Christmas at the Cat Cafe

by Melissa Daley

  Everyone agreed that an early night was in order. Debbie explained, between yawns, that she needed to be up early, and Linda was full of understanding and gratitude, acknowledging that it had been a long day.

  Debbie opened out the sofa-bed and I sat in the hallway as they all waited their turn for the bathroom, before saying goodnight and disappearing into their respective rooms. One by one, the shafts of light beneath their doors disappeared, and the flat was silent, but for the ticking of the cooling radiators. I padded downstairs to join the kittens in the café.

  4

  The next morning, I awoke on the window cushion with a start. The image of Beau’s snarling face had appeared in my dream, accompanied by a panicky concern for my kittens’ safety. Confused and alarmed, I scanned the café to check their whereabouts, and was relieved to see them all sound asleep in their various napping spots, their chests rising and falling with each breath. Jasper, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  I slipped through the cat flap and padded down the side of the café, turning right into the narrow alleyway that ran along the back of the parade. This had been Jasper’s territory when he had lived on the streets, and he still considered it his domain. A drystone wall bordered one side, facing onto the vista of mismatched fire escapes, dustbins and air vents that made up the rear view of the café and its neighbours.

  As I moved noiselessly along the tarmac, there was a flicker of movement beneath the iron steps of a fire escape, and a moment later Jasper’s bulky black-and-white form emerged. He gave his square head a perfunctory shake, before stretching out, his fur rippling as the muscles flexed beneath his skin. When I had first stumbled into this alleyway as a half-starved stray, I had been intimidated by Jasper’s imposing physical presence. The scars on his ears suggested he was an accomplished fighter, and my experience with another of the town’s alley-cats made me instinctively wary around him. Over time, however, I had come to realize that his street-cat looks and taciturn manner belied a sweet-natured, chivalrous disposition.

  I sat down next to the iron steps and Jasper came to sit beside me. ‘Sleep well?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so great,’ he answered, with a slight narrowing of his amber eyes. We contemplated the skyline in silence for a few moments: the rising sun had broken through the cloud, and the light mist that had swathed the nearby church spire was beginning to melt away. ‘Who is she?’ he asked finally, in a voice heavy with disdain.

  ‘Her name’s Linda – she’s Debbie’s sister.’

  Jasper looked pensive. ‘And is she . . . are they . . . staying long?’ he asked.

  I realized that, amidst the drama of the previous evening, Linda had not specified how long she planned to stay. ‘Just a few days, I think,’ I answered vaguely, with more hope than conviction.

  ‘Hmm,’ Jasper replied, returning his thoughtful gaze to the sky.

  Having lived on the streets all his life, Jasper had an ambivalent attitude towards the cat café, at best. It had been a mark of his devotion to me, and his dedication as a father, that he had compromised his street-cat independence to spend time with us indoors, albeit on his own terms. He consistently avoided the café during opening hours, considering the idea of being ‘on show’ to customers demeaning; but, after closing time, he would slip through the cat flap, to enjoy some of the benefits of our lifestyle. I sometimes teased him about his double standards, pointing out that his proud assertion that he would ‘always be an alley-cat’ was not entirely credible when he spent his evenings sprawled semi-conscious on the café’s flagstones in front of the dying embers of the stove. I suspected, however, that Jasper would draw the line at sharing his indoor territory with a highly strung stranger and a lunatic lapdog.

  The town was beginning to wake up around us; somewhere in the distance a dustbin lorry rumbled its stop–start progress around the streets, while the rooks and magpies in the adjacent churchyard cawed incessantly, starting the day in dispute, as always. Behind me, I detected movement in the flat above the café: the swoop of a venetian blind being raised and the patter of water from the shower. I could picture the scene inside: Debbie hurrying from the steaming bathroom into the kitchen to fill our food bowls, before shouting up the stairs to the attic, to wake Sophie for college. My stomach began to growl with hunger.

  ‘Are you coming in for breakfast?’ I asked Jasper, knowing full well what his answer would be.

  His nose wrinkled in distaste. ‘Not today,’ he replied dismissively, but when his eyes caught mine, I saw a trace of a smile. ‘If he stays much longer that dog will need putting in his place,’ he commented wryly.

  ‘Don’t worry, Purdy’s already done it,’ I said.

