Full of Prostitutes

It's about 7.15AM and I'm wheeling my bike down our driveway, about to go out.

'Yo!' It's Shooty the Drug Dealer walking along our road at this time of morning for some reason. 'Whose car is that?'

I ignore him because he's a knob.

'Yo!' again, 'whose car is that?'

I look at him. He's looking at me, and at the car right behind me. He's looking at the car which is parked in our driveway. He's looking at our car, which is parked in our driveway, and has been parked in our driveway more or less all day, every day for at least the last few years.

'It's our car,' I tell him, seemingly somewhat redundantly.

'What?'

'It's my wife's car.'

'Oh. I thought it was Kimberley's car.'

I have no fucking clue who he's talking about. 'No,' I confirm. 'It's our car.'

He wanders off mumbling about something being full of prostitutes, which is the actual expression he uses, in case anyone thinks I'm making this up. It sounds as though he means that Kimberley's notional car is full of prostitutes.

Who fucking knows?

A week later it's more or less the same encounter, except this time he wants to know have I seen a six-year old boy running around. This would be his son. Apparently he's mislaid the kid. You know how those things just run off and who can tell what the fuck they get up to? The question is put to me at 7AM as I step out of the front door to call the cats in for breakfast. I'm still in my pants. The weird thing is that I get the distinct impression of Shooty having emerged from behind the small lemon tree in our front yard, as though he's been waiting, or was lurking.

'No, I haven't seen a six-year old boy,' I tell him. 'I've only just got up.'

Weeks pass and then he turns up on our porch one evening. He doesn't actually knock at the door, instead being content to shout at it.

'You been calling up my grandmother, bitch?' he enquires. 'You better not be saying shit about my grandma, puta.'

All of this is recorded on our Ring, which is a door bell with a built-in camera activated by movement. Following the recording of Shooty proposing that we refrain from discussing his grandmother in scurrilous terms, we have a video of him sat on our porch for an hour between two and three in the morning.

He's back again the next evening, this time at 8PM as we're awake and still watching telly. His arrival is heralded by a loud bang which we later realise was him kicking over our wheelie bin in protest. He doesn't actually knock or ring, and perhaps doesn't understand the latest doorbell technology, again preferring instead to stand a foot or so away from our door and shout at it. Mostly it's about his missing son, the six-year old, the one presently in the care of Shooty's mother and grandmother. They all moved out about a month ago, unable to deal with him, and are still waiting for him to be carted off before they come back.

I catch Shooty's eye through the window and do the what the fuck, dude? gesture. The thing is, I'm somehow not actually scared of him even though I probably should be. Face to face he seems idiotic, even pathetic, regardless of the reputation.

'Fuck you!' he screams with real feeling and gives me the finger before wandering off. He thinks we've kidnapped his kid, or we've been badmouthing his kid, or we've given his kid to aliens who are probing the child even as we speak. Nobody knows.

We call the cops, because when we called them this morning, they said to call them if it happened again, and it has happened again. They arrive after about fifteen minutes and explain to us how Shooty is not a well man and may be feeling confused and upset right now, and we should definitely call them next time it happens.

Neighbours come out of their houses to share notes with us. Shooty has been dropping in for a loud one-way chat with everyone on the block, so it turns out. Someone actually saw him carrying an axe the previous night.

I've identified our boy as Shooty on the understanding that he shot and killed someone in his house five or six years ago but was never convicted because the cops were somehow unable to prove anything; or maybe they decided that they would definitely act if it happened again. However, it turns out that I am in error and he merely stabbed someone and should therefore probably be identified as Stabby the Drug Dealer, but I'm sticking with Shooty, having thought of him as Shooty for most of his time in the stripey hole.

He was in the stripey hole for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. His rap sheet can be viewed online. No actual murder, and nothing sexual, but otherwise he's pretty much done the lot. Also interesting is that the rap sheet logs calls made every couple of days for the last two months, ever since Shooty came home - mostly nuisance and disturbances, but one of them involving a knife. I guess maybe the cops were waiting for a nice even number, like fifty.

Anyway, he's now binned up, presumably medicated, and his goldfish memory will hopefully have forgotten whatever he imagined we did by the time he comes back, which he hopefully won't.

Perhaps oddly, the detail I've found most depressing is his moronic territorial yapping because I've heard it too many times.

You'd better not be saying shit about this person or that person somehow associated with my good self, because you'll be amazed at the vigour of my righteous fury. You better not be saying shit about my hood. Don't you know I be from the southside?

This is drivel you come out with when you have nothing else going for you, when the sum total of your personality is an address and the fact of your continued existence; and so you have to jab your existence at other people like it's a stick with a cowpat on the end, and keep jabbing until they notice, because when they notice you, you become real.

It's exhausting.

Feud

Since moving here, I've done more or less all of the Texan things which establish oneself as part of the San Antonio landscape. I've eaten chicken fried steak. I've experienced the music of both Selena and George Strait. I've been to a Spurs game, even though I found it massively underwhelming. The only thing left seemed to be feudin' with hornery types, and now I've ticked that one off the list as well.

It was a routinely horrible morning at the beginning of 2020, routinely horrible because the year didn't really get off to a great start with three deaths amongst friends and family, one relative sent into something of a tailspin by the same, the demolition of the house in which my wife used to live - apparently because the new owner just wanted something in a different colour - a traffic citation, and the aforementioned wife suddenly finding herself obliged to work from home because the company decided it could make great savings by giving the office space to someone else. Then, as I take out the trash I happen to notice Squidward out in his yard.

'Good morning,' I call.

I won't remember the reply but it's something testy about how he's engaged in the activity of gathering turds produced by our cats which have been deposited upon his property, or at least his landlord's property.

Okaaay, I think, and get back inside.

Squidward has lived here since before we moved in. He used to star in a popular children's cartoon series and I believe he worked in seafood retail but is now retired.

Ten minutes later he rings our door bell.

'Sorry about the snide comment,' he says, 'but you've got to understand my problem. I'm asking nicely, so what are you doing about all the cats?'

We have a number of cats, although not all of them belong to us. Most of them are feral or stray cats which we feed because someone has to. The population is fluid, more than ten, but not too much more. Some of them roam into Squidward's garden from time to time because they're cats and it's cruel to keep them cooped up inside.

We work with people from the San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, which is recognised by the Animal Control Services of the city council, to make sure all of our ferals and strays are spayed or neutered, which usually reduces the nuisance factor unless you just plain hate cats. I've told him this before, suggesting I'm fine with him hosing any that wander into his yard so as to deter repeat appearances. I bought him a bag of something called Silent Roar, which is also supposed to deter feline incursions.

I've heard his objections before and I still don't know what he wants me to say. Maybe he wants me to concede and get rid of them or have them all put down in accordance with what is presumably his idea of a good neighbour.

'I mean I wouldn't mind if it was just one or two,' he says, and I immediately recall that he clearly did mind when it was just one or two. He's been at us since we moved here, not often but just enough to form a pattern built up from just about every conversation I've ever had with the man.

Our first encounter was him welcoming his new neighbours across the chain link fence which divides our respective yards. The welcome was a detailed account of how terrible the previous tenants had been, three young guys who partied hard all of the time. This one always puzzled me because the mail we still get for the previous tenant is all addressed to Maria Ramos, a young single mother who lived on her own with just her kid. This is how everyone else in our street remembers her. No-one remembers the three party dudes. Not even the landlord was able to remember the three party dudes, because we asked when we bought the house from him.

Then Squidward wanted to know whether we were leaving food out for vermin - raccoons and opossums. We weren't, but he established the theme of the great interest he takes in what happens in our yard, the one we now own. I find this odd because generally I've never given a shit what other people do in their own yards, so I find it difficult to imagine that sort of mindset.

Yet here he is again.

He tells me that he's just sold one of his three cars - which I presume would have been the one with the personalised licence plate. The buyer complained about the paintwork having been scratched by cats. Online research suggests that this is actually impossible. Cat claws lack the necessary density to make a mark on automotive paintwork just as I'm unable to scratch the paint of a car with my fingernail, excepting obviously shitty paint jobs where some hillbilly has brought a can of emulsion back from the hardware store in hope of recreating the vehicle from The Dukes of Hazzard. Casual scratch marks left upon vehicles almost always turn out to be from trees, so it is generally believed.

As we have our conversation, such as it is, he takes a call from the disgruntled buyer so I have to stand and listen, wondering if he actually does want me to promise to have them all rounded up and euthanised. He clearly believes it's an option.

The city of San Antonio has a no kill policy regarding feral or stray cats, instead having opted for TNR - trap, neuter, vaccinate, and then return them to wherever they were found. The policy was adopted on the basis of it being better to manage stable cat populations which aren't going to produce a ton of kittens, for without stable cat populations, unstable cat populations tend to move in, bringing with them all the fucking, fighting, disease, and territorial marking you get with un-vaccinated, un-neutered cats.

Squidward gave me a heads up as I was heading out on my bike about a year ago. 'Hey, just a heads up,' he said. 'There's been an Animal Control truck seen in the area. They've been picking up any cat they find and euthanising them on the spot, so you might want to keep your guys inside. I'm telling you this as a friend.'

