I’d been feeding the stray cat for months before she brought them to our door: a gang of feral and frail-looking kittens. I’d never had a pet before, and, like many people who do not grow up with animals, I perhaps lacked a certain emotional dimension. The arrival of this bunch of spitters and shakers cracked me wide open, and right when I needed it.
It was 2016, and I was living as a property guardian in a disused care home in east London. I was 23, and I was broke, ambitious and ill. Back then I could be found having routine panic attacks in a PPE-blue ex-NHS bathroom. These days, I know all this to be the ripples of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, however, I just assumed this was what happened to unemployed writers. Enter Kitten Babyleaf and her fluffy kin – seemingly as traumatised, adrift and desperate for security as me.
With that, a dormant paternal instinct (or maybe a saviour complex) kicked in, as I set about literally herding cats, who would scatter like dust. They mewed louder than their size suggested, and it was only after I had spent three hours getting all three into a box that I heard the rest. When I poked my head over the wall of a neighbouring cubicle, my eyes met with six more, staring back like marbles lost in long grass.
We got to work; ladders were placed, deckchairs set. We waited and watched. For eight hours the mother stray laboriously dragged each kitten by its scruff to the top of the wall and then just … let go – a fresh take on helicopter parenting.
For the weeks that followed, I would creak open the door of that disused bathroom – now their panic room, not mine. I would sit still for hours, waiting. Slowly, day by day, step by step, the kittens came to me, tentatively from abandoned U-bends, led by Babyleaf, a prophet of domestic promise. As their fear was replaced by curiosity, my anxiety was ordered by action. Ours was a monastic life – together, all our untamed edges were being rounded.
However, reality knocked. The strangers we lived with were wondering why the pipes kept meowing, and, ultimately, a surprise landlord inspection meant that the game was up. If I wanted to keep my home, I would have to eject the kittens from theirs.
No charities would take them, nor friends, nor enemies. Eventually, in a fugue, I stood by and watched as a pet shop owner earnestly inspected each kitten’s genitals, then put them in a cardboard box. And that was that. I never saw Babyleaf or her siblings again. I often wonder what became of her. Is she an Insta-cat, raking in ad revenue by unboxing PlayStations? Does she have a politics podcast? Either way, despite the fact this pet barely had time to fill the role, I hope she remembers me, and I hope she forgives me.
