The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas Read online

  Then came the afternoon when Mum and Dad had to make another pot of tea as I told them I’d unexpectedly gotten pregnant. I was 22 and had been seeing a local boy called Howard for a bit. Having been told I had polycystic ovaries and would find it hard to conceive, I was—you guessed it—young and dizzy when it came to contraception and now had to tell my parents that I was pregnant.

  “Let’s have a cuppa,” Dad said and we sat down together as I cried.

  My parents looked stern. They’d brought us up with rules and I knew they’d be disappointed.

  “What are you going to do, Julia?” Mum asked.

  “I don’t know,” I wailed into my tea.

  But I did really. I knew I was going to have my baby, even though Howard was understandably a bit shocked by the whole thing. It might not be quite how I’d planned it, but this baby was mine and I would be a good mother. Howard tried to do right by me and I even moved in with him to see if we could make a proper go of it. But six weeks later I rang and asked Dad to come and get me because neither Howard nor I was comfortable. I felt as if I was letting everyone down as I sat in the cab and burst into tears.

  When we got home, I ran upstairs to my bedroom and opened the door to find the room had been decorated for me. There was white tongue-and-groove boarding around the bottom of the walls and a wallpaper frieze covered in roses around the top. Once I’d slept in that room with my sister, Tor, and now there was a cot in it. I started to cry even louder.

  “Come on, Ju,” Dad said, hugging me. “Dry your tears now and come downstairs. Mum’s put the kettle on.”

  I think most first-time mums have a dreamy image of how it’s going to be, but mine wasn’t just rose tinted. It was cerise. As I got fatter and fatter, I dreamed of the little girl I was going to have with huge blue eyes and blonde curly hair like that I’d had as a child. I couldn’t stop looking at babies in prams wherever I went and wondered what pretty clothes I was going to dress mine in. I loved their smell, their smiles, the dimples in their cheeks, everything about them.

  But when he was born, George wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Stiff and red, he screamed from the first moment he met the world, and his cries echoed around the room as the nurses took him away to look at him because he’d swallowed meconium; his head had also been misshapen as his tiny body squeezed down the birth canal. I couldn’t help but feel a little worried. I thought babies came out smiling and smelling of talcum powder.

  When they brought George back a few minutes later, the nurses suggested giving him a bottle of water and Mum took the baby because I was still so shaky I didn’t trust myself to hold him. But as he was lowered into Mum’s arms George just carried on screaming, and as I looked at them together I could see she was struggling to feed him. I wondered how I was ever going to do it if Mum couldn’t. She was an expert after four children, but even she was having trouble.

  “He’ll learn,” Mum said with a smile as she looked at George wrapped up in his blanket, his face red and blotchy from wailing. “These things take time, but it will come naturally. Don’t worry, Ju.”

  I didn’t know it then, of course, but this was something I would hear again and again over the weeks, months and years that followed. Mum was only being kind, but hers was the first of a thousand explanations about George.

  “His hips are a bit stiff, so he might be a bit uncomfortable,” one nurse said as he screamed and screamed in the days after he was born.

  “It was quite a difficult delivery, so he needs time to settle,” another told me.

  I’d be a rich woman today if I had a pound for every time I heard the words “It will take time.” Back then I believed what I was told and was sure George would be calmer when I took him home. I’d read all the books and knew that some babies take a while to adjust to life. He’d settle when he was surrounded by love and warmth instead of a clinical hospital ward. But even when we got home to Hounslow and I started giving George warm baths or putting him in his pram, walking him up and down the garden, draping him over my shoulder, laying him on his back or rocking him in a bouncy chair, nothing calmed him.

  You see, I loved George from the moment I saw him and wanted to do my best for him. He was my baby, a tiny, defenseless creature I had created and would be responsible for forever; a part of me that I would do anything to love and protect. But as the days turned into weeks, I began to feel as if he didn’t want the love and care I had to give him. It might sound silly to say that about a tiny baby, but George would scream even louder whenever I went near him and I just didn’t understand it because I thought babies loved to be cuddled.

  When the midwife visited, she said that I should take him to the doctor, who referred me to the local hospital, who said George might be suffering from constipation and gave him some medication. But still he didn’t stop crying. Then the midwife suggested that massage might help, but George went rigid the moment I touched him, as if the feel of my hands burned his skin. Later he’d lift his head when my skin made contact with his and jerk the moment I touched him. It was the same if I tried to calm him by rocking him or laying him against my chest. He just didn’t want to be close to me and screamed night and day.

  Each day I told myself that things would get better, but they didn’t. I hung a mobile over George’s cot, thinking he’d like the bright colors, but he stared past it. I wiggled brightly colored toys in front of his face, but he turned away and cried. The hardest thing was his sleeplessness, because he would only nap for half an hour at most; day and night, he was awake.

  I could see my kindly midwife thought I might be being impatient when I told her he didn’t rest. “All babies sleep,” she said. “It’s important that they do.”

  But George didn’t.

  “He’ll have to drop off in the end,” Mum would tell me. “He’s been fed, he’s warm and he’s got a clean nappy. He’ll go to sleep.”

