Mr. Avery

Mr. Avery just turned up one morning. In addition to our own gang, I also serve breakfast to three or four feral cats who've taken to hanging around in our back garden. Curiously, the feral cat population tends to remain stable, with the number remaining at three or four. Gary from down the road had recently departed to the great alley in the sky, which I imagine resembling the one in the Top Cat cartoons, and it seemed that pussycat central control had sent Mr. Avery as his replacement.

He was huge and a buff ginger colour, with a tiny little face set at the centre of a big round head giving him the appearance of a feline Oliver Hardy. At the time, Bess and I had been watching the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer which details the plight of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man currently serving life for crimes he almost certainly didn't commit; and because Steven Avery might also be described as rounded and ginger, we named the new cat after him.

Mr. Avery looked as though he'd been inflated with a bicycle pump, a series of sullen orange balloons forever sat waiting to be fed outside our back door. He seemed too groomed and well fed to have grown up feral and so we assumed he was probably lost. He wasn't particularly friendly, always keeping a distance whilst being too big to be truly intimidated by any of the other cats. He had the demeanour of a cat who had probably lived inside for most of his life and was accustomed to luxury.

Assuming Mr. Avery had probably been someone's cat, I posted on Nextdoor, our online neighbourhood forum, in the hope of tracking down his owner. I received two replies. One described a missing cat named Sunny, who couldn't have been our boy unless his nuts had grown back in accordance with the laws of only Mexican biology. The other was from a woman called Millicent who explained that her neighbour was missing a ginger cat, and specifically one with a bit of a red nose due to allergies.

I went outside, found Mr. Avery, and inspected his nose. Sure enough, it seemed kind of red.

I sent Millicent a photograph of Mr. Avery along with my phone number. She said she would show the photograph to her neighbour.

Two days later there was still no reply. I sent a second message asking if she had yet shown the photograph to her neighbour.

I have not seen her, she explained. Let me go knock.

Three days passed without further response, so I asked again.

No, she said, she still hadn't had a chance to talk to her neighbour, but it was probably a different cat - even though Millicent herself somehow had no idea what the missing cat looked like, and anyway, she was in Alamo Heights, some two miles from us, so - you know - it seemed a bit unlikely. Maybe I should pop along to my local vet and ask if anyone had reported a missing cat.

I told Bess, who pointed out that no-one born since 1910 has been named Millicent, and that this in combination with the Alamo Heights location suggested I'd been dealing with a woman who had probably never been in the position of having to wipe her own bottom, and who might therefore be characterised as inherently flaky.

All the same, Millicent had given me her own address, so it seemed like we might as well go over and call at a few of the adjacent dwellings. One of them would be the former residence of Mr. Avery, we reasoned. I would have asked for the specific details, but I found myself unable to phrase the question in a way which didn't approximate to we'll make our own enquiries if you'd be so kind as to forward the address of this person who is missing their cat, seeing as it's apparently too much trouble for you…

We drove over to Alamo Heights - two miles, but not actually that far in terms of the distance cats have been known to venture. I was going to wear my hi-viz jacket so as to effect an illusion of officialdom, the sort of stranger to whom one might safely open the door knowing it would be about the local water supply or something; but Bess pointed out that some guy in a hi-viz jacket asking about a missing cat was arguably weirder than the same thing in regular clothes, so the hi-viz stayed in the car.

The anticipated gun-toting Republicrats foaming at the mouth and bellowing git off mah probertee, bwaaah thankfully failed to materialise. Same with the cat-hating nutters who would be glad to learn of one having gone missing, hope it stayed that way, then ask how come it's okay for cats to roam all over but you see one stray dog and everyone loses their shit? These were the people we expected to meet, having read their incoherent rants on the aforementioned Nextdoor, but thankfully it turns out that the internet can sometimes present an unbalanced, unrepresentative picture of humanity.

Everybody liked cats, everybody had their own stories about a missing cat, but nobody had actually lost one; until we came to a house from which a ginger cat named Cheeto had absconded a few months earlier. This was clearly the cat to whom Millicent had alluded, but Cheeto had been back a while and was presently rubbing his face against my leg whilst purring like a motorboat.

So we went home to Mr. Avery and the others, at least knowing we had tried; which isn't the end of the story, but is probably the end of this episode.