The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas

by Julia Romp

  I scooped up the cat and put it in my car to take it to the vet. But it was only when I was halfway there that I wondered what I’d do if it wasn’t chipped. I couldn’t take the cat home with me. George would think I was playing a horrible joke or trying to persuade him to accept a replacement for Ben. A lovely woman had even phoned to offer us a kitten after reading Ben’s missing poster, but I’d told her we couldn’t have another cat. We just wanted Ben.

  I need not have worried. When the vet ran his scanner over the cat, a number appeared on the screen that told us it had been chipped. The vet rang the microchip center, gave them the number and got the cat’s details.

  “Here’s the address,” he said and reeled it off.

  Hold on a minute. I recognized that road. It was the one where the old couple lived. In fact, the cat lived next door to them. They’d only gone and captured their ruddy neighbor’s cat, hadn’t they?

  “So whose is it, love?” the old man asked when I got back to the house. “Where’s it from?”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to break the news.

  “It comes from around here,” I said, not wanting to be too specific with the details, to save them any embarrassment. “I think we should just let it back out into the garden and it will find its way home.”

  “But where’s it from exactly? Did that chip thing tell you?”

  It was time for the truth. “It’s from next door.”

  The old man looked confused for a minute before bursting out laughing. “Well, I never. Did you hear that Doris? It’s the neighbor’s cat.”

  The elderly couple started laughing themselves silly as I stood on the doorstep.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said. “We’ve really wasted your time, haven’t we?”

  But they hadn’t. As long as there were people like them, prepared to take time out of their day to read a poster and pick up the phone to try to help, I was sure that Ben would be coming home any day soon.

  The kindness of strangers can be an amazing thing. In the first few weeks after starting my search, I met some wonderful people—cat lovers just like me who all wanted to help find Ben. There was Freda, an older lady who phoned regularly to see if there was any news and tell me she was saying prayers for us; Marina, who lived in the area and had also lost a cat, so we kept each other updated on our searches; and Pat, who lived in Isleworth and had put up a huge noticeboard in her garden to advertise missing cats and help families who were lost themselves without their pet.

  Then there were the people who had seen the poster and wanted to give me any kind of clue that might help find Ben because they knew how anxious we must be to find him. If only they knew the truth. I wasn’t just anxious: I was getting more and more desperate, because George didn’t want to go out or do anything. He didn’t play or go into the garden. He just sat in his bedroom for hour after hour and had stopped eating a couple of days after we got home. Now he was hardly drinking either, and I kept an anxious eye on the plates of food which I found outside his bedroom door untouched, the glasses of water that he hardly sipped. He didn’t want to do anything but be alone. I’d only managed to persuade him to go back to school after telling him that Ben would want him to go. Even then, I’d had to ask the driver, Maureen, to turn off the music that usually played on the bus because George couldn’t bear anything that was happy. He just wanted everything to be as still and quiet as he was. Night after night, we sat in the silent house—me in the lounge and George upstairs in his bedroom—because all the life and laughter had disappeared from our home the moment Ben had gone.

  “I hate you,” George said again and again as he came home from school, went up to his room and left me feeling completely empty as he slammed the door shut.

  To hear him say that after all the love we’d known during the past two years was unbearable and nothing I said made a difference. My tears came when I was alone with my thoughts and I knew that losing Ben meant I had lost George too. No matter how positive I was about my search, whatever I tried to tell George about it, he wouldn’t listen. When he did finally leave his bedroom, he’d come downstairs to hover about in the background as I made up posters before looking at them and telling me the picture wasn’t right.

  “People won’t recognize Ben,” he’d say, so I asked him to pick out his favorite photo to use on the posters. It was a photo of Ben lying on a tartan rug. But the moment that George was happy with the posters, he went back to sitting alone for hour after hour. To him, it was simple: Ben had gone, which meant he was lost forever. Within a few days of getting home, George had started to cry, huge big sobs the like of which I’d never seen before. All the years that I’d spent wishing George could show me more of his emotions came back to haunt me as I watched grief pour out of him. I felt completely helpless. I had never seen him like this before. George had never really cried as a child and the only time he had shed tears was when I’d told him that an animal such as Mum’s dog Polly or a person he knew had died. George understood it meant he would never see them again, but he always stopped crying almost as soon as he started. Now, though, he could not stop the tears, which wracked his whole body and made him tremble. I longed to comfort him but couldn’t reach him as he mourned losing Ben, and I was shown in the most painful way I could ever have imagined just how deep his love was. George was suffering a pain the likes of which he had never known and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “I can’t breathe,” he would say over and over as I tried to put food in front of him. “I can’t swallow. My heart is coming out.”

  Some mornings, he’d walk into my bedroom and sob as he stood and looked at Ben’s pillow on my bed. But he wouldn’t ever let me anywhere near him or say a word except in anger when the rage he felt about what had happened flooded out of him.

  “This is all your fault,” he’d scream. “Ben’s gone. Nobody likes me. I can’t get on in the world. You done this.”

