by Julia Romp
It had started with a conversation we’d had in the middle of a troubled night. As on every other night now, George had been up for most of it, waking about every half an hour. After weeks without sleep we were both exhausted, and in the end I’d persuaded George to get into my bed to see if it might help. George hadn’t wanted to at first, because it meant sleeping on Ben’s side, but although I’d managed to convince him, he was soon out of bed again, pacing back and forth in front of the window and pulling the curtains back to look at the night sky.
“It’s so dark,” George said. “I wonder if Ben can find his way around. I can’t find him. Is he cold? Is he in someone else’s bed? Is he hungry?” The questions had gone on and on.
I’d tried to distract him. “Do you think Ben might have moved in with another family?” I’d asked.
It was something I hadn’t really talked about to George, but I had kept thinking of all those stories I’d read in the newspapers about cats who went missing for months and then came home right as rain because a stranger had been feeding them. People had kept telling me that might have happened and now I was beginning to think they could be right. The more weeks that passed without any news, the more fear was building up inside me, and I was starting to believe that anything was possible—even that Ben might really have thought we’d left him when we went on holiday and run away himself.
“Could he have got into someone else’s car or a removals lorry and been taken somewhere?” I said to George. “You hear about that on the news sometimes.”
George stared outside. “No,” he said. “He wouldn’t go and live with anyone else.”
But when I got up the next morning, I heard George talking as I got his breakfast.
“Ben might have moved somewhere else,” he said quietly. “Baboo might have a new home.”
It told me that hope was flickering inside him at last and I wanted to encourage it. We still didn’t know anything for sure, and until we did I wanted George to hope—anything to stop the sadness that was draining him more and more each day.
“I’ll find Ben if he is with another family,” I told him. “He would have come home by now if he could, so I just need to bring him back to you.”
But now doubts filled me as I phoned Boy and asked him to come and pick me up. Was I really right to have encouraged George to believe? It had been more than a month now with no sign of Ben. Maybe I was living in cloud cuckoo land? After Boy got to my house, we rushed to the address the postman had given us and I felt sick as we arrived there. But all we could find was a patch of bright red blood on the tarmac: the cat had already been taken off the road. I wanted to cry as I looked at it. We couldn’t leave without knowing if it was Ben or not. So Boy and I started knocking on doors at opposite ends of the street to see if anyone knew where the cat had been taken. As I waited for one to open, I thought of George, his hope and this black and white cat that had lost its life. Panic washed over me as I thought what it would mean if it really was Ben.
“I hope you can help me,” I said as a man opened the door. “A cat’s been knocked down and I need to find it.”
“It’s here,” the man replied, his face serious as he spoke.
A girl and a boy were standing beside him.
“I think it might be mine,” I said.
“It’s not. It’s our cat. I’ve buried it in the garden.”
“I’m sorry to ask, but are you sure? I was told the cat was badly hurt, so you might have made a mistake.”
“No. I’m certain.”
For just a few seconds, relief rushed through me. Then I felt guilty. How could I feel happy when this family had lost a pet they loved?
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said, as the man closed the door and I turned to walk away.
I felt so shaken later that day as I told Mum about what had happened and the words rushed out of me as I told her that I couldn’t help but think of Ben and what might have happened to him. Then I turned to see George standing by the door and realized he’d heard everything I’d said.
“The world’s gone mad,” he cried. “The cars are ruining the trees, there’s no fresh air and the animals should be walking free. Why can the cars knock cats down?”
“Because sometimes accidents happen,” I told him. “It’s very sad but they do.”
“We should get a cart and a horse to show other people that’s better than a car.”
“I’m not sure we could do that, George.”
“But we’re running out of oil. People can’t breathe. The cars are killing us. The cars are killing cats.”
The conversation went on and on over the next few days. I tried to calm George’s worries and wished so much that he’d never heard me talking to Mum.
But although I kept telling him we didn’t know what had happened to Ben and couldn’t give up hope, I realized I might have gotten it all terribly wrong when George came to talk to me the day before Halloween.
“Don’t worry, Mum,” he said.
It was the first time he’d spoken to me like that since Ben had gone and I wondered what had happened to make him do so.
“Ben’s coming home,” George told me.
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“He’s coming home tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow?”
“Because it’s Halloween. He loves Halloween. He wouldn’t not come home.”
My heart sank. George was remembering our party last year and all the fun we’d had. He was convinced that Ben would come home to celebrate with us. For the whole of the next day, he was deep in thought, but as the morning of Halloween slipped into the afternoon and then evening came, I could see George falling back into the black pit of his sadness. Tor had kept telling me to reassure him, to stop him from disappearing into it. But I knew it was too late to keep George from going back there now. By the time evening came and trick or treaters started knocking on the door, George was tapping his fingers and anxiously chanting.
“Tell them to go away,” he kept saying as the bell went again and again. “He’s not here. He’s not coming home.”
