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.'

Introducing Charlie

I don't have a huge amount of faith in our city's animal control department. Byron's dogs once escaped from his yard and ran away. He went down to the pound to see if they had been picked up and found them both already on death row, scheduled for the big sleep later that day. Both dogs were chipped with name and address but no-one had bothered to check. I've called to report dogs running loose in my neighbourhood and have been told it would be five days before anyone could attend; but having since learned that they mainly seem to be in the business of snuffing critters, I'm no longer inclined to call them.

There didn't seem to be much point in calling animal control when I first spotted the bunny, so I phoned my wife and asked what she thought I should do. She spoke to a colleague with a pet rabbit, and procured the number of something called Rabbit Rescue.

I was sat at a bench at one of the covered pavilions of McAllister Park, drinking sweet tea and taking the usual break at the halfway point of my daily cycle. I happened to be gazing at a car parked a little way away, and there was a bunny sat looking back at me from beneath the front bumper. It was white with black ears and black rings around the eyes, obviously a domestic pet, and I stared for what may have been a full minute before I realised what I was looking at, simply because it wasn't anything I expected to see.

I decided that someone must have dumped the bunny, and vaguely recalled that domestic rabbits are ill-equipped for survival in the wild. Also, this was McAllister Park, home to foxes, some enormous birds of prey, and even the occasional coyote. The rabbit was clearly out of its element and requiring assistance.

I called Rabbit Rescue, but they didn't have anyone available. As I spoke to the woman, describing the situation, the driver of the car beneath which the bunny had sought shelter returned from walking his dog.

'I've already called animal control,' he said. 'Do you know anything about rabbits?'

Now I found myself holding two separate conversations at the same time, the upshot of which was that animal control were fucking hopeless and that I'd give my wife another call. She might know someone who could come out and pick up the rabbit, maybe Edi or Byron if they weren't doing anything. If we could get the bunny home then I could sort something out from that point on, but I could hardly ferry the bunny on my bike, and the guy with the car had his dog to consider.

'Is it tame?' asked the woman from Rabbit Rescue, who was still on the phone. 'Can you get near?'

The rabbit hadn't moved, and stayed still as I lent down to see if I could pet it.

'Yes, I think it's tame,' I said as the guy with the dog tried to tell me something. This weird bifurcated conversation was an irritating distraction and had begun to get on my tits in the absence of any advice I could actually use. 'Look, I think I can handle this, but thanks for everything.'

I picked up the bunny, which was soft and didn't even struggle.

'I'm going to call my wife again,' I told the guy with the dog.

He made grateful noises and drove off just as the bunny sprang from my arms, then settled down to nibbling at the grass nearby.

'I'll call Byron,' Bess told me. 'He owes me.'

'Okay.'

I sat on the grass watching the bunny nibble at seed heads. I petted it several times and it didn't seem even slightly bothered by my presence.

Half an hour went by and I saw Byron's truck. I waved. He waved back, then drove right past into the woodland. After another ten minutes, I called Bess again.

'I have no idea what's happened but he drove past and hasn't come back, and that way is a dead end. Maybe he changed his mind and has gone into hiding.'

'Okay. He texted me to say he couldn't find you and got lost. It's nearly my lunch hour. I'll be there in about fifteen minutes.'

By the time Bess came, I'd remembered that we have a growing frame which might be put to use. I made it myself a couple of years ago as something in which I could grow onions, potatoes, or whatever else seemed at most risk of being uprooted by trash pandas; but I noticed that my horticultural mojo doesn't seem to work so well in Texas, and never got around to planting anything which the frame might protect. It measures four feet by two and comprises chicken wire over a wood frame with a hinged lid. I'd been meaning to donate the thing to Stephen, our green-fingered neighbour across the way, but thankfully never got around to it because I now realised it would serve as a fairly decent temporary hutch.

Bess took charge of the bunny and I cycled home, pausing only to stop off at the supermarket for rabbit food and a bag of hay. Back home I found the bunny duly housed in the growing frame, which Bess had moved into Junior's room. I lay down some bedding in the office - as Bess calls the room in which I have my PC and mile upon mile of shelving - and relocated both bunny and temporary hutch. I'm sure Junior would have been happy to share his room with a rabbit, but he never sleeps and I was disinclined to subject our guest to permanent artificial daylight.

'She's a girl,' Bess told me, following consultation with her rabbit-owning colleague; and for some reason the name Maisie kept slipping into my thoughts, so Maisie it was. The idea was that we would look after the bunny until a permanent home presented itself, most likely through the Rabbit Rescue people; but inevitably we decided that fuck it - one more mouth to feed isn't going to make a whole lot of difference.

