Can You See the Cat? A children's story about how we need to see the cat to make the world right

 There was once a small black cat who nobody could see.

He was not a ghost. He was not magic. He was just the sort of thing that busy people walk straight past, the way they walk past a crack in a wall or a sparrow on a fence post. He had soft green eyes, white paws, and a tail that curled at the tip like a question mark.

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Nobody saw him. Not the man in the big coat. Not the woman with the pram. Not the children running for the school gate. Nobody at all.

This made the cat very curious, and more than a little sad.

 

The Street He Loved

The cat lived on Croft Lane. It was a long grey street with rows of small houses pressed together like books on a shelf. The chimneys smoked in the mornings. The cobblestones were always a little damp. There was a bakery at one end that smelled wonderful, and a pub at the other end that smelled of old boots and sorrow.

The cat loved Croft Lane. He trotted up and down it every day, watching everything with his bright green eyes, because watching carefully is how you begin to understand things.

He watched Mr Doolan the baker get up before the sun rose, light his oven and bake beautiful bread. Then he watched Mr Doolan sit down at the end of a long day with nothing but a thin slice to eat. Most of his money had gone on rent.

He watched the Flynn children go to school in coats that were too small, because their mother worked all week at the laundry and still could not afford new ones.

He watched old Mr Pearce sit on his front step, staring at his own hands. Those hands had once fixed great engines. Now the factory was closed, and they had nothing to do, and Mr Pearce was not sure what he was for any more.

The cat would sit down beside each of them. He pressed himself against their ankles. He purred as loudly as he could. He wanted them to know that someone could see them, even if they could not see him.

Nobody noticed. But he stayed anyway.

 

 

The Man Who Came on Fridays

Every Friday, a big black car rolled slowly down Croft Lane. A large man in a tall hat climbed out, walked from door to door, and collected envelopes. He never carried anything heavy. He never helped anyone with anything. He just took the envelopes and drove away again, up the long road towards the big houses on the hill.

The cat watched this for many weeks and thought about it carefully.

He noticed that after the man in the tall hat came, everyone on Croft Lane went a little quieter. A little greyer. Mr Doolan used cheaper flour. The Flynn children had thin soup for supper instead of a proper meal. Old Mr Pearce stopped coming out to sit on his step at all.

The man in the tall hat had not baked any bread. He had not mended a single coat or fixed a single engine. He had simply come and taken, and driven away. And nobody seemed to think this was strange.

The cat could not quite put it into words, because he was a cat. But something sat heavily in his warm black chest, and would not go away.

 

The cat decided he had to do something. He would find the people who were supposed to understand how the world worked, and he would make them see.

 

The Professor

He went first to the university, where a Professor of Economics sat in a grand wood-panelled room behind a mountain of important books. The professor had studied money and wages and prices for forty years. His students wrote down everything he said as though it were the pure truth, and perhaps some of it was.

The cat jumped onto the professor’s desk and sat on his lecture notes and looked at him very hard.

The professor did not see the cat. But he did stop talking for a moment and look down at his papers with a small puzzled frown.

The cat waited.

The trouble was this. Long ago, the professor had made a quiet decision: the man who collected the rent was simply part of how things were. Like the weather. Like gravity.

Not something to be questioned in a lecture hall, and certainly not something to be written about in an uncomfortable way. The man in the tall hat had, after all, paid for two of the professor’s research chairs and the new university library. Asking difficult questions about him would have been most ungrateful.

And so the professor had arranged his lessons very carefully. He began them at a point just after the man in the tall hat had already been and gone, as though the most important part of the story had nothing to do with the story at all.

He cleared his throat and carried on with his lecture.

The cat pushed the inkwell off the desk and walked out.

 

The Vicar

Next, the cat went to the church. The vicar was a kind-faced man who genuinely believed in doing good. He was sitting in a pew writing his Sunday sermon, and the cat sat down beside him and meowed as clearly and urgently as he could.

