Lolo arrived at Prudenci’s not long after Claudia had started working there, perhaps sometime in the spring of 2005. Prudenci ran a jeweler’s workshop and gallery on Carrer dels Ases in El Born and one day a young black tabby with a small white patch on his chest came running in, never to leave. We supposed he might well have been someone’s house cat that had had the misfortune to slither past his owners legs one night they had got home late, to wander down a blackened stairwell and slip out through a front door. Quite unprepared for the grit and grime of what he found outside, the days or weeks he must have spent in the street must have been enough to leave him with the lifelong ticks he brought with him to the gallery. Added to this, the neighborhood mogs must have given him a pasting or three several times over as when he came through the door at Prudenci’s he looked decidedly torn and scratched and quite disheveled. All the time I knew him he never seemed to recover from the shock. His coat remained scruffy and itchy, more akin to Norwegian Rat than Cat, and in his neediness he would greet punters with a frightening guttural screech projected by a sort of retching motion of his entire body that must have turned more than a few people away. The poor creature also stank of kitty pheromones; a smell I later came to understand as latent trauma and fear. A few years later Claudia and I lost Otto – our cat –  over a weekend, spending an awful thirty-six hours pasting flyers all over the neighborhood as we searched for him. When we did find him, cowering behind some boxes in a room at the bottom of the stairwell of our building, behind the lift-shaft, his coat had gone from silky smooth to oily, shabby rat and he stank of piss and fear, poor thing. That same smell of Lolo’s.

My first year at boarding school our incoming year of around one hundred and fifty thirteen year olds was divided more or less equally amongst the then ten houses, seven of which were for boarders and the other three for day boys. At Judde I seem to remember we were thirteen. Any notions I had that this was all going to be tremendous fun evaporated within hours of arriving for induction on that first day in September 1985. As our parents left through the gates, Matron quickly gathered us together and took us on a tour of the house to explain the workings of what would in effect be our home nine months of the year for the next five years. She must have spoken about sleeping arrangements, lockers, laundry days, our job rota and such but what is etched in my memory is that knotted feeling I had in the pit of my stomach and judging by some of the wide-eyed looks and strained faces of others in our group I know I wasn’t the only one feeling more than a little apprehensive. Once left to ourselves to unpack and settle in it was shocking how quickly the environment amongst us became feral, as nature took its course, and we began to jostle for power and respect within the pecking order, like a pack of little wild animals. Verbal abuse – not to mention a fair amount of physical violence – was rife in those first couple of terms, compounded to which we had to deal with incessant harassment and bullying from certain key members of the years above. It was nasty.

After a few months the levels of aggression subsided somewhat as we settled into some form of Modus Vivendi amongst ourselves. Our year seemed to split three ways according to apparent physical maturity, unsurprisingly enough, as alliances were established and friendships began to be forged. One of us, however, slipped through the cracks and it never got better for him. Rufus was one of the alpha males in our year and he had it in for Alex from day one. The pranks and the goading were incessant and he bullied Alex mercilessly. In hindsight what must have triggered this animalistic attack response must have been due to Alex being somewhat socially awkward within our age group; he had the wrong haircut, didn’t wear the right sort of clothes, had something of an unfortunate tone of voice, that sort of thing. Rufus was a very clever boy and together with another couple of the larger boys in our year he led his campaign in the manner of a wolf pack. I witnessed appalling acts of the most wanton cruelty being inflicted on Alex on an almost daily basis well into our second year, to the point of leaving him on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The school and his parents became aware of this state of affairs rather late in our first year and some corrective measures were taken on both parts – some of them quite pathetic – in the hope of toning all of this down, but I think it was all too little and too late. Alex was eventually  moved to another house and Rufus was told he was not to go anywhere near him. It didn’t do much good as a few months later Rufus actively went after Alex in his new house and assaulted him. Rufus was expelled within the hour and that same afternoon his parents were there to collect him. To infer that the rest of us weren’t passively complicit in this repulsive business – if only by our silence – would be a lie and I must assume my part of the blame. I have often wondered what became of Alex. If anything his story has served me as a lifelong lesson in compassion when later on I have seen this sort of thing being inflicted on others.

Not long ago I unfortunately witnessed, from some distance, the start of one of these base little hatchet jobs. That grown, educated, civilized, mature men should find it within themselves to want to take part in this sort of thing is astounding. What disgusted me most, however, was the cynical manner in which the attack was initiated. Snide remarks and passive-aggressive observations came wrapped in the yellowest of smiles, all on the basis of what I understood can only be groundless hear-say and half-baked suppositions of the lowest order. Common sense tells me that the sort of scumbag that seeks this sort of gratification, most probably in an attempt to fill some miserable void within himself, is to be pitied as much as he is to be despised because by his very actions he is revealing to us all how he has barely fallen out of the trees. What is most depressing, however, is how this sort of behaviour is further proof that the veneer of civilization is as brittle as it is thin.