Alfie the Doorstep Cat. Rachel Wells
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have any, but she didn’t seem to understand. She crouched down and looked at my silver disc. She punched the numbers into her phone and waited. Although I knew no one would answer, I still felt nervous. ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘The phone line is dead; there must be a fault. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kick you out. Stay here tonight and I’ll try again tomorrow.’
I purred very loudly in thanks, and felt immensely relieved.
‘But, if you’re going to stay for the night, you need a bath,’ she said, picking me up. I pricked up my ears in horror. A bath? I was a cat, I bathed myself. I cried, as if to object. ‘Sorry, Alfie, but you smell terrible,’ she added. ‘Now, I’ll just go and unpack some towels and then we’ll sort you out.’
I resisted the urge to jump out of her arms and run away again. I hated water and I knew what a bath meant, having had one at Margaret’s a long time ago when I came home covered in mud. It was an awful experience, although, I reasoned, not as bad as being homeless, so I decided to once again be a brave cat.
She put me in front of a big mirror in her bedroom while she went to find the towels. I looked and I yelped in surprise. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that I was looking at another animal; I looked even worse than I had initially felt. My fur was patchy, I looked so thin that I could see my bones poking through and despite my best efforts at cleaning myself, Claire was right, I looked dirty. I felt suddenly sad; it seemed that since Margaret’s death I had changed both inside and out.
Claire fetched me and took me to the bathroom where she ran the water and then put me gently in the bath. I screeched and wriggled a bit.
‘Sorry, Alfie, but you need a good wash.’ She looked a bit confused as she held a bottle in one of her hands. ‘It’s natural shampoo so it should be OK. Oh God, I don’t know, I’ve never had a cat before.’ She looked a bit upset. ‘And you’re not my cat. I hope your owner isn’t too worried.’ I saw a tear escape out of her eye. ‘This isn’t what was supposed to happen.’ I wanted to comfort her; she clearly needed it, but I couldn’t because I was still in the bath and I felt like I resembled a giant soap sud.
After the bath, which seemed to go on forever, she wrapped me in a towel and dried me off.
When I finally felt dry again, I followed Claire to the living room, where she slumped onto the newly delivered sofa and I jumped up next to her. It was every bit as comfortable as I had hoped, and she didn’t tell me off or try to push me down. Like polite strangers, I sat on one side, she on the other. She picked up her glass, took a smaller sip, and sighed. I studied her as she looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. There were boxes that needed unpacking, a television that sat in the middle of the room and a small dining table and chairs tucked into a corner. Apart from the sofa, it wasn’t organised and it wasn’t really home yet. As if Claire had read my thoughts, she took another sip of her drink and then she burst into tears.
‘What the hell have I done?’ she said, crying noisily.
Despite the noise, I was upset at how distraught she had suddenly become, but I knew what I had to do. It was as if there was a reason I was here now; I felt a sense of purpose. Perhaps I could help Claire as much as she could help me? I moved across the sofa and nestled into her, laying my little head gently on her lap. She automatically stroked me, and although she was still crying, I was offering her the comfort that I somehow knew she needed and she was doing the same for me. You see, I understood, because at that moment I knew with certainty in my heart that we were kindred spirits.
I had come home again.
It had been a week since I’d been living with Claire and we had settled into quite a comfortable routine, although not an entirely healthy one. She cried a lot and I snuggled a lot, which suited me just fine. I loved to cuddle, and I had a lot of lost time to make up for. I just wished I could do something to stop Claire from crying so much. It was clear that she needed my help and I vowed I would give it in any way I could.
Claire had tried to phone the number on my disc again, then she’d phoned the telephone company and discovered it had been disconnected. She assumed I’d been abandoned, and that seemed to make her like me even more. She cried over it and said that she couldn’t understand how anyone could do that to me. She also said that she totally understood, as it had happened to her, although I was yet to discover the details. But I knew that I had a home with her. She started buying me cat food and special milk. She got me a litter tray, not that I really liked using them, and she was talking, luckily only talking, about taking me to the vet. Vets tended to poke around where they were not wanted, but she hadn’t called them so far, so paws crossed she’d forget about that.
Despite the almost constant crying, Claire was very efficient. She managed to get all her furniture arranged and her boxes unpacked in only a couple of days. She organised the house and it quickly looked like a home. Pictures were hung on the walls, cushions scattered literally everywhere, and suddenly warmth flooded into every room; I had chosen well.
However, as I said, it wasn’t a happy home. Claire had been unpacking and I had watched her, trying my best to work out her story. She arranged lots of photographs in the front room, telling me who was in them; her mum and dad, pictures of herself as a child, her younger brother, friends and extended family. For a while she was animated and happy, and I rewarded her positivity by brushing up against her legs the way she told me she liked. I did this a lot for her; after all, I needed her to love me so I wouldn’t have to go back to the streets again. I needed to love her, too, although I was finding this increasingly easy to do.
One evening, she unpacked a photo which she didn’t tell me about. It was a picture of her in a white dress, holding hands with a man who looked very smart. I’d learnt enough about humans to know that this was what they called a ‘wedding photo’, when two people joined together and said they would only mate with each other – something this cat certainly didn’t understand. She sank into the sofa, clutching the photo against her chest, and started sobbing loudly. I sat next to her, giving her my equivalent of a cry, which was a loud yowl, but she didn’t seem to take any notice of me. But then I started yowling in earnest; like Claire, I couldn’t stop, as my loss flooded my memory. Although I didn’t know if the man in the suit had left her, or died the way my Margaret had, I knew then that she really was on her own. Just as I had been. We sat side by side, her crying, me yowling, at the top of our voices.
After a couple more days, Claire left early in the morning, saying that she had to go to work. She looked a bit better, as she put on a smart outfit and brushed her hair. She even had some colour to her face, although I wasn’t sure it was exactly natural. I was also beginning to look better, even in a few short days. My fur was beginning to even out a bit and I was putting on weight again, now that I was eating so much and exercising so little. As we stood side by side, looking in Claire’s big mirror, I thought we made a very cute couple. Or we had the potential to be, at the very least.
But although Claire left food for me, I missed her company when she was at work and felt sad to be alone again. I had Tiger of course and we spent time together, our friendship growing as we chased flies, went for short strolls and basked in the sun in her back garden, but that was my cat friendship; I knew that more than anything now I needed humans I could rely on.
When Claire was out at work, it brought back unwelcome memories and made me think that it was time to carry on with my plan. If I was going to ensure that I was never on my own again, I would need more than one home. That was the sad fact of life.
I’d seen a ‘Sold’ sign go up outside number 46, at about the same time that one had been erected outside Claire’s house and I’d been scoping both, but of course Claire had arrived first. However, I’d noticed that 46 was now also occupied. This house was just far enough apart from Claire’s to give me a short walk. It was on the part of the road that had the larger houses – the ‘posh’ bit, as I had been told