  But George’s screams would echo around the house all night as people tried to sleep. Our home had four bedrooms: Tor was in one, Nob in another, and both had to get up for work every morning. Then there were George and me in the third, and Mum and Dad had the last one with my nephew Lewis, who was three and a half. My brother Boy and his girlfriend, Sandra, had had Lewis when they were only teenagers and were too young to cope when he was born at just 22 weeks, weighing two and a half pounds. Lewis was christened during his first few hours in the hospital because the doctors didn’t think he’d survive, but he did. He came home nine months later to be looked after by Mum and Dad, because he still had such bad lung problems that he needed permanent oxygen, which is why he still slept in their room so that he could be checked every hour. George’s screams meant no one was getting any sleep though, and it’s one thing trying to calm an unhappy baby but another when you’re worrying about everyone else too. So I started staying in my room more during the day, because I thought that at least people would get a bit of a break then with a couple of walls between them and George’s cries.

  “Don’t worry, Ju,” Dad would say as he opened the door to see me holding the baby, who’d gone rigid and red as I lifted him up. “It’ll be all right. He’ll grow out of it.”

  On days when Mum could see I’d just about reached the end of my tether, she’d strap Lewis into one side of the backseat of her car while I put George in the other and we’d go out for a drive, hoping the rhythm might send him to sleep. Hounslow is just a couple of miles from Richmond Park, a huge green space where Charles I took his court to escape the plague. It’s a beautiful place and we often went there for a picnic or a walk, so it held many happy memories for me. But all those seemed to fade as we drove through the park with George screaming.

  “He’ll be fine,” Mum would tell me. “Some babies just take a while to adjust. Things always get better.”

  But as I stared at packs of deer running across the park with the skyline of inner London far in the distance, I began to wonder if they ever would.

  Chapter 2

  Even when
you live on £85 a week you can still afford a tin of paint, so that’s what I bought when I moved into my own flat with George, because I wanted to brighten up the place. I had left Mum and Dad’s, because families are a bit like balloons, in that they’ll expand and expand to fit, but there comes a point when too much pressure might make them pop. I knew that everyone I loved was getting stressed by George, however much they didn’t want to tell me. So by the time he was six months old, I had decided to put my name down on the council housing list, because our house was packed to the rafters.

  Mum didn’t just have Lewis to worry about now, either. My dad had developed rheumatoid arthritis when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t known then just how much his illness affected him because my parents never hinted at their problems in front of us. I thought life was perfect as I sat on the sofa watching Superman. But as I got older, I could see for myself just how much Dad was suffering. By the time I got pregnant he had given up full-time work, though he still sometimes had huge steroid injections to stop the pain long enough for him to get out of bed and into a cab to earn a few quid. But even that had stopped when I brought George home. By then Dad’s hands had curled in on themselves like claws, his back was arched and he had to use a stick to walk.

  That was why I knew I had to get a place of my own, however much I hated the thought of being a single mother living on handouts, and in January 1997 I was given the keys to a two-bedroom house on an estate a couple of miles away. I arrived with a pram, a bed, a fridge and cooker Mum and Dad had bought me and a sofa covered in blue cord. I was happy to find the house immaculate. The old man called Bob who’d lived and died there had kept it well—if I heard once from the neighbors that he’d haunt me if I didn’t keep his woodwork nice then I heard it a thousand times. But even Bob’s neatness couldn’t hide the fact that there was a bare concrete floor and I could have grown mushrooms in the darkened rooms.

  I knew what Mum and Dad were thinking when they dropped me off: as sad as they were to see me go, I was an adult and had made my choices. Now I had to live with them, and while I knew they were right, I still wanted to chase after them as they drove off and beg them to take me back home. I just could not believe that this was actually real. It was a world away from all the dreams I’d had.

  Even though my new house was dark, I could make it colorful at least. Bob might have kept everything neat, but he was too fond of magnolia walls for my liking. So, with my family’s help, I painted the living room yellow, the corridors light green and my bedroom pink. I didn’t go near the wallpaper covering the walls of the back bedroom, though. It was so old it must have been worth something and was covered in huge blue psychedelic flowers. I’d have had to do a hundred coats to cover it up and couldn’t face being trapped in the room while I tried to transform it.

  The new coat of paint in the rest of the flat definitely raised my spirits, as did the fact that Howard and his mum lived nearby. Even though Howard and I were no longer together, I wanted George to know his father and I’d take him to see his dad and grandma Zena. I also visited Mum and Dad every day because I was glad of the company. But although I saw people and tried to make the best of things, life didn’t get any easier with George, and looking back I realize those first few months with him alone were the time when I began learning to hide my worries. You can’t keep moaning, can you, bursting into tears when people ask how you are and all you want to do is cry? I could have told them my life felt like a nightmare: I was alone with a baby who cried day in, day out, and who at times felt like a visitor I could not make happy instead of my own child. But it wouldn’t have done any good, so I didn’t.

  Besides, I was sure the reason George wasn’t happy was that I was making a mess of things. I could see for myself that other women did a much better job than I did. Watching their babies smile or gurgle at them, I longed for George to do the same. But he didn’t want to shake rattles or be cuddled, and when I took him back to the doctor the answer was always the same.