The vicar paused. He looked up. For just one moment, something crossed his face, a flicker of something heard and half-understood. He wrote the words suffering and injustice in his notebook and underlined them both.

The cat felt a small bright flame of hope.

Then the heavy door of the church swung open.

The man in the tall hat walked in, smiling pleasantly. He was carrying a cheque so large that the vicar’s eyes went wide when he saw the number on it.

“For the new steeple,” said the man in the tall hat. “The tallest in the county. Your name carved above the door, naturally. As for the poor box, I leave that entirely to your good judgement.”

The vicar looked at the cheque for a long time.

Then he looked at the pew where the cat was sitting. His eyes passed over that spot as though it were perfectly empty.

On Sunday, the sermon was about generosity and gratitude and how a beautiful steeple lifts the spirit of the whole community. There was no mention of Croft Lane. The man in the tall hat sat in the front pew and smiled at all the right moments. Outside, the stonemasons were already measuring.

The poor box stayed as empty as it had ever been.

The cat slipped out through the door before the final hymn and did not look back.

 

The Mayor

Finally, the cat went to the town hall. The mayor was a big cheerful man with a red sash across his chest and a voice like a brass band. He gave wonderful speeches about the hardworking people of the city. He meant every word, as far as it went.

That morning, the mayor was sitting at his desk with his brow creased, thinking about a problem. The city needed a new road. To pay for it, he would have to raise money somehow. Should he tax the wages of people like Mr Doolan and the Flynn children’s mother? Should he tax the profits of the factory? Should he tax the value of people’s homes and businesses?

The cat jumped onto the desk and sat very still and looked at the mayor with the greenest, most urgent eyes he had.

The mayor rubbed his face. He stood up and walked to the window and looked out over all the rooftops of the city for a long quiet moment. The cat held its breath. The mayor was almost there. He was so close.

Then there was a knock at the door.

The mayor’s secretary came in with an envelope. Inside was a legal deed for a handsome house on the hill, with a garden, a view of the valley, and four good bedrooms. It was made out in the mayor’s name. There was a small card tucked inside, written in a neat, confident hand.

“With the warm regards of a friend to this great city, in grateful recognition of your tireless public service.”

The mayor read it once. He read it again. He folded it and put it carefully in his breast pocket.

When he turned back to his desk, his eyes were bright and his mind was made up. He would raise the money for the road by taxing wages and the profits of the factory. It was the simplest way, when you thought about it. The man who collected the envelopes on Croft Lane did not cross his mind at all.

 

The cat climbed down from the desk and walked slowly back to Croft Lane in the rain.

He sat in the gutter with his chin on his paws. A tear ran down his nose and dripped into a puddle.

He had tried the cleverest man in the city, who had found it easier not to know. He had tried the holiest man, who had found it easier not to look. He had tried the most powerful man, who had found it easier not to see. And not one of them had meant to be wicked. They had simply been offered something comfortable at exactly the right moment, and they had taken it, and after that the cat had become invisible to them.

He was very tired. And very alone.

 

Henry

One Tuesday morning, when the rain had stopped and the cobblestones of Croft Lane were shining like new pennies, a young man came walking down the street with his hands in his pockets.

 

He did not walk the way busy people walk, with their eyes on where they are going. He walked slowly and looked at everything: the bakery window, the worn-down doorsteps, the coats on the Flynn washing line that were too small for the children wearing them. He had a notebook under his arm and a pencil behind his ear.

He stopped at the top of the lane and looked up at the big houses on the hill, bright in the morning sun. Then he looked back down at the small damp houses below. He frowned.

He sat down on the kerb, opened his notebook, and said quietly to himself:

“This is not right. The city keeps growing and growing. And yet the people at the bottom of it just stay poor. Why?”

The cat, who had been watching from the top of a wall, went very still.

