Again, faces appeared; I gave them a long, cold stare. Eventually they gave up. Bags were picked up, feet walked past the bed and out of the door, the front door slammed shut. They were gone. I was all alone in the house! They had gone and I could stay – and do what I wanted… Yes!
I shot out from under the bed and downstairs to the window overlooking the drive. They were just leaving. I gave them a little wave with my tail as the car disappeared in the trees. So that was that. I sat for a while, surveying the deserted garden, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Nothing but the ticking of the kitchen clock and the quiet hum of the fridge. Well, at least I was free, and I was home. I went to the kitchen, where I found a full bowl of food and one of milk; there was also a litter tray nearby, which seemed a little odd. But I was starving and set about eating first of all. I ate everything in one go, then started wondering where my next meal would be coming from. I hadn’t thought about that while I was ravenous. Still, no use worrying about it now. I would go out and hunt. Catching my own food would be good. I would be totally independent of humans and look after myself like a wild cat in the bush. No problem – it would be fun! I ran downstairs to my cat door.
It was locked – in broad daylight! How could they leave me trapped inside the house, unable to hunt, unable to run or reach my favourite hiding places? Now I remembered the litter tray in the kitchen. I should have known! Well, we would see about that. I worked on the door for most of the day, using claws, teeth and everything I could think of. The plastic frame came off easily enough, but the glass panel was tightly fitted and stubbornly resisted me.
By the afternoon I was exhausted and had to take a rest on the sofa. This holiday was going to be no fun at all – only marginally better than the cat prison. I was bitterly disappointed in my family. They had gone off to have a lovely time, leaving me home alone without food, drink or access to mice. The unfairness of it all eventually sent me to sleep.
I woke up to the sound of the kitchen door opening. Judging by the position of the sun, which was just sliding down behind the trees, it was dinnertime. Were they back already? I ran upstairs to investigate. As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, there was the girl with the long hair and the bright voice. She called me by my name, then squatted down and waited for me to come over. At least she had manners. I walked across to her with my tail held high and allowed her to stroke me. It might pay to be friendly to her. She might know where my food was kept. Sure enough, after a while she went into the pantry and came back with my food, which she poured into the correct bowl. Then she added milk to my other bowl, just like Mum. It was a relief to find she was well-trained. When she had finished, she stepped back and invited me to eat. I was quite hungry and didn’t need telling twice. While I ate, she sat down at the kitchen table and talked to me. Afterwards we had a little game in the living room. She was nice. I liked her voice and her shiny auburn hair that fell right down onto the soft, pink carpet when she lay down to play with me. She told me her name was Lily; it suited her. We lay together on the carpet for some time while she talked and I purred.
Unfortunately, Lily had to leave when it grew dark. I was sorry to see her go and tried to squeeze through the kitchen door after her, but she pushed me back gently and locked the door behind her. She told me she would come back the next day.
I slept in great comfort on Mum and Dad’s bed. It was quite nice not to have them there, fidgeting and pushing me out of the way. I was able to stretch out as long as I liked. When I woke up, the house was still eerily quiet. I had my lonely breakfast, then waited for the girl with the long hair to come back as the kitchen clock still ticked the minutes away and the fridge continued to hum. She didn’t come. It was pretty boring alone in the house. I decided to have another go at my door. Again I worked for a long time, squeezing my claws in behind the glass panel, pushing and pulling as hard as I could.
I was about to give up when grey cat Piglet appeared outside. What a stroke of luck! I explained the situation and he understood straight away. Now we worked together, he from the outside, I from the inside, four pairs of claws and a good many sharp teeth. In no time at all the glass panel was beginning to give and finally, with a satisfying ‘plop’, it fell on the mat outside. I dashed out of the hole and was free! Grey cat Piglet was very pleased to see me. I thanked him sincerely and we set off together for a great day’s hunting.
