She came into my life just when I needed her, and together we worked on our traumas. But it could not last …
I’d been feeding the stray cat for months before she brought them to our door: a gang of feral and frail-looking kittens. I’d never had a pet before, and, like many people who do not grow up with animals, I perhaps lacked a certain emotional dimension. The arrival of this bunch of spitters and shakers cracked me wide open, and right when I needed it.
It was 2016, and I was living as a property guardian in a disused care home in east London. I was 23, and I was broke, ambitious and ill. Back then I could be found having routine panic attacks in a PPE-blue ex-NHS bathroom. These days, I know all this to be the ripples of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, however, I just assumed this was what happened to unemployed writers. Enter Kitten Babyleaf and her fluffy kin – seemingly as traumatised, adrift and desperate for security as me.
