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.
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,