, she came to the right place. La Fonda is okay, but it's Mexican food for people who don't like Mexican food, who would rather not be startled by anything too spicy or flavoursome while they're trying to eat. There's nothing terrible on the menu, but much of it is tailored towards the conservative palates of Alamo Heights and will seem underwhelming if you've eaten at almost any other notionally Mexican place. Thankfully it's fairly difficult to completely fuck up a fajita beyond edibility, and as I say, the fish tacos are decent.

We order, then we eat. The food is okay; not first choice, but okay. Let's imagine we're eating in silence as you all watch Micro Ventures. Professor Carter and the kids pile into their miniaturised dune buggy and spend an educational five minutes driving around beneath someone's fridge.

'He went to the writer's group,' Fleegle tells the newly arrived Bingo, meaning me.

'Are you a writer?' she asks. 'I don't remember you.'

Fuck.

I don't remember her either. 'It was a while ago,' I say. 'I only went twice. There were too many people.'

'We meet at La Madeleine.'

'Were you in the writer's group when they used to meet at La Taza?' Bess asks, apparently attempting to introduce clarity.

'We meet at La Madeleine. What was your name again?'

'Lawrence.'

'Lawrence of Arabia!'

'I meet at La Madeleine too,' Bess says. 'You know the rock painting group? We're there at the same time as the writers on the Sunday afternoon, but you're in the little room.'

Bingo comes over so as to avoid having to shout. 'What sort of thing do you write, Lawrence of Arabia?'

'Science-fiction,' I sigh.

She addresses my wife as Good Queen Bess and begins to describe some movie about Queen Anne which will be of obvious interest to myself seeing as how I'm from England and all.

'Is that the one with Margot Robbie?' I ask.

'No, I think that's a different one, Lawrence of Arabia.'

'You know, that's where my name came from? My parents went to see it at the cinema before I was born. I think that's where they got the idea.' I don't bother to mention that as a nickname Lawrence of Arabia was already getting old by the time I was fucking five, and I now find it quite irritating.

'You must come to our next writers' meeting at La Madeleine, Lawrence of Arabia.'

Later, as we drive home, Bess tells me about a guy who once hung out with her rock painting group at La Madeleine. He wasn't painting rocks but invited his granddaughter to do so, and to use everyone's paint to make the sort of mess you make when you're bored and don't really care what you're doing. He was condescending and an asshole, and he was hanging around because his wife was in the other room with the writers' group. Now we're wondering if his wife just happened to be an orange gorilla with sunglasses and a fireman's helmet.

'That was okay, I guess,' Bess admits, 'but I thought there would be more about cats.'

'Me too.'

Life and Death

On Monday I encounter baby armadillos, which is a first. They're at the side of the trail, snuffling around in the undergrowth with manic energy, three of them. I've seen armadillos in the wild before, but not often. They're usually adults, and a single hasty move is all it has taken to send them scurrying away. Added up, and excluding those I see squished on the highway with depressing frequency, I've seen a total of three armadillos in the wild, and that figure has just doubled. They are each about the size of a large, well-fed guinea-pig. I walk up to them slowly and carefully, and either they don't see me or they're not bothered. I get within about three feet and stand there for the next ten minutes just watching them.

That evening, we're driving past Catman's house on Sumner. Catman is the local crazy guy who feeds feral cats. We've stopped off at his house before, and he's okay, a nice guy with not an ounce of malice or aggression anywhere in his personality; and most of what he says is lucid, even interesting, but then you get digressions into how he foresaw both the collapse of the twin towers and the death of Lady Diana Spencer - also that he died and encountered angels before being brought back to life on more than one occasion. His testimony can be exhausting, but he has kittens scampering around in his yard.

'Kittens!' I squeal.

Bess steps on the brake and backs up at speed.

We get out and go to see the kittens.

Catman remembers us but not our names. He looks and smells better than he did last time. He had painful scrapes and bruises on his arms and legs, and his hair had been cut by someone who apparently thought they were shearing a sheep. Today he's more like a skinny version of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. He tells us about the kittens, and it becomes obvious that the way to talk to him is to keep him on the subject of cats, because that way he makes sense and will even listen. The mother of the kittens was killed by some dog, he tells us.

There are six kittens, same litter but different fathers, black, tabby, and four Siamese - six little scampering fluffballs looking up at us with buggy blue eyes. They climb all over as, mewing away. We watch them clean themselves, even having a pee and covering it over with soil. They're tiny, but apparently just old enough for their mother to have taught them all the important stuff. They'll probably be okay. That all six of them have survived this long in some guy's garden suggests that they're tough and healthy.

