For two weeks Muffy had hissed and scratched, refusing to let her owner near the old sofa. Valerie had almost decided to give the cat away. But when the neighbour helped shift the furniture, what lay behind it explained everything.
Muffy had never been nasty. Yet she kept everyone away from the old sofa in the living room, and Valerie had spent a fortnight unable to understand why.
It began with a small thing. Morning, kitchen, the smell of tea leaves and burnt toast. Valerie finished her cuppa, wiped her hands on the sunflower apron and went to dust the furniture. She reached for the armrest.
The cat arched her back and hissed so sharply that Valerie jumped back and knocked the floor lamp with her elbow. In three years together they had been through a lot: purrs at dawn, demanding yowls before feeding time, and sulky silences after the vet. But she had never heard a hiss before.
Then the cat put on weight. Her sides rounded, her walk became heavy and cautious. Valerie thought: I’ve overfed her. She cut the portions, tipping the extra back into the crinkly foil bag. It didn’t help. Muffy started carrying bits of food from the bowl to somewhere behind the sofa, and once Valerie found a dried chunk of chicken under a leg, coated in dust.
The corner smelled odd: sour, warm, alive. Valerie dropped to her knees and tried to peer into the gap between the wall and the backrest. Muffy darted across, silent, without warning. She planted herself in front of the gap and stared with yellow eyes as if the most precious thing in the world lay behind her.
Two thin scratches remained on the back of Valerie’s hand.
Daisy called that evening, as usual, on the run.
“Mum, what’s happening with the cat?”
“She hisses. Scratched my hand. Can’t get near the sofa.”
Daisy sighed. In the receiver came the click of heels on pavement, a car horn, the rustle of a shopping bag.
“I told you. Give her away before she rips your face. There are groups online, they rehome quickly.”
Valerie was silent. Her fingers squeezed the edge of the tablecloth until the fabric puckered.
“Mum? You there?”
“I’m here.”
“You don’t need all this. On your own, with that cat… Come to me instead.”
She put the phone on the table. In the hallway Muffy sat by the living-room door, tail wrapped around her front paws, back straight. Like a sentry. And in those two weeks she had never left that spot for long: she even ate faster than usual, as if hurrying to return.
After the call Valerie opened her phone and typed what her daughter had said. The groups appeared at once. Photos of cats, captions: “friendly”, “litter-trained”, “looking for a home”. She scrolled for a minute. Then she put the phone face-down, and her throat went dry.
Before bed she went to the room. Muffy lay by the sofa, licking her paw slowly, thoroughly, as if preparing for something important. Valerie sat on the threshold.
“Muffy. What are you hiding in there?”
The cat lifted her head, blinked, and went back to licking.
That night Valerie couldn’t sleep. From behind the wall came rustling, then silence, then rustling again. Once, through the quiet, slipped a thin noise like a squeak. Valerie froze and listened. It didn’t repeat.
She got up and walked barefoot to the door. The floor was icy; December draught crept under the skirting board. The streetlamp outside cast yellow stripes through the net curtain, and in that uneven light Valerie saw: Muffy wasn’t on her bed. She was pressed sideways against the wall, right by the sofa. Her belly rose and fell steadily.
The cat didn’t hiss. She lay there and watched Valerie through a band of lamplight.
Valerie went back to the bedroom. On the bedside table stood a photograph of her husband in a shell frame, brought back from the seaside years ago. Victor was smiling. And Valerie thought: he wouldn’t have given the cat away. He’d have moved the sofa first.
In the morning she rang Geoffrey from the floor below. The neighbour had the sort of hands that could lift a wardrobe or fix a tap. He asked no extra questions.
“The sofa?” he repeated. “Where to?”
“Away from the wall. I need to see what’s behind it.”
He came ten minutes later, in a checked shirt and slippers over bare feet. His wife Tamara looked in from behind him, unable to resist.
At the sight of strangers Muffy darted under the kitchen table. Valerie noticed: the cat didn’t run to the living room as she always did. She stayed in the kitchen. Her pupils were so wide that almost no yellow showed in her eyes, and her paws shuffled on the cold tiles.
Geoffrey took one end. Valerie took the other. The legs screeched over the parquet, long and sharp, and the sound filled the flat to the ceiling. The sofa moved heavily, old and swollen with age. Dust rose in a column and swirled in the morning sunlight.
Tamara gasped first.
In the corner, on an old woollen scarf that Valerie had lost back in October, lay kittens. Four of them. Tiny, blind, with flattened ears and pink paw pads so soft they would have fitted on a fingernail. They stirred, opening toothless mouths, and from them came a smell of milk, warm and thick. Valerie’s throat tightened.
She dropped to her knees on the dusty floor. Her hands shook. She reached out to the ginger kitten with a white star on its forehead, and it pushed its face into her palm. Her hand was cold; the kitten was like a little stove.
“Well, there’s your nasty cat,” Geoffrey breathed, squatting beside her.
Tamara turned towards the kitchen. Muffy stood in the doorway, motionless. She wasn’t looking at the people. She was looking at the kittens.
Then Valerie understood it all at once. The hissing, the food behind the sofa, the swollen belly, the sleepless nights by the wall when she thought the cat was just “difficult”. And the scarf. That very woollen scarf from the hall, which Valerie used to wrap round her knees in the evenings. Muffy had taken it herself, spread it in the corner, and made a nest.
The cat came slowly, on soft paws. She sniffed Valerie’s hand, nudged her fingers with her nose. Then she lay down beside the kittens, drawing them towards her one by one.
Tamara quietly left and returned with a saucer of warm water. She put it on the floor without a word. Geoffrey straightened up, looked down at Valerie, and also said nothing. There was nothing to say; everything was already lying on the scarf.
That evening Daisy called again.
“Well, Mum? Have you thought about the cat?”
“I have,” Valerie said. Her voice was different, steady and warm, like the scarf that had turned up in the most unexpected place. “There are five of them now.”
Silence hung on the line. Then her daughter laughed, short and bewildered, and Valerie smiled for the first time in two weeks.
And Muffy lay on the scarf, and four blind kittens searched for her with their noses in the darkness, bumping into her warm side. She wasn’t purring. She breathed evenly and deeply.
That was enough.
Valerie closed the living-room door, but not all the way. She left a gap.
Muffy needed to get out.