by A. N. Wilson
‘Taters is narks’.’ He had advanced on Furball and cuffed her round the head with a sharp claw. ‘What is taters?’
‘N-n-narks,’ Furball managed to say.
‘And if you woz ter find, let us say, a nice chicken bone – ooz would that be?’
‘Narks’?’ Furball ventured.
‘Too right it ud be narks’. An apple core? A sosij?’
‘Narks’?’
‘Old cakes? Rotten cabbage? Remains of a lamb chop wot some wasteful oom az gorn and thrown art? Any views as to rightful ownership?’
Furball didn’t know what he was talking about, but she felt it was safer to whimper, ‘Narks’?’
‘Too right it’s narks’. And just in case any on yer – any on that putrid little gang on yer in there thinks of eating anything, I repeats, anything out near these ere bins – you’ll ave the narks to answer to.’
‘You tell it, Ray-mond,’ echoed his mother.
‘And next time, am sandwich, I won’t just tell you, nice and gentle, like I’m telling yer now. Yer know what I’ll do?’
‘You tell it, Ray-mond.’
Furball shook her head in acknowledgement that she had no idea what Ray-mond would do were he to find either the hamster or the mokes daring to satisfy their hunger on dustbin rubbish.
‘Next time, I’ll tear you, am sandwich. Next time, there’ll be a bit o’ am sandwich ere and a bit o’ am sandwich there, only which bits no one will be able ter rightly say. Gottit?’
Furball had got it. Luckily, as she scurried away from the nark to the comparative safety of the vault, she had some potato peel in her pouch. But when that had run out – where would she and the mokes find food to keep them alive?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mouse-Proof House
About a week later, Ted rang up to say that the job he was working on had been cancelled, and that he was now free to start work on Mum’s grand project: making the house mouseproof. Both Dad and Kitty had groaned slightly when they realised how thorough Mum had been in her plans. They all liked Ted. He had done most of the building and decorating work for them for as long as Kitty could remember. Kitty and her dad had hoped that Ted would just do a little bit of patching and tinkering – a dub of Polyfilla here, a bit of new skirting board there.
Mum had very different ideas. The whole of the basement in their house was to have a thorough makeover. Every bit was to be overhauled, including Mum’s little study at the front, and the kitchen-dining room at the back. She would have a new floor installed so the mice couldn’t nip in and out through holes in the old floorboards. All holes in the walls were to be patched and sealed. Various pipes running in and out of the house through the brickwork were to be wedged round with thick coatings of cement so that the little ‘beggars’ – almost the word Mum used – could not wriggle in that way.
While Ted was about it, Mum had decided he should clear out the old coal vaults at the front of the house.
‘I’m not going to let myself be beaten,’ said Mum, ‘by a bunch of little vermin.’
When she said it, at supper one evening, to prepare Dad and Kitty for the start of the works, a look of sadness suddenly passed over her face, and there was a silence at the table. They were all thinking of Chum. She had been missing over a week and it seemed very unlikely that they would ever see her again.
They had all, in fact, given themselves up to the idea that she was dead.
When Murphy had died, it had been very sad, but not as sad as this. Kitty thought she knew one of the reasons for this. They’d got used to the idea of his being dead because they could see his dead body. They had each in turn held the poor, still little handful of fur, and said goodbye to him before they buried him in the flowerbed at the back of the house. They could say goodbye properly.
Kitty had not said goodbye to Chum. Of course, she knew that her hamster was almost certainly dead. She had never been lost for as long as this. And building work was about to begin, which would make it impossible to find her if she had burrowed under a floorboard or behind the kitchen dresser. And yet… and yet… Because she had not actually seen Chum’s dead body, Kitty found it impossible not to go on hoping. Hoping that her little Chum’s pink nose would come snuffling out of the skirting board, or from the larder, or from a place by the coats and shoes where she liked to hide. On some mornings, Kitty woke up and forgot Chum had gone, and she would look – with aching longing – at the empty cage. And on some evenings, Kitty would close her eyes after she had gone to bed and just wish – wish that she could wake up in the morning and find that it had all been a bad dream, and that Chum was back with them again. It was this hope, this unstoppable hope, which made Chum’s disappearance so much harder to bear than if they had actually seen her dead.
