Ourselves from an Alternate Timeline

From time to time my wife takes to walking the neighbourhood for the sake of exercise, usually depending upon whether it's that time of year during which Texas is actually hotter than the surface of the sun. On one such excursion she noticed what she came to think of as the Sea of Tails House. The door opened as she passed by early one morning, although she couldn't see the person within. Cats - and too many to be counted - appeared from trees, bushes, beneath cars, and everywhere around, all answering the call of breakfast and making a beeline for the door with tails happily aloft, hence the name.

Many of the cats were often sat out on the front lawn of the Sea of Tails House and we would drive past on our way home just to get a look at them, because we like cats. During one such manoeuvre we additionally noticed a silver-grey Honda Element parked in the driveway of the Sea of Tails House, its rear adorned with a sticker in memorial to Cecil, the lion famously killed by massive wanker Dr. Walter J. Palmer DDS dba. Bess was driving a silver-grey Honda Element when first we met, and we both felt fairly strongly about Cecil's death at the hands of a fucking twat, so we considered the possibility of the residents of the Sea of Tails House actually being ourselves from an alternate timeline, given their having even more cats than we do.

They weren't ourselves from an alternate timeline, despite the evidence of the car, but were a couple named Susan and Randy. We met them one day as we passed and saw they were stood outside their house surrounded by cats and talking to a visitor. We stopped the car and introduced ourselves, although it should probably be noted that by this point Bess had already communicated with Susan on Next Door, our neighborhood internet chatroom, so the encounter wasn't quite so weird as it may sound.

They were about our age or maybe a little older, kind of unpolished in some respects and of unmistakably Texan heritage. Their visitor was Susan's sister-in-law from her previous marriage, a woman originally from Leicester, England, which was weird given the city being in such proximity to where I grew up. We stood around talking about cats, how we too used to get around in a silver-grey Honda Element, and how we knew their home as the Sea of Tails House.

Aside from day jobs, it turned out that Susan and Randy were representatives of the San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition. In this capacity they spent much of their spare time feeding feral cat colonies, rescuing strays, and participating in the trap-neuter-return program. The trap-neuter-return program - or TNR - entails neutering feral cats then returning them to the environment from which they were taken in the hope of reducing the numbers over time, whilst keeping the colonies otherwise stable without anyone ending up in the gas chamber. This has proven to be the most effective means of dealing with feral cats because exterminating an established colony simply leaves a gap in the local ecosystem which other less-settled and almost certainly more fertile ferals will occupy.

As time passed, we became good friends with Susan and Randy, who were additionally able to help us out with some of our own cats through their membership of the Feral Cat Coalition granting them access to certain veterinary services. In return, we took on a couple of feeding slots, and so every Tuesday evening we convey food and water to feral colonies behind Walmart and Advance Auto Parts, giving Susan and Randy a night off. It takes about ten minutes and we get to see cats. The Feral Cat Coalition drops us off a bag of cat chow whenever we're running low, so it's neither an expense nor a trouble.

Now we're deputies, or something of the sort. Susan and Randy are taking a trip down to the coast and have asked us to fill in on three nights of feeding at more than just the usual two spots. We meet on Deerwood, just behind the bowling alley. Deerwood leads into a distinctly knackered neighbourhood of apartment complexes and waste ground at the back of everything else. We get the feeling we won't be seeing yachts in the driveways. Neither Bess nor myself were aware of these streets, despite having lived within a mile of them these last eight years. Susan has drawn a map marked with six feral colonies in addition to the two we already knew about. The largest colony comprises four or five cats, but most are just two or three.

The first is outside Merlin's place, which is at the back of the office of Jan Ischy Prin's law firm, which looks a bit Better Call Saul from where I'm stood. Merlin lives in a trailer situated behind the chain link fence and Susan is talking to him right now. One of his cats has something which sounds like ringworm, he tells us through the fence. Susan describes an ointment.

'We have some of that at home,' Bess pipes up. 'I could drop it by for you tomorrow, if you like.'

Merlin nods an affirmative whilst somehow nevertheless failing to acknowledge my wife. He's kind of old with a bit of an aroma, and we're all trying to keep from looking at what the hell is going on at the front of his pants, but he doesn't seem like a bad guy and he likes cats. The thing that he doesn't seem to like is people he doesn't already know, but never mind.

We move along to where the fence meets the bushes. Susan pours out a little pile of dried cat food and fills styrofoam bowls from her container of purified water. Cats emerge from the undergrowth, one of them Siamese.

'Is he really called Merlin?' I ask, watching the subject of my enquiry shuffle back towards his trailer.

'Yup,' Randy tells me.

'He seems a bit awkward around strangers.'

'You don't want to worry none about that. It's a job to shut him up once he gets started so be thankful; and all he'll talk about is the Bible once you got him going.'

