Two cat tattoos on the thighs

The ovens were already ticking when Mrs Okafor's boy knocked at the back door at half four, and I let him in because I hadn't slept anyway. He had a cardboard box under one arm and two cats' worth of trouble inside it. Dimmity, the one with the dark markings round her eyes like old sugar-work, and Pickle, the tabby with green eyes who has decided he is a chief. You'd have laughed. He stalked the proving baskets like a magistrate, with a grey feather from somebody's pillow stuck behind one ear.

The boy wanted to sell them. His mum owed the man at the mill, he said, and a cat with that face was worth a loaf a week to anyone on the market. I told him cats don't work like that and neither does bread. So we sat on the flour sacks while the sky went from black to the colour of weak blue ink above the chimneys, and I counted out forty-two rolls on the slab. Dimmity washed one paw on the cooling rack as if the place belonged to her. To be fair, she has more claim to it than the landlord.

In the end we made a trade. He took the day-old loaves for his mum and a paper bag of cinnamon knots for himself, and I told him the cats were on the books now, one stool each in the back room, and nobody was paying for them. He went off up the lane holding the bag like treasure. Then the window turned gold, Pickle climbed into the empty flour bin and sank out of sight, and a feather drifted up through the warm air as though it had somewhere better to be.

Come up at the weekend and bring the good scissors. Dimmity keeps staring at the roses in Mr Hale's window box, and I think she wants a cutting for her own. Love, Bea.