But once the building work began, the hope seemed more and more unrealistic. Mum meant business. She was determined to make it impossible for mice to come in. And if there were no holes for mice to get through, it was hard to see how Chum could ever get back – if she was alive, which Kitty knew she wasn’t. And yet. And yet.
‘You will ask Ted,’ Kitty persisted, ‘to look out for Chum? To be – well, to be careful?’
When Mum mentioned to Ted that there was an outside chance, a very, very remote possibility, that there was a hamster at large somewhere or other, he smiled.
‘I’ll do my best for you, Alex – but it’d be like finding a needle in a haystack, really. I mean, ’e could be in the vaults out the front. ’E could be behind the cooker, behind the fridge. ’E could…’
‘She,’ blurted out Mum sadly. ‘She could. She, not he. But we don’t think…’
‘Well, I mean, I don’t want to depress you, but ’e wouldn’t stand a chance. Not really. A cat could ’ave got ’im on ’s first hour out. Really.’
‘Her,’ said Mum, who hated what Ted was saying. ‘A cat could have got her.’
Ted brought a Polish worker with him. Bogdán – this was the Polish worker’s name – did not have more than a few sentences of English. Ted certainly had no Polish, and though Alex looked up rat and mouse in a Russian dictionary which Dad had bought once in a car-boot sale (didn’t Polish have a very similar vocabulary to Russian?), they didn’t have a word for hamster. Not in their dictionary anyway. Peter said that the Russians had a letter G where English-speakers had the letter H. For instance, they spoke about Shakespeare’s play Gamlet. One morning, before setting off to work, Peter tried to say to Bogdán, ‘If you see gamster – very good. Save gamster. If you see rat – very bad – kill rat.’
‘I’m afraid you’re getting him in a muddle there,’ laughed Ted.
Kitty wished Dad had not started this stupid conversation with Ted and Bogdán. She knew that Ted was a nice man, but she couldn’t help hating him when he laughed about her lost hamster. He made it worse when he said, ‘No. Really. It’s sad for kids. When they lose their pets. Really.’
Ted and Bogdán started with a complete clear-out of the coal vaults. Bogdán saw a rat and tried to chase it, but he missed. Neither of them saw a hamster, but as Ted remarked to Mum one day, ‘A little pet like that – quite frankly, Alex, it could have been squashed without one knowing. Really. I mean, you’ve got so much stuff piled up in those vaults, you’ve got your deckchairs, your two old beds in there, you’ve got –’
‘I don’t know how we’ve managed to collect so much rubbish over the years,’ said Mum. She stopped her own work in the downstairs office and put on blue overalls to sort out objects to keep, things to be sold, and things to be thrown away.
This tidying and cleaning and sorting, and the work on the empty vaults which followed, took much longer than Ted had expected.
‘I wanted to help them clear out the vaults,’ Mum explained to Dad when they were alone together. ‘I just hoped. I thought Chum might have got in there somehow.’
‘It doesn’t seem very likely,’ said Dad.
‘I know she’s probably stuck somewhere in the kitchen. I k
now when they take up the kitchen floor they’ll probably…’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to say, They will find Chum’s dead body.
‘She’s almost certainly stuck somewhere in the kitchen,’ said Dad sadly. ‘Behind the fridge, behind the dishwasher – anywhere.’
At breakfast, Kitty asked, ‘Mum, how much longer is this going on?’
The men hadn’t finished the vaults at the front, but they had somehow also made the downstairs part of the house unliveable. In every corner there seemed to be bundles of grey, dusty sheets spattered with white paint; chrome folding stepladders, spattered with pink plaster; endless tools, chalky and paint-spattered, boxes of screws, paint tins, bags of dried plaster. Ted had assured Mum that the work would be done with the minimum of disruption. Already, her downstairs study was draped with plaster-coated sheets of cellophane. The downstairs hall was the same. No one could go in the larder without kicking paint pots or buckets, and the kitchen itself was filling up with Ted’s clutter.
