Ebony

Ebony only stayed for a week. Jim Wilson opened his front door one autumnal Sunday morning to find her sitting on his doorstep as if she owned it. Her sleek black fur lay slick against her body and her tail flicked from side to side as if waving to a silent melody.

‘What do you want then?’ he muttered, shielding his weary gaze from the spitting rain. The cat blinked her intelligent eyes and as if in answer, strutted past him, making herself at home on his shaggy hearth rug.

Steadying his weight against the mantlepiece, Jim lowered himself to a sitting position next to her. It was a risky decision at his age and he hoped to goodness he’d be able to get back up again. He had barely touched her collar to check for identification when it came away in his hand.

‘Piece of tat,’ he grumbled. They didn’t make things like they used to. He squinted at the name tag, making a mental note to buy a replacement collar. The simple five-letter word scratched into the metal in bold capitals read ‘EBONY’.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed noon, breaking the quiet calm of the living room. Jim scratched the cat’s head, her dark fur soft beneath his fingers. He had planned to turn her back out onto the doorstep, but now lacked the motivation to do so. He found himself lost in the ticking of the clock, the moan of the wild wind outside and the seduction of his new friend’s rhythmic purring.  As the last chime rang out, the rain abated and a shot of warm sunlight burst into the room, lighting up the picture frames lining the fireplace. A wife lost to cancer, forsaken faces from neglected friendships. They all smiled out; snapshots of frozen memories.

Ebony rubbed her head against his arthritic knee and flicked her lazy tail.

A sudden thud woke Jim from his reverie. A flash of black and white flew past the window and he heard the rustle of a bush surrendering to an unfamiliar weight. Wrenching open his back door, Jim stopped at the sight of a muddy football nestled in a crater of broken echinacea stems. That Mrs Tyler next door and her cretin of a son, he thought. Last week, his David Austin rose had also fallen prey to that ruddy football. Well, not the same football. He had felled the assailant straight away with a stab of his garden fork. This must be a replacement.

He took a step forward with every intention of repeating the treatment but a strange niggling feeling in the pit of his stomach brought him to a standstill. After a moment he continued forward, reached down, picked up the offending missile and threw it back over the fence into Mrs Tyler’s garden. He stood and shivered. Ebony appeared from nowhere, rubbing her long body against his leg and weaving her tail around his dodgy knee.

“Not worth it, eh?” He looked down at his companion and smiled. A quick shrug of his shoulders shifted the niggle and he headed back inside.

“Alright, alright. No need to make a song and dance about it,’ he muttered.

The niggle reappeared the next day when he surprised himself by accepting an invitation from George at number 43 to try out the local bowls club. His dodgy knee hadn’t ached quite as much as usual when he awoke that morning, despite the persistent October breeze that sneaked its way into his house through any available nook or cranny. He figured it wouldn’t do any harm to give the bowls a go. He had taken George for a stale, old bugger but it turned out the sly codger had a clever, dry sense of humour. He especially liked that one about the nun and the undertaker. Oh yes. A sly old bean, that George.

“Who’d have thought it, eh?” Jim twisted his fingers through Ebony’s fur as he sat reading the paper, sipping his tea. “Maybe there’s life in this old dog yet?”

If Ebony found offence at the mention of her species’ sworn enemy, she didn’t show it. A blink of her eyes or a flick of her tail were enough to reassure Jim that he wasn’t alone. Nor would he ever be, he felt. He discovered upon visiting Mrs Tyler that morning that her son John had to entertain himself most afternoons a week as she worked from home and had little time to entertain him. Before he knew it, he had offered to pop over and teach the lad a few basics on chip shots and bicycle kicks. Had it been his imagination that he spotted the familiar silhouette of Ebony lingering across the road as he said his goodbyes? Closing his own front door, the notion in Jim’s mind of a connection between things, the feeling of a coincidence overlooked by design, had already dissipated, much like the niggle in his stomach.

By the time the weekend had arrived, the niggle had all but disappeared, or perhaps it was that he had neglected to notice it any more. The offer of a part time job on the Thursday and the joy at discovering of a £50 note fluttering between his hostas on Saturday afternoon were a revelation. George had rang to invite him down the pub for a pint to celebrate and Jim only just remembered to scratch Ebony’s head before shrugging on his coat and pulling the front door to. Such was his delight at his good fortune that Jim didn’t notice when Ebony slinked out through his back gate the following morning.

Across town, Mrs Annette Johnson gasped in surprise, when she opened her door at noon to find a black cat on her doorstep. As she checked the collar for a name it came off in her hand. She tutted and considered her uninvited visitor.  

‘What do you want then?’

The creature blinked her emerald eyes and strode across the threshold.