When Saïd grabs one of the kittens in his large dark hands, the mother lifts her slitted eyes at the human she knows well, with a combination of total trust and pleading. The kitten he’s just caught is whining in the palm of his hand. It’s grey, a soft grey, almost blue, and its eyes, still blind, open and close, trying to grasp the world. Its pathetic cries reveal tiny little canines that are already sharp. Jo can almost hear its little animal heart beating against Saïd’s fingers, its protruding ribs beneath the thin skin. She stands up and follows the young man, unable to take her eyes off that bundle of fur burning with life.

“You don’t have to watch.”

But she opens the bathroom door, lets him through and goes in after him.

At the bottom of the bath, three siblings of the little grey one are lying, limp, on a flannel: two black and one ginger. Jo steps back.

“Why are you looking if you find it disgusting?”

“I don’t find it disgusting.”

She kneels next to the bath, leans towards the little corpses and runs her fingers over their barely grown velvet coats. They’re so small that she can only just get her thumb between their ears. She strokes a glossy black head and tells herself she could break the tiny skull if she pressed a little harder.

“What are you going to do with them afterwards?”

“What do you expect me to do? I’ll throw them away.”

Saïd presses ether-soaked cotton wool over the kitten’s muzzle. The smell, like old hospitals, has permeated the bathroom. His bare upper torso dominates the space, his poser Ray-Bans are pushed up on his head. His skin is shining, sweat beading his arms. Jo gently bites the inside of her cheek; she can’t bear the nauseating smell of the anaesthetic. “In with the rubbish?”

“Of course. Why, do you have a better idea?”

“I don’t know. Can’t you bury them?”

He looks at her in the mirror, his smile mocking, the dead kitten still in his hand. “You want them to have a little burial in a shoebox, with flowers?”

She gives a crooked smile at his teasing; she hates being caught red-handed committing sensitivity. “I just think it’s disgusting throwing them away. With the heat and all, they’ll rot and then stink.”

Saïd gently puts the fourth kitten at the bottom of the bath. “I’m leaving her two of them. Sonia’s giving a grey one to a friend, and my mother wants to keep one.” He shrugs as he says this. “Nobody else wants to do this, you know.”

In the smell of the ether, leaning over the dead kittens, their bare arms touch.