by A. N. Wilson
And Mokey Moke was saying, between mouthfuls, ‘Eat all you can, mokes, it might be the last meal we all ave for a long while.’
‘But – Furba – Furball, ole mate! Furba – my chum – where woz yer?’
‘I heard the ooms coming,’ explained Furball, ‘and I thought it might be the Giant coming to put out our food. So I ran indoors to have a look. When I saw that she had put down enough bread and cheese for all of us, I ran back to tell Mokey Moke while two of the larger ooms were moving furniture.’
‘Good old Furba! You really think the Giant put out this food – for us?’
‘For all of us, Buster,’ said Furball earnestly. ‘I told you she wouldn’t desert us.’
She found it difficult to see why this remark made all the mokes laugh so heartily. But she was glad to please them and even more glad that her faith in the Giant had been justified. There was so much bread and cheese here in the greaseproof-paper packet that even seven hungry mokes and a hungry hamster couldn’t possibly eat it all in one meal. No doubt the Giant meant her to pouch as much as possible and to store at least part of it in some safe place, while the others continued enjoying the meal.
‘The question is,’ Mokey Moke was saying, ‘where do we go from ere? We obviously can’t go back out front. But the ooms is everywhere today and we can’t stay ere eating their grub –’
‘The Giant’s grub,’ corrected Furball.
But as often happened when mokes were standing round wondering what to do next, the decision was taken out of their hands. The younger Rivals squealed, ‘Ooms, ooms,’ and the whole party – Furball by now a hammer-headed shark with her pouches full of bread and cheese – ran for the open fireplace. By the time the ooms had crashed noisily back into the room, all of them were hidden from view.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Gap in the Skirting Board
‘Haven’t we got enough on our plate,’ asked Kitty’s mum, ‘without adding Emma’s hamster to our list of worries?’
‘Mu-er-um. It’s just for the weekend – while Emma goes to a family wedding.’
‘I know you,’ said Mum. ‘It will be just for the weekend, and then just for the little bleeder’s lifetime – Rubbish, or whatever she’s called.’
‘Radish. And it’s a he.’
‘Well, I’m not so sure. Ted hasn’t even finished his work yet. I must say, he is taking his time.’
‘I really hate sharing a bedroom with Emma,’ Kitty said.
‘We hear you chattering late into the night,’ said Mum.
‘I’d still rather be alone.’
‘Yes,’ said Dad, ‘I’ll be glad to be in our own home again – even though it’s incredibly kind of Lucy and Richard to have us to stay so long.’
‘I want to be home too,’ said Mum.
So – they went home. And the following weekend, when Emma and her family went to a family wedding, they agreed to look after her hamster, Radish. It was, as Dad said, the very least they could do, to have a hamster to stay for two or three nights, when the hamster’s owners had had them to stay for over two weeks.
Ted was justly proud of his work. He didn’t tell Kitty’s mum that behind the dresser there was a gap of two inches in the skirting board. Ted had measured the space in feet and inches. Bogdán had measured it in centimetres. When they brought the wood back from the timber yard they were about two inches short. But as Ted said to Bogdán – not that the smiling Pole understood him –‘What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over.’
Mum showed Dad and Kitty round the new basement with great pride. It was almost as if she was showing it to visitors, or even to people who might buy it from her.
‘Notice the tiled kitchen floor,’ she said, ‘going right up to the skirting boards all round the room. Nowhere for our little friends to wriggle through. And then here’ – she flung open the larder door – ‘you’ll find a nice clean larder. We have our bags of flour, our cereal packets, our biscuits – no way our friends will get in here.’
‘What about there?’ asked Dad, pointing to a little gap in the wall by the very top shelf.
‘I think it’s an air vent,’ said Mum. ‘It’s an air vent. And on the top shelf. I don’t see a little mouse climbing all the way up there. They aren’t flying mice.’
‘And then in here,’ said Mum, leading to the front of the house, where her study had once been, ‘is a nice little spare bedroom.’
‘And you’ve got your power-shower,’ said Ted proudly. ‘And then, out the front, lovely clean vaults, plenty of storage space.’
‘And no R.A.T.S,’ said Dad.