Even at the time it sounded a little like the five-year old who has definitely just seen a real dinosaur.

More recently he suddenly had a daughter who was going to get rid of her two beautiful cats after ten years, and did we know anyone seeing as how we're obviously cat people and all?

It was a weird question. The daughter was living hundreds of miles away, and it seemed odd that someone in San Antonio had been picked as the potential solver of this apparently knotty problem. It seemed odd that she somehow lacked the ability to seek adoption in her part of the country; and the description of beautiful cats sounded very much like the words of a man trying too hard to impersonate someone who has no problem with cats. It felt as though the answer he was rooting around for was, hey - we'll take them, we love cats, we need as many cats as we can possibly get our hands on.

The thing is, we actually don't want that many cats but here they are, and there were at least five already hanging around when we moved to this street. When it's practical we find homes for them, as we have done over and over. We didn't bring the raccoons or opossums with us either.

Back in the here and now, he ends the call and says the same stuff all over again. I still don't know what to tell him. We can't do anything we're not already doing.

'That guy who lives next to Donna shot someone in the head a few years ago, right inside their house,' I tell him. 'You remember that? I mean with all due respect, while I'm sure we're not the most amazing neighbours in the world, I don't really see how we can be the worst.'

'I think very highly of you.' He seems slightly stunned and is pulling back, trying to be the nice guy again. 'We're very fond of the both of you,' he adds to no obvious purpose, then leaves.

A few days later we get a letter from Animal Control Services. Someone in our neighbourhood has registered a complaint about property damage and nuisance animals, but it's a form letter naming no names, adding that we should ignore it if it doesn't apply to us.

We talk to Susan from the Feral Cat Coalition. She works with Animal Control and warns us that we should expect a visit, and also that Squidward has filed a claim against us with the small claims court for property damage, a claim which didn't go anywhere due to lack of evidence seeing as he'd already sold the car, despite it having apparently been reduced to scrap by cats.

We spend a couple of days shitting ourselves. We've all seen Animal Cops Houston.

Animal Control turns out to be one young woman who turns up in the truck. She's a cop and actually very helpful. The city is mainly concerned that strays are subjected to the TNR process, which all of ours have been, and that we're demonstrably making efforts to reduce potential nuisance - for example leaving sandboxes around the yard to draw the production of cat poo from adjacent properties, which we do. Having been satisfied that we're not the sort of people who end up on episodes of Animal Cops Houston, she leaves and puts in the necessary good word by which we are able to apply for a cat colony license. This means that providing we TNR and otherwise stick to the established rules, we can have as many cats as we fucking well want.

I never had a strong opinion regarding Squidward, beyond thinking there was something a bit unpleasant about him. Now, however, he's pretty much revealed himself for who he is behind the unconvincing nice guy persona. Donna has told us he once called the cops on her son who was playing his radio too loud, so loud that the walls of Chez Squidward were apparently quite literally shaking. Everything about him seems fussy, suggestive of a privileged upbringing which failed to segue into the riches and status he probably believes to be his due, which is why he's reduced to living around here. He'd clearly rather live in Terrell Hills surrounded by doctors and dentists, prissy older women with face lifts, a better standard of person, people who touch base or give you a heads up, somewhere with a neighbourhood association to prevent scumbags such as ourselves moving in.

I've seen our cats in his garden, but they mostly stay away, and I find it difficult to believe in the hundreds of steaming turds with which they supposedly bespoil his beloved driveway on a daily basis. I suspect it's more likely that he simply hates cats and is too finely attuned to how others may impact upon his existence. Anyone living in a town or a city will probably have neighbours, and one has to make allowances for the same or else fuck off and live on a private estate with a high wall around it.

Our cats are all neutered, excepting the Wombat whom we have as yet been unable to catch. There's not much fighting, not even much bird destruction going on - contrary to the received wisdom - and not much, I would argue, to get all snitchy about. It's not like we have a fucking meth lab in the garage.

The next day, a tiny grey cat turns up on our door, a living skeleton who has been seen up and down the street for weeks, getting  more and more emaciated by the day. We haven't been able to get near her, but hunger has evidently overridden her fear, and here she is. We get her to eat, although she can't handle much at first, and over the next couple of days she gets stronger and begins to fill out a little. Once she's up to it, we'll get her neutered and take it from there, maybe see if we can't find a good owner as we've done with previously rescued kittens. Once inside our home, she's friendly, and too friendly to have been just a stray. Most likely she was dumped by some arsehole.

I've never been the sort of person who can simply walk on thinking fuck it - someone else's problem, and I don't understand anyone who is, at least where animals are concerned. I don't understand anyone who sees a cat, raccoon, opossum, stray dog, or any form of wildlife, domesticated or otherwise, and whose first thought is that had better not shit in my yard. On days such as today I tend to think such persons lack empathy and are as such incomplete human beings who probably shouldn't be allowed to raise children.

I am resident in America thanks to a green card and my whole life is here. I'm reliably informed that criminal convictions of any kind don't look great when reapplying for a green card, or even seeking citizenship, and I live next door to a man who calls the cops because he can't get along with others.

I don't think I'll be having much to do with him for a long time.

Face Off in the Parking Lot

We pull up to the fence and get out of the car. It's a chain link fence with a steep grass bank on the other side and we can see into the gardens of houses on Sumner far below. Five or six cats are running up the bank to greet us, tails aloft. We still can't get near them, but I guess they've come to recognise us. Bess fills the two plastic water bowls and I leave a couple of piles of dried food in the usual places. We walk back to the car and watch everyone chow down.

'Look,' I say pointing, 'there's the fluffy one. I haven't seen him in a while.'

He trots across the Walmart parking lot to join the others. The others are a tabby whom Bess has provisionally named Tree Cat, two black and white with markings which give them the appearance of Adolf Hitler - mother and son, by our estimation - a black cat, and a sleek grey who closely resembles our own Grace.

We do this every Tuesday evening on behalf of the Feral Cat Coalition, feeding the strays here and over behind Advance Auto Parts; because there will always be stray cats, so it's better to encourage healthy, stable colonies which can be more easily trapped, neutered, and then returned.

Sometimes we show up and there will be some guy sat in his car. Occasionally it will be some guy who lives in his car. Such is the economy. We leave them alone and they leave us alone, but tonight it's just us and the cats.

It's cold so we get back into the car and sit for a few more minutes, just watching the gang.

Another vehicle pulls up, a red Chevrolet. The door opens dispensing a massive dog, an English bull terrier which runs around the grass, wagging its tail and barking happily.

'Oh fuck,' I say.

'Are you kidding me?' Bess asks rhetorically.

The dog lays a turd, then another one. It doesn't seem to have noticed the cats.

'It isn't er… doing anything,' I suggest, hopefully.

'Let's wait and see.'

The dog, which is fairly large and muscular, suddenly barks and runs to the fence, after the cats.

'Oh hell no!' Bess leaps from the car. I get out too.

There's a woman sat in the other vehicle, window down, playing with her phone. She hears us talking and gets out. She's Hispanic with hair dyed different colours, maybe thirty. Her clothes look cheap and feature glittering panels. I'm about to say something about keeping the dog on a leash but I hear my wife's voice rise up like an angry guest on Jerry Springer. 'You better control your dog, bitch!'

Without looking I can almost sense my wife's head doing the cobra thing, side to side. I'm slightly shocked and even a little depressed that the term bitch has already entered the negotiation process. I don't think I'm going to be able to get the lid back on this one.

'Who the fuck are you calling bitch?' the woman demands, not without some justification, I feel.

I raise my hands in the air like a school teacher. 'There are plenty of dog parks. You can't just let your dog run around here.'

'She needed the toilet. She was crying!'

'Sure, but we're here to feed the cats, and your dog should really be on a leash.'

'There are leash laws in this city, bitch,' my wife proposes, or something along those lines.

'Maybe if we could just not call each other bitch for a moment,' I suggest, but no-one hears me.

There follows some more hooting and hollering and then we're back in our car, driving away with no idea of what just happened beyond knowing that the situation wasn't going to get any better. My wife had a lousy day at work and wasn't in the mood for bullshit. She doesn't often get angry, but when she does it's quite impressive.

'The cats will have run away,' I tell her, hoping that I'm right.

We drive down towards Lowes where we see a cop. Bess took a photo of the red Chevrolet on her phone, so we have the license plate, and you don't just let your dog out to shit everywhere, no leash and with no intention of cleaning it up.

We turn around and drive back up to Walmart. The red Chevrolet is still there, but no dog so she must have called it back. This is a relief because taking it to a cop would have felt a bit too much like the actions of one of those twitchy fuckers who posts on Next Door about strangers seen calling at houses in the neighbourhood.

We go home.

Englishmen (pl.) in Texas

When I first got here, my wife feared that, deprived of the companionship of my own countrymen, I might wither on the vine. Whenever she heard of some English guy in the vicinity she would joke about setting up a playdate so we could meet and talk about Coronation Street and figgy pudding, or something. This was how I met Clive, whom Bess encountered through Toastmasters. Toastmasters was a lunchtime club at her place of work to which she found herself volunteered. It sounded a little like a writers group, but a writers group specialising in after dinner speeches, motivational or otherwise, and as such an unfortunately significant draw for those who enjoy the sound of their own voice without necessarily having much to say. On one occasion of my being away in England, Bess went to some Toastmasters weekend in Houston for the sake of something to do, and there she met Clive.

