Houseguest from Oz

I am saying this in a whisper while he is asleep: Ms Pants’s hybrid owly cat Creature, Barney, has arrived at my house and is causing mayhem. I thought she was joking when she said he’d be arriving at Gatwick today heading for my house, and even if she wasn’t he would surely be held in detention for flouting quarantine regulations. But it seems he got through by pretending to be someone’s stuffed toy. I had to pay the very irate minicab driver who complained that Barney had made a mess of the newly upholstered back seat as he polished off the remnants of a smoked salmon and crab terrine he had filched from the aeroplane while the steward’s back was turned. In the few hours he has been here he has managed to down the best part of a bottle of premium quality Polonaise vodka that Mr. Signs was saving for sex-on-the-beach cocktails and more than half a bag of frozen IKEA meatballs and the rest of the lingonberry preserves. When I asked how long he was thinking of staying here he just shrugged and said Pants had bought him a one-way ticket.

The cat is upstairs underneath our bed and refuses to come out until we give her assurance that Barney is off the premises. If all else fails we will have to coax him into the garden studio and lock him in while we think of what to do. I’m considering reporting him to the authorities as an illegal asylum seeker, but I don’t think they would buy it as Pants actually got him out of the UK illegally, and he speaks perfect English – when he wants to, that is. He is something of a poseur and slips into this faux gangsta-style drawl at the drop of a hat, but clearly he doesn’t have the vocabulary. Seeing a packet of blue Rizla on the kitchen table (from when my daughter was here, she smokes roll-ups), he asked if he could score a couple of “straights.” Who has been teaching him this stuff? Obviously I have my suspicions.

Meanwhile, Daughter of Signs is heading north to Edinburgh, where she will be until end of August a-putting on and performing in her show. I got a text from her today saying that the bad news was she had missed the train (which meant shelling out £40 more to catch a later one), and she managed to do this in spite of having been at the station an hour early. But the good news was that she had bought some notebooks and had begun writing a novel. There is something so quintessentially Daughter of Signs about this that I cannot help but smile – even though this is bound to leave her rather short of money.

I think I can hear Barney waking up, or perhaps he is talking in his sleep. It sounded like “Budweiser.” I don’t know what I’m going to tell Mr. Signs when he gets home.