Tuesday is similarly grey. The skies have been heavy and overcast of late and I find it oppressive. Coming home from HEB, I see an opossum dead at the side of the road, most likely hit by a car. Worse still, I can see movement. There are babies spilling from her cooling pouch, alive but blind and hairless with ants swarming all around. They're doomed. They won't survive outside their mother or without her warmth. They're too small. It feels like the most horrible fucking thing I think I've seen. I could take them home and they will die. I leave them and they will die. I'm paralysed. Nature can be a  cunt at times, although I suppose on this occasion she was acting through some yahoo-fucknugget in a truck. I tell myself that critters die in the wild all the time and that this is no different.

I phone my wife and she tells me we have an animal rescue organisation in the city, and that it's worth giving them a call because they'll even come out for an injured sparrow. I give her the address of where I saw the opossum and she calls them.

In the evening we go back to see Catman and the kittens. We take a bag of kitten chow and some milk, because it's clear that they can use all the help they can get. Catman's care, through no fault of his own, seems a bit erratic. One of the kittens has gone missing. They're at the age where they want only to be friends with anything that moves, and Catman thinks the missing kitten probably followed the mail guy down the street and got lost. I'm telling myself that anyone decent finding the lost kitten will be unable to resist her fuzzy charm and will either give her a good home, or make the effort to find one for her; because that's what I would do. I don't want to have to think about other possibilities.

We feed the kittens in so much as that Catman sweeps a section of his path and tips out some of the dried chow. He takes an empty tin which once contained cat food from amongst the detritus scattered across his lawn, inspects the inside for crap, then pours out some kitten milk. Flies swarm around as the kittens stuff their faces.

Wednesday begins with the same grey sky, and Bess finds Gary dead in the road outside. Bess and I are devastated. I spend most of the day in either a daze or tears, and then I write this on facebook:

Gary wasn't really our cat, but he ended up living in our yard on a more or less permanent basis because his owner was an arsehole who probably didn't feed him properly, and never really seemed to give a shit about the endless succession of critters she has running around her yard for a couple of months before slouching off to die in traffic. Her name for him was Fat Cat, which probably tells you all you need to know. I renamed him Gary because Fat Cat seemed cruel, and because he reminded me of Gary, my neighbour in London - big, pushy, not very bright, always there hanging around when you open the back door, but essentially lovable. I fed him every day, left dry food out for him and the others, and yet he'd still run into the house at every opportunity, meowing his head off and burying his face in the food bowl. We usually let him eat for a few minutes, then would pick him up to take him back out. He purred like a motorbike as soon as he was picked up. He just liked the attention. The other cats eventually got used to him. He chased a few of them off every once in a while, but fights were few and far between. Once we took him for a day out, to spend time with Bess's grandmother, reasoning that it would do them both good and that he was uncomplicated and outgoing (and that she might even want to keep him), but he spent the entire time under the bed, just waiting for whatever it was to be over. This also put the dampers on a very vague plan we had of driving him up to Tennessee and giving him to my friend Sarah who was at the time looking for a large hairy cat. Anyway, today Bess found him in the road outside, presumably hit by a car. I didn't realise I would be quite so upset, but I guess he lived to a good age and at least his last few years were happy.

I dig a hole at the end of the garden. Bess comes home around lunchtime and we bury Gary. My heart is breaking.

That evening she comes home with Catman's kittens, all five of them bundled up and blinking in her arms as she gets from the car. 'I couldn't stand to think of anything else happening to them.'

'I know,' I say.

'After the one went missing and then Gary, and the opossum you saw - I can't take any more dead critters this week.'

'Me neither. I went past and the opossum was still there. I guess those rescue people didn't think it was worth their effort.'

Bess sighs. 'I had my doubts. I called them a few years ago, that time we had a ringtail in the yard. It took them two hours to turn up.'

The kittens spend most of the day asleep in a little fluffy huddle in an old crib we have under the bed, with occasional bursts of activity and following anything that moves, including the other cats. We already have eight, so we won't be able to keep them, but we can at least give them a decent start in life.

It feels like the storm has broken.

