It’s 10 in the morning and the rain is coming down in curling sheets, as it has been since dawn. Deep puddles reflect a slate-grey sky; another day without daylight, maybe the fourth in a row. I am sitting in my office shed, watching nothing happen.
January is supposed to be a time for new starts, but I’m surrounded by backlog: sitting untouched are boxes of papers I’d refused to consign to the attic until I’d gone through them. My desk is covered in a tangle of wires, after I turned out all the drawers in the middle of Christmas Day in search of some USB adapter of yesteryear.
There are the piles of books I didn’t read in 2023, along with the emails I didn’t answer and the promises I failed to keep, promises that should expire at midnight on 31 December, but in my experience don’t. Outside, the rain intensifies. At this point, even a second cup of coffee seems ambitious.
I wait for a gap in the rain, but it doesn’t come. Eventually I hear the dog barking outside, because the cat is crouched inside the kitchen, blocking the cat flap to prevent the dog’s ingress, for sport.
I pick up my empty coffee cup, open my office door and sprint across the garden. The dog, soaked through, comes round the corner to join me at the back door. We step into the kitchen, where my wife is just lifting three heavy, damp shopping bags on to the kitchen table.
“Did you delay your entrance until I’d unloaded everything?” she says.
“What?” I say. “No. I didn’t even know you were here.” I reach over to put my cup in the dishwasher.
“It’s clean,” my wife says. “I thought you might have unloaded it while I was out. But no.”
“I was trapped out there,” I say, pointing at my office, “by the rain.” Too late, I realise how this sounds to someone who has just been to the supermarket and back.
“Never mind,” she says, sighing. “You can at least help me put this stuff away.”
On my way to and from the fridge I have to step over the cat, which is now spreading itself across the floor like spilled paint.
“This cat is huge,” I say.
“That’s because you keep feeding it,” my wife says.
“No, I don’t,” I say. In truth, I have already fed the cat three times today.
After the groceries are put away, I’m sent back to my office with a list of allegedly improving tasks: three boxes, moved attic-ward; garden hammock, dismantled and stored; front hedge, Christmas lights removed from. My wife does not understand the importance of setting aside time to not do things. And Christmas lights are only Christmas lights until 1 February, after which they become ordinary garden decor.
I watch the rain until my wife texts me to come in for lunch. While we eat, the cat sits at my feet and stares up at me.
“I can’t feed you,” I say. “Not in front of her.”
“Miaow,” says the cat.
“You have to be strong,” my wife says.
It occurs to me that I can reframe the season of not doing things in a more positive light, by exercising willpower on the cat’s behalf.
“Miaow,” says the cat, standing on its hind legs with its front paws resting on my knee. I don’t move.
“You’ll thank me,” I say. “I mean, you won’t, but.”
“The important thing,” my wife says, “is not to give in.” She stands, takes her plate to the sink, and leaves the room. Once she is gone, the cat reaches up – its head nearly level with mine – and slaps me across the face.
“How dare you,” I say. I think: I can’t afford to let this cat get any bigger.
I stare straight ahead while the cat slaps me twice more, before it finally gives up and inches its way out of the cat flap and into the driving rain. When the flap finally snaps shut behind it I am left with a wholly disorientating sense of accomplishment.
I make myself the coffee I had planned for earlier and return to my office to await the darkness. But over the course of half an hour the rain stops and the sky clears. Almost immediately a powerful wind begins to blow from the west, the kind of wind that lifts your garden umbrella from its stand and sends it spiralling skyward. The kind of wind that will pick up your hammock and leave it three streets over, unless somebody does something.
Well, I think, standing up, that was quick.
