Raccoon and fox with roses on thighs

You will not believe what has been living under the boarding house since Easter. Mrs Pargeter swears it is a raccoon, though nobody on Marrow Street has ever seen one that wasn't on a film, and the fox is worse, because the fox is not even ours. It came up from the cliff path with a gull's wing in its mouth and sat on the bottom step as if it had paid for the room.

They are a pair, I'm sure of it. The raccoon has a pale mark on its brow, a little cross, which Reverend Odell says is just a graze from the gorse, and the fox has a silver crescent between its ears as though someone stamped the moon there. They go through the bins together on Tuesdays, the raccoon doing the lifting and the fox doing the shouting, and every time the back door opens they bare their teeth at the landlady in perfect unison, as though they had rehearsed it on the pier.

Last night the rain came in sideways and I found them both under the lean-to, pressed together, the fox's tail laid over the raccoon's paws. I went to fetch the kettle and when I came back with a saucer of milk they had gone, and there were two roses on the flagstones, one red and one the colour of a winter sky, set side by side like a challenge nobody had yet accepted.

I have decided I will not tell Mrs Pargeter. Let her think the roses came from the vicar's wife. The sea is flat this morning, and the two of them are sitting on the harbour wall, watching the boats come in as if they were waiting for someone who owes them money.