At the window watching the world go by...

Shortly before my Mum died in September, we started getting visits from a sleek, skittish, young black cat. There are quite a few cats around, and several wander through the back garden from time to time, especially since we set up a bird feeder and attracted lots of flying food. This one had a bit of an edge to her though. She wasn’t just wandering, she was hunting; first burning herself on my attention by pouncing at a wood pigeon that had complacently waddled too close to the bushes where she lay in ambush. And this was no half hearted jump, but a ferocious, explosive, lightning fast leap, a good yard into the air, with her claws out and front legs wide, narrowly missing the pigeon which arced away in a flurry of wings in a kind of lazy panic. Some time later I saw her explode up through the pear tree after a sparrow, which flitted off even faster. David Attenborough’s crew could lie in wait for weeks for a shot like those.

So, she was hungry. She also had no collar, so we thought she was a stray. Having rescued a cat on a previous occasion, an old reflex was rebooted and we started feeding her a bit. She was extremely wary. Watchful. Would bolt food while nervously looking around, and jump off if we got too close. After a while she relaxed enough to come in and eat and we started worrying whether she belonged to someone else and, even more, if she didn’t that we might be taking on more than we could cope with.

So we put a poster up on the front gate, a couple of local shops (tanning salon, chippy, general store, stationers) and online on cat rescue FB pages. No response. As the nights drew in and it got colder and wetter, we started asking neighbours, eventually canvassing the whole street. We started on a house that we had been partly directed to as a possibility with a hopeful feeling. As my daughter and I stood there, with looks of friendly anticipation on our faces, I suddenly had a slightly sinking feeling. “Oh God!” I said “I bet they’ll think we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses”. At that point, the door opened. A slab of a man holding a dog seemed to look through us with a face that was grimly expressionless, or perhaps expressionlessly grim. Whatever it was, it didn’t change, nor did he utter a sound, as he closed the door firmly in our faces in a definitive sort of way before we’d had a chance to explain why we were there. As Butch Cassidy might have said, whatever we were selling, he didn’t want it.

It got better after that, all sorts of people, little old Indian lady, cool young black guy, Eastern European family with shy kids, the women with the tans and full lips from the salon, all of them friendly and helpful, none of them recognising the cat from the picture. We called it a day at the house opposite where a bloke with tattoos said “yeah, we got a cat. Its my girlfriend’s and I f****** hate it”. As we beat a retreat to his front gate he said “You can chuck it under a lorry for all I care” in a cheerful sort of way.

On following days we worked our way up the remaining bits of the street, and seemed to be getting warmer. One woman in the streets at the back recognised her as an occasional visitor who would appear at her kitchen window when she was feeding her own cats and beg a share off her once or twice a week. Another said he’d seen her climbing over his back fence, and she’d skedadelled as soon as she knew she’d been spotted. It was quite a revealing walk round. The cat owners knew the other cat owners. It was much less stressful than political canvassing. Knock on a door with a rosette or sticker on your lapel and you are volunteering yourself as a target for all sorts of resentments, some of them merited.

On the day that we’d arranged one of the cat rescue people to come round and scan her for a chip, she turned up wearing a collar. The scan showed a chip belonging to someone along the road, and that her name is “Hiccup”*, but data protection meant that we weren’t allowed to know who her owners were or where they live. We passed on our number and asked them to call us, but they haven’t. So, we’re now in a “Six Dinner Sid” situation in which she turns up most days, we let her in and let her eat a bit – as she always seems hungry and still has a lean nervousnesss about her.

She has developed an expectation of being let in too. One afternoon last week I saw her stalking purposefully down the path towards the back door, opened it as she got there, and she walked in without breaking stride. I felt as though I should have saluted. She now explores, sits on the windowsill and watches the world go by, curls up on my chair and goes to sleep, dances around our feet, does somersaults and head nudges and is generally affectionate and playful. Except when she’s eating a “Bonkers” chicken “lolly” and you pull it back a bit so she doesn’t crunch it all at once. At that point she turns into Gollum. Head hunches, yellow eyes narrow and glare, paw streaks forward with claws out to hold on to it. “My precioussss!”

* We’d been calling her Imli (which is Urdu for tamarind, because she has a brownish sheen to her black fur). I’d been inclined to call her Nefertiti, because she looked like Egyptian cat statues from that period. But, as T S Eliot so wisely noted, cats have many names, at least one of them known only to themsleves. So Imli- Nefertiti – Hiccup it is.