Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

When Gerald walked out on her after seven years of marriage, Rosemary realized that she would have to acquaint herself with certain aspects of household management that hitherto had remained a complete mystery to her.

After three months she had conquered the damp above the tiles on the inside of the outside wall in the bathroom. She had also learned how to use the electronic meat knife. Her slices of chicken and beef were all perfectly proportioned and as thick as half of one of her fingernails, consistent in width, wonderful.

She had one friend, Emily, who worked as an estate agent in Finsbury Park. Often Emily worked evenings, showing potential clients around properties. Emily was also heavily involved with a pen-pal called Rolf who lived in Milton Keynes and sent her long, sweet letters, occasionally enclosing poems by Stevie Smith and Margaret Atwood. Rolf knew that Stevie Smith had lived in Palmers Green and that Emily lived in a nearby street. He imagined that Emily was a bit like Stevie Smith; creative, explosive, repressed. He liked the way she wrote her ’e’s. Each letter was full of pzazz.

Rosemary cooked a lot of meat, seasoned it, sliced it, but Emily was usually busy in the evenings so she would set the table for one and open a small bottle of wine. Invariably she left the rest of the meat on a plate in the back garden, hoping to lure a fox on to the premises, or a badger. It never occurred to her to cook less. Part of her was still hoping that one night Gerald might return home, open the door with his key and declare that he had finally abandoned his new life with Claire from Accounts.

The meat was eaten, but not by a fox. It was consumed nightly by a tom cat whose behavioural problems had made him un-house-trainable. This cat Rosemary later came to call Rasputin, because he was a complex mixture of evil and confusion.

Initially Rasputin had belonged to an old man who was dirty and who had mistreated him, kicked him when he passed by and fed him on a whim. When the old man had died, Rasputin had been cast out into the world; a world whose gentleness and kindness were absolute in comparison to what he had sadly come to understand to be ‘the norm’.

Rosemary had no particular attachment to the feline species. She liked animals in general but had never owned one because Gerald had suffered from a fur allergy which had been a perpetual cause of discomfort and asthma.

Rosemary had compensated for her lack by diverting all her affectionate energies into the large pool dedicated to keeping Gerald happy. Her favourite petting part of his body was the area of curly dark hair which descended from his belly button to his genital cluster. She padded this area like a fussy mother cat, pulling out tangles and combing it with her fingertips, stroking the hair into a glorious chestnut shine.

Gerald didn’t mind. He always washed after sex with other women. He knew that his pubis smelled of lemon.

Four months after Gerald’s departure Rosemary started attending a cookery class. She began to diversify in the culinary field. One evening she prepared a passable spaghetti, the next she created a particularly successful vegetarian stir-fry. She began to understand the joys of Cookery-for-One. There were no leftovers.

Rasputin (as yet unnamed) sniffed around in her back garden and located only an empty plate. He pushed the plate around with his nose for several minutes and then, throwing caution to the wind, attacked Rosemary’s dustbin with the sort of savagery reserved in the feline species only for breeds of exotic large cat like the puma and the tiger. He became one hundred per cent primitive.

Rosemary was watching Bergerac when she heard a terrible combination of clattering and smashing, tearing and throaty howls from outside. She quickly made her way into her kitchen and switched on the strip light. It flashed several times as she walked to the window and then lit up fully and reflected its light on to her small back garden.

Her initial sighting of Rasputin by the bins was rather dramatic. The flashing of her strip light created the effect of a strobe at a disco, and Rasputin was the unfortunate epileptic stuck on the dancefloor in the throes of a fit. He had a large piece of tin foil snapped tight in his mouth — the foil had some smears of beef fat stuck to its silvery surface — and was rolling around on the concrete by the bins as though he was actually on the steep slope of a descending hill. He rolled (like a spinning top but sideways) from the bins to the far picket fence and then back from the fence to the bins. He was like a bubonic sausage, tumbling around in a frying pan, fizzing and crackling and ready to burst.

This display lasted for two or three minutes and then ended as suddenly as it had begun. Rasputin sat up straight, dropped the tin foil, licked his lips and then turned his head to peruse the scattered contents of the upturned dustbin.

He remained still and thoughtful for what seemed like an age. Rosemary was impressed by his deep cognitive reverie, his apparent contemplative serenity.

She liked him. He was thin and his face, neck and upper legs were covered in pinky sores. His coat was an intermittent ginger, and his eyes were half covered in their white sleep-sheaths. He was a bit like a mantra (she thought). When he was still and thoughtful there was something lulling and repetitive about him, something that pulsated calmness and tranquillity.

She went to the fridge and got out a bottle of milk which she poured into a breakfast bowl. She then opened a tin of spam and crushed it up with a fork on a plate. Every so often she peeked out of the window to make sure that he hadn’t moved. Rasputin remained erect and immobile. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Rosemary moving about in her kitchen. The core of mad wilderness inside his scraggy chest fluttered and pulsated. He remained still, watching the light shimmering on the edges of his whiskers.

Rosemary opened her back door with infinite gentleness, bent down slowly and placed her bowl and her plate gingerly on the back step. She was sure the cat would run away.

Rasputin watched her and growled gently to himself. His throat vibrated like a guitar string. After a couple of seconds, before Rosemary had withdrawn — he didn’t give a damn — he stood up, stretched, and then marched towards the back step, Rosemary and the two plates. He wolfed down the spam and then (unlike most cats, who lap their milk with spiky tongues) he placed his face into the bowl of milk and sucked at the liquid with great force. He drank an inch or so (in depth) and then stared at Rosemary with a dripping visage. She smiled and offered him her hand to smell. He bit her hand and then dashed between her legs and into the house.

After washing her hand and dabbing it with TCP, Rosemary stealthily crept around the house, trying to locate Rasputin (by now he had been named), but he was nowhere to be found. The only indication of his presence was a large pool of smelly cat urine in the centre of her living-room carpet. Following ten or so minutes of fruitless searching she made herself a cup of tea and tried to concentrate on Bergerac again.

Rasputin sidled around the house like a blotchy marmalade shadow. He marked certain items of furniture with his own special cat scent, located in glands between and behind his whiskers. His tail was fluffed out like a stick of candy floss, his mood was predatory.

Eventually he returned to the living room. He sensed a tension in the air, he knew that Rosemary was ill at ease, uncertain as to his whereabouts, vulnerable. He tiptoed under the sofa where she sat and stared out at her two legs which looked to him like two pinkly fleshed chicken limbs; tempting, bitable.