SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (30 page)

They
were silent for a while then Suki said, ‘I heard about this bloke, right, got a
terrible shock, right? But instead of his hair turning white, it turned red!’

‘What
colour was it before?’

‘Dunno,
brown I expect.’

That
morning I had sat in front of my unfinished poem for what I think will be the
last time. I had gathered up the bits of paper and put them in a drawer: not
even the fifty-four lines of ‘Kubla Khan’.

There
was high-pitched mewling from outside in the back garden, I looked up. Adrian
jumped up onto the window sill and stood there crying to be let in, his pink
mouth opening and closing in petulant supplication. The others seemed to be too
sunk into the furniture to get up so I went over to the window and opened it,
the cat jumped down into the room and began clawing the moquette of the one
Hille armchair that had so far escaped his depredation. I sat back down and the
cat climbed onto my lap, sinking his claws into my best Gieves and Hawkes
moleskin trousers and coiling himself with his nose up his bottom; after a few
seconds he began purring.

Mercy
said to me, ‘You got a cat after all, didn’t you, Hillary? You said the first
time we met in that shop, you said that you thought you couldn’t stand the pain
of having another cat. That you get to a point in life where the pain wipes out
the pleasure. Where you’d rather settle for no pleasure than pay for it in
pain. But really it’s better, isn’t it, having another heartbeat around the
house and all that?’

‘Well,
I’m not sure …’ I said, but then I saw she was looking at me with an
expression of such savage entreaty on her face that I changed my tone and said
in a cheerier voice that sounded in my head like clattering tin trays, ‘Yes, it’s
better having one rather than not having one …

Then I
added, ‘… just.’