Late one night during the first Covid lockdown in 2020, my partner, Louisa, and I were watching TV in the sitting room when a tabby cat appeared in the darkness outside the patio door. He stared in through the glass, sat down and miaowed loudly.
Next morning he was still there, still miaowing. By the evening, since he hadn’t moved or even slept, we decided we had to give him some water. The next morning, we fed him. The evening after that we let him in and made him a bed out of an old fleece jacket. Because he was an explorer who’d been marooned, we called him Shackleton.
The vets were closed to all but emergencies, so we couldn’t get him scanned for a chip and try to get him home. Instead, he settled in – shouting for food, pawing at doors, occasionally tolerating a scratch behind the ear or sitting with us on the sofa to watch Stranger Things. In the long, uncertain days of lockdown he was a distraction, something else to talk about. Where had he come from? Why had he looked in at us that night and decided he was travelling no further? We felt chosen, which is exactly what cats want you to think.
Six weeks later, the vets reopened. We put Shackleton in a borrowed box, and in the car park outside a local surgery, we handed him to a nurse. She took him inside. A few moments later the vet came out, and said: “He’s chipped. I’m just going to call the owner.”
The vet was gone a long time. When she returned, she said: “This is a bit peculiar.”
She went on. “I called the registered owner. And told her I had her cat. She said that she wasn’t missing a cat – hers was at home. So I described him. And she said: ‘He sounds exactly like our old cat, Squeak.’”
So was Squeak missing? “No. Squeak’s dead,” she was told. “He was my daughter’s cat, but he died six years ago.”
The vet asked if she was quite sure about that – he hadn’t just run away or got lost? “No. I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” said the woman. “We buried him.”
But Shackleton was indeed Squeak, back from the dead. He was the much-mourned cat of a girl called Sophie, from a village a few miles away. She was nine when her family went on holiday and left Squeak in the care of a neighbour. A few days after they left, the neighbour had come to feed him, and found a dead tabby outside the house. He buried it in the garden, as Sophie requested.
Meanwhile, the real Squeak had set out on the journey that six years later led him to us. I’ve often wondered where he was all that time, and if someone else in the story is missing a cat.
So Shackleton, the cat who faked his own death, went home. We ended up friends with his family, and went to visit. He had the manners to remember us.
He died again in 2023. This time everyone is reasonably sure about it.
