The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas Read online

  In a way I was almost relieved to hear what the teachers had to say, because they were the first professionals to spend any proper time with George and they could see there was a problem, which was what I’d been trying to tell people for years. But I also felt scared, because however much you can cope with things when they’re hidden at the back of the cupboard, they feel much bigger the moment they’re brought out into the light. As George was referred for sight and hearing tests at a local clinic, I told myself that I could not be fearful: I was 27 years old, a grown-up, and if he really did have problems, the sooner they were identified, the sooner they could be sorted out.

  Meanwhile, I kept to myself on the new estate after all that had happened on the old one and the first thing that needed sorting out was our new home, because the old woman who’d had the flat before us had lived there with 13 cats and the place was crawling with fleas. While the council came in and sprayed the rooms, George and I had stayed with Mum, and then it was all hands on deck when we finally moved in. I might have thought I was Miss Independent, but I still needed my family to help decorate.

  I’d learned young, after all, that you have to make the most of your home. “Sides, top, then front,” my nan Doris would tell me as she pointed at a wardrobe before handing me a massive bottle of polish and a duster when she got me over to her house every Saturday morning to help her clean. Usually I did a good job, but then came the day when I was about 10 and she suddenly hit me across the back of the head without a word of warning.

  “Stay still!” Nan screamed as I saw stars. “Don’t move. I’m going to get your mother.”

  She ran next door, came back with Mum and together they peered at my head.

  “Look at them,” said Nan.

  “It’s those kids from down the road who gave them to her,” said Mum.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You’ve got head lice,” Mum told me and I started to cry.

  I was back to normal after a good shampoo with the nit lotion and Nan let me back in her house to help clean it again. But all those years of dusting had taught me the power of elbow grease, and that was what I used in our new flat. Soon the kitchen was painted terra-cotta, the hallway white, my bedroom pink and George’s room yellow. I didn’t just decorate the inside, though. Our third-floor flat had a balcony overlooking a field with a willow tree in it, so I made the most of the view by covering the balcony floor in rainbow stripes, painting the walls green and putting flowers in pots. Standing on the balcony blowing bubbles at George, because he could never get enough of them, I’d look at the shed roofs below and wonder if a bit of turf would make them look better. You can’t even grow grass on a roof, but I never know when to stop, do I?

  Real life came back with a bang, though, whenever I left the flat with George, because some days getting him to school could take up to an hour. He’d bite me or cling on to railings as we walked, screech and shout, or stare at the soldiers standing at the gates of the local army barracks and refuse to be moved. It was such a battle that I often took him in a stroller, and as I bumped it down the stairs, I began meeting the woman who lived in the flat below ours. I wasn’t quite sure what she made of me, because our walls were paper thin and George made a lot of noise, while the only thing I knew about her was that she loved vacuuming so much that she seemed to be at it all day, every day.

  The woman looked about the same age as me and had two children: a little boy around four, like George, and a girl who was a bit older. Even though we smiled as we passed on the stairs and she looked normal enough, I didn’t stop to chat because I’d just moved from a place where a lot of people were either falling down drunk or stealing from washing lines, however innocent they looked.

  But one day, the woman looked at me as I struggled up a step with George.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it?” she said as she looked at the gray concrete walls of the stairway.

  They were covered in graffiti and the smell of wee wafted up from the corridor below because people were always peeing in it.

  “Horrible,” I said.

  “I’m Michelle,” the woman replied with a smile.

  “I’m Julia.”

  “Good to meet you. Now, shall we get something done about these stairs?”

  That was the start of our friendship. Michelle and I were united in stair rage as we got everyone together and went to see the housing manager.

  “People will only have pride in their homes if you give them a reason to by cleaning up the graffiti and getting rid of the dog mess,” we told him.

  The housing manager agreed that if Michelle and I jetwashed the stairs and corridors, the council would paint the walls, and we were asked to pick a color. So what did we choose? Cream, maybe? White? Blue even? No: pink, pale, baby pink, because it looked lovely with the gray concrete floor, didn’t it? We got so stair proud in the end that we even stuck fake flowers on the walls and would stand on our balconies watching troublemakers walk into the building. “Hope you’re not going to let the dog pee in there,” we’d shout to one man, who we knew let his pet loose in our corridor. He didn’t like that one bit, but Michelle and I did. We’d been bitten by the brightening-up bug and even ended up painting the doors of the storage lockers each flat had on the ground floor to make the place a bit more colorful.

  But however much Michelle and I got on, I was still backward in coming forward about being proper friends. Once I might have longed for a friend of my age, someone to see a film with or do a bit of shopping with maybe. But I’d learned that I was the only person who could keep George calm and because of that it wasn’t fair for him or anyone else to leave him. His needs had to come first and I just didn’t want to go out without him.

