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.

It's Not Always Good to Talk

I'm very glad that you asked me that question...

I'm being interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. The interview lasts about an hour and is conducted over a Skype connection. Most of it is about my science-fiction novel, Against Nature, which was published by Obverse Books back in 2013. The interview is fun but exhausting, and I make the mistake of attempting to respond to certain questions with answers beyond the range of my ability to articulate them. I write a lot but I'm not very sociable and I don't engage in profoundly intellectual conversation on a daily or even yearly basis, which leaves me ill-equipped to discuss certain aspects of my own work. If I were able to tell you that, I should have said, I wouldn't have needed to write it in the first place.

Skype is a programme which facilitates communication between computers in different parts of the world. It makes use of a webcam so that you can see who you're talking to, and the webcam usually has a microphone built into it. My interview is conducted in audio only, but the webcam is nevertheless plugged in so that I can use the microphone, and thus am I able to watch a video image of myself as I speak. I'm sat in front of the Mexican national flag which I have hung over the back of some shelving. I'm going cross-eyed and duck-faced as I scrabble around in my vocabulary and attempt to form sentences. My hand wheels in the air at the side of my tilted head in illustration of something or other and I realise I've somehow turned into Suzanne from Orange is the New Black, and that I sound demented.

The thing is - well it's sort of, you know—what I'm getting at is that I was always looking for something. I mean I used to be into flying saucers and all that sort of rubbish, but I—well, it was like this. I discovered... I suddenly... I was looking for like a total... You know, I was always interested in ancient Egypt. I don't have the words here - what I mean to say...

As we conclude the interview, I tell them that I'm aware of having been unable to form sentences, or indeed to say anything useful, but they insist that I did fine and that they'll be able to edit it down to just the good stuff. I leave it at that.

I'm woken at three in the morning by my telephone beeping so as to alert me to the fact of the battery having run low and that it requires recharging. I've forgotten to switch the phone off because I barely even use the thing. Most of the time I keep it charged just in case my wife has an emergency and needs to reach me.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I swear and scrabble around in the darkness, struggling to unwrap the phone from my pants in the laundry basket at the side of the bed.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I turn the fucking thing off, then lie wide awake for the next few hours. I have David Bowie's Never Get Old stuck in my head and my thoughts are cycling, over and over - what I should have said, how I shouldn't have agreed to the interview in the first place, and how I wish there were a specific individual responsible for the fact of my stupid fucking phone having an alarm which beeps when the battery needs recharging so that I could track him down and smash his kneecaps and elbows with a ball-peen hammer.

I have to get up at seven, so naturally I lie awake, hot and restless and pissed off until approximately ten to seven.

I sleep briefly.

I get up at seven to feed a million cats, then come straight back to bed as my wife gets up and goes to work. I sleep until about ten and have a dream in which I am menaced by Adrian Meredith, an older boy who didn't seem to like me very much when I was at junior school. He's pushing me around. He needs me to do certain things. He wants me to go into a pawn shop and buy back his girlfriend's gold necklace, the one he pawned to them in the first place.

I get up and have a slow, crap day - headachey with a sore throat, so the oak pollen is probably high and it's something like 98° Fahrenheit outside.

In the evening my wife and I eat at Hung Fong on Broadway because the kid is with his dad tonight, and I've found myself unable to venture out onto the surface of Venus so as to visit the supermarket from which I would ordinarily purchase the ingredients for whatever I would have cooked as our evening meal. After Hung Fong we visit Northstar Mall because my wife needs the battery of her iPhone replaced. It charges, but only just, and she's had it about five years. She tried the AT&T store, but that line of enquiry went about as well as we expected it to, so now we're at the Apple Store in the mall. It's like a dining hall designed by IKEA, pine benches and the kind of stools you would expect to find in a pretentious kitchen. The place is packed, but it's hard to tell whether anything is actually happening. Everyone is stood or sat around, pissing about on MacBooks, chatting to staff without any obvious sense of urgency. The staff can be identified by their all being in their early twenties and skinny with beards, excepting the single female. Some of them also have ear gauges, and I expect there's a hat rack laden with fedoras somewhere at the rear of the store, ready for when they all fuck off home at the end of the working day - if we're going to expand the definition of work to such limits as to incorporate this bunch.

