The Café Cat

I want to be clear from the start: I did not want a cat. I have never wanted a cat. When I opened my little café, my ambitions were a good flat white, a clean floor, and enough customers to pay the rent. A cat was not on the list.

The cat did not consult the list. It arrived one wet October morning, a scruffy orange thing with a torn ear and the confidence of an animal that has never once been told no. It walked past me as I unlocked the door, inspected the café with the air of a health inspector, chose the sunniest chair, and went to sleep.

I did all the correct things. I said "shoo." I clapped. I opened the door and pointed at the street with what I felt was great authority. The cat opened one eye, assessed me, and closed it again. I picked it up. It went limp in the way cats do, becoming somehow heavier and more liquid, and by the time I had carried it to the door it had somehow arranged itself back onto my shoulder. I put it outside. It was inside again before I had returned to the counter. I still do not know how.

I was, at that point, three months from bankruptcy. I mention this not for sympathy but so you understand my state of mind when the first thing happened. A young woman came in, saw the cat, and audibly gasped. She ordered a coffee she clearly did not want, sat near the cat, took a photograph, and stayed an hour. She came back the next day with a friend. The friend brought a friend.

Within a fortnight my café had become, without my permission, the café with the cat. People I had never seen drifted in specifically to be ignored by an animal that regarded them all with equal contempt. They named it, collectively and without asking me, Marmalade. They bought coffee so that they had a reason to sit near it. They followed an account someone had made for it online, on which Marmalade now had, I was informed, more followers than the mayor.

I would like to report that Marmalade and I formed a deep bond. We did not. Marmalade has never shown me the smallest affection. It permits me to open tins. It sleeps on the clean laundry with what I can only describe as spite. Once, and only once, when I was crying quietly in the storeroom over an unpaid invoice, it came and sat on my feet, and then, as though embarrassed by its own weakness, got up and left.

That was eighteen months ago. The café is thriving. I have hired two staff, extended the opening hours, and paid off the debt that once kept me awake. Tourists come with maps. A man proposed to his girlfriend at the corner table last week, and Marmalade strolled over at the critical moment and sat directly on the ring box, which everyone agreed made the engagement far more memorable.

People ask me, sometimes, whether I rescued the cat. I always correct them. I did not rescue the cat. The cat, uninvited and unimpressed and entirely indifferent to my survival, rescued me — and has never once let me thank it, which is, I have come to understand, the whole point of cats.