The Incredible Story Of Dupli-Cat
To start at the beginning, my partner has always been a cat lover. She had various different cats growing up, and when we finally bought a house together in October 2006 it was only a matter of days before she broached the subject of a house cat.
Myself, I’d never had pets as a kid. Both my Grandparents had cats so I knew what they were all about (selfish, needy, prone to bouts of mouse/bird murder etc.) but given the state of the house we’d just purchased, and the mammoth task that lay ahead, it was pretty much the last thing on my mind.
As I recall, my official response was “I’m not against having a cat, but we should probably wait until all the decorating and renovations are done”. Needless to say, within a week she appeared home from work with an unidentified purring basket.
And that was how we came to take possession of a small grey kitten called Lenny, who hid under the cupboards for approximately two weeks before he dared socialise.
He was perfectly grey all over and actually quite a handsome lad (although by no stretch of the imagination a pedigree). As a cat ignoramus, I was assured that pure grey cats were relatively rare, and given that he was a rescue, we had bagged a lovely cat and a bargain to boot.
It didn’t take long before he was a fully integrated part of the happy household (even though we’d occasionally have to pin him down to wash the paint out of his fur).
The following spring, the decorating effort had finally reached the spare bedroom at the back of the house, and I was up the step ladder painting away when out of the corner of my eye I saw a cat appear in the window of the house that backed onto our garden. A grey cat.
I shouted downstairs — “what is Lenny doing in the neighbour’s house??”.
I was baffled. Even more so when the reply came
“What do you mean? He’s sat here on my lap!”
So, we chalked it up as a coincidence. There just happened to be two grey cats on the block.
Now bear in mind that this was early 2007 and for the following 5 years, we never once saw this other grey cat anywhere other than in the window of the house at the back. And even then, not very often. There were plenty of other neighbourhood cats that frequented our garden, picking fights and generally using our lawn for lavatorial purposes, but never the grey one.
Fast-forward five years to January 2013 and I was stood at the sink one evening, washing the dishes, when I saw Lenny come trotting down the garden. He was horribly lazy when it came to the cat-flap, and if he could see someone in the kitchen he would pathetically head-butt the flap until he drew enough pity from one of us to open the door and let him in the “human” way. On that basis I didn’t think too much to hear the flap-butting begin.
I was always the one least likely to pander to him, knowing that if I switched the light off and vacated the kitchen, then he would quickly give up and use the cat-flap as intended.
However, it was when I reached the living room to see Lenny already curled up on a cushion, that I really started to question my sanity.
Back I went to the kitchen window, and looking down, there was the other grey cat staring back up at me. I went back to the living room one more time to check that I wasn’t hallucinating and sure enough, Lenny was still there.
This was the other grey cat.
With that fact established, I opened the door to say hello but he promptly legged it at high speed back up the garden. That was that.
Another week passed and I came downstairs one morning to hear a cat sharply exiting the cat-flap. Lenny was still there in front of me, so I checked out the window and indeed, the other grey cat had taken the next step, busted his way in and polished off Lenny’s breakfast.
This happened a couple more times that week, and poor Lenny was looking miserable as sin — as his food was being stolen from under his nose every time we left the house. To that end we locked the cat-flap down to allow entry only.
If we couldn’t stop the other grey cat getting in, then we could at least stop him escaping again!
I’m not entirely sure what we were trying to achieve but it didn’t take long before we “captured” him and to our surprise he wasn’t the monster we thought he was. He was actually very sweet and seemed quite happy for us to give him fuss as well as food. I should probably also mention that at close quarters, he really was the spitting image of Lenny. Only a slightly fatter face allowed us to distinguish between them.
This really did open the floodgates once he realised that us soppy humans weren’t at all hostile. The next day I came home from work to find him lying on our bed upstairs! It was so unexpected that it took me a while to realise that it wasn’t Lenny, but the doppelganger cat. For a while his name was simply “Dupli-cat” but over the following week or so he became such a constant feature that we ended up christening him Kenny.
Needless to say our 3 year old son was fascinated by the sudden doubling of grey cat-based fun in the house. In fact, he quickly became better at telling Lenny & Kenny apart than we were.
Eventually it got to the point where we started to feel guilty about the amount of time he was spending at our house, so we attached a note to his collar when we kicked him out for the night, explaining that he was trying to move himself in and that if his real owners were worried about his whereabouts then he was more than likely with us, at our address.
A couple of days later, Kenny arrived again looking slightly bedraggled. The note on his collar was unread, and he didn’t really seem very well. His eyes were a bit runny and he was quite lethargic. He spent the next day lying around and seemed most unhappy when we put him out for the night.
The next morning, there was a knock at the door. It was our neighbour (this is a whole other story as he was a slightly odd chap who ran his own church from his front room). He looked very solemn and asked “Have you seen Lenny this morning?”
As I paused momentarily to ponder the question, he suddenly acquired the face of a man who had seen a ghost. Lenny had come trotting down the stairs and was stood by my feet. “Why yes, here he is!” I replied. “Oh OK..ermm…that’s OK then” he said, backing away down the path.
I had a hunch that he was probably talking about Kenny so I called him back and began to explain that there was another cat in the neighbourhood who looked just like Lenny. It was then that he admitted the purpose of his visit was to sadly inform me that he had drawn back his curtains to find a very dead grey cat lying in his backyard. Poor Kenny had passed away.
I felt terrible that the situation was laced with such black humour, but my neighbour’s face had been a picture, and it seemed a fitting tribute to Kenny that, even in death, he was still causing utter confusion amongst us idiotic humans.
I directed him to the house at the back where we suspected that Kenny’s owner lived, and he trudged off for the second time that day, steeling himself to be the bearer of bad news.
And that was that. Or so we thought…
We’d all grown quite fond of old Kenny and as the dust settled, we found ourselves grieving. Wanting to make sure that our neighbour had managed to inform Kenny’s owners of his passing, we asked the question when we saw him next.
Unbelievably, he recounted how he went round to the house in question, knocked on the door, only to be greeted by the lady owner stood clutching her own, very much alive grey cat, that she apparently never let out of the house!
So, who was Kenny and where did he come from? Why, out of all the houses in the area did he choose us? Was he magically drawn to us along some sort of grey cat ley-line? Did he know all along that his time was up and had come to us to see out his final days?
A very mysterious affair with more questions than answers.
Sadly, the final question is one that does have an answer.
We asked our neighbour what he did with Kenny’s remains.
“Oh I just chucked him in the wheelie bin” came the nonchalant reply.
We were gobsmacked. Especially as the bin-men had been that morning and there was no chance of a retrieval. Obviously, we could have taken his body to the Vet to be checked for a microchip which would tell us who owned him, or at the very least given him a dignified send-off.
And this from a supposed “Man-Of-God”. Such compassion!
That really is the end of the story, except to say that every time our son asked “Where is Kenny?” We started saying things like:
“We should get another cat”.
