Molly and the Cat Cafe

Encouraged by Debbie’s friendliness, I became braver about making my presence known in the alley. Rather than hiding out of sight when she was around, I took to waiting by the bin at the café’s closing time, in full view of the door. When I heard the key rattling in the lock I would trot over and rub my head against the doorframe in expectation. ‘Good evening, puss. How are you today?’ Debbie would say, her blue eyes twinkling as she carried the bags over my head to the bin. I would stick close to her ankles, purring, my tail erect.

A few days later, when Debbie unlocked door one evening, she was holding a dish in her hand. I could smell smoked salmon and tuna mayonnaise and I instinctively reared up onto my hind legs to get closer to the bowl. She placed it on the doorstep in front of me, scratching the base of my tail playfully. ‘There you go, puss. Now leave the bags alone, okay?’ she laughed, as I greedily tucked into the bowl’s contents.

She went back inside and I carried on eating, savouring the way the leftovers tasted so much better from a bowl than from the tarmac. Sensing that I was being watched, I glanced over my shoulder, spotting the dark shape of the black-and-white tom in the shadow of the dustbin. I swallowed my mouthful and licked my lips, before padding towards him. ‘I’m done. There’s plenty left, if you’d like it,’ I said with a look of encouragement. The tomcat’s eyes flashed uncertainly towards the café door. ‘She’s friendly, you know,’ I reassured him. ‘You should get to know her. She’s a nice lady.’

The tomcat inclined his head. ‘I’m not really a “nice lady” kind of cat,’ he replied. ‘Never have been.’

His comment perplexed me. I tried to imagine not being a ‘nice lady’ kind of cat. To me, that was like saying I was not a ‘tuna mayonnaise’ kind of cat. Granted, I had learnt that I could survive without nice ladies or tuna mayonnaise, but that was not to say I would ever choose to. The tomcat paced gingerly towards the bowl, where he ate quickly, glancing at the café door nervously in between mouthfuls.

It was obvious that being so close to the café made him anxious, but I felt a glow of satisfaction that, by eating the food she had put out, he had acknowledged that my friendship with Debbie could benefit us both. The tomcat seemed so self-assured in every other respect, but when it came to dealing with people I realized he was distinctly nervous. This was the one area in which I was the more experienced, the more worldly, of the two of us. In befriending Debbie, I had done something he had been too frightened to do himself and, for the first time since I had arrived in the alley, I felt like his equal.

Later that night, I was settling down under the fire escape when I heard claws clicking along the path. My chin was resting on my paws, but my ears were alert, monitoring the progress of the footsteps as they approached. I held my breath as the clicking came to a halt outside my shelter. A long shadow appeared on the wall behind me. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, sighing with relief as the familiar silhouette of the tomcat appeared beside the paint tins.

14

Before I had set off for Stourton, Nancy had given me some advice about how to attract a new owner. She said that people like to pursue a cat, to earn her affections, rather than feel the cat is pursuing them. ‘Don’t seem desperate,’ she had urged. ‘It puts people off.’ I had been sceptical at the time: the notion of acting aloofly with a potential owner struck me as illogical. ‘Well, look, it worked for me, six times over!’ she had replied, and I couldn’t argue with her success rate. Fearful of what was at stake if I came on too strong with Debbie, I knew that Nancy would tell me to bide my time. So that was what I did, waiting for Debbie to realize that she wanted me to be part of her life.

While I perfected my friendly-but-not-needy demeanour, I continued to gather intelligence about Debbie from my shelter under the fire escape. I learnt from eavesdropping on her conversations that she and Sophie had moved to Stourton from Oxford a few months previously, following Debbie’s divorce from Sophie’s dad. Sophie was in the middle of preparing for her GCSEs, and had found the move difficult. A look of sadness always appeared on Debbie’s face when Jo from the hardware shop asked after Sophie. Her brow would knit with anxiety as she explained that Sophie was ‘still finding her feet’ or ‘struggling to settle in’.

Sophie appeared in the alleyway every day after school, a tatty rucksack slung over her shoulder and white headphones attached to her ears. Sometimes she would stand on the path, intently tapping at her mobile phone before entering the café and slamming the door shut behind her. Her arrival in the upstairs flat would usually be heralded by a blast of loud music from one of the attic windows.