I witnessed the most remarkable instance of an individual’s revulsion of cats during my second ever visit to New York. I had been invited to a friend of a friend’s house in Brooklyn for a drink. I’d never met the friend’s friend, and the house turned out to be a luxe four-storey town house paid for by this man’s wife’s family fortune. Every weekend the man’s wife and their daughter would decamp to her parents’ place (maybe in Upstate New York or the Hamptons), and he would be left alone, in Brooklyn, surrounded by gaudy statement art pieces in this inordinately fancy house. I can no longer remember how the topic of cats arose, but as soon as I heard the anger coming out of this man I decided not to say a word; I listened, fixated. I was the only woman in the room. ‘Nasty animals, nasty animals,’ he repeated. He was looking right at me, though not with his eyes.
Sophie Collins, Small White Monkeys, Bookworks 2017, PP 12