The Emerald Dynasty

Emerald was a small black cat who took to hanging around our yard, having noticed that I occasionally left out bowls of food which our own cats hadn't finished. We didn't realise she was a stray because she looked so well groomed, but it seemed significant that we could never get anywhere near her, and that she always seemed to be hanging out with SOF. SOF, standing for Son of Fluffy, was another stray, one presumed to have sprung from the union of our own Fluffy and a female stray to which the kid gave the name Juliet, because even he could see that romance was in the air. I say presumed, but none of us were really in any doubt as to SOF's heritage. We mistook him for Fluffy a couple of times, and even his meow was the same. Unfortunately, like Emerald, he too was absolutely feral and wouldn't let us get anywhere near him.

Emerald became a familiar sight, and enough so for the boy to give her the name because of her green eyes; but still we were never able to get near her, and she'd approach a bowl of food only after we moved away to let her get on with it.

One day as we came home, we spotted kittens over at the neighbour's house. Frasier wasn't home, we guessed, and we went over to have a look. We had no idea where they could have come from. By this point we'd worked out that Emerald was female and probably a free agent, but she hadn't looked pregnant. Then again, neither of us could quite recall when we'd last seen her.

Just by Frasier's front door was a planter formed by three low brick walls running up against the side of the house. There had never been any soil in there, not so far as we knew, and a sheet of board lay across the top. Presumably he used it as storage space. I lifted the board and we had an aerial view of three tiny black kittens scrabbling to get away from the light. They were a few weeks old at most, very much mobile but still clumsy. We picked them up, noticing they were kind of chubby.

'Holy crap,' exclaimed my wife. 'These are some seriously chunky kittens.'

The one she held still had blue eyes and was noticably fluffier than the other two, although the third had vanished into the undergrowth at the side of the house.

'They have to be Emerald's kittens, I guess,' I said, as much a question as anything. 'I wonder where she is.'

'She'll be nearby,' Bess told me. 'Mother cats leave their kittens hidden while they hunt for food. Sometimes they don't even leave them all in the same place.'

Kittens are my favourite thing in the universe, so we petted them a little longer, then returned them and replaced the roof of their temporary accommodation.

Next day they were gone, but Donna noticed that I was looking over. 'Did you see the kittens?' she asked.

'Yes, we saw them yesterday. I guess you weren't home.'

'They been in there a few weeks. Lord knows where she's taken them. They were the cutest thing!'

'Yes, they were.'

A couple of days passed and, as I was washing dishes, a commotion drew me out into the garden, barking and snarling, a horrifying sound so close to the house when neither of our immediate neighbours have dogs. I ran out into the back garden. Shooty the drug dealer's two kid-killing dogs had once again escaped the confines of his own back garden and were now in Frasier's yard. They were going wild on the other side of the chain link fence, trying to get at something. They wanted to kill something. I'd never seen them jump our fence, and guessed they would have found it difficult with all the intervening wilderness, hackberry shoots and the like. I went closer.

Two of the kittens were hidden in the undergrowth, mewling and hissing in a pathetic attempt to scare off their gargantuan attackers. They were on the same side of the fence as the dogs. Only a rock hard tree stump forming a cage of truncated branches kept them safe.

I saw red. Here was a metaphor for all that was wrong with the world, helpless creatures about to meet a grisly end because our local shithead can't keep the violent killing machines he barely cares for in his own fucking yard. In that moment I could have destroyed both  dogs with just my bare hands. I ground my hands into the dirt at the lower end of the fence, underneath into Frasier's yard, and grabbed the two kittens. They hissed and scratched me, or tried.

'Fuck off,' I screamed at the kid-killing dogs with such raw fury that my throat hurt. They barked for a while, but deprived of anything helpless they might destroy, lost interest after another couple of minutes.

I temporarily housed the kittens in a cardboard box lined with a towel, and with a bowl of water. I called my wife at work.

'Emerald will be around somewhere,' she told me. 'You should just give them back when you see her.'

'You're sure about this?'

'Yes.'

'I've picked them up. She'll be able to smell me.'

'She won't be bothered. She'll just be happy to have them back. Did you say you only have two of them.'

'Yes.'

Neither of us wanted to think about what could have happened to the third kitten.

I waited.

The kittens hissed at me, which was quite entertaining, but seemed unharmed. At length I noticed Emerald watching from the side of the house. She looked pissed off, but then she always looked pissed off. That was how her face was. I set the kittens out on the grass and backed away to watch from a safe distance. She trotted over, picked one up in her mouth, and carried him off, coming back for his brother a moment later. I guessed it was going to be okay.

Weeks passed and we began to see them around, marching in a little line across the garden, tails aloft, or Emerald supervising as her kids swarmed up and down the trunk of the pecan tree. Occasionally we got close enough to pick them up, which they seemed to tolerate, but mostly we left them to it. Sometimes we'd see Emerald finish off a bowl of cat food in the porch, with two tiny black faces watching her from around the edge of the door, coming no closer because they could see that we were there.

