It must have been a month or more ago nowhow swiftly the days flee in memorywhen I came home from work to be greeted by an unusually quiet Lucy and Jack, who was standing by the hallway with a deeply contemplative brow.
Mum! You wont truly be cross, will you? Lucy called out in a tone meant to soothe.
Did you sell Oscar for a million quid? I replied airily, only half teasing. Oscar, after all, was our hairless Peterbaldthe aristocrat of felines, with a pedigree so pure we all felt like commoners in comparison. Even Jack, who would at times let slip that his fathers family could supposedly trace its roots back to William the Conqueror, had to admit Oscar was in a class of his own. If one was so inclined, Oscar probably could be sold for a small fortune. Well, or something close to it.
No, goodness, Mum! Lucy replied heatedly. Quite the opposite!
What do you mean, the opposite? I said, not catching her drift. Have you bought another cat for a million pounds?
Lucy beamed, that very smile people wear when theyre bursting with grand news. Oh Mum, no one had to pay a penny! I got everything completely free!
At this, Jack broke into such a fit of laughter I demanded an explanation, though in truth, I already knew where this was headed. What I needed clarity on were the specificsthe scale of the calamity.
And what a scale it was. Lucys classmate, Abigail, had found a tiny kitten shivering in a ditch. She took the wretch home, only to be promptly shown the doorwhat with the family dogs disapproval, and in general no one willing to accommodate a stray. So Abigail brought the kitten to school: wide-eyed, half-mad with fear (both her and the kitten, from the sound of it), and desperately pleaded, Will anyone take her?
You see, Mum, Lucy explained, no one at all wanted her. I just felt so terribly sorry for her
And that was when I briefly thought of doing away with myself by broom. For before I felt pity for the kitten, my heart ached for myselfall wild-eyed and weary, having lived through a similar farce once before. Eight years back, Jack had once rescued a blind, stripy scrap from a car park, no more than a week old. We tried nursing it with a dropper for three weeks, only for it to slip away late one night. Tiny kittens can be that waythey simply dont make it sometimes, as much as it hurts. It was after that we got Oscar, but the wound from that loss stung for a long while.
That old hollow in my heart ached anew at the prospect; I could already see how it would play outand not happily. Besides, I hadnt the faintest intention of welcoming another cat.
Well, show me then, what treasure have you been given for free?
They presented a cardboard box. Inside, amid a jumble of tattered old towels, lay well, theres really no equal in English, but in old times one might have called it a hobgoblin. It was smaller than Lucys palm, a dirty grey, and so frightfully thin that even holding it felt as if you might break the poor thing in half. A ragged skeleton of a kitten, with the haunted eyes of a dying imp. Little wonder no one else had wanted her.
Lucy and I went through the motions of that old talkwe are responsible for those we tamebut truly, it was all but decided. The soup-bone bundle would stay; who else would want it, honestly? Truth be told, Id have much preferred if we could have done without it ourselves.
Given that our modest home was already bustling with a baby and Oscar the cat, the kitten was put into quarantine until we could see the vet. That meant a separate room, a large cardboard box, a soft blanket, a hot water bottle, a makeshift litter, and a couple of old plush bears. Every four hours, a member of the family would trundle in to feed the kitten. Luckily, our familys strange hours worked well for thisJack and I stayed up late, Lucy was an early riser, and little Rosie woke at odd hoursthere was always someone to try and coax a bottle of formula into the kittens mouth. (Rosie herself wasnt up to it, but whoever woke with her could lend a hand.)
Between feeds, Lucy hovered anxiously, worried the kitten would feel terribly lonely.
I realised the kitten wasnt quite as sorrowful as expected the first night, when I found her curled in blissful warmth beneath the sitting-room blanket. The cardboard box, her hotel, was there beside the sofa, lid askew. How such a tiny morsel had escaped the box and mounted the high settee was anyones guess. Our miniature Houdini wriggled her spindly paws in protest and refused to say another word.
The vet plucked the kitten from the basket with two fingers and made an admiring sound. What a beauty we have here!
