‘Eh-heh, she has no chance. Before she can sneeze the rat will bite her nose.’ We all sat there absorbing it. It was a rat, and Manus had smeared it, and he had to clean it up. And Missus was licking rat blood with her tongue. And there was a problem with rats and only Bluey was keeping them back. ‘In the second case,’ my dad went on, ‘I won’t mind when we can afford. But for now ...’ A mood came down over us that Missus was innocent, and guilty at the same time. And it wasn’t fair, but that was what happened if you were a cat. She half closed her eyes and sniffed at the teardrops running down Manus’s nose, got ready in his lap and licked them off.

‘Ah, no,’ my mum said, ‘we’ll find a good home for her, don’t worry. It’s just we can’t afford it right now.’

My mum put on her coat and was going out with a shopping bag while Manus was out with my dad. We didn’t let her get out the front door. The bag was moving and she was holding it closed tight in her hand.

‘What you got?’ Busola said.

‘Never you mind!’

‘You gonna drown it?’ I said, like what if she’d done that to us.

‘Out of my way!’

‘Let it stay, Mum,’ Connor said, but he sounded like he was helping her run the taps when he should have been pulling the plug out. ‘We’ll look after it.’ He wasn’t getting on with Manus and left it late to do anything. ‘I’ll take it to school, they’ve cages for pets on the roof.’

‘It’s decided,’ my mum said, ‘she can’t stay. Don’t make it hard, she’ll be better off where she’s going.’

There was a lump in my throat and a look of distrust in Busola’s eyes, and even Connor was shaking his head at how cruel she was being.

‘For the love of God, I’m just going over the park, it’ll have to learn to climb trees!’ and she pulled the front door shut behind her so we were left in the hall with light flooding in from the glass above the door, and the feeling that we couldn’t even blame Connor who had his head hung down for failing to stop it.

‘Don’t tell Manus,’ Busola said, and we both looked at her. She had a glint in her eye like Bluey getting ready to pounce, but scarier, ‘I bet she drowns it.’