Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell Read Free Book Online Page A

straight ahead, despite the fact that the cat had been making a nerve-jangling noise throughout. And now to be told something about spinal cords was too much.
    “What?”
    “We need to end his suffering.” The vet was talking in a specially gentle voice that Monica did not like.
    “End his …?”
    The vet hesitated, seemed to look at her carefully. “We need to put him down.”
    “Down?” Monica couldn’t assemble the words in a comprehensible form. The vet was saying things about sleep and pain and letting go. It seemed to be even hotter in here than it was outside. Sweat was collecting in her hairline, across her upper lip, around the waistband of her dress. She was terrified that if she raised her arms the vet, a man of about her age, not unattractive, would see the dark patches spreading there. The cat was a pool of clumped fur on the table between them.
    “The cat, Mrs. Proctor,” the vet was saying, “is seriously injured and—”
    Monica stopped dabbing at her forehead with a hankie, aghast. “You mean kill it? But you have to make it better, youhave to … My stepdaughters, they’ll … You have to fix this cat. Please.”
    “Um …” The vet floundered, diverted from his usual script. Then he rallied himself. “It’s a very quick, very peaceful procedure,” he said uncertainly. “Well. Some people like to stay with the animal while it happens.”
    Monica looked down at the cat, which was making a terrible scrabbling motion with its front paws, trying to crawl back inside the cardboard box. It had taken her a good ten minutes to get it into the box—it hadn’t wanted to go in, not at all, had fought and struggled with desperate, froglike movements. And now, here, all it wanted was to get back inside. Did it somehow know? Did it realize they were discussing its imminent death? No, it seemed to be saying, not now, not yet, there are many more things I need to do. Monica thought suddenly of Aoife. How she’d cried and cried when that kitten died. Her knees raw above her school socks as she stood in the garden. The tiny form, wrapped up in an old towel, cradled in her arms. Their father digging a hole in the earth. Make it deep, now, Robert, won’t you, their mother had whispered, then pressed Aoife to her pinny. It was the kitten’s time, she’d said to her, that’s what it was. But Aoife cried, couldn’t stop. A sickly thing, the kitten had been, right from the start, but she had cried and cried.
    Monica had her hands on the cat, in the fur of its shoulders. She could feel the raised beads of its spine, the triangles of its shoulder blades. Taken aback, as always, at how frail its bones felt. It seemed such a solid, large creature, this cat, but when you actually had it in your hands, it felt birdlike, insubstantial, hardly there at all. Surprisingly warm, too. It was purring now, rubbing its face into her fingers, in a way she’d never allowed before, and it was looking up at her and its expression was reassured, trusting. As long as you’re here, it seemed to be saying, then everything is going to be all right. Monica couldn’t look away, couldn’t breakthe gaze between her and the cat, even though she was aware of the vet filling his syringe, sliding a treacherous length of silver into the cat’s fur; even though she knew this, she kept looking at the cat, she kept talking to it. The cat purred, she ran her hands over the herringbone marks of its fur, and then it was as if the cat was struck by a preoccupying thought, as if it had just remembered something important, and Monica was wondering what it might be, what cats think about, when she realized its head was slack in her hands, its eyes were no longer looking at her, but past her, as if it could see something behind her, something coming towards her, something bad, something she didn’t know about.
    “Oh,” she said, at the same time as the vet said: “That’s it now.”
    The speed of it was horrifying. That slippage from