‘It will be over in a few days,’ said Mum. ‘In a couple of weeks we’ll have forgotten all the chaos and everything will be lovely. We’ll have two clean new storerooms instead of that grotty coal hole. Ted’s making my study into a spare bedroom with a shower while I’ve moved all my stuff up to the spare bedroom upstairs. And we’ll have a new kitchen, and –’
‘Then it can’t possibly be ready in a few days,’ said Kitty. ‘Why do builders say a few days when they mean a few weeks?’
‘Because they want to please,’ said Dad.
‘Because they hope what they say is true,’ said Mum. ‘And that’s not quite the same as lying.’
‘The effect’s the same,’ said Kitty.
The breakfast cereal she was eating tasted of plaster dust.
They endured it for a few more days and then they admitted defeat. Their friends the Blackstones kindly asked them to stay until the work was completed.
Kitty went to school with Emma Blackstone, who was her age, and with Emma’s brother Tim, who was two years younger. Kitty’s heart sank when Mum told her they would be staying with the Blackstones. It wasn’t that she disliked them. But she knew she’d be sharing a bedroom with Emma. And that would mean sharing a bedroom with Radish, Emma’s rather unloved hamster.
Sure enough, as they lay there in the dark, chatting about their school day and laughing about their teachers, Kitty found herself caught in mid-giggle with a stab of grief. Because Emma didn’t clean Radish’s cage as often as she should, there was a strong hamster smell in the bedroom. Kitty could hear the little fellow climbing up the side of his cage, and the sound of hamster claws on cage wire painfully reminded her of Chum.
Emma continued to giggle and prattle in the dark. ‘And then she went, like – I so didn’t take your gym bag, and I was like, Ha–nah, I saw you take it and then Miss Macleod? And, like, it was so-o-o unfair, she came up and she went – What are you two doing in the locker room? Aren’t you like…?’
And Kitty was silent, listening to Radish scuttling about in his cage.
‘Kitty? Are you asleep already?’ asked Emma.
Kitty said nothing, but could feel tears on her cheeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Every Moke for Isself
Buster and one of the Rivals, called Frankie-boy, were waiting anxiously in the ‘safe’ vault to see if Ray-mond and his mother had fallen asleep. The two narks had eaten enough to send anyone to sleep. They knew they were being watched, because as they gorged on a chicken leg, a hunk of bread with blue mould on it, ‘Just the way my Ray-mond likes it’ – and a fish’s head, they made pointed remarks.
‘I bet as there’s some little mokes wot should never ave bin born wot would kill fer a bit of this eer chicking.’
‘Ray-mond – finish it up, son – yer don’t want no mokes eatin’ yer nosh.’
‘No, Mum –’ sounds of slurping and stuffing and chewing, ‘only like I say, I bet there’s those as ud love to eat as much as we’re eatn’ nar but as isn’t goin’ to get so much as a morsel, not from me, not from you, not from eether on us.’
The narks’ banter and the guzzling seemed to go on for hours, but eventually there was – not silence exactly, but the rather disgusting sound of a pair of satisfied narks settling down to an after-dinner sleep. There were burping, farting, snuffling and snoring sounds as the two smelly creatures curled up into an old rag which they used as bedding.
‘When they’s properly off, kid – we’ll see what we can see, eh?’
‘Sure will, Uncle Buster,’ squeaked Frankie-boy. The plan was to squeeze under the door of ‘their’ vault and look for food in the territory forbidden them by the narks, namely the area near the dustbins.
‘Cor they snore,’ laughed Frankie-boy.
‘It might be a bluff,’ whispered Buster.
But before he could explain his unlikely theory that both narks were pretending to be asleep, the door of the narks’ vault was ripped open and two enormous ooms entered. They seized hold of two old bedsteads leaning against the wall and carried them out to the dustbin area. One of them with gigantic boots almost trod on Ray-mond’s nark mother. The old nark squealed with shock and ran. Ray-mond, still stupid with sleep and overeating, lumbered after her.
The younger moke, by instinct, gave a high-pitched squeal for his mother, ‘Mokey-Mo-o-oke!’
Buster said, ‘Stay close to me, young Frankie-boy.’ But their voices were drowned by the thunderous din. The older and the younger moke scampered back under the door of ‘their’ vault and called the alarm.
