“Oof,” I hear myself exhale as I startle awake to an abrupt expulsion of air from my lungs. Our cat P.G. has just made a flying leap off the night table onto my chest. Before I can even react, she has moved on.

Now she is standing on her father’s hip, as though perched victoriously upon a successful kill. Half-asleep, he swats her away.

Time for the pacing to begin. She walks back across the bed, traipsing over the tops of our pillows above our heads, readying herself for her next salvo. She climbs back on my night table. Now fully awake and irritated, I know she’s about to launch another attack. I turn on my side to forestall the onslaught. She jumps across me and goes back to annoying her dad.

The cycle repeats until she realizes that this is not getting her what she wants. With an elegant thump, she jumps off the bed and shimmies her way behind the curtains onto the windowsill so she can survey the neighbourhood activities from her overhead vantage point. She is happy to bask in the sun – for now.

One of us stirs. No matter how quietly we do this, she is immediately attentive to our alertness. She slithers her way back through the curtains and follows me into the bathroom. She looks up with plaintive eyes. The only thing that scares her away is the flutter of the toilet paper unfurling off the roll.

Since one of us is now vertical, she decides it’s time to turn on the sound machine. Cue the pitiful and mournful meowing – sometimes pleading, other times demanding. Depends on her mood, I guess, although I have been unable to determine a pattern. Only she understands the mysteries of her top-secret algorithm.

But I have misled her. I disconnect my phone from the charging cable and crawl back into bed to check email and read the news. The meowing ceases. She begins circling anew.

Sometimes, when her father has had enough of her bad manners, he lures her out of the bedroom with the false promise of food. Then he locks her out. More plaintive mewing from the other side of the door. Occasionally we hear the thump of her body on the wood paneling, as though she were trying to break down the door. I’m the soft touch, he remains steadfast in his resolve.

Finally, when we are good and ready, we head downstairs to feed her her breakfast. The meowing starts up again until she is fully satisfied. If one of us lingers in bed, she will attempt to fool us into giving her two breakfasts. She seems utterly unaware that her parents talk.

So has begun almost every morning since we started working from home. Once upon a time, we got up early, got ready for work and school, fed the cat and left the house. These days we can sleep a bit longer and the cat has now appointed herself our alarm clock and conscience. She has, in fact, become a bully.

He blames me for this. In the days when the two of them were just a, um, twosome, they had reached some sort of “understanding” around the morning routine which did not involve circles and sound effects. In fact, he didn’t realize she even had anything to say and simply assumed she was mute. However, my introduction of wet food as a breakfast staple into her life has somehow upset that finely tuned equilibrium. Suddenly I have unleashed a newfound need, a craving, an insatiable morning mourning, in her feline soul. With it, she has found her newly demanding voice. I say I freed her to be fully herself. He says I have created a monster.

To see the cat demurely sleeping on the back of the living room sofa for hours on end during the day, you would never believe she is capable of such atrocious morning behaviour. She never utters a sound or makes a complaint. I look at this languid puddle of black fur and want to ask her, “Where has your inner Mr. Hyde gone?” But I know I’ll never get an answer – cat’s got her tongue.

Where this will all end is anyone’s guess. She has newly resorted to adding scratching of the armchair in our bedroom as part of her morning routine, as though to say, “Give me my wet food and no furniture gets hurt.” The depths of her depravity know no limits. Her moral “compuss” appears to be completely missing in action. She has become as ethically bankrupt as … a cat wanting breakfast.

The escalation in hostilities continues…