Candyfloss

Candyfloss

July 1966

H E LOST HIS

tail at the fairground. That’s what she tells herself. Bridie likes to imagine that rather than some terrible accident with a car or a lorry or the sharpened teeth of a dog. She likes to imagine he took himself to the fairground and sat down on an old wooden roller coaster and got up once the ride was over and forgot his tail, so excited was he to eat some candyfloss. Off he went (she imagines him walking on his hind legs like a fluffy human) and had some candyfloss and never missed his tail. Not once. Got on the Ferris wheel and looked at the sky, checking for birds.

At the RSPCA when she first saw him, the vet said, ‘He’s feeling very sorry for himself. His tail was degloved.’ And she promptly tried to forget the image that the word ‘degloved’ conjured. He was incredibly fluffy. A ragdoll, his tag said, but he looked small and scared and alone, peering at her from the corner of the cage, and Bridie just knew.

He didn’t have a name. So Bridie named him the first time he hopped up on to the sofa beside her and made biscuits on her thigh, claiming her for his own. ‘Ferris,’ she said.

‘How about that?’ And his low, deep purr let her know that he was pleased with the name. Or at least did not care to challenge it.

Ferris walks in the lyrical way of cats along the hallway to greet her at the front door as she arrives home from confession.

‘Hello, gorgeous boy,’ she says. ‘Sorry I’m late, I had lots to say.’ She puts her hand down and he bunts his forehead against it, hoping she will scratch the balding patches in front of his otherwise floofy ears. She stops talking and he looks up.

Go on,

he seems to say, I can listen

and bunt.

‘I can’t stop thinking about him,’ she says.

Ferris is a better confessor than Father Owen ever will be.

Her penance is scritches between his eyes.