One summer I agreed to take care of this cat. It was a difficult time for me and I needed some company, and someone to look after again. My wife had died after a long battle with cancer at the turn of the year. Since then I had moved south, changed jobs and spent a lot of time with friends but I still couldn’t get away from the fact every night I came home to nothing; the house quiet and empty, loss ringing in my ears.
So I had answered this advert in the local newspaper, it said: ‘home needed for six months for a black and white cat, male, eleven years old’. It also gave the name of the owner and her contact details – I didn’t hesitate to get in touch.
About two weeks later the cat arrived on my doorstep in the arms of his owner. He was enormous. The fattest cat I had ever seen. It was a hot day in late June and the thing was panting like a dog. When his owner put him down he waddled into the living room and sat on his haunches staring up at us. ‘He’s used to living in strange places’ his owner said.
In spite of this I didn’t see much of the cat for the first weekend we lived together. For such a fat cat he hid himself very well, and only emerged at meal times. But sooner rather than later he ended his self imposed exile, having decided that I wasn’t going to do anything worse than care for him. He waddled up to me as I was sitting writing a letter at the kitchen table and looked at me steadily for a long while. Then with an almighty effort he leapt up and scrambled onto the table. After this exertion he just sat there and panted but I was happy he was getting more comfortable with me.
Later, he would come into my bedroom when I was reading at night and tread all over me. Sometimes he made me laugh. Then he would sit heavily on my outstretched legs or come and curl up beside my head with his paws drawn under his chin and go to sleep. In the morning when the daylight began to filter through the lace curtains he would wait until my eyes had opened before batting me with his paw. It was his way of saying ‘breakfast time’.
I told my friends about him of course; all of them wanted to meet him. One by one I would have them to dinner and the cat would come sit with us and if we weren’t paying him enough attention, he would open the fridge door with his claws, stand on his hind legs and peer inside. It became his party trick.
On occasions I would give him treats from the fridge. Once I persuaded a friend to feed him a whole gammon steak and it disappeared right before our eyes. This other time I came downstairs after a Sunday lie-in to find the cat reclining against the front door with his belly bulging out, and a whole chicken carcass beside him. He had capsized the waste bin in the kitchen and dragged the thing into the hallway. For reasons like these my friends took to calling him ‘fatty’ as opposed to his real name, and so did I. I used to pick him and serenade him, singing: ‘you’re the one for me fatty’ – an old pop song I knew.
At weekends, we both liked to relax on the balcony outside and feel the warmth of the sun all over our bodies, the cat and I. There was a chestnut tree opposite the house and when the weather was at it’s hottest a whole family of parakeets would flock there and nestle in the branches. The cat would eye them with curiosity and I would chuckle and talk to the cat in a voice conjured only for him. I found I no longer felt numb, that I could go a few hours without thinking of my wife, and when I did I was glad she was buried in the cool earth, at peace at last, after everything that happened.
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