How a cat turned my devastating year around
After struggling with infertility and depression, a viral tweet about a stray has ended Kat Brown’s 2019 on a hopeful note
It felt like the plot to a Christmas film: I was turning out of my therapist’s office in Fitzrovia one late November morning when a little cat, as scrawny as a chicken leg, rushed out from under a car. She was ravishingly pretty; cloudy grey and apricot, with huge green eyes – and clearly lost. Not once in 14 years of working in this busy central London area had I seen a cat; not even a 3am feral when waiting for the night bus. My south London neighbourhood has self-important street toms, but this little kitten was not like them at all.
She looked young and underfed. “Mrrrp,” she trilled, winding her body around me as though airkissing a friend in Waitrose.
Concerned, I tried to pick her up to start doorknocking – all flats, this was going to take hours – but she was having none of it. So I gathered her bony little body into a mercifully obliging taxi to see if she was microchipped. “She’s not, or neutered,” the kind receptionist at the London Veterinary Clinic told me, rummaging under the desk for some food, “And she’s got three teeth that need whipping out pronto.”
“I will not get involved, I will not get involved,” I told myself, sending a picture of “Found Cat” and I in the cab to my 12,000 Twitter followers in the hope that her owner might find her via the power of social media. I rang the Mayhew shelter in north London to see if they could take her, but Fitzrovia wasn’t in their jurisdiction. My heart plummeted at the thought of dropping off something so small at somewhere so huge as Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, where I had got my own moggy, Ambridge.
“How much do you think that tooth operation will cost?” I asked my vet in south London, by now on the other end of the phone. Around £450 – ouch! – and a shelter would do it for free. But I’d just been paid for a couple of freelance gigs, so I had the money… I ordered another taxi and left my details with the clinic, in case Found Cat’s owner called, looking for her.
After letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that she loathed pet carriers, the little cat spent the journey chirping quietly, white paws pressed like tiny spades up against the window, while I went through endless lost cat websites, messaging people whose adverts matched her description. I got one reply saying they thought she might be theirs and would message me again after work.
In south London, my vet found her underweight and with her hind claws heavily scuffed, as though she had tried d to break a fall. There wasn’t an appointment free for her to have her teeth removed for a few w days: my husband and I have a spare room. It could take a small cat, surely? God knows, our r house had the space.
Earlier this year – our r fourth one of trying to conceive – we went through two unsuccessful rounds of IVF. The outcome was deemed to be immature eggs, something which is difficult to solve and would require spending thousands upon thousands on an uncertain outcome – and with further mental strain on us both.
I had started seeing the Fitzrovia therapist soon afterwards. Having suffered with depression since I was 12, I was already prone to deep misery. Infertility, coupled with an often unsatisfying job, meant that I had spent much of 2019 struggling to find my purpose. I had forgotten what made me tick.
Twitter had already decided that I should keep Found
Cat. Messages kept flooding in: “I’m seriously crying”; “Ambridge is going to be fuming.” Watching the vet’s receptionists going all gooey over her, something clutched in my chest. At home, Found Cat bounced around the room like an inquisitive cloud, and
I lay on the bed to keep her company, more enchanted by her with every minute, but waiting for her possible owners to call.
By 9.15pm, I was climbing the walls. At 9.30pm, I got a video on WhatsApp – “I don’t think it’s her. Looks like she’s got a good home though.”
I had been searching for someone I assumed must be desperate to find the missing Found Cat. But as the days wore on, I started to realise they did not exist. For a nation of animal lovers, we Brits can be despicable pet owners.
“Our officers have seen cats abandoned in bins, by the side of the road, on riverbanks and dumped outside vets,” says Emily Stott of the RSPCA, which took in 2,181 cats in
December 2018 alone. “People’s circumstances can change… but there is never an excuse to abandon any animal like this.”
I had a few half-genuine offers to adopt Found Cat through Twitter, but my husband was falling in love with her, too. The only obstacle was darling Ambridge: a glowering lump of coal who doesn’t particularly like people, let alone other cats.
Fortunately, after six years I know that she spends winter either on the radiator or under our duvet, so perhaps sneaking in a companion would be easier?
Found Cat’s tooth op came and went successfully, and still no sign of her owner. So I made a makeshift gate out of wire mesh (as the internet advised) to let the two felines eye one another for the first time. Ambridge puffed up like a furious owl and hissed. Found Cat went for a noise somewhere between an air raid siren and the throaty yawl of Cosmic Creepers, the cat in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Then they ignored each other and went back to skulking around in different rooms.
This much was true: Found Cat deserved a really good home after her rotten start in life. In therapy, I had marked out my values. One of these things was helping when I saw someone in distress. A pet is no baby, but I knew from the comfort I have drawn from Ambridge how life-enhancing they can be. As the two-week mark approached, I stopped thinking we would lose her.
We worked through names before landing on Genevieve – named after the vampire Genevieve Dieudonné, heroine of our friend Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula book series. It seemed to suit our tiny cloud cat and her constant lust for food – and even more so when we learnt she was actually a very small two-year-old, rather than a kitten.
Suddenly, our home has another voice in it. Not one that we had expected or longed for this year, but one we are thrilled with all the same. Whoever scripted this particular Christmas plot, thank you from us all.