Our house is not the sprucest on our leafy, suburban street, and patches of grass and moss peek through the gravel outside. In summer, the garden blooms with untamed greenery that wraps around the walls and threatens to bring down the fence. We used to picture our well-to-do neighbours raising their eyebrows.
But Bernie was never embarrassed by our shabbiness, or his. He would squat in the middle of the driveway and defy anyone to judge his matted fur or ragged ears. With his stocky body and huge tomcat cheeks, he stood out in our neighbourhood of posh pedigrees. And for those other cats he was a terror, ruling the street with an iron paw. He had spent months as a stray, which had given him a streetwise, gritty swagger, despite his pathetic, squeaky attempts at an alleycat’s yowl.
It was easy to forgive his Clint Eastwood act as he sauntered home, playing up his injuries in the hope of a second or third dinner. All the more when he finished guzzling and clambered gracelessly on to the sofa in pursuit of some babying from our mum, then snored like a foghorn on her lap.
We fretted endlessly that his feline feuds would make us neighbourhood pariahs. Instead, he lent our home some of his ragged charm. When he went missing for a few days, we posted pictures of him on the neighbourhood app Nextdoor, only to discover a legion of local fans we had never known about.
Everyone on the street, it seemed, could recall some buffoonery. He had fallen off walls chasing squirrels; crashed head-first into greenhouses; come home dyed bright green; taunted a dog so relentlessly that it had hurled itself through a Grade II-listed window to chase him off. And, displaying a remarkable awareness of the rewards of celebrity, he would saunter from catflap to catflap each night in search of dinner, like an emperor exacting tribute.
We were often in despair at his brazenness, but he helped us to feel better about our own scruffiness. If the neighbourhood could embrace his ragged charisma, perhaps there was hope for us, too.
We lost count of the times he defied death: all the sunny afternoons he lay in the middle of the road and stared down the cars racing up to the big houses on the hill; the huge dog he punched – properly punched, with paw clenched for a perfect right hook.
Little wonder it became unthinkable that Bernie would ever leave us. Even after the vet diagnosed cancer, we didn’t really believe time could be up for a cat who still pricked up his ears and rushed out to do battle every time he heard the hint of a rival’s miaow.
The receptionist at the vet’s office cried when she handed over his ashes.
We had adopted Bernie from a shelter in Northwich on Christmas Eve 2015, with a cat we were told was his brother, Jeremy. Yet when, recently, we went to reminisce over old pictures of our would-be adoptees, staring back we found two markedly thin-faced felines, tails intertwined and with a family resemblance that we had never seen in ours. No Bernie to be seen.
We never did find out what happened to Jeremy’s true sibling, but lucky us that by administrative error or sheer blind will, Bernie had muscled his way into our lives.
It was typical of our family chaos that we didn’t even notice we had been given the wrong cat. But then we wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. And nor would he.