'He's English,' she told me, clearly energised by the discovery, 'and he lives in San Antonio!'

Clive and I met at La Madeleine, the French style bakery and cafe. It turned out that he was originally from Eastwood, the town in which D.H. Lawrence grew up. He had childhood memories of a few more ancient neighbours scowling about how that young David Herbert had been a rum bugger and no mistake. As an admirer of D.H. Lawrence, I found this quite exciting. Clive was in San Antonio because, like me, he'd married an American. He'd recently bought a disused diner which he was planning to reopen as a hot dog restaurant.

That's all I can recall of Clive. He seemed like a nice guy, but I'm just not very sociable and we didn't stay in touch, possibly because there was never any strong reason to do so. His diner remains vacant. Each time Bess and I drive past, we wonder what happened, and then why anyone would consider a hot dog restaurant a good idea.

There have been others, but once we've established our shared point of origin, there hasn't usually been much else to be said; possibly excepting Chris, another person my wife met through her job. Chris was from Catford in south-east London, specifically from an address to which I almost certainly delivered mail at some point during the early nineties, so that was funny. Chris is all right, but he's about ten years younger than I am with very different priorities.

The celebrated writer Michael Moorcock spends some of the year at his American home in Bastrop county, which is about an hour's drive. I've read and enjoyed plenty of his novels, and we communicate on facebook, but otherwise I'm a bit too starstruck to introduce myself directly; besides which I'm told he tends to avoid the company of expatriate English people. I'm beginning to see why.

Malcolm is Brook's long-distance boyfriend. They met on the internet and now he's flown all this way to visit her, so we simply have to meet - as everyone keeps telling us. Our first exchange is on facebook, through Brook. I tell him Newcastle Brown Ale can be purchased from HEB, our local supermarket chain. I tell him this because American beer is undrinkable, and it's the sort of information I would appreciate were I in his shoes.

Newcastle Brown Ale is even worse than American beer, he tells me with what I imagine to be a sneer. He prefers Pabst.

This places me in the position of fearing that I have become a real ale bore whilst resenting what felt like Malcolm telling me to stick my friendly advice up my arse, whilst additionally resenting the retort on the grounds that Pabst is fucking awful, the 8-Ace of the Americas.

'I haven't even met the bloke,' I grumble to Bess, 'and I already think he's a dick.'

Nevertheless we meet, and much to my relief he seems okay. He works in the oil business and travels the world as part of his job. He's visited the United States many times before, so I can see my attempted friendly advice may have seemed condescending. He's from the north-east and therefore speaks with one of my all-time favourite regional accents. He has none of the abrasive quality I had begun to anticipate.

On the other hand, he begins a sentence with the words, 'one thing your Mr. Trump has got right…'

I have two bikes so I invite him to come over and join me for my daily twenty miles. He's clearly into exercise and agrees because it will be fun.

The morning comes and he's at my house at the agreed time, having jogged three or four miles from where Brook lives. Clearly I don't have to worry about whether he'll be able to keep up.

I make him a cup of tea - something I don't get to do very often - and we talk; or rather Malcolm talks. I don't even know how he got onto the subject, but it's something about long distance relationships. He once had one with another American, someone in the north-east. She told him she would be seeing other people in between his visits.

'That's how women are,' he tells me. 'They're all like that. I don't care what anyone says.'

'Okay,' I submit, before abruptly changing the subject.

He picks the mountain bike and we head out. He doesn't seem to experience any confusion regarding which side of the road we should take, which is a relief. We cycle a mile or so to Holbrook, then onto the Tobin Trail, leaving the traffic behind. He cycles at my side and talks. I realise there's been no point during which he's shut up since he arrived thirty minutes ago. He's been talking all this time. I'm not even sure what about.

His work takes him all over the world.

He's been to Mexico several times, specifically to Tampico. He was reluctant to sample much of the night life due to the visible presence of the drug cartel, something beginning with s, whatever they're called...

'The Sinaloa Cartel,' I suggest.

'That's the fellah.'

We cycle to Los Patios, then on to Morningstar Boardwalk. He says hello to everyone we pass. Some respond. Some don't. I recall how I too greeted almost everyone I met when I first came here.

We're off the boardwalk, heading for the bridge at Wetmore, then up the hill, and all the while he's been talking. He never fucking shuts up. Yap yap yap the whole bleeding time.

We come to McAllister Park, and we're back to sharing the thoroughfare with the occasional truck. I realise - as just such a vehicle approaches - that I've been in the middle of the road, politely attending to Malcolm's never ending monologue.

Blah blah blah…

I pull back and slip to the side of the road to get out of the way, but as I do so, Malcolm inexplicably turns right. My front wheel grinds into the gear assembly of the mountain bike he's riding and I'm off.

'Oh fucking hell,' I scream.

I land on a knee and an elbow and roll onto my back in the grit. He's shouting oh no and I'm so sorry.

We gather ourselves together in a daze. The gears on the mountain bike look fucked, but the wheel is good so we should be okay; except my front tire is somehow flat, which makes no fucking sense at all.

I fitted both bikes with brand new tires and tubes about two weekends back. We push the bikes over to the picnic area. I invert mine and make ready with the puncture repair kit.

'I'm so sorry, Lawrence.'

'Yeah.'

I try to pump up the tire but it's not having it, and I realise the valve has somehow torn itself away from the tube during the collision. 'How the fuck does that even happen?'

'Do you have a spare inner tube?'

'No. I'll have to call Bess, get her to pick us up.'

There's a station wagon parked across the way. The guy comes over. Just what we need.

'You need help.'

'No, you're all right, mate.'

'You're not from around here?'

'No,' we both answer.

'Where you from? Australia?'

'England,' Malcolm tells him.

I'm saying nothing because I'm not having this fucking conversation again given that I actually live here, and anyway I'm trying to call Bess.

'What's up?'

'We've had an accident.'

'Oh no!'

'Can you—'

'I can't. You know I have that thing.'

'Shit.' I'd forgotten. 'Maybe—'

'Let me call Byron. He owes me.'

She calls Byron, then Byron calls me, and I try to describe our location. Malcolm is still talking to the driver of the station wagon. I just want the guy to fuck off and leave us alone.

'Byron's going to come and get us.'

'Okay.'

'I have to take Gary to the vet at about three, so I need to get back.'

'I'm so sorry about this, Lawrence. I feel terrible.'

'Don't worry,' I say. 'It's just one of those things. I shouldn't have been so close behind you.'

'I didn't realise that we were going straight on, so I turned.'

'I'm just collecting wood,' the guy from the station wagon announces. He has half a tree in the back of his truck and a branch held in one hand, recently chosen from the ground nearby. He's clearly having a whale of a time. I wish I were at home, having an ordinary day.

There's a huge crater in my arm, just below the elbow, and yet there's no pain beyond a little soreness. I compare it with the other elbow and realise something is very wrong. A few more minutes of flexing leads Malcolm and myself to conclude that it's simply a bruise. The crater is actually the illusion of a dip formed by the side of lump such as you would ordinarily see on the head of the teacher in the Bash Street Kids after Plug, Danny or one of the others has dropped a housebrick on him from a great height; except it's on my elbow.

Byron turns up after about twenty minutes. My directions were not the best. We lift the bikes into the back of his truck and he drives us back into town. Byron's company comes as unusually welcome. He talks, but not constantly, and I at least feel I understand him. He's a known quantity. Malcolm sits mostly silent in the rear seat.

He feels terrible about the accident, and I'm still not convinced it was particularly his fault, but all I can recall is the constant fucking yap yap yap yap blah blah blah…

Byron drops us off at my place. Malcolm leaves after another few minutes. He's not a bad guy, but it will be nice to not have to think about him for a while.

Get at Me, Dog

It's about seven in the evening, still light, and we're watching King of the Hill. For the past half hour I've been dimly aware of a dog barking, although it's more like yapping because it's a small dog. There are dogs around here, mostly spread out in an assortment of yards so we hear rather than see them. One of them gets to barking and they all join in and it becomes background noise, something you no longer notice after a while; but I notice it now because it's on our porch, right outside our front door.

'That arsehole,' I mutter as I get up.

I suppose it's a stretch to say that we live in the 'hood, but at times you could be forgiven for thinking so. By zip code we're in the affluent part of the city, except we're in the crappy, run down corner, which suits us just fine. It's affordable, and we don't have to look at no socialism signs stuck in anyone's lawn, or have doctors, lawyers and dentists complaining to the city about the state of ours. More obnoxious relatives tend not to visit, possibly for fear of some neighbour stealing their hubcaps, so it all works out quite nicely. On the other hand, we get to be neighbours with Shooty the drug dealer. He's a young man living at home with his family and certain social issues meaning that he doesn't play well with others. He's been inside the stripey hole for something or other, but now he's toned it down, just selling the occasional baggie to fellow enthusiasts.

