Sorrell, the Abyssinian Cat

Yes, I know it’s Sorrel, but his name came like that on the paper, so we kept it.

Sorrell was an ‘Abby’ as people call them. A Sorrel Abyssinian cat. No one had even bothered to give him a name of his own. Abbys are beautiful, and insane. We adopted him from the Blue Cross and they made me do 3 sit ins with him, to make sure we were a good match. ‘He can open doors',’ they told me. ‘Latches, most doors, anything that isn’t locked, to be honest’. I was like, sure, that’s the cat for me. He had been there for 9 months because apparently he wasn’t safe around children. Nothing like a challenge, I thought. I will rehabilitate this cat.

First off, Abbys can cry. Real tears. They have this gorgeous eyeliner face, a bit like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, and then they start crying. As if you have killed all their hopes and dreams. As if you are personally responsible for every wrong in the world. When I collected him from the shelter, he cried all the way home on the A5, in the rain, in his palatial new cat basket. His poor little face. The rain was torrential and I kept having to stop the car, and he was sobbing and sniffing, staring at me as I had caused the storm. The full hard eyeball.

Adopting a real ‘rescue’ pet is always a bit of a do. They haven’t had the easiest lives and you have to get used to each other. Sorrell was a nightmare. Well, not for me, because he loved me to bits, but for everyone else. Mr I still refers to him as ‘That Fucking Cat’. He was also a fighter who used to go toe to toe with the local foxes (Abbys are big and rangy, for cats). We used to live next door but one to a ‘foodie’ pub, and he once stole an entire ham hock from a table and came back with it, as happy as a clam, but fell off the fence on his way because it was so heavy.

I have never forgotten the day he had thieved a spicy red Pepperami from who knows where, and he was making heroic attempts to eat it, but it was so hot it was making his eyes and mouth water and he kept having to drop it, yet couldn’t leave it alone. I am such a howlingly bad owner that I didn’t take it away, I just kept watching him try again with it, sobbing with laughter. It was like a horrible, gummy, stick of melted chewing gum before I finally confiscated it. Before the days of TikTok, obviously.

I adored that cat. He was, in real terms, unlovable, despite his beauty. He had to be kept away from children and the unwary (stray limbs were fair game) and we had to fit child locks on everything, in a house with no children. Yet Sorrell used to walk me to the station in the morning, and meet me at night. My 1950s boyfriend. The last road to the station was a busy one, and I said to him, NEVER cross this road, never. And he never did. The little lady whose garden he used to wait in said, ‘Your cat is so beautiful, but I daren’t touch him’. I think she had learned the hard way. I said, Thank you, he is, but please don’t, or I’ll end up with an ASBO. Told Mum and Mum said, ‘She’s not wrong. That cat is always waiting to catch you out.’

Sorrell is gone now, years since. An old and still implacably furious gentleman. He wasn’t so much a pet as a fellow combatant in what he perceived to be a permanent war zone, the demon who dwells within us all. But he knew how much he was loved. He was, in the way some cats are, immaculate regarding his ‘business’, and would wee in the awful ancient pink loo we had at the time. He would bite every grape in the fruit bowl because he enjoyed the POP, but to my knowledge never ate a grape. He ruined the fridge door seal four times after we bolted it shut owing to the unfortunate smoked salmon incident. There will never be another one like him.

Every so often I say to Mr I, the shelter has a cat they can’t rehome and we could … and he says, ‘Don’t even try. You’ll never have another Sorrell. That Fucking Cat’.