When Phil had dropped Sybil off in her cat basket – along with two tins of Sheba and a grisly chewed-up catnip toy with no eyes – he hadn’t exactly furnished Tara with a user manual. She and Sybil were already sort of acquainted from the handful of times she’d stayed over at Phil’s flat in Kidderminster, which was currently, he explained, full of builders, one of whom had nearly squashed Sybil with his toolkit. Tara would, Phil said, giving her the melting look he was so good at, be doing him and Sybil a huge favour if she could look after her for a while.

‘Cats are amazing, so low maintenance,’ he’d insisted, brushing off her panicky questions about jabs and vets and what she should do if Sybil malfunctioned in some way. ‘They just sort themselves out.’

That was his attitude to most problems, and such was his confident stance in the world that they generally did.

Tara, on the other hand, couldn’t bear a teetering washing basket or an unpaid bill. Reliability was everything to her, something she nurtured and prized in herself, as proof she wasn’t really her father’s daughter. She’d never owned a pet as an adult and her memories of Branston were, she realized after a few weeks in charge of Sybil, viewed through the soft-focus filter of childhood, in which dogs never pooed, and the top shelf in the bathroom mysteriously self-generated loo rolls like the Elves and the Shoemaker. She had a vague memory of accompanying her mum and Branston to the vet’s when he was booked in for some operation her father refused to support, but other than that, she had no idea what you were meant to do if your family pet vomited over your bedlinen.

Unlike Phil, however, Tara’s first reaction when her cat did malfunction was to panic until she’d found someone who could tell her how to fix it.

‘It sounds as though she’s just eaten something she shouldn’t,’ the receptionist decided, after a series of questions about Sybil’s habits that made Tara feel like a neglectful owner because she couldn’t answer half of them, not really having known Sybil long enough to be on intimate terms with her digestive history. ‘If you want to bring her in, the vet can have a look.’

‘Great.’ Tara had a few gaps between her Saturday appointments, and the vet’s wasn’t too far out of the town. ‘Should I bring in a sample of the vomit?’

Sybil finally lifted her head and gave her a look. Her eyes seemed a bit less yellow than normal but she still managed to look disparaging.

‘Just bring the cat,’ said the receptionist.

Tara took two paracetamol with yet another pint of water, and drove slowly to work with a reluctant Sybil in her basket in the footwell.