  So while there were bad days when I cried quietly after he’d finally gone to sleep, I soon picked myself back up again and got on with things. I was George’s mum and I’d got used to keeping both of us out of the way of most people. We saw family, of course, but I didn’t want George to be stared at by strangers when he lay on the floor stiff as he had a tantrum or hear a tut as he screamed the place down. I didn’t want to have to explain how I was getting called into school because he got into trouble with the other kids, hitting or biting them when they didn’t play how he wanted, or how I’d asked for his hearing and sight tests to be done again because although they’d come back normal, now that George was at school I was more certain than ever that something was wrong. I might have gotten used to his ways when it was just the two of us, but I couldn’t ignore how different they were now, which is why I wanted the tests to be done again in case there had been a mistake.

  How could I explain all that to Michelle, whose children, Ricky and Ashley, were perfect? Tell her that George had begun to blurt out things when we were out and just wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I tried telling him?

  “Fat!” he’d say as a larger woman walked past.

  “Hairy!” he’d cry at another with a plait.

  “Moles!” he’d shout at someone with freckles.

  “Smelly!” he’d tell just about anyone if they got too close.

  People looked at him strangely before carrying on their way, but however much I tried telling George not to do it, he couldn’t keep quiet. The school didn’t know what to make of him and had even started keeping a book in which they listed all his behaviors, like refusing to drink in front of people or disappearing for half an hour when he went to the loo because he took off all his clothes before going. There were so many little things that I did not know where to start, and that’s why I was scared of making a friend.

  Luckily nothing seemed to worry Michelle as we started to spend more time together. Maybe it was because she was a trained child minder, or just that she was really patient, but Michelle took everything in her stride—even the day when we were out on the field and I looked across to see George had pinned Ricky to the ground and was hitting him.

  “Stop!” I screamed as I ran toward them.


  George didn’t turn around at the sound of my voice and when I finally reached him, he just looked at me blankly for a moment before hitting Ricky again.

  “George, no!” I said as I pulled him off, thinking that this time he’d really done it and Michelle would never speak to me again.

  But she was quietly fine about it. “These things happen with kids,” she told me as I dragged George away.

  It made me so sad to realize that he could not make friends. As I watched him with Ricky and Ashley, I could see that George didn’t understand how to be with other children. I still wasn’t brave enough to talk to Michelle about it all, though, until she brought it up one evening as we sat on the stairs between our flats. We’d gotten into the habit of meeting there as time had gone on and I’d found myself looking forward to the moment when I heard Michelle’s knock. Leaving our front doors ajar so we were both near enough to hear if any of the kids woke up, we’d sit out together, and that’s where we were the night she turned to me.

  “Is there a problem with George?” Michelle asked.

  No one had ever said it straight out like that before.

  “I think so,” I said. “But he’s had his hearing and sight tested and they say he’s fine. I’m at the end of my tether with it, though, because I’m sure there’s a problem and no one seems to want to listen.”

  Michelle looked at me with her big eyes. “You know, you’ve got to stop apologizing for him, Ju. George is who he is and people are going to have to accept that. You get into too much of a state about it all. You shouldn’t care so much about what other people think. I can see how much it bothers you, but it shouldn’t.”

  “What about when he hits Ricky, though, or tells Ashley that she smells?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “You do as much as you can with him. I know that. But sometimes you have to let the kids sort it out themselves and know that people are going to have to accept George the way he is because he’s not going to change anytime soon.”

  I’ve always thought we meet people for a reason and Michelle was my karma. As we got to know each other better, I’d talk to her about George: how I’d finally get him to sleep each night just hoping we’d get through a few hours without him getting up to wee up the wall or how I’d see other kids playing together and wish George could learn to join in.

  “Let him be, Ju,” Michelle would tell me. “You can’t make George be what he isn’t, and anyone can see what a good mum you are. It’s other people who’ve got to change their attitude, not George. If they can’t accept him, then they’re not worth bothering about.”

  Michelle was so understanding that I soon even felt comfortable enough to take George to her flat. It didn’t matter if he wiped cake up the wall there or bashed the head of Ashley’s doll against the wall, because Michelle didn’t flinch.

  “Are you knocking some sense into Barbie, then, George?” she’d say with a laugh. “That’s good.”

  And while George still found it hard to get on with Ricky and Ashley, even though they were both really good with him, I knew that he liked Michelle. He’d never hug her, of course, or smile—George wouldn’t even look at Michelle when he spoke to her most of the time or show that he noticed when she was there. But as the months passed, he started doing something that told me he did: he sniffed. Each day when we left the flat, George would take in a deep breath of fresh air and tell me that he could smell Michelle. Because even though her flat was one floor below us, he knew when she had a wash on and to George that smell meant Michelle. Somehow she had got through to him and George showed me in his own particular way that she had.

  Chapter 4

  I stopped still as I walked into the bedroom and saw George. I wanted to scream, but knew I had to be silent. Somehow he had opened the latch that locked the window and climbed outside. He was standing on the other side of the glass with his bare feet on the ledge next to the open window. We were on the third floor. I couldn’t move too quickly or else I’d frighten him.

  “What are you up to, George?” I asked.

  He stared silently at a spot just past my head, his hands holding on to the frame.

