The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas Read online

  A PLUME BOOK

  THE CAT WHO CAME BACK FOR CHRISTMAS

  JULIA ROMP lives in Isleworth with her son, George, and their cat, Ben. When she is not looking after her family and the stray cats in the area, Julia works for the charity Lost and Found helping to re-home cats. After the success of her campaign to find Ben, Julia has become known as the local pet detective.

  Praise for The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas

  “Ben went so far as to change the lives of his owners…. It’s a gripping story we know you’ll love.”

  —Your Cat Magazine

  “The heartwarming true story of how a cat changed a little boy’s life…A very interesting read which is both uplifting and informative.”

  —South Wales Argus

  “A sheer delight…a truly inspirational autobiography.”

  —Cork Evening Echo

  “The incredibly moving story of how George found salvation in a loyal pet.”

  —International Express (London)

  The Cat Who Came

  Back for Christmas

  HOW A CAT BROUGHT A FAMILY THE

  GIFT OF LOVE

  Julia Romp

  A PLUME BOOK

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Center, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Books (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins as A Friend Like Ben.

  First American Printing, October 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Julia Romp and Megan Lloyd Davies, 2010

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  CIP data is available.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60352-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For George, who opened my eyes to your world and what a

  wonderful place it can be, and in loving memory of my

  dad, Colin, who gave me the laughter that I try to pass on

  to George every day

  Prologue

  When it came to first impressions, Ben didn’t exactly shine. He wasn’t a small, pretty kitten with a blaze of ginger hair or even a sleek adult cat with a shining tortoiseshell coat. In fact, his black and white fur was covered in dried blood, his red rump was completely bare and his thin tail looked more like a hairy twig. Thankfully, I couldn’t tell by looking at him that he was also home to scores of fleas and ear mites.

  But as off-putting as he looked, when the sickly stray started visiting my garden I left out food, because I’ve always been soft when it comes to animals. Even my pet rabbit Fluffy lives in a shed that I painted with bright flowers—it’s like the Ritz for rabbits—so I made up a bed for the cat in a carrier, which I left in the shed, hoping it would sleep there. The stray was looking worse each day and, I thought, once it felt at home in the carrier, I’d shut the door and take it to the vet.

  Please let him be sleeping, I’d think each morning as I walked up the garden with my ten-year-old son, George, to check if the food had been eaten or whether the blanket had been disturbed.

  Together we’d peer into the back of the dark shed and see the cat’s eyes peeping out at us. They were light, acid green, like the first leaves on a lime tree in spring, and every time I saw them, they stopped me in my tracks for just a moment. But although the cat was sometimes sitting on a shelf or sometimes next to a flowerpot, it was never in the cage.

  “Boo!” George would say as he tried to play hide and seek with the cat whenever we went to see it, and I was glad because he didn’t often play games with anyone.

  Autism made George’s world a very lonely place at times and other children found him almost as inexplicable as he found them. They were afraid of the rage which burst out of him in screams and shouts, while he was just as frightened by the noises they made and the way they jostled him in the school corridor. That’s why it was good to see George take an interest in the cat, even though the cat didn’t take an interest back. Whenever George or I went too near it, the cat would hiss and spit, its teeth bared and fur coat springing to attention. It obviously didn’t want anything to do with either of us.

  But time and good food can do powerful things to animals, just like they can to people. Slowly the stray got comfortable enough to start sleeping in the carrier bed, and after another few more weeks, I managed to shut the door with a broom handle.

  When I took the cat to the vet, I explained that I wasn’t its official owner and left the cat in their care, telling myself my job was done. I’d put up posters in the local area with a picture of the stray, and if anyone came forward, I would put them in touch with the vet. But no one did, and a few weeks later came the call I’d been secretly dreading.

  “Would you give the cat a home?” the vet asked, and I didn’t know what to say. Now, if you knew me, you’d know how unusual that is. My mum says the phrase “talk the hind legs off a donkey” was invented for me and she’s right. But I was lost for words when the vet asked me about the cat, because on the one hand I loved animals, and on the other I’d vowed never to have a cat because my childhood home had been so full of them that there was hardly space for me. Besides, although George had seemed interested in the stray, we hadn’t had much success with animals, because he found it hard to bond with anything. Polly the budgie had had to be re-homed because its noise disturbed George, and he’d quickly lost interest in Fluffy the rabbit. It wasn’t his fault. George just didn’t connect with things the way other children did—however much I wished he would—and I didn’t want to take on anything else, because it was such a full-time job looking after him.