  “It’s your first child,” he would say. “Don’t worry so much, Julia. You’re a great mum. Just relax a bit and the baby will too.”

  So after being told I was worrying about nothing a hundred times, I pushed down the voice inside that was telling me something was wrong; it’s amazing just how much you can kid yourself. Each night when I tried to get George to sleep, knowing it would be hours before he dropped off, I’d tell myself that things would improve the next day. Each morning when he woke up and started crying, I’d vow that I just had to get through this one because tomorrow was another day. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t have a patch on me when she grubbed in the dirt outside Tara.

  Sometimes, though, after days of George’s crying I’d feel so close to breaking point that I’d leave him in an upstairs bedroom to wail. Closing the door, I’d go downstairs just to be away from the noise, and guilt would fill me that I wasn’t giving George the happiness that I’d had as a child. I knew it wasn’t the same for him to have a mum at home and a dad who lived down the road, and his cries were his way of telling me that I just wasn’t enough. But then I’d go back upstairs, look at George in his cot, so small and perfect with his round, chubby cheeks and puff of blond hair, and wonder what kind of mother I was. Bit by bit, I shut myself away as I started to hide both George and myself from the world, and our tiny house began to feel like a prison.

  The estate where we were living didn’t exactly help keep up my spirits either. There’s good and bad everywhere, from the Hollywood Hills to the slums of India, but let’s just say there was a lot more bad than I was used to where I was living now. Shouts would echo at night as people argued, and I’d hear the smack of punches thrown in drunken fights. Or there’d be a knock on the door as one of the stream of men who hired out one of my neighbors by the hour mistook my house for hers. The gray concrete estate looked like a jail and some of the people living there knew that from experience.

  It was then that I also saw for the first time just how much drugs affect some lives. I’d never even had a cigarette, but now I saw people with eyes that were blank and desperate at the same time. Most days there would be a knock on the door and I’d open it to find someone offering to sell me wrinkle cream or baby clothes, whatever they’d managed to steal in the hope of getting whatever they could for it in order to pay for a fix.

  I hated being in the pathway of all the trouble, and so six months after moving on to the estate I leaped at the chance to swap my house for a second-floor flat in another block. So what if the ceiling was covered in nicotine stains and the front door didn’t lock? I could see blue sky outside my windows and soon made my first friend on the estate—a woman called Jane, who came to introduce herself one day after Dad, who had taken enough steroids to fell a horse so that his hands would work long enough, put on a new front door with Nob’s help.

  “Don’t go answering the bell at night,” Jane told me as we had a cup of tea. “Just keep yourself to yourself and you’ll be fine.”

  Jane was tall and slim, and I never saw her without full makeup and a pair of high stilettos. She always looked as if she was about to be whisked off to Harvey Nichols in a limousine instead of going up Hounslow high street. She seemed to like keeping an eye on me and so did her boyfriend, Martin, who was just as kind. Sometimes he would appear at the door with a slice off one of the pig’s heads they cooked in a pot, which I took with a heavy heart because I didn’t like to tell Martin that I was vegetarian. Those were the kind of people he and Jane were: kind and generous, good neighbors who kept an eye on me and did whatever they could to help. Yes, I quickly realized they had a bit of a liking for Diamond White, but it didn’t worry me because who was I to judge? As a single mum on a council estate without a penny to her name, there wasn’t exactly much for me to get uppity about.

  George was sitting beside Lewis in front of the television at Mum and Dad’s house.

  “Look at the two of them, Ju,” she said with a smile.

  Lewis and George were watching
Tots TV, just as they always did, because neither of them could get enough of the three rag dolls called Tilly, Tom and Tiny.

  “He’s a good boy, isn’t he, love?” Mum said as she looked at George, who’d got up to follow Lewis out of the room now the program had ended.

  It was 1998. George was two and he’d started walking and crawling just as he should have done a few months after his first birthday. A year on he followed Lewis around like a shadow and my mum and dad were still trying to encourage me with him. I didn’t say too much when they did. I knew everyone was being kind, but I was beginning to feel sure that my problems with George weren’t just of my own making because although I did everything I could to make him happy, it was like living with a stranger. He could change from happy to raging in the blink of an eye and as much as everyone tried to pretend that normal rules applied to George, I knew they didn’t.

  Take sleeping. At night George would lie awake in his cot for hours, and the moment he learned how to climb out of it, he’d get up every few minutes and scream without stopping if I tried putting him back down. It wasn’t that I was afraid of his temper or making rules. But I could see in George’s eyes that he just didn’t understand what I was trying to teach him. So I had no other choice but to let him toddle around the flat until he finally fell into an exhausted sleep. We must have walked a fair few marathons doing laps of our tiny flat, and even when I did get him into his cot, he often lay awake, chanting words and phrases over and over.

  “Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear,” he’d say again and again, because those were two of the handful of words that he used now, along with “Dad,” “Mum” or “Batman.”

  “It’s just not possible,” the doctor would tell me when I went to see him, almost beside myself. “Everyone needs to sleep—especially children.”