Brown Windows

Every time my mum drives round to my home she makes the same two remarks. Firstly that she should call the council about the parking in the culdesac where we live (getting round the road in the car is very tight) and secondly she comments on my upstairs neighbours windows. Friday past was no exception, though this time she added to her usual lament saying "I didn't know he had a cat."

As soon as Michelle and I had looked up to see her I was running up the stairs and pounding on my neighbours door. No answer, but in the course of the weeks of looking for Fudge I had met to a woman who lived round the corner from us and she had told me her father lived above me.

I quickly ran round to her door. I was furious. When her husband answered I told him that his father-in-law had my cat and that I wanted a key to go in and get her. The daughter was very cagey I felt but then I was far from calm after she had told me that her dad had "brought in a cat" about a month ago "a fluffy one". I had spoke to this woman at length about the cat being missing, I had shown her a picture of her, and I had put a leaflet through her door. She knew. I don't know at which point she knew, but she knew her father had taken our cat.

I kept calm in the daughters home. If I wanted in that flat I had no choice. She did not have a key but she told me she was on her way out to meet her dad for lunch. Her husband told me that he would be back with the key within the hour.

A little past her husbands self imposed deadline the daughter phoned and told me her dad had not yet arrived where they had to meet but that I would get my cat back that night. I didn't like her tone. Too nervous. I decided I would wait no longer than an hour and if my neighbour had not returned by then I was going into his flat by any means I could.

Thirty minutes later the old man was walking up the path and I came out to meet him. His daughter had got it touch with him but they were not meeting for lunch as she had claimed. Why she would lie about that I have no idea, but at the same time I was not surprised that she had done so. The old man claimed that whatever he was told had been obscured by the sound of the bus so when I told him the situation he acted surprised. "I saw a cat behind the telly a couple of weeks ago" he told me "but I never found it again". He never found it again? So, what did he think? That he imagined it? That it somehow escaped? His story changed a little every time but at that point I was ignoring him and telling him that I was going into his home to find my cat.

His flat was thick with dirt and stagnant stinking air. I quickly found where the cat had been doing the toilet - the corner of his livingroom. "In here? It's done the toilet in here?!" said the old man. He went on to claim he didn't live there. A lie; We hear his TV blaring and his toilet flush every night.

At this point you may start to feel sorry for this man. I've referred to him as an old man, yes, but in truth he is only in his mid to late sixties. He is quite deaf but by all indications he seems to have his full mental capacity. He is not to be pitied. I have thought about this for a long time and for the cat to enter his home he would have to have let her do so. She may have entered his home of his own free will but she would have done so slowly and cautiously. This is not a man who would leave his door ajar, not with the filth that could be seen by peering inside. No, he has let her enter and then shut her in. Not to care for her it seems given the frail and dehydrated state we found her in but just... I have no idea why. To reemphasis: he is not a creature to be pitied.

Fudge ran from her hiding place in his wardrobe when she saw me. She was scared. I picked her up and left him in his filth without saying a word. Back downstairs I put Fudge straight into a cat carrier to take her to a vet. The vet couldn't see us immediately and so I let her out. Only then did she realise where she was. She rubbed her face on my hands and let me pet her for the first time in a month. She was gone. She was dead. Yet suddenly she was home.

As for the old man, his claim to not have known Fudge was in his home is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely. When I brought her home she still had her collar on which has a loud bell attached and the vet told me that her throat was red from shouting. Above all else though, the biggest reason that what he says is untrue is that despite being timid, Fudge would have approached him at some point of the course of a month if only to be fed or get water. Add these facts to his and his daughters ever changing stories (she called me that night and said that she didn't think her dad had had my cat all that time, despite telling my earlier that her father had brought a cat in a month ago) and I come up with... what? Are they crazy? Certainly that or just plain evil.

All is well that ends well though. One week later Fudge is more like her old self and, though still a little jumpy, she seems very happy. And the old man? An environmental health officer will be visiting him any day now.

Here Comes the Son

"That one was was just over four minutes... That was just under three... Jesus! That was barely two minutes apart for the last two! We need to phone them."

And so I phoned Wishaw General's Maternaty Triage Unit and, in a short time later, Michelle and I were in the back of an ambulance on the way to have our baby. Finally!

Having been due on 1 August our boy was, at that point, 10 days late. A length of time which put a strain on Michelle's resolve and my ability to come up with daily Facebook puns. Nevertheless he was on his way; with contractions averaging three minutes apart we knew it wouldn't be long before we could see the face we'd tried so hard to imagine for the past nine months.

Once in the hospital Michelle was taken in a wheelchair directly to a delivery room where we met Tina, the first midwife, who dealt with us right through the night into the morning. Tina was great; very nice and she didn't sugarcoat anything, which is a quality I always appreciate. After some checks and tests were done Tina told us that things were not all as they should be and, in particular, that the baby's heart rate indicted that he may struggle in what was likely to be a long labour. As this was the case it was Tina's assessment that Michelle should have a caesarian section.

The final word on whether or not Michelle was to have a section was to be the decision of the pediatrician, Dr DeRoy. As soon as the doctor came through the door she was greeted by Michelle, drunk on gas and air, calling her by her first name. It turns out that Sabine was a client at Michelle's salon and though Michelle does not personally cut her hair she obviously remembered her. Looking back on it Michelle remembers the small small voice inside her screaming "shut up you blithering idiot!" as she called out the doctors name.

Dr DeRoy did not want to be too hasty about the surgery but decided that Michelle should be given an epidural as the eventually of the surgery might have been inevitable.

After the epidural things seemed to calm down. Tina's shift ended and she was replaced by Linda (who I keep wanting to call Janet for some reason) and Karen, a trainee midwife. as the baby's heart rate was erratic there was always someone in the room and various checks were done regularly. It was hours of waiting and though the hours seemed to pass quickly it would be dishonest to say that the wait did not seem long.

And then Michelle was told to push. And she pushed! She put everything into each of those pushes and then pushed some more. She never even made a sound because she was so focused on pushing. She was tough.

Durning the course of Michelle's labour our soundtrack had been the erratic heartbeat we could hear on the monitor as well as see. Over the twelve hours I had got to know what the digital readout was when the heart rate dipped. As Michelle pushed and I encouraged her I tried to hide the fear on my face as I watched the the numbers on that display fall lower with every push. And on the the last push the heartrate stopped and for a terrible moment my heart stopped too until... Nathan was here. All of a sudden he was lying on his mothers chest as I cut his cord.

I had been told by many that the birth was disgusting. "Don't watch" they told me "it's horrific!". What a bunch of jessies! It's a life! It's beautiful! Truly the most amazing thing I have ever seen (and I've seen Cirque du Soleil!).

Twenty four hours after his birth we were all three of us on the way home, ready for a new life, new challenges and all the stories yet to be told.