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

I was 27 years old, a grown-up, and if he really did have problems, the sooner they were identified, the sooner they could be sorted out.

      Meanwhile, I kept myself to myself on the new estate after all that had happened on the old one and the first thing that needed sorting out was our new home, because the old woman who’d had the flat before us had lived there with 13 cats and the place was crawling with fleas. While the council came in and sprayed the rooms, George and I had stayed with Mum, and then it was all hands on deck when we finally moved in. I might have thought I was Miss Independent but I still needed my family to help decorate.

      I’d learned young, after all, that you have to make the most of your home. ‘Sides, top, then front,’ my nan Doris would tell me as she pointed at a wardrobe before handing me a massive bottle of polish and a duster when she got me over to her house every Saturday morning to help her clean. Usually I did a good job, but then came the day when I was about 10 and she suddenly hit me across the back of the head without a word of warning.

      ‘Stay still!’ Nan screamed as I saw stars. ‘Don’t move. I’m going to get your mother.’

      She ran next door, came back with Mum and together they peered at my head.

      ‘Look at them,’ said Nan.

      ‘It’s those kids from down the road who gave them to her,’ said Mum.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

      ‘You’ve got headlice,’ Mum told me and I started to cry.

      I was back to normal after a good shampoo with the nit lotion and Nan let me back in her house to help clean it again. But all those years of dusting had taught me the power of elbow grease, and that was what I used in our new flat. Soon the kitchen was painted terracotta, the hallway white, my bedroom pink and George’s room yellow. I didn’t just decorate the inside, though. Our third-floor flat had a balcony overlooking a field with a willow tree in it, so I made the most of the view by covering the balcony floor in rainbow stripes, painting the walls green and putting flowers in pots. Standing on the balcony blowing bubbles at George, because he could never get enough of them, I’d look at the shed roofs below and wonder if a bit of turf would make them look better. You can’t even grow grass on a roof, but I never know when to stop, do I?

      Real life came back with a bang, though, whenever I left the flat with George, because some days getting him to school could take up to an hour. He’d bite me or cling on to railings as we walked, screech and shout, or stare at the soldiers standing at the gates of the local army barracks and refuse to be moved. It was such a battle that I often took him in a pushchair, and as I bumped it down the stairs, I began meeting the woman who lived in the flat below ours. I wasn’t quite sure what she made of me, because our walls were paper thin and George made a lot of noise, while the only thing I knew about her was that she loved vacuuming so much that she seemed to be at it all day, every day.

      The woman looked about the same age as me and had two children: a little boy around four, like George, and a girl who was a bit older. Even though we smiled as we passed on the stairs and she looked normal enough, I didn’t stop to chat because I’d just moved from a place where a lot of people were either falling down drunk or stealing from washing lines, however innocent they looked.

      But one day, the woman looked at me as I struggled up a step with George.

      ‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’ she said as she looked at the grey concrete walls of the stairway.

      They were covered in graffiti and the smell of wee wafted up from the corridor below because people were always peeing in it.

      ‘Horrible,’ I said.

      ‘I’m Michelle,’ the woman replied with a smile.

      ‘I’m Julia.’

      ‘Good to meet you. Now, shall we get something done about these stairs?’

      That was the start of our friendship. Michelle and I were united in stair rage as we got everyone together and went to see the housing manager.

      ‘People will only have pride in their homes if you give them a reason to by cleaning up the graffiti and getting rid of the dog mess,’ we told him.

      The housing manager agreed that if Michelle and I jetwashed the stairs and corridors, the council would paint the walls, and we were asked to pick a colour. So what did we choose? Cream, maybe? White? Blue even? No: pink, pale, baby pink, because it looked lovely with the grey concrete floor, didn’t it? We got so stair proud in the end that we even stuck fake flowers on the walls and would stand on our balconies watching troublemakers walk into the building. ‘Hope you’re not going to let the dog pee in there,’ we’d shout to one man, who we knew let his pet loose in our corridor. He didn’t like that one bit, but Michelle and I did. We’d been bitten by the brightening-up bug and even ended up painting the doors of the storage lockers each flat had on the ground floor to make the place a bit more colourful.

      But however much Michelle and I got on, I was still backwards in coming forwards about being proper friends. Once I might have longed for a friend of my age, someone to see a film with or do a bit of shopping with maybe. But I’d learned that I was the only person who could keep George calm and because of that it wasn’t fair on him or anyone else to leave him. His needs had to come first and I just didn’t want to go out without him.

      So while there were bad days when I cried quietly after he’d finally gone to sleep, I soon picked myself back up again and got on with things. I was George’s mum and I’d got used to keeping both of us out of the way of most people. We saw family, of course, but I didn’t want George to be stared at by strangers when he lay on the floor stiff as he had a tantrum or hear a tut as he screamed the place down. I didn’t want to have to explain how I was getting called into school because he got into trouble with the other kids, hitting or biting them when they didn’t play how he wanted, or how I’d asked for his hearing and sight tests to be done again because although they’d come back normal, now George was at school I was more certain than ever that something was wrong. I might have got used to his ways when it was just the two of us, but I couldn’t ignore how different they were now, which is why I wanted the tests to be done again in case there had been a mistake.

      How could I explain all that to Michelle, whose children, Ricky and Ashley, were perfect? Tell her that George had begun to blurt out things when we were out and just wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I tried telling him?

      ‘Fat!’ he’d say as a larger woman walked past.

      ‘Hairy!’ he’d cry at another with a plait.

      ‘Moles!’ he’d shout at someone with freckles.

      ‘Smelly!’ he’d tell just about anyone if they got too close.

      People looked at him strangely before carrying on their way, but however much I tried telling George not to do it, he couldn’t keep quiet. The school didn’t know what to make of him and had even started keeping a book in which they listed all his behaviours, like refusing to drink in front of people or disappearing for half an hour when he went to the loo because he took off all his clothes before going. There were so many little things that I did not know where to start, and that’s why I was scared of making a friend.

      Luckily nothing seemed to worry Michelle as we started to spend more time together. Maybe it was because she was a trained child minder, or just that she was really patient, but Michelle took everything in her stride – even the day when we were out on the field and I looked across to see George had pinned Ricky to the ground and was hitting him.

      ‘Stop!’ I screamed as I ran towards them.

      George didn’t turn around at the sound of my voice and when I finally reached him, he just looked at me blankly for a moment before hitting Ricky again.

      ‘George, no!’ I said as I pulled him off, thinking that this time he’d really done it and Michelle would never speak to me again.

      But she was quietly fine about it. ‘These things happen with kids,’ she told me as I dragged George