Once he called out, 'Nice bike!' as I rode past.

Another time he asked if I'd like him to mow my lawn, which struck me as a stupid question given that I was myself in the act of mowing it when he made the enquiry.

That's been the full extent of our interaction, although I once helped his mother push her stalled car to the side of the road. She was intrigued by my displaced nationality and I had the impression she was taking the piss out of me, just a little.

A couple of years back Shooty supposedly shot someone in the head inside his own home. I guess they must have had a disagreement about something. The entire street was full of cops, and even a television news crew, but no gun was ever found. Everything returned to as it was before, except that now I had a nickname for the guy which saves me using the more nebulous those people qualified with similarly vague hand gestures.

Shooty has a dog, a chihuahua. He's had it for about a month. It roams up and down the road, just yapping away. It never seems to be inside his house. It's always there, sometimes yapping outside our window at two in the morning. Sometimes I see Shooty walking his dog, which just means that he walks alongside it as it covers its usual ground, up and down the road, yapping away. We have cats, so it's becoming more and more annoying.

'That arsehole,' I mutter as I get up and rush out onto the porch to chase it off. No-one fucks with my cats.

Shooty himself is there, stood at the end of our drive, stood on our drive. 'Good boy,' he says in his stupid sing-song voice. 'Good boy.'

He's a walking, or at least shuffling, cliché. He makes me think of Chico and the Man, although truthfully I barely remember the show. He's the racist beaner caricature of the stupid, simple Mexican who wobbles his head from side to side as he grins and admits I no know, Señor. It's a bit of a shock to realise that such people exist.

'Good boy,' he says as he watches his dog bark at the side of my house, as though this isn't something the dog would be doing regardless of his tutelage, like this is some fucking trick he's managed to teach his pooch. 'Good boy.'

How the fuck is that good?

I stand on the porch, arms spread like I'm Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood as Ferris drives past. It's a challenge. Get at me, dog.

'You maybe want to call him away - off my lawn,' I suggest kind of forcefully. I should probably be scared of this arsehole, but I just can't get there. I can't bring myself to respect this walking cliché; and besides, twenty-one years as a postman has made me pretty hard to kill. I can feel myself wanting him to start.

'He like to chase the cats,' Shooty explains happily, because like, liked, likes - that be some complicated shit right there. Ain't nobody got time for that.

'Yeah, I can see that,' I say. 'That's why I want him off my lawn. I don't want your dog chasing my cats. Do you understand what I'm saying here?'

Incredibly he doesn't, and I hear some sort of question forming as I slip back into the house and close the door, because I've remembered that there's never anything to gain from getting into arguments with morons, and this moron supposedly shot someone in the head. Additionally, it's mainly just the yapping that's driving me batty. Not even Holly, our smallest cat, is bothered by the chihuahua.

'Something's going to happen to that dog,' my wife mutters darkly, and over the next few days we realise we've both been thinking the same thing. The dog is always there, with his owner usually nowhere in sight. All we need to do is to lure him into the car, drive out to Boerne or Selma or somewhere, and let him go, hopefully to find a better home with owners who actually give a shit and don't just let him roam free. The plan changes to taking him to an animal rescue center in another city, then to the one in our own city because it's not like Shooty's going to bother to check.

One week later we hear Shooty having an argument with the guy over the way. The guy over the way owns a couple of large flat-faced dogs, quite vicious looking. One of them escaped a few years ago and met me as I returned home. It was sat on my own porch growling at me, and not that happy waggy-tailed growl of when Fido or Rags or Scamp just wants to play; so thankfully the guy over the way makes sure his dogs stay inside his yard. Excepting this one occasion, I guess.

'How can you be so stoo-peed?' Shooty is screaming. 'He jos' a leel' puppy dawg! He never done no harm to no-one!'

My wife and myself peer out of the door, across the way, then duck back in before we're seen. Shooty is stomping back to his own house. As keen practitioners of the detective arts, my wife and I are able to ingeniously piece together a scenario equating to what we think must have happened.

The chihuahua was roaming up and down the road unsupervised, as it always is. One of the larger dogs escaped and attacked the itinerant chihuahua. Elementary, my dear Watson.

So fuck it, we're definitely going to dognap the yappy little bastard. Truthfully, we feel sorry for him having such a shitty owner. Maybe he'll have a better life with someone else. We're definitely going to do that.

Then I go back to England for a couple of weeks, and a couple more weeks have passed following my return before I remember the chihuahua and realise that I haven't seen him around.

I mention it to the woman next door, having previously established that the dog's constant presence was likewise getting on her nerves.

'It died,' she tells me.

'What? Seriously?'

'I saw her just putting it in the trash so I had to ask, and she told me it died. It had been laying around ill for a week, then it was gone.'

'Maybe it ate something.'

'Yeah maybe - you know they just let it run all up and down the street. It could have eaten anything. They didn't really care for it none, just let it loose.'

I step back inside, a little shocked.

Poor little cunt.

I didn't like the dog much, but I didn't want it to die. Maybe somebody else enjoyed the constant yapping even less than we did and laid out poison.

Then again, I wonder if Shooty even bothered to feed the thing.

I guess I don't really want to know.

Code

The letters are in white envelopes, obviously something personal and handwritten with some strange code on the reverse. The letters are also fairly frequent, and yet on the few occasions I've met Theresa - to whom they are addressed - she doesn't seem like the sort of person who would spend a lot of time engaged in correspondence. She's young, white, blonde hair in a scrunchy to effect what will eventually be known as a Croydon facelift, and she usually wears trackie bottoms. She has a malnourished face, slight but hard.

The flats along Thurbarn Road, Catford will eventually be described as apartments on the websites of certain estate agents, but right now it's 1991 and they're just flats - probably just fucking flats, if you want to get technical; Theresa might be imagined at her writing desk, pausing for thought as she gazes from the window then dipping that quill in the ink pot as inspiration strikes, but anyone who met her  would have found the image unconvincing.

She is a friend of Princess. Princess - or Emma as she's named on her giro - is a big girl, mixed race with hair in dreads. She has a kid called Shane and she's loud and overpowering, but not confrontational. She just lacks either understanding or two shits which might be given regarding her own volume, and so she booms, and it's always a relief when she laughs because it's with you rather than at you - which is good to know because otherwise she'd sound like she was picking a fight all the time. She's married to Irish Barry who is Jean's boy, or one of them - there's a big one as well, built like a brick shithouse, as the saying goes. Irish Barry is the little one. It's the brick shithouse who usually comes down three floors to meet me at the door asking for his mum's giro. It's kind of terrifying at first. I just hand it over and remind myself that stuff gets lost in the post all the time and it's not like anyone can really prove anything. Also, the residents of Thurbarn Road habitually expect the dole to have withheld their money this week, so it will be a few days before anyone might consider accusing me, probably. It will sort itself out.

After the third or fourth giro handed over to the brick shithouse without ensuing complaints, I meet him in the company of Jean, his mum, and understand that he really is coming down all those stairs to save her the trouble. Thurbarn Road is on the southernmost edge of Catford in south-east London, a couple of hundred yards from roads listed as being in the county of Kent. It's a council estate, or was a council estate before market forces embarked upon the gradual reclassification of its brick and concrete boxes as apartments. I'm in my twenties and haven't been at the job very long, and of all the places to which I've delivered, it's thus far the one with the greatest potential for being a no go area for cops and certain emergency services, depending on which way the wind's blowing. It's not that there's a lot of graffiti or a significant quota of boarded up dwellings or broken windows, but it's a bit rough around the edges. Theresa seems very much at home here.

The letters Theresa gets are often embellished with acronyms, as I realise when I notice SWALK among them - sealed with a loving kiss. They must be from her boyfriend. I guess he lives a long way away or something.

'Do you ever see SWALK written on the back of envelopes?' I ask Micky Evans, an older postman who seems to know most things.

'Sealed with a loving kiss,' he confirms as we eat egg on toast in the canteen. 'Probably someone in the nick, I should think.'

'Really?'

'It usually is, yeah.'

'So what about NORWICH?'

'Nickers off ready when I come home. He might be in the army, I s'pose - posted overseas or summink, but it's usually jail birds write all that.'

Mick seems to know everything. There doesn't seem to be a question you can't ask him. He became a postman after being made redundant. He used to work at the docks up near Deptford and remembers the strikes back in the sixties being broken up by the Kray twins. 'Horrible pair of cunts they were,' he tells me. 'Fucking scum of the earth, and everyone idolises them like they're heroes.'

I ask him about HOLLAND, which Theresa's jail bird also writes on the back of the envelopes, but Mick doesn't know that one.

'How is she?' he asks, because he did Thurbarn Road before me for a couple of months. 'She never looks well, does she?'

'I think she's okay,' I say. 'Hard to tell, really.'

Theresa joins the list of names of those I recognise on Thurbarn Road and the surrounding streets. It's important that I recognise them because they follow me around on giro day, so I need to keep track of who is who. Obviously I'm not allowed to hand mail out to people in the street, but I do it anyway once I know who they are because it isn't hurting anyone and I remember what it's like waiting for your giro to turn up. The pay off, I suppose, is that I get to know the people to whom I deliver a little better which makes the job more pleasant.

