Chris arose from his seat at the breakfast table and went over to the fridge for butter.  When he returned I hit him with it:

“Do you know who who reminded me of just then?”

“No,” Chris paused and braced himself as if something awful was coming. (I can’t imagine why husbands always expect the worst…)

“Well, you looked just like Jess the cat,” I said.

“How do you mean?” Chris still thought there was an insult coming.

“Don’t you remember how Jess sort of rolled his shoulders forward like a big tough guy and swaggered his haunches to show off?”, I answered, getting up and doing a bit of shoulder-rolling and swaggering myself. (In fact I reminded myself more of John Wayne than Jess our long departed cat.)

Chris laughed and we had a few moments of silence while we each enjoyed our own private reverie about Jess. We didn’t need to speak because we’ve reminisced so many times on the characterful antics of our half-feral cat. Jess didn’t like flea repellent. As soon as he ever heard the crack of the glass capsule breaking he would go into reverse and nearly walk up the wall back feet first. But he was clever enough to understand that he had to keep very still when we had to remove tics using a lit cigarette and a pair of tweezers (those were days when I used to smoke – now I’m like Mother Teresa, not to be confused with Teresa May our Prime Minister!). Poor Jess, he died from poisoning (a neighbour had set a trap for rats in his garden).

No doubt the image of Jess’s face flicked through Chris’s mind, too – and the burial, which was something of a black comedy. You see Jess was rather a big cat, and it seemed all the more so in death – and we have a vertical garden with little topsoil and lots of sandstone; hence we decided to bury him up on Haldon Moor only a few miles from home. Along with the black sack containing the heavy body, we carried a pickaxe and spade with us into the woods… but, unfortunately, below the scant three inches of topsoil was flint – sparks flew every time Chris’s spade made contact. We couldn’t bring ourselves to take the “stiff” home with us so the only other answer was to build a pyre above ground and place logs and stones on it to prevent foxes from getting at it. It was quite a romantic send-off, if a bit furtive. Armed with our pick and spade we felt like criminals coming  out of the woods, especially when we met a cyclist who looked at us suspiciously. “Just buried the cat,” Chris said. “A likely story,” the cyclist may have thought… We made our getaway before he had a chance to call the police.

Back in the kitchen it was clear that Chris had not felt insulted.

“I hope you didn’t mind me saying that you reminded me of Jess the cat,” I smiled.

“Not at all,” he responded, “you’ve said a lot worse!”