A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son. Julia Romp

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      I knew what Mum and Dad were thinking when they dropped me off: as sad as they were to see me go, I was an adult and had made my choices. Now I had to live with them, and while I knew they were right, I still wanted to chase after them as they drove off and beg them to take me back home. I just could not believe that this was actually real. It was a world away from all the dreams I’d had.

      Even though my new house was dark, I could make it colourful at least. Bob might have kept everything neat, but he was too fond of magnolia walls for my liking. So, with my family’s help, I painted the living room yellow, the corridors light green and my bedroom pink. I didn’t go near the wallpaper covering the walls of the back bedroom, though. It was so old it must have been worth something and was covered in huge blue psychedelic flowers. I’d have had to do a hundred coats to cover it up and couldn’t face being trapped in the room while I tried to transform it.

      The new coat of paint in the rest of the flat definitely raised my spirits, as did the fact that Howard and his mum lived near by. Even though Howard and I were no longer together, I wanted George to know his father and I’d take him to see his dad and grandma Zena. I also visited Mum and Dad every day because I was glad of the company. But although I saw people and tried to make the best of things, life didn’t get any easier with George, and looking back I realise those first few months with him alone were the time when I began learning to hide my worries. You can’t keep moaning, can you, bursting into tears when people ask how you are and all you want to do is cry? I could have told them my life felt like a nightmare: I was alone with a baby who cried day in, day out, and who at times felt like a visitor I could not make happy instead of my own child. But it wouldn’t have done any good, so I didn’t.

      Besides, I was sure the reason George wasn’t happy was that I was making a mess of things. I could see for myself that other women did a much better job than I did. Watching their babies smile or gurgle at them, I longed for George to do the same. But he didn’t want to shake rattles or be cuddled, and when I took him back to the doctor the answer was always the same.

      ‘It’s your first child,’ he would say. ‘Don’t worry so much, Julia. You’re a great mum. Just relax a bit and the baby will too.’

      So after being told I was worrying about nothing a hundred times, I pushed down the voice inside that was telling me something was wrong; it’s amazing just how much you can kid yourself. Each night when I tried to get George to sleep, knowing it would be hours before he dropped off, I’d tell myself that things would improve the next day. Each morning when he woke up and started crying, I’d vow that I just had to get through this one because tomorrow was another day. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t have a patch on me when she grubbed in the dirt outside Tara.

      Sometimes, though, after days of George’s crying I’d feel so close to breaking point that I’d leave him in an upstairs bedroom to wail. Closing the door, I’d go downstairs just to be away from the noise, and guilt would fill me that I wasn’t giving George the happiness that I’d had as a child. I knew it wasn’t the same for him to have a mum at home and a dad who lived down the road, and his cries were his way of telling me that I just wasn’t enough. But then I’d go back upstairs, look at George in his cot, so small and perfect with his round, chubby cheeks and puff of blond hair, and wonder what kind of mother I was. Bit by bit, I shut myself away as I started to hide both George and myself from the world, and our tiny house began to feel like a prison.

      The estate where we were living didn’t exactly help keep up my spirits either. There’s good and bad everywhere, from the Hollywood Hills to the slums of India, but let’s just say there was a lot more bad than I was used to where I was living now. Shouts would echo at night as people argued, and I’d hear the smack of punches thrown in drunken fights. Or there’d be a knock on the door as one of the stream of men who hired out one of my neighbours by the hour mistook my house for hers. The grey concrete estate looked like a jail and some of the people living there knew that from experience.

      It was then that I also saw for the first time just how much drugs affect some lives. I’d never even had a cigarette, but now I saw people with eyes that were blank and desperate at the same time. Most days there would be a knock on the door and I’d open it to find someone offering to sell me wrinkle cream or baby clothes, whatever they’d managed to steal in the hope of getting whatever they could for it in order to pay for a fix.

      I hated being in the pathway of all the trouble, and so six months after moving on to the estate I leaped at the chance to swap my house for a second-floor flat in another block. So what if the ceiling was covered in nicotine stains and the front door didn’t lock? I could see blue sky outside my windows and soon made my first friend on the estate – a woman called Jane, who came to introduce herself one day after Dad, who had taken enough steroids to fell a horse so that his hands would work long enough, put on a new front door with Nob’s help.

      ‘Don’t go answering the bell at night,’ Jane told me as we had a cup of tea. ‘Just keep yourself to yourself and you’ll be fine.’

      Jane was tall and slim, and I never saw her without full make-up and a pair of high stilettos. She always looked as if she was about to be whisked off to Harvey Nichols in a limousine instead of going up Hounslow high street. She seemed to like keeping an eye on me and so did her boyfriend, Martin, who was just as kind. Sometimes he would appear at the door with a slice off one of the pig’s heads they cooked in a pot, which I took with a heavy heart because I didn’t like to tell Martin that I was vegetarian. Those were the kind of people he and Jane were: kind and generous, good neighbours who kept an eye on me and did whatever they could to help. Yes, I quickly realised they had a bit of a liking for Diamond White, but it didn’t worry me because who was I to judge? As a single mum on a council estate without a penny to her name, there wasn’t exactly much for me to get uppity about.

      George was sitting beside Lewis in front of the television at Mum and Dad’s house.

      ‘Look at the two of them, Ju,’ she said with a smile.

      Lewis and George were watching Tots TV, just as they always did, because neither of them could get enough of the three rag dolls called Tilly, Tom and Tiny.

      ‘He’s a good boy, isn’t he, love?’ Mum said as she looked at George, who’d got up to follow Lewis out of the room now the programme had ended.

      It was 1998. George was two and he’d started walking and crawling just as he should have done a few months after his first birthday. A year on he followed Lewis around like a shadow and my mum and dad were still trying to encourage me with him. I didn’t say too much when they did. I knew everyone was being kind, but I was beginning to feel sure that my problems with George weren’t just of my own making because although I did everything I could to make him happy, it was like living with a stranger. He could change from happy to raging in the blink of an eye and as much as everyone tried to pretend that normal rules applied to George, I knew they didn’t.

      Take sleeping. At night George would lie awake in his cot for hours, and the moment he learned how to climb out of it, he’d get up every few minutes and scream without stopping if I tried putting him back down. It wasn’t that I was afraid of his temper or making rules. But I could see in George’s eyes that he just didn’t understand what I was trying to teach him. So I had no other choice but to let him toddle around the flat until he finally fell into an exhausted sleep. We must have walked a fair few marathons doing laps of our tiny flat, and even when I did get him into his cot, he often lay awake, chanting words and phrases over and over.

      ‘Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear,’ he’d say again and again, because those were two of the handful of words that he used now, along with ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’ or ‘Batman’.

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