We returned in the afternoon to see Lily with the long hair driving up to the house. Piglet said he had to go home, so I trotted up to the kitchen door on my own to welcome her. She stopped short when she saw me and seemed unsure what to do. She wasn’t nearly as friendly as yesterday and did not bend down to stroke me. When she unlocked the door, I tried to walk in with her, but she shooed me away, slipped in quickly and shut the door. Strange creature! I wandered around the house to my cat door, jumped through and walked upstairs into the kitchen.
I might have been a totally different cat: as soon as she saw me in the kitchen, she was back to her usual bright, happy voice, said hello, stroked me, served dinner, played, trailed her hair on the carpet and seemed in every way back to normal. Humans! No use worrying about their behaviour too much. It could easily drive a cat crazy trying to work them out.
After Lily left, I went back outside for some night-time hunting, a rare treat, and then retreated to Mum and Dad’s bed exhausted and ready for a long sleep. My dirty paws and the remnants of my last kill, a juicy bat, would have to wait until the morning. I was too tired to wash, and my meal would be alright on Dad’s pillow.
There followed several more fantastic days of complete freedom and peace. Lily came in the late afternoons like clockwork, never recognized me outside the kitchen door where I waited for her, but was always full of affection when we met again inside the kitchen seconds after. She looked after me very well, even emptied my clean litter tray each day, and I became quite fond of her.
When my family came back, it was evening and Lily was with me. They looked pleased to see us getting along so well and had a long chat with Lily about me, my excellent appetite and all my talents. Then she told them about this other ginger cat who had apparently been prowling around outside every time she came to see me. Mum gave me a thoughtful glance, while Dad scratched the top of his head the way he does when he tries to solve a tricky problem. I blinked back at them in equal puzzlement. I had never seen another cat, except for Piglet and he wasn’t ginger. How could I have missed an intruder on my patch? Lily said goodbye to us and seemed genuinely sad to leave me. I hoped she would come back again some time.
After we had waved her off, Mum and Dad took the bags upstairs while the children and I went to watch TV in the basement room, where it felt a little cool because my door had been open all those days. The children didn’t mind, as their favourite show was just starting. Some loud exclamations from the bedroom above disturbed us at first, but we turned the TV up a notch or two and settled down. Not long after, Mum and Dad joined us. They noticed my open door straight away. Dad examined my work with expert appreciation, while Mum clapped her hands and screamed in delight at all the dead mice and moles I had lined up for her on the doormat. I purred at her and told her it was nothing. Then I helped Dad put the door back in its frame. I think he regretted locking it in the first place, because it was quite a fiddly job, especially without Piglet’s assistance from outside. While we did that, Mum changed the sheets on the big bed and generally tidied up our bedroom. It was good to have them back, and best of all Mum said they weren’t going to leave me alone again for a long, long time.
18
WE HAVE A SLEEPOVER AND I JOIN THE TEDDY BEARS’ PICNIC
Caroline’s best friend came over for a sleepover; they were both very excited. The three of us went up to Caroline’s room to put up the spare bed. Then I sat on it and watched the girls give each other fancy hairstyles. They piled each other’s hair up high in various ways to see how many pins and ties they could fit on their heads. The pins looked sharp and na
sty, and I didn’t like the look of the ties either. They had a tendency to shoot off from the girls’ fingers like lethal projectiles, and I kept my distance until they had used them all up. Then they started painting each other’s faces with little brushes and powder puffs. I checked all the different paints and powders with my paws and made pretty, multicoloured paw print patterns on Caroline’s desk and on the carpet. Soon the room was full of pink and blue powder that made me sneeze. The girls looked a bit scary once they had applied lots of bright blue around their eyes, thick, black lines to their eyebrows and poisonous shades of red to their lips. When they approached me with a brush and one of the powder puffs, I retreated to the safety of the kitchen, where Mum was preparing dinner.
After dinner, we went back upstairs again to listen to music and to talk. I listened to the music while the girls talked. Emily and Robin weren’t allowed in. When Mum came to say it was time to go to sleep, the talking changed to whispering, but it didn’t stop. I nodded off at the foot of Caroline’s bed to the sound of whispers and giggles.