  Jasper blinked his approval and puffed out his chest. ‘Good for her,’ he commented. Then he stood up, stretched and slunk away towards the row of conifers at the end of the passage.

  Inside, the kittens had vanished from the café. I crept cautiously up the stairs, my ears alert for indications of Beau’s whereabouts. The living-room door was still closed, but I could hear Debbie in the kitchen, talking happily to the kittens. ‘There you go, Purdy; now, be nice, make room for Maisie. Bella and Abby, you can share the pink dish – there’s plenty for both of you. Don’t worry, Eddie, I haven’t forgotten about you, aren’t you a patient boy?’

  Her loving chatter made my heart swell with gratitude; she knew my kittens almost as well as I knew them myself, and she always made sure they each received their fair share of food and attention.

  I paused in the doorway to watch as they ate greedily from the dishes on the kitchen floor. With their heads lowered, the four tabby sisters looked so similar that they were almost indistinguishable, although Maisie’s petite frame marked her out from the others. Eddie was at the far end of the line, noticeably taller and bulkier than his sisters, his black-and-white colouring a sleeker, glossier version of his father’s.

  Debbie stood at the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘Morning, Molls, I was wondering where you’d got to.’ She smiled as I edged in alongside Purdy.

  I had just taken my first mouthful when there was a scuffling sound across the hall, and Linda squeezed out of the living room, holding the door close to her body to prevent Beau from escaping. He yapped and scrabbled in protest as she pulled the door shut behind her.

  ‘Cuppa?’ Debbie asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, please,’ Linda answered, sidling into the kitchen to lean against the fridge. In her dressing gown, with mussed-up hair and eyes puffy with sleep, she was hardly recognizable as the immaculately presented woman I had met the day before.

  At that moment Sophie raced noisily downstairs from her bedroom and steadied herself on the kitchen doorframe to pull on her trainers.

  ‘You having breakfast, Soph?’ Debbie asked.

  Sophie glanced at her watch, considering whether she had time, and perhaps also whether she could face the contortions required to extract a bowl of cereal; the kitchen was compact at the best of times, let alone when it contained two adults and six cats. ‘Er, actually, don’t worry, Mum, I’ll get something at the canteen,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got to get my art portfolio—’

  Before Debbie or Linda could stop her, Sophie had crossed the hall and flung open the living-room door. Beau instantly darted out into the hallway, his feathery eyebrows twitching, his pink tongue hanging out. He looked as if he could hardly believe his luck at finding so many cats directly in his eye-line.

  Experience had taught me that, when it came to dogs, attack was the best form of defence. As Beau hurtled across the hall, I braced myself for a fight: my hackles rose, my ears flattened and I growled in warning.

  But before he reached me, Linda had lunged out of the kitchen and swooped down to lift Beau off the ground. Thwarted and humiliated, Beau tried to break free, but Linda kept a tight hold on him, cradling him in her arms as if he were an angry baby who needed soothing. Realizing that the dog would not settle with several cats in such tantalizingly close proximity, she droppe
d him back into the living room and closed the door on him.

  ‘Sorry, I’d forgotten he was in there,’ Sophie said sheepishly, before grabbing her things and thundering downstairs and out through the café.

  Debbie sighed and stirred two mugs of tea. ‘He’s a feisty little thing, isn’t he?’ she observed, over the sound of Beau’s determined scraping at the living-room door.

  ‘It’s the breed,’ Linda concurred. ‘He’s a Lhasa Apso – they’re very territorial. They were used to guard Buddhist monasteries in Tibet.’

  Debbie raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, right,’ she replied in a flat voice. ‘Well, he’s not in Tibet now, he’s in the Cotswolds. In a cat café.’ She handed Linda a steaming mug of tea. ‘I mean . . . the clue’s in the title, really.’ She took a sip and fixed her sister with a look over the rim of her cup.

  ‘I know, Debbie – sorry,’ Linda replied. ‘I think he’s just a bit traumatized by the whole experience. I mean, all the arguing and shouting at home, it was so awful . . .’ Her cheeks flushed with colour and I could see that tears were imminent. I watched as Debbie put her mug back on the worktop and touched her sister’s arm.

  ‘Sorry, Lind, I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  Linda’s head dropped and she covered her eyes with the sleeve of her dressing gown, her shoulders starting to shake.

