Читать книгу Ten Things My Cat Hates About You - Lottie Lucas - Страница 12

I wake with a start, jerking into an upright position in bed. Darkness envelops the room, broken only by a pale lilac light creeping beneath the curtains.

Momentarily disorientated, I fumble for the bedside lamp, relieved when its warm glow chases away the shadows, revealing the familiar outline of my bedroom. Everything looks as it should be, at least. Yesterday’s dress thrown over the back of the pink velvet chair, the cream painted wardrobe hulking in the corner, the door slightly ajar as always. I bought it at an antiques centre several years ago, and it’s never closed properly. My dressing table is littered with various paraphernalia: bottles of nail polish, lipsticks, a piece of amethyst given to me by my mother, its faceted crystals gleaming in the lamplight.

I sit there for a moment, the duvet drawn up under my chin for warmth, wondering what might have woken me. Normally I sleep fairly soundly. Unless I’m having a nightmare, and usually, if I’ve had one of those, I know all about it. I wake up cold, shaking, the remnants of the dream still clinging to the edges of my mind like cobwebs.

No, I’m pretty certain that I was sleeping quite peacefully. So what …?

And then I hear it. A deafening, screeching sound fills the air, followed by yowling. It sounds like it hails from the bowels of the earth itself, but I know better than that.

Fully awake now, I throw the covers aside, heart already in my mouth. As I clatter down the stairs, knotting my kimono at my waist, I keep telling myself that I’m overreacting. That of course it’s not Casper. That I’ll open the kitchen door and he’ll be safely there, all curled up in his …

All right, so he’s not in his basket. He’s not on the windowsill either. Or on the chair. He’s nowhere to be seen.

Really, who was I trying to kid? If there’s a fight going on, he’s bound to be involved. I’ve never known him to miss one yet.

The hideous screaming sound has stopped and I waver in the middle of the room, trying to decide what to do next. Then, with a huff of resignation, I pull on my flowery wellington boots, which now live permanently next to the back door. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to take a nightly sojourn into the garden in pursuit of my errant pet. Far from it. But I know I’ll never get back to sleep until I’ve reassured myself that he’s all right.

“Casper?” I call softly, even as I do so wondering why I’m bothering. As if that cacophony hasn’t woken the whole street anyway. He certainly has a way of making me unpopular with the neighbours.

Tentatively, I venture out onto the lawn, my boots sinking into the damp grass. The first light of dawn is bleeding into the sky, washing the garden in an ethereal pink glow. Dewdrops have transformed the lawn into a shimmering carpet and the air is bitingly cold, invigorating in its sharpness. It would be stunningly beautiful, I suppose, if I weren’t too preoccupied with worry to pay it much attention.

I check half-heartedly under a few bushes, already knowing that he won’t be there. He’ll turn up when he’s good and ready, and not a moment sooner. I don’t come across his assailant either. Or – and I have to allow for this possibility – his victim. I’m not so blinded by love that I don’t know what he’s like. He’s just as likely to start a fight as he is to get drawn into one.

Giving up the search, I trudge back into the kitchen to find a tousled-looking Freddie standing there, yawning extravagantly.

“What’s going on? I got up for a glass of water and saw that the lights were on downstairs.”

And yet, somehow, the screeching and caterwauling completely passed him by. My brother would make a fascinating case for medical science. His tendency towards complete obliviousness never fails to astonish me. I swear he could sleep through the apocalypse with no trouble at all.

“I can’t find Casper,” I explain, stamping my boots on the mat to knock the excess mud off them. “He’s not in the garden.”

Freddie stares at me like I’m utterly insane. “Clara, he’s a cat. What do you expect? That he’s going to just stay in one place?”

“I know, but …” How can I explain it to him? How can I tell him how much Casper means to me? Of course, to him, it seems ridiculous. Even to my own ears it sounds it.

At that moment the cat flap rattles and Casper slinks into the kitchen, drawing up short to look askance at us both. For a cat, he has a surprisingly expressive face, and I can tell that he’s wondering what the humans are doing up at this hour.

“There you are.” Instinctively, I move towards him, the relief in my voice audible.

Certainly, he’s been in a tussle of sorts; his fur is all standing on end, his eyes bright and feverish. But he looks okay, at least. To be honest, I feel a bit foolish now, having got into such a state about it all.

“See, he’s fine.” Freddie’s already halfway through the doorway, stifling another gargantuan yawn. “Nothing to worry about. Now can we go back to bed?”

“Freddie …” I’ve drawn my hand away from Casper’s side to find it stained red. For a moment, I can only stare at it, frozen.

“What?” He turns, then blanches. “Oh, God. Is that …? What do we do?”

Casper’s leaning into me now, obviously weakening. I shake the fog from my brain, willing myself to stay focused. This is no time to panic.

“Get the cat basket out of the cupboard under the stairs, will you? We’re going to have to make a dash across town.”

***

“What were you even thinking?” I pant as we cross the market square. Rearranging my grip on the basket, which was digging painfully into my fingers, I continue. “Why must you get yourself into every fight going?”

Casper looks up at me balefully from where he’s nestled on his favourite blue blanket. I know he must be feeling bad because Freddie and I managed to get him into the basket with surprisingly little fuss. Usually, the very sight of it is enough to send him into histrionics.

