An Englishman in HEB

HEB is my local supermarket, our equivalent of Tesco or Sainsbury's. The most popular, most visible alternatives are Target and Walmart, although they don't quite count, being department stores with grocery sections; and I dislike Walmart due to their employment practices, generally depressing atmosphere, and because the last time I went, I was refused entry with my backpack. This was in the wake of a mass shooting in the El Paso branch of Walmart, down on the Mexican border. I guess the staff were concerned that I might intend to go nuts with a firearm I had fiendishly secreted in said backpack, although my actual intention had been to buy stuff and use the offending item as a means of conveying it all back to my dwelling. I have reservations regarding Walmart's commitment to discouraging persons with firearms going nuts given the great prices to be had in their own well stocked guns and ammunition department; although in their favour, they prevented my potentially deadly ingress by posting a crack team of very old ladies at the store entrance.

'Sir, you cain't come in heah wit' that,' they told me.

There are smaller supermarkets such as Michoacana, which is handy for anything Mexican which can't be found elsewhere, but HEB is the most convenient. As with branches of Jim's diner, HEB is to be found all over town, and each store has a slightly different character according to the neighbourhood it serves, as denoted by an unofficial but widely known nickname. The fancier end of Alamo Heights is served by the Gucci B, whilst the more temperate end of Alamo Heights is served by the Dooney B - a joke which my wife had to explain to me but which apparently makes immediate sense if you've ever bought an expensive handbag. The one on Fredericksburg Road is called the Deco B in reference to its architectural style, and the one near the Jewish Community Centre is sensitively referred to as the Heeb.

My local HEB is known as the Ghetto B because we live at the edge of what many rap artists would recognise as the 'hood. Practically this means that white women with face lifts are rarely seen amongst its clientele, the majority of whom seem to be Hispanic, which itself also means that it can sometimes be difficult to buy bratwurst. On the other hand, I feel approximately at home at the Ghetto B, as though they're my peeps, roughly speaking.

I shop there every day, just fifteen minutes as I make my way home from the trail negating the need of one massive, expensive and time consuming shop at the end of the week in the generally exhausting spirit of a mountain climbing expedition. Consequently I know the store pretty well, and the staff have come to inhabit my current mythology in the absence of workmates, even those to whom I've barely spoken a word. Excepting my wife and facebook, they're what I now have instead of a social life, which works out fine seeing as I've discovered that I'm not actually that social and quite enjoy not having to talk to people all the time.

I know to avoid tills worked by Lorna or the woman with Karl Malden's nose. I checked out at Lorna's till on three occasions when I first moved here, and there was a problem every time. I'd bought the wrong one, or picked one that wouldn't scan, or something else which had her rolling her eyes as though I'd done it on purpose before calling for a manager. The woman with Karl Malden's nose seems less contentious, but once stockpiled all of my purchases at her end of the conveyor belt after ringing up the prices. This meant I was unable to pack them into my bag as they were scanned, and gave me the impression that she believed I'd been banking on doing a runner without paying; so that was annoying.

There have been a few whose tills I always head for, based on some vague impression of their being nice people, or at least interesting people - Jennifer who resembled a Mayan princess, and the young black woman with blue lipstick who always seemed unreasonably happy - both of whom have gone on to hopefully better things. Then there's Lesbia, who used to work at Walmart, and I don't know but that's what's printed on her name tag; and no, I'm not going to ask. There's Thomas who has a girlfriend who lives in England, which is how we got talking, because he flew over to see her about a month before my own most recent visit. It turned out that she lived in a village called Stoneleigh, near Coventry. Given that Stoneleigh is so small as to have neither a shop nor a pub, and I used to cycle through the place two or three times a week when I was living at my mother's place, back in 2010, the level of coincidence would seem comparable to that thing about random chimps coming up with Macbeth.

Today I'm carting my seven tins of cat food, bottle of tonic water, and ten packets of Ramen noodles for the kid to Katherine's till, which is rare, although I think this is the first time I've noticed her name tag. She seems okay, but is very, very small, and I've developed an irrational fear of small people ever since I went out with Dora the Explorer. Someone called Brandy is stood at the end of the belt on bagging duty. As they work they're talking about allergies and having trouble sleeping. Katherine recommends something called Benadryl.

I listen in because I've had a couple of restless headachey nights, which I'm blaming on pollen in the absence of any better idea. It never used to affect me, but I guess now it does.

Usually I pack my own bag, but sometimes it seems rude to do so if there's a bag packer stood there looking bored, as they occasionally do. I give Brandy the bag, the one I always bring with me.

'I love that pattern,' she says with a strong Texan lilt, the kind which sounds like words spoken whilst chewing gum. 'Is that like a crocodile print?'

'I've no idea.' I don't want to be rude but it's just a bag, and weirdest of all is that I've had this conversation before in this store with other bag packers. I guess they're just making conversation.

'Did you say you were having trouble with allergies?' I ask her, because I actually want to know.

'Nope.'

I'm confused. 'Was it you who had the allergies?' I ask Katherine.

'Yes.' She squints at me, curious. 'London?'

It takes me a moment to recognise it as a question.

'Yes, I'm from London.'

'I just love your accent,' says Brandy.

'Thanks.'

'My friend is from London,' Katherine adds, then starts on some story about a phone-in radio show which relates in ways which aren't yet obvious, and I'm suddenly aware that I'm holding up the line. I pop my card into the reader and enter my number.

'Do you know what part of London?'

'No, but I can tell the accent apart from the rest.' She means as distinct from other English accents. 'I bet we all sound weird to you, ha?'

'Well, not really. I've been here ten years so I don't really notice.'

'But at first we must have sounded strange.'

'At first, when I first came here, yes.'

I've had this conversation many times before, but it's preferable to the weirder alternatives, such as the cashier who deduced that I have a rabbit because I was buying rabbit food, told me that she too had a rabbit, then spent the rest of the conversation going on about the terrible smell of rabbits. I found this weird and confusing because Charlie, who is our rabbit, usually smells quite nice.

I've had this conversation before, as I say, but I don't mind it at Ghetto B because I know people are simply curious, interested to meet anyone from a foreign land.

'How do you like it here?' Brandy asks, as they always ask.

'I like it a lot,' I say, as I always say. 'To be honest, I like it a lot more than I like England.'

So that was my adventure for this week.

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.