by Matt Haig
But it was going to be a long walk through the outskirts of town, through quiet streets and empty houses, their occupants out at school and work. About three miles, at least, which, even with Rissa’s long legs, would mean an hour or more.
And they weren’t safe.
Barney didn’t understand exactly why they weren’t safe, but he sensed danger in the air. Little invisible signals from somewhere, picked up by his whiskers the way aerials pick up the sound of music on a radio.
I’ve got a bad feeling, he miaowed to Rissa. The swipers – and Miss Whipmire – are trying to kill me.
She just patted his head and kept going, probably not realizing they were being watched.
Or followed.
Rissa Gets a Shock
IT WAS ODD, how it started.
A bronze and black tabby cat sitting on a low garden wall. Rissa and Barney walked towards it as it turned to look at them, then, once they had passed, Barney realized this was one of the swipers he had encountered this morning.
Sure enough, the cat was now following them. And it wasn’t alone. A few steps behind the tabby was Pumpkin.
Rissa, Barney said. We’re being followed.
But, of course, she didn’t understand. She just carried on walking without realizing that there were two – no, three now – actually make that four – no, five – six. And what about those three at the back? Nine cats, walking in a very serious group, keeping their eyes fixed on Barney.
Then Rissa stopped.
A pelican crossing. She pressed the button and waited.
Meanwhile the cats gathered behind Rissa’s heels as ominously as a rain cloud stalking the sun. Barney looked at them, scanning the crowd. There seemed to be twice as many as there had been this morning. Barney saw the one with bat-sized ears and a single-fanged tooth sticking out of its mouth. He remembered this one was called Lyka.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Barney asked them.
They said nothing.
Rissa carried Barney across the road, and the cats followed.
As they got further and further away from the centre of town the streets became quieter, until there was no one. No cars, no pedestrians, just cats. And more than nine now. About twenty, at least.
Enough for Rissa to turn round.
‘Whoa!’ said Rissa, and Barney felt a big bass drum of shock beat in her chest before she calmed herself down and realized it was only some cats. But soon she began to freak out as they all started purring loudly, rubbing their heads against the bottom of her legs.
‘OK, good cats … nice cats … I’m just going to go now.’
Barney was confused. Why had these swipers been scared to attack him in front of Rissa earlier but were now perfectly fine about it? Then he remembered Miss Whipmire whispering to Pumpkin. Things began to make sense.
Rissa tried to escape the cats without hurting them, by lifting one of her feet high in the air and attempting to step wide onto the pavement. But the persistent creatures didn’t allow this to happen, because as her leg rose at least four of the cats dug their claws into her socks and her skin, trying to weigh her back to the ground.
‘Ow!’
Rissa had to literally jump free from the cats, and even then she ended up landing on one of their paws.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the swiper she’d stepped on.
Within moments the cats had started to gather again around Rissa’s ankles, clawing at her as if she were a tree.
‘Get off! That hurts!’
Another – Lyka – had jumped so high she reached Rissa’s hand. Her long claws hooked into her skin, causing enough pain for Rissa to drop Barney onto Pumpkin.
‘Wotchit, Lyka, he landed on me blinkin’ ’ead.’
Barney scrambled to his feet. Swipers circled.
He realized now that even Rissa couldn’t save him. Maybe she would have if she’d known who he really was, but as a cat, well, that was a different issue. Cats attacking cats was just nature and sometimes you had to let nature be. True, she did stamp her feet, but it did nothing to shoo off Pumpkin or his fellow swipers. So Barney ran, as fast as he could, pushing his way past Lyka and the bronze and black tabby. He could hear Pumpkin behind.
‘Right, boys, geddim! Can’t ’ave ’im escape us this time!’
Barney galloped towards some railings and a front garden full of plants and hiding places. He snuck through the railings and realized he wasn’t being followed any more. Hiding amid some rhododendrons, he saw the swipers still on the street, frozen with fear.