‘Some people,’ said Kitty, ‘are E.L.E.V. E.N. and can S. P. E. L.L.’
‘You wonder where they go, don’t you,’ mused Dad. He turned to Ted. ‘I mean, you didn’t find anything when you were clearing out, did you?’
‘Any dead ’uns?’ asked Ted.
Dad flinched at the directness of Ted’s language. The builder said, ‘No – didn’t see a trace of ’em. Not a trace.’
It was, indeed, good to be home. All three of them recognised that it had been kind of Emma’s family to let them stay for such a long time. But they wanted to be in their own beds at night, and by day, they wanted to be among their own books, their own belongings.
It wasn’t the most restful of Saturday mornings for Kitty. She had wanted to spend it doing absolutely nothing, sitting in the small upstairs living room with the computer, the TV and Radish in his cage. But Ted had still not completely finished his work downstairs. There were occasional hammerings and bangings from the kitchen regions of the house, and shouts to Bogdán. At one point, Mum brought Ted into the living room and they peered up the fireplace. There had been an old gas fire there when Mum and Dad had bought the house. They had removed this because it looked ugly, but although there was now an open fireplace, they didn’t burn fires there. They tried it once, as Mum was explaining to Ted, and the upstairs bedroom had filled with smoke.
‘Yeah,’ said Ted, whose head was now stuck up the chimney, ‘you see that. I mean, you had a cracked flue, and the crack could be literally anywhere. Really. To be honest with you, short of taking the whole chimney breast down and rebuilding from scratch…’ He laughed at the possibility and added, ‘really.’
Kitty looked up sharply. For Kitty and her dad, builders’ work was a bore and a pain, and they both wanted it finished quickly. So too, of course, did Mum. But Mum also liked giving instructions to builders, and she enjoyed the excitement of new building projects. Kitty would not entirely trust her mother not to set Ted the task of finding the crack in the chimney flue, even if it did mean putting several rooms to ruins in the process.
‘And who’s that then?’ asked Ted in a friendly spirit, smiling down at Radish, who sat, rather shyly quivering on Kitty’s lap.
Radish was a very different hamster from Chum. To tell the truth, he was a little bit of a bore. Kitty felt that Emma had done nothing to stimulate her hamster. She hardly ever let the little fellow out of his cage, which wasn’t often cleaned. There would have been no question with Radish, as there had been with dear little Chum, of inventing a voice for him, or pretending that he could speak to the Giant or Allie (Mum) or Mister Peter (Dad). Radish just sat there, quivering. On occasion, he would run about the tubes in his cage. For the rest of the time, he either ate or slept.
‘You‘ll have been glad to have got him back then,’ said Ted pleasantly.
Kitty just smiled and nodded. It was too complicated to explain that this was not her lost hamster, and that she was just looking after Radish for the weekend.
‘Where d’you find him then?’
‘Well,’ began Kitty, ‘he’s not exactly…’
‘Under the floorboards?’ asked Ted. ‘In the airing-cupboard?’
‘Sort of,’ said Kitty.
‘Really?’
Ted and Mum were making their progress upstairs. While Mum had Ted in the house, there was a whole shopping list of small
tasks which she wanted him to work on either now or at a future date. When she mentioned the guttering, Ted laughed and said, ‘Some of the jobs I done. And animals. Really. I worked on a house up in Finchley and there was this kitten. Well, I’d taken up the floorboards to see to the wiring – it was in a terrible state. Dear, oh, dear. We fixed it all up, and we put back the floorboards…’
His merry laughter echoed up the stairs.
Kitty flicked through the channels on TV. The choice was between sport, and the drivel of Saturday-morning children’s programmes. She didn’t switch off, but the chatter on the screen didn’t hold her attention. She was soon much more interested in a game on the laptop. As she clocked up more and more points in the game, her eyes were focused ever more fixedly on the screen, away from the little hamster who had jumped off her lap and who, very tentatively, was pitter-pattering across the sofa.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Up the Chimblee
It was a bit of a nuisance, clambering all the way down the chimney when they needed more supplies of food, but in general, as they all agreed, it was the best berth yet. There was quite a gang of them – Uncle Sid, Buster, Mokey Moke, Frankie-boy, Kev and others, not to mention their chum, Furball.