  As much as I knew Ben’s disappearance was no one’s fault, part of me also agreed with George that it was mine. I was the one who’d agreed to go away and all the guilt I’d struggled with throughout George’s lifetime as I wondered if I was somehow responsible for his problems returned tenfold. When Ben had arrived, I’d felt as if I’d finally done something really right for George, but now as he looked at me with tears on his face and hate in his eyes, all the guilt I’d once felt came flooding back. I just wanted to cuddle him, to do anything to try to ease his pain. I longed so much to comfort George. But I couldn’t, and I felt just as I had during all the years when he was young and nothing had reached him: so helpless and so desperate that I could hardly put my feelings into words.

  “I’ll find him, I promise you,” I told George again and again. “I’ll do whatever I have to. I’ll win the lottery and put up a big reward.”

  “No you won’t! He’s gone and I hate you.”

  The only time George spoke to me now was when he got home from school and asked the same question as soon as he got through the door each day.

  “Have you found him?”

  And every day I had to tell him the same thing. “Not yet. But I will.”

  As I sat alone in the evening, I thought about Ben again and again. I longed to hear him meow, see the curve of his tail disappearing through the door and feel the weight of his soft paws landing on my lap as he jumped up for a cuddle. The ache I felt for him was matched by the fiery panic that was building inside me about the state of George. The only way I could keep it in check was by answering every phone call I got, in the hope that it might lead us to Ben. The calls were coming thick and fast now, as many as 30 some days, and I responded to each one by either phoning the person and getting enough information to know for sure that the cat wasn’t Ben, or by taking down all the details and driving to the place if I couldn’t be sure. I was out every day from the moment George left for school until he came home again, because most of the time I didn’t manage to find the cat I had been called about so I had to keep goin
g back until I did. Often I’d take food and ask the person to feed the cat at a certain time, hoping that I’d be able to see it then, or ask them to try to tempt it into a garage or shed so that I could have a look. But that wasn’t possible a lot of the time, so I’d drop everything each time I got a call. Mum was getting used to being left in the middle of the supermarket when my phone rang. “Got to go,” I would tell her as I sprinted off and left her standing in the cereal aisle.

  There were so many calls because there were so many posters all over the area now that I’d started to widen the search to Feltham and Hayes to the west, and Richmond and Chiswick to the east. I’d put up so many that a man from the council had even told me I could get prosecuted for littering if I didn’t stop, but at least I knew I was getting the message out.

  One of the phone calls I got was from an Australian man who told me that he got on the train into central London each morning from Osterley station, about 4 miles down the road. Since around the time that Ben had disappeared, he had been seeing a black and white cat on the railway embankment most mornings. I knew feral cats were often found living close to railways, so I wondered if Ben might have followed them. I took down all the details before packing up a pile of leaflets and going to the streets around the station to post them through every door.

  Within a day, I’d gotten an e-mail from a man living in one of the houses near the railway line who had been feeding a stray black and white cat. But although I kept going back to try to find it, the cat was never there, so I asked the man if he would take a picture when he next saw it. Hope filled me when he sent one. The cat certainly looked like Ben, but I couldn’t be completely sure if it was him or not because the picture had been taken side on, so the distinctive white bib on his chest was hidden. I’d seen enough, though, to know that I had to find the cat. After going back a few times without success, I decided it was time for desperate measures. I asked Mum to come over to stay the night because I was going to stake out the railway bank under the cover of darkness.

  “Are you certain about this, Ju?” Mum asked as I packed up some sandwiches and a blanket. “Do you really want to sit out there alone all night?”

  “I’ve got to, Mum. I’ve got to know if it’s Ben.”

  As darkness fell, I put a bowl of food beside the car. It was Ben’s favorite, so he’d come running if he smelled it. But although several cats turned up for a quick bit of dinner, he wasn’t one of them. As the hours ticked by and I kept running the engine to get a bit of warmth into the car, I felt so sure that he was somewhere close. But as I thought about it, I suddenly realized what I was doing wrong. How was Ben ever going to find me sitting in a Toyota Aygo?

  Getting out of the car, I stared at the railway bank. Is that where he was hiding? Was he sitting in a bush or hiding in a tree there? As I walked toward the fence that ringed off the railway bank, I knew I could be arrested for trespassing if I went on to it, but as I climbed over I told myself it was a necessary crime.

  “Baboo?” I called into the darkness.

  I clambered through brambles and felt them scratching at my face, wondering for a moment what on earth I was doing: everyone else was fast asleep in their comfy beds and I was out here at the dead of night, all alone on a deserted railway embankment, trying to find a cat that might not even be Ben. But if that is what it took to find him I’d do it—and more—because I could not give up until I knew. I had to follow up every phone call and sighting, to keep believing, because there was no other choice.

  I went up and down the railway embankment for hours, calling Ben’s name, but I couldn’t find any sign of him and had to go home in the end. But hours after I called the man who’d been feeding the stray to ask him to let me know when he saw it again, the phone rang.