They became bolder over time, and grew bigger. One was  turning into a fluffball, with a chocolate complexion which seemed almost red under a certain light, so Bess named him Jack in oblique reference to Jack Ruby, because rubies are red. His shorter-haired brother became Tony because we'd been watching The Sopranos. We couldn't really get close to Tony, but on the other hand he didn't quite seem afraid of us, although Jack still ran up into the walnut tree every time one of us came near.

Eventually Tony plucked up the courage to enter our house in search of food.

'He wants to be our cat!' Bess squealed happily, and it seemed like he really did.

'We already have about four-hundred,' I pointed out, exaggerating but not by much.

Tony vanished into the kitchen and was using the litter tray, like a workman whom you employ to fix your roof coming in to use the lavatory. The line between what we might describe as our cats and cats we just happen to feed was becoming intangible, and Tony became a part of the family, or at least a welcome relative.

Apparently he told his brother, because the previously timid Jack transformed overnight into the world's friendliest cat. We noticed also that he had tufts of fur between his paws, like a Maine Coon. We remembered how often we'd seen Emerald hanging out with SOF and realised that Jack was therefore almost certainly Fluffy's grandson. Unfortunately the two of them didn't get on, necessitating frequent incidents of my scooping Jack up and taking him outside to safety, away from grumpy old Granddad; following which he seemed to have decided I was his daddy. Wide green eyes full of admiration may have been just anthropomorphic thinking on my part, but on the other hand, he'd occasionally reach up and take hold of my hand between his two front paws whilst giving me that look, as though beseeching me to help drive the bandits away from his village. Bess occasionally referred to him as Jacques, and so he became our French cat.

Meanwhile, Emerald was pregnant again, a black silky pumpkin  waddling onto the porch to finish off another bowl. We vowed to catch her and get her fixed once this new lot were born.

The new kittens were sighted, with Jack and Tony now nearly fully grown, our back garden swam with black cats. We watched the new kittens grow, and occasionally managed to hold them so as to acclimate them to human company. As with Jack and Tony, they weren't really our cats as such, but my wife nevertheless named them Enoch and Jessie after characters in Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad. We'd had a Pekingese called Enoch when I was a kid, so I thought my wife had made a good choice. The first Enoch had been small, black and apparently named after racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell, which I believe was something to do with my dad's sense of humour.

Enoch, like Tony before him, wasn't backwards in coming forwards. He wanted to be our cat, and we let him because we couldn't say no. He had us at a disadvantage. He had the softest, darkest fur, the sweetest nature, and the loudest meow of any cat we'd ever encountered, and it didn't take too long to work out that his dad was almost certainly Mr. Kirby, one of our feral friends distinguished by a peculiar hooting meow. Enoch would stroll in, meowing loudly, and it sounded almost like singing, someone playing saxophone or guitar solos with heavy use of wah pedal.

'What is it, Enoch?' we asked. 'What do you want?

'Waaaeeooohhwwwaaahhheeaahhhooo,' and he'd wander off down the hall as though looking for something. Then he'd come back and take up residence on a lap, purring like a tiny motorbike. Scratch the back of his neck and he'd tip his head back and it would seem as though he was grinning. Sometimes I did this and I'd whisper Bob 'Oskins to him, because that was who he reminded me of, and he seemed to like it. We began to refer to him as our perfect cat, because he was wonderful.

Enoch was about a year old when Jessie, his brother, was hit by a car. Jessie had remained feral and unapproachable but it was still a sad day. Then Emerald was suddenly pregnant again and still unfixed, and our golden age of black cats came to an end. They disappeared one by one, excepting a cat we think is probably Tony but who keeps his distance these days. We suspect the third pregnancy was probably too much for Emerald, and we still have no idea what became of Jack or Enoch. Their stories may have had some unfortunate end, but given our neighbourhood, it seems just as likely that someone took them in. So that's what we tell ourselves.

My journey once again interrupted by our French cat.

Cats' Breakfast

It was my fault - my idea, so I only have myself to blame. I don't recall how many cats we had at the time, but it was a good few less than we have now. They'd been living on dry food because that was how Bess had done it since before we were married. I'd raised an eyebrow, vaguely recalling something about cats fed on dry food alone having medical problems, possibly something to do with a brand inanely named Cupboard Love; but it turned out that I was remembering something from back in the eighties. Dry cat food had come a long way since then, so it turned out; plus there was the advantage of being able to fill a cat feeder and it being good for a couple of days, with cats eating just when they felt like it.

