Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Zöe Beck don’t you just leave your cat here? He had laughed in reply, murmuring something in Gaelic. After two weeks, I almost looked forward to our little ritual, and by June, my second month in my shoebox-sized rowhouse on a cul de sac in a less- than-picturesque part of St. Andrews, I had gotten so used to it that I was shocked when the old man didn’t turn up one day. The cat was sitting at his closed kitchen door, watching me. Nobody responded to my knock. Half an hour later, the entire street had gathered in front of his end-of- terrace, and his son drove up with a spare key. We found the old man dead in his bed. “France and Belgium,” I said to his son, after the

crowd in the old man’s bedroom had thinned out. “No more than that?” The son shook his head. “At first, there was no money, and then my Mum got sick, and then Flann came.” I commented: “You don’t have to take a cat everywhere. They wouldn’t even like that, would they?” And his son said: “Flann was his Púca.” neighbor, Sandra, was in the process of scrounging through my kitchen cabinets when I got home. As far as I could tell, everyone from our street was packed in my living room. Some of them were holding My other

266