I woke up in the middle of the night. The girls were just getting out of bed. I had a quick stretch before joining them. We crept silently past Mum and Dad’s bedroom door, down the stairs and into the kitchen. The girls opened fridge and pantry and prepared a midnight feast on the kitchen table. The spread was magnificent: we had cheese, ham, crackers, biscuits and a whole giant bar of chocolate between us. The chocolate was delicious. I had never tasted any – Mum believes in healthy snacks for cats. Now I wished I’d eaten some of the chocolate eggs and bunnies at Easter.
When we had had enough, we went outside into the dark, silent garden. A full moon bathed lawn and trees in a silvery light. The bushes all around the lawn gave off a heady scent; their white blossoms looked like brilliant stars fallen from the sky. The air was warm and still. Somewhere in the forest an owl was hooting. The girls got bikes out of the garage and raced them up and down the driveway and round and round the house. Then they bounced on the trampoline. I expected Mum and Dad to appear on their balcony at any moment, but they never heard us, so I did a bit of hunting and caught another bat. There were hundreds of them flying around us. The big, yellow moon had set and dawn was just breaking when we finally crept back into the house and upstairs into our beds. This time the whispering and giggling stopped quite soon, and the three of us slept soundly.
The sun was high in the sky and the rest of the family looked as though they had been out and about for hours when we finally crawled downstairs. Mum was working in the vegetable garden, talking encouragingly to the lettuces, while Dad could be heard hammering in the garage. Emily and Robin were preparing a teddy bears’ picnic. A blanket was already spread out in the shade of a small tree; tiny plastic cups and plates were arranged on it in a circle. About a dozen teddy bears had been jammed into a trailer that was being towed towards the picnic site by Robin in his little red jeep. I went to join them just as the party arrived by the blanket. Emily and Robin sat the teddies down on the blanket, where they stared with glazed expressions at the plates and cups before them. I squeezed into a gap between them and received a plate as well.
Emily poured tea into the little cups and set a birthday cake down in the centre of the blanket. It had candles on it. Emily lit them with a match while Robin admonished the teddy bears, who kept tumbling over. We all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of the teddies. He tried to look pleased but refused to blow out the candles afterwards, so Emily and Robin had to do it for him. Emily cut slices of cake for everyone and placed them on the plates. The feast could begin. Unfortunately, the teddies didn’t seem to know how to eat and drink, so Emily, Robin and I helped them. The tea turned out to be water and tasted disgusting, but the cake was very nice. I had two pieces; Robin had at least five. He pretended to give them to one of the teddies, then popped them quickly into his own mouth while Emily wasn’t looking.
When the cake was all gone, we played ‘Pass the Parcel’. The teddy bears clearly didn’t know how to play the game: they just kept rolling over whenever the parcel came their way. Emily and Robin had to help them constantly, which left me free to play with the little toys that came out of the parcels as they were opened – key rings, rubber balls and more pink hair ties. It really was a great party. As we rested on the blanket afterwards, I noticed that there was fruit in the tree above our heads – small green balls, some of them just turning a little red. Emily told me they were called plums, and that we would be able to eat them soon, once they were ripe. I thought I preferred birthday cake.
The party broke up soon afterwards: the teddies were jammed back into the trailer and Robin drove them up to the house, while Emily and I followed with the blanket and the picnic basket containing the tea set. It was a glorious early summer day – I fancied a little snooze on my mossy wood pile in the deep shade of the oak trees.