‘It’s him!’ gasped Lyka.
‘The Terrorcat,’ said Pumpkin, gravely.
‘He can melt your brain if you stare into his eye!’ said the tabby.
‘He can stop your heart with one whisker curl!’ whimpered another, and the panic quickly spread among the others.
‘And your breath with a tail swish!’
‘He can make your fur feel wet for the rest of your life!’
‘He has his own army of hypnotized rottweilers!’
‘He is EVIL!!!’
‘I want my mummy …’
And they turned and fled with the other street cats as Rissa reluctantly walked away in the other direction and Barney did nothing at all. Just stayed breathlessly still, looking past pretty petals to try and get a glimpse of the Terrorcat.
It was the old silver cat he’d always seen staring out of the window. The one with the stitched-up eye. And even though Barney knew he should have felt scared, he didn’t. It was strange. As he watched the cat – a fireside, as Mocha had told him – licking his front paws, he couldn’t conjure the slightest trace of fear in his heart. Barney felt, in fact, as though he was watching an old friend. The eye was looking right at Barney, but he didn’t feel like his brain was melting. He felt, in fact, something else completely. He felt kindness, or maybe even love.
‘Who are you?’ Barney whispered, too quietly for the Terrorcat to hear.
The Terrorcat seemed sad, and Barney felt an urge to go over and comfort him. But, still, he knew he had to be cautious. So when the silver cat stood up and walked away, Barney didn’t follow. He just waited there until it was out of sight, and then he carefully – and watchfully – slipped back between the railings.
There was a pond-sized puddle on the path. Still water lit by the faint morning sun.
Barney looked into the remnants of yesterday’s rain and saw a face he recognized. A cat’s face, with a white patch of fur around its left eye.
It was the cat he’d seen on his birthday. The one who’d made him feel dizzy. The one Barney had wished he could be in order not to have to face his mum.
To be a cat …
And so it was that, right there, Barney’s terrible mistake was confirmed.
A Whisper
HE WENT LEFT. He didn’t know why. Left just felt better than right. Instinct. And left was better, because he recognized the next street he came to, with its bigger detached houses and sky-high trees. It was where the Primm twins lived, but that’s not how Barney knew it. He knew it because it was a street he had been on many times in his life. Because it was on the way to Blandford Library. Where his mum worked.
Where his mum was working right now.
He would go there.
Yes.
He would go there and make his mum understand. Somehow he would tell her the truth.
Her son was now a cat.
A cat, whom Miss Whipmire, along with half the swipers in Blandford, wanted dead.
Oh, and his dad was alive.
Yes, that really would take quite a bit of explaining.
A giant human appeared miles in front of Barney. It was one of his mum’s friends taking out heavy shopping bags from the boot of her car.
Claire! he shouted. Claire! Claire! Claire!
He stood at her ankles. Miaowing. Worth a shot, he thought. After all, Miss Whipmire won’t be the only former cat around here …
But it was no good.
Claire didn’t even l
ook down as she crossed his path, nearly knocking him out with one of her bags as it swung boiler-sized tins of beans at his head.
Barney kept going, feeling very small indeed.
Walking down the road towards the library was like being in the depths of a valley, with enormous parked cars on one side of him and houses on the other. These houses, like all the houses in Blandford, were suddenly bigger than skyscrapers. It was weird. These were the streets he knew better than any other in the world, yet it might as well have been another planet.
Again he had the feeling that someone was watching him. He turned and saw nothing but a dark brown tail sticking out from behind the wheel of a parked car. The tail quickly whipped away.
Time to speed up, Barney said to himself.
He galloped, cat-style (of course), to the library, turning round every time he heard the tinkling of a collar.
Then, a whisper.
‘They’re after you,’ came a voice.
Barney looked. Couldn’t see anything except the wheel of a car.
‘What? The swipers?’
