Over the last few months, Percy’s absences had been getting longer and longer and he was getting fatter and fatter. It was obvious that Percy was tarting himself around the neighbourhood, and Margot had had to resort to desperate measures. She’d been dripping with blood by the time she’d managed to secure a note around Percy’s collar.
To whom it may concern,
Percy is a very well loved, well-fed cat. Do NOT let him come into your house and do not feed him.
My number is on his collar tag, if you need me to come and fetch him.
‘We haven’t stolen him, he happens to prefer it round here,’ the woman now said indignantly. Then she must have realised that technically she had catnapped him if he was on her premises, because she sighed. ‘Look, I don’t suppose you could come round?’
Margot would have liked nothing more than to go home, change into her cosies and brood over what had gone wrong with George. She might even have cried. Not for George and his ripely fertile twenty-six-year-old new girlfriend, but because finding a man, just an average, ordinary man without commitment issues, continued to elude her.
Not tonight, Satan. Tonight, Margot was only home long enough to grab Percy’s pet carrier, a pouch of Dreamies and a thick towel so she could retrieve her sociopathic cat from one of the beautiful big Victorian villas that Highgate was famous for.
Margot was ushered into a double-aspect, open-plan living room with not one but two wood-burning stoves, a Warhol print of Chairman Mao on the wall above one of them, and a huge sectional sofa, which would have taken up her entire flat. On that sectional sofa were two little girls – they couldn’t be more than four and six and should absolutely have been in bed at eight o’clock on a school night – and nestled in between them, wearing a baby bonnet was Percy. He pointedly ignored her.
‘The thing is, you have to stop letting him in,’ Margot said to the harassed-looking woman who had answered the door and said her name was Fay and her equally harassed-looking husband, Benji. As Margot had entered, their nanny was just leaving for the day, so Margot didn’t know why either of them was quite so harassed looking. ‘He’s a cat. He’s an opportunist. But Percy is my cat and my opportunist.’
‘His name isn’t Percy, it’s Pudding,’ the smaller of the two girls piped up. Her chubby arm held Percy/Pudding round the neck in a vice-like grip. Soon there would be bloodshed.
‘If he was happy with you, then he wouldn’t keep coming here,’ her older sister said with an opaque stare, which was similar to the venomous expression on Percy’s face as he now gave Margot the full weight of his attention.
Margot’s boss, Tansy, had told her not to get a tortoiseshell cat. ‘All cats have a tendency to be bastards but torties are the worst,’ she’d advised when Margot had been scanning cat rescue websites during kitten season a few years before. There were many times that Margot had wished that she’d listened to Tansy but now, she wasn’t giving up on her cat without a fight.
There was bloodshed. Margot’s blood that Percy shed as she tried to herd him into his carrier, an exercise that necessitated throwing the thick towel over Percy to incapacitate him which also ensured that he couldn’t do much harm. Unfortunately, he managed to work a paw free and inflict considerable damage on Margot’s right hand, which already bore many Percy-inflicted scars.
The little girls were crying. Fay had disappeared with the words, ‘God, I need a drink’ and Benji kept saying, ‘Are you sure he’s your cat?’
Oh yes, he was Margot’s cat all right. The latest in a long line of men who thought that the grass was much, much greener somewhere else.
‘Fine,’ Margot said, when Fay returned with a first-aid box. ‘Fine. You know what? You can have him.’
Fay and Benji were very gracious in victory and the youngest girl, Elise, came over to give Margot a consolatory hug as Fay carefully dabbed antiseptic cream on Margot’s hand while Benji wondered aloud if she needed stitches.
They kept calling her Marge until at last Margot pointed out that it was ‘Margot, Mar-go. Marge is a butter substitute and I’m not a substitute’, even though her substitution status had been a recurring theme that evening.
Benji gave Margot a lift home, but that was only so he could pick up Percy’s things. The cat scratching tower, the countless toys, the very expensive cat food which was all he would eat. Margot boxed it all up, refused to take payment for any of it and came to a momentous decision after she’d shut the door.
‘That is it! From now on, I’m a dog person.’
2
Will
Roland wore black turtlenecks, cream chinos and horn-rimmed glasses. Come winter, come summer, come the in-between seasons, his black turtlenecks, chinos and specs were absolute and his face impassive.
For a whole year Will had been coming, once a week, to Roland’s consulting room just off Kilburn Park Road, and yet Will was sure that without the turtlenecks and the horn-rimmed glasses, he’d never be able to pick Roland out of a police line-up.
Maybe that was the point.
‘So, you’re quite sure that you want to pause our sessions?’
Will realised that while his own mind had been wandering, Roland’s gaze had been fixed on him.
‘Not pause, stop,’ Will said firmly, though there was always something about Roland’s expressionless expression that made him want to squirm. ‘I said right at the beginning that I was going to give myself a year of therapy to fix myself.’
As soon as he said it, Will wished he hadn’t. Roland adjusted his spectacles so he could peer over the top of them. ‘Fix?’ he queried mildly. ‘I seem to recall that at the beginning of our very first session we also discussed that this wasn’t a fix but a process. An ongoing process.’
‘Yes, but I only wanted to ongo it for a year,’ Will reminded him. Thanks to Roland, he no longer felt uncomfortable about confrontation. ‘To favour a goal-orientated approach. Well, I’ve hit my targets, so now is a good time, a great time, to move on. When I lived in New York, there were people who’d been in therapy for years, decades, with no end in sight.’
Will didn’t add that most of them were completely dysfunctional because the therapy had invaded every aspect of their lives, instead of improving it.
‘Well, you have made a lot of progress,’ Roland conceded. ‘Put a lot of work in, and I don’t say that lightly because it’s been challenging at times, accessing memories that have been buried for so long.’
Which was another reason why Will deserved time off for good behaviour. A year ago, he’d been a shell, a husk. Burned out. Not fit for purpose. And now? Now, he might still be on a fact-finding mission to discover who he was, but he certainly wasn’t any of the things that he used to be. ‘I have come a long way.’
‘And the panic attacks have abated?’
‘Haven’t had one for months.’
‘And your GP agreed that you could come off the antidepressants?’
Will nodded. ‘I started reducing the dose about five months ago, stopped taking them completely two months ago.’
‘And you’re ready to make the emotional connections that have been missing in your life?’