The woman from Rabbit Rescue called me back that afternoon wanting to know what happened. She was overjoyed that we had decided to keep the rabbit.

Maisie settled in and began to put on weight, which was a relief. After two weeks I was no longer able to feel the nobbly bits of her spine when stroking her. At weekends we ferried her temporary home outside to the garden so she could eat grass and see the sky while we cleaned up in the office.

Some evenings, when all of the cats are outside, she gets to hop around in the front room. I'm spending this time building her a proper hutch, more or less the same dimensions as the growing frame, but taller with two floors connected by a ramp. Eventually it's finished, and I prime the wood with a waterproof sealant, a non-toxic rabbit friendly brand which has proven harder to track down than you might think.

Bess has told Maisie's story on facebook, specifically joining a group called Alamo City House Rabbits.

You were bunny people all along, writes someone or other who has never met us, you just didn't realise!

Rabbit Rescue holds an adoption event at one of the local animal sanctuaries. Obviously we're not looking to adopt, but we go along for the sake of taking notes. A large enclosure dominates the center of the room, full of bunnies. It's quite something.

'You were rabbit people all along,' observes another woman we've never met and whom we don't even know from facebook, 'you just didn't realise!'

By the third time someone makes the observation it has become annoying. It isn't as though either of us experienced a Damascene conversion following a lifetime of rabbit detestation. Both Bess and myself had rabbits as pets when we were young.

Tina from Rabbit Rescue, to whom I spoke on the phone, says hello and tells us how glad she is that we've decided to keep Maisie as our own house rabbit, because as we know, domestic bunnies tend to expire from the heat of the Texan summer which is why they can't be kept outside. The disparity between this information and what might seem like common sense is that the wild rabbits of Texas know to burrow downwards, away from the heat of August.

'Fuck,' I mumble to myself as I watch Rug, a hairy rabbit resembling a toupée tearing around the enclosure chasing the other bunnies like a lunatic. We don't know his actual name, but Junior has decided it should be Rug, which seems fitting.

By the time we're home, we've concluded that the hutch would take up roughly the same space as the glass display cabinet near the French windows, providing we shuffle a few things around and move the aforementioned cabinet to the bedroom; and now that we have a bunny, obviously we don't want him to catch fire when the temperatures begin to soar.

He settles in to his new home in our front room just fine, and I say he because a trip to the vet has revealed that he's actually a boy, thus at least meaning we have no pressing need to have his rabbit making apparatus decommissioned. The cats get used to him. None of the gang seem particularly antagonistic, and Fluffy is actually scared of the bunny. Strangest of all, the faint bouquet of hay and vegetarianism is quite pleasant so far as front room smells go.

'I don't mind what we rename him,' I tell Bess, 'so long as it's nothing silly, and isn't a character from a game or some lame movie, or from a meme.' I'm on the defensive, recalling Junior's previous form for naming critters after arcade game celebrities or awful characters from the Divergent books, which I'm not convinced he's even read. What really sticks it in and twists it for me is that he seems to believe that coming up with names for animals is one of his unique and special talents.

Surprisingly, the boy comes up with Charles, which I like because it's a proper name and because it will also allow us to address the bunny as Charlie, Chuck, or Chas.

Charlie had a bad case of ear mites, as we found out when Bess took him to the vet, but he's been treated and now has a clean bill of health. He seems to like his hutch, and sometimes won't come out, even when the opportunity is presented. In many respects he seemed an unusually highly-strung bunny, at least at first. During the first week of his residence in the hutch, I took him outside for an hour or two each morning, letting him eat grass and experience sky from the repurposed growing frame, now in use as a run. Each day when I bought him back in, he seemed more and more agitated, and by the Friday he was tearing around inside his hutch, thumping his back foot to signify displeasure with the sonic force of a rifle report, then upturning his water bowl in a way which seemed to be saying fuck this bullshit! We couldn't work out whether he was stressed at the change of scene, or whether he'd loved it so much that he would have preferred to stay out there. Thankfully he now seems to have got used to living with us.

Now that we have a rabbit, we've realised how difficult they are to read in comparison to cats. We can tell when he's pissed off, but his expressions of happiness can be ambiguous. We know the ways of our cats so well that sometimes we may as well be having an actual conversation with them, compared to our attempts to communicate with the bunny.

We'll get there, I suppose.