  My heart was battering in my chest as I jumped into my car. The man had only just seen the cat. It was on the embankment right now. Every minute I was in the car felt like an hour as I sped over to Osterley. After parking, I rushed to the fence next to the embankment and sure enough I could see a black cat in the distance, sitting in the grass without a care in the world. I strained my eyes to get a better look. The cat was so far away I couldn’t tell if it was Ben or not, but I didn’t want to scare it by getting too close too quickly.

  “Ben?” I called. “Baboo?”

  The cat started meandering up the railway bank, closer and closer to where I was standing, and my heart soared when I saw a glimpse of white on its chest. But at that moment, the cat moved its head and I noticed a bright red flash on its neck. It was wearing a collar. It couldn’t be Ben. He didn’t wear a collar because he always pulled them off, and the vet had explained that because he hadn’t gotten used to one when he was young, we’d never be able to persuade him to keep one on. I felt empty as I stared down the railway bank, wishing I could close my eyes, tap my heels together three times and open them to find Ben in front of me. Instead tears started falling down my face and I turned to go home.

  Every time the phone rang when George was at home, he’d appear at the top of the stairs like a shadow, listening to what was being said, or stand in the hallway as I switched on the answer machine.

  “That might be our cat, that might be our cat,” he’d chant as we listened to the messages.

  I usually tried to keep him away as I turned on the answer machine, because we had had a couple of nasty messages from people who swore curses down the line because I’d put a leaflet on their windscreen. We’d also got a couple of calls that were even more upsetting: one from someone who said they’d seen a black and white cat jump off a tower block and another from a person who said just “Meow” until the answering machine was full of their horrible taunts. Because of that, I did not want George to listen, but when I tried to distract him, he got so angry that I often didn’t have a choice but to let him.

  That’s why he was standing beside me as I saw the light flashing on the machine when we walked into the house one cold afternoon about three weeks after Ben had gone missing. Every day had dragged by since then and I’d counted each one, feeling panicked as one week turned into two and then three. Soon it would be a month since Ben had gone and it seemed like a lifetime.

  I hit the switch to listen to the messages.

  “Julia Romp?” a voice cried as the answer machine tape started playing.

  It sounded high, almost manic. The person was cackling with laughter as they spoke.

  “We’ve got Benny Boo here, Julia. He’s with us here. He’s in our flat. He’s black with a white chest and he’s here. We’ve got him and you won’t get him back.”

  The person started giggling. They sounded almost mad, and as we listened to the horrible laughter, George fell to the floor.

  “George?” I said as I bent down to him. “George?”

  He lay completely still, staring into space, and I sat down beside him. Fear flooded over me as I looked at him. I’d always tried to protect George, to keep him away from people who wanted to hurt others and cause them pain. Now that world was pouring into our house and there was nothing I could do to stop it if I wanted to find Ben.

  George’s face was completely white as I spoke to him.

  “Come on, darling. Shall we get you up? That person is just trying to have a nasty joke. They haven’t really got Ben. Don’t listen to them. They are not well. They don’t know what they’re saying.”

  I made sure not to touch George. I couldn’t go near him now because from the moment we’d gotten home from holiday, he hadn’t come to me for a hug or even rough played with me. He hadn’t spoken in cat talk either, and when I’d done it a couple of times without thinking, he’d looked at me in disgust.

  “We can’t do that now,” he said. “Ben’s not here.”

  On another day, he had said something himself in cat talk by accident and his face had gone white the moment he spoke.

  Now George started to cry as he curled into a ball, sobbing and sobbing as he lay on the floor.

  “There are
nasty people in the world,” I said to him gently. “But they won’t have Ben. He wouldn’t have gone to anyone like that. You know how much he can see into people’s hearts: he’d never trust anyone so cruel.”

  George did not listen, though, and when he finally stopped crying, he got up and walked toward the living room.

  “I have to listen to the messages,” I said as I followed him. “I can’t ignore them because one day soon there’ll be one from someone who knows where Ben is and we’ll find him again.”

  George opened the door into the garden and walked outside, where he tiptoed across the stepping stones on the lawn before stopping on the last one, the one that led to the summerhouse, Ben’s favorite place in the world. Then he opened his mouth and started to scream.

  Chapter 16

  My stomach turned over as the postman spoke. He’d been out on his rounds when he’d seen a cat lying in the road. It had been hit by a car.

  “It’s black and white,” he said. “Like the one on the poster.”

  “Are you sure it’s dead?” I asked, the words feeling stiff as I said them.

  “Yes. It was very badly hurt. It’s in the road now.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  I put down the phone and felt shaky as I picked it back up to ring Boy and ask him to come with me to find the cat. I couldn’t do it alone because just as I hoped it might be Ben each time I got a phone call from someone who’d seen a cat in their garden or walking down a road, I now felt sick inside that this could be him. Deep down, I’d been waiting for a call like this. I knew cats often got hurt on the road and as the weeks had passed I had kept wondering if that was what had really happened to Ben. However much I wanted to believe he had been stolen, because that would mean he was still alive, I couldn’t keep pretending there was no possibility that something even worse had happened. Now I felt scared. This cat that had been found on the road just couldn’t be Ben, because George had finally begun to hope that he might really come home again.