I longingly watch a car trundle past. There’s no point in my owning a car here in Cambridge; in fact, very few people do. Normally, I’m quite content to get around on foot, although this morning that’s not so much the case, what with my rather unwieldy cargo.

I’m beginning to wish I’d just bitten the bullet and called a cab. I’d forgotten how heavy Casper starts to feel by the time you’ve lugged him halfway across town. Failing that, I should have let Freddie bring him.

“Besides, you’re not exactly a spring chicken any more, are you?” I point out, stopping on the corner to catch my breath. “Don’t you think you should be past all of this by now? Isn’t it time to retire to your basket and let the younger toms have it out?”

Actually, that’s probably a bit unfair. The truth is, I have no idea how old Casper is. When I first took him in, the vet estimated him to be somewhere between four and twelve.

Which is … you know, helpful.

In any event, he’s old enough to know better. But perhaps not quite at the pipe and slippers stage just yet.

He obviously feels the same because he glowers at me before turning around in his basket so that he’s facing the other way.

“Fine, be like that,” I mutter. “It was only a suggestion. Ah, here we are.”

Thank God the vet opens early, I think as I wrestle my way, cat basket in arms, through the glass doors. Inside the cool grey interior, all is calm. There are a couple of people already in the waiting room, baskets by their feet. Classical music floats through the air. Behind the curved steel desk, a receptionist taps away efficiently at her keyboard.

“Good morning,” I say, still slightly breathless. “I need to make an emergency appointment.”

She looks up, a pleasant smile on her face. Then her eyes travel down to Casper, filling with dread. “Oh, no,” she says emphatically. “Absolutely not. That cat is banned!”

I’d anticipated that we’d come up against this issue, so I’m already prepared with a response. “Look, I know he hasn’t always been the easiest of patients …”

“Easiest?” Her voice comes out as a strangled shriek. “He’s an absolute nightmare. He can’t possibly come in here.”

Casper, who’s been quietly slouched in the corner of his basket, opens one eye and emits a faint hiss. The receptionist pales, shrinking behind the counter.

“You’re not exactly helping yourself,” I murmur at him out of the corner of my mouth. “Just work with me here, all right?”

He falls silent, which I take as tacit agreement.

I turn back to the receptionist. “If you could just give him one more chance …”

“He’s already had more chances than he deserves,” she retorts. She holds up her hand, beginning to tick off her fingers, and immediately I feel a sense of foreboding.

“There’s no need—” I begin hurriedly, but it’s too late.

“First he broke the brand new scales.”

“That was an accident,” I say defensively. “He didn’t mean to do it.”

She gives me a hard stare. “He kicked them off the bench. There was nothing accidental about it.”

I notice that the other people in the waiting room are pretending very hard not to listen, but with little success. I feel heat rising beneath my skin.

“Then, of course, there was the time he escaped and ran all around the surgery.” She’s warming to her theme now. I could swear she almost seems to be enjoying herself. “We had to have half the staff pulled away from their duties to chase him around. Twenty minutes it took us to catch him, and even then we had to throw a towel over him to do so.”

“He must have panicked. No one likes to see a thermometer heading towards their rear end. Isn’t that right, Casper?” I appeal to him.

He just looks back at me disdainfully. If cats could roll their eyes, I’m certain he’d be doing so right now.

“And then, of course,” the receptionist trills, triumph colouring her voice, “the final straw was when he bit poor Stacey. She was traumatised.”

I wince. That was pretty bad. Who knew a tiny nip from a cat could produce so much blood?

“He sensed that she was nervous, that’s all,” I reply quickly, with a mollifying smile. “Inexperienced. Perhaps he took advantage a little, I’ll admit. I’m sure it happens all the time.”

She looks at me sourly. “It doesn’t.”

I feel my face fall. Wow, she’s a tough nut. I thought it would be easier than this.

“We had to sign her off with stress, you know,” she’s saying now. “It was weeks before she felt up to facing another patient on her own.”

I sense that I’m getting nowhere with this line of attack. She looks completely and utterly unmoved. If anything, she actually looks even stonier than she did when we first came in. So, flinging my pride out of the way, I resort to the only tactic still available to me: shameless pleading.

“Look …” I put Casper down on the floor, where he immediately starts terrorising a Jack Russell sitting under the nearest chair. Placing both hands flat on the counter, I look her straight in the eye. “I understand why you don’t want him in here, I do. But I haven’t had time to find him another vet just yet, and now he’s injured. I don’t know where else to take him. So will you please just see him once more? Then I promise you solemnly that I will take him far away from here, find another surgery, and we will never darken your door again.”

For the briefest of moments she looks on the verge of relenting. Then the Jack Russell whimpers from beneath the seat, cowering away from Casper. She purses her lips, and I know that I’ve lost her.

“I’m sorry, Miss Swift,” she declares, not looking particularly sorry at all. “But it’s just not possible.”

A cold sensation lodges itself in the pit of my stomach as I take in her words. What am I going to do? This was my one and only plan. I look down at Casper. He’s lying on his side, panting heavily. I’m willing myself to calm down, but it’s not working.

Then, from the doorway through to the surgery, an unfamiliar voice speaks. “I’ll take a look at him.”