A Street Cat Named Bob (2 page)

A guy appeared at the door. He was unshaven, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit bottoms and looked like he’d been sleeping even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘Sorry to bother you, mate. Is this your cat?’ I asked him.

For a second he looked at me as if I was slightly mad.

‘What cat?’ he said, before looking down and seeing the ginger tom curled up in a ball on the doormat.

‘Oh. No,’ he said, with a disinterested shrug. ‘Nothing to do with me, mate.’

‘He’s been there for days,’ I said, again drawing a blank look.

‘Has he? Must have smelled cooking or something. Well, as I say, nothing to do with me.’

He then slammed the door shut.

I made my mind up immediately.

‘OK, mate, you are coming with me,’ I said, digging into my rucksack for the box of biscuits I carried specifically to give treats to the cats and dogs that regularly approached me when I was busking.

I rattled it at him and he was immediately up on all fours, following me.

I could see he was a bit uneasy on his feet and was carrying one of his back legs in an awkward manner, so we took our time climbing the five flights of stairs. A few minutes later we were safely ensconced in my flat.

My flat was threadbare, it’s fair to say. Apart from the telly, all I had in there was a second-hand sofa bed, a mattress in the corner of the small bedroom, and in the kitchen area a half-working refrigerator, a microwave, a kettle and a toaster. There was no cooker. The only other things in the flat were my books, videos and knick-knacks.

I’m a bit of a magpie; I collect all sorts of stuff from the street. At that time I had a broken parking meter in one corner, and a broken mannequin with a cowboy hat on its head in another. A friend once called my place ‘the old curiosity shop’, but as he sussed out his new environment the only thing the tom was curious about was the kitchen.

I fished out some milk from the fridge, poured it into a saucer and mixed it with a bit of water. I know that - contrary to popular opinion - milk can be bad for cats because, in fact, they are actually lactose intolerant. He lapped it up in seconds.

I had a bit of tuna in the fridge so I mixed it up with some mashed up biscuits and gave that to him as well. Again, he wolfed it down.
Poor thing, he must be absolutely starving
, I thought to myself.

After the cold and dark of the corridor, the flat was five-star luxury as far as the tom was concerned. He seemed very pleased to be there and after being fed in the kitchen he headed for the living room where he curled up on the floor, near the radiator.

As I sat and watched him more carefully, there was no doubt in my mind that there was something wrong with his leg. Sure enough, when I sat on the floor next to him and started examining him I found that he had a big abscess on the back of his rear right leg. The wound was the size of a large, canine-like tooth, which gave me a good idea how he’d got it. He’d probably been attacked by a dog, or possibly a fox, that had stuck its teeth into his leg and clung on to him as he’d tried to escape. He also had a lot of scratches, one on his face not far from his eye, and others on his coat and legs.

I sterilised the wound as best as I could by putting him in the bathtub then putting some non-alcoholic moisturiser around the wound and some Vaseline on the wound itself. A lot of cats would have created havoc if I’d tried to treat them like that but he was as good as gold.

He spent most of the rest of the day curled up on what was already his favourite spot, near the radiator. But he also roamed around the flat a bit every now and again, jumping up and scratching at whatever he could find. Having ignored it earlier on, he now began to find the mannequin in the corner a bit of a magnet. I didn’t mind. He could do whatever he liked to it.

I knew ginger toms could be very lively and could tell he had a lot of pent-up energy. When I went to stroke him, he jumped up and started pawing at me. At one point he got quite animated, scratching furiously and almost cutting my hand

‘OK, mate, calm down,’ I said, lifting him off me and putting him down on the floor. I knew that young males who hadn’t been neutered could become extremely lively. My guess was that he was still ‘complete’ and was well into puberty. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but it again underlined the nagging feeling that he must have come off the streets rather than from a home.

I spent the evening watching television, the tom curled up by the radiator, seemingly content to be there. He only moved when I went to bed, picking himself up and following me into the bedroom where he wrapped himself up into a ball by my feet at the edge of the bed.

As I listened to his gentle purring in the dark, it felt good to have him there. He was company, I guess. I’d not had a lot of that lately.

On Sunday morning I got up reasonably early and decided to hit the streets to see if I could find his owner. I figured that someone might have stuck up a ‘Lost Cat’ poster. There was almost always a photocopied appeal for the return of a missing pet plastered on local lampposts, noticeboards and even bus stops. There seemed to be so many missing moggies that there were times when I wondered whether there was a cat-napping gang at work in the area.

Just in case I found the owner quickly, I took the cat with me, attaching him to a leash I’d made out of a shoelace to keep him safe. He was happy to walk by my side as we took the stairs to the ground floor.

Outside the block of flats the cat began pulling on the string lead as if he wanted to head off. I guessed that he wanted to do his business. Sure enough he headed off into a patch of greenery and bushes adjoining a neighbouring building and disappeared for a minute or two to heed nature’s call. He then returned to me and happily slipped back into the lead.

He must really trust me
, I thought to myself. I immediately felt that I had to repay that trust and try and help him out.