  But as I hesitated, the vet suggested that maybe we could just pay the cat a visit.

  “He seems sad,” he said. “I think he’d like to see a friendly face.”

  What could I do? My heart won over my head and I took George to the vet’s, where we saw a familiar ball of black and white fur curled up in a cage. Then it stood up, and I saw that the cat had a huge shaved patch on its stomac
h and a plastic collar around its neck to stop it worrying its stitches. It looked even uglier than it had before, but that didn’t seem to put George off in the slightest as he knelt down beside the cage.

  “Benny Boo!” he said in a high voice I’d never heard before, sounding expectant, excited.

  “Is you feeling better now, Ben?” George asked. “Is you well?” Again, he spoke in a singsong voice I didn’t recognize, and the cat meowed back as he talked to it.

  “I think he likes you,” the veterinary nurse who’d shown us into the room said with a smile.

  George immediately went silent. He didn’t like talking to anyone, let alone strangers, and he couldn’t look people in the eye if they tried to speak to him; instead he stared silently past them at something in the distance, anywhere other than in their eyes. But as soon as the nurse busied herself with something else and George knew he wasn’t being watched, he bent down to the cage once again.

  “Benny Boo!” he said in his high voice. “Is your tummy hurting?”

  He pressed his face even closer to the bars of the cage and I started moving forward, sure that the cat would claw at him through the bars, just as it had whenever we’d gone to see it in the shed. But then I stopped because, as the cat looked solemnly at George, it stepped carefully forward before turning its body against the length of the cage and rubbing up against the bars. Where had the hissing, spitting cat we knew so well gone? I thought I was seeing things. Then I decided I was hearing them when the stray started making a throaty, rolling purr as it moved in time with the words George was speaking to it.

  “Ben, Ben!” he chanted. “Is you well now? Is you well?”

  The cat sniffed the air and George bent down even closer to it. As his head drew level with the cat’s, it looked him square in the eyes and I was sure he would turn away. But George didn’t. Instead of staring past the cat or hanging his head, he stared right back at the cat. The two of them did not break eye contact for a second as George carried on talking softly. I held my breath, looking at the two of them in shock: George talking to the cat and smiling as though it was something he did every day, the cat staring back with its green eyes full of something I can only describe as acceptance. It looked like an old soul who’s seen it all and is surprised by nothing.

  Well, I knew what I had to do, didn’t I? Like they say, hope springs eternal. I didn’t know why George liked the cat—maybe it was just a moment in one day or maybe it was the fact that he knew the world would have a hard time accepting the strange-looking animal, just as it did him. But I’d seen a glimmer of something that I’d spent George’s whole lifetime longing to see him show another living thing: love. And the cat seemed to feel just as strongly about him. That was enough for me. All I hoped back then was that the cat might become a friend for George. What I could never have known was that it would change our lives forever—in more ways than I could have ever thought possible.

  Table of Contents

  Prolouge

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Before Ben

  Chapter 1

  London is a global city, but it can still be very small if you are born and brought up there. Away from the royal palaces and parks, skyscrapers and museums, red buses hooting around corners and pedestrians jostling for space on busy streets, are places where you know your neighbors and where the streets you walked on as a child don’t look so very different when you finally grow up. That’s the kind of place I was born in: one of London’s western outer boroughs called Hounslow, where families who had been there for generations mixed with others who’d arrived more recently and where everyone knew each other by sight at least, if not from a chat over the garden fence.

  London, you see, isn’t just made up of the mansions and skyscrapers printed on postcards. These are few and far between by the time you get a few miles out of the center of the city. There instead are rows and rows of terraced houses battling for space with tower blocks, and while some areas get smartened up, there are a lot that don’t. Hounslow, where I grew up, wasn’t the poshest of places but it wasn’t the roughest either. We lived on an estate built in the 1930s in one half of a semi with my nan and granddad, Doris and George, next door. I was born in 1973, the decade of flared trousers, the Bee Gees and skateboarding—like a more up-to-date Austin Powers film but for real—and while many people say this, I know for sure that mine was a truly happy childhood.

