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Chapter One

 Abby Makes Her Mark

 

By the time she was a year old, Abby Cat had used up about eight and a half of her nine lives. Or so it seemed. Perhaps after all she still had as many as four in reserve – it was difficult to keep count. But at least three times she brushed innocently against the dangers of the big world even during the few short weeks she lived with her original family.
      Abby was the kitten of a work colleague’s daughter’s cat, the last-born of a litter of four. They were all black and white but this little one had an extra
      orange stripe on its face. Pamela came to work one day worried because the two-week-old kittens were all snuffling and sneezing.  
      “They’ve got cat flu,” I told her. “You’ve got to get them to the vet today.”
      I was remembering someone else’s cat who had had the flu, which is as bad for cats as it is for us, or perhaps even worse. Pamela rushed home at lunchtime to load cat and kittens, daughter and daughter’s baby (who couldn’t be left behind) into the car and take them all to the vet. It turned out that their mother cat, Jasmine, was a cat flu carrier and although she had no symptoms herself, she had silently passed the virus to her first, and only, litter.
      It was a serious matter in such small creatures but with treatment from the vet they all survived and by the time they were running around, Ginge, as they called her then, was the leader-in-charge-of-mischief-making. She was offered to me but it was only a month since my beautiful tabby soul mate, Tigger, had died and I wanted to keep the summer months free to go away on holiday without having to make expensive arrangements for the care of a cat. So Ginge went to live next door.
      She came home the next day, having been chased by the dog. The next door people felt they couldn’t guarantee her safety. I relented and agreed to take her after all, but couldn’t pick her up for another week as I was going away for the week-end. Over the weekend Abby/Ginge managed to fall into the toilet bowl and was only fished out just in time, drenched and spluttering, when her faint kitten mews were heard by Pamela’s daughter.
      “You nearly lost her.” Pamela, wide-eyed and soulful, couldn’t wait to tell me the story when I returned to the office on the following Monday morning.
      I went round to her daughter’s house that lunchtime to meet Abby for the first time. I held the small kitten up to my face to look at her. I had forgotten just how tiny they are and how they always seem to have adult-sized ears which they have to grow into. The kitten stared me straight in the eye, put out a minute paw and scratched me so hard on the lip that I went back to work bleeding. Abby Cat had already made her mark.
      The following day I took the cat basket with me to pick Abby up after work. By this time another colleague was looking for a home for the last remaining kitten of her own cat’s grown-up offspring whose promised new home had also fallen through. This one was a little tabby.  
      The tabby’s grandmother cat was called Tea Leaf and her mother cat TyPhoo so the litter had become known
      as TyPhoo’s little tea bags. TyPhoo was a good mother cat but wasn’t going to let her kittens interfere with her own comfortable way of life, that is, sleeping on her owner-person’s bed at night. One by one, she would carry the babies by the scruff of their necks up the stairs to bed at night. Soon they grew so big they went thump thump thump against each tread of the stairs and TyPhoo’s owner-person had to take over and carry them carefully up to bed to prevent any damage.
      It seemed best, if I was to have a tabby tea bag as well, to fetch her that day and take the two kittens home together so that neither of them could dominate the other through prior ownership of my house. The little tabby was such a delicate, ladylike kitten that everyone said she should be called Lapsang Souchong to keep it in the family. But, somehow, I couldn’t imagine myself standing at the door calling “Lapsang Souchong, Lapsang Souchong” every evening. So she was named Kitty Tea Bag instead, in memory of Tigger who was also tabby and was once known as Kitty. 
      I spent the evening collecting twice as many kittens as originally planned and the pair of them became best and inseparable friends in the cat basket on the car journey home. On arriving home I sat on the floor with them to give them a chance to acclimatise and watched them play together. When I offered them each a little bit of food on the tip of a teaspoon, Kitty carefully and neatly lapped the spoon clean before licking her lips and washing her face. Abby opened her mouth as wide as possible and tried to bite the spoon, tipping its contents on the carpet. I rang a friend who was also on the look-out for a new cat for me, and said, prophetically, “I’ve got one who’s going to be home-loving and gentle and one who’s going to go out and have adventures. KittyKat and Abby Cat.”

 

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