It may have seemed like a great hardship, but I didn’t mind. The cold, the hunger, the loneliness… All of that was better than going back home. Sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. I had no idea why these words kept coming back to me, or where I’d heard them. But I knew for sure that in my case they definitely weren’t true. I was determined to suffer through life until I could find a job without having to fear a fine or a trip to a police station. The fear of returning back to that house of terror always kept me ready to run at the sight of any problem. And I could run bloody fast, because running away meant surviving.
I’d lived this way for two years before I dared to even look anybody in the eye. When I eventually did, the eyes were kind, full of sorrow and worry. It was one of the worst winter days, when it was almost freezing. I’d only had a thin damp sweater on, so weak and cold I couldn’t even walk over to the nearby bus station in search of a roof. I curved into a ball on a porch of a small house with an overgrown front garden. It looked fairly abandoned. Plus the porch was protected against the wind, so it was an almost perfect shelter.
But I was wrong. Someone did live there and they came investigating when they heard the noise of my rattling bones. The lady must have been over seventy, her face full of wrinkles, she was bent down and leaning on a stick. She was wearing a warm-looking dressing gown I was intensely jealous of at that moment.
“You can’t sleep here,” she said and looked at me for a while.
I was surprised she wasn’t chasing me away with that stick. I couldn’t risk her calling the police, so I used the rest of my dwindling energy to get up and plod away. A gust of wind blew into me as soon as I stepped onto a pavement a few metres from the lady’s house. I turned around longingly one more time, to say goodbye to that windless place, at least with my eyes, and they widened in surprise.
That plump figure was still standing in the doorway and was gesticulating for me to come back. I couldn’t resist and stepped closer, although I still kept my distance in case I needed to run away.
“I didn’t mean for you to leave,” she called out to me apologetically. Why should she apologize to me? “I meant to say that you can’t sleep outside. Come in.”
She went back inside and left the door open.
I threw all caution to the wind and followed her. I don’t even really know why I felt safe there and nowhere else. I was standing in the corridor, unsure but curious.
“I’m Barb. What’s your name?”
I didn’t answer.
“Why don’t you go home?”
Silence.
“Do you have a home?”
I shook my head and kept looking back at the door, my escape route, as if she was about to pounce and attack me.
“You can sleep here tonight. I’ll make the bed for you in the guest room,” she said simply, as if I was just a family member popping in for an unexpected visit. She disappeared in a little closet, and re-emerged a moment later with her hands full.
“I’m not about to do all of it myself,” she mumbled, but it didn’t sound reproachful at all. “Come help me.”
Together we put on a bed sheet, a pillow and a duvet cover in a room which was a bit stale, but certainly warmer than the outside, and my frozen body started to warm up. All the while she kept asking me questions. I didn’t answer, but she didn’t seem to mind. I suppose she just wanted to fill the space with words.
“Are you hungry?”
I nodded and my stomach growled to confirm it.
“Go take a shower and I’ll make you something. Towels are in the cupboard under the sink.”
Twenty minutes later we sat down at her table and I was stuffing a fried sandwich into my mouth, while Barb sipped her tea with milk, watching me carefully.
“Have you ever heard of Pay it forward?” she asked and then started explaining something about favours, but my eyes started to close on their own accord. The warmth and a full belly were working their magic.
She sent me to sleep as soon as my plate was empty, and I obediently went to the guest room, despite my resolutions to never get into that kind of situation again. Me and a stranger in a house.
I did it though, because… Barb looked so kind and safe. Because I hadn’t slept in a bed for two years. And because I didn’t have the strength to wander around like a stray cat anymore.
This is exactly why you should never feed stray cats, I thought. You do it once and they