Furball was more skilful than the mokes at climbing the chimney. It took her only about thirty seconds to leave their comfortable fluffy nest behind the living-room fireplace and come out of the spacious doorway which – Furball felt sure – the Giant had had built into the kitchen. From there, she and her friends had foraged quite enough food to live on, though they were sometimes became thirsty. There had been a wonderful day when the building-ooms had left out for them a paper packet full of fried potatoes. But even on sparser days there had been crumbs, crusts, an old chicken bone to drag back under the dresser. The terrifying banging noises of the ooms died down. And then, one glad day, Buster brought the news that the ooms were restocking the larder.
Furball spent part of her time helping Buster to forage for food, and part of the time helping Mokey Moke, who was becoming surprisingly fat again, even though none of them were greedy like the narks. Furball didn’t like to make comments about her friend’s change in weight, but Buster did. ‘Mum’s filled art agin now she’s up the duff.’
It was all most mysterious. But interesting. As were the tales which Buster or Uncle Sid told the Rivals as they sat round in the evening after their crust of bread or piece of apple core. Furball could listen forever as the mokes told of their adventures, or celebrated the brave deeds of mokes who had perished. To the stories of Aunt Flo and the snapper, or poor old Uncle Barney and the floor-food there would now be added the tale of Nobby and the glue-tray, or the time one of the Rivals was grabbed by a fevva ‘wot swooped out of a clear sky’.
Furball couldn’t hope to rival such heroic sagas, but the younger Rivals, in particular, loved to be told of the time she found a chicken pie in the kitchen. In fact, even the older mokes preferred the chicken-pie story to the stories of blood and gore.
Buster’s view was that any of the food put out in the larder was likely to be a trap. This opinion was shared by the ever-gloomy Uncle Sid. The pessimistic Sid was also the only moke to realise that they were nesting in a chimney. As far as Furball and her other moke friends were concerned, it was just a slightly sooty bit of wall, highly convenient for nipping in and out of – especially now the ooms were back in the house. The living room was used more and more. Biscuits were eaten there; even buns with raisins. All good pickings.
For Uncle Sid, though, things looked different. ‘Yer realise wot ooms use these caves for?’
‘Nar.’
‘Fer smoke. Fer fire. Fer roastin’ mokes alive – that’s what they’re for.’
The opinion was greeted with unbelief.
From the younger mokes there was many a Never! and Gid aw-eye! at the suggestion that ooms would deliberately set fire to their present nest. Sid, though, would not be budged in his view. In the last house he’d been in – well, maybe not the last, maybe the one before it – there’d been one of them caves. Chimblee was their proper name. Nice and snug. Whole family of mokes. Nice and comfy. Easy access to food supplies. Everyfink lovely. Comfy nests on brick ledges just like this one. And then, one day, some heat – you couldn’t breathe. E – Sid – had had a lucky escape, run down towards the flames, then took a left down a dark passage and out through a skirting board. A few mokes what come with him had also escaped. What happened to the ones who’d run up the chimblee he didn’t like to think. Chokin’ to death. Chokin.
Mokey Moke told Sid he was an old misery-guts. Even if it was true, she said, they’d cross that bridge when they came to it. For the time being, it was hard to imagine a better place to be. Furball agreed. She wondered if the chimblee was the same as the duff, that mysterious place where Mokey Moke went sometimes. But now was not the moment to ask since, about this time, Mokey Moke was joined by another party of baby mokes – or Rivals. Where they were coming from at such a rate was more than Furball could guess.
The Rivals fed from Mokey for the first day or two but – just as before – this meant that Mokey herself was even more hungry. Furball was only too happy to be Mokey’s chum and search for food.
She knew the way so well by now that she even had a name for it: the larder run. Down the dark sooty cave, left, then right, then a wiggle, then down a long very dusty tunnel, over a few bits of broken brick, on towards more fluff, where you began to see a patch of light, and then – the door – which (she remained convinced) had been built for her by the Giant.
