OOC: canon excerpt: Charles and a stray cat.
It was not easy to get Charles to come to the door. We knocked for what seemed like half an hour. Camilla had given us a key, which we didn't want to use unless we had to, but just as we were contemplating it the bolt snapped and Charles squinted at us through the crack.
He looked disordered, terrible. "What do you want?" he said.
"Nothing," said Francis, quite easily, despite a slight, stunned pause of maybe a second. "Can we come in?"
Charles looked back and forth at the two of us. "Is anybody with you?"
"No," Francis said.
He opened the door and let us in. The shades were pulled and the place had the sour smell of garbage. As my eyes adjusted to the dim I saw dirty dishes, apple cores and soup cans littering almost every conceivable surface. Beside the refrigerator, arranged with perverse neatness, stood a row of empty Scotch bottles.
A lithe shadow darted across the kitchen counter, twisting through the dirty pans and empty milk cartons: Jesus, I thought, is that a rat? But then it jumped to the floor, tail switching, and I saw it was a cat. Its eyes glowed at us in the dark.
"Found her in an empty lot," said Charles. His breath, I noticed, did not have an alcoholic odor but a suspiciously minty one. "She's not too tame." He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe and showed us a discolored, contaminated-looking crisscross of scratches on his forearm.
"Charles," said Francis, jingling his car keys nervously, "we stopped by because we're driving out to the country. Thought it might be nice to get away for a while. Do you want to come?"
...
He insisted on taking the cat with him. We had a terrible time catching it - Francis and I dodging round the dark kitchen, knocking dishes to the floor, trying to corner it behind the water heater while Charles stood anxiously by saying things like "Come on" and "Good kitty." Finally, in desperation, I seized it by a scrawny black hindquarter - it thrashed around and sank its teeth into my arm - and, together, we managed to wrap it up in a dish towel so that only its head stuck out, eyes bulging and ears flattened back against the skull. We gave the mummified, hissing bundle to Charles. "Now, hold her tight," Francis kept saying in the car, glancing anxiously back in the rear-view mirror, "watch out, don't let it get away - "
But, of course, it did get away, catapulting into the front seat and nearly running Francis off the road. Then, after scrabbling around under the brake and gas pedal - Francis aghast, attempting simultaneously to avoid touching it and to kick it away from him - it settled on the floorboard by my feet, succumbing to an attack of diarrhea before falling into a glaring, prickle-haired trance.
-- Donna Tartt, The Secret History