It begins on Next Door, the social media site which puts you in touch with all your neighbourhood psychopaths. Some woman has heard that we do things for cats so she's sending Bess message after message after message. This is problematic enough but for many of the messages being of essay length due to the woman feeling it necessary to describe all of the circumstances of her having decided to compose the message, what she'd had for lunch when it occurred to her to get in touch and so on. The point of her messages, when she gets around to it, relate to her neighbour's cat. The neighbour doesn't seem to be looking after it. She doesn't feed it. It needs to be taken to a vet but the woman has no money despite working three jobs. The woman is crazy. She feeds the cat but wants to give it away to a good home.
Bess proposes that the woman sending the messages have the neighbour, the actual owner of the cat, get in touch. Bess next hears from a person associated with PETA who calls from Washington state, way across the other side of the country. She is calling because the neighbour has been calling her almost continuously, and she is worried because the woman sounds crackers. The neighbour has been calling PETA because she needs money to take the cat to the vet for an x-ray. The cat isn't eating, it's terminally ill and it sleeps all day. Additionally, the cat is possessed by evil spirits.
Eventually, following a great many messages sent back and forth, more phone calls, and a wealth of information about what the cat owner's neighbour was thinking of having for dinner, the stars align and Bess comes home with the cat. She's a female Russian blue, more or less, and part of our concern has been informed by our having had two female Russian blue cats who went missing about a year ago, one after the other. The older of the two was named Grace, funnily enough, and the woman tells us this cat is named Gracie, although it's spelled GrayC like the name of one of the more rustic contestants on Family Feud - a spelling which we ignore because we have standards.
We establish that Gracie isn't either of the cats which went missing. Weirdly, she seems friendly, well fed, and not even particularly upset about anything. She doesn't seem like a dying cat. She eats, albeit not very much, and we take her to Martha, one of our local Feral Cat Coalition people. Martha is due to drive a few strays to the clinic to be fixed and has agreed to take Gracie along.
The vet tells Martha that Gracie is a perfectly healthy cat and that an x-ray would therefore be pointless. Bess compares notes with everyone involved and we discover that Gracie's owner claims her cat died at one point and had to be revived by mouth to mouth resuscitation. This seems to be a case of Munchausen by proxy, but with a cat. Munchausen by proxy is a psychological condition wherein a caregiver attributes all sorts of imaginary diseases and conditions to their charge, presumably so as to justify their own possibly cranky attention.
She's your responsibility now, Gracie's owner tells Bess, I don't need the drama - or words to that effect, but words on a screen rather than spoken because thankfully she doesn't know where we live, specifically that we actually live about one hundred yards away from her apartment, albeit one hundred yards bent around a street corner.
Gracie settles in, at least up to a point. She has a tendency to growl or swipe at our other cats as they pass. On the other hand, she's only just arrived, and there hasn't been any fighting, marking, destruction, or even the sort of feline Mexican stand offs one might naturally expect when a new cat shows up. She bites me just once but not with any force, and is arguably less feral than at least three of those we've had for ages.
Days pass, and although it's clear that Gracie doesn't like surprises, she seems mostly happy. She sits with us on the sofa in the evening and follows me around the house making trilling noises. We worry about her eating, namely that we never see her eating anything but for cat treats - for which she goes bananas - but presume she snaffles dry food when no-one is looking. As for cans, a process of elimination reveals that she'll eat only Fancy Feast, which is three times as expensive as what everyone else eats, but that's what she likes so that's what we buy.
A couple of weeks pass and we figure it's safe to let her out in the garden. Then one evening she doesn't come back in and we can't find her. As expected, she's there at the door waiting to be fed first thing next morning, but she's not happy - hissing, swiping, and scratching - the worst we've seen her. She settles down and we make a note to make sure she's always back inside before evening.
Her former owner wants to know if she can come over and see Gracie. Bess says it simply wouldn't be convenient. It would be inconvenient because we already have sufficient nutcases in our lives and don't need one more, much less one who effectively lives on our doorstep.
A few evenings later, Gracie slips out and once again we can't get her back in. Bess receives a text from the crazy woman about five minutes later. GrayC came back to me, she says. She came back to her real home.
Next day, the woman wonders what we've been doing to her cat who never used to meow so much as she does now; and what the hell have we been feeding her? Didn't we know she eats only Rachael Ray brand cat food?
We don't know what to do.
The woman, aside from the sheer sauce of it all, is crackers; but clearly she loves her cat. We worry that her cat care may be cranky and intermittent, but an intervention seems out of the question, arguably even pointless if Gracie is simply going to run back home every time she gets the opportunity.
We chalk it up to experience, part of the learning curve, although it's difficult to say quite what we've learned.