Also pleasant is that Jean now invites me in for a cup of tea every once in a while. She's an Irish woman, in her fifties with long dark hair suggesting former if admittedly distant associations with swinging London, and I have the strangest feeling she fancies me a bit - which I don't mind because she's nice and very funny, even if it would never work due to the age difference. We drink tea, and talk about our lives and slag off her neighbours. She has a fluffy cat called Libby who also seems to like me, and sometimes Princess passes through with Shane and I remember that Jean is a grandmother, which is a peculiar thought.

Months pass, skies turn grey, and I notice clumsily rendered repairs to Theresa's front door up on the top floor of her block. There's a crescent of splinters around the lock where I suppose someone must have tried to kick it in. A couple of days later I see her from a distance. She no longer chases me down on giro day, so I deliver the thing along with all of her junk mail. I don't get close but it looks as though she has a black eye.

'I used to hear some terrific fucking rows up her place,' Micky Evans tells me, shaking his head in despair at the mess of some people's lives. 'What a terrible thing.'

A week later there is a note taped to the main door of the block just below the security buzzers.

the Lady in number 37 is very upset as her boyfriend passed away on 22/3/91 so plese be considorate because she is upset

Her mail begins to come back to me marked deceased and not known at this address. There doesn't even seem to be a pattern. Some of the mail is addressed to a name I don't recognise; and some of it is addressed to her, but she isn't dead, just upset - at least so far as I know. I collect the pile of mail on my bay, take a roll of the red stickers which will return it all to the various senders, and wonder whether there's really much point in my trying to understand any of this.

Telly & Poo

I'm cycling along the Tobin Trail, the stretch between Holbrook Road and the Austin Highway, and there's some bloke stood at the side of the path with a camera and a tripod. He waves me down and introduces himself as a reporter - John Salazar for Time Warner Cable News. It's just him with the camera, but he has one of those huge microphones embellished with a square collar sporting the company logo, the kind of thing you usually see thrust into the faces of murderers or politicians as we try to get to the truth of the facts.

'Do you live along the creek?' he asks me.

'No.'

'But you use the trail?'

'I ride along this way every day.'

This makes him happy, and he explains that he's doing a feature on improvements the water company are supposed to be making to the sewerage system. The pipes come close to the trail in several places, and the trail follows Salado Creek. San Antonio is one of the most flood-prone cities in the United States, and the flooding usually pops one or two of the pipes every so often, mainly when the weather turns particularly Biblical and prone to dramatic subtropical storms. This means we occasionally get sewage spilling across the trail or into the creek, ominous black water smelling of toilets in Wigan. The worst I've seen affected a section of the creek which widens out into a semi-permanent lake just past Los Patios. I gather a subterranean pipe of some description burst below the lake bed, resulting in a fountain at the centre of the water. It went on for days and days, looking very much as though it were about to bloom into some aquatic horror from a Godzilla film or one of Gerry Anderson's combined spaceship-submarine jobbies.

John asks me if I've seen any evidence of similar problems with the sewer system. We're standing next to a drainage outlet full of smelly black water, and there's a sign stuck into the earth, informing us of the hazard and promising that a clean-up operation is progress.

'Just back there on Holbrook.' I point in the direction from which I've come. 'It was gushing up out of the manhole and across the road, but it wasn't that bad, I suppose. It's been worse.'

'Is it still that way?'

'It was fine just now. They've put up one of those signs.'

This doesn't seem to be the environmental disaster he's looking for. 'Have you seen it that way in other places?'

A few months back there was a big one on the other side of the Austin Highway, I suppose behind Oakwell Farms riding stable where they have all the horses. It stunk worse than I've ever smelled it, so bad that the trail became briefly impassable for about a week and the air was full of mosquitoes; but they got it sorted out in the end. I tell all this to John, adding that so far as I can tell, none of it seems to be chemical waste, which would trouble me a lot more.

John asks what I think of what SAWS are doing to deal with the problem of poo on the trail - SAWS standing for San Antonio Water System. I get a feeling he maybe wants me to say that I'm disgusted, outraged, flabbergasted, mystified, and all that good stuff; but the truth is, I don't know what they're doing beyond that I suppose they must be doing something, so I don't know whether they're doing it well or not. My understanding of San Antonio's sewer system is rudimentary at best, so I have no idea what it would take to make it work better so as to prevent further poo spillage, if that's even possible.

'I'm sure they're doing their best,' I tell him.

He asks where I'm from and how long I've been here. He seems an amiable and friendly guy. He sets up the camera for a shot which will establish my credentials as a cyclist, just in case any viewers don't know what that is, and so I ride back the way I came, then come around the corner - not looking at the camera - and off towards the Austin Highway.

Twenty-four hours later and I've been on the news. The kid has seen it at his grandmother's house so now I'm famous. The clip is on the Time Warner website, using snatches of my speech to construct a narrative, but the recording of my voice came with a certain level of background noise which cuts in and out as I deliver my lines, emphasising the editing process.

'It's not the worst that I've smelt,' I tell the viewers, implying further aromatic secrets I'm keeping to myself. The pick of the crop of my complaints are followed by footage of a SAWS official explaining what they're going to do about all the poo, then cut back to me as though I've just been told the news.

'If they are, that's good,' eventually concluding with a Pinteresque declaration that, 'sometimes it's worse than others.'

I'm introduced as a San Antonio newcomer, and I look like a fat old sack of shite on the screen. These days my face seems to consist entirely of jowls, so that's how I speak - a bubble of noises escaping like farts from big bollocky drapes of flesh swinging back and forth. This is why I don't like to see or hear myself on film, because it reminds me that I'm turning into Richard Nixon. It's not that I suffer from a dearth of self-esteem or anything, but that's mainly because I tend to avoid all evidence of my long having ceased to resemble Johnny Depp because it's not like I need reminding.

Last time anyone I knew made it onto San Antonio news it was Chun, a Chinese woman who worked with my wife. She was involved in a traffic accident so traumatic that she forgot how to speak English and was only able to converse in Chinese, which never happened, and to this day no-one has been able to work out quite how such a detail found its way into the story.

I suppose I shouldn't complain.

Hustle

I'm in HEB, my local supermarket. I've just ridden twenty miles so my legs are aching. I've bought chicken stock and now I need milk. I'm at the chiller cabinet when she accosts me. She is small with bright blue eyes and reminds me of Pennsatucky from Orange is the New Black. She is animated, fidgety. She jumps up and down as she speaks, although this is almost certainly just how I remember the encounter.

'Can I talk to you?'

I am uncertain. 'Sure.'

'First I've got to ask you, are you old enough to vote and do you have a really cool job?'

What the fuck? I wonder. 'Well, I can't vote because I'm not a US citizen.' You would think she might have got this much from my accent, but never mind. I'm trying to work out what the hell is going on here. One of the store people walks straight past us so I assume this to be a legitimate enquiry by some definition. This person isn't just some crazy woman.

She seems excited. 'This is a challenge for me because I have public anxiety issues,' and she describes what sounds like some kind of therapy performed by inducing random strangers to conversation. 'What do you do for a job?'

She speaks with the cadence of someone conducting an interview, and it doesn't occur to me that I don't have to answer, or that I should tell her to piss off. 'I'm a writer. Well, I write novels. I mean it doesn't pay the rent but...' Already I'm making excuses when I'm under no obligation to say a fucking word. I see-saw back and forth between self-deprecation so as to avoid it sounding like I think I'm some big shot, and a sort of assertive pride: I write books, people I don't know have bought them, so fuck it - I am a writer.

'Have you ever spoken in public?'

'Yes I have.' I briefly recall the open mic events last year.

'Did you enjoy it?'

'It was okay.'

The conversation has thus far endured for mere seconds, but she talks fast. It's bewildering. This is her therapy, I decide, something to do with anxiety. I think this was what she said.

'Do you like to read?'

I would have thought that was obvious, given that I've just told her I'm a writer. 'Well, yes.'

'I'm going down under next year,' she says and describes some sort of competition or something she has won. It seems to relate to the therapy, possibly. 'Can you guess what I mean by that?'

'Down under?'

'Yes.'

'Are you going to Australia?'

She is pleased. 'You know, not many people get that one right. Someone guessed Mexico just now.'

'Mexico?'

'I know - I mean how is that down under?'

'Well, yeah.' Much later it occurs to me that she may have assumed me to be Australian, as some do. The accents apparently sound similar to Texan ears.

'Do you like to read magazines?'

She has thrust some sort of laminated promotional brochure at me, a brochure listing the kind of dull magazines you see on the news-stand - Beef Cook, Men's Trousers, Ladies' Hat Monthly. I realise that this is a sales pitch, or at least it suddenly feels like one, but her angle is bewildering to me.

'I read, but I don't really read magazines. Mostly I read books.'

She changes tack to sponsorship and it sounds like I'm about to be signed up for something. A few months ago I paid twenty dollars for a subscription to the local newspaper - something I have no real interest in reading - because it seemed like the easiest way to get rid of the guy who came to the door. I'm not going to be caught again, if that's what this is.