  ‘Don’t worry, Linda,’ Debbie reassured her. ‘I’m sure the cats will adjust to the situation. They’ll get used to Beau soon enough.’

  She leant in to hug Linda, and I caught Linda’s eye over her shoulder. I held her gaze while the two women embraced, doing my best to convey that if anyone was going to have to adjust, it would not be me.

  5

  In spite of my determination to make as few concessions as possible to their presence, it was impossible to ignore Linda and Beau. With three adult humans, half a dozen cats and one dog sharing the flat’s limited space, there simply was not enough room for us all.

  The living room bore the brunt of the impact. The opened sofa-bed took up so much of the floor area that to get from one side of the room to the other, Linda either had to edge sideways around the foot of the bed or clamber across the mattress. The alcove next to the sofa functioned as her makeshift wardrobe; she had propped her huge suitcase open in there, alongside Beau’s upended carrier, and piles of clothes, jewellery and cosmetics spilled out of it onto the floor.

  But Linda’s clutter was not confined to the room she slept in. Boxes of floral-smelling herbal teas and plastic tubs of vitamin pills appeared on the kitchen worktop, and her extensive collection of creams, oils and lotions jostled for space on the bathroom windowsill. Even the hallway seemed narrower, what with Linda’s jackets and gilets bulging from the coat pegs and her numerous pairs of boots and shoes snaking across the floor. When Linda took Beau for his daily walk, I tried to reclaim some territorial advantage by scent-marking the furniture with my cheeks. But in spite of my efforts, the combined aroma of Linda’s cloying perfume and Beau’s dog-shampoo continued to overpower any other scent in the flat.

  To my great relief, the aggressive swagger that Beau had displayed when he first arrived did not last more than a few days. The scratch Purdy had inflicted on the dog’s nose remained visibly raw and weeping, serving as a reminder of Beau’s place at the bottom of the animal hierarchy, and the kittens soon learnt that a vicious hiss and the swipe of a paw, with claws bared, would send Beau scurrying to Linda for protection. His tufted eyebrows still twitched if a cat entered the room, but his growl lacked conviction, and he wore the resigned, resentful look of an animal that knew he was outnumbered. Like a piece of grit trapped between paw-pads, Beau was impossible to ignore, but in the short term at least he was an irritation that we could tolerate.

  The highlight of his day was invariably his walk. He would bounce up and down manically, his moist tongue hanging out, while Linda fetched his lead and the plastic pouch of poo-bags. She would tuck the excitable creature under her elbow and head downstairs to tell Debbie that she was ‘taking Beau out to explore Stourton’. It didn’t take me long to work out that when Linda said explore, what she actually meant was shop.

  She returned from their first walk with a thick cardboard shopping bag slung over her shoulder. Intrigued, I followed her upstairs and watched from the living-room doorway as she tore open layers of rustling tissue paper to reveal an expensive-looking leather handbag. Her eyes wide with child-like excitement, she transferred the contents of her old handbag to the new one, before leaning over the side of the sofa to tuck the discarded bag beneath a pile of dirty laundry.

  ‘What a gorgeous bag. Is it new?’ Debbie asked that evening, catching sight of the bag sitting on the floor next to the sofa-bed.

  Linda feigned surprise. ‘What, this?’ she said, nudging the bag casually underneath the bed with her foot. ‘I’ve had it for years!’

  As the week went on, her shopping habit became increasingly furtive. She and Beau would head out mid-morning, and hours would pass before she returned, laden with purchases from the many chichi boutiques that lined Stourton’s cobbled streets. I would watch from the café windowsill as she clopped along the parade, with Beau bounding along next to her spiky-heeled boots. Only when she was sure Debbie was out of sight would Linda push open the café door – slowly, to minimize the tinkling of the bell – and dart between the tables to the staircase.

  Once Linda had got her purchases into the flat, the majority of them seemed mysteriously to disappear. By the time Debbie trudged upstairs after work, there was no evidence either of the shopping bags or of their contents, and Linda never admitted how much time she had spent trawling the Stourton shops. The only purchases she ever admitted to were the gifts she had bought for her hosts. A silk scarf appeared in Debbie’s bedroom one afternoon and, the following day, when Sophie returned from college, Linda was waiting to present her with a pair of pyjamas. ‘They’re cashmere – feel them!’ she urged, her eyes twinkling as she handed the luxurious sleepwear to her stunned niece.

