Cathy laughs. ‘Didn’t you enjoy it? Your task?’

‘I did.’

All she can hear is the stirring of the animals. She can just about make out the X-ray machine attached to the wall, in the dimness. The blink of the lights of the machines. ‘Nothing seems to bother you,’ she says to Tom. ‘You are – like, so light-hearted. It’s so easy. You don’t care that I’m weird.’

He throws back his head and laughs, no doubt startling the animals. ‘You’re not weird. I’m just really dumb,’ he says to her earnestly. ‘Promise.’

‘No way.’

‘Definitely.’

‘How so?’

‘I mean, I really do fuck about for a living.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yeah. Today I taught one single guitar lesson. I’m an extremely lazy freelance person,’ he says easily. Just like that. A small self-judgement, laden without any shame whatsoever.

‘What else do you do? If you don’t work a lot?’

‘Er, well, I am a vets’ assistant on the side.’ He flashes a grin at her.

‘I literally never fuck about,’ she says.

‘I have noticed. You should try it sometime,’ he says casually. ‘Bunk off. Stuff something up. It feels good.’

‘No way,’ Cathy says, and he laughs again.

‘Okay,’ he says, the word still imbued with humour. ‘That’s cool too,’ he says happily as they leave the surgery and head out into the rain. He glances over his shoulder at her. ‘We could go get some dinner, if you wanted? Whatever.’

Internally, Cathy laughs in delight. Whatever.

43.

Joe

It’s seven o’clock in the evening. Joe’s been operating almost all day, his arms aching with the effort of it. He’s in the backroom now, doing post-op admin.

His mother passes through. ‘All right?’ she says to him. She stops and leans over him in a waft of perfume as she looks at what he is doing. ‘Why is that so cheap?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Joe sighs. And it is. A fraught negotiation to get the owners to agree to this much. A heavily discounted operation because Joe knows that otherwise it wouldn’t have happened at all.

‘It should be twice that,’ she says.

‘I know.’ He looks up at her. ‘You’re not even working today. Stop – just – stop fussing.’

Joe is immediately assaulted by a memory of a different Maria entirely. The mother who waited, smiling, for him at the bottom of a slide so hot it burned his thighs in the summer. The mother who – he is sure – used to tell him never to be a vet, that the hours were punishing, the work hard and miserable, sick animal after sick animal. He can’t help but look curiously at her as he remembers, the mother before and the mother after Rosie died.

‘Why did you want us to do this job?’ he says, covering the invoice with another piece of paper.

‘What?’ Maria says, but it doesn’t sound like a question.

‘I just … I’m sure you told me once not to do it,’ he says. ‘When I was little. When I got Peanut.’ He could almost cry, saying Peanut’s name. Jesus, what the fuck is up with him? Crying over a fucking dead cat.