Molly and the Cat Cafe

Sure enough, a little later I heard rustling in the conifers, and saw his silhouette slink silently in front of my hiding place. This time he seemed genuinely oblivious to my presence as he ate. Observing him through a gap between two cardboard boxes, I was struck by how at ease he looked in the alley. I was convinced now that he was the alley’s resident cat, but I was surprised that, rather than feeling afraid of him, I found his presence reassuring.

I was woken during the night by ear-splitting yowling, the unmistakeable preamble to a cat-fight. For a horrible moment I wondered if my hiding place had been discovered by the ginger cat and I was under attack. I remained silent and motionless, relying on my ears to discern what was happening. There were two cats in the alley, mere inches from my shelter, growling and hissing in a noisy stand-off. My heart raced. One of them was surely the black-and-white tom, but who was his adversary?

I remained petrified inside my box, feeling at once terrified and guilty that I was not doing anything to help. There was a momentary silence followed by a scuffle. The yowling stopped and I could hear bodies writhing on the path, the eerie quiet punctuated by yelps of protest. Eventually I heard a hiss as a cat ran out of the alley, and then there was silence once more. My curiosity to know who had won was more than I could bear, and I peeked out into the alley. The tomcat was sitting at the entrance, his inky profile silhouetted against the glow of the street light beyond. There was no sign of his opponent, and he was calmly smoothing his fur with his tongue. I crawled back into my cardboard shelter, more certain than ever that the alley was his territory.

The following morning he was sitting on top of the dustbin when I emerged from my box, sleepy but hungry.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said nervously, determined to appear more coherent than I had on our first meeting.

‘Good morning. Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes, thank you. And are you . . . okay?’ I added, thinking of the fight I had heard during the night.

‘Never been better,’ he answered, a smile in his eyes.

There was no evidence on his body that he had been fighting and he seemed in remarkably good spirits after his ordeal. I felt slightly in awe that he had managed to come unscathed out of such a nasty-sounding battle, and I even wondered whether I had dreamt the whole thing. He stood up and stretched, before jumping down onto the path.

‘There’s some left,’ he said, gesturing with his head towards the rubbish bags protruding from under the lid. ‘Won’t be any new stuff till this evening, so make the most of it.’ As he strode purposefully past me on his way to the churchyard, I noticed how the muscles around his shoulders rippled under his fur.

‘Oh, thanks,’ I replied meekly.

I waited until he had vanished into the conifers, before jumping onto the bin. Through the gap in the lid I could see a small amount of leftover sandwich fillings inside a ripped bag. A perfect portion-size for a cat, in fact. For a moment I wondered if the tomcat had purposely saved some for me, rather than eaten it all himself, but I quickly dismissed the thought from my mind. He was an alley-cat, after all. Why would he do such a thing?

13

The alley was rarely used by passers-by, due to it being blocked at one end by the churchyard conifers. I liked its peaceful, enclosed atmosphere; it felt safe, far removed from the dangers of the busy town beyond. I made a shelter underneath the spiral steps of a fire escape at the back of a shop, to which I returned every night, curling up to sleep on a flattened piece of cardboard behind a stack of rusty paint tins.

It didn’t take me long to adjust to the rhythm of life in the alley. I soon learnt that six o’clock was the café’s closing time, and that the day’s food waste would be put out shortly afterwards. The church bells’ sonorous clanging became my cue to return, in hungry anticipation of an evening meal of leftover sandwich fillings. I rarely saw the tomcat during the day – he roamed much further afield than I did – but sometimes our paths crossed as we both trotted hungrily towards the dustbin in the evening. He was always courteous, chivalrously allowing me to eat before he did, but I nevertheless remained slightly in awe of him. I sensed his territorial vigilance and, having overheard the fight on my first night, knew that he was capable of defending himself fiercely. I did not want to do anything that might make him regret his tolerance towards me.

A couple of weeks after my arrival I noticed that the colourful lights had disappeared from the shop-front windows along the parade. The cobbled street seemed in a permanent half-light under low-slung winter cloud and had a melancholy feeling, stripped of the cheerful presence of Christmas decorations. The street seemed emptier of people too, as if the town’s residents had gone into hibernation after the exuberance of the festive period.