266 292
266
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.”
My
other
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