Now she's making some claim about sales of these magazines benefitting disadvantaged children. It sounds like horseshit but I'm stuck. 'Look I—'

'If you can't do that, well then just a cash donation, as little as—'

'I can't really afford this sort of thing.' I consider telling her that my wife and I are trying to buy our house and money is tight.

'It doesn't have to be much, as little as five dollars...'

'I could give you five pounds.' I still have English notes in my wallet, pictures of the Queen. The joke doesn't work, and I see I have a five dollar bill. I give her the five dollar bill. She carefully straightens it out and adds it to other bills kept in a small folder alongside the laminated brochure. It seems kind of professional, but I later remember that charity workers usually spend five minutes flashing all sorts of ID before they mug you.

'Thank you! You have a great day, you hear!,' and she's gone; and I am free; and I buy milk and cat food and make my way to the till. A minute later I see my little friend walk past accompanied by a partner, another woman. They look busy.

What the hell just happened, I wonder.

Bad Day

The bad day began online, as is often the case, specifically with an email notification pertaining to a new post on Next Door - a social networking site designed to fill in for the role of neighbours actually talking to one another as they once did. Most of the time Next Door will be someone looking for a new home for some bit of old furniture, or offering a lawn mowing service, but recent postings have been rendered increasingly exhausting by our local gun nut whining about liberals, or Obama's plan to take away our guns, or the hypothetical presence of ISIS cells in the neighbourhood. So, having signed up I've tended to ignore the actual website, relying on either email notifications or my wife - who is now also a member - to keep me informed in the event of there being anything I really need to know. The email notification which heralded the approach of my bad day pertained to a thread headed Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, and which opened with the suggestion that I probably shouldn't read what followed if easily upset, and so I didn't.

I've been down that road before with the kind of email notifications you receive on a daily basis if you've ever signed an online petition to ban this, stop that, or to bring an end to such and such. This petition called for the prosecution of individuals who had posted a video clip of animal cruelty undertaken for kicks on YouTube. I won't describe what had been filmed, but the email provided a link to the offending YouTube clip, and by association an image and a description of what I would see should I follow the link. The act of cruelty had involved a cat and had been filmed for the purpose of entertaining the sort of cunts who would find such a thing entertaining; and given that the reason such cunts would even bother posting such a thing on YouTube seemed most likely be so as to upset people such as myself, then it bothered me how the petition site had effectively done their job for them, even without my watching the thing. Hence I do my best to avoid anything I'm likely to find upsetting beyond the limits of my distress serving some purpose.

We have a number of cats, and as I work from home I spend more time amongst cats than amongst humans, so it would be fair to say that I have a lot of time for cats. Unfortunately this often seems to place me in opposition to a certain section of the online community, namely those who use facebook principally to mount a protest against people posting pictures of cats on facebook. I can understand up to a point in so much as that I find the children's television show Doctor Who annoying and headachey, and there tends to be a lot of Doctor Who in my daily facebook feed; but being an adult I am able to reason that if something brings happiness to a person without involving others being marched off to the gas chambers, then that has to be a good thing. Generally I would hope others might be able to take the same view of those who, like myself, happen to like cats. Most do, but then there are persons like the facebook connection I made on the grounds of my having enjoyed his novel and that we know a load of the same people. His posts hilariously described facebook as catbook and suggested that the love of cats demonstrated by others was quite literally ruining his life. Our love of cats was making his existence a living hell!

Stuck in Guantanamo Bay, blindfolded and having a lamb korma pumped up your arse, or noticing that a facebook acquaintance has shared a photograph of their cat - same fucking thing, my friend, same fucking thing.

Then, on the day that Kirby - one of our own cats - went missing, an unrelated Google search brought me the appalling news of domestic cats having been found dead following probable torture by a psychopath three or four miles from our house; and this was immediately followed by the important novelist's side-splitting facebook post proposing swimming lessons for cats using the brick and sack method.

Ha ha.

I defriended the shit BBC medical-drama scriptwriting cunt, and have done my best to try to learn something from the experience, which is why I now chose not to read Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace.

The day was okay for the most part. I cycled twenty miles as part of my new daily exercise regime, wrote the usual bollocks, and then mowed some lawn. Our garden at the back is enormous and so I tend to mow it in sections, one quarter of the whole area each day using a reel mower - that is to say one powered by myself - because I knackered the electric one last year. The temperature differential between Texas summer and winter is such as to necessitate two kinds of grass grown on a lawn. Bermuda grass thrives during the hottest time of the year, then dies away around November to be replaced by rye grass, which itself dies away when the Bermuda grass returns in spring. The cycle more or less looks after itself, the only significant problem being just how thick rye grass will grow in a very short space of time, even after what is only a light rain. It was rye grass with which I knackered our electric lawnmower, because when it gets thick, I may as well be trying to mow a lawn of rubber tubing.

My day began to turn bad as I now attempted to mow another quarter of lawn in the back garden. Rain the previous week had set my regular schedule behind by a couple of days in addition to bringing the rye grass up thicker than ever. I pushed the mower into the growth, then brought it back, then forward again, over and over across the same patch. It was like hacking away, like cutting someone's hair with a kitchen knife. The blades clogged with thick green wads, the wheels seized up, and the grass didn't even seem cut so much as crudely levelled; and although I'd opted for the reel mower on the grounds of its use constituting exercise, this was exhausting and far more work than seemed fair. It took me about forty minutes to make a lousy job of what would have taken ten minutes in summer. The work left me pissed off and rudely aware of our garden growing faster than my ability to keep it all in check. I'd finished weeding the cactus patch a week before, and it had returned to its overgrown state even before I could get back to work on borders I hadn't touched in over a year.

I could feel depression settling over me as it does from time to time, without warning, often even without any coherent reason. The term depression may be misleading, but it's the best I have. I've suffered on previous occasions, and have been given a medical diagnosis of my thankfully infrequent darker moods as something other than just feeling a bit pissed off. I once wondered if it might be hereditary given my grandfather's episodes of clinical depression, although being realistic, he was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress following service in the second world war.

To get things in perspective, my circumstances were once substantially more miserable than they are at present. Specifically there's nothing about my present circumstances which could be described as miserable, or even unfortunate. I have no real cause for complaint, and so I suppose I must have some perverse subconscious need to arrange for my own discomfort from time to time. I find myself pissed off by things which don't matter and which have no long term consequences, unfortunate or otherwise.

I've mowed the lawn and now Bess comes home in something of a state. She too has received the email notification for Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, but she's read it and is upset. I tell her I don't want to know, and try not to think of what I read when Kirby went missing, what was done to those cats over by Windcrest, or wherever it was.

'The signs are all around on the trees and telephone polls,' Bess tells me.

Cats being mutilated in this area, they read. Beware!

I've already tried to rationalise some of the horrible possibilities. The cat was found on Bradshaw, about a mile away from us, maybe a little more. That places it in the vicinity of Catman's house. Catman is either the local crazy guy, or the local guy who just happens to live on welfare, likes cats and could maybe stand to take more care of his yard, depending on how you look at it. I would guess him to be about late fifties. He's tall and scrawny with straggly hair and a huge white beard. His clothes seem lived in and he pongs a little, but I've spoken to him in the local supermarket from time to time, and he's a nice if slightly intense guy. His yard on the other hand is a mess. It isn't that it's full of rubbish so much as that it is left wild and untended even by the variable standards of our slightly crappy neighbourhood, and there's a six-foot pyramid of discarded cat food tins at the back of the house accounting for why the garden is always full of cats. We don't know if they're his cats or just local strays that he feeds. Each time we pass either Bess or myself will submit an involuntary wave at the place and coo, 'Hey, Catman!' in the vein of Earl Hickey greeting Darnell Turner in an episode of My Name is Earl.

Catman lives one block down from the street on which the mutilated body of a cat was found. I know not everyone likes cats. I can easily imagine that a person who doesn't like cats might be prone to dark thoughts if they lived near Catman, within view of the pyramid. Additionally, it's presently spring break which is historically a time when retarded deeds tend to be done with greater frequency due to those responsible being at liberty rather than at school. Given the presence within our neighbourhood of at least one gun nut who worries he might be sharing his road with an ISIS cell, I can easily imagine someone young and morally stunted electing to take a stand against Catman by hurting one of his cats with the added bonus of terrifying the shit out of the rest of us. This is what I've been telling myself, that it might be a vendetta waged against one particular person rather than cats as a species. I tell Bess, but it doesn't really bring much comfort.

It's six in the evening so I cook the dinner - chicken in walnut sauce. I usually serve it with potatoes done in a certain Mexican style with bacon and coriander, but as we're both trying to cut down on the carbohydrates, I've done cauliflower as well as potatoes; but there's too much material for the one pan, and cauliflower florets fall to the floor as I mix in the seasoning. The pans, of which there are three presently on the cooker, have become too hot to pick up without an oven glove, and somehow I now have too little space in which to put anything down. I'm getting more and more stressed as food I've prepared spills from pans onto the tiled work surface and down into the cracks.

