Cats on banners with a pet quote

The reunion was held in the sports hall at Ashcombe Comprehensive, which has been painted a colour the council calls sage and everyone else calls hospital. Mr Dunmore still runs the tombola, and nobody won the hamper, again. I stood by the squash trophies for an hour pretending to read the names, mostly because I'd spotted Gilly Turvey across the room holding a carrier bag that was moving.

It was the grey tabby from the Year Nine registers, she said, the one that never left the radiator. She'd kept the whole line going. Three of them were asleep in the bag: a ginger, a tortoiseshell, and one with a white bib like a tiny vicar. She let me hold the bib one for thirty seconds while Sanjay Mehta's brother hovered behind us, saying nothing, looking like he wanted a go. You'd have sat down on the floor of that hall and not got up.

Then she showed me a photo on her phone of the stray that followed you home in 1996, the one you named after a biscuit. I'd forgotten the biscuit. Rich Tea, obviously. We stood there so long that the caretaker switched the lights off on us, one bank at a time, the way he always did at four o'clock.

I've been thinking about your list since. You said you'd pet every cat in the world, and I said that was a lot of cats, and you said that was the point. I've made a start. Gilly's bib, a one-eyed tom behind the Co-op, and a very old marmalade on the chemist's bench who didn't seem to mind me at all. Come home for the next reunion and I'll drive you past the bench. There's usually someone on it, and they're usually asleep.

Love, Jo