'Oh.'

Randy pulls a face, amused but not unkindly. 'He don't hold with the theory of evolution.'

'Oh dear.'

'Every summer he goes to stay with all his buddies in Mexico some place, like down near Cozumel. I think they're the only friends he really has, and he always takes the coach.'

'What? All the way to Mexico?'

'Yeah - a couple of thousand miles and three coaches, he says. Always tells me, I was sat next to this one feller the whole way and couldn't get a word out of him. I think that's because he starts off telling them about the Bible.'

'Sheesh.'

We adjourn to our respective vehicles and drive one hundred yards up the road. Susan and Randy leave food and water by a tree at the centre of a green associated with an apartment complex. There are no cats to be seen, but apparently they're around somewhere. Next is a vacant lot on Cloudhaven, cracked concrete squares where a house once stood, now overgrown with the usual scrubby hackberry bushes and dry things with thorns. Randy pours food onto a wooden door laid flat on the grass verge. Cats emerge from the house which isn't there, three of them, two orange.

'Hey, Swirl,' Randy greets the smaller orange cat. 'How you doing?'

Next is the apartment block behind the antique castle. It was once a mediaeval themed restaurant, hence the ludicrous crenellations running along the edge of the roof, as on a castle. Then it became a private museum dedicated to the history of film, which I only found out because it was mentioned on the radio, on NPR. This function was advertised by a giant model movie camera at the top of a pole serving for a sign on the Austin Highway, despite that curious parties were apparently required to apply for the privilege of going in and having a look around. Now it's a similarly secretive antique center owned by a guy who allegedly hates cats. We therefore feed this colony in the parking lot of the apartment block, on the rough ground down near the fence. Unfortunately some guy in one of the apartments also hates cats.

'He comes out and tips over the water bowls,' Susan tells us. 'He's threatened us a few times.'

This worries me. Susan bears a striking resemblance to Freida from Orange is the New Black even to the point of her voice sounding similar. Freida is resourceful and deadly, and I realise I have come to assume Susan to be the same. I can't imagine anyone threatening her.

'He spreads dog do all around to scare off the cats,' Randy adds. 'Sometimes he's sprayed the cat food with weed killer, and as you know, that's illegal.'

'You just got to explain to him, cool and calm, you're working for the Feral Cat Coalition and it's all legal and has been approved by the city.' Susan waves the legal papers at us, signed forms in a clear plastic wallet. 'We got a right to be here and if he has a problem he needs to take it up with the city.'

'He don't like me much, I can tell you that.' Randy chuckles. He seems very much a guy who takes everything in his stride.

'Well, we don't like him, and even his neighbours don't much like him,' Susan adds, glancing around at the apartments behind us, 'so I guess it all balances out.'

'You'll give us a copy of that thing,' I say, 'in case he has a pop at us too?'

'We already have a copy,' Bess says.

We watch the four or five cats come out to eat and drink, and then we're off again.

Rainbow Drive has a number of large apartment complexes which have recently been shut down. The tenants were all shipped out and quite a few pets left behind to starve or turn wild. Susan and Randy have mentioned this before and it's been a major headache for them over the last six months. The places remain empty, boarded up behind secure fencing, but the emerging cat colonies seem to have stabilised. They're very happy to see us too, and as we feed them I pet a black fluffy one, which has been my first friendly cat of the evening. I have an unusually soft spot for black fluffy cats.

After this, we're done, with only the Walmart cats left, and we already know about them as they're on our regular route.

The week passes, and then we fill in from Monday to Wednesday as agreed. Our shifts are without incident, aside from a homeless man emerging from the vacant lot on Cloudhaven to apologise for having trespassed on what he seems to suspect is our property. I tell him that we're just feeding the strays, and the rest of the conversation is about how I'm from England, because he has to ask, naturally.

I don't mind, but it's one thing I like about Susan and Randy, namely that they've never seemed bothered, presumably because they already know someone from Leicester so it doesn't seem such a big deal. At no point of my previous existence could I have predicted the arrival of Susan and Randy in my diminishing circle of friends. From one point of view, I suppose they might seem weird and cranky. They have a million cats in their yard. They're about as Texan as it's possible to be. I don't know if either of them have ever set foot inside an art gallery, and Randy's truck is festooned with the sort of bumper stickers you would probably expect of a guy with that beard, accent, and baseball cap - jovial threats involving firearms; and yet I've never known a man appear so genuinely happy at the sight of a kitten. They're good people, honest, and without any strange screwy agenda. In fact, these days and in terms of my present location, Randy and Susan are easily the nicest, most well-balanced people I have the pleasure of knowing, aside from my wife. I'm still not sure if this says more about me than it does about them, but whatever it says is, I feel, probably something good.