1
Margot
Margot Millwood was a cat person. Unfortunately, no one had explained this to Percy, her cat.
It also seemed that no one had explained to Margot’s ex-boyfriend George that after two months apart, they were getting back together.
George had asked to meet for early drinks after work. Margot had imagined that early drinks would lead to dinner then a declaration that, like her, George had seen what was on offer on the dating apps and realised that what they’d had together hadn’t been so bad.
Wrong!
‘I found a few of your things knocking about my place,’ George said, handing over a bulging bag for life, before Margot could take even one sip of her gin and tonic. ‘I can only stay for a quick drink. I have plans.’
‘Plans?’ Margot echoed as she cast a cursory glance inside the bag and saw an almost empty tube of bb cream and a pair of red lacy knickers that absolutely did not belong to her. She was tempted to hand them back to George with a scathing remark, but she didn’t know if they’d been washed or not. ‘These knic—’
‘Yeah, sorry this is so rushed, but I’m sure neither of us want to rehash the details of why we broke up,’ George continued, then downed half his bottle of fancy, locally brewed lager with almost indecent haste.
Margot could never back down from a challenge. ‘We broke up because, after two years together, you decided that you weren’t ready to even have a conversation about when we were going to start a family and you decided to break this to me on my thirty- sixth birthday.’ Nope, she still wasn’t over it.
‘Only because when I took you out for your birthday meal, you told me, no, demanded, that we start trying for a baby that very night. I hadn’t even looked at the menu,’ George recalled with an aggrieved tone as Margot’s phone rang. She ignored it.
‘I didn’t demand that you impregnate me that very night, I just pointed out that at thirty-six, I couldn’t continue to take my fertility for granted,’ Margot reminded George. Her phone beeped with a voicemail message at the same time as George sighed long and loud.
‘Anyway, it’s water under the bridge now. We’ve both moved on,’ he said. ‘Really, there’s no use in holding a post-mortem, Margs.’
There really wasn’t. Margot steepled her hands together so she wouldn’t make any threatening gestures. She didn’t want a post-mortem either, but still, George could benefit from a little advice.
‘Talking of moving on, can I just say that the next woman you get involved with . . . well, it would be better to tell her right from the start that you’re categorically not interested in having kids. Better to be up front than stringing her along for two years on false promises and maybes,’ Margot said coolly and not at all bitterly as, once more, her phone started to ring.
Again, she ignored it, because she was far more interested in the way that suddenly George wouldn’t meet her gaze.
‘You’re already in another relationship.’ It wasn’t a question. Didn’t need to be.
George nodded. ‘There’s no law says that I can’t be,’ he said a little defensively. ‘Are you going to answer your phone?’
‘Never mind my phone,’ Margot said. ‘Like I said, please don’t lead her on if you’re not serious. By the time a woman is thirty-five, her—’
‘ – fertility could be halved,’ George finished for her. ‘Yeah, you did mention that about a few hundred times when we were together.’
But still, it hadn’t been enough to spur George into action apart from vague platitudes about how Margot would make a great mother. Or how it would be best to wait a year or so and a couple of promotions down the line, so they could buy a house for this hypothetical family that it turned out George hadn’t really wanted.
‘I’m just saying. For the sake of your new girlfriend.’ No one could ever accuse Margot of being unsisterly.
‘Not something you need to worry about and neither does Cassie,’ George said, probably not even realising that he was puffing out his chest, proud as the plumpest pigeon.
‘I take it that Cassie isn’t in her thirties.’ It was obvious that she wasn’t, but George’s faux bashful smile confirmed it.
‘She’s twenty-six,’ George confirmed. He didn’t look even a little embarrassed to be dating a woman fifteen years younger than him. On the contrary, he looked pretty bloody chipper about it.
Margot’s phone started ringing for the third time. By now it was a welcome relief. ‘I really must get this, it sounds like someone is trying to contact me urgently,’ Margot said, getting to her feet and quickly gathering up cardigan, handbag and the bag for life full of mouldy crap that probably wasn’t hers. ‘Lovely to catch up. Must go!’
Of course her handbag strap was caught on the arm of her chair, so in the time it took to extricate herself, her phone stopped ringing and George had the chance to not only have the last word but deliver a pretty damning character assessment while he was at it.
‘The thing is, Margs, I always hoped we might go the distance, but you’re just too much.’
Margot was completely blindsided. Also completely furious. A younger Margot might have sworn that in the future she wouldn’t be so much. But older Margot refused to make herself something less than she was.
‘No, you’re just too much,’ she hissed under her breath, as she fled the chichi little bar in King’s Cross, her hand digging into her bag for her phone, which was ringing and vibrating yet again. When Richard Burton had met Elizabeth Burton for the first time, he’d said that she was ‘just too bloody much’, but that was because Elizabeth Taylor was too much of all the good things that womanhood had to offer: wit, intelligence, killer curves and a pair of violet eyes. But when George, who had a very weak chin and a weak grasp of current affairs to match (there! She could finally admit it), said that Margot was too much he meant that she was needy, demanding and desperate. Margot didn’t think that she was any of those things, but she was thirty-six and time was marching on even if her prospects of being in a committed relationship weren’t.
‘Yes?’ she snapped as she answered the phone to a withheld number – probably someone in a call centre on another continent wanting to know if she’d recently been in an accident.
‘Hello?’ the caller, a woman, queried back uncertainly. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the last half hour. I’m calling about your cat. I believe you call him Percy.’
‘I call him Percy because that’s his name,’ Margot said evenly, though she felt very far from even. ‘Are you the person who’s stolen him?’
Margot was used to Percy keeping his distance. In fact, he barely tolerated her presence. After a long night of catting, he’d come home and scream at Margot until she fed him. How she longed for an occasional dead bird or half-alive mouse – the tokens of love that her friends received from their cats. But just because loving someone, or a cat, was difficult, it didn’t mean that one should just give up. He was still her Percy. Though Margot’s friends called him Shitbag on account of his habit of luring Margot in with big eyes and floppy limbs as if he wanted to snuggle. He’d even begin to purr as she tickled him under his chin. Then, just as Margot dared to relax, he’d either scratch or bite her. If she were really unlucky, he’d do both. To love Percy was to always make sure that your tetanus shots were up to date.