Once she’d come to the Giant’s door, she put out her little pink nose and her whiskers and sniffed for danger. She looked right and left. She looked out for narks, snarls, claws and unfriendly ooms. As she did so, she also still looked out, half hopefully, for the one oom she trusted, the Giant. Furball was not like an oom, so she didn’t miss the Giant, not exactly. But very nearly. Often, as she scuttled quickly along, she imagined that she was going to be picked up by the Giant. And it never occurred to her to suppose that she wouldn’t see the Giant again. Without actually thinking about it, she supposed that snuggling under the Giant’s shirt was – well, one of the things she did. It would be something that happened again one of these days.
Out of the Giant’s door, sniff, sniff, quiver-whiskers. Out into the shadows under the dresser. A quick scutter across the kitchen floor and – what amazing luck! The Giant had put on the floor a large piece of toasted bread: just for her and her friends. But the Giant was always generous.
With her two front paws Furball tried shoving the piece of toast. Then she prodded it with her nose. No. Too heavy. So with her sharp teeth she bit off and pouched a good quantity, ran to the dresser, depouched, and then ran back to the toast for more. She did this three times. Then she heard oom voices and she skedaddled.
She didn’t understand the oom voices, but Kitty was saying, ‘I don’t know – I don’t know!’
And Kitty’s dad was saying, ‘He can’t have gone far.’
‘There was just this sudden bang outside the window,’ Kitty said. ‘A car backfired or something. Radish leaped and I thought he’d just jumped down on the floor.’
‘Well, that’s probably all he did do.’
‘But he’s disappeared.’
Instinct made Furball run when she heard the ooms yelling. She had only one pouchful of toast but she could come back for the rest when things quietened down. Meanwhile she climbed upwards with two pouches of toast for Mokey and the new Rivals, seven of them. Frankie-boy said he was going to call them Smelly-one, Smelly-two, Smelly-three – and so on up to Smelly-seven. Furball thought this was very unkind but at the same time she found it very amusing. Fluff. Brick. Dusty tunnel and up against the sooty walls, a wiggle to the left – instinct-memory took her back towards the fireplace in the living room. And as she came down the final passage, although it was very dark, she was aware of a creature straight ahead of her. A moke? No – something told her
it wasn’t a moke. There was a smell – but it wasn’t a nasty, narky sort of smell. Quite the opposite. It was a delicious smell, a familiar smell. Could it be? Was she just smelling herself? It was a hamster smell!
With her moist little beady-eyes she saw some very similar eyes looking back at her. Hamster eyes. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.
The other hamster peered back at her silently. Furball hoped it wasn’t a girl-hamster, but, somehow, even in the darkness she could tell that it wasn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the Piano?
Dad returned to the kitchen.
When Kitty had yelled from upstairs, he’d just made some toast. In his haste to answer, he had dropped the toast from his hand. Now, when he picked it up from the floor, he was puzzled that a large corner of it had been nibbled off.
He went to the broom cupboard and collected the dustpan and brush. He scooped up the remaining crumbs from the floor and looked round the kitchen. Then he picked up the piece of toast again.
If he hadn’t been so worried, he might have examined the rows of toothmarks at the corner of his toast. But he was worried. Mum had gone out, and Kitty said she had only looked at her laptop ‘for a second’ and that Radish had ‘just disappeared’.
It was bad enough to have lost their own hamster, Chum, some weeks ago. But to have lost another hamster – Radish – which belonged to someone else…
Dad paced about the kitchen.
Upstairs, in the living room, Kitty was on her hands and knees peering under the chairs and sofa. No Radish. She opened a cupboard and rummaged among some DVDs which she had grown out of years ago, and some board games such as Scrabble which she hardly ever played. When she had searched for Chum in the old days, she had called her name, half believing that the little creature could understand English. Kitty had no such beliefs about Radish. And she knew that her friend Emma didn’t care for Radish especially. But Kitty felt responsible for him. Having said she would look after Radish for a few days, she wanted to keep her word. And she dreaded the fuss from her mum and dad if Radish were to go missing. They were sure to say ‘I told you so!’ – for they’d both been against the idea of looking after Emma’s hamster (or ‘wretched little rat’ as Mum called Radish).