Nine Lives of a Municipal Cat

Life One: Arrival

The cat appeared outside Brenford Central Library on the ninth of March, sat down on the top step, and began the long process of becoming an institution.

Nobody knows where it came from. The prevailing theory involves the 47 bus.

Life Two: The Naming

By April it had four names, and this is the root of everything that followed.

The library staff called it Dewey, which they found extremely funny and which no member of the public ever understood. The market traders across the square called it Boss. The primary school on Cranmer Road, which passed it twice daily in a crocodile, called it Susan, for reasons that were never established but were defended fiercely.

And Mr Adeyemi at the newsagent's called it the cat, with the flat precision of a man refusing to participate in a mass delusion.

The cat answered to all four and came to none.

Life Three: The Complaint

In July somebody complained.

It was, everyone agrees, a perfectly reasonable complaint. The complainant pointed out that the cat had no owner, no collar, and no veterinary oversight, and that it was routinely fed by at least thirty members of the public, and that this was not a system.

Environmental Health opened a file.

Life Four: The Feeding Rota

The response of Brenford to the opening of a council file was to organise.

Within eleven days there was a rota. It was laminated. It lived in the library, in a plastic sleeve, next to the noticeboard about the choral society, and it specified who was feeding the cat on which day and what they were permitted to feed it, following an incident with some ham that nobody discusses.

It also had a waiting list.

Life Five: The Vet

In September the cat was taken to a vet, in a carrier borrowed from the choral society, by a delegation of three.

The vet reported the cat to be roughly six years old, in excellent health, neutered, and microchipped.

The chip was registered to a Mrs Doreen Faulk of 22 Aster Way, who had died in February.

The delegation sat in the car park for some time after that.

Life Six: Aster Way

Somebody went to look. Of course somebody went to look.

Number 22 was empty and up for sale and there was a cat flap in the back door, and the neighbour said oh, him, yes — he'd walked down to the bus stop with Doreen every morning for years, and after the funeral he'd carried on walking down to the bus stop, and then one day he hadn't come back.

The 47 goes from Aster Way to Brenford Central.

It stops directly outside the library.

Life Seven: The Ruling

Environmental Health closed the file in November with a form of words so magnificently evasive that it was pinned up in the staff room and is still there.

The cat was declared to be ordinarily resident.

Nobody has ever worked out what this means legally. It has never been tested.

Life Eight: The Bay

In the spring the square was resurfaced, and when the lines were repainted there was, at the foot of the library steps, a small rectangle roughly the size of a cat, painted in white, with the letters B.C. in the corner.

The council has never officially acknowledged this bay. It has also never removed it, repainted over it, or answered any of the four separate freedom of information requests about it.

The cat does not always sit in it. But it sits in it often enough.

Life Nine: Now

The cat is, by the vet's estimate, about fourteen now. It sleeps a great deal. It has developed a policy on children which is generous but firm.

The rota is on its ninth laminated iteration and has a two-year waiting list. Mr Adeyemi, who spent eight years calling it the cat, was observed last winter carrying it inside during a hailstorm and was heard — by two independent witnesses — to say come on then, Susan.

He denies this.

There is a plaque planned, for eventually. There has been an enormous amount of argument about what name to put on it, and the argument has been going for three years, and everybody involved has quietly realised that nobody actually wants it settled.

So the plaque has not been made.

And the cat sits in its bay in the afternoons, in the sun, on a piece of municipal paint that officially does not exist, being four different animals to four different sets of people, and answering to none of them.