My first port of call was the lady who lived across the street. She was known locally for looking after cats. She fed the neighbourhood strays and got them neutered, if necessary. When she opened the door I saw at least five cats living inside. Goodness knows how many more she had out the back. It seemed that every cat for miles headed to her backyard knowing it was the best place to get some food. I didn’t know how she could afford to feed them all.

She saw the tom and took a shine to him straight away, offering him a little treat.

She was a lovely lady but didn’t know anything about where he’d come from. She’d not seen him around the area.

‘I bet he’s come from somewhere else in London. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been dumped,’ she said. She said she’d keep her eyes and ears open in case she heard anything.

I had a feeling she was right about him being from somewhere far from Tottenham.

Out of interest, I took the cat off his lead to see if he knew what direction to go in. But as we walked the streets, it was obvious he didn’t know where he was. He seemed completely lost. He looked at me as if to say: ‘I don’t know where I am; I want to stay with you.’

We were out for a few hours. At one point he scurried off into a bush to do his business again, leaving me to ask any passing locals whether they recognised him. All I got was blank looks and shrugs.

It was obvious that he didn’t want to leave me. As we wandered around, I couldn’t help wondering about his story: where he’d come from and what sort of life he’d led before he’d come and sat on the mat downstairs.

Part of me was convinced that the ‘cat lady’ across the street was right and he was a family pet. He was a fine-looking cat and had probably been bought for Christmas or someone’s birthday. Gingers can be a bit mental and worse if not neutered, as I’d already seen. They can get very dominant, much more so than other cats. My hunch was that when he’d become boisterous and frisky he had also become a little too much to handle.

I imagined the parents saying ‘enough is enough’ and - rather than taking him to a refuge or the RSPCA - sticking him in the back of the family car, taking him for a drive and throwing him out into the street or on to the roadside.

Cats have a great sense of direction, but he’d obviously been let loose far from home and hadn’t gone back. Or maybe he’d known that it wasn’t really home at all and decided to find a new one.

My other theory was that he’d belonged to an old person who had passed away.

Of course, it was possible that wasn’t the case at all. The fact that he wasn’t house-trained was the main argument against him having been domesticated. But the more I got to know him the more convinced I was that he had definitely been used to being around one person. He seemed to latch on to people whom he thought would look after him. That’s what he’d done with me.

The biggest clue about his background was his injury, which looked nasty. He’d definitely picked that up in a fight. From the way it was leaking pus, the wound must have been a few days old, maybe even a week. That suggested another possibility to me.

London has always had a large population of street cats, strays who wander the streets living off scraps and the comfort of strangers. Five or six hundred years ago, places like Gresham Street in the City, Clerkenwell Green and Drury Lane used to be known as ‘cat streets’ and were overrun with them. These strays are the flotsam and jetsam of the city, running around fighting for survival on a daily basis. A lot of them were like this ginger tom: slightly battered, broken creatures.

Maybe he’d spotted a kindred spirit in me.

Chapter 2

Road To Recovery

I’d been around cats since I was a child and I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of them. While I was growing up my family had several Siamese and I remember that at one stage we also had a beautiful tortoiseshell cat. My memories of all of them were generally fond ones, but inevitably I suppose the one that stuck most vividly in my mind was the darkest.

I’d grown up in England and Australia and for a while we’d lived in a place called Craigie in Western Australia. While we were there we had a lovely, white fluffy kitten. I can’t remember where we got it from but I have a feeling it might have been from a local farmer. Wherever it had come from, it was a terrible home. For whatever reason it hadn’t been checked out medically before being handed over to us. It turned out the poor little thing was flea-ridden.

It hadn’t been immediately apparent. The problem was that because the kitten had such thick white fur the fleas were festering in there and nobody knew. Fleas are parasites, of course. They draw the life out of other creatures to sustain their own. They basically drained this poor kitten of all its blood. By the time we spotted it, it was too late. My mother took it to the vet’s but she was told that it had passed the point of no return. It had all sorts of infections and other problems. It died within a couple of weeks of us getting it. I was five or six at the time and was devastated - as was my mother.

I’d thought about the kitten often over the years, usually whenever I saw a white cat. But he had been on my mind a lot this weekend as I’d spent time with the tom. I could tell his coat was in a bad state. It really was threadbare in places. I had an awful feeling that it would suffer the same fate as the white kitten.

Sitting in the flat with him that Sunday evening, I made a decision: I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wasn’t going to assume that the care I had given him was going to make him better. I wasn’t going to take anything for granted.

I had to take him to a vet. I knew my makeshift medication wasn’t going to be good enough to heal the wound. But I had no idea what other underlying health issues he might have. I wasn’t going to take the risk of waiting, so I decided to get up early the next morning and take him to the nearest RSPCA centre, down the other end of Seven Sisters Road towards Finsbury Park.

I set my alarm early and got up to give the cat a bowl of mashed biscuits and tuna. It was another grey morning, but I knew I couldn’t use that as an excuse.

Given the state of his leg, I knew he wasn’t going to be up to the ninety-minute walk, so I decided to carry him and placed him in a green recycling box. It wasn’t ideal but I couldn’t find anything else. No sooner had we set off than it was clear that he didn’t like it. He kept moving, sticking his paw over the top of the box and attempting to climb out. So eventually I gave up.