'Fuck!' I pick a stray cauliflower floret from the floor, step outside and hurl it against the frame of the porch to teach it a lesson.

Dinner is eventually served but somehow it doesn't taste so great to me, despite which I eat too much, or at least enough to leave myself in some discomfort. Bess thinks it tastes fine, so I suppose that's something.

After dinner we drive to the Methodist Hospital to visit Myra. She fell at the weekend, fracturing the bone down the left side of her face and jaw. They've operated and she has four metal plates and twenty screws in her skull. She looks a state. We're all relieved, but I can't stop thinking on what a shitty world it is that such a thing as this could have happened to the woman.

We return home, and more and more I feel like buying cigarettes, when I haven't smoked or even felt the urge in a long time. I feel numb. I feel like going to sleep for a year or two. The world seems cold and cruel and joyless. There is no prospect for anything good ever again.

Of course I recognise the feelings for what they are, none of which makes any difference to the fact of my experiencing them.

The signs are still up. Cats being mutilated in this area. Beware!

Bess and I bring all of the cats inside, except we can't find either Snowy or Kirby and have to hope they will remain in some place where a roving nocturnal lunatic is unlikely to find them. Keep your cats in at night, was the thrust of Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace on Next Door, so we're doing what we can, not least because further dismembered bodies have been found in the same area. A few of our cats tend to remain inside at night anyway, but the others are accustomed to staying outside and are clearly pissed off with this change to the established routine.

Holly is in our bedroom. Ordinarily I would put her out in the hall and wedge the door shut with the doorstop so as to prevent her waking us up in the middle of the night, but tonight I can't be bothered. I'm past caring and I feel protective towards all of them because they're my family.

I just want it to stop.

I pop an Oxycodone I have left over from harrowing dental treatment some years earlier and look forward to the cotton wool effect. It's not something I'm in the habit of doing but tonight feels like dangerous, unexplored territory.

After I turn out the light, Nibbler or one of the others manages to get our bedroom door open because the lock has never worked and the doorstop I purchased from Lowes a couple of years ago - the only one they had in stock - is crap; much like everything. In the darkness I can feel a tidal wave of cats washing into our room and taking their places on the bed with us.

I don't quite sleep, and both Nibbler and Holly wake me from whatever state of slumber I almost attain with kitty headbutts at different intervals. Enoch wanders around the house meowing his arse off like a little velvet fire alarm every thirty minutes or so, just as we knew he would, which is why he otherwise usually goes outside at night. I can't even be mad at them. I love these cats and would do almost anything to keep them safe. I just hope Snowy and Kirby are okay out there.

They are, and are at the door waiting to come in when I get up to feed them all around seven. So far as I can see there are no mutilated feline bodies on the front lawn.

Even before she is out of bed, Bess looks at Next Door on her iPhone. The police report is in, because this kind of animal cruelty is now a felony. The police report is adamant that the Bradshaw cats were killed by a coyote. It's horrible, but it's at least preferable to that which we've been fearing for the previous twelve hours. Coyotes are a rare sight within the city limits, but not unknown. I myself saw one down on Holbrook over a year ago.

The whole day suddenly looks different. In fact the whole world looks different, and somehow we came through. I can live with acts of God or nature or whatever you prefer to call it.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Dora R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn

In the dream I'm walking up the long road to the houses and buildings of Wimpstone Fields farm. This is in rural Warwickshire in England, and Wimpstone Fields was the next farm along from Sweet Knowle, the farm on which I grew up. Wimpstone Fields was a poultry farm, and Paul, the son of the family who ran the place, was my best friend at the infants and junior school in the village of Ilmington. We lived on neighbouring farms and we were roughly the same size, so that was that.

Paul now lives in Australia, and yet here I am in the dream walking up the road towards his house as I remember it. The large farm building at the end of the road has been converted into a Royal Mail sorting office, and that's where I'm heading, because that was my job for twenty-one years. It's been converted to a Royal Mail sorting office without utilising any of the actual features you might find in a Royal Mail sorting office - packet frames and so on - but none of us are worrying about this too much. We're just getting on with it, because it's a dream and is therefore under no obligation to make sense. I'm sorting letters inside a brick structure within the building, like a rectangular space with an opening for entrance and exit at opposite ends of the two longer walls which face each other. It's about the size of a lavatory or a large broom cupboard. Lee Cooper, my manager at Royal Mail, appears. He looks worried.

My most enduring memory from growing up on Sweet Knowle Farm is of the dark. We were miles from even the nearest small town, or anywhere with street lights. When I looked out of my bedroom window at night, if there was neither moon nor starlight, all I could ever see was black and then the near black of sky up above. Sometimes I saw that the lights were still on over at Wimpstone Fields across the shallow dip of hills dividing us, if it wasn't too late; and on such occasions it felt like Paul and myself might be the only two kids left in the universe.

Back in the dream. Lee looks worried, but then he always had that kind of face. He probably wasn't the greatest manager in real life, for the simple reason that he tended to empathise with those he managed and lacked the nastier, more ruthless qualities required by modern business practice. Some regarded him as a soft touch whilst others considered him ineffectual. Being as I was never that bothered about trying to wriggle out of anything I'd been asked to do, I never had a problem with the man. He was one of the few managers I wouldn't cross the road to avoid were I to see him now.

I do see him now and he looks worried, although as I say it's a dream. He seems to be apologising and I understand when Dora the Explorer enters the building. She must have come and asked if I was here, and Lee has brought her in to see me. Her name isn't really Dora the Explorer but I'm calling her that because there's a resemblance and it amuses me. Dora was my girlfriend for three unfortunate years. We broke up in 2009 because it was either that or top myself, and I know this because I know that I'm dreaming. Dora the Explorer turning up at a Royal Mail sorting office on Wimpstone Fields farm makes no sense otherwise.

She has somehow found a way to print out the entire run of my bank statements for the duration of our relationship, and she is showing them to me with her customary blend of righteous indignation and glee. She has found me out and it makes her so happy that she can barely contain herself, but she is also angry because of what she has found out and because she is always angry regardless of contributing factors.

What are you going to do about this, Lawrence?

She has added up the wages I made during those three years and decided that she was entitled to half of the sum, and now she would like to know what I've done with her money.

Luckily it is at this point that Enoch wakes me up. Enoch is our smallest and loudest cat. I usually put him outside at night, but it has been cold so I've let him stay in, hoping he will behave; but as usual he's taken to walking around the house meowing his head off at four in the morning. It sounds like somebody playing jazz trumpet, so I have to get up and put him outside. As I do so, I roll the dream over and over in my thoughts, hoping to remember the details.

I don't know why I still get these dreams, specifically subconscious episodes in which Dora the Explorer remains very much the passive-aggressive predatory presence she was in daily life. I suspect she might even be pleased to know that her image continues to inspire discomfort, to belittle and hector in my thoughts without any active effort on her part. She didn't really do active effort as such. The eternal failure of everyone else in the entire universe was really more her thing.

The last time I heard from her was Wednesday the 10th of June, 2009, a text message reading don't bother about yr stuff in attic, I'll ask someone else 2 help. I won't contact u 4 6 months.

When I moved out of her place the previous December, I had left some of my belongings in the attic because I was keen to be gone as soon as possible, it wasn't stuff I needed, and I was past caring. Specifically it was a small wooden rack I had made to hold compact discs - about four foot in length by eight or so inches high, a cassette deck which no longer worked and I had been carting around with me for a couple of years for no good reason, and maybe a carrier bag of old newspapers. Together, these didn't take up a great deal of room in Dora's attic, besides which, she never went up there due to being too short to make the ascent from the uppermost step of the stepladder. I couldn't even work out how she had realised that I'd left these few things behind. Maybe someone had given her a periscope.

Anyway, when she discovered this latest crime against her person, she phoned to tell me that the presence of a knackered tape deck in the attic was destroying her life, and what was I going to do about it, and why oh why oh why did she always have to do everything herself? She had never quite grasped just how counterproductive it can be to treat someone like a cunt as you attempt to enlist their assistance, but happily I was no longer obliged to deal with her bullshit. I told her that I didn't know, and that I didn't really care, and I suggested that maybe it would be an idea if we had no contact with each other for a while. The six months passed without yielding any reason why either of us should speak to each other ever again, and so we didn't.

In June 2015 I was back in England, stood outside the Plough in East Dulwich waiting for my friend Pete, when I saw a small, angry looking figure heading towards me along Eynella Road. It was Dora the Explorer and I experienced genuine terror, a queasy feeling deep in my gut; but luckily she either hadn't seen me, or had seen me and was pretending that she hadn't. I ran into the pub and peered out, waiting for her to pass, as she did. I was still shaking a little when my friend Pete arrived at the agreed time.