‘They follow Caramel,’ said the same dark brown cat he’d seen behind the car as he walked to the library, who – incidentally – was Mocha’s sister, born in the same litter (even if she hadn’t seen her sister for seven years). ‘She rewards their loyalty with sardines and catnip. In return she gets protection from some of the most deadly swipers in Blandford.’
‘Oh,’ said Barney, remembering what he had seen outside the school gates. ‘You mean Miss Whipmire.’
‘They’re getting closer. Hide.’ And then she darted away. A fast blur of chocolate-brown fur.
Barney only had a short distance to go, across the road and then the bowling green, but he felt exposed, and he panicked, the way he had seen insects panic when he’d turned over stones or lifted up plant pots in his garden.
I’m never going to scare an insect again, he told himself, if this is how it feels.
Then it was there.
One of the largest buildings in Blandford, made of glass like a giant greenhouse. Not the best hiding place in the world, now he thought about it.
There was his mother’s Mini in the car park.
He trod through a puddle of old rain and looked up at the steps which led to automatic doors. He doubted he’d be able to get them to open on his own. But then he saw a woman and her little boy arrive, so he waited and snuck in behind them, looking in every direction for his mother.
A City of Books
IT WAS A city of books.
Every aisle between the towering bookshelves was street-sized. The shelves themselves seemed impossibly high, but at least he was unseen here. Barney had deliberately chosen an aisle with no people. He looked up and saw the same label on all the shelves: Classic Literature. Authors S–Z.
He saw books with spines as tall and wide as doors, large names on them: William Shakespeare. Leo Tolstoy. Mark Twain. Voltaire. Barney had no idea that all four of these very famous dead writers had, at one time or another, been cats. Or that one of them had even admitted to having been a cat. (That one was Mark Twain, who had written very brilliant books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who were both boys but acted more like wild and adventurous cats, and were based on Mark Twain’s own early years as a tomcat. Hence the clue, Tom Sawyer.) Indeed, as I think I’ve told you, most of the really brilliant people who have ever lived have been cats at one time or another. And that is because many of the great cat geniuses, in cat form, get very fed up of not having the kind of wiggly thumbs and fingers that let you write a book.
And you know when people say, ‘I just don’t know where she (or he) gets it from’ – the ‘it’ meaning imagination or talent or nastiness? You can be pretty sure he (or she) gets it from having been a cat somewhere along the line. Or knowing or loving someone who used to be a cat.
Anyway, I digress. Let’s get back to—
Barney.
He was trying to lift his neck as high as possible to look over the lowest row of books. He saw the desk, but there was only a man at it. A man with orange hair and an orange moustache, eating an orange. Barney had seen him before, when he’d been here with his mum. The man was called Jeremy, Barney remembered, and he had been a bit grumpy.
He still looked grumpy now, actually, as he chewed his orange and stared crossly towards a noisy little girl and her mum who were in the far corner looking at picture books.
‘BORING!’ the girl was yelling as her mum showed her a book about crocodiles. ‘Want DVD!’
And she really liked saying ‘DVD’ so she kept on saying it, as a kind of chant. ‘DVD! DVD! DVD!’
Barney turned back round. If he didn’t find his mother soon, then someone else was bound to find him, and he’d be thrown outside to fend for himself against those evil and obviously super-powered cats.
And there she was!
Three bookshelves along. He could see her jeans. She must have been stacking more books back in place. The trouble was, there was no way of reaching her without stepping out into the view of the orange man. And, anyway, he couldn’t just reach his mum with no plan. How could he prove who he was? Then inspiration struck.
He had it!
It was perfect!
And a stroke of luck aided his plan. Barney heard an incredibly loud wail coming from the picture-book section. The little girl was now crying and screaming, throwing books all over the place.
‘No like croccy-dile! No like teddy bear! DVD! DVD! DVD!’
Her mother – a blonde lady wearing a lot of make-up – was crouching over her, hands hovering nervously, as though her daughter was a very dangerous and complicated bomb.
