For what it’s worth, the cat is called forty-two, what it cost, pence, that is, for what it’s worth. I bought it for Sally. Right now, the little shit, I mean forty-two, not Sally, the little shit, has got in behind the fitted kitchen. It got up through a gap underneath the built-in oven. Five thousand fucking quid’s worth of mahogany and it finds a gap big enough to escape from me.

I think Sally is going to move out.

I don’t blame her, can’t blame her. Who wants an old fart suffering from post-traumatic stress, writer’s block and left-the-kids guilt? After a while, even the sex gets in the way. The old-hand is just old hands, yes?

I’ve got a Phillips screwdriver now, I’m on my back, taking off the facia below the oven. Can you hear forty-two, mewing, scratching, trying to get further away? He can’t. He’s too stupid to know he can’t, but he does this every time, gets under the cooker and tries to get away. But he can’t.

I didn’t mean to fall in love. Sally worked for me. I should have been like the rest of the lads—scale of one to ten I’d give her one—Jesus! —the arse on that—the box. But not me, I fell in love, said so, one lunch-time, said so, said we should stop having lunches, best not any more, eh?

Removing eight Phillips screws takes about five minutes.

She said she felt the same. She said she was moving out, leaving David. She said she would tell him when he got home from work. I asked her if she was sure. ‘Oh, Christ, sure,’ she said. ‘For a month now.’

I put the screws to the side in a saucer, four of them.

She went to a friend’s first. I waited at work. She rang me. She said, ‘Come round. I need you. I want you.’

I said, ‘No, Sally, not yet.’ I said she should think. I said to be sure.

‘Two hours,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring you in two hours.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘OK. But I’ll be exactly the same in two hours.’

‘Think hard,’ I said.

I put two more screws in the dish.

That night we made love, if you could call it that, on a borrowed blanket on a borrowed floor, by a dying fire in a cottage of a friend who suffered our mistakes and didn’t like me. It was love, at least love was there, but David hovered, my wife hovered, the friend’s bedroom creaked. The love act, it was something that had to be done, so was done, some rubber-stamp, some symbol, an act to parade, a red flag to make something elsewhere absolute.

One last screw.

She will leave me. I’m surprised we lasted so long. Listen, hear him scratching.

The memory; Sally cried, I cried. I hadn’t even rung home, just not gone there. The act, the darkness, the deep heat of a woman, the suicide, the giving up, that is the memory. The look in her eyes, the timid power blurred by tears, that massive victory, that I remember. The late explosion, if it was there, was a comma. I remember only falling.

The last Phillips.

I remove the plinth carefully. If I scratch it, Sally will know. Behind me, the kitchen door is firmly shut.

And for a while, we raged with success. I raged, like a rampant cock. And money, power, the two of us, drunk with the blackness, driving through the ruins of half-lives, ignoring amber lights, warning signs, getting it done.

Forty-two cowers, right at the back. He hisses, mews, cries.

‘I have you now, you little bastard!’

He does not scratch or bite. He did once but he remembers.

Out he comes. I pull him by the reached leg. He quivers. He shivers.

‘Why do you always run away, you little fucker?’

Sally should be home soon.

‘I won’t hurt you, will I? So why d’you run away?’

I put him in a cupboard while I refit the cover. I must get that hole filled somehow. I’m finished maybe ten minutes before Sally arrives. I hear her key in the door and my gut turns over.

I’m on the sofa, watching something.

‘Hi-yah!’ she says. ‘Hello, forty-two.’

‘D’you want your baby?’ I say softly.

‘Please,’ she says.

I pass her forty-two. He scrabbles up her suit to her neck. ‘How about we go out tonight?’ I say, my voice light. ‘A nice Italian, some Il Grigio?’

‘I’m a bit tired,’ she says.

I’m sure my disappointment shows.

Forty-two squirms closer.

Then she says, ‘Do you really want to?’

I pause. ‘Unless you fancy an early night.’

‘No let’s go out,’ she says.

Alex published five crime novels in the 90s, switched to literary short fiction. US publications include the inaugural story at Atlantic Monthly's Unbound Site, Mississippi Review, Blue Moon Review, Crania. Alex is a regular columnist at The Internet Writers Journal. Currently writing a novel about a writing machine.

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.

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