In the end I turned off all the lights in the house to stop people knocking on the door. George and I spent the rest of the evening sitting in darkness. The silent house felt like a tomb surrounding us and guilt filled me. How was I ever going to make this right again if I didn’t find Ben? How would I ever get back the boy I knew George could be? As I sat and thought, I realized two things: maybe I had been wrong to encourage George to hope, and from now on I had to be realistic about the possibility that Ben might not come back to us. But until I knew for sure that he wasn’t, until I found the truth, I would keep believing that he might and telling George that I did. I had to have hope for the two of us now.
A good friend I made as I searched for Ben was a woman called Sally, who lived next door to her mum and aunt in Isleworth, just down the road from Hounslow. We met after Sally’s mum phoned to tell me that she and her sister had been feeding a black and white cat since late September.
“We’re sure it’s yours,” she said. “It’s identical to the one on the poster.”
So I rushed round as I always did, found the two ladies at home with their Scottie dog and saw immediately that the cat wasn’t Ben: the only white fur it had was a splash at the end of its nose as if it had been dipped in white paint. But the cat was in such good condition that I was sure she belonged to someone. Feral cats and people’s pets are very different: one’s thin and scraggy, the other is well fed and fatter, one is able to let a person get near, the other runs a mile. So I suggested that I take this one to the vet to check for a chip.
“Don’t worry,” one of the ladies said to me. “Sally, my daughter, is away in America but she’s coming home soon, so she can help us. She’s been helping at an animal charity for years, so she’ll know what to do.”
I didn’t expect to hear from them again, but Sally e-mailed when she got back from her holiday to apologize about the mix-up before
explaining that the cat they’d been feeding had been nicknamed Dizzy. Sally was fostering her until the local animal charity found the cat a new home, and Dizzy’s story soon had a happy ending. A family Sally had sat next to on the plane home from America, who lived just a couple of miles away, offered Dizzy a home.
She wasn’t the only cat I met who had strangers to thank for giving it a new life, and three of the luckiest were Monty, Socks and Prudence. They belonged to a woman called Mavis, who I went to visit one evening in November with Wendy. Mavis had called to say she’d been feeding a stray matching Ben’s description. The door of her house was opened by a woman in her seventies with silver hair cut into a neat bob. Mavis was very well presented and her house was the same—everything was just so, with the smell of clean laundry in the air and an ironing board folded in the corner of her kitchen.
Mavis told us that the first cat she’d taken in was a stray she’d called Monty when he came to live with her four years before. Then she’d adopted a cat she’d called Prudence, after finding her badly neglected and starving.
“I can’t introduce you to Prudence today,” Mavis told Wendy and me. “She’s deaf and old and doesn’t like strangers too much. She lives in one of the bedrooms upstairs and doesn’t go out.”
I could see that Mavis felt really protective of all her cats but especially Prudence. The latest addition to the family was a black and white cat called Socks that Mavis had been feeding since he had appeared in her garden a few weeks before. He was the one she wanted me to see, because although Mavis thought it probably wasn’t Ben, she wanted me to see him for myself to make sure.
“It’ll be time for his fish soon,” she told us. “He has it every evening on the boardwalk.” The boardwalk was a strip of wood just outside the back door.
Sure enough Socks soon appeared and, just as Mavis had thought, it wasn’t Ben. I felt a wave of sadness. It had been nearly two months without him, but I still hoped that every cat I was called to might just be Ben. I could not stop myself from believing that I could find him if only I looked hard enough. But I pushed down my sadness as we stood chatting to Mavis. I could see that she was worried about Socks, who she was sure had a home somewhere.
“If my Monty wandered off I’d want someone to check if he was chipped, but I haven’t been able to catch Socks,” she told us.
I understood exactly how Mavis felt.
“Why don’t I catch him and take him to the vet to get him checked?” I asked her and Mavis agreed.
Now the reason I could say that was because I’d become so determined to solve the mystery of the missing cat that I didn’t just stop with Ben anymore. After coming across so many strays, I’d started catching some and taking them to the vet at the local animal charity to be checked for a chip, in the hope that I might track down their home for them. Sadly none of the half-dozen cats I’d taken in had had a chip, so I had taken each one back to where I found it, just as the charity had advised me to. That was why I could offer to help Mavis. I told her I’d be back the next day, armed with my carrier and some gloves, because I’d learned to be prepared for cat catching. I wasn’t too worried about catching Socks; I knew what I was doing.
The next day I went back to see Mavis and asked her to put down a dish of food in the kitchen to tempt Socks inside while I hid behind the back door. She would close it when he came in and I would catch him.