‘Calm down, Florence. It’s all right. Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go home and watch a DVD. You can watch Princess Piglet. That’s your favourite. And you can have some jelly stars too!’
‘No want jeh-wee stars! Want choc-lutt! CHOC-LUTT!’
‘You can have some chocolate. Just, please … get off the floor.’
‘No, Mummy! No! No-aaaaagh!’
Meanwhile orange man, Jeremy, had finished eating his fruit and was now stepping out from behind the desk to walk over and get cross with the little girl in pink and her mother.
So, this was the moment.
Barney ran, fast and low, feeling yet again like a panicking ant, down the aisle, over a book that had fallen off the shelf with the words: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the cover. Then he reached his mum. Staring up at her face, he realized she looked worried. What he didn’t know was that she had already heard the message Rissa had left this morning by using her mobile to check her home answering machine. But Rissa hadn’t said much. She’d been cut off, so Mrs Willow didn’t have a clue what it had been about.
Barney’s mum had tried phoning back but there was no answer. So she had then phoned the school, and the secretary had put her through to Miss Whipmire herself (who Barney’s mum hadn’t even asked to speak to).
‘Oh, yes, don’t worry,’ Miss Whipmire had said in a most reassuring voice. ‘He’s at school. I just saw him only a moment ago. But I’m afraid he will be very late home as he got into a bit of trouble in the school corridor.’
‘Trouble?’
‘Yes. Bullying. Picking on other Year Sevens.’
‘Bullying? That doesn’t sound like Barney.’
And Miss Whipmire had laughed. ‘What? After the fire alarm?’
‘Fire alarm? What fire alarm?’
‘Listen, no mother ever likes to believe their son could be a little monster. But let me assure you, he’s been a little monster these past two days. I’ve seen it with my own eyes … So I’ve had no choice but to give him a detention. He won’t be home until eight o’clock tonight.’
‘Eight? A four-hour detention? That seems a bit excessive.’
‘Excessive deeds require excessive measures, Mrs Willow.’
It had been a strange conversation. And it was the reason why she looked troubled as Barney miaow
ed up at her.
Mum. Look. Down here. Look at me.
And she did look, as she slipped a thin book of poetry onto a high shelf.
‘It’s you,’ she said.
She recognized him! But then Barney’s heart sank as she said, ‘The cat from this morning. What are you doing here? Come on … no cats are allowed in the library.’
Barney waited for his mum to reach down for him and, at the last available moment, sprang away from her, wanting her to follow. He looked up at the sides of the bookshelves until he was where he wanted to be.
Classics: A–K.
He ran along, looking desperately at the spines of books.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice … Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights … Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner …
Then he got there. To the Ks.
His plan was to find his favourite book, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. It was an old book that he had found one evening and which hadn’t been taken out of the library since 22 August 1982. It was a bit of an odd story really, about a boy who falls into a pond and turns into a weird creature called a Water Baby. Anyway, Barney liked it, odd or not, and he’d read it about ten times when his parents first divorced. Plus a few times since.
And his mum knew he liked it because he had kept asking her to get it out for him again and again. So he thought that if he deliberately went over to that book and touched it with his paws, even tried to pull it off the shelf, then he might just get her to realize he was her son. And he knew the book would be on the bottom shelf because that was where it always was.
Trouble was, The Water Babies was nowhere to be seen, which was very weird because Barney was sure he was the only person who ever took it out of the library. Well, since 1982, anyway. So Barney looked for another book that he liked, but he couldn’t see any except The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, which he hadn’t actually really liked very much but which was at least a book his mum knew he’d read. It was on the third shelf so he tried to jump. But Barney couldn’t get anywhere near where he wanted to be. All he did was bring down another book. A hardback which fell on top of him. He could see the cover, with the scary-looking block capitals KAFKA and METAMORPHOSIS falling towards him, before the inevitable clunk on the head.