Yet something about this system felt wrong, and it was hard to ignore the detail of how excited the cats would get when I bought them the occasional tin of food as a treat.

'I'm going to start giving them a regular breakfast,' I announced one day. 'Same time every morning. I don't mind getting up to do it.'

My logic was that firstly it would be fun for the cats, giving them something to look forward to; and if they'd been outside during the night, it would provide an additional inducement to come home, hopefully reducing the occurrence of anyone vanishing for a couple of days at a time. Also, the more varied diet would probably be good for them, and we'd save on bags of dried food.

So now it's a regular thing, part of my routine; and I like routine because it means you get things done without having to think about them, freeing up the day for more important stuff.

I wake at any time between six and seven, rarely later. If it's summer, it will be light. If it's winter, it will be getting light. If any of the cats stayed in during the night, usually they'll be waiting outside the bedroom door, or Jello will already have forced the bedroom door open. Only Jello and Kirby seem to have this ability, although to be fair the locking mechanism of the bedroom door is crap, so all it really requires is a good, hard push.

I get up, throw on a robe, take a leak and then enter the front room. Occasionally Fluffy will have either produced a hairball or else laid an egg during the night, so I usually deal with that before anything else, if necessary. Fluffy isn't keen on the litter tray, despite that it's kept clean, and all the other useless advice you'll find on the internet when Googling why does my cat keeping taking a dump on the rug? Online wisdom suggests that he poos in protest, but none of us can work out what might have prompted him to express his reservations in this way. He has a pretty easy life, all things considered. I suspect he simply dislikes the litter tray and would otherwise prefer to use the facilities outside.

So I enter the front room, and if there's no damage control to be undertaken, I throw open the front door. This means Fluffy can go and take a dump in a bush if he needs to, and Snowy is usually sat on the garden path awaiting breakfast. Where once I'd step outside and call out their names, now I simply leave the door open and let Grace, Holly, and occasionally Kirby arrive in their own time, not least because Grace has usually found her way up onto the roof during the night and sometimes needs a bit longer.

I go to the kitchen and arrange seven metal bowls on the counter, then open the back door and let Nibbler in, and sometimes Jello if he's been outside during the night. By this point I usually have the full complement of seven cats marching around the front room or in and out of the kitchen, and the meowing can be deafening. Snowy is always right up on the counter top, quite happy to be fed directly from the tin. I've tried to find some way around this, so as to enable me to at least open tins in peace, but there isn't one, so Snowy gets first dibs - an entire five ounce can to herself because she has twice the appetite of everyone else.

It's probably a good thing in certain respects. She went missing earlier in the year, and we found her twelve weeks later trapped in the garage of a neighbouring house which had been unoccupied for some time. She'd somehow survived three months in isolation without regular food and water. She was the weight of a newspaper when I picked her up, which was kind of horrifying, but has nevertheless since fully recovered. We assume she must have caught mice or cockroaches or something, but she probably had a bit of stored fat on her side too.

Once I've shaken the hockey puck of food into Snowy's bowl, I put the tin down on the kitchen floor. It gives Jello something to think about and keeps him from joining Snowy on the counter top whilst I fill the other bowls. It's all a bit like juggling, but by this point I can do it in my sleep.

Fluffy, Nibbler, Grace, Holly, and Jello each get the contents of a three ounce can. I can usually shake these out, then convey the five bowls to different parts of the front room in a single trip, which at last silences the chorus.

This leaves just Kirby, who gets Princess food because she's weird and highly strung. She'll eat what the rest are eating, and have no qualms about finishing off abandoned bowls, but for some reason you have to start her off on Princess food, which is a fancier, marginally more expensive version of what everyone else is eating and comes in a sachet. It would be annoying, but I'm used to it.

Kirby came to us as a kitten which some friend of my wife had rescued from an unpleasant neighbour. The unpleasant neighbour had taken three tiny kittens from a feral cat, declared them guilty of having been born in her yard, and then left them to die in a metal bin with the lid on beneath the scorching Texas sun, because that's the sort of thing unpleasant neighbours do. Anna heard the cries, rescued the kittens, and then found it in herself to not drive her car back and forth over the head of the unpleasant neighbour, which is what I would have done under the circumstances. Anyway, the point is that Kirby had a seriously rough start, and then suddenly she was our cat and I was her Daddy; and I'm still Daddy all these years later. She follows me around the house. She sits and watches me, waiting to see what I will do. When I look around, usually Kirby is there. At times it drives me nuts, but there's not much point getting pissy about it, given that she's a cat; and I suppose I should be flattered.

