Wild One by James D. Irwin

I moved into the flat about three years ago. The landlord had warned me that I would be sharing with another tenant, and the he was ‘a bit of a wild one.’ I was grateful for the warning, but I assured him that I had probably had worse in my university Halls.

However, to call my new room-mate ‘a bit of a wild one’ proved to be something of an understatement. To my great surprise I found myself living with the famed feral child of the Utomugo River. He had been discovered living amongst panthers or cougars or something in the early 1990s. He had been brought back to Britain to be civilised and properly cared for. Of course he was a little older now, but it was unmistakably him. He wore only a loin cloth, and a soiled but fashionable t-shirt.

I extended my hand in friendly introduction. The feral child (I never did learn his name) sniffed my palm nervously, whimpered, and then urinated in the far corner of the lounge. This was apparently something of a favourite pastime for him.

Whilst he had been taught to walk upright, and could grasp and enjoy basic cable television, he was in all other areas distinctly feline in attitude and manner. In many ways he was the worst chap I ever roomed with. He was a messy eater, completely uneducated, and prone to defecating on the furniture. Of course you couldn't say anything because it was the way he’d been brought up. He was also incredibly poor company on the social scene--- unable to hold neither conversation, nor his drink.

But somehow I can still only look back fondly at my life with ‘the wild one.’ We were clearly both two very different people, but in time we developed something that was a vague approximation of a friendship. In my first few months at the flat he would try to eat me an average of twelve times a week. By the time I came to leave that was down to about three times a month.

I don’t know if he was sad to see me go, but as I was leaving he brought me a freshly dead bird and dropped it at my feet.