‘Out – out – out now – ooms! Ooms!’
‘Where?’
‘Never mind where – out – we gotta get out! Get the young ’uns – out!’ Buster was shouting desperately into the darkness.
There was a chaos of chattering moke voices. Everyone who had been shut up in that vault, hiding from the narks, was by now extremely hungry. This made them not only weak, but bleary and sleepy. Some of the mokes were slow to realise they were in danger.
Mokey Moke was wide awake, and trying to rouse her sleepy children. She knew that some of them would die of starvation, but she wanted to save as many as she could. Of the large numbers of mokes who had escaped from the house about a week before, six survived.
‘What’s going on?’ she yelled.
‘Sounds like they’re pulling whole place to bits,’ gasped Buster. ‘Got to get – out!’
‘Take Frankie-boy, Kev, Tone – I’ll try and wake up the others.’
‘Where shall we run to?’
‘Inside again.’
‘But –’
‘No time for buts, Mokey.’
This exchange took only a few seconds. All a human could have heard would have been two mice squeaking.
‘What about Furba?’ asked Mokey Moke as they ferried young mice out of the vault to a hiding place behind the dustbins.
‘What about her?’
‘We can’t leave er in vere.’
‘Every moke for issel, Mokey Moke.’
‘The narks is in there. Ran into our vault. I could smell em. Even if the ooms leave our vault alone – we can’t leave Furba behind. Not on er own in vere wiv the narks.’
‘Mokey – it’s er or us.’
‘No, Buster. It ain’t. It’s er and us.’
Buster looked at his mother. He hoped she wouldn’t remember what he’d just said. ‘I’ll find er,’ he said.
‘We can’t waste too much time, though,’ squeaked Mokey Moke.
‘Make your bloomin mind up,’ he called as he ran back into the dark. It was hard to call out for Furball against the crashing din of the ooms in the next-door vault. Having removed the bedsteads and some boxes and some deckchairs, the ooms were bringing out armfuls of old junk. They were shouting to one another. If the mokes could have understood English they would have heard Ted saying, ‘She says we can chuck all this lot in the skip.’ And: ‘Bloomin’ eck – d’yer see that, Bogdán, bloody great rat.’
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‘E gamster?’
‘No, it ain’t a bloomin’ amster – it were a rat,’ said Ted, before yet more crushing and banging.
Buster ran into the dark. The stench of nark was overwhelming. Every instinct made him want to run – at the smell of the narks and the noise of the ooms. But he knew he must make one last effort to find Furball.
He wasn’t exactly looking. It was too dark in there to focus his eyes. He ran this way and that, hoping to find her, and realising that he almost certainly never would. At one point, when he was in the depths of the vault, the smell of nark became overwhelming. Much too late, he realised he was almost face to face with stinking Ray-mond.
‘Wot d’you want, moke – want ter get us all killed, do yer?’
Buster didn’t answer. He ran off, and could hear the nark mother and Ray-mond still talking in the smelly shadows.
It was no good. He had tried his best. He would never find Furball. What would he say to Mokey Moke? There was nothing he could say.
He left the vault just in time. The enormous plaster-caked boots of one of the ooms came crunching in, and Buster managed to slip between his trouser legs without being noticed. A grim pleasure at thinking of the fate which would befall the narks was clouded by grief for the friend they had lost. She’d been a good friend to the mokes, Furball had. Chum was what the ooms called her. Nobby had told Buster that a chum was what she had been – sharing her food, pouching nosh and squeezing with it behind the skirting board to feed Mokey Moke when she was having the Rivals. One of the best, old Furball.
He was just having these sad thoughts as he scuttled across the area yard towards the dustbins, when he came face to face with the curranty eyes and excited expression of the hamster.
‘Oh, Buster! I was coming back to rescue you,’ she said.
‘You were coming to rescue me – that’s a larf! I was coming –’
‘I’ve found some food. Come quickly.’
On a packing case just inside the door of the house, Furball had found a packet containing soft white bread and cheese. She had scuttled back to tell Mokey Moke and the younger mokes. Then she had run back to fetch Buster, who now found something a bit like a party in progress. The little mokes were calling out, ‘Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!’