  There were six of us at home: my mum, Carol, who looked after us all; my dad, Colin, who drove a black London taxi for a living; my older sister, Victoria; and our younger brothers, Colin and Andrew. Not that anyone knew us by our names, of course. Victoria was known as Tor, Colin was Boy, Andrew was Nob (weird, I know; I have no idea where that one came from) and I was Ju. We didn’t ever question why we didn’t go by our proper names, because we didn’t question anything. Our life together was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers.

  Back then, it was different for kids to how it is today. At weekends and during the school holidays, we had left the house by 9:00 a.m. and we only went back for a bit of lunch or to get a plaster on a cut knee. Tor, Boy, Nob and I played in the local parks with our friends, where there was always someone to keep an eye on us. The worst trouble usually involved falling out over a water fight and the best noise of any day was the sound of the ice-cream van. On high days and holidays, my dad would pile us into his cab and whizz us into town, where he’d drive us up the Mall to watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace or down the Embankment to the Tower of London. On more run-of-the-mill days, we’d go in to see Nan and Granddad or up to Mum’s allotment, where she grew all our veggies on a patch of ground behind the local army barracks.

  “Shall we have a cup of tea?” Mum would ask after what felt like hours of digging, and she’d pour us all a cuppa from the flask she always had with her.

  If American kids learn to love milkshakes early and French ones like a bit of watered-down wine, British children have the need for tea soaked into their bones from almost the moment they’re out the cradle. Tea was the answer to every one of life’s setbacks, according to my mum and dad, and a cup of tea like one of those I’d had as a child on the allotment, when I’d dreamed of fixing up the shed just as they did in Calamity Jane, was poured once again when I left school at 16 and we all wondered what I’d make of myself. I’d never got on at school because I was a daydreamer, and my teachers had said again and again that I wouldn’t go very far. But just before I left, I did work experience at a flower shop and a whole new world opened up for me: I enjoyed the work, was good at something for a change and was paid £15 for the day. I couldn’t wait to leave school.

  So that’s just what I did, after a chat over a cuppa with Mum and Dad; and a few years later they poured another when the local vicar asked to marry me. I’d met him when I was working at the flower shop, where I was on the phone almost every day to the local undertaker, Alan, who was on the phone just as much to the vicar, Harry. Funerals, just like weddings, are important business to any florist, but when I made up wreaths I liked to think I was also helping grieving families say a proper goodbye. Then at the end of a busy day, I’d meet up with Alan and Harry, who weren’t much older than me, and we’d go out.

  “Aren’t you the florist, undertaker and vicar?” people would ask, looking really surprised that t
hree people so used to the sad business of giving the dead a good send-off could enjoy themselves. We were even spotted in the local disco a few times, and we all laughed when people’s mouths dropped open in surprise. I liked Harry more and more as I got to know him. He was kind and considerate, and never judged anyone who came through the doors of the church youth club he ran and where I volunteered. He had all the time in the world for everybody—day and night—and I liked that.

  Trouble was, though, I was totally unprepared when he asked my dad if he could marry me. I thought Harry was just coming round for tea, but he only went and told Dad that he wanted to pop the question, didn’t he? I was young, about 20 at the time, and couldn’t believe it. I’d always dreamed of having what my parents did, but I wasn’t ready just yet. I burst into tears of surprise when Harry spoke to Dad because I didn’t want to leave my lovely, comfortable home. Most of my friends still lived with their parents and I liked the way things were.

  “Let’s have a cuppa, Ju,” my dad said after Harry had left.

  The vicar had got the message that maybe I wasn’t ready to be his wife when I’d started crying, and I wasn’t the only one who’d been surprised by his proposal. Dad had laughed out loud when Harry spoke to him and I think he was almost as shocked as I was that anyone would think I could make a wife, because I was still so young and dizzy. But as I sipped the hot sweet tea, I wondered for a moment if I’d made a terrible mistake, because Harry was such a good man.

  I didn’t stop to think about it too much, though, because I didn’t stop to think about too much of anything back then. I just trusted that things would work out as I wanted them to; that another honorable man would come along and ask to marry me. I never questioned the fact that one day I would settle down with my Prince Charming. I was such a dreamer back then that my idea of a bad day was getting into work—after moving to a florist in London’s poshest district, Mayfair—to find out they’d delivered flowers to Michael Jackson at a nearby hotel. He was my idol and I was heartbroken that I’d missed him. As I say, I didn’t realize how good I had it.