We can't tell what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to see. Each one of the staff is chatting to someone, busy in his own way. There's no queue nor till nor any obvious point of focus to the store, because that would be like sooo predictable. There's a bench at the far end of the store identified as the genius bar by text printed on the wall alongside a symbol resembling an atom with neutrons and protons in orbit, possibly so as to make a slightly mystifying association with Albert Einstein. I am familiar with the Apple corporation's repurposing of the term genius. I have iTunes on my computer, and the genius feature is something which plays my tracks at random. This seems a very loose application of the term to me, something relating to the fetishisation of the mix tape, now that we've rendered cassettes obsolete and decided that they were called mix tapes, which they never were. It's because simply choosing something is now considered a wildly creative act, so when you're putting together your mix tape and you have Madonna's Material Girl followed by something from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that makes you a genius, yeah?

Even so, I can't tell what they're doing at the genius bar, and it isn't even the sort of bar at which you could buy the beer necessary for some of this arrangement to make sense.

'Maybe we just send out a vibe,' I suggest, 'or maybe if we take our clothes off...'

A young man - I'd guess in his early twenties - with a beard takes my wife's telephone number. It's a little before eight in the evening.

'I'll send you a text when someone is free,' he tells her. 'It shouldn't be much more than three quarters of an hour.'

We leave the store and take the escalator to the upper level, the food court I suppose you would call it. We buy ice cream from Marble Slab - because there's always room for ice cream - and sit and wait for the text summons to come to the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery.

We are summoned as we head back to the store just in case they've sent the message and we failed to receive it on the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery. The time is 8.45PM, and we waste another five minutes back in the store trying to work out who has summoned us. Eventually a young man with a beard identifies himself and shows us to a couple of stools. 'Someone will be with you shortly,' he tells us.

We wait.

I reintroduce the idea of taking our clothes off, but Bess isn't so keen. I move the stool away from the bench so that I can lay on it on my stomach. I stretch my legs out back and spread my arms. 'I'm a plane!' I tell Bess.

This doesn't work either so I try to look like I'm buying something. I take a box from the shelf and pull faces so as to suggest that I'm weighing up the pros and cons of buying a household lighting system which can be controlled from your iPhone. I guess my pantomime isn't very convincing because no-one comes to manage the potential sale. Try as I might, I am unable to impersonate interest in something which no-one sane could ever possibly need in their home.

The store begins to empty. An assistant with an unusually prodigious beard leaves.

'That one must be their king,' I point out, having decided they're like an ant colony. I say it loud in the hope of annoying somebody.

Twenty minutes have passed and a young man finally comes to see what's up with my wife's iPhone. Weirdly, he has no beard and he's kind of chunky.

'It's the battery,' we say.

He takes the iPhone into the back room in order to perform a full diagnostic. 'It's the battery,' he tells us fifteen minutes later.

I think of the phone guy in Earlsdon High Street back in Coventry, England; forever sat there yacking away to his ancient sidekick, always with a fag on the go. It's my phone, you just about manage as he snatches it from your hand, presses a few buttons, pulls a face, rips the back off, replaces something, then chucks it back.

'Call it a tenner, mate.'

We're a long way from Earlsdon High Street, and still some way from a fully operational iPhone. It's booked in, but it will take an hour and a half and my wife will be able to collect it tomorrow around noon.

'An hour and a half?' Bess is sceptical. 'There's a guy on YouTube who does it in twenty minutes.'

'Well there are other jobs we have, cracked screens to be replaced and so on.'

Neither of us can be bothered to point out that these alleged cracked screens are nothing to do with us. We just want to go home.

On the way to the parking lot we pass a Microsoft concession out in the mall. I wonder out loud if they have fights with the Apple colony, like the Bash Street Kids and their rivals in the pages of the Beano.

'Maybe that's where the King went. Maybe someone challenged him to a duel?'

We may never know the answer.