Our plan went like clockwork. Socks appeared right on time and, after standing at the threshold and sniffing, stepped into the kitchen. Quick as a flash, Mavis slammed the door shut and I went to grab Socks. But the second he realized he was trapped, Socks went wild. I’d never seen anything like it. He flew into the air, jumped on to the sideboard, flew off it again on to the floor and reared up at me, his claws and teeth bared. It was like catching a tiger. Although I’d heard the expression “spitting like a cat” before, I’d never seen one actually do it, but Socks did. I ended up wrestling him to the ground, where I held him by the scruff of the neck before getting him into the carrier. It was all for his own good, of course, but Socks couldn’t see that and when I put the carrier into the car, he almost smashed his way through on the way to the vet. He was the Incredible Hulk of cats.
After taking Socks to the vet at the local charity that Sally had introduced me to, the Animal Rescue Center in Twickenham, I was told that he hadn’t been chipped. Socks also needed a health overhaul and an operation to neuter him, because the vet was sure he was feral. After that, Socks would need to recuperate somewhere, and I decided to offer to have him at my house because Mavis was elderly and already had two cats to look after. I was worried, though, about how George would react, because although I’d taken three strays home overnight before taking them back to the place where I’d found them, I hadn’t had a cat in the house for any length of time.
“My Mum tries to look after everyone’s cat,” George said angrily to Nob after I brought Socks home and put him in a basket in the downstairs loo. “She don’t care about Ben anymore.”
“Of course I do,” I told him. “But Socks has had a sad life just as Ben had before he came to us. He hasn’t got a mum and dad to look after him.”
“You don’t care,” George shouted. “You’ve forgotten him.”
He pushed past me to go upstairs and I watched him disappear. George’s anger was getting worse with each day that passed and it reminded me of the darkest days when he was young. Rage and frustration were pouring out of him now, just as they had back then, and I was the person who had done this because I was the one who had made us go away. Watching George wrestle with his pain was almost more than I could bear.
It was a hard week as Socks recuperated. George refused to even look at him. Socks was a cat—and Ben had never been just one of those.
“I don’t need to look at it,” George would tell me when I asked if he’d like to go and see Socks.
So I looked after Socks and the cat was as nervous as ever when I went to see him. I often came out of the loo with a couple of scratch marks and as soon as Socks was well enough, I took him back to Mavis’s garden where he obviously felt most at home. During his stay with the vet, he’d been chipped and Mavis and I were now listed as his foster parents. I was happy for her when Socks finally disappeared down the garden because we both knew he’d be back for his fish that night. Mavis and I had been through a lot together for that cat, and as we walked back inside, she turned to me.
“Would you like to meet Prudence?” she said.
I knew by now that Mavis never let anyone see Prudence and I felt very honored as we tiptoed up the stairs to stand outside a closed bedroom door. Mavis opened it and I saw a beautiful room with a huge bay window, pink carpet and a bed covered in a pink eiderdown. The bedroom was so nice that I could have moved in there myself.
Prudence was lying on a pink cat bed in the corner, and as soon as the door opened, she got up to see who her visitors were. I forgot the rest of the room as I looked at her. Prudence was the most beautiful fluffy tortoiseshell with huge big eyes. She walked delicately across the room, putting each foot carefully in front of the other like a ballet dancer. She kept her nose in the air as she walked toward us before looking around as if to ask me whether I liked her bedroom. She was like royalty, not a Heinz 57 with a bit of moggy thrown in for good measure like most of the cats I knew. And as Mavis bent down to pet Prudence, I felt that it was only fitting for a cat who’d had such a bad start in life to end her days in a room fit for a cat queen.
I might have been Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, when I first started searching for Ben but I ended up more like Indiana Jones. All I could think was that the next call might be the one that helped me find Ben, the next cat I went out to find after someone caught a glimpse of it could be him; I had to chase any piece of information, however tiny, that might lead me to him.
As one month without Ben turned into two and December drew ever closer, my head was filled with fears about what might have happened, and the more my ima
gination ran wild, the more extreme my search got. My hope that Ben would come home was now balanced with my fears that something had happened to him, and whichever one it was, I had to know for sure. I could not break George’s heart beyond repair by telling him Ben would not be coming home unless I was certain he would not be. George needed an answer, a full stop, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to get that for him. The worry of it all had made my hair start to fall out and the doctor had told me the bald patch on my forehead was caused by stress. I knew my hair wasn’t going to grow back until I had found out what had happened to Ben.
Soon after he had gone missing, I’d started visiting the council yard where all the rubbish trucks and cleansing teams were based, because as well as sweeping the roads and picking up litter, they were responsible for disposing of any animals that were found after being hit by a car—which usually meant cats. After the bodies were picked up, they were put in a big plastic bag, taken to the yard, scanned for a chip and put into a freezer. If the cat was chipped, its owners were contacted to ask if they wanted their pet. If it was not, it stayed in the freezer until the council was sure it was unclaimed and then it was cremated. That happened often, because most cats weren’t chipped. Even though Ben was, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging idea that there might have been a problem with his, which would mean I’d never know if he was found on a road somewhere. I knew it was a far-fetched idea, but the head doesn’t always rule the heart, so I went down to the yard every day just to make sure.