  I was intrigued to know where Linda had put the rest of her shopping and so, one morning while she and Beau were out, I crept into the living room to investigate. There was no sign of her new purchases, just the usual messy pile of clothes on the floor next to the open suitcase. It was only when I scaled the suitcase that I discovered her secret: she was using Beau’s pet carrier as storage. Concealed behind its wire door were boxed pairs of brand-new shoes and a stack of clothes, all neatly folded and wrapped in tissue paper.

  Linda’s shopping habits notwithstanding, by the end of their first week the overcrowded conditions in the flat were beginning to take their toll. Perhaps sensing that tempers were close to fraying, Linda insisted that she would make dinner for the three of them on Friday night, as ‘my way of saying thank you’. And so, as the clock struck eight that evening, Debbie and Sophie waited at the dining table, while Linda bustled and clattered in the kitchen. Debbie looked worn out, but Sophie’s slumped posture and bored expression conveyed something closer to ill will. She had foregone an evening with her boyfriend in order to be home for dinner and was making no secret of the fact that she resented the sacrifice.

  Eventually Linda tottered through from the kitchen, balancing three plates in her hands. ‘Voilà! Superfood salad,’ she announced, lowering the plates onto the table with a flourish.

  Debbie smiled wanly at the pile of grains and pulses in front of her. ‘Mmm, wow!’ she murmured, with an unconvincing attempt at enthusiasm. Sophie scowled.

  ‘Don’t you like it, Soph?’ Linda asked, as her niece began to push the contents of her plate around reluctantly.

  I sensed Debbie’s patience was wearing thin as she watched her daughter’s ill-disguised revulsion. ‘Come on, Sophie,’ she chivvied her. ‘Eat up, please. Auntie Linda has gone to a lot of trouble to make this.’ But Sophie merely glared sideways at her mother and picked at the mound of vegetation with her fork.

  ‘You don’t like quinoa?’ Linda asked, looking
concerned.

  ‘No, I’m not a massive fan of keen-wah,’ Sophie replied, her drawling enunciation carrying an unmistakeable hint of mimicry.

  I watched as she picked up a single grain on the prongs of her fork and peered at it dubiously.

  ‘There’s no need for sarcasm, Soph. Just eat,’ said Debbie, fixing her daughter with a stern stare. Sophie placed the tip of the fork into her mouth and began to chew the single grain, slowly. Debbie turned towards Linda. ‘She’s always been a fussy eater,’ she said apologetically.

  There was a sudden crash as Sophie’s fork hit her plate. With a furious look at Debbie, she stood up and thrust her chair back, forcing the rug into messy folds behind her. On the sofa, the commotion made me jump, and I saw Beau’s body spasm as he jerked awake in alarm under the table. ‘I’m going to make a sandwich,’ Sophie mumbled, picking up her plate of uneaten salad and carrying it into the kitchen.

  ‘Sophie!’ Debbie said tersely, sounding at once cross and embarrassed. ‘Linda has gone to the trouble of making that for you – the least you can do is try it,’ she called after her daughter’s retreating back. In the kitchen, Sophie was noisily scraping the contents of her plate into the rubbish bin.

  ‘It’s fine, really,’ Linda said in a conciliatory tone. ‘Quinoa is an acquired taste, I suppose.’

  Debbie ignored her, and kept her eyes firmly fixed on Sophie who, after much tutting and slamming of cupboard doors, stomped upstairs with her substitute meal.

  It troubled me to see Debbie and Sophie bickering. It reminded me of how things used to be, when Debbie had first taken me into the flat. Back then, their arguments had been a regular occurrence, usually culminating in Sophie storming out, leaving Debbie morose and tearful. For a while I had blamed myself for Sophie’s unhappiness. Their relationship was already fragile, in the wake of Debbie’s divorce and their move to Stourton, and I worried that Debbie’s fondness for me had given Sophie another reason to feel hard done by. In time, however, Sophie’s resentment towards me had mellowed, at first to tolerance, and eventually to something approaching affection. It had been a long time since she had deliberately flung her school bag at my head, or referred to me as ‘that mangy fleabag’.