I fill Kirby's bowl, convey it to the hall, and pull the door closed so that she gets the required couple of minutes to eat without interruption, because the rest have usually taken to a game of musical bowls by this point.

Then comes phase two.

All the while, a group of five or six strays will have been waiting outside our back door. This is also my fault. It began shortly after I began providing a regular breakfast for our cats. There would always be some food left uneaten, so I took to leaving the bowls outside the back door for the benefit of passing strays, of which there were a couple, specifically a couple who told their friends.

Feral cat populations will tend to stabilise, rarely exceeding a certain number of cats per colony, and you can look it up online if you don't believe me. So far as our back yard is concerned, and keeping in mind that we already have seven cats, that number seems to be about six, although it recently dropped to five when Garak stopped showing up.

Garak was a slightly elongated cat from a house at the end of the street. He wasn't actually a stray, but was nevertheless happy to help out at breakfast time.

Don't mind if I do, he seemed to say as he sauntered onto the porch each morning. For the sake of calling him something more personal than that one over there, Junior named him Greenie after a lame character in something called Maze Runner. The name Greenie implied a new arrival and this cat had just showed up, so there it was; but I wasn't going to call him Greenie because I disliked the name, and Maze Runner sounds rubbish, and when the boy has emptied his first litter tray, maybe then and only then he gets to decide what we're going to call those cats he occasionally notices over the top of his iPad. Anyway, this cat looked like a Lester to me, so that's what I called him until a neighbour informed us that he already had a home and was known as Garak, presumably after the Cardassian tailor from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Garak was fine by me, because somehow the cat really did resemble the character played by Andrew Robinson.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Garak simply stopped showing up - although I've seen him out and about a couple of times since so I know he's okay - and the b-team now comprises just Gary, Mr. Kirby, Charlotte, and the Gus sisters. These are the strays I feed, although technically Gary isn't a stray either. He lives at a house at the opposite end of the road to the former residence of Garak, but his owner is deranged and calls him Fat Cat, presumably because he's huge and fluffy and she doesn't have much imagination. I call him Gary because he's large and not very bright and is always hanging around whenever I open the back door, much like Gary my neighbour from when I lived in London, whom I miss.

Charlotte is a Siamese cat, named after my wife's stepmother, the one who was niece to Johnny Cash.

The Gus sisters, whose obvious affection for each other suggest that they're almost certainly related, are named as such due to their shared resemblance to the late Gus, short for Asparagus.

Mr. Kirby is a stray we first noticed when searching for Kirby, who briefly went missing. We noticed him because he resembles our Kirby quite closely, but for his possessing a massive pair of knackers. Like his female counterpart, his black on grey stripes divide into spots in places, suggesting some Bengal heritage, and unlike our Kirby, he makes a hooting noise in lieu of a meow.

So, with the indoor cats fed I step out onto the back porch to feed the rest, unless it's winter and not yet light. If it's still dark, there will usually be a couple of trash pandas hanging around in the hope of getting in on the act; and while I like trash pandas, they hustle the cats away from their food and have a habit of taking everything to the water bowl to wash it before they eat, which may sound endearingly weird or even cute, but gets a little annoying after a while given the state of the water afterwards.

Anyway, Mr. Kirby remains a little feral. I can stroke him when he's eating, but he will otherwise avoid coming too close if he can help it; and yet at breakfast he hoots away like I'm a long lost friend.

I have six bowls which I place on the glass table on which we keep pot plants in the corner of the porch. I have three of the five ounce cans and I divide the contents between the six bowls with a fork. Mr. Kirby gets the first one because he's usually right up there on the table. Then I give Gary a bowl, because even though he has a home - albeit one in which he may not be appreciated as is his due, judging by how he spends all of his time at our house - if I don't give him a bowl, he'll just nab one from someone whose need may be greater. Finally I set the other four bowls down, and the three girls watch and wait for me to leave before joining in. The fourth bowl was originally for Garak, but now serves as a spare. As I go back inside, Nibbler usually slips past me in search of further gastronomic variety, and so the fourth bowl means everyone gets to eat.

This done, I make my toast and coffee and go back to bed to read for a while. Some days it's a pain in the arse, but it never takes longer than ten minutes, and even on a bad day it brings a great sense of satisfaction as I watch them happily stuffing their faces.

So now you know.