Julian

By Rachamim Farnworth

My Uncle Julian was a cat. 

He was gone long before I arrived into the world, but I always felt like I knew him. He featured in every family story, every fading Polaroid, every “Remember when?” anecdote. 

My dad and my grandma would point at him in the photos and say, "Look Ellie, that's your Uncle Julian!" 

Julian was a tuxedo cat with dark, short, smooth fur, and green eyes. Each of his feet were white, as was his chin, making him look as though he'd stepped in a two-inch puddle of milk and dipped his head down to drink.

The story goes that my grandmother, heavily pregnant with my father and distraught at her husband's betrayal and departure, was weeping alone in her kitchen. The harsh sound of the rainfall muffled her solitary sobs and kept the older children from waking. As she wondered at how she would support both her twins and a new baby all alone, she heard a sound like a baby's cry. 

She pushed herself up from the stool by the sink and went to investigate. The twins were sleeping soundly when she peered through the gap in their slightly opened bedroom door. The TV was switched off and so was the radio. 

She might have stopped then but this was the first thing to occupy her thoughts in hours other than her own wretched circumstances, and the novelty alone propelled her from room to room, searching for the source of the pitiable sound.

Eventually, she came to her bedroom, still in disarray after her husband had whirled in and out to grab his things and go. The room was frigid, the curtains swaying back and forth in the draught from the open window. Rainwater sopped into the carpet. And when she crouched down carefully beside the bed and looked into the dark space beneath, two bottle-green eyes looked back. 

Chiding herself for even thinking of it, she set out some water and some lunch meat on shallow plastic plates beside the bed for the skinny black and white cat hiding from the storm. 

The next morning, she awoke to find Julian curled up in the bed with her, nuzzling her swollen belly. By the time my father was born a week later, Julian had been named and adopted into the family—initially as a good luck charm, but within a few weeks he became as much a son to her as my father was. 

Julian walked his siblings to school in the morning and could be relied upon to pick them up again in the afternoon. He was a familiar sight wandering around the village with his brothers and sister. 

Eventually, he had his own room, but even then he would slip into each of the family member's bedrooms each night—checking on their breathing and their sleep. He usually slept in my dad's bedroom, ready to purr away his nightmares. Once, when he was six, my dad fell from his bed and knocked himself out on the bedside table. Julian went into their mum's room and screamed until she woke up and followed him back to find her son unconscious and bleeding slightly from his head. Julian made it into the local papers for that: “Cat Saves Human Brother.” The newspaper clipping is framed on my dad's desk—a picture of Julian sitting on the kitchen table, him with a bandaged head, his mum standing behind them wearing an apron and a fond smile. 

My childhood acceptance of my unusual uncle eventually eroded under adult cynicism. I hadn't thought of Uncle Julian in years. And when I did think of him, I thought of him not as my uncle but as my dad's cat. However much he helped my grandma, however much my dad loved him, my oh-so-rational adult mind insisted he couldn't really be anything else. Not even his remarkable lifespan that kept him alive and well through his twenties, nor his sudden mysterious disappearance, could make him more than just a pet.

But. 

I am thinking of Julian now and thinking of him as maybe actually my uncle in more than name. My wife has left me, I'm expecting to give birth to my first baby any day, and in the winds and rain of a storm blowing into my bedroom, a tuxedo cat with milk-white feet and bottle-green eyes is staring at me quietly like he knows me. 

"Julian?" I ask. 

The cat chirps as if to agree and slowly blinks his familiar green eyes. 

Rachamim Farnworth splits his time between writing, entertaining small children and wondering how so much mud got into his wheelchair wheels. He lives in North West England with his husband.