19
I FULFIL MY GREATEST AMBITION AND HAVE A FABULOUS FEAST
Summer arrived in full force. Some days were so hot and humid that hunting was out of the question after sunrise. All I could do was drag myself to a shady spot, stretch out on the cool earth and sleep all day. By late afternoon, there were often spectacular thunderstorms. I would run inside at the first distant rumble, then Mum, the children and I would watch from the safety of the sofa in the living room as the heavens cracked open outside. It was pretty scary: bright lightning flashed across the garden, thunder boomed above our heads and torrents of rain ran down the windows, completely blocking our view. Afterwards the garden smelt fresh and strong as each plant drank in the rain and breathed a sigh of relief after the heat. Mum opened the windows wide to let the cool air into the house. Back on the prowl outside, I had to zigzag across the driveway to avoid deep puddles, and the grass on the lawn was squishy under my paws. The trees had an annoying habit of dripping water on my head as I passed beneath them; in fact the whole forest was drip, drip, dripping all around me.
The mornings after a thunderstorm were always the best: the sky was bright blue and the air clean and fresh. One such morning I was sitting on the front veranda, surveying the garden below, when I spied a group of tree runners making their way across a big oak tree branch towards the little plum tree that had recently provided shade for our teddy bear’s picnic. They took it in turns to jump from the oak tree branch on to the plum tree, pick a plum, jump back onto the oak tree and disappear up its trunk, cradling the stolen plum. One after the other they helped themselves to our fruit, more and more and more of them racing up and down the oak tree, greed written all over their cheeky faces. I was appalled – shameless burglary was taking place in front of my very eyes, in broad daylight. The plums were barely ripe! Worse still, I knew at that moment in my heart of hearts that plums were in fact my favourite food, much better even than cake or chocolate. I could almost smell the juicy fruit as it disappeared up the tree at an alarming rate. I could also smell the tree runners.
Fighting down the urge to run down to the tree and chase the thieves off, I swiftly plotted a battle plan instead. Had I not been waiting for such an opportunity for ages? Had I not realized long ago that greed was a tree runner’s only weakness? My hour had surely come, but I had to be clever now. They were nimble, but I was smart. And so I lay low on the deck for some time without moving a whisker. The humans were out, there was nothing to disturb the tree runners in their thieving progress. I watched every move they made. As the little tree was gradually depleted of plums, it became harder for the tree runners to pick the remaining ones: only low-hanging fruit growing at the very end of the thin branches was left now, and the creatures’ weight was bending the branches right down towards the ground. I had my eye on one particular plum, which grew right at the end of the lowest branch – the hardest one to get, surely. Soon it was indeed the only one left. I crawled down the steps of the deck in the shade of the hand rail. Inch by inch I crept up to the little tree, keeping my body close to the ground and using bushes and clumps of grass for cover. Not for one secon
d did I take my eyes off the tree runners. I listened out for any sign of alarm amongst them, but they were too intent on their harvest to notice me. Besides, I am a masterful hunter. I was quite close now and settled down in the high grass, hind legs gathered under me, until the right moment came. I did not have to wait long. A tree runner had discovered my plum and was making its way towards it. The long, thin branch of the little tree began to bend down as the creature crept further and further out from the trunk. I could tell it was aware of the risk it was taking: the branch could well snap or bend all the way down to the ground, and it was a long way to the nearest big tree trunk. But it continued nevertheless, unable to resist that last plum.
It all happened in a flash: the branch dipped down low, the tree runner lost its balance and flipped over, holding on to the branch from below now, eyes on the plum, claw outstretched to pick it. Its back and tail were only inches from the grass. A quick wiggle of my bottom, and I pounced. In the split second as I flew through the air towards the creature, I saw its head turn and its eyes widen in surprise. Then my teeth closed around its neck and I heard the satisfying crunch of breaking bones. The creature was mine!
Holding the limp, warm body in my mouth, I marched to the very centre of the lawn, where I could be clearly observed by all its mates, laid the creature down on the grass in front of me and took a large bite out of its side. It was juicy and delicious; no plum could taste better. All around me, I heard tree runners screeching in alarm; no more giggling now – I had the last laugh. I licked the blood off my lips and continued my feast. From time to time I stopped to look around, but the screeches were fading as the scoundrels were scampering off to safety, letting the neighbourhood know that this garden was to be avoided in future. I was able to crunch away undisturbed.
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