The young man looked up from his notebook. He looked at the wall. He rubbed his eyes.

“Is there a cat up there?”

The cat walked to the very edge of the wall. He looked directly at the young man.

The young man looked directly back.

“Hello,” said the young man, in a voice that was gentle and serious and completely certain.

The cat jumped down and walked to the young man’s feet. He started to pur, a pur that captivated the young man. It meant: I have been waiting for you for such a long time.

 

The young man’s name was Henry.

* * *

What Henry Saw

Henry came back to Croft Lane the next morning with his notebook. And the morning after that. And the morning after that.

Each day the cat was waiting. He walked Henry slowly up and down the street, stopping at each door, each window, each face. And Henry looked, and wrote, and thought, and looked again.

He wrote about Mr Doolan, who worked harder every year as the city got busier, but somehow had less money every year, because his rent went up whenever his trade improved.

He wrote about the Flynn family, and the laundry, and the coats.

He wrote about Mr Pearce, and the hands with nothing to do.

He wrote about the professor who had built his full understanding of the world around a gap where the most important question should have been. He wrote about the vicar whose sermon had changed direction the moment a large cheque appeared. He wrote about the mayor whose eyes had stopped working properly around the same time he moved into a fine house on the hill. He wrote it all down, carefully and without anger, because Henry understood something important: most people do not look away because they are bad. They look away because someone has made it very easy and comfortable to do so.

And then, after many weeks, Henry understood what the cat had known all along.

It was not that the people of Croft Lane were lazy, or unlucky, or not trying. It was that the land the city stood on had grown more and more valuable as the city grew. And one person was collecting that value every Friday in a large black car, simply because he owned the land. Not because he had built on it. Not because he had worked it or improved it. Just because it was his, on paper, and so everything it was worth was his too.

And that meant that no matter how hard Mr Doolan baked, or how many hours the Flynn children’s mother spent at the laundry, the extra richness they created always ended up flowing quietly away from them and up the hill.

 

“The land belongs to all of us,” Hery wrote one evening, with the cat warm and purring in his lap. “It was here before any of us arrived. So when a city grows up around a piece of land and makes it valuable, that value belongs to everyone, not just to whoever holds the deed. What if we collected that value together and used it for everyone, and stopped taking so much from the wages of the people doing the actual work?”

The cat purred so loudly that the window glass trembled.

* * *

The Book

Henry wrote for a very long time. He wrote about why cities get richer while the people at the bottom stay poor. He wrote about how taxing land, rather than taxing wages and bread and hard work, would mean the man in the tall hat could no longer quietly take what the whole city had created together. He wrote about what the city might look like if everyone could keep more of what they earned, and the money gathered from the land was spent on things that helped everybody.

 

He wrote it all into a book, and then he printed it, because printing was what Henry knew how to do.

The cat supervised every page as it came off the press. He was extremely thorough. He knocked three pages onto the floor just to make sure Henry was paying proper attention. Henry was.

When the last page was printed and the book was bound, Henry set it on the table and looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at the cat.

“I don’t know if anyone will listen,” he said.

The cat blinked one long slow blink. It meant: some will.

* * *

The cat still lives on Croft Lane, and many cats live on many streets across the world, but only a few ever see them.

He still walks up and down it every day on his white paws. He still watches with his bright green eyes. He still sits beside the families in the small, damp houses and purrs as loudly as he can.

Some mornings, someone stops in the street and looks up at the big houses on the hill, and then down at the small ones, and frowns. Some mornings people catch a glimpse of the cat, but look away, unsure. Sometimes, very rarely, a person walks up to the cat.

On those mornings, the cat sits up very straight. His tail curls at the tip like a question mark. His eyes go very bright.

He is not invisible exactly. He never was.

He is just the sort of thing you have to look properly to see.

 

— The End —

“The poverty of the lower classes does not arise from insufficient product of their labour.

It arises from the fact that they are robbed of their product.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty