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.”
“Thank you so much for agreeing to see him,” I blurt out for what must be the third time in as many minutes.
I’m kicking myself before the words are even out of my mouth. Way to sound like a complete cretin, Clara.
“You’re most welcome,” he replies, also for what must be the third time in as many minutes. Amazingly, though, there’s no hint of sarcasm or impatience in his tone. Instead, he just smiles at me, before returning his attention to Casper.
The thing is, the new vet is decidedly not what I was expecting. It’s sort of thrown me off balance. For one thing, he’s quite a lot younger than most of the partners here.
He’s quite a lot more attractive too. Just … you know, as an observation.
Not, of course, that I’m in any state to be noticing that sort of thing. After all, my mind is consumed with anxiety over the welfare of my precious cat. I haven’t got the energy left to pay much notice to … I don’t know … say, those warm green eyes or those high, slanting cheekbones or that burnished brown hair falling over his forehead as he leans over Casper …
Who, incidentally, is behaving most … well, most unlike Casper, for want of a better phrase. That’s the biggest shock of all; to be honest, I think I’m still getting my head around it. My cat, sitting quite tamely on the vet’s table. He’s even allowing himself to be touched without the slightest peep of complaint.
It’s like a dream. A very sad, pet owner’s dream, granted, but a dream nonetheless.
“He likes you,” I
