A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son. Julia Romp

son, George, to check if the food had been eaten or whether the blanket had been disturbed.

      Together we’d peer into the back of the dark shed and see the cat’s eyes peeping out at us. They were light, acid green, like the first leaves on a lime tree in spring, and every time I saw them, they stopped me in my tracks for just a moment. But although the cat was sometimes sitting on a shelf or sometimes next to a flowerpot, it was never in the cage.

      ‘Boo!’ George would say as he tried to play hide and seek with the cat whenever we went to see it, and I was glad because he didn’t often play games with anyone.

      Autism made George’s world a very lonely place at times and other children found him almost as inexplicable as he found them. They were afraid of the rage which burst out of him in screams and shouts, while he was just as frightened by the noises they made and the way they jostled him in the school corridor. That’s why it was good to see George take an interest in the cat, even though the cat didn’t take an interest back. Whenever George or I went too near it, the cat would hiss and spit, its teeth bared and fur coat springing to attention. It obviously didn’t want anything to do with either of us.

      But time and good food can do powerful things to animals, just like they can to people. Slowly the stray got comfortable enough to start sleeping in the carrier bed, and after another few more weeks, I managed to shut the door with a broom handle.

      When I took the cat to the vet, I explained that I wasn’t its official owner and left the cat in their care, telling myself my job was done. I’d put up posters in the local area with a picture of the stray, and if anyone came forward, I would put them in touch with the vet. But no one did, and a few weeks later came the call I’d been secretly dreading.

      ‘Would you give the cat a home?’ the vet asked, and I didn’t know what to say. Now, if you knew me, you’d know how unusual that is. My mum says the phrase ‘talk the hind legs off a donkey’ was invented for me and she’s right. But I was lost for words when the vet asked me about the cat, because on the one hand I loved animals, and on the other I’d vowed never to have a cat because my childhood home had been so full of them that there was hardly space for me. Besides, although George had seemed interested in the stray, we hadn’t had much success with animals, because he found it hard to bond with anything. Polly the budgie had had to be rehomed because its noise disturbed George, and he’d quickly lost interest in Fluffy the rabbit. It wasn’t his fault. George just didn’t connect with things the way other children did – however much I wished he would – and I didn’t want to take on anything else, because it was such a full-time job looking after him.

      But as I hesitated, the vet suggested that maybe we could just pay the cat a visit.

      ‘He seems sad,’ he said. ‘I think he’d like to see a friendly face.’

      What could I do? My heart won over my head and I took George to the vet’s, where we saw a familiar ball of black and white fur curled up in a cage. Then it stood up, and I saw that the cat had a huge shaved patch on its stomach and a plastic collar around its neck to stop it worrying its stitches. It looked even uglier than it had before, but that didn’t seem to put George off in the slightest as he knelt down beside the cage.

      ‘Benny Boo!’ he said in a high voice I’d never heard before, sounding expectant, excited.

      ‘Is you feeling better now, Ben?’ George asked. ‘Is you well?’ Again, he spoke in a sing-song voice I didn’t recognise, and the cat miaowed back as he talked to it.

      ‘I think he likes you,’ the veterinary nurse who’d shown us into the room said with a smile.

      George immediately went silent. He didn’t like talking to anyone, let alone strangers, and he couldn’t look people in the eye if they tried to speak to him; instead he stared silently past them at something in the distance, anywhere other than in their eyes. But as soon as the nurse busied herself with something else and George knew he wasn’t being watched, he bent down to the cage once again.

      ‘Benny Boo!’ he said in his high voice. ‘Is your tummy hurting?’

      He pressed his face even closer to the bars of the cage and I started moving forward, sure that the cat would claw at him through the bars, just as it had whenever we’d gone to see it in the shed. But then I stopped because, as the cat looked solemnly at George, it stepped carefully forward before turning its body against the length of the cage and rubbing up against the bars. Where had the hissing, spitting, cat we knew so well gone? I thought I was seeing things. Then I decided I was hearing them when the stray started making a throaty, rolling purr as it moved in time with the words George was speaking to it.

      ‘Ben, Ben!’ he chanted. ‘Is you well now? Is you well?’

      The cat sniffed the air and George bent down even closer to it. As his head drew level with the cat’s, it looked him square in the eyes and I was sure he would turn away. But George didn’t. Instead of staring past the cat or hanging his head, he stared right back at the cat. The two of them did not break eye contact for a second as George carried on talking softly. I held my breath, looking at the two of them in shock: George talking to the cat and smiling as though it was something he did every day, the cat staring back with its green eyes full of something I can only describe as acceptance. It looked like an old soul who’s seen it all and is surprised by nothing.

      Well, I knew what I had to do, didn’t I? Like they say, hope springs eternal. I didn’t know why George liked the cat – maybe it was just a moment in one day or maybe it was the fact that he knew the world would have a hard time accepting the strange-looking animal, just as it did him. But I’d seen a glimmer of something that I’d spent George’s whole lifetime longing to see him show another living thing: love. And the cat seemed to feel just as strongly about him. That was enough for me. All I hoped back then was that the cat might become a friend for George. What I could never have known was that it would change our lives forever – in more ways than I could have ever thought possible.

PART ONE Before Ben

       Chapter 1

      London is a global city, but it can still be very small if you are born and brought up there. Away from the royal palaces and parks, sky scrapers and museums, red buses hooting around corners and pedestrians jostling for space on busy streets, are places where you know your neighbours and where the streets you walked on as a child don’t look so very different when you finally grow up. That’s the kind of place I was born in: one of London’s western outer boroughs called Hounslow, where families who had been there for generations mixed with others who’d arrived more recently and where everyone knew each other by sight at least, if not from a chat over the garden fence.

      London, you see, isn’t just made up of the mansions and sky scrapers printed on postcards. These are few and far between by the time you get a few miles out of the centre of the city. There instead are rows and rows of terraced houses battling for space with tower blocks, and while some areas get smartened up, there are a lot that don’t. Hounslow, where I grew up, wasn’t the poshest of places but it wasn’t the roughest either. We lived on an estate built in the 1930s in one half of a semi with my nan and granddad, Doris and George, next door. I was born in 1973, the decade of flared trousers, the Bee Gees and skateboarding – like a more up-to-date Austin Powers film but for real – and while many people say this, I know for sure that mine was a truly happy childhood.

      There were six of us at home: my mum, Carol, who looked after us all; my dad, Colin, who drove a black London taxi for a living; my older sister, Victoria; and our younger brothers, Colin and Andrew. Not that anyone knew us by our names, of course. Victoria was known as Tor, Colin was Boy, Andrew was Nob (weird, I know; I have no idea where that one came from) and I was Ju. We didn’t ever question why we didn’t go by our proper names, because we didn’t question anything. Our life together was as comfortable as an old pair