My Daughter Dreamed the Lost Cat's Hiding Place

Marmalade slipped out during a house move — the worst time, doors propped, chaos everywhere — and was gone. Nine days. We did the leaflets and the shelters and the walking-the-streets-at-dusk-with-a-pouch-of-treats, and my six-year-old cried herself to sleep more nights than I want to remember, and I began, privately, to give up.

On the ninth night she woke me at some small hour, calm rather than upset, and said, with the certainty children have about the wrong things and, apparently, sometimes the right ones: 'Marmalade is in the man's shed with the red bikes. He can't get out. He's cross.' Then she went back to sleep as if she'd delivered a parcel.

I lay awake. In the morning she remembered saying it and added, unbothered, that she'd 'seen it' — the shed, the bikes, cross Marmalade. We had no shed. We knew nobody with red bikes. But we were out of better ideas, so after the school run I walked the nearby streets looking, absurdly, for a shed and red bikes, feeling like a woman who'd lost more than a cat.

Two streets over, in the front garden of a house I'd never had reason to notice, a man was doing something to a bicycle. A red one. There were others, red, leaning against a shed at the side of the house — he restored them, it turned out, a hobby, a little fleet of red bikes. I did the only thing I could, which was to knock and, mortified, explain that my daughter had dreamed my cat was in his shed, and could we possibly look.

He was kind about it, the way you're kind to someone clearly at the end of their rope. He'd not been in the shed for over a week, he said — busy, away a few days. We opened it. Marmalade shot out past our legs, filthy, furious, ravenous, entirely alive, having been shut in for who knows how many of those nine days when the man last closed the door without checking the shadows.

Cross. Exactly as she'd said. In the man's shed. With the red bikes.

The vet said cats survive shut-in stretches on very little, that it's common, that we were lucky. Lucky. My six-year-old dreamed the precise shed, two streets away, that she had never seen, belonging to a man we'd never met, containing a fleet of red bikes and one imprisoned, cross cat, and I found it by walking to the images in her dream. She doesn't think it's strange. She thinks that's just what you do when a cat is lost: you go to sleep, and you look for them, and then you go and get them. I've stopped trying to correct her.