These days, whilst my life may not be perfect, I have no cause for complaint and there is much which makes me happy. I sometimes wonder over the meaning of these not-infrequent nocturnal visits from the Ghost of Christmas Which Would Have Been Much Better If You Hadn't Ruined Everything and Why Do I Have to Do Everything Myself? She might be an expression of my subconscious reminding me that those who attribute all the evils of the world to a former, now shunned partner tend to be arseholes who might be well-advised to take a look at their own lives; although if this is the case, my subconscious clearly doesn't know what it's talking about, and the existence of arseholes who might be well-advised to take a look at their own lives does not preclude the possibility of Dora the Explorer having been a genuine sociopath. She herself might suggest it is my conscience kicking me in the shins for the burden of guilt of the three years I spent letting her down, ruining her life, and failing to obey orders; but to suggest that, she would have to hear about it in the first place, which isn't going to happen.

Sometimes I compose an imaginary postcard, something I will send from Texas bearing a US stamp.

I've been happily married for five years now, and I'm not sure my wife and I have had anything you'd really call an argument in all that time, so I guess it really was you after all. Isn't it fucking funny how things work out?

Of course, I don't do it and I never will, because whilst the thought may be a lot of fun, it won't benefit anyone in the real world and nothing will be learned. I've exorcised the pain, and have now written up almost every significant or otherwise memorable incident of those three years so that I can at least take pleasure from reading it back as farce. There's nothing left to write and yet still I have the dreams from time to time, although it's probably no coincidence that this is also how Cthulhu communicates his will to minions and victims alike.

The point is, I suppose, the contrast, or at least that's what I take from it. The point is that I survived, and that some days I just can't believe how fucking fantastic it feels to be able to say that; so thank you, Dora the Explorer.

Thank you for showing me just how bad it could have been.

After I've put Enoch outside I go back to bed, but I doze rather than sleep. I get up to feed the cats at a quarter to seven. The sun is rising over Fort Sam, or whatever there is to be found at the back of the houses opposite. The sky is crimson and there's a light frost on the front lawn. It will be another good day, if that doesn't sound too sappy.

Conversations in Supermarkets

I needed to drop off a cheque at the bank which meant that I might as well stop in at Target seeing as it was on the way. I could pick up a jar of curry sauce and that would be tonight's dinner sorted out. For some reason they don't sell curry sauce at HEB, or at least they don't sell it at the branch I visit nearly every day at the end of my morning ride. I could make the curry from scratch, as I once did, but it's cheaper to buy a jar; and in any case I lost my curry mojo a year or so before I moved to America. Every time I made curry I would vary the improvised recipe just enough to keep it interesting until I ended up with something I didn't actually like that much, and which I could no longer reverse engineer back to its former glory.

I'm in Target and I've got a jar of curry sauce, naan bread, Cadbury's Dairy Milk - which is difficult to get here in the US for some reason, and a box of Slim Jims, which is beef jerky and one of the things the kid will actually eat but which HEB no longer sell; and I'm in line at the till marvelling over having just seen copies of the new David Bowie album here in Target, which strikes me as weird. The cashier and the woman she is serving are talking about video games, Nintendo or Wii or something of the sort. I'm not listening but I gather they are discussing video games as something annoying, or which contributes to annoying behaviour.

The person stood in front of me decides that the time has come for him to chip in. He is a young male, maybe about twenty-eight, with a beard and a small child in tow. He is buying curtain hooks. He waits for a pause in the conversation and then contributes, 'they're not annoying when you make $750,000 from each one.'

The two women look at him.

He smiles and adds, 'I own a games company.' He puts a little spin on the statement punctuating the sentence with a chortle at the halfway mark just so that we know he isn't taking himself too seriously, and that he would be equally surprised and amused to encounter someone like himself at the checkout at Target. The chortle is his way of letting us know that he isn't just some tosser bragging to complete strangers in a supermarket on the Austin Highway.

Quick as a flash, I knock his spectacles from his nose and grind them beneath the heel of my shoe.

'Give us your dinner money, Harry Potter,' I growl.

I don't really, but I like to think that I would have done were my actions guided by the greater karmic forces of the universe. Nothing to do with a video game has ever impressed me, and certainly not grown men and women clinging stubbornly to their childhood whilst whining they have really interesting stories now, and you should check them out. My suspicion and distrust is further aroused by how much importance Junior attaches to the games he plays on his iPad, and how he still seems unable to grasp that we don't all feel the same way, that in his absence we don't sit around trying to work out which is his favourite Skylander. I once heard him attempt to dispel an unrelated accusation with I do know a game that I'd like. We'd found a plate of six week old pizza crusts in his room or something of that sort, and in his world the case for the prosecution could be derailed fairly easily with this announcement of some new game to which he'd given consideration.

'What can it be?' we had all asked ourselves over and over, and soon we would know.

I stare hard at the video game mogul, giving him that look which I perfected during my twenty-one years as a postman. Give us your dinner money, Harry Potter. I stare hard but say nothing and in the next minute he is gone. My head is still spinning as I pay for my curry sauce, naan bread, Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and Slim Jims.

They're not annoying when you make $750,000 from each one.

Arsehole.

I get back out on the bike with my stuff in my backpack and cycle through Alamo Heights to the nearest branch of BBVA Compass, along Chevy Chase, then Haskin Drive, then Country Lane - which may well be a lane but is cartographically within the city limits, so who knows? Chevy Chase is similarly a mystery, and my wife and myself presume it must have been named after the actor, although we have no idea why.

The cheque is a refund from the dentist. We overpaid, which is probably something to do with changes to whoever is providing our dental insurance. I fill out a slip and deposit the sixty dollars in my account, then head out on the Nacogdoches Road towards Salado Creek, past something called Sir Winston's Pub, a distance of maybe two miles. It's a route I would have avoided had I not had to go to the bank, but is by far the quickest given that I did. Typically I get a blast of car horn as I cross the bridge over the creek, just as I have been subject to a honking every other time I've cycled on this road. I get a blast of car horn because someone in a truck the size of Gibraltar is overtaking an even bigger vehicle on the inside lane and is presumably irritated to experience the inconvenience of an Obama-loving Communist faggot on a bike on a road surfaced by his tax dollars. How the fuck dare I, he is asking, assuming it's a man at the wheel. I shout tosser and give him the hand signal popularised by Sir Winston Churchill, the man whose pub I passed about five minutes before. I expect that one day I will gesture at a vehicle, having received a blast of horn for no good reason other than a general dislike of cyclists, and the vehicle will draw to a halt and disgorge an angry hillbilly with a firearm.

I suppose I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

I've just crossed the one over Salado Creek, and now I head through Ladybird Johnson Park and onto the Tobin Trail, the greenway along which I cycle fifteen miles every morning. It is peaceful, cold but sunny, with not many others around. The greenway follows Salado Creek which itself crosses an undeveloped flood plain, so it isn't like being in a city at all. You see the occasional building and pass beneath a few highways, but that's about it. I cycle along Morningstar Boardwalk to My Hill, then stop to have my ceremonial pee at the top. I can see the city from the summit, and the airport and Wurzbach Parkway, but I'm fairly certain that even as I pee I will be seen only as some tiny figure in the wilderness, and I can see along a mile of greenway in both directions, so I know when someone is approaching before they see me.

Anyway I have my pee, relieving my bladder and further laying claim to the land between Wetmore and Wurzbach, then I sit and drink the bottle of iced tea I always bring with me. I sit for a couple of minutes then get on the bike and head back.

At the end of the trail I take Corinne Drive up to HEB. I need to buy cat food and oranges and all the things I didn't want to buy in Target because I didn't want to have to carry them around all morning. I have become such a regular at this branch of HEB that I give out Christmas cards. My wife says she finds this branch depressing and it has the reputation of being the 'hood HEB, which just means fewer white faces, excepting people from the trailer parks down by the creek. This doesn't bother me. They don't bother stocking curry sauce because I guess there isn't much you can teach Mexican families about hot, spicy food, but it also means that I don't have to look at all the face-lifty heiresses you see squeezing kumquats and scowling in those other branches of HEB. I fill my basket and unload all my crap onto the belt at Cherie's till. I'm calling her Cherie because I don't want her to get in trouble, although it isn't her name. She's a black woman, about my age or a little younger, with an accent so strong I probably wouldn't have understood what she was saying five years ago. She holds some sort of in-store record for the speed at which she whizzes stuff off the belt and charges you for it. The manager came along and gave her a cheque - her prize money - as I was buying cat food a couple of months ago, and Cherie explained the award to me and how she had held the title for a couple of years by that point.

She's pleased to see me, but then she seems pleased to see everyone and it never comes across as sales patter.

'You got yourself a new one,' she says happily as I fill my backpack with stuff. 'You'll be able to get a lot more in there, for sure.'

I'm not taken aback that she remembers me, but it's weird that she even notices I have a new backpack. I suppose when you work the tills you'll take whatever gets you through the day.

'How much were these?' she asks. 'Two dollar sound about right?'

The price tag has come off my bag of onions. 'I think it was more like three dollars, maybe two ninety-five?'

She shrugs. 'Let's call it two dollar.'

'Three is fine. I don't want you getting into trouble.'

'I'm sure they about two dollar.' Tap-tap-tap-tap bleep and I have my onions.

This is why I like this branch of HEB, even if they never have curry sauce. Even when no-one is really saying anything beyond just the noises of social interaction, the standard of conversation is better; and I don't come home annoyed with myself for having failed to take anyone's dinner money.