  Slowly I reached into my pocket for my phone and dialed 999. “I need help,” I told the operator.

  A voice on the other end took my details and my eyes didn’t leave George as I put down the phone, praying that someone would get here soon. If he moved an inch he would fall. I should have known he might do something like this. George had no sense of danger at the best of times and didn’t seem to feel pain either. If he fell over, he never ran to me or cried; he just got up and walked away, with his knee pouring blood if he had cut it. But lately he’d been jumping up and down a lot when we went for a walk and telling me he was flying.

  “Are you, my love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Over a big building.”

  “Really? Where else?”

  “A tree.”

  I’d told myself George had a wild imagination and I was happy that he could dream. But now as my heart hammered and George looked at me I knew I should have kept a closer eye on him. I wanted to scream—knowing I had to stand still, longing to run at him—for what felt like forever, but was probably just a couple of minutes, until I heard the sound of sirens. I had asked the firemen to be ready to catch George if he fell because I couldn’t let them into the flat. If he saw strangers I was sure he’d let go of the window frame. He just didn’t understand that if he did that, he would fall. George thought he could fly like the birds.

  I took a step forward, ready to rush at him and grab him if he let go with his hands. Then I looked at my watch as if it was any other day and I didn’t have a care in the world.

  “We’re late, George,” I told him. “We’ve got to get to Nannie’s because Lewis is waiting to see us.”

  George looked at me, as if he was thinking about whether he wanted to move or not.

  “They’ll be wondering where we are,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  Inch by inch, George started shuffling back along the windowsill and my heart was in my mouth with every move he made. But the moment he put a foot through the open window, I gripped it so hard there was no way he’d be able to rock back and I pulled him down into the room with me.

  “Good boy,” I said, longing to cuddle him, knowing I couldn’t. “But you know you mustn’t do that again, don’t you, George?”

  He brushed himself with his hands where I’d touched him and looked at me without a shadow of understanding in his eyes. My hands shook as I followed George out of the room and even though I knew that from now on I would lock every window and door in the flat and hide all the keys, I was still at my wits’ end as I talked it over with Michelle that night.

  “We’ve got to show him, Ju,” she said. “George can’t see it himself, so we’ve got to show him what could happen.”

  The following morning Michelle arrived at the flat armed with a box of eggs, and we took George to the bedroom, where we opened the window.

  “Do you see this egg, George?” Michelle asked as she held it in front of his face. “It’s you, it is.”

  She dropped the egg out the window and George watched as it flew down and smashed on the concrete below.

  “Now you try,” Michelle said as she handed him an egg.

  After throwing half a dozen out the window, we ran downstairs to find the concrete outside the flats covered in bits of yolk and shell.

  George looked around with a blank face.

  “You’ll get broken too if you fall—just like you’ll get broken if you step in front of a car,” I told him, kneeling down to face him. “You’re like an egg, George—you’re fragile. Do you see?”

  He didn’t look at me or say a word, but at least we’d tried, and I was learning by now that if you said things enough to George they eventually went in. If most mums had to tell their kids a hundred times, I had to repeat it a thousand to George. How
else was he going to learn to fit into a world he didn’t understand?

  His problems at school were only getting worse and I knew a lot of people thought George was just a naughty child who couldn’t be controlled: he’d climb the fence as the teachers told him to get down, hide under the dinner lady’s sari or push children over. He had to learn, so I’d try to talk to him every time I was called into school, but George just couldn’t see that what he was doing was wrong. He didn’t know the difference between a tap and a grab so rough it ripped another child’s jumper, or even understand how to move around other adults or kids: every time we left school, he’d run through the gates crashing into people, leaving them staring at him. I’d tried everything I could to make him walk with me, but he always bolted the moment he got out the school door and as I chased after him, he would roll on the floor screaming the moment I touched him.

  George just could not see that he was the one who was different, and every time I tried to talk to him about what he’d done wrong, he would tell me that he hadn’t. What I was trying to teach him just didn’t make sense and he was sure it was the other children who were the problem. But although I knew that I had to keep trying to help him understand the way the world worked, it felt more and more as if his school was almost giving up on helping me to teach him that.

  In the December of George’s second year at school, when he was about five and a half, I was told he couldn’t join in the Christmas concert because it might spoil things if he had one of his outbursts. I knew George wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t at the concert, but I would because that’s what mums do, isn’t it?

  Teachers don’t spend twenty-four hours with children, though. They didn’t know George as I did and see all the tiny details of his behavior—the good bits that were mixed in with the not-so-good ones. For instance, he might not seem interested in most of his lessons, but the one that always made George listen was history. So I’d started taking him to all the places I could think of—Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and old aristocratic houses—to give him the kind of days out that I’d had as a child when Dad and Mum had told us all about London’s old buildings and I’d learned to love those kinds of places. My favorite had always been Hampton Court Palace; whenever I walked into the huge hallway with its marble stairs, old paintings and enormous chandelier, I’d imagine that it was my house.