The kitten glared at him with her signature goblin gaze and squeaked a raspy Miaow.
Clever girl, the vet approved.
I, meanwhile, was fussing over how best to bathe her, dry her, even handle hershe seemed so insubstantial, a hundred grams at most, as fragile as a snowflake in the rain. A sharp look might break a leg. The vet, pragmatic to the core, simply lathered that hundred grams of cat in some sort of foamy suds, rinsed her under the tap as if washing stubborn stains from school tights, all but wrung her beneath a towel, and set her down. Remarkably, the kitten didnt utter a peep. Either she enjoyed the bath, or the trauma was so deep it immediately vanished into the nether reaches of her walnut-sized mind.
(Dont ask me what a subconscious could be in a skull so tiny. If you ask me, theres hardly enough space for the basics.)
The vet, ever enthusiastic, ran a battery of tests and procedures and declared the kitten not too bad. But she was severely undernourished, anemic, and desperately weak.
You saved her, the vet told Lucy. In that ditch, fleas wouldve eaten her alive, mark my words.
It was Abigail who rescued her, Lucy insisted, always honest. I just brought her home from school.
What year are you in? he asked professionally.
Year six.
Then yesyou certainly saved her.
To hear it, the vet thought Year Six little more suitable for a half-dying kitten than the ditch itself.
Once washed, our scrappy little hobgoblin did fluff up ever so slightly, developing vague cat-like contours, though pretty would have been too strong a word. For the first week and a half, she did little but eat, sleep, and suffer all manner of digestive woes, which left me near despairI couldnt bear to lose another kitten. Day and night, I checked if she was breathing, if shed managed to eat, and, inevitably, how things went on the other end. The vet began to know us by phone. When we arrived with her yet again over some complaint of the bowels, he gave the plumper patient a hearty pat and grinned.
Thats it. You neednt worry. Youre stuck with this cat now for many years.
What a curious creature is man! A fortnight earlier, the thought of taking on a wild-eyed, scraggy feline would have struck me as sheer lunacy. Had anyone inquired if I wanted such a burden, Id not have dignified it with a noI simply wouldnt have understood the question. But the moment Lucy brought her home and wed all fretted for her life, the news that youre stuck with this cat for years felt like the very brightest of days.
Ah, if you could have seen this best news of the month. In the old Jungle Book cartoon with its songs of bones that walk about on their ownwell, thats exactly what she resembled.
Wed thought, at first, the new arrival was a little girl. But on the way to the vet, a closer look revealed otherwisea tomcat, perhaps! Lucy and I spent the journey discussing possible names. Only the night before, wed watched a cartoon about a friendly sprite called Barnaby, so shed been running around the house shouting, Barnaby! Barnaby!which, in her mind, was the perfect sound for something lost and plaintive. Thus, the kitten was to be Barnaby.
The vet, however, proclaimed we were dealing with a girl after all. But the name stuck! Barnaby the boy transformed into Barnaby the girl. Or, as she came to be known, just Bonnie. Bonnie, Bon-Bon, or, grandly, BonifaceRosie, for her part, simply shrieked, Yippee! whenever she appeared.
By now, our hundred grams of cat had grown to a sturdy half-kiloand gained quite a bit of cheek. She still wasnt what youd call beautiful, but for some reason each evening a queue of family members would form just for the privilege of holding her. When that scruffy little monster purred on your lap, all seemed right with the world. Why, I couldn’t say.
Incidentally, the vet explained that Bonnie was a calicoa proper three-colour. I had doubted it: all I saw was grey on grey, and yet he pointed out the white undercoat (one), the grey (two), and a soft buff streak running like a domino mask from brow to chin for the third. There you arecalico! Almost the Union Jack, I joked.
And just recently, I spotted a big, wild-looking cat prowling in the hedges near our housebrilliantly patched, clearly feral, and giving the home a lingering, anxious look. When she spied me, she bolted but kept glancing back. She too was calico. I called out to her, just so shed know that Bonnie was well and safe inside.
